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    Arraon Bastani - The Independent Group Will Be an Unmitigated Disaster Archived Message

    Posted by johnhol on February 19, 2019, 10:20 am, in reply to "Phil BC - Is The Independent Group a Wind-Up?"

    Begins:

    Despite the last four years being a time of unrivalled volatility in recent British history, some hardy perennials have persisted.

    One is that Jeremy Corbyn will ‘destroy’ the Labour party – although it’s not quite clear how given he oversaw a large increase in its share of the vote at the last general election. Another is how Jacob Rees-Mogg retains a measure of affability, at least among Tory voters, despite doing things like defending the use of concentration camps.

    But perhaps the most enduring has been the whispers that centrist MPs will break ranks with Labour. Today, finally, it happened.

    Placed within historic context, the formation of the ‘Independent Group’ not only makes sense, but is predictable. The last two major crises of capitalism, the Great Depression of the 1930s and stagflation of the 1970s, both precipitated a crisis of the British state and, with it, the Labour party. This found expression in two splits separated by five decades: the first in 1931, the second in 1981.

    In May 1929, Ramsay MacDonald led Labour to a historic breakthrough when, for the first time, they became the largest party at Westminster. They lacked a majority, however, and in order to govern depended on the confidence of the Liberals for MacDonald to remain as prime minister.

    When the Wall Street Crash unfolded that autumn, the global economy went into meltdown. Within a few years the scope of such calamity was unprecedented, if less keenly felt in Britain than the US. Between 1929 and 1932 unemployment more than doubled in the former, while industrial production fell by a quarter. More troublingly for Britain – at that point still the world’s leading trade power by virtue of its empire – world trade came to a standstill. British trade fell some 60%.

    This all took place before Keynes published his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, written in response to such events. Labour, without a modern account of macro-economics, lacked an intellectual framework to make sense of the crisis and how to resolve it. Despite that, the majority of the party instinctively rejected budget cuts and austerity, the very measures being proposed by the civil service and parties of the opposition. The alternative was a budget deficit and, for the establishment, this was unacceptable.

    It was in such circumstances that MacDonald, along with several other Labour MPs, agreed to form a National Government with the Tories and Liberals. As members of the new ‘National Labour Organisation’ they were expelled from Labour, a party to which MacDonald had belonged since its inception. He remained the country’s prime minister for another four years. Whether his primary motivation was personal ambition or servicing the ‘national interest’ is impossible to reckon. Suffice to say, one often acts under the guise of the other.

    Precisely a half century after MacDonald was banished from Labour, another split took place – only this time in opposition instead of government. And rather than being expelled, the self-styled ‘Gang of Four’ – comprising Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams – chose to leave the party with a plan.

    While only Rodgers and Jenkins were members of parliament at the time, they would ultimately manage to take another 26 Labour MPs with them. For all the talk of this new formation reaching out across party divides, only one Tory, Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler, actually took the gamble. He, like most of his newfound colleagues, would lose his seat at the following general election.

    Continues:
    https://novaramedia.com/2019/02/18/the-independent-group-will-be-an-unmitigated-disaster/

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