by Les May
SPEAKING to students at the Cambridge Union during a book promotion tour of the UK earlier this year Bernie Sanders said 'If I give a speech about combatting racism people would say ‘that’s great we cannot tolerate racism or sexism or homophobia’ and people respond to that. But what is harder for a variety of reasons for people to deal with is the fact that increasingly in this country, and Corbyn makes this point, and in my country, we are looking at oligarchic forms of government where the people on top have increased power, increased wealth, while the middle classes shrink and why many people live in desperate poverty. That is an approach that makes certain people uncomfortable. They feel uneasy about that, but I applaud Jeremy Corbyn for raising those issues”.
At the Oxford Union he said, 'There is an area which is not nearly so sexy as dealing with race, as dealing with gender, as dealing with homophobia and that is the economic struggle and in that struggle we are not only not making progress, we are losing ground'. As if to emphasise his point the applause came when he made reference to ‘gay’ marriage in the UK.
He had said much the same thing in his own country. On the campaign trail in 2015 he said 'Once you get off of the social issues — abortion, gay rights, guns — and into the economic issues, there is a lot more agreement than the pundits understand.'
Both Sanders and Trump announced their bid for the presidency in that year so saying that there was ‘agreement’ on economic issues seems strange. But as Trump went on to show millions of voters were ready to listen to someone promising to reverse the long time decline in their economic prospects. Trump may be a phony but he won the Republican nomination and the election by saying he could do just that. And it was Hillary Clinton not Bernie Sanders who was nominated by the Democrats.
Sanders it seems did not ‘connect’ with ‘women, Latinas and Blacks’ in the way that Clinton did, or so we are told. If that’s true it tells you more about the priorities of some members of the Democratic party and their journalist friends than about the priorities of voters.
The response to Sander’s 2015 comment from one Destiny Lopez was to say he had ‘set economic issues against reproductive health’ and he was ‘throwing abortion rights under the bus’.
But as Sanders told his Oxford audience the economic issues ‘wrap around’ all the social issues. If you are on a zero hours contract, living in a lousy house for a rent which takes a third of your income, are always one pay packet away from being penniless, working but having to use a food bank, it’s not because you are black/white, male/female, gay/straight, cis/trans, keto/enol, it’s because the people who run the system want it that way. They and their even richer friends benefit from running the political system along neo-liberal lines. And you will find some of the beneficiaries in all the categories listed above.
It’s not just the Sun and the Daily Mail in their efforts to present Corbyn and his supporters as dangerously left wing which bolster the status quo. At least these have the merit that they are focused on Corbyn’s political and economic policies. The supposedly liberal papers play the same game and are equally opposed to radical change. A few week ago the news that one Holly Willoughby was getting a pay rise found its way onto three pages of the ‘i’ culminating in an article by Jessica Barrett with the heading ‘Why stars pay matters to all of us’. It seems that Ms Willoughby had been given a pay rise of £200,000 taking her pay from a measly £400,000 to £600,000. It also seems that Jessica Barrett was using a different dictionary for her definition of the word ‘all’ than the one I use.
I doubt the lady who cleans the toilets at the ITV studios gave a whoop of joy at the news. I suspect that like me she would be more likely to ponder what qualities Ms Willoughby has which makes her worth £600,000 a year. If she did, she was more astute than Jessica Barrett to whom it does not seem to have occurred that the ratio between the pay of women at the top and the bottom of the pay hierarchy is much, much, greater than the ratio between men and women. The same is true of the pay hierarchy for men.
In the world that those journalists who characterise themselves as being ‘of the left’ inhabit, Holly Willoughby’s pay rise was no doubt seen as a blow for gender equality. The fact that in Rochdale we now have two ladies who work as loaders when our wheelie bins are collected each week probably wasn’t. It’s not a high status job so it doesn’t count. Call it snobbery or the antics of the liberal elite the effect is the same. They and their male counterparts are marginalised. The likes of Jessica Barrett aren’t going to write articles telling us that what wheelie bin loaders are paid matters to us all.
Thirty years ago in his book ‘Choose Freedom: The future of democratic socialism’ Roy Hattersley pointed out that there isn’t such a thing as a ‘socialist’ foreign policy. By the same token there isn’t such a thing as a ‘socialist’ view about gender, sexual orientation, racism, abortion, nuclear weapons, women only railway carriages, or whether transexuals should be allowed to enlist in the military or use women’s toilets. But there is room for a nuanced debate about all of these things. And if you don’t accept the possibility of debate you are headed down the road signposted totalitarianism.
Bernie Sander’s question needs to be answered. Why is it that people, and not just young people with their demands for ‘safe spaces’ and the like, cannot resist sniffing out and condemning anything they think smells of racism, sexism or homophobia, yet don’t show the same enthusiasm for combatting the rise in vast inequalities in both income and in wealth, the growth of zero hours contracts, the receding possibility that they will be able to live a dignified and not poverty filled old age, the demonisation of the poor as work shy
scroungers, the lack of social housing and the increasing proportion of household income that is going to a new rentier class?
You can find video recordings of Bernie Sanders talks to the Oxford and Cambridge Unions on YouTube
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