​I was just listening to a recent episode of the The Dig, the ever excellent podcast from Jacobin Magazine called ‘Cops and Counterinsurgency’, with  Stuart Schrader discussing his book Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, which is about how the US ‘police-reform’ movement, which began in the 1960s, was directly inspired by and based upon security tactics developed in post-colonial states, where the US government funded, trained and equipped local police forces to suppress communist and other left-wing political organisations and discipline populations into going along with the US’s desired model of (capitalist) development and ‘modernisation’. It’s a fascinating episode and I’m not even finished with it yet but I just wanted to write briefly about one fundamental theme, namely that our analytical models for social and political issues should never be solely national. If our analysis accepts the bounds of the state and the nation as its own bounds, we could never even really see these connections between the tactics of post-colonial ‘hegemonising’ (is that a neologism?!) and those of domestic policing. 

​This reflects a broader point that is basically common sense on much of the left; that we must be internationalists, always, in theory and in practice. This amounts to a banality in most broadly marxist contexts. But I think its worth drawing out some of its implications.

So states Clause One of the constitution of the UK Labour Party. On June 8th 2017, this party came close to an extraordinary electoral success under its most left-wing leader…probably ever, certainly since the 1940s, when Britain’s modern welfare state was born.
 
The Labour Party is internally organised as a corporate hierarchy, like virtually all major modern political parties.

​Estamos sufriendo un confinamiento especialmente estricto en España, donde incluso está prohibido salir a hacer el ejercicio, y, por supuesto, también uno de los peores brotes del mundo hasta la fecha. Esto ha dado lugar a una extraña mezcla de envidia, presunción y preocupación ligeramente condescendiente cuando vemos otros lugares con brotes bastante graves, pero donde a la gente todavía se le permite el lujo de, por ejemplo, salir a caminar.

lick here for Part 1: Introduction
…here for Part 2: Tories and Brexit Party
…here for Part 3: Labour and Lib-Dems

SNP and Plaid Cymru

In addition to their havering over Brexit, Labour under Corbyn have done nothing to fix the deep institutional sickness in Scottish Labour and are no better than most English politicians at giving the impression that they give any distinctive shit about Scotland at all. So the SNP are still riding high as the main alternative to the Tories in Scotland and, as ever, will interpret this anti-Tory, anti-Brexit vote as expressing support for a second independence referendum.

Click here Part 1: Introduction
…here for Part 2: Tories and Brexit Party
…here for Part 4: SNP, Plaid Cymru and conclusion.

Labour

Labour head into this election well behind in the polls and with at least some of the energy having drained out of the Corbyn project by the internal tensions over Brexit, problems over anti-Semitism and the ongoing, concerted campaign to discredit Corbyn himself, which has had some success in pushing down his personal approval ratings. So there are some challenges.

Click here for Part 1: Introduction
…here for Part 3: Labour and Lib-Dems
…here for Part 4: SNP, Plaid Cymru and conclusion.

Conservatives

The Tories have changed a bit, since last time around and a lot since Cameron, especially rhetorically. They are likely to suffer some losses from their remainer wing, mostly to the Lib-Dems and the SNP. So their path to a majority relies on winning lots of leave-voting, historically Labour seats in the post-industrial heartlands of England and Wales.

.Click here for Part 2: Tories and Brexit Party
…here for Part 3: Labour and Lib-Dems
…here for Part 4: SNP, Plaid Cymru and conclusion.

I have been saying for quite some time now that Brexit will never happen. And guess what? It still hasn’t! Nor is it much closer to happening, although of course that could change after the General Election on December 12th. there is only one result that makes Brexit really likely to finally occur, namely a proper Tory victory, with a proper majority, no depending on the DUP, let alone the Lib Dems. This is, however, not an especially probable result, despite the current polling.

Why is this not likely? I’m going to outline the situation with this election, mostly for the benefit of interested observers who are not intimately familiar with the tangled cluster-fuck that is British politics at the moment, though I hope Brits find it useful too.