THE EMERGING DYSTOPIA

Yesterday after work I went out for a drink with Peter, an "old" socialist (as opposed to a New Labourite.) You wouldn't think there were any of these beasts still around - yet there he was, and with his utterly convincing Tony Benn impersonation, and references to class struggle and "Maggie" Thatcher, it was like going back in time. He joined Labour in 1981 and watched as Neil Kinnock betrayed the Left. Of course, he had absolutely no mercy for Tony Blair and the New Labour project. Here are some of the facts - I wish I had time to source them all properly.

1% of the UK population own... could you guess?... 89% of the wealth.

"Between 1996/97 and 2001/02, income inequality rose on a variety of measures, to reach its highest ever level (at least since comparable records began in 1961) ... Since then, income inequality has fallen, and it is now at a similar level to that in 1996/97: the net effect of eight years of Labour government has been to leave inequality effectively unchanged."
Institute of Fiscal Studies

Even though there is greater wealth among the middle strata of society, the bottom decile (10%) of the UK population are worse off in relative terms than they were under Mrs Thatcher. This is the "underclass", whose benefits have been cut under Labour and from whose ranks the bulk of the prison population (which is double what it was in the 1970s) is composed.

And then here's one statistic that has stuck in my memory: Labour, during its term in office, is estimated to have thrown away £70 billion of public money (who else's?) on consultancy fees.

In response to the idea that Labour have kept Blair because he was media-friendly after Labour's years in the wilderness, Peter pointed out that, far from being a populist, Blair has been engaged in forcing through several changes which have been unpopular in many cases - not just support of Bush in Iraq (and whole neo-con agenda) but privatisation of the London Underground, health service reforms, tuition fees, ID cards, and so on. As for people's expectations of Gordon Brown, he compared them with the, now laughable, expectations of Labour's second term - remember those?

He had three questions to which he wanted a deeper answer than the usual one (that Labour were just desperate to keep the media on-side):

How did a man like this, a conservative, get to lead the party in the first place?
Why was he permitted to remain?
Why is there no realistic left-wing alternative?

Perhaps those "deeper" answers have to do with Thatcherism: the deliberate fragmentation of the working class, particularly their group identity; increased prosperity coupled with political apathy; the interests of capital "manufacturing consent" through control of the media. There wasn't time to discuss these further.

As with the last time I heard a real Marxist speak (in Hyde Park) I left the conversation feeling badly informed (not having these kind of facts and figures at my fingertips) and also wishing that more people were interested in what was really happening in the world, rather than the many distractions of gadgets, sport, home redecoration and Big Brother. I am convinced that continued lack of engagement with politics - with no grassroots left-wing political party in the UK - can only lead to a future similar to the one portrayed in the film Children of Men last year i.e. a deeply divided, and more violent society, where an authoritarian regime protects the "haves" against the "have-nots". Or maybe we're already there.