My next novel, for adults, is Winds of October, published on September 23rd. Here are the details.

This is what the mother of Heather Heyer said

About her daughter.

She said: somehow I almost feel that this is what she was born to be,

a focal point for change.

Nobody is born to hate

So Heather took a stand against hatred.

Nobody is born to see their fellow human beings

As other just because

Of the colour of their skin.

So Heather was in that street

With people as diverse

As the flowers in the field

To take a stand against racism,

Against fascism.

We will remember Heather Heyer

The best way we can, by taking our own stand

Against hatred,

By taking our own stand against racism,

Against fascism,

Because we are as diverse

As the flowers in the field.

We will remember what the mother

Of Heather Heyer said

About her daughter

Because this is what we were born to be,

Focal points of change.

Vince Cable says Corbyn must ‘end his infatuation with the government of Venezuela.’
Since 2010 Britain has also sold arms to 39 of the 51 countries ranked “not free” on the Freedom House “Freedom in the world” report, and 22 of the 30 countries on the UK Government’s own human rights watch list.
Vince Cable was a minister for four of those years.

Sometimes, in one frothing paragraph, the chatterati of the better-off suburbs of London Town demonstrate their gob-smacking ignorance of the politics of the people across the UK.
Today, in the Observer, the home stable of getting the last General Election absolutely wrong, Nick Cohen fulminates: “Last week, the British Election Study concluded voters fled to Labour because they thought Jeremy Corbyn was offering a soft Brexit. A day of judgement will come when gullible Labour supporters realise the far left is more concerned with defending the power of tyrants in Venezuela than the jobs of British workers in the single market.”
This is a net of inchoate Guardianista prejudices held together by a frustration that Labour failed to succumb to the electoral annihilation every sub-Macronian curmudgeon wanted. If Cohen were to examine some of the polling evidence, he would have discovered the balancing evidence that a tiny sliver of Labour voters actually thought Brexit the most important issue. It was austerity. He might have examined the polling evidence from a slew of council by-elections this week that showed Labour on the march in Kent and West-Sussex, extending their influence in Tory and UKIP areas.
I think I am on pretty safe ground in saying that I knocked on rather more doors than Cohen during the election campaign. I was out every day for three weeks in three different constituencies, my own Liverpool Walton, the safest Labour seat in the UK with 85.7% of the vote, Wirral West which we transformed from a marginal to a 5,000 Labour win and Crewe, which we won by a whisker. How often did Brexit come up unsolicited? Four times. That’s right. Four. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. It does. But for most working people, Brexit was the prism that refracted poverty, poor pay, exclusion and frustration at seven years of ideologically-fired Tory austerity. You can see that in the poor performance of the very pro-remain Lib Dems and SNP.
I was once in a ‘far left’ organisation, leaving in 1996, so I am the kind of guy who would know lots of the people Cohen attacks here. (Good to see Nick prioritises attacking the Left during a summer when the Tories are in meltdown, by the way).
Are my Labour friends and non-Labour socialist friends transfixed by all things Venezuela? Actually, the commonest attitudes are firstly, that it is a distraction tactic by the Tories, trying to divert attention from their infighting and their press-ignored U-turn on energy pricing, and secondly, that the situation in Venezuela is sobering, but highly complex and much more to do with the historic fault-lines of politics in the United States’ backyard of Latin America than Labour CLPs jumping on the ship to form a new International Brigade. Venezuela needs patient, nuanced analysis, not sloganeering.
Finally, of course, Cohen lets the cat out of the ideological bag, squealing that Labour doesn’t care about the jobs of British workers when jobs are actually the prime focus of the party in its flexible approach to Brexit. Cohen is not trying to shift Labour policy. It is not his concern. He doesn’t have a practical, principled and flexible approach to the concerns of the working class because he doesn’t live among it or campaign on behalf of its interests. That is the job of people like you and me. I spent my Friday night with Labour friends discussing how to prepare our organisation for an election victory and collecting supplies for our local food bank. I will be on the ISS picket line in Liverpool next week. What will you be doing, Nick? Maybe you will be insulting ordinary Labour voters, all intelligent and discerning people, as ‘gullible’ in you column.

Winds of October is my next novel. It will be published in October, of course, by Circaidy Gregory. Winds of October is the first volume of a trilogy following the lives of a group of Petrograders during the critical years 1917-1921, from the February revolution to the Kronstadt rebellion. On this page, I will be keeping potential readers up to date with developments.

Now they’re all at it. Tory ‘I’m human, really’ flavour of the month Heidi Allen pops her head above the parapet to say that she is ashamed of the Tory’s grubby deal and suddenly every Blue Meanie and her or his dog is saying the public sector pay cap must be relaxed. First there is Philip Hammond, fresh from his post-election reprieve. Then it is Michael Gove, still shaking the soil from his shroud after rising from the political dead. Now, it is tousle-haired bluster boy Boris Johnson, undergoing his latest Damascene conversion. Most comically, we have self-appointed Conscience of the Nation, Sarah Wollaston saying we need a cross-party national conversation about health. In classic Goldilock terms she says we can’t be too fiscally tight, can’t be too fiscally loose and wants Labour to tie itself ideologically to a form of Tory-lite neo-Blairism. Labour’s front bench will quietly decline her soft-spoken, but dishonest entrapment strategy.

Why are we here? Quite simply, it is not because the Daughters and Sons of Austerity have suddenly discovered their consciences at the bottom of the sock drawer. It is because Labour made itself electable again on June 8^th and because a buoyant leadership team exposed Tory contempt for ordinary people by pressing the vote on public sector pay. Shocked by the election result and wrong-footed by Labour’s parliamentary tactics, a section of the Tory party is now scrambling to position itself on Labour’s turf. The problem, of course, is that Labour is better at promoting the interests of public sector workers than the Tories and is far more likely to be the beneficiary of the current mood.

It is in this context surely, that we should see the ‘rebellion’ by 49 Labour MPs. When the public sector pay and Creasey amendments had thoroughly exposed the Tories, insisting on ‘membership of the single market and customs union’ instead of ‘fighting for the benefits of the single market and customs union’ gave the Tories’ succour. Such a fine line led Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson, hardly central to the Corbyn project thus far, to criticise the rebels as inept.

Little wonder. There was little principle on show here. Some, who really should know better, thought this might defend migrant workers’ interests. Well hardly. Chuka Umunna is on the record saying he would give up freedom of movement to keep membership of the single market and would support regional immigration controls, measures that would surely result in grotesque chaos.

Labour and Tory have their respective problems with Brexit and the negotiations will test both parties, but it is the party in power most subject to pressure. Labour’s left leadership has every right, given the high stakes and the weakness of the Tories’ arrangement with the Democratic Unionists, to expect a degree of political nous from the Parliamentary Labour Party. Sadly, some sections of the party still seem obsessed with parliamentary moves calculated to undermine Corbyn and resistance to the democratisation of its procedures at its annual conference. Labour’s membership must be as active as possible both in CLPs, pursuing left policies and on the stump and in communities, unions and workplaces. We should not wait until the next election to engage with the public. The battle lines are already drawn.