Eastleigh by-election: open thread
Posted on Sunday 10 February, 2013
Filed Under Politics |
78 Comments
EASTLEIGH has never been held by Labour since its inception as a parliamentary constituency in 1955, and the last general election saw its share of the poll slump from over 20% to under 10%.
While it can reasonably expect to claw back a few percentage points in the February 28 by-election, a win seems out of the question, and given that I don’t have a spare Saturday between now and the polling date, I won’t be able to help the campaign in any case.
But as a lefty, I will thoroughly enjoy the spectacle of the Tories and the Lib Dems knocking seven shades out of each other, in a contest that is clearly crucial for Clegg and Cameron alike.
It will also be interesting to see how well UKIP do in the sort of seat in which one would expect them to go down pretty well. Meanwhile, TUSC looks like it is on course to lose (yet another) deposit.
The comments box below is open for observations from supporters of all parties, especially anybody who has been on the knocker.
Gramsci: the bits Gove left out
Posted on Wednesday 6 February, 2013
Filed Under Conservative Party, Education, Theory |
38 Comments
I ONCE drew attention to a passage from a book by Malcolm X, in which the legendary African-American activist demanded black community control of black educational institutions, and jokingly suggested that Michael Gove could use the reference when next speaking in support of free schools.
Now the Tory education secretary has gone one step further, and invoked the name of the great Italian revolutionary socialist Antonio Gramsci in support of coalition education policy.
This has been bugging me ever since I read about it online at work, and the first thing I did when I got back home was to dust off my Gramsci books and remind myself what the great man actually said about education. I suspect Gove would not approve:
In a parliamentary-democratic state there can be no technical or political solution to the problem of the school. Ministers of education are placed in office because they belong to a political party, not because they know how to administer and direct the educational function of the state.
Mmmm. I see, Antonio. Do go on.
Book review: ‘Standing for Something’ by Mark Seddon
Posted on Sunday 3 February, 2013
Filed Under Book review, Labour Left |
44 Comments
ON THE evidence of this autobiography, Mark Seddon is very much still the truly lovely bloke he was when we worked together on the Labour newspaper Tribune back in the mid-1990s.
The smutty schoolboy sense of humour, the slightly naff taste in suits and the guileless belief in an anachronistic brand of latter day Bevanism are all quite clearly still present, and I for one hope they never leave him.
But the big question for those that knew him way back when is why the political ascent that almost everybody within our milieu two decades ago regarded as inevitable never happened.
After establishing himself as the Owen Jones of that period, in the sense of being the go-to guy when broadcasters needed an articulate and young-ish leftwing talking head, the expectation was that Sedders would become a Labour MP and ultimately the leader of the parliamentary left, and that within a decade.
Do we really need to resuscitate the Convention of the Left? Reply to Owen Jones and Luke Akehurst
Posted on Friday 25 January, 2013
Filed Under The left |
106 Comments
DOES the name ‘Convention of the Left’ mean anything to you? Don’t worry, you are not alone; 99% of the population will never have heard of it, and even those for whom the name rings a bell may need their memories jogging on this one.
Five years ago, a number of well-known socialists and an environmentalist or two declared that it was high time to ‘explicitly challenge Labour’s programme of warmongering, neoliberal privatisation and failure to tackle environmental destruction’.
The declaration was signed by Tony Benn, John McDonnell MP of the Labour Representation Committee, Robert Griffiths of the Communist Party of Britain, former Green Party principle speaker Derek Wall, George Galloway MP and Salma Yaqoob of Respect and Chris Bambery and Lindsey German of the Socialist Workers Party.
Figureheads such as those have the ability to mobilise several thousand serious activists, and given the aims of the initiative, may reasonably have hoped to attract tens of thousands of others who agreed with the initial premise.
Doctors without qualifications: how Milton Friedman inspired coalition NHS reforms
Posted on Friday 18 January, 2013
Filed Under Politics, The right, Theory, Welfare State |
132 Comments
WHEN you trust someone to wield a scalpel on the most sensitive parts of your anatomy – and such, dear reader, was my painful lot some 18 months ago - you cross your fingers and hope they are a properly trained surgeon.
But according to the libertarian right, regressive attitudes like that hold back the development of a free market in health services. The requirement for licensure both prevents all and sundry who wish to practice medicine from doing so, and deprives the rest of us of the opportunity to purchase their services, and so should be scrapped.
In case you suspect that I am making this stuff up, it is all there in black and white in the work of Milton Friedman, a thinker whose impact on the policies of governments of all parties since the 1970s has been incalculable.
On a range of issues from monetarism and exchange controls to the clear ideological animus against public housing, the emasculation of trade unionism and explicit tolerance of tax avoidance, Friedman’s ‘Capitalism and Freedom’ has been the de facto blueprint for successive administrations.
I predict a riot … or not
Posted on Friday 11 January, 2013
Filed Under Society |
11 Comments
BRITONS don’t riot, my friend Nick Cohen famously told the readers of his Observer column a couple of years back. Yet even as the first copies of the paper were hitting the newsstands outside Kings’ Cross, buses were being overturned in Tottenham. Within days, the disturbances had gone nationwide.
The irony is that in 2009, the Observer’s daily stable mate ran a front page splash based on an interview with a senior copper, which suggested that this country was in for ‘a summer of rage’ as ‘middle class anger at economic crisis’ erupted into violence on the streets. Needless to say, nothing of the kind occurred.
Predicting riots is clearly a game best left to the Kaiser Chiefs. Yet that hasn’t stopped others having a go. Just after Christmas, the Labour leaders of Newcastle, Sheffield and Liverpool used the letters page of Nick’s publication to warn that the coalition’s cuts will see ‘the forces of social unrest [start] to smoulder’.
The latest prognosis comes from Yves Daccord, head of the International Red Cross, who told BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme this week that he was expecting a rerun of 2011, again by way of readily anticipatable reaction to austerity.
These are easily generated alarmist headlines, as the right will no doubt point out. I have no idea what will happen in the months ahead, and neither do those who venture into print with claims to 20/20 foresight.
But my sense would be that such forecasts are as difficult to rule out as they are easy to make. Cameron and Clegg cannot afford to be complacent.
Book review: ‘Maonomics’ by Loretta Napoleoni
Posted on Sunday 6 January, 2013
Filed Under Book review, International |
69 Comments
BACK in the 1930s, a certain breed of starry-eyed European leftist was eager to make the case that the USSR somehow represented ‘a new civilisation’.
Proof of the superiority of Stalin’s economic policies, they insisted, was to be found in continued expansion, even at a time when western capitalism was deeply mired in depression. The techniques by which this was achieved could therefore felicitously be overlooked in polite Fabian circles.
Fast forward to now and you find several writers ready to take a parallel stance in the case of China, and Loretta Napoleoni is a prime example. ‘Maonomics’ sits alongside Jenny Clegg’s ‘China’s Global Strategy’ as a typical representative of the genre.
They provide the intellectual underpinnings of an outlook widespread inside the British labour movement, exemplified by the regular favourable coverage of China carried by the Morning Star, and the propensity of some leftwing bloggers to get slightly turned on by pictures of hunky rifle-clutching men in Chinese navy uniforms.
Let’s be frank from the outset; Ms Napoleoni’s book is a bad one. The writing style is meandering, to put it kindly, and the translation from Italian frequently clunky. She doesn’t even deliver on the title, which should surely be ‘Dengnomics’, in honour of the chief architect of China’s turn to the market.
Cult comes a cropper: an article by Duncan Hallas
Posted on Wednesday 2 January, 2013
Filed Under Socialist Workers' Party, Trotskyism |
105 Comments
BACK in 1985, the Workers’ Revolutionary Party fragmented eight or nine ways following revelations that its main leader, Gerry Healy, had seriously sexually abused women comrades. Among those on the left quick to condemn such disgusting behaviour was the Socialist Workers’ Party.
The following article by the late Duncan Hallas – originally published in the SWP’s Socialist Review magazine that year – pretty accurately sums up the reasons behind the decline of what was once the largest far left group in Britain.
By this point the WRP was routinely exaggerating its membership, claiming to have about 6,000 cadre. It typically worked through opportunistic political relations with some MPs and union officials and ‘united fronts’ that gathered little support beyond its own ranks. Most worryingly of all, it was also courting reactionary political trends in the Middle East.
Hallas concluded:
The WRP has visibly declined in the last decade and is now scarcely of even marginal significance. A tragic waste of the efforts and sacrifices of many well-intentioned revolutionaries and a most salutary warning about the dangers of mistaking wishes for reality, of false perspectives uncorrected by experience, of virulent sectarianism and political dishonesty.
Quite. I have lightly edited what follows:
IT IS A fair assumption that most members of the SWP have had little contact with members of the Workers Revolutionary Party. A fair assumption because in workplaces, in union organisations at local, district and national levels, on workplace and street sales, in colleges and universities, on demonstrations and so on, their presence. is very much the exception rather than the rule. Equity apart, of course.
Their claim, solemnly repeated in various organs of the capitalist press, to be “a party of 6,000 members” is manifestly absurd. Six hundred tolerably active members before their present split would be a generous estimate. Daily paper notwithstanding, their operation has been largely a bluff for many years.
Statement of SWP Democratic Opposition
Posted on Sunday 23 December, 2012
Filed Under Socialist Workers' Party |
78 Comments
Four members of the Socialist Workers’ Party have been expelled in the run up the that organisation’s conference next month, for reasons detailed here. Some of their co-thinkers have responded by forming an oppositional grouping. This is what they have to say for themselves:
FOUR comrades have been expelled for forming a ‘secret faction’ during the discussions prior to SWP conference. The expelled members had been legitimately concerned about the handling of very serious allegations directed at a CC member and the way that this was being handled by the organisation and had discussed about what this represented and how comrades could ensure the matter was dealt with properly.
There had been some discussion about whether to declare a faction or not. Some comrades, out of concern for how these matters had been dealt with previously, were in favour of doing so – but other comrades were worried that this might be premature or even disloyal. It is for having this discussion and sharing these concerns that the comrades have been expelled.
Importantly, the accusation of ‘secret faction’ was made against those concerned about declaring one whilst those in favour of declaring one have been referred to as ‘honest’ in a number of report backs from the CC to affected local branches, implying that those expelled were ‘dishonest’. We unreservedly reject this description as slander against the four excellent and valuable comrades who have been expelled.
From Section 28 to gay marriage: the Tories and homosexuality
Posted on Monday 17 December, 2012
Filed Under Conservative Party, LGBT |
102 Comments
ON ONE level, David Cameron’s decision to legislate for equal marriage is a measure of just how far the Conservative Party has come since the 1980s.
Only a quarter of a century ago, it was still acceptable for a Tory local government leader to respond to the arrival of AIDS with a call for ‘90% of queers’ to be sent to ‘the ruddy gas chambers’ rather than be allowed to ‘trade their filth up and down the country’.
A toned down version of that rhetoric could be heard even at the very top. Margaret Thatcher herself told Conservative conference in 1987: ‘Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.’
The double standard was palpable. The government benches were absolutely jammed with closet queens, not least Maggie’s own parliamentary private secretary, the late Sir Peter Morrison.
Her predecessor as Tory leader, Ted Heath, was still in parliament at the time. Only after his death did it emerge that he had to be warned off his propensity for cottaging prior to his political career taking off.
