I am currently on a writing job, so can't spend too much time on this.  But the elections deserve at least a word or two on the Tomb. 

First of all, let us all rejoice in another Liberal Democide, a Liberal Defenestration, a Liberal Decomposition, a Liberal Debacle, a Liberal Demolition Derby, a Liberal Demise.  Let's hug ourselves with pleasure at Liberals Demolished, and Liberals Disemboweled.  There is no more civilized spectator sport than rubber-necking at a Liberal Democrash.  They're Lib Dead, Lib Dumped, and Lib Derelict.  They're finished.  Brian Paddick got less than 5% in the London mayoral elections, actually losing to Jenny Jones of the Greens, only just beating the ex-civil servant 'non-party-political' Siobhan Benita (to whom we will return).  Nationwide, they were mauled by Labour.  Their share of the vote remained in the region of 15%, meaning that they haven't recovered from their nadir last year.  They lost over three hundred councillors.  They held onto six councils, all in relatively wealthy areas of Cheltenham, Hertfordshire, the Lake District, Hampshire, and Portsmouth.  Their long march into Labour heartlands has been reversed, and their retreat has left orange carcasses everywhere.  It is not so much that the centre is collapsing, though there is an element of that.  It is that the Liberals can no longer occupy any space to the left of the centre. 

The wolf-eyed replicant seems unperturbed.  Watching him on the news yesterday, I suddenly saw that he had the look of a man who did not give an immense fuck.  He said the words 'sad' and 'sorry', and pouted in what might be a cyborg's imitation of human affect.  But it was as frigid as a penguin's fart.  One imagines him, faced with a demoralised membership and backbench, scowling at them all to grow up and live in the real world.  This is what it costs to be in office, to make difficult decisions.  There are parties and party leaders across Europe who are willingly immolating themselves in order to implement austerity measures and appease the gods of finance.  For Nick Clegg, to be down to 16% in local elections is no great pain.  He expects growth to resume at some point before 2015, and Osborne to introduce an inflationary, give-away budget just before the general election.  And perhaps there will be some landmark liberal reform just in time for the vote: the abolition of badger confinement, or the introduction of large print safety tags on electric blankets.

Second, and much better, the Tories finally got some of what they are due.  Their share of the vote is back down to 31%, they lost the GLA, and they lost over four hundred council seats.  Their notoriously ill-disciplined backbenchers are already decrying Cameronite triangulation for having failed to motivate grassroots conservatives with the classic poujadist pabulum: prison for strikers, deportation of you-know-who, and the restoration of the cat o' nine tails.  How about that?  And the reactionaries are not stupid.  They may slightly over-estimate the challenge from UKIP, for now, but they understand the need for a more populist conservatism.  One Tory MP complained yesterday that the government had wasted the last budget cutting taxes for the rich when they could have cut fuel duty.  The latter would have been a conventionally right-wing policy, while also handing a material incentive to the base.  Because the major reason the Tories lost was not due to a Labour surge, but to the complete demoralisation of the right-wing vote.  Turnout was the lowest for over a decade.  Labour under Ed Miliband certainly can't be credited with galvanising people on the basis of anything so tangible as an agenda.  It was almost wholly an anti-government vote.

Third - oh, and this is delicious - the rout of the fascists.  As things stand, the BNP seem to have lost every seat they contested, and their mayoral candidate received less than 2% in London.  The sad old geezer with the orange Sainsbury's bag who returned twice to deliver BNP newsletters in our area won't live to the see the Fourth Reich after all.  Their electoral meltdown, after a decade of constantly expanding their base, seemed to have come very suddenly after their peak in 2009.  It must be said, because few will admit it, that it didn't actually happen that way; there was a great deal of hard work by anti-fascists going on below the media radar to split the fascists from their right-wing, racist electoral base, thus preventing these racists from empowering a bunch of Nazis.  Such campaigns made all the difference in Barking and Stoke, which were the key electoral battlegrounds in 2010, where the BNP's slide began.  Simultaneously, there were ongoing fights to prevent the 'mainstreaming' of Griffin and the BNP, by fighting for a 'no platform' position within unions, student bodies and so on.  And of course, the physical obstruction of the far right organised under the canopy of the EDL, whose aim has been to incite the sort of riots and racial polarisation that gave the BNP their first open door in Burnley, Bradford and elsewhere.  (How different those cities look and feel today).  The EDL's decisive setback, I still maintain, was in Tower Hamlets.  Since then, they have been losing momentum and numbers.  There is still a mass base for right-wing, racist and authoritarian politics.  It just won't find expression in an empowered fascist bloc for now.

Finally, and this is no good at all, Boris Johnson returns to City Hall.  His friendships with Alexander Lebedev and Sarah Sands - respectively, proprietor and editor of the Evening Standard - undoubtedly helped.  The Standard ran a scare campaign to mobilise the anti-Ken Livingstone vote, claiming that reams of illegitimate votes were being racked up for Ken in Muslim areas.  But this would have had less traction were it not for the Labour Right.  These people embarked on a sabotage campaign in print and on television, their hatred for him vastly disproportionate to their real political differences with him.  Some openly said they supported Boris Johnson and would vote for him.  Others muttered darkly that it was far from ideal that Ken was the candidate.  'Hold your nose' and vote for him was Tom Watson's advice.  Some of this reflected resentment over the way Livingstone had himself defied the party bosses and the right-wing managerial establishment in the East End to back Lutfur Rahman.  More generally, it reflected discontent with Ken's anti-racist, centre-left politics, the way that he would occasionally shoot from the hip and embarrass the functionaries of our increasingly managed democracy.  And it has been suggested, and I can't help concurring, that there's a certain amount of resentment in the charisma-free political class over his ability to communicate with the plebs.

I don't completely disagree with those who say that Ken Livingstone helped sabotaged himself.  It's true that he could have motivated more people to turn out and vote for him, that his campaign wasn't hugely ambitious and that he's far too fond of the Metropolitan Police.  It's also true that he said some stupid things, offered some hostages to fortune, and allowed Andrew Gilligan to provoke him into a ridiculous miscalculation over his tax affairs.  But he would have carried an election on this agenda in 2000 or 2004.  His defeat cannot largely be explained by his lack of radicalism alone.  The fact is that he got fewer votes than the Labour Party itself, which was hardly running on a programme of radicalism; meanwhile, Boris received considerably more votes than the Conservatives.  There was an active anti-Ken vote.  This could only have been neutralised to the extent that Johnson was successfully depicted as an ally and confederate of the government, which he adamantly refused to be.  That is why it was so important that sections of the Labour Right endorsed Johnson, thus colluding in the attempt to represent him as something other than a Tory.

There was also a slight whimper of excitement among some Labourites over Siobhan Benita, a former civil servant who espoused a vague, seemingly apolitical liberalism - a drip, you might say, of the first water.  Well, why not?  She was a close colleague of Gus O'Donnell, the former Blairite cabinet secretary, and had accumulated supporters such as Sir Richard Branson and Michael Portillo.  She had high profile communications experts on her campaign team, who procured some glittering coverage of the passionate 'Mum for London' with her 'People Not Politics' schtick.  They made her a t-shirt which, appropriating a recent Stonewall campaign, said "I'm an independent.  Get over it."  Inevitably her clothing and appearance came up.  Because she's a lady and, well, that goes with territory does it not?  Between lechery on the one hand, and condescension on the other ("she's awfully pretty, but..."), it seemed that her professional dress and business-like demeanour conformed to a certain ego-ideal among the capital's petty bourgeois ideological producers.  She was like Nicola Horlick, supermum, juggling a career and a family, striking an almost Zen balance on all sides.   As a consequence, Benita polled much better than pre-election surveys anticipated.  But if London's politicos have got that out of their system, I hope it's the last we'll be seeing of that sort of thing.  I disapprove of the 'non-political' politician, just as I think we need more of what the bores call 'punch and judy politics', not less.

As for Livingstone, I regret that this was his last election.  As the results came in, and his tally crept ever closer to Boris, one almost thought he might do it on second preference votes.  To paraphrase P G Wodehouse, the voice of Fate seemed to call him, but it was the wrong number.  "Harrow?  Is it me you're looking for?  No?"  No.  Goodbye, Ken.

Keep huddling around the collapsing centre-ground:

Class has never been less relevant to how people vote. We are a culturally more cohesive society than we have ever been. From Ikea to Ryanair to X Factor, our way of life is converging...

Thus Tessa Jowell, whose way of life is more akin to those of the spivs who've just destroyed the global economy than that of the 'middle' she is assiduously courting. These people really have no idea how hated they are. Anyway, as this is nothing more than a regurgitation of a piece written by Peter Kellner, a Blairite married to Lady Ashton, here's one I prepared earlier.

This is by way of being an extended footnote to some previous arguments. I have argued that the Tory base is dramatically narrowing in the UK due to social polarisation under late capitalism. Actually, John Ross has long been on this case, detecting its effects back in the early 1980s. This is due largely to the loss of mass support among the 'skilled working class' and the professional middle class. Their present strategy is thus about reorganising British capitalism and their position within it, so that they can restore their role as a hegemonic party of capital. At the same time, I've said, the centre ground is contracting under the impact of the gravest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, such that - even if Clegg hadn't cuddled up to the Conservative leadership - the Liberals' nuptials with the electorate were always likely to be brief. Thirdly, I've argued that the crisis would present the possibility of an historic reversal of the split in the Labourist coalition. This of course depends upon the claim, widely rubbished in mainstream psephological literature, that class remains an important explanatory feature in voting behaviour.

The evidence that class motivates voting behaviour is actually very robust. Robert Anderson and Anthony Heath's study of class and voting in the UK between 1964 and 1997 looked in vain for real evidence of what psephologists call 'electoral dealignment'. Using their 7-grade 'social class' model (which is not unproblematic), they found the following correlation:


You can see the trend. The Tories' most ardent supporters are consistently among the petit-bourgeosie and the 'upper salariat' (which includes managers, professionals and administrators in large companies). Labour's core support is among manual workers, both skilled and unskilled. As I've pointed out before, this also holds for all general elections held since 1997. But this correlation would require further interrogation before it becomes an explanation.

For example, right-wing Labourites tend to insist that the working class core of Labour's vote is, though economically left-wing, socially conservative. This is their explanation for how voters in former Labour heartlands defect to the BNP - it's a socially conservative revolt of the 'white working class'. Thus, from their perspective, it is both necessary and true to the proletarian cause to spread racism and hatred toward immigrants and minorities. If this claim were accurate, the consistency with which the core working class vote has stayed with Labour through thick and thin, refusing the serenading of the Tories, and the fact that the BNP's inroads into working class communities are principally achieved by winning over former Tory voters, would present a real mystery. But it is not accurate. As other critical work has shown, social conservatism and liberalism have less to do with class than with cultural capital, ie education. Socially progressive attitudes are not an attribute of the rich, but of the educated; reactionary attitudes are not an attribute of the poor, but of the uneducated or poorly educated. This is why, for example, Cameron has had to adopt a more socially liberal facade. He can't win by wooing the know-nothing bigots of the petit-bourgeoisie. The Tories want to win back the sorts of professionals and skilled workers who have been to university and simply aren't up for deference and social authoritarianism.

***

Arguments for the demise of the relevance of class are hardly new. Throughout the postwar era, we were continually told that class was, in different ways, increasingly obsolete. Anthony Crosland argued from the Labour Right that the division between the management and ownership of capital meant that a direct conflict between workers and owners no longer existed. Instead, a new managerial class had taken over, and society was going to become a lot more stable as a consequence. In fact, Crosland was regurgitating the conclusions of American rightist political economy (Daniel Bell, James Burnham) and sociology (Talcott Parsons).

Communist Party member Sam Aaronovitch's terse polemic, The Ruling Class, was one of the better ripostes to that argument. Unfortunately, the salient points of Aaronovitch's later career would include the Alternative Economic Strategy (failure), Eurocommunism (failure) and a son called David (erm...). Subsequent research on class, for example by John Scott, also helped demolished this ideologeme. Even so, and all throughout the height of class conflict in the 1970s and 1980s, the Tories consistently argued that class was no longer relevant in the new meritocratic order. Thatcher, as a good Hayekian, argued that 'class' was a communist concept, and that to even talk of 'classlessness' was to concede the terrain in advance. In the same period, the emergence of But the argument that class was over really took off between the defeat of the miners and the collapse of the USSR, when Labour, the trade unions and the right-wing of the Communist Party were united in cognisance of the 'new times' and the need for a 'new realism'. It was in this period of reaction that the arguments for 'electoral dealignment' first came to the fore.

The new orthodoxy had it that class was losing its ability to produce solidaristic communities united in political struggles, due to the prolonged experience of relative affluence. As a consequence, class was being replaced by other, structural but non-class factors such as private vs public sector employment, wage earners vs the unemployed, home ownership vs renting, car ownership vs public transport users, and other sources of sectional or individual interest. At the same time, even those structural interests were giving way to 'issues' - voters now preferred to act as consumers, choosing parties based on issue preferences.

Marshall et al's Social Class in Modern Britain (1989) was a riposte to such arguments by way of an extended study of 'class consciousness' and its effects on political behaviour. It concluded that class remained the single most important structural factor in determining ideological conflict in Britain. But although it was far from alone in its findings, such studies tended to be buried under an avalanche of vulgar, triumphalist declarations that all conceptions of class - marxist, weberian, pluralist, etc. - were superfluous historical detritus. At its most sophisticated, this theory was expressed by Terry Clark and Seymour Lipset (1991), whose conclusions precipitated a surfeit of literature expanding on, and generally approving, the idea that social class has declined in relevance since WWII. On the conventional Alford Index, it was assumed that working class voters would side with leftist parties and middle class voters rightist ones, and it was on the perceived decline of 'class voting' on that index that Lipset and Clark staked their case.

There have always been dissidents. In the UK, Geoffrey Evans has always maintained a sceptical defence of the relevance of 'social class', though not from a marxist perspective. His studies of voting, ideological conflict and class in the UK have been consistently inconvenient for those of the Blairite persuasion who would like to see class interred with the USSR. Psephologists like Anthony Heath have similarly argued that while the relative size of different 'social classes' may have altered, the relationship between social class and political attitudes remains firm. Others pointed out that the 'decline of class' thesis depended on crude measurements based on manual vs non-manual workers - the 'cultural/status' model of class which I've criticised elsewhere. And, as I've previously mentioned, the great unwashed generally seemed unconvinced by the decline of class, with supermajorities registering support for the view that there is a class war going on in this country.

But the pollsters whom the pundits listen to still want to cleave to orthodoxy, even when it manifestly fails to predict or explain real world political developments. This is one reason why the Miliband leadership has its occasional moments of interest. As much as he doesn't want to talk about the 'working class' in front of the capitalist media, instead restorting to euphemisms about the 'squeezed middle', his leadership pitch was explicitly based on asserting the centrality of reviving the working class base of Labour's coalition, and thus was a tacit recognition that the post-class ideology of the Third Way was moribund. And as the movement against the cuts springs into life, that opens up a space for all sorts of critical perspectives.

An under-read component of Miliband's oeuvre is his 1982 book Capitalist Democracy in Britain. It is a fusion of his previous account of the state under capitalism, and his critique of parliamentary socialism. As an argument about the nature of the British state and its antipathetic relationship to popular democracy, it should be essential reading for all those agitating for proportional representation and out protesting against their sense of disenfranchisement by the parliamentary system today. This is what Milband says on the uses of first-past-the-post:

"It may be noted here that the Labour Party's electoral advances were achieved under a system which greatly distorts the relationship between votes cast and seats won at elections. All representation is to some extent misrepresentation. But there are degrees; and the British 'first past the post' system almost guarantees distortion of the popular vote in terms of party representation in the House of Commons, and on occasion in terms of who forms a government.

"In all, general elections since 1945 except that of February 1974, one party has obtained an overall majority of seats, though by only the barest of margins in the elections of 1951, 1964 and October 1974. But in no election since 1945 has one party obtained 50 percent of the votes cast. Yet, government by one party - Conservative or Labour - has been the rule in that period, with the 'winner' claiming a 'mandate' from the 'electorate' for its policies, and with the habitual assertion that 'the British people' had expressed a clear wish for this or that. In the light of what actually happened, this was abuse of language on a grand scale - part of the 'democratic' mythology which forms the most important part of the political culture.

"Furthermore, as the Hansard Society Commission on Electoral Reform also noted in 1976, 'in three out of the last thirteen elections (1929, 1951 and February 1974), the party which returned the largest number of MPs actually had a smaller share of the vote than the runner-up party in the House, so that in a sense the "winner" was in fact the "loser"'. In the general election of 1951, Labour achieved the highest percentage of the national vote ever, but it 'lost' the election to the Conservatives in terms of seats won, even though they had 200,000 fewer votes. The result was solemnly taken to mean that 'the British people' had decisively repudiated 'socialism', and the Conservatives duly formed a government and remained in office, with further electoral victories in 1955 and 1959, for the following thirteen years.

"As for individual MPs, it is onyl a minority of them who receive a majority of the votes actually cast in their constituencies. In many constituencies, the percentage of votes cast for the successful candidate is substantially less than half the number of votes cast. It is only notionally, by convention, and so to speak, as a matter of convenience and courtesy that a Member of Parliament thus elected on a minority vote may be said to 'represent' his or her constituency.

"This electoral system has endured depsite various promptings for its reform because the two main parties have erived substantial advantages from it. In the case of the Labour Party, there was the hope, from the First World War onwards, that the system would in due course bring a majority Labour government to office; and the minority Labour governments of 1924 and 1929-31 greatly strengthened the attraction and plausibility of such a prospect. For the party's leaders the system had the further advantage of greatly strengthening their hand in relation to their left activists: without 'unity' (mainly on the terms of the leaders), the prospect of office must recede. Nor were Labour activists themselves unmindful of the fact that the system, for all its undemocratic features, indeed because of them, might produce a Labour government; and they naturally beieved that a Labour government, whatever might be said against its performance in socialist terms, was better than any alternative.

"From the point of view of the Conservative Party, the 'first-past-the-post' system was attractive because it held out the prospect of undiluted majority Conservative rule; and this was indeed the case from 1922 to 1940, with the minor and innocuous interruptions of Labour's enure of office in 1924 and 1929-31. They also saw the advantage of a system which strengthened 'moderation' in the Labour Party - and which indeed helped them with their own 'extremists'. Even the transformation of the Labour Party into a 'party of government' from 1945 onwards, with the possibility of Labour governments with inflated majorities, did not outweight the advantages of a system which served Conservatives well for a very long time.

"However, the essential condition for its continued acceptability was that Labour, as the alternative party, should remain an essentially 'moderate' party, whose activists should remain under the firm control of its 'moderate' leaders..." (Ralph Miliband, Capitalist Democracy in Britain, Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 36-38)

The first-past-the-post system is only one, relatively small component of the state's containment of democratic pressure. And to focus too narrowly on electoral systems would be to buy into one of the main ideas legitimising the state's democratic credentials, which is that in embracing the elective principle it has consistently offered peaceable and legal means of social transformation. It might be an unwelcome thought for most of those protesting today, but this widespread belief is based on a myth. Nothing, not the franchise itself nor the most cherished institutions conceded through parliament (such as the NHS, for example), has been conceded exclusively on account of moral pressure, and the winning of hearts and minds. And the state in its neoliberal phase is becoming even more impervious to popular pressure, with or without first-past-the-post. Still, a genuinely proportional system of representation would raise certain opportunities for the Left and is not to be sniffed at.

The Tories, winning a plurality of the vote, have failed to get an overall majority. This is excellent news both for what it shows, and for what it means. It shows that people were more wary of the Tories and their aggressive agenda of cuts than they were of any of this crap about a hung parliament or irresponsible liberals. Lack of enthusiasm for Labour didn't translate into votes for Tories. The share of the vote for the Conservatives is just over a third of those who voted, or approximately a fifth of all eligible voters, and the number of seats won by the Tories is lower than in 1992, 1987, 1983, 1979, 1970, 1959 and 1955.

Not only did a wave of enthusiasm not bring Tory voters surging out to overthrow Labour in the marginals, but in some seats the dread of a Tory victory produced a strong swing back to Labour, mostly in areas where Labour already had a solid majority. It means that there will not be a Tory government with an emergency budget passed into law in the first six months of their rule. Of course, the alternative Lib-Lab coalition will certainly impose steep budget cuts, but there isn't a clear and authoritative mandate for it in the way that there would be had the Tories won an outright majority. Even if all parties are committed to cuts, this result places us in a better position to resist them.

Neither Labour nor the Lib Dems individually has any right to boast about these results. However, both parties can now form a coalition based on the clear anti-Tory majority that the results express. New Labour ministers and officials have been talking up this clear progressive majority all night. Indeed, the combined vote for Labour and the Lib Dems is easily more than 50%, which would give them a legitimate basis for such a coalition. If they're going to do this, however, then they will have no choice but to deliver electoral reform as a minimum in the next term. That means they will have to live with the possibility of smaller parties finding it easier to emerge and challenge their hegemony over all the left-of-centre votes. Also note that the basis on which such a coalition is being raised by Labour MPs is that it will avoid rapid and deep public spending cuts and thus protect the economy. This being the case, they will experience some severe difficulties when they try to push through the cuts.

Relatedly, the results for almost all left-of-Labour candidates were either disappointing or appalling. The best result of the night was Caroline Lucas' excellent victory in Brighton Pavilion, but there's not much to celebrate beyond that. Salma Yaqoob came a strong second in Birmingham Hall Green - but given Yaqoob's profile, and the backing of Lynne Jones among others, one might have expected her to do better. She has been squeezed by the rush back to Labour in working class heartlands. As yet, there is no word on Galloway's result, but right-wing Twitterers have been perhaps prematurely dancing on his electoral grave all night - ah but, as I write, a banner on BBC News says Labour has held Poplar and Limehouse... Beyond that - well, look at the results for TUSC and those Respect candidates not based in Birmingham or the East End. On the disappointing side are results like Sheridan's 3%, but most of the votes are at an appalling fraction of 1%. I suppose on the bright side, the Solidarity/TUSC candidate in Inverness soundly thrashed the 'Joy of Talk' candidate by gaining fifty percent more votes than him. Let no one say that I don't know how to accentuate the positive. You might think it's as well that the Left did not go into these elections grandstanding and talking up its chances, but the fact is that even where the Left had localised prospects the returns have been a disappointment.

The only realistic conclusion is that the window for left-of-Labour electoral challenges has been gradually shutting since 2005, and will not dramatically widen short of the emergence of a social movement on which to base it. These are objective limitations which can't be overcome with a command economy of movement-building in which the grassroots is badgered and cajoled into hyperactivism. What can be achieved in the immediate term is the working out an emergency coalition against the coming public sector cuts. And that is exactly what is needed as soon as possible.

The news about the fascist vote is on balance good. It could have been gruesome, but instead its merely ugly. As it turns out, it looks as if the BNP was easily defeated in Barking, despite Griffin gaining more than 6,000 votes. Griffin tried to say in the run-up to the result that he'd only really aimed to get second place. Actually, he was driven to third place. He's now reportedly blamed his misfortune on the "harrassment" of his bootboys by UAF activists. I'm happy to be among those noisome intruders that Griffin can blame for his defeat. The BNP was also driven into fourth place in target seats like Stoke Central and Stoke South. They did, of course, gain some strong votes even where they were clearly defeated. Overall, they gained about 2% of the vote nationally, a slight improvement. I'm not sure how to interpret this as yet, but with UKIP's vote at 3% (not much in the way of gains for them) that makes a 5% vote for right-of-Tory forces. It does possibly suggest that they were unable to capitalise on the really nasty atmosphere over immigration, which would mean that people were more inclined to vote on class issues than they were mobilised by racism.

Lastly, the turnout is being talked up, but at most it is projected to reach about 70%, less than in 1997 which was then the lowest turnout in the post-war period. The turnout has been driven up by the closeness of he contest, but it's still consistent with the longer term popular disengagement with electoral politics. The legitimacy of the state is entering into a long-term crisis, as its representative features look increasingly unconvincing as bases for popular participation. Whitehall is well aware of this, and that PR isn't going to fundamentally reverse this trend. For a full discussion of the reasons for this, see chapter one of The Meaning of David Cameron, perhaps shortly to be renamed, What Was the Point of David Cameron?

Just a couple of election book recommendations, as this issue of equality is going to be vital in rebuilding the Left after New Labour's meltdown this Thursday. Getting a firm grasp on the topic is also going to be important in unmasking the pseudo-egalitarianism of the Cameronites. Notwithstanding some of Brown's last minute attempts to talk up his egalitarian credentials, it is reasonably well established that the New Labour project that he co-founded has been positively harmful to the cause of equality. It actively shifted the agenda on this question to the right, away from equality and toward a nebulous conception of fairness and social inclusion. This in turn has fed into Cameron's 'Big Society' agenda. (Actually, the story goes back further than that, as readers of my unreasonably inexpensive little book will discover).

Fortunately, there is an intellectual backlash against this trend underway. Two recent books make an explicit and compelling case for egalitarianism: The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, which has been widely celebrated and even cited by David Cameron to the authors disdain; and Injustice by Danny Dorling. Each deals with different aspects of the argument. While Pickett and Wilkinson, experts in health and social epidemiology, deal with forensic statistical analysis of inequality and its baleful effects on various aspects of social well-being, Dorling, a geographer at Sheffield University, tackles the corrosive beliefs which support inequality, and which the powerful go to great efforts to reproduce through various institutions from education to the media.

So, while The Spirit Level makes the case for equality on the basis of the social advantages it brings, Injustice makes the case for equality as a demand for political justice. Not to lapse into caricature, I should stress that it is clear that Pickett and Wilkinson believe that inequality is inherently unjust aside from being disadvantageous, but that is not the focus of their treatise. Their main focus is to show that almost every aspect of our lives, including educational attainment, our susceptibility to imprisonment, mental and physical health problems, community relations, and everything that makes up for the quality of life, is related to inequality. The authors note that in the last 'epidemiological shift', the focus of healthcare moved toward seeing stress as a major factor in long-term and fatal illnesses. And stress, as an occupational hazard, is something that mostly affects the majority who are lowest in the hierarchy, and who have the least control over their work. So, there's a multi-dimensional account of inequality here - it isn't just about inequalities of wealth; it is also about status and power, especially power over one's own destiny. They attack politicians for attempting to decouple the symptoms of inequality from their cause, thus leading to moralistic, socially authoritarian drives to get people to change their behaviour. Whether it is an insistence that parents be more feckful, or the heart disease-prone get more exercise, policies built in such a basis have consistently failed in their objective. Only a materially more egalitarian society will produce the desired effects.

Dorling argues that there are five chief kinds of inegalitarian belief that are encouraged by the powerful, perhaps only really believed by the powerful, but which exert real social effects because of their role in shaping official doctrines and policy. Worse is that they come in a language that deliberately softens their edges, prettifies them, and neutralises their political charge. Thus, Dorling engages in a sustained attack on the intellectual bases for inequality, from the superstition that elitism is efficient to the claim that prejudice is natural. All of the arguments he discusses are ones that have become, in different ways, hegemonic, and all of them have been involved in one way or another in this election campaign. Moreover, the effects that such beliefs have are evident in the arrogant self-satisfaction of the rich, their contempt for the poor and unemployed, and their belief that any government interference with their wealth is a betrayal of the extraordinary few who make things work for the rest of us. Given that the rich don't believe they should be forced to pay for any of the recession for which they are chiefly responsible, from the proceeds of the growth that they did least to create and most to benefit from, making the case against public sector cuts and for a socialist response to the crisis requires a fundamental break from the ruling dogmas of the past generation.

Pointlessly indulgent, but also compulsory. I've been trying to work out the likely result of the election, based on a mixture of polling reports. The polling points to a hung parliament with the Tories 43 seats short of a majority, the Lib Dems being massively under-represented despite beating Labour in votes. However, my 'instinct' - a compound of expectations based on past disappointments, unrealistic aspirations and a sense of sheer dread - has other ideas. Furthermore, my 'ego' - an obese monkey that incessantly pleasures itself while I carry it around on my back - leads me to believe that my 'instinct' has superior access to voters' preferences. Said instinct therefore expects a last minute Labour surge giving them just under a third of the vote, a squeezed Lib Dem vote, closer to the low than the high twenties, and a very slight overall Tory majority - about 330 seats of 646, based on just over a third of the vote. I would also expect Plaid Cymru and SNP to pick up a few seats. Having negotiated a compromise between my instinct and psephological science, I therefore offer the following: