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Democratic workers’ control of football! Labour promise football fans a say over their club’s choice of manager
“Labour will put fans at the heart of football by giving them a far greater say over the way their clubs are run,” she said. “We will provide them a say over who their manager is, allow safe standing, and make sure all stadiums are fully accessible.”
This enhanced fan influence, which is likely to be resisted by most clubs and leagues, relates to legislation should Labour win next week’s general election that would allow accredited football supporters’ trusts to purchase shares and change at least two directors if the club changes owner.
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The organs of Workers’ Control have the right to supervise production, fix the minimum of output, and determine the cost of production.
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The ideal situation for Socialists. Control without responsibility for outcomes.
An echo of how Mr Corbyn got the Labour leadership, open it up to anyone with a couple of quid to spend for a vote and no immediate stake in the organisation, but with him in charge of that party, all we in the UK have a stake in the outcome, and maybe one put through us.
So let me get this straight. Each Tesco’s local customers are going to
vote“have a say” about whom to hire for store manager?And this will also go for Fortnum & Mason’s and for Harrod’s, right?
Over here, it will apply to Safeway supermarkets, WalMarts, to 7-Elevens (convenience stores), and to all local branches of hospital conglomerates. Also to Barnes & Noble (since Borders went the way of all dead fish).
AND, to the local Apple Stores. :>)))
What could possibly go wrong.
If workers wanted to pool their capital and run a business as a co-op, etc, there’s nothing stopping them. But, as Robert Nozick pointed out in Anarchy, State and Utopia, running a firm of any kind is risky, and not everyone wants to shoulder these risks. So what happens if one of the benighted workers chooses not to get involved in making business decisions, etc, and prefers to turn up, do his job, get a wage and go home?
What the Marxists don’t or won’t accept is that a division of labour is not some diabolical scheme through which the “workers” are alienated from their labour, but a function of human nature. Not everyone is a risk-taker, and in a world with a spectrum of appetites for risk, you will get a range from those who just get a salary and take zero risk at one end, and serial entrepreneurs who form new firms, at the other.
Another thing Marxists don’t seem to understand is that even the humblest worker has capital, in the form of skills and habits they form by working hard, showing up, being diligent, attending to clients’ demands, etc. That is capital they acquire and bring to the employment contract. All of us are, therefore, capitalists in that sense in that there is capital we own. A lawyer who has accumulated vast knowledge of, say, IP law is a capitalist as much as a factory owner is. A building worker who has accumulated experience as a bricklayer has capital; a lorry driver who is a reliable driver is, etc. etc.
A problem with giving employees decision-making powers in a privately held firm is that there is a high risk the incumbent workers will choose the safest, least challenging option, and resist change. Result: East Germany.
I agree with your point, Johnathan, but the posting is specifically about giving the fans (customers) a say in who will run the local clubs [shops], not the players or support staff — i.e. the employees.
Maybe that’s just picking nits, but it sounds to me goofier than having employers providing decision-making input to the hiring and other processes of running the businesses. And after all, sometime co-ops do seem to work okay.
I would be interested in examples of successful co-ops. The only one that I know anything about was Triumph motorcycles in the 1980s. After much of the British bike industry collapsed due to not moving with the times, the Triumph twin became a kind of modern classic, its outdated design having become a feature rather than a bug. My impression of the enterprise was that it limped on for fifteen years or so and then was bought out by John Bloor who injected enough capital to develop a modern range of bikes.
Lots of Mennonite and Hutterite colonies out here in the Dakotas and up in Canada function very well as true successful, profitable co-ops.
I suspect that workable co-ops depend on some overarching cause into which people can subsume their own desires – like a strong religion, or a nationalistic fervor (in the case of the Israeli kibbutzes.)
(I wonder how long it will take until Labour decrees that all football teams will always win all of their games. If Labour wins the election, start betting on 0-0 football results.)
This looks like a big mistake from Labour’s perspective. If football fans have the power to choose managers, they might choose managers whose priority is to win at football. Labour would prefer managers who prioritize “diversity”, allow people to use whatever toilet is appropriate to their identity, and support equal pay for women’s football teams.
The fight over equal pay in football, incidentally, is likely to be much more fun than most football matches.
I agree with your point, Johnathan, but the posting is specifically about giving the fans (customers) a say in who will run the local clubs [shops], not the players or support staff — i.e. the employees.
Julie, true, but it speaks to the idea that people other than those who own a business/organisation are entitled to control its affairs. Fans/consumers could, in some cases, buy shares in the entities they care about if a club/organisation wants to allow that (such as in raising capital to fund a new stadium, etc) but that is not a matter for government to intrude into. And my point about Marxism and failure to understand certain relations is that this proposal is grounded in the same hostility toward property rights and voluntary interactions generally.
The question is: are the fans that stupid? You know the old saying: “Everyone is conservative about what they know.”. I noted at the end of this post the possible dangers to Corbyn of applying his form of reasoning to sport. It will gain him some votes but it may lose him others.
Stonyground – interesting to note, in respect of the Triumph Meriden “cooperative”, few people hated it more than – the BSA workers at Small Heath in Birmingham. They felt that company and government resources were being unfairly directed to the cooperative at the expense of the workers at Small Heath. They derided the then-chairman of Triumph and the-then Minister, the sometime-Viscount-Stansgate, as ‘Bill and Benn, The Cooperative Men’. (English children’s joke in there) Remember it well. Worker solidarity only went so far.
llater,
llamas
Without knowing much about the daily workings, I’d go for John Lewis/Waitrose and The Co-Op Food group over here in the UK.
But that’s workers, not fans/customers. I don’t know enough about “supporters’ trusts” to know whether the article is being entirely honest by using the word “fans”, or whether “supporters’s trusts” can genuinely be held to have an interest in the same way as a worker or a shareholder. Given the state of some of the other proposals by Labour, it’s plausible that they genuinely mean “fans”.
Nonsense.
They will mandate that each striker must score a given number of goals, and each keeper will save a given number of shots.
Start betting on 5-5 results.
😉
(You beat me to it. I did have exactly the same thought)
The plan appears to require that fans buy shares of ownership to have a say in management.
Perhaps the plan gives disproportionate authority to a fan trust holding only token shares. But if the fan trust actually owns a substantial part of the team, then no violence is done to property rights.
There is one very successful pro sports team with a similar ownership/management model: the Green Bay Packers of the US National Football League. The team franchise is held by a non-profit corporation with 360,000 shareholders.
Fucking pathetic.
Why doesn’t the ZaNu cunt just offer to put 100 grand in the bank account of everybody who’ll vote for him?
Now I hear even The New Statesman won’t endorse the idiot as fit to be PM.
Only vote-splitting and an SNP suck-up could put him in.
Better re-consider PdeH. The price of a gesture will be way TOO high. Even if Bojo tries to sell out Brexit will still be alive and ready to do battle. Against Jizz and 4 million+ fixed votes that is it for Brexit and the UK.
That can’t last long. That’s exactly what they hate. They’ll end up awarding shares with Party membership instead.
I think you’re more right. 0-0 games sound like weak, listless play. 5-5 games sound more like vigorous, well-fought contests. You can’t put up giant Soviet-style granite-men statues to weak listless 0-0 players.
A long time ago, i read in the FT about a couple of cannibal tribes in the highlands of New Guinea. Every man in a tribe was supposed, as a rite of passage, to kill one, and only one, man of the other tribe. It seemed to me like a form of birth control.
Anyway, missionaries tried to re-direct “the violence inherent in the system” by getting the 2 tribes to play soccer/football against each other. Every game resulted in a tie, because of the mentality of the tribes.
Is it, though?
We can cede to an authoritarian right (Boris and co) that we know we can’t trust, and encourage them to do more of the same. Or to a (very mildly) libertarian (medium hard) left, who will potentially force the right into a dirty rethink.
It’s not cut and dry, mate. I’ve a good deal of respect for those withdrawing their vote from the Tories, even though my mind isn’t made up yet.
If he dies, he dies.
I eagerly await the definition of this …
There is a football club run along these lines in Manchester already, FC United of Manchester.
Suffice to say it seems unlikely ever to challenge Manchester United or Manchester City in the Premier League.
@Rich Rostrom
There is one very successful pro sports team with a similar ownership/management model: the Green Bay Packers of the US National Football League.
However, to bobby b’s point there is a strong team loyalty component that drives it. (As a Chicago Bears fan I can say that it is actually a religious cult, they may well sacrifice chickens and virgins and worship the devil before each match…. I don’t know for sure if that is true, but I heard from a guy, who heard from a guy that that is true. So it MIGHT be true, so why take the risk? You should stay away from those cheese headed devil worshipers…)
Go for 0-0 scores! Don’t socialists believe that economics is a zero-sum game? If someone wins, someone else loses?
neonsnake–mildly medium hard left? What planet are you on? The shit they have already announced fucks my plans to see out my dotage.
Brexit will be alive with Blojo–even if he trys to cheat I reckon he can be forced. Jizz and his 4 million fixed votes can’t be beat. You need to see what’s in front of you.
As a Vikings fan, all I can say is, virgins? In Green Bay? 😛
Johnathan (December 4, 2019 at 1:13 pm),
Good points. Thanks for the clarification.
Well, I view the UK as skewing fairly highly on the spectrum of Liberty/Authority towards the Liberty end, whilst nowhere near as highly as I’d prefer, and edging towards authority (certainly since 1997 and probably earlier) – but very much still on that end. Labour wouldn’t take us fully into Authoritarian, but their commitment to Liberty is no more than very mild, in my opinion.
If we view “privatise everything” as the Right end of economics, and “private markets, public utilities” as a rough and imperfect definition of the centre, and “Full state ownership of the economy including all businesses coupled with central planning a la Cuba/North Korea” as the far Left end, then I’d place Labour maybe 60-70% from the centre towards far Left. Past medium, but still a way away from Cuba/North Korea.
By process of elimination, I presume neonsnake is referring to such Brexit party MPs as came to it from the left (such Brexit MEPs as Claire Fox have certainly been medium hard, or maybe just hard, left in their time). Certainly, no other rival to the Tories could even remotely fit the description. In a given seat, a particular Brexit party MP might well target economically-leftish voters who hate PC – and/or the particular MP might be such a person, though it’s not how I’d describe the party as a whole.
Over on The Great Realignment, Perry has argued for voting The Brexit Party, not Tory. Conversely, a number of Brexit party staff and MEPs are recommending that people vote Tory, not The Brexit Party – as are various old Labourites recommending that people vote Tory.
One (only one) of the reasons I will not be voting for The Brexit Party is that they are not standing in my seat. If I lived in Theresa May’s seat and they were standing there (alas, they’re not) I would have voted for them.
Not quite. I’m a reluctant Brexiteer, and am trying to respect Mr. De Havilland’s wishes to keep Brexit from this page.
The second that anyone breached the promise they immigrants from the EU from 2016 or earlier had to jump through hoops to retain UK citizenship is the moment I parted company from Brexit.
I can’t speak for Perry but suspect he learned long ago – as I do every time I post – that while posts can be held to a certain standard of relevance, comments can sometimes depart surprisingly from topic as commenters wander of on first one and then another side-issue. Compared to some examples of that, relations to, or illustrations from, either Brexit or realignment arise routinely from discussions about posts – as indeed your own puzzling comment that prompted this seemed to do.
As for the rest of your comment above, why is it not in the subjunctive tense? Are you in any real doubt that the Windrush folly was civil servants intentionally trying a bit of Brexit-discrediting which it would be folly to fall for? Whether Priti Patel can better control the home office than the useless May ever did when she was its secretary I know not, but Priti seems on balance a more hopeful choice for that.
Finally, and most importantly (by all means just ignore all my remarks above if you feel they are off-thread), the question of who on earth you could possibly have been thinking of (if it was not some left-leaning members of the Brexit Party) when you spoke of a medium hard or hard left that was also libertarian remains open. IIRC some ‘Spiked’ people started off as marxists but their former friends long to ‘cancel’ them now and would reject the suggestion Spiked was any kind of left. Conversely, the left in the UK today is farther from any kind of libertarian than it has been since the wall came down and in many ways farther than it has ever been. Which former Labour PM was even less libertarian than Corbyn? The LibDems look almost mild by comparison but they are also free speech haters who look less libertarian now than anytime in my adult life.
So I understood the confusion of Gene and the (as always, ‘vigorously’ expressed) scepticism of Mr Ecks as to whom you could have meant, and made the best guess I could.
I’m still in favour of Brexit, I just never believed that it would lead to the Great Realignment.
I meant Labour (see comment December 5th, 1:46pm). Stick them on the Nolan Chart, and my guess is that they’ll be 60-70% towards Far-Left (starting measuring from the centre) – ie. very very very left, whilst not being Cuba. And very mildly south of the centre along the authority-liberty axis. Being south of the middle doesn’t make one a capital-L Libertarian, just that we’re not talking about anything like Mao, Mugabe, Castro etc.
I find capital-L Left-Libertarianism an odd term, and somewhat incoherent (every definition I’ve seen has differed to the others), but there’s plenty of people with commitments to liberty that skew to the left economically. They just differ from us in that their approach has more to do with positive freedoms than negative ones.
(I’d stick LibDems above the centre, tbh, with their commitment to flat-out Revoke. I don’t think they can be called anything like libertarian, neither of the small-l nor the capital-L variety!!)
As for Conservative, I see little evidence of much that I like. It’s still watery mush, with a few proposals I do like (devolving power to local government) and a lot that the purist in me doesn’t (voter ID). But most importantly, I see no current incentive for them to change unless someone gives them a bloody nose – but I suspect I’ll lose my nerve and still hold my nose and vote for the lesser of two evils.
“Finally, and most importantly […], the question of who on earth you could possibly have been thinking of […] when you spoke of a medium hard or hard left that was also libertarian remains open.”
Given that the comparison was with the ‘authoritarian’ Boris & Co., they only need to be slightly less authoritarian than the Tories to count.
Personally, I think Boris and his newly purged party are the most libertarian set of politicians we’ve seen since Maggie (which isn’t saying a lot), and while nobody *we* would consider even ‘mildly’ libertarian is remotely electable, it’s a step in the right direction that needs to be seized gratefully. But judging from Perry’s post over at TGR, some don’t agree, and think the practice of voting for “the least bad” is how we all got to where we are. And that is a valid point. If our voting is not conditional, politicians have no reason to respond to our opinions. Politicians without principles of their own normally aim for the biggest clusters of opinion. They will move in a particular direction if the number of voters gained at one margin exceeds the number lost at the other. So political change is normally driven by voters right on the edge of the party, and especially on the most densely populated bits of the edge between the major clusters. People in the middle of the cluster, and people far outside it, have no influence. (Though people in the middle have no need for it, and those far outside no hope of it.) Sometimes, as recently, politicians chasing the voters around the established boundaries miss the presence of large clusters forming some little way outside the boundary, and you can get a sudden jump when a ‘maverick’ politican spots them. So there might be some sense in trying to form such a cluster. But that’s a long-term strategy, and we’ve currently got a short-term goal.
You might also bear in mind that there are still lots of Blairite Labour politicians around, the Corbynite purge is far from complete, and a lot of swing voters are far less concerned about (or aware of) the authoritarianism of socialism than we are. To such a person, the Tories might well strike them as significantly more authoritarian than Labour. Each party is more authoritarian on some policies and more liberal on others. So how you see them depends to a large extent on which policies you happen to be affected by. The LGBT crowd for example – even the quiet, non-PC, liberal end of it – would no doubt consider the Left’s attitudes to be less authoritarian in this regard than the Right’s. ‘Mildly authoritarian’ voters (i.e. almost all of them) judge the ‘authoritarianism’ of a policy primarily by how it affects themselves.
It’s all relative, anyway. Compared to Kim Jong Un or Stalin, they’re *all* mildly libertarian.
The comments have said it all – there is nothing I can helpfully add.
I would say that’s largely a non-issue nowadays, at least for LGB. It would take an epic swing in public opinion to take us backward (the backward swing over the last year or so notwithstanding, as it’s very slight, although I’m keeping an eye on it)
The T still have some ground to gain.
I’m looking at Voter ID, stronger Stop and Search Powers, the manifesto promise to review judicial review (ie. placing the government above the rule of law), the threat to C4 after the climate debate debacle, the FactCheckUK debacle, minimum wage of £10.50, dedication to zero carbon by 2050, and so on. Some of this offends my libertarian/autonomist sensibilities, some of it is just wet. There’s been a lot of “ends justifying means”, even when I’ve agreed with the ends, that I feel obliged not to ignore (I understand and respect that not everyone will agree, nor feel any passion for the things I’ve listed. That’s cool)
What libertarian policies are current crop pushing?
That’s not a loaded question. I’m registered to vote in a safe Tory seat, but would feel happier if I was able to vote without holding my nose, as it were. I’m kind of in the place that “Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.” to quote Thoreau.
I’m not seeing anything substantial that isn’t more of the same – a weaker, watered down version of New Labour that gives us sugar taxes and so on and so forth.
If there’s something vigorous and muscular that I’ve missed, then please point it out!
While comparisons stand, I think it’s also important to be sober about it. A lot of (not all) of the Labour policies are nutty as a pile of squirrel shit, but we’re not about to all be hauled off to re-education centres if they win.
And yet, I’d be interested in your input, as your are, if I understand correctly, someone who is actually involved in the party I’m likely to vote for, despite enormous misgivings
(I appreciate that my misgivings might not be the same as yours, but I think we can respect each other’s differences and concentrate on common ground)
“I’m looking at Voter ID, stronger Stop and Search Powers, the manifesto promise to review judicial review (ie. placing the government above the rule of law), the threat to C4 after the climate debate debacle, the FactCheckUK debacle, minimum wage of £10.50, dedication to zero carbon by 2050, and so on.”
On voter ID, it’s a requirement for the fairness of the process to ensure citizens only gets one vote. Asking for ID is one way – probably the simplest to implement but not the only method – of doing that. Are you asking that they should find a different way, or are you asking that they not check?
I agree on the stop and search powers, they ought to find a better way to deal with gangs and knife crime. Though that’s hard to do, and “being tough on law and order” is unfortunately very popular. That’s going to be a long and difficult debate, and a difficult election campaign is not the time to start such a conversation with the public.
Reviewing judicial review isn’t about placing the government above the rule of law. The problem they were trying to address was the courts placing themselves and the Commons above the rule of law.
On the Channel 4 thing, it depends what they propose to do. The problem is that media organisations are claiming to be impartial when they’re not, and acting as campaigning wings of political factions with huge state-granted reach and significant resources, that they exclude everyone else from. It’s false advertising, breach of contract, and a breach of electoral laws designed to limit the ability of the rich to buy the result they want. I’m all in favour of free speech, but not deceptive advertising. If Channel 4 present their programs with an explicit label saying in this programme they’re representing the Greens or whatever, fine. But you can’t sell goods to the public and lie about what they are.
The FactCheck ‘debacle’ was nothing of the sort. ‘FactCheck’ just means you check facts – there’s no requirement implied in that description to be politically unbiased, and none of the fact checking sites ever are. Labour did the same thing, I hear, and nobody pulled them up on it.
On the minimum wage I agree. Again, this is not an argument the voters are ready for. First you have to educate the public, debunk the economic assumptions behind it, and the middle of an election campaign is not the time to start doing that.
And climate change is an empty promise they don’t have any intention of delivering, same as all the other climate promises everyone makes. Boris isn’t going to be Prime Minister in 2050 – there’s no way he can be held to this one. This is a straight-out lie, and everyone knows it. But it blunts the attacks if there are no explicit climate-sceptic quotes they can use against him.
“What libertarian policies are current crop pushing?”
Post-Brexit free trade with the rest of the world, primarily. Freedom to go our own way on gaining economic advantage by lowering regulatory barriers.
They’re very carefully avoiding announcing any controversial or unpopular policies, and keeping the message simple. Brexit is the only issue. Everything else is window dressing to limit the scope for others to attack them.
“That’s not a loaded question. I’m registered to vote in a safe Tory seat, but would feel happier if I was able to vote without holding my nose, as it were.”
I’m not arguing for your vote. You should vote based on *your* opinions, not mine. If that means not voting, or voting for someone else, then that’s democracy.
Voters get the politicians they deserve, as they should. If it takes more than Brexit to win them your support, then so be it, and that’s as it should be. I agree that even Boris’s Tories are not remotely ‘libertarians’. No currently electable political party is. All I’m suggesting is that they’re more libertarian than any of the alternatives, and more so than more typical/traditional Tories, and that in the short term, there is Brexit to consider.
“Guido is just another Screetch Site. They’ve nothing of value to add.”
??!! 😳
If you automatically dismiss any source that’s outside your political ‘bubble’, what possible assurance do you have that any of your own information is reliable?
Go read JS Mill’s arguments on the reasons for paying attention to opposing arguments and opinions again. (“… He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. …”)
Guido provided the evidence – a screenshot of the account in question. The channel through which you found out about it is irrelevant to validity of the evidence.
neonsnake (December 6, 2019 at 8:44 pm), Nullius anticipated me as regards the voter fraud point. The Blair-created political UK Supreme ‘court’ is just 10 years old as of October 1st. What we did not have till 10 years ago we can very well do without. My concern is rather that Boris may not be angry enough!
To a Churchill-style democrat, democracy is the worst – except for all the known alternatives. One of those alternatives is rule by those most skilled at voter fraud (“It’s not the voting, it’s the counting.”, is a Tom Stoppard quote, and may be older than that). Another is rule by insider-appointed politically-guided law-inventing judges – judicial activism. It is a very proper libertarian concern to resist either. The effectiveness of Boris’ plans to resist may be debated. That the Tories and the Brexit party are the only game in town for resisting either at this moment seems less debatable.
Nullius (December 6, 2019 at 9:42 pm) likewise anticipates me re Guido. Some of the links in my most recent post are to Guido. (Missed this one.)
Regarding libertarian lefties, words can change drastically. Anarchists once meant something similar to communists, except they believed in small communes. Maybe the small scale makes them libertarian, and the communal living makes them leftish?
Generally attributed to Stalin, phrased variously:
As I learned it, it goes
But more to the point is this wording:
Brainy Quote puts it this way:
Late to the game, but …
neonsnake, Co-op Food Group is a customer co-operative. I’m a member, as it was the closest supermarket to my previous house. John Lewis is, as you said, a worker co-op.