Manchester Convention of the Left 24-25 Sept

Just thought I'd flag up an event in late September in Manchester. The Convention of the Left is an initiative that's been going on for a little while now bringing together people on the left and trying to facilitate a bit of conversation between the often fractious and warring left factions.

Rightly it has quite modest aims. It does not set itself up as a new coalition or party of the left, but simply tries to get people in a room with each other and being nice to each other. That's a good place to start I think.

This September will see some speakers like Ian Angus on ‘Climate & Capitalism’, Gregor Gall (strong lefty on industrial relations), John McDonnell MP and Matt Wrack (General Secretary of the Firefighters' Union). However the main session will be an open forum on building alliances against the cuts. Seems sensible and well worth attending.

Visit the website at conventionoftheleft.org for more details. Download the flier here. (Reminded by Liam)

Blog Nation: left Lib Dems

At the Liberal Conspiracy blog nation event yesterday one speaker from the Social Liberal Forum told us that the biggest threat in this Parliament will be tribalism. He continued to predicate everything on the inevitability of Parliamentary mathematics and the idea that the Lib Dems had no choice but to support the coalition.

Well, I don't agree. Like my friend Dave Osler who gave a spirited rant in response I think the biggest threat posed by this Parliament is a slash and burn economic policy under pinned by a right-wing anti-state ideology.

It's estimated that between half a million and 1.3 million people will lose their jobs, millions of families who rely on public services will find their lives harder and many people will literally find themselves on the streets - all cheerfully supported by the Lib Dems en bloc, en masse, en tribe.

Anyone who saw the beleaguered Vince Cable on Question Time this week will have seen the shonky dishonesty of the Libs Dems on proud display. He weakly tried to justify this budget as progressive and good for the poor. He claimed to have changed his mind about VAT, coincidentally at the same time as being given a cushy treasury job, even he didn't believe it.

If Lib Dems want to dissent from the party, argue against the budget and other parts of the coalition deal then they're welcome to pride of place in any campaign I'm part of, but you don't get to posture as part of the left while supporting these extraordinary measures of mass impoverishment.

The speaker told us that if we rock the boat too hard it would "jeopardise the referendum on AV." Well, big deal. AV, like FPTP, will leave millions unrepresented in Parliament and millions more massively under represented. As carrots go it's pretty rotten.

The AV referendum is the Tory strategy to prevent PR, damn right I want to jeopardise it but not half as much as I want to challenge the down right villainy of this budget.

If Lib Dems want to hang out with the left then they need to buck up and stop pretending that they're taking part in some sort of "progressive coalition". Our job is to thwart the intentions of this government, not give excuses to its embarrassed supporters.

Dave Prentis wins UNISON General Secretary election

As the hyper-cuts budget is announced it would be easy to overlook the election of the General Secretary of one of Britain's largest unions, and one whose members will be bearing the brunt of the public service bonfire. Who leads the union in this crucial time is extremely important.

The incumbent Dave Prentis, who Cameron took the trouble to slag off the other day, won the votes of 67% of the 216,116 people who cast a ballot (14% turnout, which is pretty standard). A fairly ringing endorsement of a union moderate who has been able to make the right noises in the press but has also taken a hard line approach with the left in the union, including some extremely dubious expulsions.

His two challengers were both from the left. Roger Bannister of the Socialist Party won an impressive 20% of the vote and Labour Party member Paul Holmes won the remaining 13% for the 'United Left'.

The result is no surprise given that Prentis was nominated by a whopping 371 branches, 11 regional councils, 7 service groups and the National Executive Council (compared to Bannister's 31 branches and Holmes' 52 branches) but the size of the opposition is significant, as is the fact that it all came from the left of Prentis.

It's also interesting that Prentis has seen his support among members decline from the 77% of the vote he received five years ago, with the left increasing it's share of the vote (last time round Jon Rogers, also a left Labour Party member stood as the United Left candidate).

2010 candidates			2005 candidates
Dave Prentis	145,351	(67.3%)	Dave Prentis	184,769	(75.6%)
Roger Bannister	42,651	(19.7%)	Roger Bannister	41,406	(16.9%)
Paul Holmes	28,114	(13.0%)	Jon Rogers	18,306	(7.5%)
	216,116			244,481

It's interesting that in both elections Bannister was put under a great deal of pressure by the 'United Left' to stand down in favour of their candidates who on both occasions received more branch nominations but less support from ordinary members.

Quite rightly in my view the Socialist Party understood that they had the better placed candidate among members, even if the United Left was able to mobilise a certain layer of branch officers. On both occasions it was seen as the height of sectarianism on the part of Bannister not to step down, and on both occasions it turned out that it was the United Left that was in fact speaking to a more narrow section of the membership.

At no time did the United Left seriously consider stepping down in favour of Bannister despite the fact that such a move could bode extremely well for a more coordinated approach to elections and campaigns at other levels of the union. Such as it is the different cliques of the organised left in the union are still at daggers drawn and will, therefore, remain unable to win a majority influence.

However, the good news is that 32.3% of the union's membership who voted opted for a fighting union that takes on the government cuts agenda head-on. Whether that one in three can be translated into victories in the public sector depends not just on UNISON members but the wider movement as a whole.

BA-union negotiations disrupted by direct action

The BBC and the Telegraph report that the union negotiations between the UNITE union and BA management have been disrupted by protesters coming from the Right to Work conference. The BBC have particularly exciting footage which shows quite a few people I recognise from the SWP and at least three of them are employees of that organisation.

Now, I might be taking a wild stab in the dark here but there didn't seem to be a single BA worker among the protesters who'd decided to break up the union's negotiations. If anyone is going to make the decision to occupy their union's negotiations with management it should be the BA workers themselves, and not just one of them but collectively making that decision.

I have absolutely no idea what this is meant to achieve apart from making the strike more complicated for those workers who are already on the receiving end of abuse from media and management alike.

Derek Simpson, one of the union's negotiators tweeted that "Unite totally and absolutely condems [sic] the demonstrators who disrupted the talks at ACAS no member of cabin crew were involved". Now, whatever you think of him that seems to be a perfectly justified position to me.

Unsurprisingly Socialist Worker have a report up already where they unintentionally make clear that no BA worker asked them to disrupt their negotiations and that their key (or should that be only) purpose was in "demanding that activists build solidarity for the BA workers and hold collections to support the strikes."

So that's all about activists demanding things of other activists then without any involvement from the workers who are actually on strike and whose livelihoods are concerned. I don't think this is very cool, in fact I'd say it was the wrong way to help cabin crew win their dispute.

Labour Leadership race

In the space of such a short time we've gone from the leadership race being characterised as a Miliband family operation to being swamped by a host of would be leaders of the opposition. This is, of course, a good thing. For Labour to have a proper discussion about the direction it wants to go would mark a great improvement on the last time they selected their leader, from a list of one.

Generally I'll keep my nose out of it, I'm not emotionally involved enough to distinguish between David and Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Andy Burnham et al. They all pretty much look like caretaker leaders to me anyway.

What does interest me is that there are currently two lefties with their hats in the ring, although we'll have to see which, if either, actually gets on the ballot paper.

The left hopefuls are Diane Abbott and John McDonnell who are two London MPs who have long political histories and who are both members of the Campaign Group. Either one of these candidates would be a real contribution to the political breadth of the leadership debate and would provide an opportunity for left-field ideas to get a wider airing.

McDonnell comes in a straight clear red, softened by his personable and thoughtful style while Abbott is more of a free thinking leftist who often does not conform to type. In other words she's not as left-wing as McDonnell, but then again it would be hard to live up to his impeccable, mace wielding, credentials.

Well, I say impeccable, he's been consistently opposed to electoral reform on the basis that Labour might seats and he's also supported odd EDMs on homeopathy and voted for the Digital Economy Bill but these aside he's as sound as a pound. Not the pound obviously - but a pound.

The objections most often aired about Abbott tend to revolve around two things. First that she's on TV a lot and second that she sent her kid to a private school. Having heard Ed Balls on Radio Four yesterday I'd say that someone who is capable of being in the glare of the media without collapsing into a blubbering ridiculous heap is probably an advantage.

The school thing is less fortunate although quite why this as been elevated to the status it has been as opposed to the way, for example, Jon Cruddas voted for the launching of an illegal war that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands is quite beyond me. I'm pretty relaxed about candidates that are not 100% on message, and I'm certainly repulsed by the idea that to be on the left you have to be a moral paragon.

If we compare the left's challenge this time to last time's dress rehearsal we see differences and similarities. We're obviously seeing a more open field rather than the coronation of Brown. We're not seeing an associated deputy election, at least I hope not. However the attitude of McDonnell's supporters is surprisingly similar.

Last time McDonnell's allies chose belligerence as their coalition building tool of choice. They poured poison over both Michael Meacher, who they described as fake left, and bile over deputy leadership challenger Jon Cruddas who they simultaneously insisted had to back McDonnell. This time it's Abbott who is being accused of being fake left, despite the fact that she backed McDonnell's campaign last time around. I don't think this sort of heat will do anything except make it impossible for McDonnell to get onto the ballot paper - and he deserves to be there.

Whatever the outcome I hope that one of them is on the ballot paper, although I suspect it is extremely unlikely that either of them will be able to make a truly significant challenge for the top post simply because they represent a Labour Party that does not exist - and maybe never did.

Are we going back to the eighties?

Before the election a number of people I knew would shudder and say of a potential Tory government that they "they remembered Thatcher" and didn't want to go back to those days. Never that they remembered Major or Heath or MacMillian (although actually very few would remember MacMillian, he was certainly in power before I was born).

Somehow Thatcher had become the representative of what Tories are like through the ages, regardless of the political and economic circumstances and regardless of the ideological nuances and gulfs that exist between different strands of Conservatism.



It could get a bit wearing sometimes if, like me, you don't accept that all bad things are the same despite all being bad.

Thatcher came to power with a plan, a large majority and a clear determination to take on a powerful trade union movement. So there's three differences straight off with Cameron's government that hasn't really decided what it's for, has been forced to deal with the Liberals and whose main priority is to attack a budget deficit in times when the trade union movement is a shadow of its former self.

It seems to me that the challenges we face in the next five years will not be the same as those we faced in the early eighties - but they could well be harder not softer days.

With no mass membership left of center party to draw on and a far left that is sadly far more confused and pessimistic than that of 1979 the austerity measures may not be met with Greek fire at all, although we can certainly hope.

What's clear is that trying to rehash the struggles of the eighties (struggles that we, cough, lost) is not going to be up to the job. Over the coming months we'll see a good number of trade unionists and leftists trying to come to terms with the new period, that's going to be important work in my view.

If our resistance is going to be both active and effective a solid appraisal of where we are and what the government is concretely going to do is going to be essential. What's clear is that it wont be a historical re-enactment of the battle of Orgreave.

What sort of election did the left have?

How well did the left do at this election? 'Not brilliantly' is the quick answer, and depending upon your party loyalties that could be upgraded to 'disastrous' or even 'abysmal'.

I've already mentioned that the Labour Party did far better than we might have expected and left-wing Labour MPs actually performed very strongly within that doing very well in mobilising their support.

Green victory

The headline for the left is, of course, that anti-capitalist leftoid Caroline Lucas has been elected to the House of Commons making her the first Green MP in British history - but this result does conceal disappointments elsewhere.

Adrian Ramsay performed well in Norwich South almost doubling his vote to 14.9% (up 7.5%) taking almost all of Labour's hemorrhaging vote in the constituency. Tony Juniper also polled well in Cambridge at 7.6% but largely the vote was heavily squeezed in the course of such a momentous election.

This is, of course, partly down to the heavily targeted strategy the Greens pursued as well as the electoral circumstances, but it's disappointing none-the-less despite the great achievement in Brighton Pavillion.

Respect did quite well

Outside of the Green and Labour Parties there were three left results of any note what-so-ever - all from Respect. While Respect may have taken a pasting in Poplar and Bethnal Green they still polled very well with 16.8% in Bethnal Green and Bow (down a massive 19.8%) and 17.5% for George Galloway in Poplar and Limehouse (with the far smaller reduction of 0.7%). These areas also saw a near wipe out of Respect from Tower Hamlets council.

On the other hand Salma Yaqoob performed extremely well in a hard fought election in Birmingham Hall Green more than doubling Respect's vote to 25.1% (up 13.9%). Other results for Respect were not as cheering but should not be allowed to cloud their well deserved results in these three strongholds.

McCann: the boy done good

In Foyle Eammon McCann (who I mentioned previously) polled extremely well in a very polarised environment.

He managed to receive 7.7% of the vote as a 'People Before Profit' candidate up from his 2005 performance of 3.6% when he stood as the Socialist and Environmental Alliance backed, if I recall correctly, by the local Green Party.

This is stirring stuff, particularly when we've seen that the voters in the North of Ireland are beginning to loosen up in their political affiliations and consider alternatives, albeit ones with a solid history - which McCann has.

TUSC et al - poor to piss poor

The Morning Star has printed a little guide to how the left did here which shows that generally we are talking about 1%ers in decline. However Tommy Sheridan provided the Scottish left with their best result in Glasgow South West at 2.9% and Jenny Sutton provided the best London result for TUSC with 2.6% in Tottenham.

If we take a look at the left's electoral trajectory it makes for depressing reading. I was sent an email from the 'Cambridge Socialists' saying what 'a great start' they had made having just received 0.7% of the vote, which did make me feel a little bit like I was being expected to have a five second memory.

Cambridge: Martin Booth who is an excellent, open minded socialist and stood for TUSC got 0.7% of the vote. In 2005 Tom Woodcock (part of TUSC) stood for Respect and got 1.1% of the vote and in 2001 Howard Senter (who is now a Green) stood for the Socialist Alliance and got 1.7% of the result. Over nearly ten years the left vote has declined by more than half in Cambridge.

Coventry: This mirrors a similar picture elsewhere. Dave Nellist, for example, who got one of the best TUSC results of the night in Coventry North East with 3.7% of the vote, received 5.04% in 2005, getting his deposit back and 7.1% in 2001. Again, Nellist's vote has almost halved since 2001.

Lewisham: Ian Page in Lewisham Deptford is often held up as one of the Socialist Party's great white hopes but his result of 1.6% this time was down on his 2.4% in 2005 which itself was down on his 4.6% in 2001. Page polled a third of his 2001 result in 2010.

These are not campaigns which are building up the socialist vote but are demonstrations of the hard left's (temporary?) decline. Feel free to give me examples of a left vote that went up from 2001 to 2005 to 2010 - I need cheering up!

This should make sobering reading for the non-Labour left and, I hope, sparks some sort of calm reflection on where to go from here. These are people who contribute far, far more to their communities and to the left than these small votes reflect and it will no doubt be hard to pick themselves up and keep at it.

Obviously I joined the Greens sometime ago and found it an interesting home for a socialist, although for those who like their socialism full of quotes and by the book I suspect the Green Party would be a hard terrain to negotiate. Others will reassess whether they want to be involved in electoral work altogether, which may well be the right decision for them. Party loyalties aside though I really do hope we haven't seen the last of the likes of Sutton and Nellist whose contributions are much appreciated by me - if not necessarily the electorate!

Caught in the headlights of a Tory government

Prior to the election there were some on the left who would hold up the ragged scarecrow corpse of Thatcher and wail that we're all doomed if Cameron got in. I went to a Keep the NHS Public meeting tonight and there were a couple of people there who seemed to have the view that we're all doomed.

Now, first of all, if there is a rumble to be had let's not go into it with our head in our hands. That's not the fighting spirit is it?

Secondly, to a certain extent this result makes things much clearer. Cuts and privatisation were on the menu no matter who won this election. The result simply determined the colour of the executioner's hood.

What the result does mean is that Labour Party members, cllrs and MPs as well as some trade union branches will be less 'confused' when the cuts come. It will be easier for them to join in campaigns to save hospital units or protest against public sector layoffs when it isn't "their" government that they are having to fight.

As a campaigner I'd far rather have good Labour Party supporters with me than vacillating on the sidelines looking guilty and sick as they try to persuade me to be realistic as their government obliterates some public service or other.

The potential Lib Dem-Tory coalition will not be as daunting to face off than the 1979 Tory Party with its whopping majority. It wont have the confidence, it doesn't have a proper plan, and there is a real potential to exploit the cracks between the parties, especially as the Lib Dems are likely to be thrown into a crisis with this shoddy decision.

It's not good news. They are a shower of shits. But they are a shower of shits we can beat if we keep it together and keep on fighting for what is right.

The lefties: who's got mojo?

Next in my series of discussing members of other political parties I admire I thought I'd take a look at some of the lefties standing at this election. I hate to disappoint any Tories reading but whilst I've met plenty of Tory supporters I like I could not for the life of me put together a similar post about Conservative politicians.

My admiration for George Galloway I'll leave aside for the moment as I know some people find him hard to take and I'll focus on three others that I've discussed less often on this blog.

Eamonn McCann

McCann is standing for People Before Profit in Foyle, a seat he got 12.3% in in 1969, and the last time he stood there he managed to beat the Ulster Unionists.

Eamonn McCann is a long-serving socialist warhorse of the most excellent, humane sort. Having been consistently active in politics in the north of Ireland for decades it's fair to say he's been there and done that, this and the other.

From his involvement in the very early days of the civil rights movement alongside the likes of Bernadette Devlin right up to his acquittal after direct action against multinational arms company Raytheon in 2008 he has been a constant radical presence.

I thought his book Dear God: The Price of Religion in Ireland was absolutely breath taking, hilarious and shocking by turns and his attempts to bring socialist politics to Ireland, free from the debilitating sectarianism that has plagued the country, is much to be admired.

McCann argued in the Sunday Journal: "When market forces drive the poor into destitution, we must roll with the punches. But when hard times discomfit the super-rich, the State weighs in to make a mattress for them stuffed with our money."

Salma Yaqoob

No-one will be surprised to see Ms Yaqoob on my love list. After all I've spoken about her before and even interviewed her a little while back.

Salma is part of the New Left camp site (as opposed to big tent) who has been been willing to back the Greens when appropriate (like last year's Euro elections) and has always been someone who has approached others on the left in an open and thoughtful way.

She has rightly received many admirers from outside of Respect in return. As she said in The Guardian a little while ago; "Labour's mantra on the need to make others more "British", rather than making ourselves less racist, has helped undermine concepts of national identity that celebrate pluralism and diversity."

More importantly she points out that; "On the economy, [Labour, Lib Dems and Tories] have for years embraced and celebrated the neo-liberal free market dogma responsible for record levels of wealth inequality and the worst recession in over fifty years. They are also united on the necessity of vicious cuts as the solution to the crisis and are divided only on the timescale for the implementation of those cuts."

That's why she is an important part of the left alternatives.

Colin Fox

Co-speaker of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) Colin Fox has had a hard decade. Or at least it must seem hard having been part of a team that led the SSP to six MSPs and a real chance to hit the big time he had to see it all fall apart and fall back to square one.

However, where lesser mortals would have given up in despair, and certainly if it had happened to me I'd have been trailing stuffing behind me for years, he's made of far better stuff than me and kept ploughing on. After all he was a leading campaigner against the poll tax and had to go through the indignity of the Labour Party so I guess he'd done it all before.

When I interviewed him a little while ago he said that; "The SSP has been in favour of an independent socialist Scotland since our inception ten years ago. We believe that working people in Scotland will be economically, socially, politically and culturally better off if able to control all our revenues and all our own decision making. It is clear to us that if this were the case then Scotland would be a radically different country from the one we live in today. There is no doubt whatsoever that an Independent Scotland would not have sent troops to Iraq or Afghanistan, would not have nuclear weapons stationed on the Clyde, would not have entertained the privatisation of our hospitals and schools and, since a majority here are in favour of a modern democratic republic, we would not have the Queen as our head of state either."

And I rather enjoyed that - but most of all I admire the man's stamina to keep fighting the good fight, regardless of how hard it gets.

John Hicklenton: Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave!

I was sad to see that John Hicklenton (wikipedia) the creator of the likes of Judge Dredd has taken his own life after a long battle with illness.

Hicklenton was part of a team that helped create a bleak, if artistic, form of social criticism.


As a teenager I was particularly fond of the Nemisis / Torquemada episodes where an alien freedom fighter battles the religious zealotry of a human militaristic empire that sought to exterminate everything not like itself.

It played into my growing awareness of racism, religious dogma and political violence - although whether it really helped my understanding is another matter. Whatever its utilitarian value the stories were glorious.

By placing the focus on the psychology of discipline and order Hicklenton and others teased out how the desire for perfection was intrinsically linked to the desire for death.

Where change and chaos occur it is the product of life, which is naturally ambiguous, complex and difficult. By attempting to wipe out those ambiguities the forces of law and order become forces for death itself.

Makes sense to me anyway.

Torquemada in particular relied upon the artificiality of 'the other'. Those elements that seem alien are often only different because of the conditions we have placed upon them because of their alienness.

Years before I started thinking about these things possible I began to understand how creating enemies can serve a purpose quite at odds with the propaganda that supports conflict and hate. I'd like to thank John Hicklenton - he'll be missed.

Not boycotting those who will not boycott

From time to time little blog spats take place which become heated, personalised disagreements of no interest to anyone outside the blogosphere. I have to say these are the one aspect of the blogging that I have absolutely no time for, and absolutely no interest in. They are tedious in the extreme and only appear political because it is political people who indulge in them. Just this once I'm going to mention one, just to make it clear why I'm not getting involved.

Iain Dale, who is a Tory blogger of some renown, is heavily involved in Total Politics, a magazine that goes out to all sorts of political types. Iain has recently interviewed BNP leader Nick Griffin for the magazine. This gives Griffin a platform and presents him the opportunity to pose as a respectable politician.

This is a bad thing and I wish Iain and Total Politics had not done this, in my view they are playing a dangerous game. However, almost every news source I use has interviewed Griffin and his BNP henchmen at some point so Total Politics is hardly forging new ground here.

However, over at Though Cowards Flinch, they decided this was too much to bear and issued a call for every political blogger to boycott the Total Politics blog awards because the magazine carried the interview. They explicitly do not a call for a boycott of the Guardian, or the BBC or Channel Four News, who have all interviewed Griffin, but target Total Politics because it's small enough to push around and Dale is a Tory.

That's not good enough.

AVPS points out that the boycott achieves the reverse of it's intention; "By advocating action against TP, the TCF comrades have ensured Iain's interview will receive wider circulation than would otherwise be the case. Inadvertently, calling for no platform in this case means Griffin gets a broader platform."

That, in fact, those who issued the call are more interested in emphasising their political differences with a Tory than they are in minimising the amount of publicity the fascists receive. They have ensured that this interview, that they say they wish never happened, is read far more widely than if they had never mentioned it. The success of the boycott call will be judged by how much harm it does a Tory blogger even as it helps the BNP get its message out which, in reality, is a side issue to the call - which is a big part of why I don't trust this initiative.

I don't believe Iain was right to conduct and publish this interview but I've never before heard that it is a principle to no platform or boycott people who don't believe in no platform - I think the idea has always been to try to persuade them they are wrong, something this boycott is not going to do, in fact it will entrench those who oppose no platform in their position.

Blog wars of this kind have nothing to do with real politics even when they work, which this one doesn't. I love Liberal Conspiracy, for example, but its personalised attacks on Iain Dale come across as puerile and tribal, something that I have no interest in and always makes me think less of what is, more generally, an excellent site.

I wont be taking part in the call for boycotting Total Politics. Nor will I be mistaking the fact that I despise Tory ideas for the need to despise individual Tories. The few times I've met Iain Dale I've rather liked him and don't feel the least bit bad about it, I just don't want him running the country is all.

Inventing new principles that we have to boycott people who don't agree with no platform for fascists risks weakening the no platform principle itself. No platform relies upon the idea that we specifically deny a platform to fascists, and only fascists, because of the threat they pose to democratic politics. We do not boycott people because they don't agree with us, at least grown ups don't.

Italian protests get colourful

The movement against Berlusconi's anti-democratic ways is still going strong with ongoing demonstrations and protests. I noticed in The Times today that part of that movement has branded itself 'The Purple People'.

Berlusconi, like many right-wing populists before him, has taken it on himself to curtail the right of the courts to investigate his crimes, has little to no regard for internal democracy simply appointing cabinet ministers and candidates as he sees fit and has mounted a continued attack on the legal system every time it acts independently of his will.

The latest episode occurred this weekend when "judges in Milan refused to annul a trial in which Mr Berlusconi is accused of bribing David Mills, his former British tax lawyer and the estranged husband of Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister".

I was interested by 'Il Popolo Viola' partly because there seems to be a bit of a habit of using colours to define political movements in Italy. The 'Tute Bianche' (all in white) were a strong leftist political current not long ago. In fact both groups used the slogan 'Ya Basta' (Enough) and talk admiringly of their own 'spontaneity'.

We don't tend to use colours this explicitly in politics over here. The only examples that spring to mind are the highly successful, cough, Red Wedge and the Green Party of course. hopefully Purple will work for these protesters and they'll help to destabilise Berlusconi's rotten regime.

Lindsay German: united fronts or just fronts?

I don't normally comment on this sort of thing but there are a couple of things worth saying about the resignation of Lindsay German from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

It's important for two reasons. Firstly because Lindsay is the convener of the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) the most important umbrella group in the UK organising against military aggressions. The second reason is because it helps illustrate a problem of how political activists involve themselves in broader campaign groups.

In brief, she has resigned after decades of service to the party after the national organiser of the SWP instructed her that she was not to attend a StWC meeting that she'd been booked to speak at that evening. Told that this was a matter of party discipline Lindsay knew that if she did speak at the event she may well find herself expelled and choose to jump rather than get the push.

This came on the back of a long running factional battle that goes way back into the split from Respect and a rather obscure set of mild differences over political perspectives which, once aired, have started to snowball into quite real differences in approach.

At this point I shall declare that I rather like Lindsay, although I haven't spoken to her for quite some time. It's also worth stating that the arbitrary rulings she was facing were not so very different from the kind of discipline she has expected of other comrades when she had the whip hand. I recognise though that not every dom can easily switch to sub.

Regardless of this she should not have been put in the position of having to choose between her commitments to the coalition she leads and the party that she supported.

The key point for me is that genuine coalitions, that include a politically broad range of organisations and members, united around specific set of demands have to have an independent life of their own if they are to maintain mutual trust. The difference between a united front and, well, just a front is whether one organisation can unilaterally trump the decisions of the coalition without reference to its structures.

I'm a member of the Stop the War Coalition and an activist in the anti-war movement. If I book the convener of my organisation to speak at a meeting I don't expect to be told that someone I've never voted for, who belongs to an organisation I don't belong to has cancelled my speaker for me. That would rather undermine my confidence that I'm a member of an independent organisation.

The issue is not whether it's nice for Lindsay to speak at a meeting, she may or may not feel it's personally unfair to be forbidden to speak. The issue is whether members of one organisation can cancel the plans of a different organisation unilaterally.

I can't hold the SWP national organiser to account, even if I could expel him from the coalition he'd still reserve the right to instruct SWP members however he sees fit within it. If the coalition chose to make an official complaint about this specific instance of stupid interference in its work the SWP would go into an immediate fit and insist this was a witch hunt against the left, because there's no one quite so adolescent as a petty dictator whose edicts have been politely questioned.

The fetish for centralised party discipline, where members accept arbitrary, overbearing and misjudged micro-management of their activity, is not my cup of tea. I'm also rather partial to the odd bit of democratic transparency in organisations I belong to.

The SWP may feel it owns its members, that's distasteful but something they submit to willingly. However the SWP does not own the movement nor the Stop the War Coalition. If it wants to work constructively with anti-war activists, trade unionists, or whomever in its campaigning work it needs to recognise the limits of its command structure ends where the democratic rights of members of different organisations begin.

If you tell someone they cannot speak at an event, you are also telling the attendees of that event that they cannot hear who they want to, in this case the leader of their own organisation. That can't be right. Lindsay was not speaking in a personal capacity but as StWC convener which makes the order for her to cancel not a matter of Lindsay's personal SWP membership but a matter of political control over the Coalition.

Treating a branch of the StWC as if it is a subsidiary of the SWP is not on, not least because the StWC is a larger, more influential organisation than the SWP.

There is also a broader point that can be made here.

All political activists that are involved in campaigning work and also happen to be members of political parties are, in a sense, the servants of two masters. When the orders of those masters conflict they have to make a choice and that's for them to decide how to react, but when they have a position of responsibility in a coalition no one has the right to tell them to betray their commitments or subvert democratically agreed decisions.

That's undue influence exerted through undemocratic means.

If the SWP does not want Lindsay to speak at a meeting I suggest it persuades the organisers of their case rather than issue orders that bypass their quite correct control of their own event that they are organising. The activists of the SWP do not hold some magical historical privilege that trumps the rights activists who are non-members.

Normal parties do not expect immediate, psychotic subservience to every dot and comma of party memos. Nor do they demand that every branch of any united campaigning organisation they are involved in should be subjected to the codes and rules of a party they do not belong to. If they were to do that it would be a very good argument for excluding members of that organisation from holding any position of responsibility in any campaigning organisation.

This tension exists for all parties that involve themselves in broader groups, but it only exhibits itself in this extreme form with organisations that are so insecure that they see any decision contrary to its position as a matter of hard discipline and any speaker who is not exactly on message as some sort of enemy.

The People's Charter

I attended the People's Charter event today at Camden Civic Centre. The Charter is a rather neat idea to collate the ABCs of left policy into six main points, like the original nineteenth century Chartist document, and then get lots of people to support it.

That means it includes loads of good stuff that happens to be part of Green Party policy already (green jobs, renationalising the railways, scrap trident, that sort of thing) and is pretty much the left-wing version of motherhood and apple-pie.

There were a whole host of interesting speakers from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. Trade union leaders like Matt Wrack of the FBU and Bob Crow of the RMT gave the affair some solidity whilst people like Pregna Patel from Southall Black Sisters and Colin Prescod from the Institute of Race Relations provided a more social, community focus.

There was far too much said to give a full and proper report back but I do remember one speaker from the floor defending the Labour Party's record by saying "The Labour Party has had no influence over government policy for some time." Well, that's inspired me to join then!

Perhaps more accurately a PCS speaker described the three main parties as "in fact, three factions of the same party." Although I'm not sure about that, as factions implies there are real differences.

Another speaker put forward the idea that not only do we have a broken society with a broken economy, we also have a broken democracy and, he said, he'd like to see the Charter adopt some demands around democratising the country - in just the way that the original Chartists had been a movement for working class political representation.

If I have criticisms it's probably that in the effort to be uncontroversial the Charter may well be considered a little bland to some, which may explain a lower than expected turnout. The other difficulty - which is not a criticism but a problem - is that, as a set of general demands that few people have as yet heard of, you can't just wander up to people in the street and say "sign up to the People's Charter?" and even if they did what would it actually mean?

You really need to move from the specific to the general. In other words you're campaigning over the closure of a local nursery and you raise the Charter within that to deepen the politics of the campaign - this way the demands have more substance because they are connected to something directly tangible.

I'd also say the crisis of political representation was the driving force for the original Charter and, in very different circumstances, that's exactly why the left needs to popularise its demands today. It's because common sense ideas that are held by millions - like renationalising the rail - are just not represented in Parliament that the need for the Charter and other initiatives arises. The Charter by its very nature has to skirt round this issue, and that blunts it as a tool.

Anyway, I'll continue to argue for the demands of the Charter, and more, and if this document helps bring to life some of these basic socialist ideas then that's all to the good.

RIP Chris Harman

I was saddened to see that Chris Harman, long term leading light of the SWP, has died. It's been a while since I've spoken to him but it's still a shock to hear this news as he was always someone who seemed so flea fit and full of intellectual life.

Outside of his friends and family Chris will mainly remembered as an intellectual and theoretician who was able to make socialist and Marxist ideas accessible. This side to his work is best exemplified by Economics of the Madhouse, How Marxism Works and A People's History of the World.

The last of these extremely readable books is a very impressive tome covering the entire sweep of history and ever since I read it almost ten years ago I've always kept a copy around for reference and I'll continue to do so for some time I'm sure.

I've not read his latest work Zombie Capitalism yet but I've heard it's very good and one thing about Chris was that his powers never seemed to dim across the decades of his political activity. My condolences go out to his friends and family.

Other thoughts at Lenin's Tomb, Socialist Resistance, Dave's Part, Left Outside, Third Estate.

Countering racism as well as the racists

I went to an extremely interesting Socialist Resistance meeting last night on the rise of the far right (write up). One of the reasons I like this bunch is that the standard of political discussion is extremely high and they have the knack of being able to openly disagree with each other without turning every issue into a crossing of the Rubicon.

There are a number of crucial debates taking place at the moment over how we deal with the far right. For example, tactical discussions on the utility of no platform, the need to mobilise counter demonstrations against the English Defence League (EDL) and how we deal with the fact that more than a million people voted for the BNP in the European elections.

Now, I think that if fascists are organising an 'anti-mosque' march in your area the number one short term priority is to make sure anti-racists turn up in larger numbers and directly confront the bone heads. I'm also completely opposed to inviting the BNP, or other far right ideologues, onto political platforms to debate their ideas. These people are building a movement to send me to a gas chamber and I'm opposed to giving them a leg up.

That said I'm concerned that the debate can sometimes get boiled down to these counter measures, because they are part of the left's 'comfort zone', when they are only a small part of the fight against the far right.

You can't defeat the BNP through counter marches because they rarely march, that's not how they've accumulated their record support. Likewise, no platform was the mainstream consensus when the BNP won their first MEPs, we should maintain it in my view, but those Euro-seats were won without the assistance of Question Time and the show is not make or break in terms of the fact that the BNP have managed to achieve mass support for the first time in history.

All the evidence points to the British National Party being a disorganised bunch of inarticulate muppets who have an anatomy problem - they don't know their arse from their elbow. They do not garner votes through the force of their arguments or the genius of their street mobilisations but because they are the focus of pre-existing bigotries and anger.

The tactical questions of countering the EDL physically or shoring up the confidence of those who can deny the BNP electoral platforms must not be allowed to obscure the fact that the BNP have grown out of a sewer, and it is no use spending time combating specific racist organisations without also recognising that racism, homophobia, and all the rest of it are social problems that exist independently of far right organisations.

UAF, Hope not Hate and independent local groupings do tremendous work which we should all support where we can, but we shouldn't confine ourselves to their sensibly limited menus. We have to do what we can to undermine racist ideas, Islamophobia, climate change denial. It's not enough for people like Jack Straw to take up a posture of hatred for the BNP while parroting their anti-immigration agenda in the hope that it will undermine their vote.

We've seen recently that homophobia is still alive and well, it wasn't created by BNP goons and our work to tackle it is just as important. It would be very easy to get distracted by mobilising against right wing football hooligans and for the focus to drift away from the bigger picture. These set piece battles are not enough.

Greens stand aside in Birmingham for Salma Yaqoob

Over the last couple of weeks Birmingham Green Party has been balloting its members on whether to stand a candidate in Birmingham Hall Green, the target constituency for Respect's Salma Yaqoob.

Last night the executive committee met and ratified the decision of the members in the constituency who voted 83% in favour of stepping aside.

The very small minority who were opposed to the move argued that the involvement of hard left groups who believe in "armed revolution" and the (undoubted) fact that Respect and Green Party diverge on a small number of key policy issues was too great a barrier for us to take this decision.

To stand aside, they argued, meant to endorse everything they stand for and everything every faction of their organisation stands for. The majority of members saw things differently.

The fact that Hall Green is neither a national nor local target for the Greens means that our resources would be better spent on those areas in Birmingham where we do expect to do well. Most Party members also recognise that, as a small party, the Greens need to work with others from a number of political perspectives in order to be most effective. It's no use simply arguing (as the 'no' side did) that if a candidate wants our support they can always join us.

So, for example, the fact that both Caroline Lucas and Salma Yaqoob have indicated that if both were elected to Parliament they could work closely together was extremely persuasive. Salma's support for Green candidates in the North West and West Midlands at the recent European elections trumped concerns that others in Respect campaigned against us.

It was this history of friendly relations, going well beyond nice words, that made it possible for those arguing to stand aside for Yaqoob to win the debate. In my view Yaqoob would make an excellent MP and she has a serious minded, long term campaign that means that her election is a possibility. I for one wish her the best of luck.

Interview: Salma Yaqoob

Many thanks to Salma Yaqoob for agreeing to this exclusive interview where we discuss Respect, politics in Birmingham and democratic reform.

This week has seen three major political events; demonstrations marking the anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, the BNP appearing on Question Time and the postal strike. Politics seems to be becoming increasingly confrontational. What's your approach to this?

I don’t feel the issue of Afghanistan is such a confrontational one any more. In fact, the opposite is increasingly the case. A recent Times opinion poll showed that over 65% of the electorate favoured the troops withdrawing. Of course, it was not always like that. I remember well how difficult it was to speak about Afghanistan after 9/11. For example it was not uncommon to have abuse hurled at you when doing Stop the War campaigning in Birmingham city centre around that time. Thankfully those days, and that sense of isolation over the issue of opposing the occupation of Afghanistan, are gone.

Unfortunately, the issues of industrial conflict and racism are probably going to be very much with us in the coming period. As I write the BBC News are carrying stories about the deepening nature of the recession. At a time when we need more government investment to kick-start the economy, all the mainstream parties are proposing cuts, cuts and more cuts in public spending as a solution.

This invariably will provoke reaction from trade union members wanting, quite rightly, to protect themselves and their families from a crisis not of their making. Invariably, the political consensus of the mainstream parties will be accompanied by the politics of scapegoating. I am expecting there to be an increase in racism and votes for the BNP in the coming period. All the more reason for the broadest unity left wing and progressive forces in the coming period.

Many of my readers may not know much about where you stand on specific policies. I wonder if you'd be happy to say a few words about where you stand on a few? First nuclear power, second refugees and asylum seekers and third, democratic reform.

1. I think the recent United Nations Security Council vote in favour of the need to work towards a world free of nuclear weapons is an important development. However it is only a first step. We need binding and equitable international agreements on reducing nuclear arsenals. And those holding the biggest arsenals need to be the first in showing the way. One very simple but significant step this country could take would be to scrap Trident.

2. It is over 60 years ago that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written. 
In many ways it is a remarkable and inspiring document in its commitment to uphold protects the rights, freedom, dignity, respect and equality of all people. And of course it was written in the shadow of the Holocaust. We must never forget that it was so-called civilized Europe that gave birth to fascist inspired genocide. Our attitude to those others escaping oppression and tyranny today is simply a hallmark of how civilized a society we are.

Britain has a moral responsibility to provide a safe haven to such people and it is a disgrace that tens of thousands of refused asylum seekers are currently being kept in destitution, denied the right to work in order to drive them out of the country.

The way the mainstream parties promote and pander to reactionary and racist ideas about refugees and asylum seekers is deeply worrying. It was noticeable that in the recent edition of Question Time that one quote of Nick Griffin's that nobody mentioned was his comments about boats carrying migrants from Africa to Europe should be sunk. None of the panel dared to go near the issue of asylum and immigration except to present themselves as being ‘tough’ on it. Undercutting racism and prejudice on this issue is a critical task for the left today.

3. I support the call for proportional representation. British politics is suffocating because it is so dominated by the politics of tweedle dum and tweedle dee. The implementation of PR will allow more genuinely democratic expression and enable progressive opinion to better punch its weight. It is ideas, the contest between them, and the commitment to implement them, that will really breathe life back into a political system ossified by a lack of real choice and discredited by expenses abuse.

As a local councillor what do you think the key issues are that face local residents?

I am an elected councilor for Sparkbrook ward and I hold weekly advice bureau. There are three complaints that I hear again and again: lack of local housing, jobs and school places. Birmingham has shocking levels of overcrowding and a chronic shortage of council housing. It is to Labour’s eternal shame that they presided over a halving of the council housing stock in the city.

Similarity, unemployment is critical. A recent study in Birmingham found the with the recession beginning to take its toll, 37 per cent of adults of working age in the city do not have jobs. Finally, many of these same families are having to travel across the city every morning to drop their kids off, often to differing schools, because of shortage of school places, plus we have no secondary school in my ward.

I think it's fair to say that your party, Respect, has been through some radical transformations in its short life. How would you characterise the organisation today?

Making very healthy progress! The SWP are no longer with us and one consequence has been to make it easier for Respect to adhere to the thinking behind its original conception.

I always wanted Respect to be an organisation that seeks to progress the totality of the left, and not just our bit of it. I feel, for the first time, we are actually starting to implement that concept. For example, I am proud of the position we adopted in the European elections where we openly campaigned for Green candidates in the North West and West Midlands because they were better positioned to stop the BNP. And I am proud that we unequivocally came out in support of Ken Livingstone in the last London Mayoral election.

Respect is a very young, small party of the radical left with a real electoral footprint in two key areas. If we can emerge after the next general election with our support intact or even stronger I think our future will look bright. And I am confident we are going to emerge from the General Election in such a position.

You're running a strong campaign to win a seat in Birmingham at the general election. Good luck. What contribution do you think one lone MP can make whether we end up being under a Labour or Tory government?

Thank you. The only positive contribution a single MP can make is to use the platform to advance progressive issues. And that is the single reason why I am standing.

I have taken the hard route by going outside the ‘mainstream’, despite no shortage of approaches from them. But I have chosen this road because I value my independence. I want to be able to speak my mind about the issues I feel strongly about – war, racism, and inequality - unbeholden to anyone. My hope is to help stimulate genuine debate and discussion, rather than merely re-enforcing the status quo, which has caused many of the problems in the first place.

We need more independent voices in parliament. I hope after next May myself, Caroline Lucas and others will be adding ours to the likes of George Galloway in being prepared to use the office not only to speak truth to power, but to address the democratic deficit such that the concerns of millions of people as expressed through popular social movements are no longer ignored, but genuinely represented.

Which of the others deserve support?

It may come as a surprise to some readers but the Greens are unlikely to form the next UK government after this coming General Election. Call me a pessimist but I don't think we'll even scrape through.

In fact I'm not even sure we'd form the government after next. Long is the tearful road to Parliamentary dominance.

Given that some Parliamentary seats will be filled by non-Greens I thought I'd speculate as to who I'd like to see keeping our seats warm. For example David Howarth, Cambridge's Lib Dem MP, has a very irritating habit that when you lobby him he not only agrees with what you have to say but generally has a list of achievements on the issue to show he's not just saying whatever you'd like to hear.

I'm not sure I could ever bring myself to vote Lib Dem but certainly my experience of Howarth on climate change, nuclear power, Iraq, civil liberties and international development have been wholly positive, unlike my experiences of the Labour candidate who seems to be the worst sort of authoritarian you could imagine.

Then there's MPs like Plaid's Adam Price who appears to have an excellent record pushing for left social democratic policies and in opposing the various wars New Labour have launched over the last decade and a bit.

Independent candidates like Jan Jananayagam in Harrow will be raising important issues and should poll well, although she'll find it difficult to win the seat, obviously. She did get 11% of the vote at the Euro elections in Harrow though so it would be wrong to think she wont be mounting a strong and highly charged campaign.

Let's not forget Salma Yaqoob in Birmingham. I'd certainly like to see Salma being given the support of the local Greens (although that's up to them obviously). She's been an inspiring figure in many ways and I've been a fan of hers for a number of years. I'm sure we disagree on a number of issues but then what's life without a little bit of friendly friction?

John McDonnell isn't the only Labour MP who has a more than decent record but he's among an ever decreasing circle of hard left Labour members who are slowly shuffling out of the Commons. I say let them shuffle a bit slower.

Which reminds me of people like Dave Nellist who were once left Labour MPs but found themselves on the wrong side of the Star Chamber of internal democracy. He's still a formidable councillor in Coventry and will probably having a crack at one of the seats. You can't say he wouldn't make the place much more interesting!

I feel a little out of touch with where other significant left challenges are likely to come from, for instance in Scotland are there any seats that the SSP are likely to get a creditable vote? Are there strong challenges in any constituencies from other left forces that I've missed here for instance?

Defend Mark France

The Stirrer reports that Respect activist Mark France is being victimised by his employer, the DWP, for being part of the campaign to oust disgraced MP Julie Kirkbride.

What business is it of the DWP if one of its workers wants to make perfectly reasonable and respectable political statements on his own time? Is being opposed to corruption a disciplinary offence now?

Mr France said “The attempt to silence me will fail. I have a democratic right to speak. Alongside thousands of other Job Centre Staff up and down the country I work hard to ensure that the victims of the recession are treated with dignity. We face a bullying management culture that stamps on the human rights of Job Centre staff and our unemployed customers”.

“The DWP can punish me and my family for daring to speak the truth…but they will not stop the ‘Peasants Revolt’ that started in Bromsgrove from growing”.

“On Saturday 20th June I will be in Bromsgrove High Street and I will speak”

Mark is backed by his union, the PCS, and any attempt to victimise him should be resisted. For those who missed it here is Mark's appearance on Sky News.