At Welney, this morning:
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A very well rendered sun there Richard!
Camera of phone?
Nice!
Phone.
No editing.
What a beautiful, peaceful photo Richard. Lovely skies in Cumbria this morning too. Thanks for all your hard work this year, I’ve learned a lot from you and your regular contributors and because of you word is spreading that there is another way. I’ve always known that, but not economic specifics. I look forward to continuing to broaden my knowledge and understanding. Happy Christmas!
Thanks, Jane and Happy Christmas.
Richard – a fine photo.
And thanks for all your brilliant posts, even if I don’t agree with them all! A fantastic source for us all
The work continues…
Robin
Thanks, Robin
Happy Christmas
What a beautiful photo, Richard. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for broadening my mind this year.
Wishing you and your family a very merry Christmas.
Clare
Happy Christmas
What a lovely photo! I can feel the peace.
Merry Christmas to you and your family and thank you for providing so much enlightenment this year!
It just asked to be photographed. It could/should have been edited – I could have improved the framing, but there gain, that was the moment I saw.
Happy Christmas.
Go well..
Steve
And you, Steve.
The real world, in my case, across the Menai Straights to Snowdonia (Eryri) . We should all find a reset button and a stunning sunrise and the sounds of nature is hard to beat.
Much to agree with.
Happy Christmas.
And enjoy your wonderful part of a wonderful country.
Skies symbolise futures, possibilities, hopes to us, and your work, which is indefatigable and forensic, is bringing hope to many futures in this country (even if its potential beneficiaries don’t yet know it). Your voice is an important one in a building community of people on the Left who realise that the time has come to advocate bold change.
I urge you though, Richard, to remember that, in order to defeat the forces ranged against us a multiplicity of different voices will need to cohere around a unified position: we know the Right will achieve this single-minded focus on power at all costs. The tendency to nurture animosities often signifies one who has felt unfairly scorned, but our time will come. The theme this year should be building natural alliances, of slowly but deliberately becoming power-ready, not further antagonising useful comrades, such as Grace Blakeley. Your characterisation of her as some sort of ‘red under your bed’ personal threat to you is absurd. Her recent substack post about ‘energise the base, alienate the opposition’ is correct – that’s why Polanski is a game-changer: he’s refusing to compromise on ‘signifier’ type beliefs such as anti-prejudice. Grace, Gary Stevenson, they’re part of your base: people convinced that major structural change – green transition, public banks, taming the City etc. – is required. To win public backing for that change, we must not be blinded by differences of emphasis. The country that under Thatcher became neo-liberalism’s exemplar can also be the site of its first great symbolic unspooling, led by online activism, in which you are ALL equally cherished pioneers.
‘Goodwill to all (wo)men’ and all that eh, Prof…? A year to bury a hatchet or two?
Thank you for this – and let me respond carefully, because the spirit in which it is offered matters.
You are right about one central thing: no serious change happens through a single voice, however forensic or persistent. Power is always assembled, not proclaimed. If the Left is to be effective, it will have to cohere around shared purposes even where there are differences of emphasis, language or tactical choice. History bears that out very clearly.
Where I would add a note of caution is this. Building alliances does not mean suspending criticism or flattening real disagreements. Unity that rests on silence or avoidance is brittle. It breaks precisely when pressure is applied. My concern, when I am critical of people who I broadly agree with on ends, is not personal rivalry or threat, at all. It is about clarity of diagnosis and honesty about constraints. If narratives slip back into frames that empower thsoe we oppose then the ground we are trying to stand on erodes.
That said, you are also right that tone matters, and timing matters. There is a difference between rigorous disagreement and unnecessary antagonism, and I accept that the latter can harden divisions when what is needed is alignment around core goals: decarbonisation, rebuilding public capacity, taming finance, ending rent extraction, restoring democratic control, and simply delivering care.
Grace Blakeley, Gary Stevenson, Zack Polanski and others are plainly part of a wider movement pushing against the same underlying structures. Differences of emphasis should not obscure that shared direction of travel. The task now is to ensure those differences strengthen the argument rather than fragment it.
So yes – perhaps this is a year for fewer trench lines and more bridges, and nt just from me, but from others as well – without surrendering intellectual honesty in the process. If neoliberalism is to defeated it will be because enough people learned how to argue together, not because they all argued the same way.
And goodwill, in that sense, is not sentiment. It is strategy.
There is, though, something I should add. I reached out to Gary, seeking to cooperate and assist, and he chose not to do so, quite deliberately spurning my suggestion that I could design the taxes that he needed.
And I did not preclude working with Grace and James; it was they who emphatically rejected MMT and said they could not work with anyone who embraced it. I am not, therefore, I suggest, the problem here. I do sincerely hope that you are posting your comment on their blogs and websites as well because that is where the change is needed more than it is with me.
Thank you for your gracious reply, Richard. Yes, I did comment on Grace’s blog (below):
Calum Law
Dec 5
“I.e. are we a movement invested in teaching people about economics, or promoting class struggle”
Both. Gary Stevenson (who isn’t an MMT-er – yet) constantly talks about “the rich” and their greed as being the source of all our problems. Murphy’s podcasts are similarly laced with critiques of “capitalism”. That sounds like class warfare to me -though Murphy would naturally reject the label. Both assume that the free market will continue to exist.
That’s because it will. At least until socialist/social democratic policies and organisations have become sufficiently embedded in people’s lives that technology (via ‘technocratic’ problem-solving) has created sufficient leisure for humans that they cease to really strive for material ambitions.
And that’s a long way off. We need to get to B before the public heads off to Z. Whatever revolutionaries may wish their sainted proletariat to become, winning elections via policy platforms that are comprehensible and not alarming to them is going to remain the only game in town.
PR would change things – and allow space for the likes of Mick Lynch, say, to get the wind in his sails – but PR will also entail the kind of compromises that will equally blunt revolutionaries’ cutlasses.
From that reply, you’ll understand why your ‘Moaning is not Campaigning’ is perhaps my favourite. All that matters: How do we get to ‘B’? (Keeping Farage away from power in 28/29)
So I think Grace’s Energise the Base, Alienate the Opposition’ has part of the answer. The Corbynist-style ‘youthquake’ shows signs of revivifying via social media, but a settled Left position that encompasses elements of MMT also needs developing. This does entail ‘war-gaming’ what happens if there is a run on the pound led by bond market panic, as both Meadway and John Gray (in his recent New Statesman interview) forecast. If devaluation is something you tacitly encourage, how is a public panicked about inflation reassured? I think such ideas as National Savings/Investments and UK payments systems are part of the answer, as is a comprehensive policy on housing/rents/state-backed mortgages/direct order building that expressly aims to drive down the cost of housing as a matter of national emergency.
What are elements of MMT?
It’s an explanation of what happens.
What elements of reality don’t you accept?
You are confusing MMT with policy here: they are not the same.
By ‘elements’, I mean in terms of how electoral messaging is shaped (I accept the analysis as being a description of reality). I think an understanding of the fact that bonds are largely just UK savings, thus enabling the potential link between pensions and infrastructure investments, begins to re-establish the narrative that the Government controls the money supply; this is a pre-condition for countering fears of bond-market driven devaluation/ import price shocks. Similarly, I think it’s useful to arm the public with an understanding that the Government allows commercial banks to create money and the way this function has been dispensed has created most of the problems that beset our economy.
But let’s face it, the infamous ‘household analogy’ has deep roots in the national psyche. Like you have said – and Meadway has also pointed out – bond markets aren’t ideological and will broadly buy into a government that initiates long-term green restructuring, but the scaremongering will still be extreme – and any electoral coalition is only as strong as its weakest point.
As it stands, Farage can only be defeated two ways (a Reform/Tory pact is a given imo). One – through PR – is currently in the gift of the Labour Party – and the second is a dedicated electoral alliance, which probably entails standing down candidates (or at the very least a highly focused campaign of tactical voting). This means a tactical coalescence that encompasses soft Tory Rejoiner types with Your Party urban Leftists. The former need reassurance that the investments they hold will not be subject to a devaluing; the latter that they are not being suckered into yet another centrist groundhog day.
What we need then, is a sense of national mission that these plural strands can all sign up to. A negative value – stopping Farage – is not be enough, especially if the Fear factor of the alternative is even higher…
Let me keep working….