Junior doctors strike ballot exposes reality of human cost behind Tory laissez-faire

Junior Doctors at Castlefields Arena in October, taking part in the People's Assembly Take Back Manchester protest march that was held in parallel with the Conservative Party Conference.

Last week ended with news that ballots had been sent out a for vote on whether doctors should go on strike (The Guardian, 2015). The decision follows the latest developments in the dispute between junior doctors and Conservative Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt (The Economist, 2015).

With Prime Minister's Questions as a back drop, Hunt attempted to see off possible strike action with an offer of higher pay to junior doctors (Campbell, 2015). Yet his offer of an 11% rise was heavily criticised for being massively offset by the redefining of working hours to run longer into the evening - cutting what could previously be defined as out-of-hours pay during anti-social hours.

A vote for industrial action will surely reignite the tense clashes between government and unionised public servants that have been so much a feature of the Cameron ministries. As with the tube strikes, fears over long shifts worked during anti-social hours have led to stand offs and tense meetings between public sector union leaders and Conservative government ministers (BBC, 2015; Cooper, 2015).

For the Conservatives, their response has been consistent. They have refused point blank to see the human impact of political and economic decisions. The approach of the Right over the last five years has been to simply dismiss or condemn public servant strikes as "irresponsible" and inappropriate (BBC, 2011; Wardrop, 2011; Evening Standard, 2015).

Yet Conservative decisions are having profound affects upon the lives of many people, not least public servants. There have been public sector and private sector job losses, a more frightening prospect for many as unemployment support has also been cut and restricted, and invasive pressures have been put upon public servants.

From doctors to tube workers, to low pay workers, the balance between work and life is being drastically tipped by a lurching grasping attempt by the market to snatch up the personal time of citizens (Jeffries, 2014; The Guardian, 2015). Hours are running longer and later, more temporary and more insecure. Refusal runs the risk of dismissal in favour of someone who will accept the conditions.

On the Conservative part, there is a denial of responsibility. As Conservatives shift the duties and burdens onto the individual, they stand by their laissez-faire position that it is not the place of the state to 'interfere' with how markets are shaping people's lives.

Yet the Conservative use of the laissez-faire approach does not seem to reflect its liberal origins. The difference between laissez-faire in the hands of the Liberals of old and the Conservatives of today, is that the Liberals saw work as a means to personal self-improvement and liberation.

In pursuit of those aims, of ensuring that "individual men and women may have life, and that they might have it more abundantly", Liberals moved away from laissez-faire - towards a more interventionist approach - when the realities of exploitation and poverty where exposed. The ideological and economic ground they abandoned has been occupied by the Conservatives.

In Conservative hands the high aims of laissez-faire look more like propaganda. The economy, as they're managing it, is hugely unequal. Their 'apparent' prosperity is built around the statistical distortion caused by the concentrated wealth of the 1% - through property and other assets holding inflated value - and through "competitiveness" - where investors and employers can be guaranteed cheap labour, from workers who live increasingly fragile and temporary lives filled with stress and anxiety.

This is laissez-faire within a strictly hierarchical, deeply unequal, conservatism organisation of society. A society where free time is treated as the privileged reward of success in a system based around wealth, assets and property. That system locks out the poor and the unfortunate, who have no chance of owning property at grossly inflated prices and for whom social progress requires some combination of debt, nepotism and extreme good fortune (Mason, 2015).

What the junior doctors are campaigning for affects all citizens. Safely run services and respect for the rights of citizens to lives outside of work. It isn't unreasonable to put alongside to those demands the right to some sort of security & consistency, and a guarantee against poverty, as demands on workers become greater and the safety nets to protect them become thinner.

The market may have competition but it is not fair, particularly in a society suffering from massive inequality. For a government to choose to stand by as people are stretched thin, used up & exploited, or cast recklessly adrift by market forces is for it to neglect its duty to social welfare. Whether they like it or not, Conservatives have to face to fact that the state has a duty to interfere and that it can do so for the common good.

Intervention doesn't have to mean state ownership. There are decentralised alternatives like co-operatives and a citizen's income that could empower workers and make them more secure. But what it does mean, is that a government has to be prepared to act and to look beyond the appearance of prosperity, as reflected in short term profits, to find better alternatives.

Can Guy Verhofstadt's four steps to reforming the state help bring together progressives of all stripes?

In July, Guy Verhofstadt outlined to Alexis Tsipras the steps he believed where necessary to reform the state. Photograph: Press Conference from ALDE Communication (License) (Cropped)

Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the Liberal caucus in the European Parliament, was amongst those to congratulate Justin Trudeau on his party's victory in the Canadian general election. The former Prime Minister of Belgium praised the inspiring example set by the Liberal Party of Canada's positive campaign (Verhofstadt, 2015).

Trudeau's team sought to rise above their opponents' negative campaigning and pledged investment in much needed infrastructure - with the promised benefit of stimulating the economy - and to pursue progressive policies like a positive climate change policy, taking the pro-choice side of the abortion debate, and seeking to heal the wounds from internal conflict over indigenous rights (Hays, 2015; Phipps, 2015).

It is unsurprising that Europe's liberals would be looking for the lessons they can learn from the success of their counterparts in North America. In the European Union, liberals govern in only 7 countries, their European Parliament group holds only 9% of seats, and in countries like Germany and the UK the long established liberal parties have faced electoral wipeouts over the last five years.

Yet the elections in Canada - as well as elections in Argentina, Poland and elsewhere over the past week - confirm one thing very clearly. Overcoming the Conservative establishment and fending off the efforts of Right-wing populists to assume control, isn't something that one progressive faction alone can accomplish.

Relying on the distorting effect of electoral systems that force voters into unrepresentative concentrations, or hitching the party wagon to a popular carthorse, cannot be considered lasting strategies. In what is clearly a pluralistic and divided political arena, the alternative has to be the building of alliances - and that means finding common cause between liberals and democrats, socialists and radicals, that can hash out what it means to be progressive in opposition to conservatism.

Back in July, Guy Verhofstadt used a visit by Prime Minister of Greece Alexis Tsipras to the European Parliament to challenge the Syriza leader on the need for political reform in Greece (ALDE Group, 2015) - a confrontation that was at least softened with support for finding a solution to the government of Greece's need for serious debt relief.

In his speech, Verhofstadt laid out a series of reforms Tsipras would be required to take if Greece was going to get the support it needs. Condensed into four steps, they were:

• Bring an end to clientelism & establishment privileges,
• Downsize the public sector,
• Privatise public banks, and
• Open up employment to give young people access.

If these four steps can be taken to represent a condensed version of the reforming aims of modern liberalism, how do they match up with the aims of other progressives?

In Greece, Tsipras and the Radical Left Syriza party have been struggling under stringent fiscal and economic conditions to press on with reforms (Hope, 2015). Tsipras choice to accept Eurozone terms for a further 'memorandum' bailout, to get access to the funds to continue reforms, even caused a split in his party that saw first Yanis Varoufakis and then later the Left faction of his party leave (Farrer, Rankin & Traynor, 2015; Henley & Traynor, 2015).

In his efforts to find a solution to the recurring crises, Alexis Tsipras' pragmatic radicalism has seen the Prime Minister of Greece drifting into the same political territory as that occupied by Prime Minister of Italy, and Partito Democratico leader, Matteo Renzi.

In Italy, Renzi has faced many of the same problems as Tsipras: unemployment, particularly amongst young people; clientelism and corruption; and a public and private sector heavily intertwined (Kramer, 2015). His approach has been to try to work within neoliberal models and play by its rules - a big centrist democrat legacy of Tony Blair (Day, 2014). That has required the pursuit of "competitiveness", including making labour more "flexible" - meaning making the cost of business cheaper, by making the cost and permanency of labour cheaper and weaker (EurActiv, 2014).

In the run-up to the UK general election in May, BBC Economics Editor Robert Peston described Ed Miliband as in the mould of Margaret Thatcher in his attempt to react to the times, and the debts held by the state, to tried to find solutions that did not involve the state being in control or ownership (Peston, 2015). In seeking decentralised solutions, Miliband was crossing into traditional liberal territory, but he struggled to sell them or inspire support with them

With Jeremy Corbyn taking over the helm of the Labour Party there have been fears of a sharp shift towards state ownership. Yet the ideas of the his economic advisory council are fundamentally mainstream and his 'renationalisation' plans have been more about co-operative public ownership than state control (Cortes, 2015).

In Greece, Italy and the UK, economic conditions are forcing parties of the Left to look for solutions that would certainly fall within two of Verhofstadt's recommendations: to downsize the public sector and privatise public banks. The question then becomes whether progressive parties can find an economic approach broadly acceptable to all sides.

As for political reforms, the situation looks trickier. In the UK, support for electoral reform towards something more proportional and bringing an end to an unelected Lords is growing, but is far from certain. In Italy, proposed political and constitutional reforms remain controversial in their attempts to strengthen the executive over the legislative (Politi, 2015), while Italy, and Greece, remain in an ongoing struggle to tackle corruption.

With regards to youth unemployment, in both Italy and Greece, tackling that specific problem seems a long way away as both countries grapple with the broader crisis (Totaro & Vasarri, 2015; Howden & Baboulias, 2015). In the UK, the Conservative government is pursuing apprenticeships as its go to measure, a pledge matched by the Labour Party during the election campaign (Wintour, 2015).

The need to find broad agreement across the Centre and Left is hastened by the dangerous rise of populism in the hands of deeply sectarian factions and moved along by popular nationalism and popular traditionalism (Roubini, 2015). Critics of conservative populism call for a Keynesian response that boosts aggregate demand with job creation and economic growth, that reduces income inequality and increases opportunities for the young.

To achieve these goals, a way has to be found to overcome the problem of social democratic/liberal positions having become toxic and to embrace the fact that people want something more. There is a general progressive hope, expressed through protests and activism, for a grander vision that focusses less on ambition and wealth, and more on cooperation and on what kind of life, and what kind of opportunities, there can be.

Elements of Guy Verhofstadt's proposed reforms being found in the work of other government's of the Left across Europe, even under huge fiscal burdens, certainly shows that some sort of bridge can be built between the positions of moderate and radical progressives, whether democrats or liberals, to offer a positive progressive alternative to conservatism, nationalism and populism.

But these are only the broad strokes and far more progressive things can be achieved. The next step has to be to embrace movements like Yanis Varoufakis' "very simple, but radical, idea" to build a cross-party EU democracy movement (Varoufakis & Sakalis, 2015). In such movements there is a chance to find common ground in pursuit of reform for the common good.

If Labour is going to compete with the SNP in Scotland, it needs to address its own complicated and confusing politics

Labour have a lot of work to do in Scotland if they are to recover from the landslide defeat that cost Jim Murphy his job. Photograph: Jim Murphy and Eddie Izzard meeting retailers in East Renfrewshire by Scottish Labour (License) (Cropped)

In his speech to the Scottish Labour Party conference, Jeremy Corbyn made clear his intention of facing the SNP head on in Scottish Parliamentary Elections in May (BBC, 2015). Corbyn pulled no punches in the speech, which contained barely veiled criticism of SNP. He referred to Labour as the true democratic socialist party, in both "words and in deeds".

Along with new Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale, the Labour leadership face an undoubtedly uphill task. Even accounting for the 'Corbyn Effect' and 'Corbynmania', the general election in May was only the culmination of years of alienation - during which time the popularity of the SNP soared.

If Corbyn wants to outright defeat the SNP, he has to get to grips with Labour's long term Problems. At the last election, Labour lost support in every direction: they lost their base on the Left and amongst the working class by making those supporters feel abandoned; and they lost amongst their targets on the Right because the Tories convinced voters that their abandonment of the Left was not genuine.

Their unclear, inconsistent, positions - that sought to string the Left along without having to pursue Left policies - only led to alienation.

Ahead of Corbyn and Dugdale is the task of making Labour credible again. But rather than how this is usually interpreted - vis a vis embracing mainstream neoliberalism - the renewed credibility requires consistency: clear beliefs, backed by clear motivations, that support clearly communicated stances and policies.

That means Labour has to be very careful of U-turns and wavering - the choice to delay tax credits cuts rather than to kill them outright (BBC, 2015{2}), or Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell's shifting position on George Osborne's fiscal responsibility charter (Perraudin & Wintour, 2015), both being prime examples.

Along with establishing their own position, they also seem determined - if the thinly veiled criticisms from Corbyn's speech tells us anything - to shake the impression people have of the SNP as a true party of the Left.

There certainly are, undoubtedly, some legitimate criticisms to be made with regards to SNP governance (Macwhirter, 2015). And it isn't a departure from reality to suggest that the SNP could be more comfortably described as a broad tent party of the Centre. But the SNP under Nicola Sturgeon is no flash in the pan protest vote, to be undone by the simple bursting of a bubble.

The SNP used disaffection on the Left with Blair and Brown's long rule of Labour to first establish themselves, through Alex Salmond's Scottish minority administration, as a credible party of government. As Labour's credibility sank, the SNP converted that position into a majority in Scotland in 2011 and then a virtual sweep of Scottish seats at Westminster in 2015 under Nicola Sturgeon.

The position of the SNP has been at least a decade in the making. It is a well organised, with visible support that wields distinctive branding and a clear sense of themselves as the opponents of conservatives. Theirs is a formidable position.

If they're to compete, Labour need consistency, clarity and clear communication. Without addressing the complicated and confusing politics with which they alienated supporters as New Labour, they stand little chance of being seen as a credible alternative to the SNP.