The new LBC started last year and has publsished some great books, including Kevin Ovenden’s Syriza, along with books on the housing crisis, austerity, the politics of music and more… They are now crowdfunding to expand online and get reading groups going.
A worthy cause, I have donated, I hope you will too.
We are truly entering the world of the surreal. The BBC and other news outlets report in breathless tones how Iraqi government forces and Kurdish soldiers are entering Mosul to fight ISIS with American air cover, and possibly the support of the RAF. The Iraqi government has invited military support from the Americans and other Western powers.
Meanwhile the same news channels report that Syrian government forces and Iranian soldiers fighting Islamists in Aleppo with Russian air cover.The Syrian government has invited military support from the Russians and Iran. According to the British government, the Syrians and Russians are apparently committing war crimes by bombing an urban area.
Meanwhile the British government supplies planes and munitions to Saudi Arabia who bomb civilian areas in Yemen.
I have respect for consistent pacifists. I once asked Bruce Kent what the alternative to war is,for example in self defence, and he said “”the alternative is not to fight”. I don’t agree with this point of view but it is intellectually and morally consistent.
In practical terms, armed operations to defeat a determined and organised military force in an urban battlefield cannot avoid civilian casualties. The law is complicated, not least as both the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts are internal armed conflicts, where legally the Islamist forces are not soldiers of a belligerent power.
I am not an expert on the laws of war, though I have been trying read up on it to gain some understanding, but from what I gather, while it is illegal for those besieging Mosul and Aleppo to target civilians, it is not unlawful for them to target military assets where they anticipate proportionate civilian casualties. It is furthermore unlawful for the besieged forces to deliberately site their military assets so as to be using the population as a human shield.
As a question of fact, I don’t know whether the Islamist rebels in Aleppo,or iSIS in Mosul, have located their military forces close to civilian buildings. However, if they have, the choice given to the besieging forces is to either disengage their attack, or to calculate that the number of civilian casualties that it will consider proportionate has increased by the actions of the defending forces.
What is clear, is that peaceful and political solutions are to be preferred. The actions of the British government in seeking to raise the temperature with ill considered and reckless sabre rattling aimed at Russia are at very best unhelpful.
The first two US presidential debates did not reveal anything new when it comes to either candidate. They only served to confirm that Donald Trump is a slobbering megalomaniac who should be kept away from political office in the same way a three-year-old child is kept away from a box of matches. A poster boy for unfettered capitalism, he is a man so divorced from reality — and, with it, his own humanity —that every word that leaves his mouth comes over as a cry for help.
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is a passionate disciple of US exceptionalism – someone who believes there is no country that cannot be improved with a shower of cruise and tomahawk missiles. She and her husband come as a package of liberal opportunism who have made a successful and hugely lucrative career out of speaking left and acting right. The fruits of this opportunism are mass incarceration, the entrenchment of Wall Street as the golden temple of the US economy, and perpetual war and regime change overseas. Christopher Hitchens perhaps put it best when he opined that they [the Clintons] “haven’t met a foreign political donor they don’t like and haven’t taken from.”
Such is the parlous quality of both candidates for an office which, even in its better years, is synonymous with war crimes and crimes against humanity, it is tempting to conclude that we’re fucked. I say this as a non-American given that the occupant of the White House is a matter of grave importance for a world by now grown weary of Washington’s vast and ongoing experiment in democracy, along with the moral sickness which fuels its untrammeled power and the doctrine of ‘destroying the village in order to save it’ that has long underpinned its foreign policy.
It begs the question of who will save us from America?
Writing these words while on a recent visit to Los Angeles, I was struck by the ocean of broken humanity that fills Hollywood’s mythical gilded streets. Anyone who believes that America is a classless society need only take him or herself over here to realize how utterly wrong they are. Indeed not only will they be assured that there is no society more defined by class than US society, but that every minute of a every day a fierce class war is raging in its towns and cities, with up to now only one side in this war, the 99 percent, taking all the punches and doing all the bleeding.
Across America the abandonment of the poor, the downtrodden and the sick to their fate in service to the rich has been so brutal and cruel that its human consequences given new meaning to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. America’s poor are a colonized people, be assured, which is why Malcolm’s assertion that, “You can’t understand what’s going on in Mississippi if you don’t understand what’s going on in the Congo,” remains one of his most cogent.
Yet as much as I loathe America for the scale of injustice, brutality, and mendacity that informs its treatment of the poor at home and abroad, hope arrives in the tremendous litany of rebels, dissidents, and counter-hegemonic movements which the country has produced in response. Oppression breeds resistance and throughout US history there has been fierce resistance against overwhelming odds — Sitting Bull, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, the San Patricios, Frederick Douglas, John Brown, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood and the Wobblies, Eugene Debs, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, MLK, Malcolm X, SNCC, the Panthers, anti-Vietnam War movement, Cesar Chavez, and on and on.
Each of them, along with the movements they led or were a part of, were sustained by the same fierce moral outrage at the injustice they experienced and witnessed being inflicted in the name of progress and might is right. Many people experience at some level and point this burning sense of moral outrage at the injustice that defines the world they live in. The difference arises between those who learn to make their peace with it and those who refuse to make their peace with it – who instead choose to grapple with this monster in what they know before they start will be a losing fight.
This is the human condition at its most inspiring, the willingness to fight even while knowing you can’t win. But, then, such a reductive and one dimensional interpretation of victory has no place when we understand history as a river that flows without end and not a monument separating it into neat and tidy chapters, as in a book. Fighting is winning and winning is fighting in a struggle that will continue so long as injustice continues.
The race for the White House is a race for power engaged in by those Chaplin famously described as “machine men with machine minds and machine hearts.” It is a contest between two representatives of a psychopathic ruling class for the keys to a kingdom of despair. But lest they allow themselves to become smug and complacent as they wallow in lives of privilege and decadence, they should hark the words of Crazy Horse, spoken days before he died while resisting imprisonment. “The Red Nation shall rise again and it shall be a blessing for a sick world; a world filled with broken promises, selfishness and separations; a world longing for light again.”
Amen.
“What’s my vision for Britain? My philosophy? My approach?
Today I want to answer that question very directly.” Theresa May
Who am I? And what on earth am I doing here?
Let me be clear. Each time I stand up to speak
as your Prime Minister, the church organist at Midsomer
kills again: the village florist gets it savagely
across the back of the head with a cast iron frying pan
that’s been in the family since seventeen seventy six;
or her lover, the sexton, turns up strip-jack-naked
at the bottom of the better variety of slurry pit…
In my Britain the brothels that serve
next year’s Conservative Party conference
will only employ girls with ‘Best of British’ tattooed
tastefully across their lower backs. Trust me,
when all the relevant members of my cabinet
have had their faces sat on for a fee
by Staffordshire’s finest, the British people will see
we, as a government, are ready to grasp
this once in a generation chance for change.
I will glue our United Kingdom back together,
and never let divisive nationalists,
with the exception of those here amongst us today,
tear us asunder. To this end,
the children of Dundee and Kirkcaldy
will be made recite every morning before Latin
the collected works of Rudyard Kipling;
and every homeowner south of Rickmansworth
on a salary over thrice the national average
will be given a toy Glaswegian each
with a tiny can of Irn Bru preinstalled, courtesy
of the new Department of Citizenship & Ethnic Integrity.
We are not just a party for the big people,
the sort who know what’s in the compromising photographs
the average person must never be allowed see;
we also rely on the votes of those many millions
of little people who believe in
what the big people have in store for them.
Come with me as we rise
to meet this challenge and take
each of them – be they gay
or straight, white or a bit yellow,
complete slap head or hairy all over –
coldly by the gullet
and give them the shaking
we know they deserve.
KEVIN HIGGINS
The appointment of Diane Abbott as shadow home secretary has received a predictable cacophony of faux outrage. The coverage in the Express is typical, replete with sexist references to her sexual history and insults.
The appointment of Ms Abbott, a close ally, supporter and one-time girlfriend of fellow north London MP Mr Corbyn, was seen as a particularly provocative move.
She moves from Shadow Health Secretary to replace Andy Burnham who has stood down to focus on his campaign to be elected Greater Manchester Mayor next year.
One anonymous Labour MP commented: “Diane Abbott is now in charge of our response to security, terror and immigration. Do they want anyone to vote for us again?”Another branded her “incompetent” while former Labour HQ official Jo Green Tweeted: “Labour’s top three are Corbyn, (Shadow Chancellor John) McDonnell and Diane Abbott. Electoral suicide awaits.”
Last week, Ms Abbott told a Labour conference meeting that voters backing limits on European Union immigration simply “want to see less foreign-looking people on their streets”.
In fact it is a very smart move. The senior leadership of the shadow cabinet is now in hands of those who are loyal to trajectory of the party, as now twice endorsed by the membership.
Like McDonnell and Corbyn himself, Diane Abbott has historically been a figure outside of the golden circle of the Westminster elite, and the last year has clearly required adjustments from all of them, in response to their greater responsibility. However, over the last few months she as done extremely well as shadow health secretary, and she is accomplished in front of the television camera.
But most significantly, a time when the Conservative Party is seeking to polarize British politics over the issues of race and immigration, hoping to seek the shift the centre ground on the issue as a smokescreen for their problems over Brexit, then Abbott’s appointment is the clearest signal that Labour will not follow them down that path.
Let us be clear, the wisdom of the centre-right in the party that Labour should not drift too far way from the Conservatives over policy simply doesn’t work when politics is in flux. The economic prescriptions which the three defeated candidates in last year’s leadership elections were triangulated around George Osborne’s policies, and would – in logical terms – be to the right of the current government.
Triangulation is part of a tired process that the electorate is disillusioned with. What is more, the chaos in UKIP and the opaqueness of what Thereas May’s government actually believes in, shows that all political parties are struggling to position themselves in a dramatically altered political landscape.
Abbott is the right choice, and she will do well.
LBC’s James O’Brien did a superb job of placing the anti-immigration narrative of the Tories, unleashed at their first post-Brexit party conference in Birmingham, into its rightful and very worrying context. Simply put, we have entered a politics that bear a striking resemblance to that which Europe lived through in the 1930s, when in similar conditions of economic depression, austerity, and the ensuing assault on workers’ wages, conditions, and living standards, the politics of race and ultra nationalism were able to achieve mainstream legitimacy and traction.
If, by now, there is anybody on the left who still believes Brexit somehow enhances the prospect of a more just, equitable, and progressive society coming to pass, they are not only delusional but also mendacious. Those who sided with Farage and company — and here George Galloway with his obscene appearance at that now notorious UKIP anti-EU rally, where he baldly proclaimed, ‘Left-right, left right, all the way to victory,” springs to mind — in making the case for “taking the country” back should be hanging their heads in shame over the reality of Brexit, as opposed to the theoretical and doctrinal wonderland they inhabited while campaigning for it.
The warnings issued by those who saw further and deeper, that Brexit would unleash a tidal wave of right wing consciousness across the country, such as that which followed the Falklands War, were blithely ignored – even contemptuously dismissed – by people who should know better. The result is that we now have a Tory Prime Minister embracing the politics of anti-immigration and xenophobia in a move designed to curry favour with an indigenous white working class that has been persuaded that dwindling public services, low pay, and job insecurity is a product of immigration rather than inequality and Tory austerity.
With her speech — which followed on from an even more reactionary effort by her Home Secretary, Amber Rudd — Theresa May has drawn a clear dividing line in British society on the question of immigration and the status of migrants. In other words, you either stand in solidarity with migrants or you stand against them. Any nuanced middle ground left available to stand on when it comes to this question has now disappeared
Much of the responsibility for this state of affairs, the ability for such nakedly and brutal xenophobia to take root, lies with the left. As Ben Chu wrote in The Independent:
The academic evidence we have is very clear that immigration does not undermine average UK living standards, but actually enhances them. Some researchers have found that there is a negative impact on the wages of unskilled natives — but only a mild one. Overall the impact is positive.
Yet some on the liberal left, despite acknowledging this evidence, are moving to the view that telling people that they’re wrong when they complain of a negative economic impact of immigration is condescending.
Prior to the EU referendum, British society was already being dragged deeper and deeper into a swamp of identity and anti-politics. Seen in this light, Brexit marks an all-too regressive and reactionary culmination; tantamount to the reassertion of far right nostrums not only on free movement, but also on all immigration, minorities (particularly Muslims), and multiculturalism.
The reason such a vile and toxic mix has been able to gain the traction it undoubtedly has is austerity and the unleashing of the class war it describes and has informed. It has led to the collapse of the political centre ground, not only in Britain but all across Europe and the US, where Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency has served to elevate the same xenophobic and reactionary politics to mainstream legitimacy as Brexit. The space vacated by this collapse has been largely filled by the right and far right rather than the left. In sum, the right is currently winning the battle of ideas with the result the triumphalist re-branding of the Tories as a patriotic defender of British workers against their foreign counterparts and interlopers, coming over here to steal British jobs and push down the wages of British workers.
Jeremy Corbyn’s response to May’s conference speech, while of course welcome, was an exercise in attacking the Brexit horse after it has bolted. He and his team failed to understand the danger Brexit posed during the EU referendum campaign, else why was his campaign so lacklustre and woefully dispassionate?
The SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, who is the only party to leader to have emerged from the wreckage of Brexit with any credit, again proved her mettle when in response to May’s conference speech, she opined:
Theresa May’s vision of Brexit Britain is a deeply ugly one — a country where people are judged not by their ability or their contribution to the common good, but by their birthplace or by their passport. It is a vision the Scottish Government wants no part of, and one which we will never subscribe to.
The British people in 2016 are sleepwalking, just as people in Germany and elsewhere in the 1930s sleepwalked, into a sewer of right wing demagoguery and racism. Nobody should make the mistake in thinking it can’t happen here.
It can.
Even for those of us who have a positive assessment of George Galloway’s political career, it has been hard to get the image of him pretending to be a cat fed by Rula Lenska out of our heads.
Poor Ed Balls should have seen this coming. Enjoy.
The Thomas Helliker lecture.
Organised by the White Horse Trades Union Council.
In the memory of Thomas Helliker, the Trowbridge Martyr 1784 – 1803
22 October 2016
10.00 – 3.30pm.
Free entry – The Cause, 42 The Causeway, Chippenham, Wilts. SN15 3DD
A day of discussion about Civil Liberties
Speakers include leading authors, journalists, campaigners, union activists
Phil Chamberlain – Blacklisted – The full story
W Stephen Gilbert – Jeremy Corbyn: Accidental Hero
Ray Packham – Working in and for Palestine
Paul Dobson – Venezuela: the truth behind the headlines
Phil Chamberlain – blacklisting
We are in particular delighted to be joined by Phil Chamberlain, co-author of the explosive book “Blacklisted” which reveals the full story of how major corporations maintained an unlawful blacklist which prevented a number of people, entirely innocent of any wrongdoing, from gaining employment, often for years.
Read the original review in the Guardian of the first edition: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/undercover-with-paul-lewis-and-rob-evans/2015/jul/09/blacklisted-the-secret-war-between-big-business-and-union-activists-a-book-review
Thomas Helliker
The anniversary of Helliker’s death, March 22nd, is celebrated each year by a wreath laying at St James Church in Trowbridge. White Horse ( Wilts) trades council is now also reviving the practice of holding a memorial lecture each year.
Thomas Helliker is an important figure in Wiltshire and working class history. In the early nineteenth century the introduction of machinery into the woollen trade impoverished thousands of workers; the best organized of the dispossessed workers, and the most opposed to mechanization were the shearmen. Littleton Mill near Semington was allegedly burnt down by a shearman in 1803. For his supposed part in this, a young Trowbridge apprentice, Thomas Helliker was hanged in 1803. Despite Helliker having an alibi from his friend Joseph Warren he was charged and lodged in Salisbury gaol. He refused to give evidence that would clear his name because it would have incriminated the real culprits.