It's just not cricket!

This is hilarious.

If there was ever a case where the Daily Fail earns its nickname, this article must be it.

Daily Mail journalists Kate Loveys and Eleanor Harding - got to give them a namecheck in the hope they google their own names - sex up the threat of the tomorrow's impending student walkouts with the revelation that the ICC ARE INVOLVED!!!! (An exclamation mark for each member of the ICC.)

Yep, Eleanor and/or Kate must have attended a recent student organising event in London, picked up an ICC leaflet and decided to run with the red scare story that impressionable students with legitimate concerns are being manipulated by a shadowy organisation with links to the historical bunfight that was Paris '68. Suburban parents choke on their morning cornflakes as they discover that Tarquin and Jemima's strings are being pulled by an organisation called International - that must mean swarthy foreigners are involved - Communist - a sealed train is travelling down to Esher and it's Bordiga on board - Current - it's happening NOW!!!!

In response, the ICC cancel cadre activity for tomorrow. They have to now totally rewrite December's World Revolution to include a four page response to this attack by the bourgeois press; call an international plenum - make sure to send out an invite to that bloke in Venezuela and to their pole of regroupment in East Asia - to discuss the burning question of whether or not having a picture to accompany the article is a concession to Centrism; and, finally, issue a complaint to both the PCC - this lot, not that lot - and the National Union Students for Aaron Porter's suggestion in the article that students are "‘aligning themselves with anarchists’.

The ICC's complaint will be turned down by the Press Complaints Commission's chair, Baroness Buscombe, whose pithy response will be, 'If you will insist on sniffing around the Anarchist Bookfair year after year after year, you can't really complain when people mistake you for members of the Solidarity Federation.'

Hat tip to Tendance Coatesy, who got the story from Entdinglichung.

Living in SSiN

One for the Leftist Trainspotters amongst you: Socialist Organiser have their own entry in the Urban Dictionary!

It begs the question: Why?

Whatever happened to the dislikely lads?

They must have finally remembered their password. It's back up and gurning:

https://www.counterfire.org/

Counterfire? That was the website that was set up by the dissidents in the SWP late last year when Rees, German and co were fighting a rearguard action for the life, soul and a seat on the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party.

The website was taken down under instruction from the SWP CC because it was viewed as factional activity by the Left Platform. (Turns out they were right.)

Now that the 60 or so members of the LP have either decamped or been expelled from the SWP, the website's out the blocks and picking up speed. With 60 plus members - amongst that number there's some very talented individuals - they're already bigger than the likes of the Weekly Worker; Workers Power and Permanent Revolution and not much smaller than the likes of AWL or Socialist Resistance, so they (and their snazzy website) are definitely ones to watch in the British Left Blogosphere.

If I was going to use a football analogy, I'd say that they probably see themselves as the FC United of the Trotskyist Left at the moment. For their sake, I wouldn't want to stretch that analogy too far, though, because after a strong start FC United are currently stalled in mid-table mediocrity in the Northern Premier League Premier Division. (Aren't I being overly generous on a Monday morning for the latest rehash of Generals Without Armies? I must be on a sugar rush.)

Amongst other things, they're offering the rest of us 'Leninism in the 21st century' as part of their introduction to Counterfire. I suggest they handpick their four burliest members and install them on the door of the blog. The comments looking to push their way in uninvited won't be pretty and will be looking to cause trouble.

Hat tip to MP over at Leftist Trainspotters.

A burning sensation in my left arm

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 129

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 129th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1561 friends!

Recent blogs:

Capitalism and Climate Change

Intervention USA

Banks and the crisis

Quote for the week:

"Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people." George Jean Nathan, 1882 - 1958.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Bolshevism and Other Kids' Stuff

Plastic gangsters or toy-town bolsheviks? I can't decide.

Someone thought it was a good idea to make lego figures of Trotsky, Lenin, Gorky and Stalin.

He - am I being too presumptious in assuming it's a he? - also has a go with Marx and Engels and Che Guevera. I'm intrigued on so many different levels. Especially on the question of whether or not the Karl Marx lego figure looks more like Charlton Heston's Moses or Billy Connolly in his dotage?

Not coming to a toy store near you this Consumermas.

Hat tip to sks over at Leftist Trainspotters (though I have a sneaking suspicion that Ally had previously blogged about this kids stuff.)

Latest News From Red Mars

From next week's Weekly Worker:

American Spartacist spotted doing paper sale outside meeting of the Martian Communist Party.

Looks Like The Posadists* Have Landed On Planet MySpace

"Take me to your paper sellers."

*Posadist who? I thought this was a wannabe music blog?" Let an old article from the Fortean Times bring you up to speed on what I'm wittering about.

He Ain't Heavy, He's My Political Big Brother

AWL apparatchik, Mark O, always insisted that Ken Loach had a major political crush on Alan Thornett (if Loach had ever adapted Jack London's 'Iron Heel' for the big screen, I'm guessing that Thornett would have been his Ernest Everhard), and up pops a love letter in 'The great and the good 2007' article in the Independent on Sunday's Review section that suggests that Mark O. might have had a point.

The rebel: Ken Loach on Alan Thornett

Ken Loach, 71, is a film-maker. Alan Thornett, 70, is a left-wing political activist, journalist and writer

"I met Alan in the 1960s at political meetings; he stands for those many people who struggle to keep the idea alive that society can be organised in another way socially, industrially and politically. He was a senior steward at the Cowley car plant through the 1970s, and like many union members, didn't think his union leadership represented the workers' interests. He was victimised for his views and subsequently lost his job.

He wrote about that period and has this ability to be clear and articulate on the issues he cares about. He contributed to a documentary series I worked on in the 1980s called Questions of Leadership, about the willingness of rank-and-file union members to take on the government. It was never broadcast because it was deemed, wrongly, to be defamatory.

Since then Alan has been speaking and writing really persuasively in left-wing newspapers. There's a whole other world that runs parallel to the mass media, a real political alternative, and Alan is prominent in that world; he is also senior in the Respect Renewal party. Alan has battled illness over the past few years, yet he is finding renewed energy in his work as a Marxist and a Socialist. Mike Higgins

Loach met Thornett "in the 1960s at political meetings"? Christ, that means that Loach was in all probability part of the luvvie brigade of the Socialist Labour League during that period. What with his long working relationship with the late Jim Allen, I guess it makes sense but it's still depressing to read. Anybody who tries to tell you that an organisation led by Gerry Healy was still a viable and healthy political option in the sixties is kidding themselves on. It was warped from the get go. Have a flick through the autobiographies of Harry Ratner or Bill Hunter or Brian Behan if you don't believe me.

Hat tip to Liam Mac Uaid.

What do you call an addendum to an addendum? Feeding A Print Run Of 5000

"Victoria, if the Spice Girls ever do reform, any chance of you lot doing a cover version of the Crass song, 'I Ain't Thick, It's Just a Trick'? I mean, I've got the T shirt and everything."

"Sorry David, I've set my heart on us doing a cover version of the Poison Girls's 'Cry No More' for the comeback album. Ask All Saints."

Christ, nothing like stumbling across a draft post hidden away in your dashboard to hit home the fact that you are and always will be a one-trick blogger.

The struck out title, the snatch of imagined dialogue above with the (wrong) accompanying picture - see previous post for elucidation - and the italicised text below dates from the 1st of December of last year.

Sod it, I'm posting it anyway. It's one post closer to one thousand published posts that I'm hurtling towards with increasing banality, and hopefully I'll catch some extra stray search engine traffic via the mention of Posh and Becks.

. . . Oh, and the Spice Girls have now reformed for a reunion tour; the New Statesman have seen the archive access light, so I can now link to Ian Aitch's book reviews direct; and the B52s track 'Housework' has just come on iTunes. I love a happy ending.

Hidden in draft, and dating from 12/1/06 1:42am

No idea if the New Statesman continues to have the annoying habit of charging for archive material, so I'm falling back on the good service provided by someone on the Leftist Trainspotters List who has cut and pasted a review from the October 2nd 2006 issue of the magazine on

Ian Aitch's review of "The Story of Crass" by George Berger and "The Day the Country Died" by Ian Glasper is no great shakes, but I liked this nugget from the review.

"On one occasion during the Falklands conflict, the band heard a rumour that a battleship, HMS Sheffield, had been willingly sacrificed by the British government in order to protect HMS Invincible, on which Prince Andrew was then serving. In response, Crass created a fake taped telephone conversation between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher discussing the matter. This recording was sent out anonymously to newspapers, and before long it surfaced in the US state department, which denounced it as the work of the Kremlin. The KGB was so impressed by the stunt that it, too, tried to recruit the band members. But they simply drank the free vodka and played dumb."

Drank "the free vodaka and played dumb.? Even back then they were 15 years ahead of Chumbawamba.

Hobgoblin Soup

Well as the hardy perenniel of 'socialist as cultists' is currently doing the rounds on various discussion boards, I guess it's timely and apt that socialists will see the prophet, Karl Marx, in everything . . . but in a bowl of radish soup?

I wonder if the picture above has any connection with that time I discovered the 1905 IWW Preamble in a tin of Heinz Alphabetti Spaghetti?

Maybe that's the sign we need to confirm that we truly are living in revolutionary times.

Picture from here. Hat tip to the Stationmaster Magnus B for spotting it.

Two Tales from Two Internationals

A couple of links to freshen up the page:

A recent post from the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back, The Second International and War: a correction, takes issue with an article on the 1907 Congress of the Second International, which appeared in last week's Socialist Worker.

With his post, IMG Remembered, Ken MacLeod takes a trip down memory lane to his old alma mater, the 4th International (USEC Franchise), for a few political reminiscences and a few gentle and not so gentle digs. Especially liked this wee passage from the piece:

"In the 1970s I was a member of the International Marxist Group. It was the largest British Trotskyist group not led by one of the grand old men of British Trotskyism. This was less of an advantage than might be supposed. Lacking a grand old man the IMG settled for a squabbling coalition of alpha males (and females). The resulting frenzy of competitive nit-picking has often stood the group's ex-members in good stead in their later careers. It also helps to explain why the intelligence of so many of the group's individual members seldom showed itself in the group's political line, which lurched hither and yon as the squabbling alphas wrested the joystick from each other. Opening the weekly bundle of the group's newspaper was always a thrill. One week there was a supplement on surrealism; the next, the editorial office had been briefly occupied by feminists and an apology inserted for the sexism of the surrealists. People familiar with the IMG only from its press, or hearing of its political interventions, could be forgiven for thinking that its members were half-wits. Who can forget the argument of the IMG's Women's Liberation Commission that the demand of South African mineworkers for a family life was reactionary?"

One Day In September . . . (possibly a couple)

Maybe with the last post and a few others, I've been a bit harsh on West Ham (as I'm doing partial penance, I'll also throw in this, this, and this to be taken into consideration), but they really did get on my goat this year. (No jokes about Dynamo Tirana, please. The timing is all wrong.)

A Premier League investigation panel's - misled by Scudamore - refusal to dock them points, and West Ham's ready acceptance to accept the five and half million pound fine without seeking to appeal against the financial penalty all point to the fact that they got preferential treatment over their murky transfers dealings involving Tevez and Mascherano. If it had been Sheffield Utd or Wigan in the same set of circumstances, they would have been slaughtered.

At a bare minimum, West Ham should have been docked the three points plus a fine, and it was those precious three points that were all that was needed to relegate them to the are they calling it Premiership B, yet? Championship. Throw in that dodgy winning goal that never was by Zamora against Blackburn at Ewood Park with the fact that they signed the relegation king Nigel Quashie mid-season, and their supporters should have been singing that old hammers classic 'Marco Boogers Wonderland' on their winter travels to Glanford Park and their local derby with Colchester United next season.

However, I've decided to lay off West Ham for a bit 'cos I just discovered what may be the little known fact that September 1st 1904 is a shared date in the annals of history for both the SPGB and the Hammers.

Spotted this on the West Ham wiki page:

"Funded through local collections, sponsorship and breweries the club [West Ham] eventually constructed a 20,000 capacity stadium with 2000 seats. The stadium was eventually named The Boleyn Ground (in honour of being constructed upon the grounds of a former residence of Anne Boleyn, Green Street House) it is, however, generally known as Upton Park in popular media. Their first game in their new home was against local rivals Millwall F.C. (themselves an Ironworks team, albeit for a rival company) drawing a crowd of 10,000 and with West Ham running out 3-0 winners, and as the Daily Mirror wrote on September 2, 1904:

"Favoured by the weather turning fine after heavy rains of the morning, West Ham United began their season most auspiciously yesterday evening; when they beat Milwall by 3 goals to 0 on their new enclosure at Upton Park."

The report dates the match September 1st, which - hedging my bets here - was in all probability the same day that the first issue of the Socialist Standard appeared.

I wonder if they overlapped in any way? Paper sales outside the ground; impromptu propaganda meetings by the bovril stand at half time, where the Party speakers would denounce football in general as the modern opium of the masses, and West Ham in particular for employing a 1-2-7 formation (a formation revived by Ossie Ardiles ninety years later when he managed Tottenham Hotspur). In its very early days the Party had Branches in parts of East London such as West Ham, Stratford, Stepney, and further out, Romford. They would also organise outdoor public meetings in places such as Barking, East Ham and Whitechapel.

Christ, now that I think about it; it puts a whole new perspective on the W.B of Upton Park controversy that still divides Party members and supporters to this day. Surely it wasn't this 'W.B' of that 'Upton Park' ? I knew he was long in the tooth but I thought that back in 1910 he was still at Charlton Athletic?

I feel another whimsical 'Football & Socialism' post coming on.