By Dave Osland (at Left Futures)
I guess I’ll never make it as a bureaucrat. When people start droning on about paragraph this, subclause that of any organisation’s rulebook, I usually interpret it as a cue to get another pint in.
But if there is now going to be a debate over what precise mechanism Labour should use to elect leaders in future, let me say this now; the current arrangements have proven a huge success.
I’m not just saying that because they are perceived to favour the candidate I have backed from the beginning, namely Jeremy Corbyn. My point is that they have enabled Labour to engage the electorate in a manner I haven’t witnessed in decades.
This was brought home to me forcibly when I attended a routine City drinks reception, and I was struck by the number of people who – knowing that I am a Labour Party member – raised the subject of the race.
I should stress here that the attendees were not in the main high rollers with telephone number salaries. Instead this was in the main a gathering of what you might call ‘the real City’, middle-class commuter belt people on what most of the country would consider a good whack, but hardly enough to lead the life of Riley in expensive London.
They were there for the free plonk and canapes and the networking, but many spontaneously buttonholed me and started talking politics.
It’s not that any of them were raving Corbynistas. The first of the many double-cheek mwah-mwah kisses I got that night came from a young woman I had assumed to be apolitical, who looks like Liz Kendall, dresses like Liz Kendall, and was most impressed with – yeah, you guessed – Liz Kendall.
Similarly, a man who once sat on the board of a company you will certainly have heard of revealed that he had been a Labour Party member as a young man in the 1970s, and had signed up as a three-pounder with the intention of voted for LK.
A guy who has set up his own successful PR outfit – yes, aspirational businessman to a Tee – mentioned that his wife had rejoined as a full member after the May defeat, and was supporting Burnham. That had, in turn, increased his interest in what Labour does.
His colleague confided that he had not voted for many years. He liked some Corbyn policies, detested others, but was glad that there would again be a clear choice between opposing parties. Maybe that will get him to the ballot box next time.
To top it all, a multimillionaire corporate lawyer who had taken a drink revealed that his father had been a Communist partisan in a southern European country in world war two and that, if anything, he finds Jeremy insufficiently assiduous in promulgating the needs of the toiling masses.
Now, the last few months have – probably unavoidably – seen Labour Party members too wrapped up in the internal battle to notice that we are talking to the public again, in a way that I haven’t seen in years.
As it goes, I live in Hackney North, one of the few constituencies where the CLP still boasts a four-figure membership that enables it to be a genuine force in the community.
But we have all heard the stories of areas where Labour barely functions and it is hard to even get a quorate meeting together.
The oft-remarked-upon energy that has been generated in the last few months has presented us with a one-off opportunity to rejuvenate our structures up and down the country.
Let’s stick with OMOV. And the one-year free membership for registered supporters looks like a no brainer.
Yes, I have heard old stagers argue that they shouldn’t have the same rights as those us who have been around for yonks, but from a marketing perspective, this idea is a clear winner.
What’s more, the need to win over people who voted other than Labour in May is a statement of the bleedin’ obvious. We need to go easy on the social media Thought Police routine.
Let’s declare an amnesty for those who may have tactically backed the Lib Dems in hopeless seats or voted Green in disillusionment with our offer four months ago. Nor should past support for the Tories or UKIP be any bar to involvement now.
If people have changed their minds, they should be welcome on board.
Now the voting has closed, thanks are due to Jeremy, Yvette, Andy and Liz alike. Yes, things got harsh at times, but as the standard marital advice cliche goes, least said, soonest mended.
Comrades, Labour is exciting people again. When was the last time you could say that with a straight face?
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“Don’t mourn, organise”, the American trade union activist Joe Hill famously told his comrades in 1915 as he was railroaded to a firing squad on trumped-up murder charges.
If Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour leader on 12 September, we should flip that motto into “don’t celebrate, organise!” And if he has a near miss, Joe Hill’s original will do.
All the opinion polls since early August show Jeremy Corbyn ahead. They also show him more popular with voters in general than the other candidates.
Corbyn, an unassuming campaigner and supporter of workers’ struggles for forty years, has become the seed around which a surge of anti-capitalism, generated by the crashing and grinding of the system since 2008 but previously dispersed and almost “underground”, has crystallised.
It will be wrong, terribly wrong, disastrous, if we think that once we’ve elected Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, then we can sit back and let ourselves be towed by the new leadership to a better future.
The basic ideas of democracy, workers’ rights, and social provision which Corbyn represents are not such as can prevail just by having a good advocate in the high ground of politics.
They can prevail only by determined and militant mobilisation of the rank and file.
A relatively “moderate” Labour right-winger, Luke Akehurst, has denounced Corbyn’s supporters as “moving through the party like ISIS in their jeeps in Iraq”. Decoded: he wants to demonise the Corbyn camp, and move against it as the US has moved against Isis. The New Statesman reports that Corbyn “faces a significant number of Labour MPs not merely against him but actively out to get him”.
Behind those MPs stand hundreds of “advisers”, “researchers”, spin-doctors, think-tank people and other careerists. And behind them, the billionaire media and the whole entrenched power of the ruling class. The smear and scare campaigns of the last couple of months — “Corbyn will make Labour unelectable” — are only the start.
They are the minority. A small minority. But compact and rich minorities win unless the working-class majority makes itself organised and compact, striking with a fist rather than flailing with limbs askew.
Corbyn’s advisers will tell him to go softly-softly, to woo the maximum number of right-wingers who may grudgingly cooperate for a while.
We’ve seen where that approach leads with Syriza’s decision to form a coalition with the right-wing Anel, to elect a moderate right-winger president of Greece, and to invest in cajoling Hollande and Renzi and Lagarde to sway Schäuble towards less harsh EU policy.
Working-class, socialist majorities need to be made and sustained in dynamic action. Unless the Corbyn campaign presses on to transform the labour movement radically, it will be neutralised and then reversed by the entrenched power of the right wing. If Corbyn wins, we should press him to start by opening out the Labour Party conference at the end of September, allowing debate on rule-change reforms and political challenges usually stifled.
Already in some areas, like Sheffield, Corbyn supporters are organised into active, regularly-meeting, local groups. Elsewhere there have been only rallies and phone-banks without organising meetings. The first step should be to get local groups going everywhere – democratic, active, open to debate, geared both to campaigning on the streets and to transforming their local Labour Parties.
Transforming the unions, too. The great lesson of the last big ferment in the Labour Party, in the early 1980s, is that the left-talking union leaders who had let it happen, by supporting democratic reforms within Labour, also cut it short. Because no similar democratic reforms were made within the unions, the top union officials could meet with Labour’s leaders in January 1982, at Bishops Stortford, plan to start reeling back the left-wing surge, and carry through the plan.
The TUC congress assembles the day after the Labour leader election result is announced. Trade unionists should argue for it to raise the pressure on Labour.
Young supporters of Corbyn have a national conference for ongoing organisation on 20 September. We need a similar general conference as soon as possible.
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Now seems an appropriate time to remember George Lansbury, who led the Labour Party from 1932 (shortly after the defection of MacDonald and Snowden) until 1935 (when his pacifism was rejected by the Labour Party Conference). Below we reproduce Jon Cruddas’s speech at the 2011 unveiling of a plaque in honour of Lansbury, in Bow. The speech was originally posted at Labour Uncut and it should go without saying that we at Shiraz don’t necessarily share Cruddas’s assessment:
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Thank you very much. It is great to be with you all this afternoon. We are here to celebrate the life of one of the true heroes of the Labour party: George Lansbury. A man who was – to quote the great historian AJP Taylor – “the most lovable figure in British politics”.
We as a party are really only beginning to understand the true significance of the man and of his leadership of the party; a process of rehabilitation is underway yet is far from complete.
I think of Lansbury as arguably the greatest ever Labour leader. Not in an empirical sense in terms of elections won – he never faced the electorate in a general election as our leader.
Raymond Postgate wrote after George had resigned – and two weeks later an election was called – that “now they had lost their only popular leader, it was enough to wreck the labour men’s hopes of a victory”.
Irrespective of this, to have a third Labour government in 1945, or Wilson’s and Callaghan’s governments of the 60s and 70s – or Blair and Brown’s of more recent years – you had to have a party for them to inherit and subsequently lead; indeed from which to govern.
This is part of Lansbury’s legacy – to quote George Thomas
“He not only saved the soul of the party, he saved the party. We could have sunk into oblivion and the Liberals could have been reborn”.
When I think of George Lansbury I am consistently reminded of the fundamental paradox of the Labour party; the source of great hope whilst consistently being a provider of such profound and indeed bitter disappointments for us all. Its relationship between romance and rationalism.
Consider the events leading to George’s resignation. Half of Baldwin’s 500 seats were vulnerable. There was a possibility of a newly confident Labour Party gaining a majority and prime minister Lansbury. Contrast that with the party of 1932 – totally and utterly beaten – 50 odd seats left. Broken. In that short space of time he had overseen a profound transformation.
Yet what about military support for the Abyssinians through the League of Nations: on this to quote Postgate: “its leader was beginning to answer no; its members yes”. George offers to resign: at the 1934 Stockport conference, at the TUC in 1935 in Margate, Before the party conference in Brighton and finally at the conference itself.
At the conference Lansbury rises to speak to choruses of “for he’s a jolly good fellow” throughout the hall. He starts by saying: “I agree with my friends who think it is quite intolerable that you should have a man speaking as leader who disagrees fundamentally on an issue of this kind”. He then makes the most powerful statement possible about his Christian socialist convictions. Read the rest of this entry »
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Like Jim below I won’t weep over the death of a jihadist who gets his jollies from theocratic state and sex slaves sanctioned by religious tests but I’m not that happy about extra-judicial killings.
David Allen Green:-
When someone is killed by state action “who deserves it” then it is always tempting to convert one’s normative view into a positive statement that the death was lawful. But for me, the legal problem with the killing of Khan is that to invoke Article 51 of the Charter is to perhaps push “self defence” beyond the limits of elasticity.
Article 51 is not a general “licence to kill” terrorists on sight wherever in the world they may be found — a “licence” here meaning something which permits an action which would otherwise be unlawful. Some may say that the UK government should have such a licence to kill; but that is not what the law actually says.
For me, this killing prompts various questions. What are the limits of “self-defence” when faced with international terrorism? Is the contention that any preemptive attack can be justified if the target is a terrorist? When does “self-defence” simply merge with a “
shoot to kill” policy?
In 1988 the UK government
sanctioned the killing of three IRA terrorists in Gibraltar. It must have seemed a good idea to the government at the time; but under scrutiny its account of what happened unravelled. Indeed, the government (and the security and police forces) do not have a great track record when pleading “terrorism” when killing people. There is a good reason why life and death should not depend on the executive’s
fiat.
The death of an Isis operative does not matter; but what does matter is that a government capable of killing people does not fall into the habit of casual international homicide, believing it just has to shout “self-defence” and “terrorism” so as to get people to nod-along.
If the UK government wants to re-introduce a general “shoot to kill” policy, but one using drones rather than snipers, then it should say so plainly. The UK government should not hide behind legalistic invocations of Article 51. A “licence to kill” is the stuff of spy fiction, not of foreign policy.
Though I have no sympathy with jihadists, thinking they are greatly improved by death, I am sorry for the families:
The Telegraph reports: The father of two British jihadists thought to have been fighting alongside Reyaad Khan, the Isil terrorist killed in an RAF drone strike, has said he fears his sons will be next:
Ahmed Muthana – whose sons Nasser, 20, and 17-year-old Aseel also left their home in Cardiff and travelled to Syria – suggested David Cameron was “right” to order strikes on Isil fighters if they were planning terror attacks in Britain.
But the 57-year-old retired electrical engineer, who came to Britain from Yemen aged 13, said he feared it was only a matter of time before he received the news that his boys had been killed in a targeted drone strike.
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John Rees of Stop the War Coalition flanked by Cage representatives, making excuses for ‘Jihadi John’ earlier this year
I personally find it extraordinary that any sane person could have any moral or political objection to the British government’s killing of ISIS fascists. The organisations that have been bleating about this – CND, Reprieve and Stop The War, have long since exposed themselves as outfits who will sympathise with any forces, no matter how barbaric, who oppose the ‘West.’ At least Reprieve is in business to mount legal challenges to the government when it believes human rights are a stake (though they seem mightily selective about whose human rights they’re concerned with); but what the hell is CND doing commenting on this issue? As for the misnamed Stop The War Coalition – we all know that they operate on the basis of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” and will ally with some of the vilest organisations and individuals on the planet, in the name of supposed “anti-imperialism.”
But what about the legal grounds for the killings? Leading legal blogger Carl Gardner opines that the action was probably legal, but acknowledges that it’s not entirely clear-cut:
Some would argue that an armed attack has to be by a State, or attributable to one, before the UK can defend itself. Here, the RAF’s attack violated Syrian sovereignty but Khan’s plans, whatever they were, can’t obviously be blamed on the Syrian regime. But I don’t think this is a strong argument against the UK .
…
In any event, the insistence that self-defence can only be invoked against sovereign states seems to me unreal after 9/11. Either international law on the use of force is an ass, unfit for purpose in the 21st century; or its principles must be capable of application to today’s real threats to peace and security. I think the latter.
Read the rest of Gardner’s opinion here
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Say no to anti union laws!
#RIGHTTOSTRIKE SERVES A HIGH COURT INJUNCTION ON SAJID JAVID
On Wednesday 9 September activists campaigning for the right to strike, and against the Trade Union Bill, will take a high court judge to the offices of Sajid Javid at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 1 Victoria Street, London.
At 6.00 pm activists will serve Mr. Javid with a high court injunction banning him for his political office, as he was elected with only 38% of the electorate(1), when the Trade Union Bill which he is sponsoring would require trade unions to gain 40% of their electorate.
Trade unionists from many different unions will join the high court judge to make sure that Mr. Javid gets the message.
“Trade union rights are democratic rights,” said Ruth Cashman of the Right to Strike campaign . “No other voluntary organisations in society face as much interference in their internal affairs as trade unions. It is the height of hypocrisy for a government elected by just 24% of the public to tell us that we need a minimum turnout to carry out our democratic decisions. If they want to make trade unions more democratic they introduce legislation to allow us to have workplace ballots and electronic ballots.”
Right to Strike(2) invites media outlets to send reporters, photographers and to video the event.
Contact: Gemma Short on 07784641808 or Ruth Cashman on 07930845495, email: ourrighttostrike@gmail.com, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/842189349235316/
1. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/sajid-javid-would-have-failed-to-be-elected-under-his-own-trade-union-strike-law-reforms-10389669.html
2. www.righttostrike.co.uk
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From the Jewish Chronicle:
There is growing unrest within Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign team over his approach to dealing with issues of concern to the Jewish community, the JC can reveal.
One well-placed source within his team said that the unwillingness to deal “head-on” with these issues had come from Mr Corbyn himself.
The reluctance, according to the source, was because the frontrunner in the Labour leadership campaign was “partly casual about Jewish concerns, partly [because he knows] hostility to ‘Zionist neocons’ plays well to his constituency”.
Media interest in Mr Corbyn’s association with Holocaust deniers, antisemites and other extreme figures has grown in the past three weeks since the JC posed a series of questions for him to answer.
Another senior Corbyn campaign member indicated this week that the issues raised by this newspaper were not being taken seriously by Mr Corbyn and his team and said some within the team have grown concerned at the Islington North MP’s reluctance to speak in more depth publicly about the Jewish community’s concerns.
“This comes from Corbyn himself,” the source said.
(After Eliot’s Macavity the Mystery Cat)
Our Jeremy’s an activist, he is the brand new hope,
As he pushes Labour to the edge of a slippery slope,
He is the Blairites’ nemesis, the Moderates’ despair
But when you try and pin him down, Our Jeremy’s not there.
Our Jeremy, Our Jeremy, opposer of austerity,
His rivals are so timid, and he’s full of temerity,
But when his friends say, Stone the Gays, he doesn’t really care
He suddenly goes deaf and dumb, no Jeremy’s not there,
Islamist mates say “Holohoax”, and he’s not au contraire,
They’re anti Israel, that’s enough, and Jeremy’s not there.
Our Jeremy’s not besuited, no he’s not poshly dressed,
His shirt lies open for us to see the collar of his vest,
He is the man of Islington, and when he’s holding forth,
His is the stripped pine wisdom that pours from London North,
His world view’s very simple, all wars are Nato’s fault,
And as for intervention – no, he will call a halt.
Our Jeremy, our Jeremy, there’s no one quite like Jeremy,
His followers worship him, yea, amen and verily,
You can see him on a podium, cursing Tony Blair,
But getting a straight answer – our Jeremy’s not there.
He doesn’t live it large at all, politicking is his life,
He doesn’t go out giggng, or dining with his wife,
His idea of an evening off or joyous holiday,
Is standing at a rally, to damn the USA,
His mother marched down Cable Street, so he boasts with pride,
But he won’t detect a Fascist if a Fascist’s on his side,
At shirts of black and swastikas, his rants will fill the air,
But put them in a keffiyeh, and Jeremy’s not there.
Our Jeremy, Our Jeremy, aghastness from posterity,
That eager young politicos were dazzled by sincerity,
His beard is prophetic white, his frame ascetic spare,
But query his alliances, Our Jeremy’s not there.
And they say that all the Andies, Lizzes and Yvettes,
Will be cordoned in a hollow square and stripped of red rosettes,
And the old team of door knockers will be promptly chucked
And social democracy is well and truly fucked.
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August was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the murder of Leon Trotsky by an agent of the Stalinist USSR’s secret police (remembered by his grandson, here). Workers’ Liberty is publishing a second volume of documents from the movement which kept alive and developed the revolutionary socialist politics Trotsky fought for. Just before Trotsky’s death, the American Trotskyist organisation split after a dispute triggered by Stalin’s invasion of Poland. The majority was led by James P Cannon, the minority by Max Shachtman. Shachtman’s “heterodox” side, would later repudiate Trotksy’s analysis of Russia as a “degenerated workers’ state”; but that was not their view at the time of the split. Cannon’s “orthodox” side continued to hold onto the degenerated workers’ state position and from that would flow many political errors. This extract from the introduction to The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism by Sean Matgamna, puts the record of the two sides into perspective:
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Above: Shachtman and Cannon, on the same side in 1934
The honest critic of the Trotskyist movement — of both the Cannon and Shachtman segments of it, which are intertwined in their history and in their politics — must remind himself and the reader that those criticised must be seen in the framework of the movement as a whole. Even those who were most mistaken most of the time were more than the sum of their mistakes, and some of them a great deal more.
The US Trotskyists, Shachtmanites and Cannonites alike, mobilised 50,000 people in New York in 1939 to stop fascists marching into Jewish neighbourhoods of that city. When some idea of the extent of the Holocaust became public, the Orthodox responded vigorously (and the Heterodox would have concurred): “Anger against Hitler and sympathy for the Jewish people are not enough. Every worker must do what he can to aid and protect the Jews from those who hunt them down. The Allied ruling classes, while making capital of Hitler’s treatment of the Jews for their war propaganda, discuss and deliberation on this question endlessly. The workers in the Allied countries must raise the demand: Give immediate refuge to the Jews… Quotas, immigration laws, visa — these must be cast aside. Open the doors of refuge to those who otherwise face extermination” (Statement of the Fourth International, The Militant, 3 April 1943).
We, the Orthodox — the writer was one of them — identified with the exploited and oppressed and sided with them and with the labour movements of which we ourselves were part; with people struggling for national independence; with the black victims of zoological racism. We took sides always with the exploited and oppressed.
To those we reached we brought the basic Marxist account of class society in history and of the capitalist society in which we live. We criticised, condemned, and organised against Stalinism. Even at the least adequate, the Orthodox Trotskyists generally put forward proposals that in sum meant a radical transformation of Stalinist society, a revolution against Stalinism. Always and everywhere the Orthodox Trotskyists fought chauvinism. When some got lost politically, as they sometimes did and do, it was usually because of a too blandly negative zeal for things that “in themselves” were good, such as anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. We mobilised political and practical support for movements of colonial revolt.
French Trotskyists, living in a world gone crazy with chauvinism of every kind, set out to win over and organise German soldiers occupying France. They produced a newspaper aimed at German worker-soldiers: some twenty French Trotskyists and German soldier sympathisers lost their lives when the Nazis suppressed it. The Orthodox Trotskyists even kept some elements of feminism alive in a world in which it was long eclipsed: Michel Pablo, in a French jail for helping the Algerians in their war of independence, applied himself to studying and writing about “the woman question”. Large numbers of people shared the view of the Trotskyists on specific questions and worked with them or in parallel to them. The Trotskyists alone presented and argued for a whole world outlook that challenged the outlook of the capitalist and Stalinist ruling classes. We embodied the great truths of Marxism in a world where they had been bricked up alive by Stalinism. We kept fundamental texts of anti-Stalinist Marxism in circulation.
Read the accounts of the day to day mistreatment of black people in the USA in the mid 20th century – Jim Crow in the South, where blacks had been slaves, segregation in the North, all-pervasive humiliations, exclusions, beatings, burnings, mob lynchings, the systematic ill-treatment of children as of grown-up black people. Work through even a little of that terrible story and you run the risk of despairing of the human race. The Trotskyists, challenging Jim Crow, championing and defending the victims of injustice, showed what they were. To have been less would have been despicable. That does not subtract from the merits of those who did what was right and necessary, when most people did not
James P Cannon and Max Shachtman, the main representatives of the two currents of Trotskyism, were, in my judgement, heroes, both of them. Cannon, when almost all of his generation of Communist International leaders had gone down to Stalinism or over to the bourgeoisie, remained what he was in his youth, a fighter for working-class emancipation.
I make no excuses for the traits and deeds of Cannon which are shown in a bad light in this volume. It is necessary to make and keep an honest history of our own movement if we are to learn from it. After Trotsky’s death Cannon found himself, and fought to remain, the central leader of the Trotskyist movement, a job which, as the Heterodox said, he was badly equipped politically to do. He did the best he could, in a world that had turned murderously hostile to the politics he worked for and the goals he fought to achieve. More than once he must have reminded himself of the old lines, “The times are out of joint/O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right”. James P Cannon remained faithful to the working class and to revolutionary socialism. Such a book as his History of American Trotskyism cannot be taken as full or authoritative history, but it has value as what Gramsci called a “living book”: “not a systematic treatment, but a ‘living’ book, in which political ideology and political science are fused in the dramatic form of a ‘myth’.”
Socialists today can learn much from both Shachtman and Cannon. In his last decade (he died in 1972), Max Shachtman followed the US trade unions into conventional politics and dirty Democratic Party politicking. He took up a relationship to US capitalism paralleling that of the Cannonites to Stalinism of different sorts and at different times. Politically that was suicidal. Those who, again and again, took similar attitudes to one Stalinism or another have no right to sneer and denounce. Shachtman got lost politically at the end of the 1950s; the Cannonites got lost politically, in relation to Stalinism, twenty years earlier! When Trotsky in 1939-40, living under tremendous personal strain, reached a crossroads in his political life and fumbled and stumbled politically, Max Shachtman, who had tremendous and lasting regard for Trotsky and a strong loyalty to what he stood for, had the integrity and spirit to fight him and those who — Cannon and his comrades in the first place — were starting on a course that would warp and distort and in serious part destroy their politics in the decade ahead and long after.
The Prometheus myth has been popular amongst socialists, supplying names for organisations and newspapers. As punishment for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humankind, the Titan Prometheus is chained forever to a rock in the Caucasian mountains and vultures eternally rip at his liver. Shachtman picked up the proletarian fire Trotsky had for a moment fumbled with and carried it forward. Generations of mockery, obloquy, misrepresentation, and odium where it was not deserved, have been his punishment for having been right against Trotsky and Cannon.
This book is intended as a contribution to the work of those who strive to refurbish and renew the movement that in their own way both James P Cannon and Max Shachtman tried to serve, and served.
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You can order a copy of the book here
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Some of Jeremy’s supporters may accuse me of betrayal and of aligning myself with his right-wing critics. Not so. My criticisms are rooted in a leftist, human rights politics that is democratic, secular and internationalist – Peter Tatchell
From International Business Times
Like many others, I face a real dilemma. I’ve known Jeremy Corbyn for more than 30 years and love nearly everything he stands for. Yet there are a few important issues on which I profoundly disagree with him. Does this mean he should no longer have my support?
Jeremy is not a saint. He’s never claimed to be. Even the best, most admirable politicians usually get some things wrong. Jeremy is no exception. On a majority of UK and foreign policy issues he’s spot on, with real vision and an inspiring alternative. On a small number of issues he has made lamentable misjudgements. Despite these shortcomings, I’m backing his bid for the Labour leadership. Here’s why.
I look at the big picture and judge politicians on their overall record. What are their ideals, motives and aims? What kind of society are they striving for? How would their policies impact upon the average person? On all these assessment criteria, Jeremy is on the right side and is the most progressive candidate on nearly every issue.
He has strong, unique policies for social justice and equality – to secure a kinder, gentler, fairer and more inclusive, harmonious Britain. I am with him in opposing austerity. So is much of the country – including the Greens, SNP and Plaid Cymru, with whom I hope Jeremy and Labour will make common cause in a quadruple alliance.
Jeremy’s plan to invest in infrastructure to reboot the economy is backed by 41 economists, including a former adviser to the Bank of England. His strategy echoes FDR’s New Deal and proposals from the International Monetary Fund.
A Corbyn premiership would reverse damaging, cruel welfare cuts and the privatisation of vital public services. He’d tackle climate destruction, rocketing rents and house prices. Trident renewal, foreign wars and the sinister Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership would be nixed. His administration would bring rail and energy companies back into decentralised public ownership. All sensible, compassionate policies. Good for him.
In my book, he is head and shoulders above all the other Labour leadership candidates, both in terms of his past political record and his political agenda for the future. But the single most important over-arching reason for supporting Jeremy is that Britain needs to turn away from the flawed and failed policies of business as usual. He is shaking up the establishment and breaking with the cosy political consensus that has been shared by Labour, Conservatives, Lib Dems and UKIP. The mainstream, middle-of-the-road policies of the last decade are not the answer. All they offer is more of the same, which is what got us into the current mess.
Jeremy is thinking beyond what is. He’s imagining what could be. It’s a much needed political rethink, which leaves his rivals lagging far behind. Now that he has a serious chance of winning the Labour leadership, Jeremy has faced a barrage of accusations over his contacts with anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers and Islamist extremists. This puts me in a very difficult position, given my advocacy for human rights. At what point do links with bad people put a politician beyond the pale? How many flawed judgements does it take to cancel out all the good that a MP might have done and espoused?
Read the rest of this entry »
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March 1939: German-Jewish refugee children arrive at Southampton on the US liner Manhattan as part of the Kindertransport programme(Fox Photos/Getty Images)
October 1950: Latvian refugees arrive in Penzance after escaping from a Baltic port(Fox Photos/Getty Images)
November 1956: The first of 2,500 Hungarian refugees offered settlement in Britain arrive at Blackbushe airport in Hampshire(Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
September 1971: Vietnamese war orphans travel on a coach on their way from London Airport (Heathrow) to the Pestalozzi Children’s Village in Sussex(Central Press/Getty Images)
October 1978: A group of Vietnamese boat people hold a large banner saying, “Our Gratitude to Elisabeth II and the English people for hospitality to the Vietnamese refugees”(Colin Davey/Evening Standard/Getty Images)
April 1999: Well-wishers wait to greet Kosovar refugees at Leeds Bradford airport(Reuters)
September 2015: Syrian boy lies dead in the surf near Bodrum, Turkey (Reuters)
David Cameron: “I don’t think there is an answer that can be achieved simply by taking more and more refugees” (see: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/02/david-cameron-migration-crisis-will-not-be-solved-by-uk-taking-in-more-refugees)
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