People need their hope back. Here it is…
The reasons why it’s so hard for ‘the left’ to re-group and push back into party politics are many but the main one is that getting back into party politics may not be what we need. The real tragedy is that many who have lost faith in the so-called Labour Party, or the Green Party, have also lost faith in our power to act at all.
That’s why Claire Provost and Matt Kennard’s SILENT COUP is a must-read for all political activists.
The real blocker for many at the moment is feeling over-faced – or rather, given the situation in Palestine, being overwhelmed by horror. The first time I saw that sense of hopelessness was in most politicians’ responses to the controversy over international trade agreements. Remember those campaigns during the last century, and the first decade of this one? Two incidents in particular come to my mind.
TTIP
When I went to a meeting addressed by Keith Tailor, then an MEP for my region, I heard the most extraordinary story about what was known as TTIP – a transatlantic agreement that many progressive politicians said would put our NHS at risk. This is the extraordinary bit – when it came to the EU parliament for discussion, MEPs were expected to ‘debate’ and sign off the agreement without actually seeing its content. This was my first experience of the way the protection of ‘business interests’ had come into direct conflict with our democracy, and apparently won hands down.
TTIP had a bit of a set back at that point though, as Tailor was one of a group of MEPs and journalists who staged a sit-in in the EU parliament, refusing to move until they were allowed to see the documents they were being required to sign off. They won in the end, in as much as the documents were set out in a room they were allowed to enter for a short time, on condition that they didn’t remove or attempt to photograph the documents. It wasn’t enough to allow a properly informed debate, but it was enough to bring the problem that those trade agreements presented to public attention.
In our discussions with Tailor, the most alarming aspect of such agreements that came up was the way many of them gave corporations legal powers over councils and national governments, so that companies could sue governments, not just for actual losses, but for potential losses of profit if governments did not do what the companies wanted. This gives business interests the edge over national and local interests in issues large and small – large, when for example a country in South America or in Africa decides that mining in a particular region would be too environmentally destructive, and small, such as when a council planning committee is railroaded into allowing a batch of unaffordable, anti-social housing to be built because building social, affordable housing would mean a reduction in developers’ profits.
The next time I came across TTIP was after I, along with many thousands, had joined the Labour Party, and organized to support Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party. I went to a campaign workshop led by Anneliese Dodds in Brighton, and the subject of TTIP came up. Dodds told us it was Labour Party policy to support the agreement, and our job to think of a way of selling the idea on the doorstep. She seemed really flustered when she discovered there were activists in the room who absolutely were not happy to support it. She tried to sell the idea that although the agreement did put the NHS at risk, we should tell people it would be much safer in Labour hands than, for example, if the Conservative Party were in charge of allowing US healthcare to buy into the NHS.
Accepting defeat is ensuring defeat
It wasn’t that Dodds thought TTIP was a good thing, she simply could not conceive of the possibility of standing against it – and that, after the experience of the last few years, is a delusion many of us have fallen for.
In recent years, the problem of international trade agreements seems to have loomed so large, and seemed so undefeatable, that it’s gone right off a lot of people’s political radars. The task Provost and Kennard gave themselves in writing this book was to put those agreements right back on the agenda, and to signpost the way to defeating them – because government-crippling agreements have been defeated at times – a fact mainstream politicians and journalists seem determined to keep off their news agendas.
The book is also valuable because it demonstrates the absolute opposite of political journalism as practiced by the reporters working in our mainstream papers and TV channels. The book is subtitled How Corporations Overthrew Democracy and it is the story of an extended piece of in-depth investigative journalism that took the pair all over the world.
They take the reader back 500 years, to the original founding of limited companies and corporate law, and bang up to date to look at, for example, the private companies deeply involved in the militarization of Israel, in the casting of worldwide smoke screens over what was really happening there, and in the founding of ‘free zones’ for businesses, and ‘corporate cities’ across the globe.
In conversations with activists and politicians in South America, China and Europe, Provost and Kennard uncover the root and branch of the problem of corporate domination of governments, and also bring back into the light those times when governments have, usually under pressure from a population that knows what it doesn’t want, said ‘no’ to treaties that transfer power from governments to corporations.
That is the news we need flashing across the world. A country that rejects a trade agreement will run into trouble with the big corporate players but it can be done, and here’s the major weak spot in the Corporate Empire…
If a group of countries, with the enthusiastic support of their populations, said ‘no’ together, that is the point where we could dismantle and redesign company law, so that it could no longer interfere with democracy.
It is fitting that Silent Coup has a foreword by Jeremy Corbyn, because at the height of the Corbyn movement, despite a huge international push by corporate powers to discredit us, the solution to the problem of corporate power began to be visible to everyone. It is the solution the Occupy Movement used to speak of – that we are the 99% — and the inspiration for the Corbyn campaigners’ favourite line, ‘we are many, they are few’.
We fix this by getting enough people to understand that we can, and by reminding them what we have to gain by trying to fix it. We fix it by large numbers of people going to councillors and national politicians and saying, we’re going to fix this – are you with us, or shall we remove you from office?
First, a load more people need to read this book, so they can help spread the news. This’d be a great time to order it from your library to make sure they have a copy — or buy it for someone for Christmas.
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Kay
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Kay Green 