First they came for the disabled...

...but fortunately Bendy Girl, now armed with her own YouTube account, is on top form;

This covers pretty much everything I wanted to say about the claim that "75% of incapacity claimants are fit to work," and more. Especially on the idea that the "tough new benefits test weeds out the workshy," rather than shoving people into a more vulnerable position.

As such, further comment is superfluous.

The EDL threaten Christmas mayhem over recycled tabloid myths

The English Defence League, spiralling further into irrelevance as far as real issues facing the working class are concerned, has decided to save Christmas. It has issued letters to councils across the country saying they will "close down" any town that "bans" the festival to "appease Muslims."

At this point, it is unclear what their aim is besides beating the tabloids to the punch in the annual tradition of re-writing the old, and thoroughly discredited, "Christmas is Banned" yarn.

And, as I pointed out last year, it is bullshit;

Late last month, the Daily Mail reported that "David Cameron was facing a backlash from his own party after it emerged the Conservative official cards have the message 'Season's Greetings'." This after "he derided politically-correct Christmas cards which do not mention the word Christmas as 'insulting tosh'" two years ago. Thus, the paper is given occasion (not that it needs an excuse) to throw out clichés about "pandering to the extremists of the PC brigade" and "white middle-class Guardian-reading left-wing do-gooders with a misguided guilt complex and too much time on their hands." That the "controversial" cards actually contain a greeting which originated with the Victorians and attained its modern form in 1920 goes unmentioned.

That same day, the Daily Express told us with considerable indignation that "Britain’s biggest Christmas cracker factory has ditched dozens of risque gags in favour of more politically-correct alternatives." Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I've never come across anything other than tame, cheesy, and utterly godawful cracker jokes. I've certainly never had the pleasure of those "about mother-in-laws, transvestites and animal cruelty," which we're to believe have been replaced by "a new selection guaranteed not to offend."

John Midgely, of the rent-a-quote organ Campaign Against Political Correctness asks us "shouldn’t Christmas be the one time people can be free from PC in their own home?" One might be tempted to answer that we would be, if people like Midgely and the Express would stop rehashing old nonsense as an excuse to moan.

But, perhaps in the interests of keeping journalists who can't do basic fact-checking employed, the circus rolls on. The latest offering comes from yesterday's Mail, with the headline "Council renames Christmas festival 'Midwinter Celebration' sparking PC row." The author, one Chris Brooke, alleges that Bradford City Council "face[s] accusations of being oversensitive to ethnic minorities by keeping the reference to Christmas out of he family event on the last Sunday before Christmas Day." The first falsehood is that there is in fact only one complaint, from the Rev. Paul Flowers, whose rage is in full flow when he asks "why, oh why, must they now resort to the stupidity and banality of advertising a bland "Midwinter Celebration" when the season is clearly  Christmas and should be appropriately named as such?"

The answer is offered to anybody willing to read a little further. Even in the Mail, you can usually find at least one sentence alluding to the truth of the matter. Thus, we discover that far from "being oversensitive to ethnic minorities," the aim of the event is to "celebrate traditional seasonal  activities that are relevant to the history and heritage of the hall and the communities it supported over many centuries," and is being run in the midst of "a wide range of events to celebrate Christmas." Whilst there, "families will be able to 'listen to authentic music' and see traditional medieval folk plays as well as participate in workshops including sugar mice and herb bag making," hardly what you would expect from a politically correct event aimed at "denying" and "erasing" tradition.

But then, political correctness isn't actually a real phenomenon. It's the invention of right wing cranks looking for an excuse to spew out nationalistic and / or religious hyperbole. If more people take note of this fact, and disseminate the truth to those who believe the lies, then maybe we can put to death the ridiculous "culture wars" that serve only as a convenient distraction from the real issues we all face in our lives.

Distracting from the real issues, however, is what the EDL do best.

That's why, when several thousand people marched against the Lib Dems for supporting the cuts, they "marched" against them for apparently “refus[ing] to tackle the threat of Islamic Extremism.” And why they deliberately doctored a photo of Merseyside TUC president Alec McFadden to say "protest against the troops" when he was calling for people to "protest against the cuts."

It's also why, whilst millions of people will be worried about the effects of the Comprehensive Spending Review, they're pissing in the wind about non-existent bans on Christmas.

But what really gets me is EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon's quote that “working class people” in the UK are “at boiling point” over the “Islamisation of Britain.” His evidence? The fact that "yesterday’s Daily Star poll found 98% of readers fear that Britain is becoming a Muslim state."

The first thing to question here is how Yaxley-Lennon (better known by his more proletarian pseudonym "Tommy Robinson") defines "working class people." If his definition includes the phrase "Daily Star readers," at any point, I'd say he's doing us an incredible disservice.

Unfortunately, this wouldn't be surprising. As part of their traditional tactic of warping class consciousness to suit their agenda, one thing the far-right has always done - unfortunately often aided by the snobbery of establishment liberals - is to define class on the basis of a shallow and extremely patronising caricature. Amongst other things, this includes an appeal to wilful ignorance.

The working class, when at its strongest, had a vibrant intellectual culture. It drove our politics and maintained our class consciousness. It served our desire to educate and upskill ourselves. And its decline is part of the campaign to roll back every advance that organised workers have won.

This is exactly why fascists, witting or unwitting stooges of the bosses, promote an anti-intellectual parody of class. The de-skilling of labour is ignored in favour of racial or nationalistic epithets, reason and logic become taboo, and "student" is all-but synonymous with "middle class." It is exactly the same ideological trickery put forward by the media.

Yaxley-Lennon is wrong. The majority of the working class aren't "at boiling point" over Islamisation, because it just isn't happening. But the media and far-right continue to parrot the lie, excluding opponents from their narrow definition of working class by fiat, and it continues to gain weight.

Or, as Anton Vowl put it;

98 per cent. Ninety-eight per cent of Star readers fear that Britain is becoming a Muslim state. Now, it's easy to point to the publications of Richard Desmond - the Daily Express and Daily Star - and wonder why exactly that kind of fear might be occurring at such an alarming rate

The point needs to be challenging the myths put out by the media, more vociferously and publicly than ever. They are no longer just the fodder for "Disgusted of Tumbridge Wells" to vent his spleen, but an excuse for the far-right to take to the street to cause mayhem.

At the same time, antifascists need to be on the alert. Every recycled myth now brings with it the threat of mob-handed fascists. We must be ready to confront them so that hey cannot make good on their threat.

Of "austerity hypocrites" and strawmen

Writing for the First Post, Brendan O'Neill has branded "liberal, left-wing and green-leaning commentators" who oppose the measures in the Comprehensive Spending Review as "hypocrites." This smacks of a deliberate attempt to divert attention from the real issue. At best, it is callous idiocy.

O'Neill makes his case thus;

So don't be fooled by their crocodile tears today - they laid the cultural foundation stones for this age of hardship.

These austerity hypocrites have short memories. This week, the Guardian's George Monbiot wrote an angry piece about the Tory-led cuts agenda, claiming that it will help the rich and hurt the rest.

"When we stagger out of our shelters to assess the damage, we'll discover that we have emerged into a different world, run for their benefit, not ours", he said.

This is the same Monbiot who wrote a piece in 2007 titled 'Bring on the recession'.

"I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises", he said, because only a recession could give us "the time we need to prevent runaway climate change".

A recession would hurt poor people, he acknowledged - but that was a price worth paying to halt out-of-control economic growth.

Inspired by Monbiot, in 2008 some deep greens kick-started a campaign called Riot 4 Austerity - which says it all.

Their reactionary demand, dolled up in radical garb, was for a 90 per cent cut in carbon emissions - a move which would have a far more devastating impact on people's daily lives than any of the slashes Osborne has come up with.

This is just one example of how, apparently, "the cultural zeitgeist today says that wealth is bad, frugality is good; abundance is destructive, austerity is eco-friendly; wanting stuff warps us, giving things up is pure." Thus  these "liberal prejudices, propagated by the well-off" are as responsible for the current situation as Osborne.

Firstly, I must point out that I am neither a liberal, nor a member of any "intelligentsia." I am certainly not "well-off." Nor are many of the others worried about the cuts, such as those who blog at Where's the Benefit.

We're ordinary people, and we're worried by and opposed to the austerity measures of the present government. Go figure. Some of the worried are even disproportionately affected by the measures as disabled people, women, or single parents. How weird is that?

Being kind to O'Neill, we might assume that he's not referring to us, but only to the media commentators, the Labour party opposition, and/or various champagne socialists. I don't - I think he's an insincere arse looking for a stick to beat everyone who opposes the cuts with - but others may. Even on that basis, he's arguing on the basis of a cheap, over-flogged strawman.

I don't doubt that Monbiot said what he did. There are two strains of the green movement, alas dominant, which I dislike: the primitivists and the privileged. Both have a tendency to anti-humanism and the latter especially to pretend that class has no bearing on things whatsoever.

But Monbiot is not the left. He's not even the green movement. He's a single individual, paid to write for the Guardian, who many on the left - including MediaLens and anarchist Climate Campers - are critical of. And yes, that includes his "emphasis on guilt as a precursor for individualistic lifestyle change." If he demands austerity, there are many more on the left who challenge that.

But others attacked in the piece deserve no such criticism. Johann Hari, who O'Neill says "called on the government to enforce wartime-style rationing in order to save the planet from almost certain fiery doom" did nothing of the sort.

O'Neill presents Hari as believing that the government "must "force us all" to live more frugally and sensibly." When, in fact, his article stated that "green consumerism is at best a draining distraction, and at worst a con." Yes, he's advocating state action of a sort that I disagree with, but he wants the state to "force us all" to live greener, not "more frugally."

Hari, though I have disagreements with him on a variety of issues, at least aims for consistency in what he says and has certainly not called for the kind of brutal austerity that we're seeing now.

The other point to be made is that, more broadly, anti-capitalism doesn't equate to saying that "we must learn to live with less "stuff"." This is an idiotic strawman. The vast majority of anti-capitalists are not primitivists, and we don't yearn for everyone to go back to living in mud huts any more than we want a brutal, totalitarian state in the model of the Soviet Union.

What we do want is an end to a specific socio-economic order, wherein ownership is divorced from labour and intertwined state and corporate power conspire to maintain the power and privilege of a minority on the back of everyone else's labour and at our expense. In fact, we believe that replacing that with worker and community self-management would increase prosperity more broadly and end much injustice. And what George Osborne is implementing is the opposite of everything we stand for.

The "new age of austerity" is not the result of any "cultural Zeitgeist," and the blame can not justifiably be lumped with those who oppose it and those who suffer from it. But we will need to keep restating this point in the face of propaganda by the ideologues and the wilfully ignorant.

Jimmy Mubenga deserves justice - those who survive him deserve solidarity

On the 12th of this month, Jimmy Mubenga became the first person to die during deportation for 17 years. Now, detainees in Dover immigration detention centre have issued a statement demanding an official investigation into his death.

The statement, signed by 25 of the detainees, also asks that "all those responsible for this brutal crime at the UKBA, G4S and British Airways are held responsible and punished accordingly."

According to the press release;

Detainees in other detention centres around the country are said to have been disturbed by the news and many said they fear that the same might happen to them when they are "deported in the caring hands of G4S." According to campaigners, detainees in various detention centres started to organise mass protests but these soon died out as many feared "management's retaliation."

This is a truly appalling state of affairs and reveals just how backward our border regime is.

A week after Mubenga's death, a report for the Institute of Race Relations (PDF) which "has catalogued a roll call of death of the 77 asylum seekers and migrants who have died either in the UK or attempting to reach the UK in the past five years as a consequence of direct racism or indirect racism stemming from policies."

Even the overview makes grim reading;

• 15 died taking dangerous and highly risky methods to enter the country. With legal barriers in place to prevent them securing visas or work permits to enter legally and sanctions applying to above board carriers, the desperate stow away on planes and lorries or attempt to cross the channel in makeshift boats or cling to trains. The number recorded here is probably only a fraction of those who have died in this way. Our figures rely on news reports and, by virtue of the subject matter, these deaths are not news.
• l 44 died as an indirect consequence of the iniquities of the immigration/asylum system – by taking their own lives when claims were not allowed, by meeting accidental deaths evading deportation or during the deportation itself, by being prevented medical care, by becoming destitute in the UK.
  Of these:
  – 28 died at their own hand, preferring this to being returned to the country they fled, when asylum claims were turned down. And compounding the process is the fact that some of those in detention and known to be traumatised and particularly vulnerable appear not to have been provided with the medical (especially psychiatric) support they needed.
  – 1 died accidentally as, in terror after a raid by police and immigration officials, he took evasive action.
  – 1 person died during the deportation process itself as he was being deported to Luanda, Angola escorted by three guards from G4S, a private security company.
  - 4 people died after being deported back to a country where they feared for their safety. The actual number is certainly far higher.
  – 7 people died because of being denied healthcare for preventable medical problems.
  – 2 people died destitute and unable to access services.
  – 1 baby died as a result of possible safety failings of a housing provider contracted by the UK Border Agency (UKBA).
• 7 died in prison custody, either being held for deportation or while awaiting trial or serving sentences for charges involving false documentation.
• 4 died in the course of carrying out work which, by virtue of its being part of the ‘black economy’, carried particular dangers and few protective rights. (The numbers listed here are probably a gross underestimate, as work-related deaths of people who are ‘illegal’ will often go unreported in the media.)
• 7 died on the streets of our cities at the hands of racists or as a consequence of altercations with a racial dimension. Often the victims had been moved, via the government’s dispersal system, to areas where they were particularly isolated and vulnerable to attack.

As Harmit Athwal, a researcher at IRR and the report's author, told the Guardian;

Racism percolates right through the immigration-asylum system – from forcing people to risk life and limb to enter, forcing them to live destitute on the street, prey to violent racist attack. That 28 people died at their own hand, preferring this to being returned, when their asylum application failed, to the country they fled, is a terrible indictment of British justice.

Asylum seekers are demonised by the mass media as illegals and scroungers and to appease popular racism, governments across Europe, in addition to making access to refugee status much more difficult, have decided to accelerate the deportation of the many who have 'failed'.

Such forced deportations of those terrified of being returned to the countries they have fled – often areas in which we are involved and at war – will inevitably lead to more deaths.

Now, with the ruling class shoring up their own position through savage attacks on the working class, such problems are only set to increase. Politicians and the media will serve their traditional role of offering up reaction and fear-mongering to distract from the real issues, whilst the far-right will seize upon this as a way to push their own agenda.

I made this point when discussing Margaret Hodge's battle to defend her seat from Nick Griffin;

Let's be clear on this point: although the BNP tap into people's frustrations, this does not in any sense make the solutions they offer the right ones. The whole point here is that the BNP, as so many other fascist groups before them, take genuine grievances against the current system and spin them to offer a scapegoat and division.

As an example, let's take social housing. The reason that we are suffering a severe shortfall in social housing and long waiting lists at present has nothing to do with migration and everything to do with successive governments that have put private profit ahead of public welfare. Studies have shown that migrants do not "jump the queue" for social housing, and I have previously debunked attempts by the Daily Mail and the BNP to rubbish those findings. What we have, instead, is a policy that goes back to the Thatcher era whereby money made from giving council tenants the "right to buy" was not reinvested in housing stock. As Liverpool Antifascists point out, "councils are not allowed to build new houses with the money from the sales, and housing associations have built very few. This has meant that total social housing has reduced from 35% of housing stock in 1965 to about 21% today." At the same time, "successive governments have left it to the private landlords to provide more houses but this just hasn't happened. As always, the system we are ruled by prioritises profit over the needs of real people, whatever our colour or race."

This is the realisation that needs to be made if we are to stop people turning to the BNP out of sheer frustration. Private greed is a genuine threat to our lives, unlike living with people of other races who are - like us - just trying to get by.

But, of course, distorting the issues leads working class anger up a blind alley and helps to drive a wedge between people who share common interests, common problems, and - if they organised together to fight the class war - a common solution.

That, as a reult, we have people suffering in detention centres and dying during deportation, whilst fascists are in more elected positions and have their arguments heard more widely than ever before is just collateral damage. Indeed, given that it exacerbates the issues, it may even be an intended or desired side-effect of the carnival of reaction.

This is why the death of Jimmy Mugembahas gone unreported by much of the press. Truth is only acceptable when it fits the dominant narrative.

It is also why we need to not only reject, but actuively challenge the media/far-right narrative on immigration. As fellow working class people, crushed underfoot by the state and capitalism, migrants deserve our support and solidarity - not our hatred.

Lord Young's review offers neither "common sense" nor "common safety"

As regular readers will know, I'm more than a little sceptical about Lord Young's intentions. Not least because he views health and safety regulation as "a burden that we have to eliminate."

However, I must admit that his report, Common Sense, Common Safety (PDF), makes interesting reading. Not least because within it Lord Young makes many of the same assertions that I do with regard to the myths the media have built up around "elf 'n' safety."

Hat tip to Tabloid Watch for saving me work by fishing out the following quotes;

Britain’s ‘compensation culture’ is fuelled by media stories about individuals receiving large compensation payouts for personal injury claims and by constant adverts in the media offering people non-refundable inducements and the promise of a handsome settlement if they claim.

And;

One of the great misconceptions, often perpetuated by the media, is that we can be liable for the consequences of any voluntary acts on our part. During winter 2009/10, advice was given on television and radio to householders not to clear the snow in front of their properties in case any passer by would fall and then sue.

This is another manifestation of the fear of litigation. In fact there is no liability in the normal way, and the Lord Chief Justice himself is reported as saying that he had never come across a case where someone was sued in these circumstances.

And;

We have all read countless media stories blaming health and safety regulations for all manner of restrictions on our everyday life...

The Health and Safety Executive runs a successful ‘myth of the month’ page on its website; however, there is no end to the constant stream of misinformation in the media.

Again and again ‘health and safety’ is blamed for a variety of decisions, few of which actually have any basis in health and safety legislation at all.

The key point is that, so often, "the health and safety aspect of the story is a media addition." Unfortunately, it isn't just tabloid hacks like Richard Littlejohn who will "continue to get their 'mileage' out of it if they keep exaggerating or inventing these 'health and safety' stories."

Lord Young himself, after agreeing that the media take on health and safety is borne of myth, then agrees with their position on what to do about it. Hence the calls for "simplification" and "easing burdens" in a variety of areas as a prescription for a problem which doesn't exist. If the issue is "perception," as he accepts, then changes to legislation aren't necessary at all.

But they still crop up in his recommendations. He laments that safety regulations exist in all workplaces rather than just "hazardous" ones, and dislikes the fact that "risk assessments [are] compulsory across all occupations."

For example, he wishes to "exempt employers from risk assessments for employees working from home in a low hazard environment." It is couched in language that sells it as "common sense." After all, why obsess over the "low risk?" Except that home workers are still the responsibility of employers whilst on the clock. Particularly if they require specialist equipment as a result of disability, which is more difficult to manage when they are out of the office.

In fact, identifying and offering reasonable adjustments for health issues from back pain to crippling arthritis is part of the risk assessment process. Rather than being a burden, this is "immensely liberating" for disabled workers and allows them to carry on working effectively.

Performing a risk assessment simply means making sure that reasonably practicable measures exist to deal with foreseeable risks and hazards. Which, one would have thought, is common sense.

Not to mention, as Senior TUC health and safety policy officer Hugh Robertson notes, "the average employer will never see a health and safety inspector, and even if they are failing to fulfil their basic legal obligations, such as risk assessment, the chances of them being prosecuted are virtuallynil unless they kill or seriously injure anyone."

Amending the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences (RIDDOR) Regulations is also on the agenda. Young wants to "extend to seven days [from three] the period before an injury or accident needs to be reported." Needless to say, such a move would be open to untold abuse. Especially given that so many accidents already go unreported, with 1.2 million people suffering work-related illnesses as a result.

The proposal that "police officers and firefighters should not be at risk of investigation or prosecution under health and safety legislation when engaged in the course of their duties if they have put themselves at risk as a result of committing a heroic act" is nothing more than a prescription to deal with an outright myth.

As is the idea that "officials who ban events on health and safety grounds should put their reasons in writing." Stories of such bans are spurious at best.

The entire raft of proposals to deal with a "compensation culture" are redundant given that "in nearly all cases there are less claims than there were 10 years ago," and "people can't claim compensation unless they have been injured because someone else is at fault."

All through the document, the stories Young admits are fallacious are trotted out as justifications for various recommendations. The fact that something "is seen as a cost and burden on business" becomes irrefutable proof that it must be scrapped, regardless of the fact that every single health and safety protection had to be fought, tooth-and-nail, for.

If businesses could profit from throwing its staff into a meat grinder, they would find ways to argue that prohibitions against doing so were an unnecessary "cost and burden."

This document, and the review behind it, is nothing more than a way of implementing an ideological attack on health and safety whilst conceding that every justification for said attack is fabricated and overblown nonsense. That "the aim is to free businesses from unnecessary bureaucratic burdens and the fear of having to pay out unjustified damages claims and legal fees." says it all.

David Cameron may be "delighted" that Lord Young has "put some common sense back into health and safety." But the rest of us - especially workers who depend on proper health and safety in their jobs - ought to be very worried.

Project Prevention and blackmail from the moral high ground

It appears that an American "charity" has come to the UK in order to bribe drug addicts to get sterilised - that bribe being the grand sum of £200. The move has been condemned by drugs charities, and rightly so. This is perhaps the stupidest idea I have ever heard.

Barbara Harris, founder of Project Prevention, justified herself to the BBC thus;

Mrs Harris set up her charity in North Carolina after adopting the children of a crack addict.

Damage to children
 
Speaking to the BBC's Inside Out programme, she said: "The birth mother of my children obviously dabbled in all drugs and alcohol - she literally had a baby every year for eight years.

"I get very angry about the damage that drugs do to these children."

After paying 3,500 addicts across the United States not to have children, she is now visiting parts of the UK blighted by drugs to encourage users to undergo "long-term birth control" for cash.

There is a debate to be had about how to deal with the issue of drug addicts who have children. Drug charity Addaction estimates that there are 1.3 million children living with drug dependent parents. And it can be passed to unborn children, causing brain damage and over complications.

But if there are ways to address this, what Project Prevention offers is not it. They may stop a random sampling of addicts from having children, but they have not done anything to stop that group from being addicts. All they have really done is give said addicts the money for a few good fixes which will drive them further into the gutter whilst patting themselves on the back for a job well done.

Project Prevention claims that "unlike incarceration, Project Prevention extremely cost effective and does not punish the participants." But it doesn't help them either. Their true motive is "to reduce the burden of this social problem on taxpayers," and "trim down social worker caseloads."

Or, let them suffer but let us not have to do anything about it.

They claim also to "alleviate from our clients the burden of having children that will potentially be taken away," but unlike serious drug charities, alleviating the addiction isn't even on the agenda. Give them £200, take their nuts, and return to our suburban bubble whilst they rot on the street.

Hence Addaction's verdict that "that there is no place for Project Prevention in the UK because their practices are morally reprehensible and irrelevant."

They offer the following alternative;

Sex education and contraceptive advice is part of drug treatment work in this country. Women who use drugs can access all types of contraception free on the NHS including a number of long term options.

Addaction is one of the UK’s largest providers of drug treatment. Our first-hand experience shows that people can make positive changes with the right support – both for themselves and for their children. In fact, many of our clients stopped using drugs because they became a parent.

It’s certainly true that too many children are growing up with drug-using parents, but working with the whole family – as Addaction does – helps stop drug use and improves a child’s prospects dramatically.

This may not be as quick and easy. But in the long term it allows for the development of effective treatment methods and actually addresses the underlying problem of drug dependency rather than simply snipping at a symptom.

Just as criminalising drugs and locking away dealers only exacerbates the problems of the drug trade being in criminal hands, so bribery and sterilisation will only make the problem of addicts being sucked into destructive lifestyles worse. Alongside the extra money for a couple more fixes, they have tacit consent to continue the downward spiral from people interested only in their loins.

We are long overdue for a sensible debate on the problems around drugs and how to address them. Hysteria, reactionary dogma, and schemes to simply shove the problem out of sight and mind are only making the issue more difficult to address.

Gillett and Hicks may be gone from Liverpool, but football's capital crisis has barely begun

Liverpool Football Club has been bought by New England Sports Ventures (NESV). Fans are, justifiably, glad to be rid of Tom Hicks and George Gillett. But is this really the fresh new beginning that they were after?

The most immediate problem - namely, the threat of Liverpool's holding company going into administration and the club being docked 9 points - is likely to be averted. According to the club, "the transaction values the club at £300m and eliminates all of the acquisition debt placed on LFC by its previous owners, reducing the club's debt servicing obligations from £25m-£30m a year to £2m-£3m."

So, on that front, fans can breathe easy. But the idea that simply changing owners will do anything to address the broader issues facing LFC (and, indeed, all football teams) is wishful thinking. Contrary to chairman Martin Broughton, the sale doesn't "comprehensively resolve" anything.

Football 365's MediaWatch section puts Broughton's comments in perspective;

"This is a great day for Liverpool Football Club and the supporters...I just hope we can deliver what we have set out to do. We have found the right owners. There will be money to invest in the squad" - Martin Broughton on John W. Henry, October 6, 2010.

"This is great for Liverpool, our supporters and the shareholders - it is the beginning of a new era for the club" - Rick Parry on Hicks and Gillett, February 6, 2007.

"NESV wants to create a long-term financially solid foundation for Liverpool FC and is dedicated to ensuring that the club has the resources to build for the future, including the removal of all acquisition debt" - A statement from New England Sports Ventures, October 6, 2010.

"We have purchased the club with no debt on the club. We believe in the future of the club" - George Gillett, February 6, 2007

"Our objective is to stabilise the club and ultimately return Liverpool FC to its rightful place in English and European football, successfully competing for and winning trophies...NESV wants to help bring back the culture of winning to Liverpool FC"- NESV, October 6, 2010.

"The Hicks family and the Gillett family are extremely excited about continuing the club's legacy and tradition. We are particularly pleased that David Moores and Rick Parry will have a continuing involvement in the club. For us continuity and stability are keys to the future" - A joint statement from Hicks and Gillett, February 6, 2007. 

The fact is that the major problems facing football remain. It is still operating on a business model which sees the sport and the fans who follow it as the absolute last priority for clubs. The danger that dangerously high wage costs will collapse clubs still remains.

In over a decade, wages for footballers have risen by 550%, whilst revenue has oly grown by 400%. This is hitting the clubs' bottom line, and driving up prices for tickets and merchandise. One result of this is that the cultural connection between the sport and the working class - as a result of families following teams across generations - is being torn apart by cost.

Meanwhile, competitiveness on the pitch is dying. Clubs with the most money claim a monopoly on the best players, the best coaches and training facilities, and thus the best performances. At the same time, the emphasis on buying in talent makes it more difficult for youngsters to go into the game.

None of this will be impacted by Liverpool getting a new owner. The reduced debt will not see ticket and merchandise prices go down, nor reduce the gap between the football club and the supporters which are now a market rather than a community. And the detrimental effect on local economies of turning teams into moveable franchises is an increasing problem.

The solution is the same as that in employment and communities more generally - taking the power away from a detatched board of executives and the capitalist class, and returning it to workers and local communities. In essence, the Spirit of Shankly union's ultimate goal of supporter ownership of LFC.

Unfortunately, it looks as though Liverpool fans will have to learn the hard way. There can be no "nice" capitalism, and changing the boss doesn't remove the underlying issues.

Why unemployment is not caused by worker organisation

In a 2003 paper (PDF) for the London School of Economics, Christopher A Pissarides argued that "the decline of trade union power" is one of the reasons for falling unemployment in Britain. Seven years later, this has been dredged up with much glee by the "Libertarian" blogosphere.

The Devil's Knife sums up the basic reasoning behind this;

Unions, in this day and age, exist to do only two things: inflate wages and protect their members' jobs (regardless of ability or need).

High wages reduce the number of jobs that are created—especially as technology becomes cheaper—and making it difficult to sack people not only means that jobs can be occupied by those who are not best suited to them, but also reduces the willingness of employers to take people on in the first place (thus reducing the available jobs).

This isn't exactly rocket science, is it?

It's not rocket science, indeed. But then it's not a science at all - it's economics, which is the business of blinding people to the obvious to suit the interests of certain classes.

I have already, previously, torn down the Devil's argument that worker organisation has no place or purpose in the present day. It is, quite simply, an absurdity and I feel no need to labour the point here. Suffice to say that workers, without organisation, face only a race to the bottom.

In fact, you will find this by going back to the writings of Adam Smith. Whilst workers "are disposed to combine in order to raise" wages, bosses are equally disposed to combine "in order to lower the wages of labour." More than that, "the masters can hold out much longer" than the workers if employment ceases. They can exist "upon the stocks which they have already acquired" from the labour of others.

The difference is that, in Smith's time, there was "a certain rate below which it seems impossible to reduce, for any considerable time, the ordinary wages even of the lowest species of labour." The "wages must at least be sufficient to maintain" the workforce.

With the advent of cheap credit, that is no longer the case. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (PDF), "a couple with two children needs [to earn] £29,200" in order "to afford a basic but acceptable standard of living." But many don't earn that. And many more have to work multiple jobs and live hand-to-mouth in order to barely scrape that figure.

Add to that the casualisation and ever cheaper labour that comes from un-organised workers, and the idea of a level below which employers cannot reduce wages quickly vanishes. Compared to previous generations, we are working for less - and harder.

Returning to the argument that strong unions increase unemployment, this may be true to a certain extent. But if lower wages mean more jobs, at what cost does that come? Talk to those stuck in precisely the casual work that such a market creates, such as Chugging, and you will see that trapped is exactly the right descriptor to use.

They have no base wages. They have no statutory entitlements. Attempts to assert their rights or to combine will see a target on their back and their arses out the door. They endure appalling conditions, for pitiful return, and often can find nothing better because of the declining standards of work.

Is this really an acceptable alternative to unemployment? Is this really the alleged prosperity created by the free market and the employers enjoying an unopposed monopoly of force?

The idea that high wages and job security leave those not employd out in the cold is an argument put forward in the past by Milton Friedman. In Free to Choose, he argued that unionisation frequently produces higher wages at the expense of fewer jobs, and that, if some industries are unionised while others are not, wages will decline in non-unionised industries.

But, from the left, this is a point that the Industrial Workers of the World (amongst others) make - in favour of more universal organisation!

One of the major left-libertarian criticisms of craft or trade unionism is that by organising along the lines of specific crafts or trades rather than across entire industries it creates a two-tier workforce and improves conditions for one group of workers only at the expense of another.

The alternative to this is not to get rid of organisation and equalise everything with a race to the bottom. That only benefits the bosses and makes the problem more acute.

Rather, the answer is to organise workers as a class, to unite everyone in any given industry under the same banner, and to challenge the broader injustices of the wage labour system. Rather than defending one insider group to the detriment of everybody else.

Part of which would involve pushing for greater investment and employment, both inside the workplace and outside through the organisation of the unemployed, to challenge exactly that issue.

But none of this increases the power and privilege of the ruling and propertied class, and so you won't here the right-wing (least of all self-styled "Libertarians") arguing for it. As Adam Smith noted so long ago, the combinations of the masters go unremarked upon, viewed as entirely natural, whilst the combination of workers is derided and scorned as the physical manifestation of evil or madness.

Unemployment is the product of an economic system built on theft and artificial scarcity. Those who would have us believe that combining to challenge that system is the real fault do so only because of ideological dogma. And, to be frank, they can fuck right off.

On Liverpool BNP's response to last Saturday's events

The Liverpool branch of the BNP have taken their time offering a write-up of their being run out of town on Saturday. They have obviously taken their time putting just the right spin on events to serve their purposes ... and still come up with semi-coherent garbage.

The new Liverpool BNP blog is far better presented than the Merseyside BNP one now controlled by the party's dissident "reformer" faction. But it is still a mess, not least because whoever writes it often forgets how to use hyperlinks and the text becomes clunky as you try to wade through web addresses thrown, seemingly at random, into the middle of sentences and paragraphs. If their aim is readability, they're self-sabotaging.

But anyway, returning to the main point, they begin with what is now a common refrain;

My companions and I are members of a legal, democratic political party and in our opinion the only alternative to global politics and world domination. Our Leader and local MEP Mr Nick Griffin has a mandate from nearly a million to serve the people of Merseyside and the North West. In fact it has just been announced Nick is the 2nd best performing MEP. Of course this to us is common knowledge but, of course media bias avoided this!
http://www.nickgriffinmep.eu/content/nick-second-best-performing-north-west-mep

It goes almost without saying that nobody has ever claimed that the BNP are "illegal," since to qualify as such you have to be proscribed by the Home Secretary. And if they want to believe that the BNP is the only viable alternative to the status quo, that's up to them - though I and many others beg to differ.

But the idea that they are "democratic" needs to be challenged. The recent farce of their leadership challenge demonstrated just what a dictatorial stranglehold Nick Griffin has on power in the BNP. Though I'm no fan of them either, the Labour Party had an open and fair leadership election, and many of the failed contenders will now be part of Ed Miliband's shadow cabinet.

Not so the BNP. Those who supported Eddy Butler have been suspended or expelled. The other challenger, Richard Barnbrook, has been booted. High-profile critics of Griffin - such as Lee Barnes - have jumped ship. And Griffin's personality cult has been cleansed of "spies," "homosexuals," and "cranks."

As for Griffin's "mandate" to represent Liverpool - it was only that the vote was across the entire North West that he scraped in. Those million votes didn't come from this city.

I pointed this out at the time of his "victory;"

In the North West, the increase in BNP support was marginal. They barely upped their share of the vote to 7.96%, just ahead of the Greens' 7.63%. In Liverpool, meanwhile, the locale of the defining moments in their North West campaign - from the arrest of 12 activists for inciting racial hatred in distributing the Racism Cuts Both Ways leaflets to prominent Merseyside BNP members Peter Tierney and Steve Greenhalgh's vicious assault on local anti-fascists - they polled at just 6.4%.

Moreover, "an incredibly low overall turnout, contrasted with the generally high turnout the BNP pushes for amongst its supporters, suggests that 6% may be an overestimation of BNP support in the city."

The events of this Saturday, and the similar occurrence a fortnight before that, bear this point out.

But the BNP, as you might expect, tell that differently too. The fact that "the general public are in full support of this campaign and most flock to sign our petition" can be boiled down to the fact that the public - including antifascists - are overwhelmingly anti-war.

But whilst those on the left try to do something about it, from enormous marches and support of deserters to direct action such as that of the EDO decommissioners, the BNP use the issue to hide their politics.

To labour the point, the "petition" they're touting is not a petition at all. As Griffin admits on the BNP website, it is part of a recruitment campaign, and those who sign up will only succeed in lining themselves up for his begging letters and BNP postal votes. Not to mention that, per their election manifesto, they would happily still leave "our boys" to die in that war if they felt it "in the national interest."

But I often wonder whether the BNP activists involved in this are deliberately masking the truth or  if they are utterly delusional.

They consider the chants of antifascists to be "government induced." And, despite the disproportionate arrest and harassment of antifascists and youth, their post rails against "the (left-wing, common-purpose ordained) Police," "the baying ‘Sponsored Anarchist’ crowd," and "the obvious ‘State protected’ confidence, which has been bestowed on these Anarchists." [sic, ad infinitum]

Hyperbole and excessive use of randomly-aligned adverbs aside, this betrays the cultish, barnpot mentality of those deepest in the mire of the far-right.

For them, there are only two sides: themselves, and the student-liberal-hippy-ethnic-politically-correct-common-purpose-communist-Marxist-anarchist-unwashed-left. Who are, naturally, all sponsored by the state. And "middle class" - despite being "unwashed."

Liverpool BNP tried to articulate this reasoning in "Meditations on a Lefty Mob "Demo""[sic];

all the UAF and Socialist librarian gimps had concentrated at the Echo Arena to perform a demo for the public and Media against the ConDem ‘Government’ in No. 10. However, on hearing that the nefarious BNP had the audacity to hold a Day of Action in Liverpool Town Centre Comrade McFadden hastened into the town centre. Surely enough there was the BNP! How dare they confront this glorious regime! http://www.stopcp.com/index.php Comrade McFadden was on the phone immediately.

...

Now whilst most ordinary folk seem to agree with the sentiment ‘Bring Our Boys Home’ the elite had other ideas and by mid morning Comrade McFadden had arrived and was on the phone to his government rent-a-mob. ... Then lo and behold The Government cash funded UAF and Socialist Workers Party and a few of the old Hatton Militant hard-liners abandoned the [Liberal Democrat] Party Conference to perform a merry dance around the BNP table top instead!!! Thus exposing the public to a performance of what it really is-a Thespian parade for the controlled Tabloids and Media.

So, because left-wing activists had abandoned a protest against the Liberal Democrats to protest the BNP, we are all of course in the pay of David Cameron and Nick Clegg. And protesting against them as a show for the media.

In reality, the "demo" was actually a small gathering aimed at lobbying attendees of the conference, attended by 20-ish people. The main march and protest was the next day and attended by a throng of several thousand people. But the idea that somebody can oppose both the present government and a fascist party such as the BNP is apparently really far-fetched. Or something.

Likewise, it would seem that opposing the BNP makes you no longer a local to anywhere they happen to be. Unless you're a member of an ethnic minority.

According to the wisdom of the BNP;

only about 5% of them are actually from Liverpool, and that 5% are ethnics. The rest are students from outside so they can by no means speak on behalf of the people of Liverpool!

Except that I am a white, working class person who holds a full-time job, was born in Liverpool and has lived here all his life, and I was amongst the crowd opposing the BNP. Unless I and my fellow white, working class, antifascist Scousers imagined the whole thing, of course.

I'd also point out that, as an anarchist, I was no doubt in a minority amongst the antifascist crowd. But it would no doubt fall on deaf and wilfully ignorant ears.

I'm not going to Fisk the entire article, because I have better things to do with my time. But it should be pointed out that there were no "indiscriminate[?] members of the public standing in the crowd observing this situation and then fearlessly challenging this mob’s week[sic] argument."

The BNP themselves would only get in the faces of kids, whilst members of Liverpool Antifascists would engage with passers-by and could hold our own in debate easily enough. Far from "watch[ing] the agitators shrivel when confronted with common sense debate," all the BNP could do was shout "fuck off" and call us "paedophiles."

Likewise, when "one of the protesters was caught by one of our group, and by the Police, vandalising our equipment," it was actually a young lad who hooked his mp3 player up to their loud-hailer so that it played rap! Whether it should be classed as "vandalism" or music is entirely subjective, I guess.

Thus, the writer of this pathetic diatribe may "honestly believe the UAF are above the law and they know it," but I wouldn't take his word for it since I doubt his grip on reality.

He rounds of his semi-coherent rant thus;

Is this the price we pay for being a Patriot in Britain today? The true concept of ‘democracy’ has been lost. Anyone who supports an opinion different from the Government/State is demonised. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx2YLFyp43Q&feature=player_embedded The media have aided the Government in the sanctioning of attacks on Nationalists/Patriots. There is and has always been a media bias against Nationalistic endeavours. http://www.nuj.org.uk/innerPagenuj.html?docid=1253

We are now, no-longer safe in our own land. Am I frightened? Yes, I am terrified for our Country’s future but I am awake and I cannot turn away from what is happening to my beautiful Land.

This ‘politically–correct’ Regime, is empowering alien cultures, at the expense of our’s. Are we not the Host-Nation ?

My Grandfather went to War for this Land and my Great Grandfather was in the trenches. I cannot stand by and let Traitors and fiends deliver this Land into the hands of foreigners. I will not apologise to Blacks for my Great British History. If I am to be condemned for loving my own culture, so be it! And if you want to call me names for trying to stop MY People becoming second class citizens in our own country, feel free. I don’t care.

In MY heart I am a Patriot-British till the end. The blood of the ethnic English runs through my veins. Onwards and upwards!

Well, he may be right about a couple of things. But the manifestation of the state demonising dissidents, i.e. left-wing activists being filmed, photographed, and documented as "domestic extremists," is utterly at odds with his view of us being "above the law."

If the BNP wants to think of us as "government-sponsored" and "traitors," that's their call. But the evidence doesn't bear it out.

We're not asking them to "apologise to Blacks for my Great British History," or "condemn[ing them] for loving [their] own culture." We're challenging their advancement of a fascist ideology rooted in bigotry and political violence.

Torture, murder, and state repression under Barack Obama

The hype of Obamania has long died down and the US President has slipped into his expected role as a typical Clinton-style Democrat. In the process, many of his supposedly "radical" campaign promises have fallen by the wayside - most notably that to close Guantánamo Bay.

Of late some quite specific consequences of this broken promise have come to light, as the blog Tiresias Speaks notes;

A US federal Judge dismissed a complaint Wednesday (9/29) brought by the families of two Guantánamo prisoners that alleged that the circumstances surrounding the men’s deaths had been covered up when they were declared suicides by the Pentagon in June of 2006. 

The families of Saudi prisoner Yasser al-Zahrani and Salah al-Salami of Yemen were asking US District Judge Ellen Huvelle to reexamine the case in light of new testimony from military personnel working at Guantánamo at the time of the “suicides” that directly contradicts official accounts. 

A third prisoner, Mani al-Utaybi of Saudi Arabia also died the same night, but his family has not filed a complaint. 

At the time of their deaths, Al-Zahrani, 22, and Al-Salami, 33, had been held at Guantánamo without charges for four years at the US naval base. According to the Pentagon, on the night of June 9th, 2006, Al-Zahrani, Al-Salami, and Utaybi were found at approximately the same time hanging from makeshift nooses in their cells. They were then rushed to the camp’s infirmary where they were shortly pronounced dead. 

The following day the commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, put the base on lockdown. He ordered almost all reporters on the base to leave and told those already en route to turn back. He officially declared that the deaths were “suicides,” and he went on to say, “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” 

But new first-hand accounts from soldiers on duty at the base on the night of June 9th suggest that Admiral Harris’ and the Pentagon’s version of events is false and that the men may have actually died as the result of torture at a site off base known as “Camp No.” According to the petition, this site was called Camp No because if soldiers were asked if it existed the were supposed to say no. 

Army officer Joe Hickman says that he was supposed to log every vehicle that exited or entered the base. Even when Senator John McCain came to visit the base Hickman ensured that he was properly logged in and out. However, there was one windowless paddy wagon that was sometimes used to transport prisoners that he was not supposed to keep any log of. He and other soldiers say that they saw this van pick up three prisoners and drive them to Camp No on the evening of June 9th. 

When the van returned to base later it did not return the prisoners to their cells, instead it backed up to the infirmary. A medical officer told Hickman they had been sent to the infirmary, “because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised,” the petition said. 

When Hickman heard the official cause of death was suicide by hanging the next day he talked with the other guards who would have had to of seen if any bodies had been transported from the cells to the infirmary, but no one had seen any bodies being moved. 

The families of Al-Zahrani and Al-Salami demanded an independent autopsy, but when the bodies arrived they had already had all of their vital organs surrounding their throats removed making it impossible to 100% verify the cause of death.The medical examiners they had hired made requests for the organs to be sent from Guantánamo, but their requests were ignored. 

In her ruling Wednesday, Judge Huvelle did not really address any of these issues raised in the petition. Instead, she cited a decision by a federal appeals court in Washington stating that conditions at Guantánamo should not be investigated by the courts and should remain the purview of Congress alone due to national security concerns. 

In light of this ruling, it is unlikely that all of the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Al-Zahrani, Al-Salami, and al-Utaybi will ever be discovered. The Obama Administration has already made it clear that it not interested in looking backwards to investigate potential war crimes and there is no reason to think that Congress would investigate the Pentagon’s official account. 

The whole incident and yesterday’s ruling in particular serve as a stark reminder of Obama’s broken promise to close Guantánamo within one year of taking office. Even if Obama does end up closing Guantánamo down, it is difficult not to wonder how much of its true history will remain forever unknown?

On its own, this would be a troubling story. But it is not occurring in isolation - rather, it is part of a broader context of gross civil liberties violations by the Obama administration.

Just as, here in Britain, the Blair era never saw the restoration of freedoms taken by Thatcher, so Obama has failed to right the wrongs of the Bush era. The USA PATRIOT Act remains in force. The illegal war in Afghanistan drags on. And the US can now kill its citizens without due process.

Yes, you read that right. From a May article by Glen Greenwald in Salon;

The most recent liberty-abridging, Terrorism-justified controversies have focused on diluting the legal rights of American citizens (in part because the rights of non-citizens are largely gone already and there are none left to attack).  A bipartisan group from Congress sponsors legislation to strip Americans of their citizenship based on Terrorism accusations.  Barack Obama claims the right to assassinate Americans far from any battlefield and with no due process of any kind.  The Obama administration begins covertly abandoning long-standing Miranda protections for American suspects by vastly expanding what had long been a very narrow "public safety" exception, and now Eric Holder explicitly advocates legislation to codify that erosion.  John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduce legislation to bar all Terrorism suspects, including Americans arrested on U.S. soil, from being tried in civilian courts, and former Bush officials Bill Burck and Dana Perino -- while noting (correctly) that Holder's Miranda proposal constitutes a concession to the right-wing claim that Miranda is too restrictive -- today demand that U.S. citizens accused of Terrorism and arrested on U.S. soil be treated as enemy combatants and thus denied even the most basic legal protections (including the right to be charged and have access to a lawyer).

And last week Greenwald wrote of the shroud of secrecy around this process;

At this point, I didn't believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record.  In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki's father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims.  That's not surprising:  both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality.  But what's most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is "state secrets":  in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are "state secrets," and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

Which, as the The Agitator rightly points out, "Obama is arguing the executive has the power to execute American citizens without a trial, without even so much as an airing of the charges against them, and that it can do so in complete secrecy, with no oversight from any court, and that the families of the executed have no legal recourse."

This should give us all a cause for worry. Not least because Obama's is currently the most liberal administration of western governments. And that the actions of the United States all too often set a precedent for others, not least its British "junior partner."

What we see here is nothing less than overt tyranny, being pushed through with much noise on the blogosphere but little on the ground.

The important fact to remember is that, no matter how much we bitch and moan on "teh internets," nothing will change. Righteous anger and moral outrage has to be accompanied by direct action. Tyranny can only be defeated through active resistance, and that is exactly what Obama has wrought.

Where the libertarian left and right overlap, or don't - a response to John Demetriou

On Sunday, a conversation on Twitter with John Demetriou - a right-libertarian blogger - inspired him to write a post called "What have left and right libertarians got in common?" What follows is my response.

Demetriou, hereafter JD for brevity, is an interesting case amongst right-libertarians. I've cited him previously as being "far more honest and consistent in his libertarianism" than his peers, and I stick by that. He realises the utter lunacy of "anarcho"-capitalism and is closer to mutualism in his ideology.

But I digress. His post was prompted by my tweeting that "there are lots of areas of agreement between libertarian right and left. But blogging only seems to overlap on economics [where we disagree]."  And "it would be interesting, for example, to read right-libertarians on fascism, illegal wars, nationalism, migration, et al."

With a rapidity that my response has failed to match, JD rose to the challenge, offering his opinion on exactly those subjects.

On fascism, nationalism, and migration, his perspective diverged from mine quite broadly. I will come to that. However, having already written a great deal on the irreconcilable differences between left- and right- libertarianism - see here, here, here, and here - I would like to go first to the commonalities.

On this point, JD is quite eloquent;

I think the best way to improve relations with other countries and to encourage better relations across the world is to essentially trade. Trade civilises. Trade is good. Business and commerce is good. Why drop bombs on Afghanistan, when we should legalise all drugs and buy their heroin from them and sell it at below dealer rates in the UK in order to destroy the illegal drugs industry?

Why feed despotic, pernicious regimes in the Middle East (like Saudi) because we want to sate our miserable addiction to oil, when we can simply junk our dependence on oil and move towards a transport system based in renewable energy?

This is where left libertarianism comes in - it can energise and educate people to realise the destructive nature of the oil industry and why it poisons just about everything in the world.

Left and right libertarianism has much in common, and while our differences may seem stark, and our paths meander off into random directions, we can agree and shake a friendly hand on the fact that our one main enemy is the state. The further you go to the extremes (anarchism, Anarcho-Capitalism), the more you believe the state should not exist.

Let me leave you with this image from a great film I watched recently called 'The Bucket List' with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson. If you have seen it, you might want to muse on why I draw the parallel between this discussion and this film.

Because for me, Freeman's character is like a left libertarian and Nicholson's is like a right libertarian. One is a rich billionaire, the other is a man of modest means. One is brash, caustic and obnoxious, the other is charming and a gentleman. When brought together, they have a turbulent relationship, but dedicated common ground can bring great things...

I'm not of the opinion that the libertarian spectrum can or does play out like a political buddy movie. There is common ground, and there are even areas where opinions from the left and right compliment one another. But the elephant in the room is the economy, stupid, at as a result there will always be antagonism.

Perspectives on the state are part of this. For left libertarians and anarchists, the state is our enemy because (to varying degrees) it represents an authoritarian and hierarchical structure. We are equally suspicious of such structures outside of the state, whilst with many - if not all - right-libertarians there is the suggestion that authoritarianism is acceptable if privatised.

Nonetheless, sticking to common ground, I would agree there is a lot of it. For example, whilst we lefties "come in" on the issue of foreign wars and the oil industry, I have no problem letting the libertarian right have at it on smoking bans, free speech, and other such issues.

Going back to fascism and such things, here we find that common ground remains, but it is an awful lot more sparse.

For example;

For me, fascism cannot be blithely dismissed as a right wing political creed. This is lazy. Fascism is extremely similar to its opposite number; communism (or hardened socialism). They both want a massively powerful state, led by an elite, who dictates everything on behalf of the people who they pretend to laud and love. Both communism and fascism are scathing of capitalism, and Jews, and they are quite aggressive and imperialistic, though for slightly different reasons.

I believe the differences are tiny. The reason fascism gets the right wing tag is pretty much because of its latent nationalism and obsession with race and eugenics.

Although there is an issue with calling fascism "right wing" or "far-right" in terms of the economic left-right line, it does not follow from this that it is socialist or left wing.

As I have argued before, fascism is the logical, extreme of the status quo. That is, corporatism, nationalism,  authoritarianism, and rigid bureaucracy. It has traditionally found support from the business classes, and been used to smash picket lines and organised workers as a movement.

It should also be noted that capitalism is not synonymous - or, for that matter, at all compatible - with free markets. It is a social order, wherein state and corporate power are intertwined.

I won't defend "Communism," quite simply because I don't believe in it. The oppositional perspectives of anarchists and Marxist-Leninists is well known and doesn't need rehashing here. Suffice to say that the USSR wasn't socialist after 1921. At the latest.

JD's claim that "as long as left libertarians constantly see fascism as a right wing movement, they will persistently fail to spot the inherent flaws in socialism" is at best facile. We know well what socialism is and what it is not - which is why we are in non-hierarchical, decentralised groups such as the Solidarity Federation rather than towing the line of the Socialist Workers' Party.

Further to which, the idea that "can only really ever exist where it is guided by a very strong, coercive elite in dominance of a very strong state" is a falsehood.

Though it was short-lived, the Spanish Revolution showed communism to be quite the opposite. In fact, as in Russia, it was clearly the case that those "in charge of a very strong apparatus of thuggery and tyranny" destroyed communism rather than bringing it to pass.

JD is harsher on nationalism than I. I would agree that it is "an emotional sop" and "pointless way of seeking an identity and a way of seeking meaning."

However, where I have sought the root of such sentiments and ways to challenge it for leading working class discontent up a blind alley, he simply writes those who think that way as "the types of people who flip burgers and fit tyres to down tools every generation or three in order to 'defend the realm'."

Beyond which, JD is "ot one of these cunts who wants to do away with 'countries' and just have the world as one big meadow of goats with no borders and loads of women with lank hair dancing round Maypoles." But I am, and as he points out whilst there are a fair amount of minarchists on the libertarian right, they are few and far between on the left.

I won't go into the arguments in detail here. But in response to his suggestion that a minimal state is neccesary and anarchism "would only work in a very ideal world which can never exist," I suggest he reads my case against borders, and my posts on how community self-defence and self-organisation would work.

Anarchism is not a pipe dream invented by stoned students - it is an idea rooted in over 150 years of trial and error. After all, an ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

Returning to the original point, I would say that there is far too much difference for any kind of consensus between the libertarian right and left. But we are not two separate, homogenous camps - there is an entire spectrum of libertarian thought and so great potential for overlap.

With the exception, of course, of anarcho-capitalists, Randian objectivists, and big-L Libertarians like Ron Paul. I'm unrepentant that they're just corporate capitalists lacking access to the whip.