— Twitter Moments UK & Ireland (@UKMoments) June 7, 2019
The Peterborough result merits a longer post – starting with how the Brexit Party has clearly not got its Crosby and Glasgow Hillhead by-election moment, but for the moment this is my reaction.
Comrade Missy to Young Sheldon,
“Why can’t I just be happy?”
'We didn't win in Peterborough because we didn't have the data. Also, not enough people voted for us' – Nigel Farage
All you need to know about Farage: When he thought the BxP won Peterborough he showed up at the count. Once he realised they hadn’t, he hid in the loo from reporters, then left by a side door before result was announced, instead of supporting his candidate or answering questions. pic.twitter.com/L9gB1LFXhr
/Expectation is everything in politics and therefor this counts as a considerable reverse for @brexitparty_uk One lesson will already have been absorbed by @Nigel_Farage Don’t field a multi-millionaire Tory in a Labour seat.
A charity fronted by the former MP George Galloway may not have conducted any charitable activity or distributed any humanitarian aid despite claiming to have gathered £1m in public donations, according to an investigation from the charity regulator.
On Thursday it finally concluded its investigation and found that the trustees had:
Failed in their statutory duty to provide any financial accounts, in breach of the charity’s own governing document and charity law.
Failed to address the outstanding regulatory concerns by completing the steps required in the action plan.
Failed to co-operate with the commission during its investigation, including failing to provide information.
Failed in their duty to provide and maintain proper financial controls and to properly manage and administer their charity.
Failed to discharge their duties to safeguard the charity’s money and assets and to act prudently, which included avoiding activities that may have placed their funds, assets or reputation at undue risk, namely:
they failed in the basic requirement to keep receipts and records of income and expenditure and so be able to properly account for charitable funds raised and spent. These basic requirements are all the more important when charitable funds are raised from members of the public and used for humanitarian needs in conflict zones;
there were no basic financial controls or policies in place to account for and safeguard funds coming into the charity and being spent.
The commission concluded: “In summary, the charity was not properly governed, managed or administered by its trustees – as a result of those failings its reputation, that of the wider charitable sector, and charitable funds donated by the public to the charity were put at risk.”
‘No evidence of charitable activity’ at aid convoy charity set up by George Galloway https://t.co/JsXTChUU5L
A few days ago I, as a loyal supporter of la France insoumise (along with half a million others who signed up to their free online registration of support) received a notification of their latest ‘conference’ the Assemblée représentative de La France insoumise on the 23rd of June.
The E-Mail invited me to put my name into a hat for the “tirage au sort” (selection by lot) to attend. 160 of us would be chosen by this method, and 80 “representatives” from the “different spaces” (its sounds as odd in French) of the “point de ralliement” of Jean–LucMélenchon.
There are no “factions”; indeed no different currents of opinion on an organised basis. There are no bothersome competitive elections, different political platforms or indeed anything more than an opportunity to talk as individuals about the programme for the upcoming Municipal elections.
One is invited to contribute to the debate with comments on the “Texte programmatique national pour les élections municipales” – as in the good old days when the Parti communiste français invited members, and cells, to express their views on the Central Committee’s documents before the Congrès. Before that is, the CC’s line was adopted unanimously.
This kind of ‘democracy’ may remind some people of how Momentum operates, except that this is a group with MPs, MEP and a whole raft of councillors.
It has long irked many people and been cited as an example of how E-democracy with a “charismatic” populist leader is no democracy at all.
The idea of a lightening struggle for power, that has no need for long-term structures, has been proved wrong by election results.
Today we learn that leading activists in lFI are speaking out and calling for democratic change inside the movement.
The Huffington Post this Thursday reports that after last week’s discussion on “left wing populism” dissatisfaction with la France insoumise has moved now onto its internal structures and lack of viable democratic channels.
Si le débat stratégique entre “ligne populiste” et “union de la gauche” a focalisé l’attention la semaine dernière, c’est désormais la gouvernance même de La France insoumise et son manque de démocratie qui sont aujourd’hui pointés du doigt.
"La maison brûle, il faut agir": La France insoumise et sa direction épinglées dans une note interne https://t.co/eSEuXe37yk
Amongst the many reasons why a large section of the Left in France, and elsewhere in Europe, is sceptical about ‘left populism’, is this kind of simulacrum of democracy cobbled together around a “Webocracy”.
The stimulus for this is that today Le Monde published an internal document of LFI in which members of the movement criticise these structures and their poor results (6,3%) in the European elections.
Dans un document que « Le Monde » s’est procuré, plusieurs dirigeants « insoumis » demandent plus de démocratie interne et critiquent sévèrement le mauvais score du parti aux élections européennes.
In a document that le Monde has obtained many leading figures of LFI have asked for more internal democracy and have heavily criticised the poor results of the party in the European elections.
No real collective decision-making body with a democratic base has been set up.
(…) The fundamental strategic decisions are taken by a small group of people (…) without them having received any real manades from the movement to do so.
It concludes with,
Three constructive demands for the representative assembly of La France insoumise on June 23 in Paris (see above):
“That real debates, between different standpoints, take place “
“That the “insoumises” have the possibility to propose texts to the vote at this Assembly which will decide on our political line with the necessary internal counterweights which will allow these decisions to be implemented.
“the principle of a constituent assembly of the movement by this autumn.”
This is not the end of the troubles of LFI.
One of their best known intellectual, Thomas Guénolé, has fallen out with the rally, and has been embroiled in a sexual harassment case brought by a young woman LFI activist.
The political scientist is the author of some decent books (Petit guide du mensonge en politique, 2014) and some, in many critics’ view, less than decent books – (Islamopsychose 2017).
Guénolé had been active in LFI. He was a candidate on their European list this year, before falling out, drastically with them. He has called hMélenchon an « autocrat », la France Insoumise a « dictatorship », and denounced their “stalinist methods of stifling critics. Guénolé has been accused of sexual harassment by LFI.
Today he announced that he will see them in court…
To cap it all in le Monde yesterday (print edition) an appeal was published calling to break with the existing structures of the French left (follow my gaze, La France insoumise), in a “big Bang” to create co-operative structures.
CitizenGO is an advocacy group founded in Madrid, Spain, in 2013 by HazteOir.
The foundation promotes petitions in 50 countries, including petitions defending Christian and Catholic causes, and those opposing same-sex marriage, abortion,and euthanasia.
There is a precedent for a link between far-right anti-gender equality ideology and the protests in Birmingham.
There have been alliances of Traditionalist (far-right) Catholics and Conservative (far-Right) Muslims in France on the issue of Gender Equality teaching.
In 2014 France saw a wave of pupils being withdrawn from school where a new programme of gender equality was taught.
One of the linchpins of the movement was Farida Belghoul, close to the essayist Alain Soral (a convicted Holocaust denier) and his organisation Equality and Reconciliation. This brought into clear view an alliance, which was known for some time ago, between a part of the extreme right in the broad sense, Catholic fundamentalist or not, and some very conservative Muslims, generally on the periphery of the Muslim Brotherhood.
These are the kind of rumours propagated (and still are).
dispensé dans le premier degré, cet enseignement favoriserait la légalisation de la pédophilie, impliquerait l’apprentissage de la masturbation et de ‘l’amour anal’ dès l’école maternelle.
how to sex education from the first years at primary school, this teaching that would promote the legalisation of paedophilia, imply learning how to masturbate and ‘anal love’ from kindergarten.
Looking at the campaigning site Stop RSE, (Stop RSE was set up in 2018 as a resource for parents and carers in the UK to inform and support families concerned about the mandatory introduction of Relationship Education and Relationship & Sex Education into all schools across England from September 2020) we find this, articles based on long-standing alt-right/conservative conspiracy theories about the “sexual revolution” ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘feminism’
“If you want to destroy any nation without war, make adultery or nudity common in the young generation.”
Salahuddin Ayyubi (12th Century )
Quotes from articles in this section:
“The philosophy behind this new compulsory sex education agenda can be traced back to the sexual revolution, which had its heyday in the 1960s, and is influenced by various social and political movements. Ideologies from Marxism, radical feminism and gender theory have all contributed to this new sexual ideology. They have intertwined with the thought of various protagonists, the most notable being Alfred Kinsey, who is seen as the master architect of sexuality education as it is now being taught.”
“The Frankfurt School combined Marxist thought with psychoanalytical theory as believed people were socially and economically as well as sexually repressed. Religion, the family, marriage, heterosexuality and gender hierarchies, were all viewed as part of the problem. Key members include Max Horkheimer, Theodor, Adorno, Erich Froerber. ”
Marcuse was a German-American philosopher, sociologist and political theorist. He was a key member of the Frankfurt School and had the most direct influence on the sexual revolution. He was nicknamed the “Father of the New Left.” And for many young radicals of the time, Marcuse’s ‘Eros and Civilisation,’ published in 1955, formed the cornerstone of the sexual revolution.
He wrote excessively on sexual liberation and based his ideas on Freud’s theory of ‘polymorphous perversity’, which asserted that children were sexual from birth and receive sexual pleasure from all parts of their body until society represses them. However, whilst Freud believed sexual urges needed to be suppressed for the function of society, Marcuse thought that due to the level of affluence and civilization that society had reached, it could withstand the release of sexual passion. He espoused a sexual utopia based on sexual freedom and promoted individuals to fulfil their perverse sexual fantasies on the basis that such fantasies were grounded in childlike innocence.”
Then this:
Two of the books on the curriculum at Anderton Park are “My Princess Boy” which has been reviewed as “addressing the needs of transgender children.”
Protesters against LGBT teaching at a Birmingham primary school have vowed to continue their opposition despite being banned from gathering outside the gates.
Birmingham City Council pursued the legal action after months of demonstrations outside Anderton Park Primary School.
The school shut early before half-term due to escalating action.
The council said it sought the urgent injunction after the risk to children became “too serious to tolerate”.
It said the behaviour of demonstrators was “increasingly unacceptable”.
On Monday, parent Rosie Afsar, speaking on behalf of the protesters, said: “We will challenge the injunction in court. We will not be silenced.”
Protest Against Trump’s Vision of a Brexit Britain.
Trump waded into the U.K.’s fraught politics on the first day of a state visit, urging his hosts to proceed with Brexit and dangling the promise of a U.S. trade deal he said would swiftly follow. https://t.co/s8VwKrcZtv via @bpolitics
Viewers of Channel Four last night know that apart from the free entry of US business chancers into the NHS Trump is also demanding that this should be in the supermarkets.
Just in time for Trump’s UK visit, Channel 4’s Dispatches looked at the food standard implications of a post-Brexit trade deal with the US. It wasn’t a pretty sight
Chlorine washing may prevent the detection of contaminants through ordinary testing, because it partially masks the problem. Quilton had no trouble finding a Texas restaurant owner who will swear there is nothing wrong with American chicken – “Not a thing. Superior quality and flavour”. But the numbers speak for themselves: US rates of campylobacter infection are 10 times higher than in the UK. The US records hundreds of salmonella deaths a year; the UK has in recent years recorded none.
Central to the programme was footage shot inside a giant processing plant by an undercover employee. Looking at it, a former EU meat inspector was able to identify several flagrant violations of good hygiene practice and even the plant’s own policies, but there was more sickening stuff on display: a supervisor is overheard talking about “a trend of adulterated product”, by which she means glass in the chicken, and also making reference to a recent “amputation”. To me, the word amputation brings to mind an operation performed by a professional for the good of a patient, and not, as in this instance, some poultry worker losing three fingers in a machine.
One study found 95 such “amputations” over a single year in American poultry processing, making it one of the most dangerous occupations in the US. Debbie Berkowitz, a former chief of staff at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), who now campaigns for employment rights, maintains that the industry is also exploitative: employees, her office found, were routinely denied basic rights, including toilet breaks. “Workers did not want to have to soil themselves,” she said. “So they wore diapers (nappies) on the line.
We will make it clear to the British government that it’s not OK to normalise Trump’s agenda and the hate and fear it has sparked.
Trumpism directly threatens steps towards tackling:
Inequality
Peace and disarmament
Climate change
Fighting discrimination, particularly against already marginalised groups like migrants and Muslims
Corporate greed
Antisemitism
And – this is not mentioned – Brexit!
It was not mentioned, at least I did not hear it, in the interviews with the Stop Trump demo on the telly this morning.
Yet this is the core of Trump’s agenda, as his support for Farage and Boris Johnson and present touting of “trade deals” makes clear.
One can only imagine the squirming that’s going on amongst the Brexit left who cannot bring themselves to admit that there is a link, a tight bond, between the carnival of reaction that is the Brexit Party and the Tory No Deal Right and Trump’s agenda.
Will they see that the demand for a Sovereign nation battling it out with Trade Deals with Trump, and – who knows since he’s iffy about it, the WTO, would be a burden for a left government.
Will they continue to indulge that section of the left, as yet only a section, that by its talk of the “real” people who back Brexit, and loathing of “rootless cosmopolitans” has become the the fellow travellers of National Populism?
Like this chap, who’s something of hero o the red-brown front?
Another Europe certainly does not think so.
Brexit and Trump are two sides of the same coin – the same brand of toxic right wing nationalism. We need to stop both.
Help us take this message to tomorrow's protests: sign up to volunteer! There will be plenty to do and we need every pair of hands. 👇https://t.co/SlgCLtEyku
Visit of #Trump becoming nightmare for UK. He is no friend of Britain and enemy of our values and interests. #ClimateEmergency destroying #WTO trade system and warmongering with China and Iran End of #SpecialRelationship.
….Fake News will be working hard to find them. Great love all around. Also, big Trade Deal is possible once U.K. gets rid of the shackles. Already starting to talk!
Hey @realDonaldTrump, we read the story about the sailors on a US warship being ordered to hide from you because you’re triggered by the name on their hats. So we turned Madame Tussaud's into a giant USS John McCain baseball cap. Welcome to London! pic.twitter.com/KuynOwupFm
George Galloway has revealed he has been sacked from Talk Radio following a huge backlash to comments he made about Liverpool’s Champions League win over Tottenham Hotspur.
The former Labour party member, who has hosted a TalkRadio show since 2016, faced criticism and was condemned by Spurs after he was accused of “blatant anti-Semitism” by the club.
In congratulating the Merseyside club, Mr Galloway tweeted: “Congratulations to the great people of Liverpool to the memory of socialist miner Bill Shankley, to the fallen #96, to those who fought for justice for them and to the Liverpool dockers.
“No Israel flags on the cup”.
On Monday morning, Mr Galloway said he had been given a “red card” from TalkRadio, and said: “I’ve just been sacked by TalkRadio. See you in court guys. #Palestine #Moats Long live Palestine”.
talkRADIO has terminated George Galloway's weekly show with immediate effect.
As a fair and balanced news provider, talkRADIO does not tolerate anti-semitic views. pic.twitter.com/upDUaNPoi0
Note that Galloway always spells Israel with a tréma as in above, ‘Israël.
The reason is bleeding obvious, “Israël” is the French spelling. It’s not an umlaut but a tréma as in Noël, maïs, ambiguë. Galloway can thus make Israel sound ‘foreign’ in the language of a secular state he hates almost as much as Israel.
In the meantime another Brexit Party supporter, Ann Widdecombe finds herself in a spot of bother.
These figures predict the beginning of a political earthquake.
One might say that such a tectonic shift in support cannot happen.
There are good grounds for scepticism.
But…
Fast backwards to France a couple of years ago.
Since the French elections of 2017 the victory of President Macron and its aftermath have seen the traditional parties of left and right nearly wiped off the map.
The first round of the Presidential contest saw the former ruling Parti Socialiste get 6,36% for its candidate, Benoît Hamon. For the traditional right,
François Fillon scored a respectable 20,01%. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, for the “movement” or “point de ralliement” la France insoumise, got 19,58%. The context went into the second round with a duel between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, which ended in Macron’s victory at 66,1% over the far-right Le Len getting 33,9%.
In the legislative elections held afterwards Macron’s party and allies won 348 seats. The left (Socialists, Communists and La France insoumise) was reduced to 44 deputies.
This is the result of this year’s European elections which saw, in France, the left further reduced (only the Socialists, PS, and La France insoumise LFI won seats) the ‘neither right nor left’ Greens (EELV) win MEPs, and the traditional right (Les Républicains, LR) also lose heavily. The results were again dominated by Macron’s party and Le Pen’s rally (RN).
Some features stand out.
The first is the marginalisation of a splintered left.
If people have been “freed” from the slavery of their traditional allegiances, in Christophe Guilluy’s words, “Le grand marronnage des classes populaires” (Le Crépuscule de la France d’en haut, 2018) their new home is not in any renewed democratic politics.
Far from creative grass roots politics, or a new kind of left, we had the success of Macron’s ‘start up’ Business party.
This is its internal structure, “La République En Marche!considers every person who submits identification information (date of birth, email, full address and telephone, number) and adheres to the party’s charter to be an adherent.” The English Wikipedia entry neglects to go further into how LRM operates, “les décisions viennent d’en haut, il y a une commission d’investiture sans que les militants ne votent…”, Decisions come from above, there is a commission of investiture (selection of candidates) without activists voting. (see Structure )
It is a “movement”, like Mélenchon’s La France insoumise, run top down by a coterie of professionals in communication and in liaison with the Parliamentary group around the Leader (with all the authority in this case of the President) with no internal democratic decision making, only online “consultations”.
The Third is that if the “gilets Jaunes”, whose main rallying call has been for Macron to Resign, have not created an alternative out of their “assemblies”, or one that is invisible to anybody but their more gushing admirers, from the UK’s National Populists of left and right, and some romantic leftists.
I the European elections it was the Rassemblement national (RN), ex Front national (FN) who came first. This party has a tiny, 38 000 official membership. It has a structure, said originally to be inspired by the French Communist Party, of a an executive bureau, a political bureau and a central committee, now know (since 2018) as the ‘national council.”
Is that the kind of political melt-down we are facing in the UK.
Richard Seymour, in no less an organ than the New York Times observes.
.Long underestimated, Mr. Farage has done more than any politician in a generation to yank British politics to the hard, nationalist right. He is one of the most effective and dangerous demagogues Britain has ever seen.
Seymour notes the most relevant aspect of the Brexit Party’s model, which has been widely commented on:
Farage has spotted an opportunity: a new political model, inspired by the Five Star Movement in Italy. A “digital platform” that harnesses the free labor of its “users,” allowing them “participation” through content-sharing and online polls, rather than rights. Parliamentary democracy is slow at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. Such platforms, however, introduce volatility to the system. Dropping UKIP, a traditional membership party, he launched something like a venture capitalist start-up, with crowdfunders rather than members, and a chief executive rather than a leader.
Unlike older party models, it doesn’t invest in lasting infrastructure. It is nimble-footed, expert at gaming social media — the stock market of attention. It won the battle for clicks, and made a killing in this election. Such online frenzies are akin to destabilizing flows of hot money, forcing legacy parties to adapt or die. But when Parliament is so weak, its legitimacy so tenuous, they can look like democratic upsurge.
If the poll today there is more than a “online frenzy” happening.
The M5S, Movimento 5 Stelle may or may not be a “model” for some. I doubt if Macron or Mélenchon’ would see it that way and Podemos, while partially inspired, has at least some democratic framework.
Most significantly M5S, with an unstable record of support (32,7% of the vote in 2017 Parliamentary elections, 17,1% in this year’s European elections, in coalition with the far-right Lega, has, with its deputy PM Luigi Di Maio paved the way for the hold on power of his fellow deputy PM, the National Populist Matteo Salvini.
Yet the issue of Democracy apparently remains at the centre of the Brexit Party’s claim to Speak for the People, for National Sovereignty, and for a Hard Brexit.
Usefully highlighting the core of the operation Seymour does see off this self-serving claim by Claire Fox:
In Spiked the former RCP activists continues: Claire Fox on what’s next for the Brexit Party and her journey from Marxist to MEP.
when I was in the RCP many moons ago – and the past really is a different country – I was always a democrat, a supporter of liberty, agency and sovereignty, so I don’t think I’ve travelled that far.
I somehow felt that if I could do anything to rescue the democratic potential of the 2016 vote, then I would. So in that sense, it has been a journey. But the journey was not so much from revolutionary communism to standing next to Farage, but from commenting on events to taking on that responsibility.
Engaging the ignored masses, tapping their democratic insights, genuinely drawing their convictions and concerns and beliefs into the heart of the political sphere – this is now the key task of everyone who is committed to the idea of Brexit, democracy and radical political change in this country.
Brendan O’Neill
But…..if you’re not democratic inside your ‘party’, if you leave things to the Farage coterie, how can you be democratic in the country?
Seymour concludes,
The quintessential City trader and apostle of cutthroat competition, he is exploiting our democratic crisis to remake politics in his own image.
Shift forward to today’s headlines.
Is the Brexit Party also fascist?
For the moment we take this into account:
Both right and left should fear the justified rage of Remainers | Nick Cohen https://t.co/abC7KtWmrY
During the state visit, the president, his wife Melania, and his four adult children are expected to meet Prince Harry as well as Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, and his wife, Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge. Meghan is expected to stay home with Archie.
Trump referred to the American-born Duchess of Sussex as “nasty” over comments she made in 2016 threatening to move to Canada if Trump won the presidency.
“I didn’t know that she was nasty,” he said when informed of her criticism. The former Meghan Markle married Prince Harry in 2018 and gave birth to their first child, Archie, in May.
BBC News – Trump administration wants UK to leave EU, says adviser John Bolton https://t.co/GPOkaWxYa6
World exclusive: Trump backs Boris to be Britain’s next PM with highly controversial intervention into Tory contest. "I know the different players. But I think Boris would do a very good job. He would be excellent”.https://t.co/Qt0zjwwePJ
It may seem odd that some of pro-Brexit left are hostile to this radical critic of members of the Royal Family, who backs the “Fuck Business” Boris, and who is doing all he can to make Brexit happen.
But internationalists are clear: Piss off Trump!
Brexit = Trump. On Tuesday, we will be protesting against both, saying no to dodgy trade deals, no to building walls, no to hate and division.
On the 11th of May Jean-Luc Mélenchon presided in Marseille over one of his many public rallies. This was one had a new angle. On the 11th of May he had invited the principal ‘left populist’ parties in Europe. An alliance, under the name of Maintenant le Peuple, claiming to be a European Citizens’ Revolution, was backed by his own “point de ralliement”, La France insoumise (LFI), Podemos, the Portuguese left bloc, the Bloco, and parties of the Swedish, Danish and Finish radical left. The immediate plan (while awaiting the “révolution citoyenne en Europe”), was to restructure the left in the European Parliament, inside the GUE/NGL. (See: Elections européennes : La France insoumise, chronique d’un désastre annoncé )
Last Sunday’s European elections saw the Continent’s radical left go from 52 MEPs to 41. Nowhere were the ambitions of the new alliance less answered than in France. Mélenchon’s list led (after considerable internal rumblings about its make-up) by Manon Aubry got 6,3% – below the objective of 11% and well short of Mélenchon’s Presidential score in 2017 of 19, 58 %. Just above the Parti Socialiste-Place Publique list led by 6,2% LFI was well behind the French Green EELV at 13,5%. LFI now has 5 MEPs, EELV 10.
“No self criticism!” (Ne pas faire de auto-critique) was heard from the movement on the evening as these results came through. This was, predictably, not followed. LFI MP, Clémentine Autain, with an independent base in the bloc of left groupings, Ensemble, made a very public intervention in Le Nouvel Observateur (Clémentine Autain tire les leçons des Européennes).
She observed that La France insoumise was backed by 36% of its voters in 2017 while 57% of Macron’s supporters from that year chose his list and 78% of Marine Le Pen’s have voted for the Rassemblement National. Their “political capital” had been severely eroded.
There was no official response, although Manon Aubry registered her movement’s activists’ hard work and disappointment, while stating that LFI had still shown that it anchored itself on the political scene. (Déclaration de Manon Aubry)
Clémentine Autain
« Rallumer tous les soleils » comme disait Jean Jaurès. Mon interview dans l’Obs https://t.co/5tEbAgK5Ix
How had this come about? Autain questioned the left populist strategy of dividing the people into an “us” and the “elites”, including intellectuals and the media. They had built walls rather than bridges. The deputy observed that Mélenchon had railed against those who’d supported a petition to support migrants, while he had let a sovereigntist wing, increasingly nationalist, best known for François Cocq et Djordje Kuzmanovic, off with mild rebukes. That is, until one of them, Andrea Kotarac, made an open appeal to vote for Marine le Pen. This did not show difficulties about the “internal democracy” of the LFI – a point few would ignore. It shied away from the need not the rebuild the old “union of the left” but to bring together “le peuple sur une base de gauche “, the people on a left-wing basis.
There are those who claim that LFI lost out by dropping the more forceful aspects of its ‘populism’, their journey from celebrating the Brexit vote (which did not go unnoticed amongst the internationalist anti-Brexit left in the UK), to an ever-increasingly watered down demand to ‘renegotiate’ EU treaties eroded support. Others point to his ill-judged ‘war’ with the media, the hysterical reaction to an investigation into their use of EU funds, his “command and control” approach to his movement (” le but du mouvement de la France insoumise n’est pas d’être démocratique mais collectif”), the feeble participation in its “on line” votes, and Mélenchon’s irksome traits, above all his tendency to attack in all directions at once. LFI, some estimate looking at internal party consultation rates rather than the massive 500,000 click supporters, may be effectively total 20,000 activists, at most.
In Le Monde yesterday Manuel Cervera-Marcel listed the ‘left populist’ strategy, designed to replace the social democratic and neo-liberal left. Citing Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s approach, for the author it claims to replace the old left/right division by the “people versus the oligarchy”. These parties have a charismatic leader to incarnate the ‘people’ runs parties. They claim to give a voice (‘articulate’) popular demands against these ‘elites’, in LFI terms, “federate the people”). Finally it proposed taking over the ‘floating signifiers’ of the Nation, Security and Order, and giving them a democratic content. (Elections européennes 2019 : « Le recul de la gauche “radicale” ne s’explique-t-il pas par le tournant “populiste” de ces dernières années ? »)
Laclau and Mouffe’s strategy in question.
Cerbera-Marcel suggests that this approach can have immediate electoral benefits but that results, such as the European election defeat of LFI and the shrinking of Podemos in those and Spanish national elections, suggests that short-term popularity can easily be lost. A much more extensive list of criticisms of the skeleton and the details of this strategy, from the abstractions of Laclau and Mouffe to the practice of left populist parties, above all, La France Insoumise and Podemos has already been made by people on the left. French contributions can be seen in, for example,La stratégie de Mélenchon se discute. Nous-le peuple, eux-les élites : un nouveau populisme de gauche and Populisme de gauche, du nouveau ? Sur le dernier livre de Chantal Mouffe.
This is not the place to go into details about them. Yet one could usefully begin with Laclau’s efforts to designate forerunners of modern populism amongst the British Chartists. Drawing on the studies of Stedman Jones, Laclau talked of how the “us” and “them” was constructed between the “producers” and “idlers”, Old Corruption Jones, made this relevant point, “The self-identity of radicalism was not at of any specific group, but of the ‘people; or the ‘nation’ against the monopolisers of political representation and power and hence financial or economic power “. That is, it was not capitalism, a system of exploitation, injustice and oppressions, but those “monopolisers” who were at fault. Stedman Jones, Laclau notes, saw how this channelling was warded off by legislative reform. This channelling of democratic demands through political action, within the limited space of restricted, but gradually expanding franchise paralleled the High Victorian separation between the economy and politics. (1)
The People and its Parasitic Other.
One might speculate that the major fault of left populism is to divide the world into the “people” and this parasitic ‘elite’ concentrated in the ‘casta’ giving the impression that capitalist exploitation is created by politics. The ‘logic of populism’ is to unite against them, and to project the hatred talked about by Autain onto this “oligarchy, the source of their problems. One can only register that many Gilets Jaunes have this focus in their demands for a “moral economy” to meet their needs without any vision of a real change to economic and social structures. (3)
An ever-expanding pile of pamphlets, of which the virulent diatribe against the Macronie (as his critics call the Macron ‘system’) by Juan Branco (Crépuscule. 2019) is by no means the worst, takes up against Corruption. It offers no way of uniting the popular electorate for a positive programme of emancipation. It is the seed-bed for the extreme right’s charges of “conspiracies” against the people, ‘betrayals’ by cosmopolitan elites, Globalism, People-Nations against International Elites. In short, it opens the way through an easy “chain of equivalences” to National Populism.
The principal French national populist party,. Marine le Pen’s Rassemblement National, is a materialised bearer of Laclau’s abstract ‘rhetoric’ about the People versus the Elites. It is well funded, have hundreds elected figures:
Anybody playing with the language of populism will run up against their simple, easy to understand, law and order, nationalist, political message. That’s without even looking at the strong “affects” and “libidinal ties” the far-right can draw on to spread its nationalist message to the ‘nationalised’ left populist people.
La France insoumise, far from freeing voters from their grip, may well have given their message an easier ride to first place in the French European elections, at 23,3%
The experience of the Brexit left in the UK confirms that anti-EU populism, even when only a small minority of them have openly endorsed the far-right Brexit Party, is another route to boost the national populists.
As an outside observer one can only commend Autain for her stand. Mélenchon’s strategy, his ‘rally’ (point de ralliement) run top down, a Net Corporation (though its media company failed) with “groupes d’appui’ (branches kept deliberately small to discourage organised disagreement) federating the people without respecting a vibrant internal democracy, his seductive rhetoric, with fewer and fewer listening, is part of a wider problem. As a less than outsider, not as a looker-on, but an active participant in the European left, it has been obvious that the ‘left-populist’ turn was not headed in the right direction. Those who praised Mélenchon, whether academics playing at politics in journals like Jacobin and its subsidiary in the UK, Tribune, or engaged in mass politics, have been misled. We can see in France how rancour is not only a bad starting point, but a way that leaves open national populists and business liberals of the stripe of Emmanuel Macron dominate the show – with of course some Greens who also deny the ‘left right’ division playing on the sidelines.
Autain’s intervention is a good and positive sign. A green socialism, a reformist and a radical socialist way forward, has, many would agree, to be grounded on gathering together of the left, campaigns and the labour movement, with a generous and appealing vision of the future.
There remain forces in La France insoumise who wish to contest any such refoundation of the left.
*****
Pages 90 -91. On Populist Reason. Ernesto Laclau. Verso. 2005.
Page 104 Languages of Class. Studies in English Working Class History 1832 – 1982. Gareth Stedman Jones. Cambridge University Press. 1983.
In L’économie morale et le pouvoir. Samuel Hayat makes an interesting compassion between E.P.Thompson’s The Moral Economy of the English crowd and the demands of the Gilers Jaunes. In Le Fond de l’air est Jaune. Seuil. 2019.
Teachers ‘in tears’ at school gates as row over LGBT classes worsens
Worth reading the statement by @nazirafzal on the dispute in Birmingham over LGBT classes.
Its excellent. Key points:
– parents are being lied to – 'we cannot and must not pick and choose what victims of hatred should be protected. Its all or nothing.'https://t.co/bBIu42Shqx
Mediation between parents and staff over the issue of relationships education at a Birmingham primary school has stalled.
Nazir Afzal who is in charge of steering talks between the council, parents and teachers, told Sky News that six weeks of discussions have been unsuccessful.
He claimed staff at Anderton Park Primary School are at risk and frequently break down in tears because of hostility at the school gates – with protests taking place against teaching children about same-sex relationships.
Mr Afzal, a former chief prosecutor for North West England, said: “I can’t think of any other way to get people round a table again than to speak to you and Sky.
“I’ve looked at the curriculum, there is nothing in the curriculum that is LGBT specific. There is nothing about gay sex.
I’ve seen people walking around outside of that school with stuff that they have downloaded from the internet suggesting this is on the curriculum.
“This is what’s being taught to their children. It’s a lie. And this is what I’m dealing with.”
It is important to note that the movement, called Stop RSE (relationships and sex education) is not confined to Islamist bigots.
There are widespread concerns that the mandatory introduction of RE/RSE into all schools across England, from September 2020, and Wales from 2022, will be used by sex education organisations and LGBTQ+ activists to promote their controversial beliefs to the youngest of children.
There is an international move, backed by international bodies such as the United Nations and by organisations such as the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, to get compulsory sexuality education into all schools worldwide. Their agenda is not to educate children in the biological aspects of reproduction but to teach children that they are sexual beings and have the right on act on their sexual urges with who, what and when they like. There is a concerted effort to undermine parental and religious authority by making school teachers the primary educator of children in all matters of sexuality education, as it has been redefined.
The philosophy behind this new compulsory sex education agenda can be traced back to the sexual revolution, which had its heyday in the 1960s, and is influenced by various social and political movements. Ideologies from Marxism, radical feminism and gender theory have all contributed to this new sexual ideology. They have intertwined with the thought of various protagonists, the most notable being Alfred Kinsey, who is seen as the master architect of sexuality education as it is now being taught.
Their Facebook page promotes this (28th of May), which links paedophilia to RSE education.
“Our children are being assaulted and groomed in the classroom …. according to an FBI definition of grooming*
This lecture at Liberty University Law School makes a connection between traits pedophiles have and early childhood sexuality education is designed to teach in classrooms.
The National Secular Society has said the government should “not give ground” on relationships and sex education (RSE) in England’s schools after highlighting the bigoted messages of religious anti-RSE campaigners.
An NSS investigation has exclusively revealed that an academic who secured a debate on RSE in parliament has encouraged Muslims to adopt a “psychological” or “mental health” response to same-sex attraction.
In a speech promoting her anti-RSE campaign Dr Kate Godfrey-Faussett also said homosexuality results from a lack of “guidance”.
Godfrey-Faussett is playing a key role in the primarily Islam-based Stop RSE campaign, which opposes plans to make RSE teaching compulsory. She also created a petition on the parliament.uk website which demands a parental opt-out from RSE classes.
…
In her speech about the campaign broadcast online Godfrey-Faussett said many young Muslims were “turning to same sex relationships because they haven’t had the guidance”. She bemoaned the “queering” of the “Muslim community” and said Muslims should “work psychologically or in a mental health capacity” with those experiencing same-sex attraction.
She claimed the government’s move was part of a “totalitarian endeavour to indoctrinate our children in secular ideologies” and criticised “the promotion of the homosexual agenda”.
She also called for “unity” among Muslims, approvingly quoting an imam who said: “While we’re arguing about whether we pray with our hands crossed or our hands by our side, our enemy is actually plotting to cut our hands off.”
Her petition says: “We believe it is the parent’s fundamental right to teach their child RSE topics or to at least decide who teaches them and when and how they are taught. We want the right to opt our children out of RSE when it becomes mandatory.”
Islam though does feature heavily in this campaign,
Downloadable resources which were available on its website until earlier this week included the book Marriage and Morals in Islam. This says: “In the Islamic legal system, homosexuality is a punishable crime against the laws of God. In the case of homosexuality between two males, the active partner is to be lashed a hundred times if he is unmarried and killed if he is married; whereas the passive partner is to be killed regardless of his marital status.
“In the case of two females (i.e. lesbianism), the sinners are to be lashed a hundred times if they are unmarried and stoned to death if they are married.”
he book goes on to say Islam “is not prepared to tolerate any perverted behaviour” and high rates of AIDS show “nature has not accepted” homosexuality “as a normal sexual behaviour”.
It also decries “the moral bankruptcy of the West”, based on some Christian churches’ acceptance of gay relationships.
Dr Kate Godfrey-Faussett is now being investigated.
The Islamist site, 5 Pillars, has come to her support.
Commenting on the letter sent to the council by the NSS, Dr Godfrey-Faussett told the Observer: “I have simply tried to warn people of the underlying liberal secular agenda of RSE and the harm that it may cause children – and is, in fact, already causing based on reports I am receiving from parents.
“It is well known that if you speak out against the secular narrative they will silence you through smear campaigns and getting you struck off professionally.”
More on this individual:
#Shia convert Kate Godfrey-Faussett: Sex education in English schools is a social engineering program to corrupt Muslim children and get them question their religion. It’s mix of 1960s’ Sexual Revolution, radical feminism to destroy men, transgender movements and critical theory. pic.twitter.com/Atiy9Su9Kn
#Shia convert Kate Godfrey-Faussett: Muslim community is the final frontier for gay movement. Muslims who experience same-sex attraction should not be ostracized but helped psychologically or in a mental health capacity. pic.twitter.com/lHPuALn4FU
There is no equivalence between sodomite fetishism and healthy sexuality between husband and wife after nikah. The former is a depraved act that debases a human being in every way, spreads moral decay, transforms society into a cesspool of degeneracy and base lust (as the Quran describes with Qawm Lut). The latter is the basis of love and mercy between two halves, man and woman, committed to each other, being fruitful with each other in nourishing a family that becomes the building block of a flourishing society as God Almighty intended.
Teaching Muslims LGBT and promoting “LGBT-friendly Islam” is a well known counter-radicalization tactic. These anti-Islam government agencies know that when a Muslim accepts LGBT, he is just a hop, skip, and a jump away from abandoning Islam entirely. This is one of the main reasons they are so insistent that Muslim children get anal sex lessons in elementary school.
By contrast:
‘We can’t give in’: the Birmingham school on the frontline of anti-LGBT protests by religious extremists. They want respect and acceptance for themselves but not for LGBTshttps://t.co/8s6LpJAyTP
We've written to Education Secretary, @DamianHinds urging mandatory #RSE in every school, with no exemptions for faith or independent schools & a restricted right of parents to withdraw their children. RSE should mention both risks & pleasures of sex. SEE https://t.co/vczShIPPDopic.twitter.com/dAJkOqmjgb
The Parkfield protest organisers, such as Ahmed, flaunt their homophobic bigotry whenever they are interviewed. “We do not accept homosexuality as a valid sexual relationship to have,” he said.
“This is about proselytising homosexuality to young children.”
The protests have been joined by conservative Christian and Jewish figures who oppose sex education.
Ahmed always claims that he isn’t homophobic and organisers say they don’t oppose teaching under the Equality Act.
But the Equality Act is weak. It calls only for the curriculum to be “designed to encourage respect for other people” and it does not apply to independent schools, including faith schools.
The Parkfield protesters stress that they call for “dialogue” and “consultation”, but for them that means getting rid of the No Outsiders programme for good.
At best it means watering down the lessons—to teach tolerance of LGBT+ people, but not that it’s possible to be both LGBT+ and Muslim.
Ezra from LGBT+ Muslim organisation Hidayah said, “The protesters at Parkfield talk about consultation. But I don’t think any consultation would make the parents have the lessons.
“There is no way that they would be happy with it because they view any teaching about different relationships or homosexuality as promoting it.”
The lessons should be reinstated.
Latest news:
Tory leadership: Esther McVey says 'parents know best' on LGBT lessons https://t.co/e24qMIoa59
In France in 2014 a similar movement of bigots united Islamists, ‘Conservative’ Muslims, and hard-line ‘traditionalist’ Catholics and the French far-right:
Vendredi 24 janvier et lundi 26 janvier 2014… quelques centaines de familles, parmi lesquelles de nombreuses familles musulmanes, n’envoient pas leurs enfants à l’école. Ils protestent contre des cours d’éducation sexuelle donnés à leurs enfants en bas âge.
Une autre lecture des événements devrait être celles-ci : les 24 et 26 janvier 2014, de nombreux musulmans, en retirant leurs enfants de l’école, en apportant du crédit aux rumeurs propagées par les initiateurs des Journées de retrait de l’école (JRE) apportent leurs soutiens aux mouvements d’extrême droite.
“Full Brexit now “. We need to expel saboteurs” Tom Flanagan in Morning Star.
In an “opinion” piece in the organ of the Boycott Labour Communist Party of Britain, the Morning Star, Tom Flanagan called today for a purge of the party to create a pro-Brexit organisation.
Leave won the EU elections – to win a general election Labour must rid itself of Remain saboteurs, argues TOM FLANAGAN
The apathy amongst some of our members is caused by the softness of the Corbyn project on dealing with our enemies within the movement. The knives are already out once again, the olive branch hasn’t worked yet again.
We need to expel saboteurs.
Alastair Campbell’s departure is brilliant start — now we must clear out the other liberals so we can get on with building socialism.
He continues,
Full Brexit now. Socialist governments in London and Edinburgh tomorrow.
Tom Flanagan is press and communications officer for Scottish Young Labour.
Labour has no Scottish MEPs and barely any MPs in Scotland.
As far as I know Edinburgh and London are the homes of the loathed, “metropolitan elite”, or whatever that fucking gibberish means.
This article might seen best classed with the Workers Revolutionary Party call for a General Strike to introduce a socialist Brexit.
And yet..
Let is ignore the eructations of Bastani and come to something serious:
“Unite the Union disagrees with Paul Mason on Labour’s Brexit position.
It’s hard to take issue with some of the points made by Howard Beckett in this article.”
Mason’s famous piece indeed combines support for a strong Remain position with ill-thought out asides about the need to “fight personal insecurity, crime, drugs, antisocial behaviour and organised crime as enthusiastically as it fights racism”. The first words could have come from Marine Le Pen, the latter from some of the red-brown sovereigntists anxious to cover up their own working class identity politics.
No doubt the claim that “a strong national security policy is somehow “imperialist”. It needs to forget scrapping Trident” is as irrelevant as it is annoyingly off beam.
Some will, perhaps those in well-paid labour movement jobs themselves, find the rudeness about Seumas Milne, director of strategy, and Karie Murphy, and poor old thin skinned Ian Lavery MP, the party chair, sympathise with their wounded, delicate, .souls.
But this is the core of Mason’s argument,
Corbyn’s mistake was not simply triangulation between the values of leave and remain voters. It was an attempt at triangulation between two wings of Corbynism: between the demands of an economic nationalist current from the old left, and the internationalist and progressive politics embedded in Labour’s new urban heartlands. I understand his loyalty to the former group, they stuck with him through every attack. But their politics are a throwback, and the voters rejected them last night.
Being seen to deliver Brexit loses votes from progressive voters and wins none back from more socially conservative ones. That’s exactly what a leaked internal poll by Hope Not Hate and the TSSA union told Corbyn back in February. It was ignored.
We need, and an important part of the Labour leadership agrees, a pro-remain and reform Labour position.
Mason is right, empirically and politically right, to point that not adopting this stand, equivocating, beating around the bush, for ever, is not the way to electoral success.
We need a Remain and Reform agenda.
Those of us on the Another Europe is Possible left want to achieve that goal, shared by the majority of Labour members, to prevail by debate and democratic party vote.
We do not need the assistant general secretary for politics and legal affairs at Unite the Union to say, of Mason,
Today is clearly a moment for flinching cowards and sneering traitors.
This means that a Brexit on October 31 or before, carried out by the working class taking general strike action to bring in a workers government, will be welcomed by workers all over Europe and lead to the revolutionary replacement of the EU by a Socialist United States of Europe.
Only the WRP and the Young Socialists are fighting for this policy and perspective. We urge all workers and youth to join today and to fight for the victory of the British and world socialist revolutions!
The Communist Party of Britain (Marxist Leninist ) founded by Reg Birch and whose best known former member is Alexei Sayle – not to be confused with Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) who ‘best known’ member is Harpal Brar – is also chorting.
Long believed to have disappeared into red bases in Thetford Forest the one-time supporters of Enver Hoxha finds in the Brexit Party an instrument of the working class.
Britain voted Brexit – again https://t.co/5eZXySKpJG "The working class has used the Brexit party to tell the pro-EU ruling class to carry out our 2016 instruction to leave and we have given that ruling class a bloody nose." pic.twitter.com/C2eNFimcKR
— Communist Party of Britain Marxist-Leninist (@CPBML) May 28, 2019
The working class has used the Brexit party to tell the pro-EU ruling class to carry out our 2016 instruction to leave and we have given that ruling class a bloody nose.
Three years after we voted to leave, it was a staggering failure that we were made to participate in the EU’s elections. Even May herself admitted that taking part in these elections would amount to “failure”.
Fresh from their triumphal implementation of the red-brown mass line the former Revolutionary Communist Party, now Spiked, finds time for a whinge by some useless idiot, Isaac Doel.
Recently Nigel Farage was pictured drenched in milkshake after a pro-Remain protester launched the drink at him. This fuelled debate about the ethics of ‘milkshaking’ as a form of protest. Many jumped to the protester’s defence, claiming that throwing milkshake was an acceptable form of protest when dealing with ‘fascists’ like Farage.
High-profile Remainers frequently use the f-word to describe Nigel Farage. In a video recently posted on his Twitter account, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Tom Watson, said Farage ‘represents the creep of fascism across Europe’. ‘Fascist’ is a term used by those who oppose Farage’s politics to attempt to damage his reputation and delegitimise his Brexit movement.
Quite right!
Le Monde merely calls them “extreme right wing“: “le leader d’extrême droite, Nigel Farage”.
We prefer national populist.
The theme that the voters of the Brexit Party were expressing ‘working class anger’ is dear to many on the Lexit left.
In more measured tones LIndsey German comments, from Counterfire, that Labour’s poor showing was
..the result of trying to put a position which unites both sides of the referendum divide at a time when both sides are becoming more polarised. Jeremy Corbyn’s original position of a People’s Brexit had more chance of working. It was an approach that accepted the referendum result but committed Labour to a progressive Brexit.
In other words Labour should have adopted Counterfire’s views.
She suggests, not unreasonably,
The impasse at the top of politics can only be resolved elsewhere. That requires a focus on wider politics as well as trying to address the EU question. The major class divisions which cut across leave/remain, the issues facing people over their jobs, housing, education, are the ones on which people can find some unity. The left also needs to ask itself some questions: can the Corbyn project succeed in winning an election and making the first steps towards changing British government policies? How can Labour’s right be defeated? How can the left relate especially to working class people in the old industrial areas?
But this comes back to the “EU question”, and internationalists are not going to “unite” with the Brexit camp, ‘People’s’ or not.
Pompous Padre Giles Fraser says,
The Labour Party’s commitment to a 2nd Ref is a historic turning point in its history. It marks the point at which Labour finally betrayed its working class base and turned itself into a party for London, Cambridge and Brighton.
He found time yesterday to show some solidarity with the Red-Brown inner core:
So delighted for my mate @Fox_Claire. Fighting for democracy, she has taken loads of shit and came through it with her head held high. I couldn’t support her party, but she will be brilliant.
Meanwhile more details emerge of the top Galloway Bannon summit.
Perhaps the WRP, the CPB (M-L) and the CPGB (M-L) should get an invite to the next jamboree.
Bannon: I will soon show people of Central Asia how “people who have been ridiculed take active control of their own countries.” "From my table, I overheard Bannon and Galloway expand on their predictions for an imminent global revolution." @antelava 👇 https://t.co/vXqhZ0A5u2pic.twitter.com/wgcsvL5AUl
“I’m a working-class man from the same ethnoreligious background as Steve Bannon,” said Galloway, in a gesture of affinity. Bannon nodded and smiled as Galloway soliloquized in defense of the working class. @mattjanney25https://t.co/2jUCk3aplQ
“If you wanted to show a foreigner England” begins chapter nineteen of HowardsEnd, “perhaps the wisest course would be to take him to the final section of the Purbeck Hills, and stand him on their summit.” E. M. Forster gazes to the “gates of London itself. So tremendous is the City’s trail!” We pause for breath, “But the cliffs of freshwater it shall never touch, and the island will guard the Island’s purity till the end of time.”
If you wanted to show the Brexit Party after its triumph in the European elections, our media have decided, do not stray in the shadow of the City with the hard Brexit Nigel Farage and Home Counties Boris Johnson. Stand in the North and ask the views on Europe of those who voted for the Egocrat. They voted to Leave and to “get the job done”. Now.
In Bradford, on Channel Four News, a former Labour supporter was fed up with a party that ignores the “working class”. Labour stands now; he was ready to inform us, for the middle class. The days of Tony Blair’s robust proletarian politics are long gone. He left happy backing the Brexit Party, defending our Island Purity in the company of a man Benjamin Disraeli would have saluted as an Angel in Marble, a former Tory voter.
Decline of Working Class Politics.
1971 saw the appearance of The Decline of Working Class Politics by Barry Hindess. It talked of the “apathy, resignation and indifference” that “characterise the political position of the working class throughout the developed industrial countries of the west today.” The political sociologist that he was at that time charted the evidence in terms of a sharp drop in grass roots working class participation in the Labour Party. Hindess suggested that political action outside its formal structures, including industrial unrest, would not stem a longer term “rejection of politics”, formal politics amongst this section of the population. (1)
The 1970s and 1980s, with large scale union unrest, and radicalisations channelled into the Labour Party might be seen as a parenthesis from this trend. The rise of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, apparently a ‘left populism’ has been seen as a means to revive a mass socialist movement. Whether it can ward off the longer-term fragmentation and decline in working class politics is another issue.
Europe has seen some dramatic declines in working class parties, combining the fall out from the end of Official Communism in 1989 and the failures of ‘Third Way’ social democracy represented by Blair, Brown, die Neue Mitte in Germany, and social liberal governments in a number of countries, notably France under President Hollande. In Italy the left, reduced by the centrist Partito Democratico, barely exists.
In the elections this year France the once ruling Parti Socialiste scrapped a few seats this Sunday with 6,2% of the vote, while the left populist La France insoumise scored .. 6,3% . This contrasts with their leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s personal vote of 19,48% in the 2017 Presidential elections. With some exceptions, such as the Dutch labour party, the only radical parties, with an ambiguous relationship to the left (sometimes in coalition with it, other times not), that did well were the Greens. The EELV won an unexpected 13, 47% in France (only a few months ago they barely topped LFI) and did well in Britain.
The main result from France was that the Marine Le Pen’s Party won 23,31% of the vote, while Macron’s party got 22,41% – a win for National Populism.
In Spain, by contrast the Socialist party (PSOE) did well, although another left populist group, more democratic and internationalist than la France insoumise, lost a lot of votes.
The Spanish Socialist Party, which won the most votes at the recent April 28 general elections but fell short of a majority, secured another bitter-sweet victory at the “Super Sunday” polls yesterday. The PSOE, as the party is known, consolidated its power at the European Union, municipal and regional polls, but left-wing groups lost the jewel in the crown: Madrid City Hall, which until now had been controlled by former judge Manuela Carmena. Leftist groups also failed to beat out the right in the Madrid region. The conservative Popular Party (PP) and center-right Ciudadanos (Citizens), with the support of the far-right Vox, could join forces to govern in Madrid. The divisions of the left, combined with the poor showing of anti-austerity group Podemos, were the key factors behind this failure.
..
The biggest turnaround, however, was for Podemos, which suffered a much greater loss than expected. The group’s founding leader, Pablo Iglesias, will now be left exposed to criticism for the poor result. The situation will also weaken his negotiating position with acting Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who needs the anti-austerity group’s support to form a government. Iglesias had been vying for a coalition government, and for Podemos to have control of several ministries. This may be off the table after Sunday’s polls, but the 42 seats that the group holds in the lower house of parliament are still essential for Sánchez if he is to be voted back in as prime minister, and Iglesias could negotiate a global pact – the group’s seats are key to forming a government in a number of regions, including Aragón, the Balearic Islands and Asturias, as well as dozens of local councils.
Occupational change, above all the shrinking of industrial employment, to the growth in tertiary, often precarious, employment with individual sometimes insecure, contracts, and employer monitoring. Welfare ‘reform’, from Britain’s Universal Credit to the mean-spirited cut backs imposed in France in Édouard Louis’s latest book, Qui a tué mon père, has further sapped class solidarity. Unions across the continent have been, outside a few white collar and transport sectors, weakened. That they have shrunk is not news to anybody. But the effect of that decline on what it means for a political working class identity, which seems at present going the way of other ‘identities’, a particularity, not universality, is not clearly recognised.
Inside Labour there are those still keen to listen to the voices of those who have backed the Brexit Party. Their voices count. In the pseudo psephology of the Brexit left they have more weight than anybody else – the Labour voters who went to the Greens and the Liberal Democrats to start with. There are those who consider that a firm commitment to leaving Europe, a ‘socialist’ Brexit, a People’s Brexit, or whatever phrase that have mongered this week, would best shore up Labour’s vote. Some go so far as indulge themselves in a neo-Stalinism that dreams of socialism in one country, Britain.
From my Euro-election post vote poll: 53% of 2017 Conservatives who turned out on Thursday switched to the Brexit Party; 12% went to the Lib Dems. Only 21% stayed with the Tories.
38% of 2017 Labour voters stayed with Labour. 22% went to the Lib Dems, 17% Green, 13% Brexit. pic.twitter.com/LU0F7u7aFa
Here's what "senior Labor sources" spent until 2 am organising – hours after Labour's election collapse: union leaders, MPs, fake news sites… not analysing the causes of defeat but attacking me. When someone writes a hatchet job, always ask cui bono. Who ordered this? https://t.co/aMa8kKrYUv
Confronting the facts about the sections of the popular vote that go to the far right is never going to be easy. The French Front National, now Rassemblement National, of Marine Le Pen, has long been the “premier parti des ouvriers in France”. In a delicate and perhaps life-changing book Retour à Reims, Didier Eribon talked in 2009 of how members of his family in Northern France had passed from support for the Communist Party to voting for the national populist right. He asked for way to “neutralise” the xenophobic racist, “negative passions” that enabled the FN to mobilise its electorate. This non-fiction novel also covers homophobia, another issue which is becoming political in Britain, with the bigoted anti-gay scenes outside a Birmingham Primary school set to spread further.
Left Populists in Decline.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon sought not just to counteract the racialist right. La France insoumise promised to “federate the people”, beyond left and right, against the “oligarchy”. His party-movement, a “point de ralliement” (rallying point) is built on the Internet. Resembling in this respect president Macron’s La République en Marche, this easy to access network “is broad. But its hierarchy is steep. The man at the top stands aloof” Over the least year LFI has seen dissent, democratic, or nationalist, swept away. Indulging in his favourite sport, attacking every other group on the left, from the “social liberal” Parti Socialiste, to the ‘sectarian’ Communists, Mélenchon’s spend the last weeks of his campaign attacking the Greens. Ferociously (Crash de la France insoumise aux européennes : Jean-Luc Mélenchon à l’heure des comptes).
Left populism may have lost one prominent model and the other, Podemos, has had a set back, but will some continue to offer this “insurgent” template for Labour. Or will the left recognise that the best answer, in the far from wished for position we are in now, is to unite around an internationalist and Universalist position on Europe: remain and reform. The alternative is is to listen to these people.
Update: the Morning Star, of the Boycott Labour Communist Party of Britain, says today,
British politics is volatile. The emergence of the Brexit Party from nowhere to hold mass rallies up and down the country and dominate the stage at these elections shows how quickly any formation that captures an anti-Establishment zeitgeist can take off (without suggesting for a moment that this alliance of ex-Tory and ex-Ukip chancers are actually anti-Establishment.)
It also demonstrates the anger that large sections of the public feel about Parliament’s inability to deliver Brexit. Claims that a second referendum would “break the deadlock” don’t hold water. These results suggest one would simply entrench the division of the country into two mutually hostile camps
********
Page 167 – 8. The Decline of Working Class Politics. Barry Hindess Granada Publishing 1971.
Page 160 Retour à Reims, Didier Eribon. Champs essaies, Edition. 108 with an introduction by Édouard Louis.
Page 149 How Democracy Ends. David Runciman. Profile Books. 2018.
Ukip was deeply and recognisably British. The half-colonels; the angry golf-playing uncles; the rankling over “elf and safety” and political correctness. Its pound-sign logo was almost quaint: It was a Britain Orwell would have recognised. Ideologically, too, its Euroscepticism mined a deep vein in British politics, tracing back to our entry in 1973, if not before.
But,
Politics has moved on – and so has Farage.
Brexit now isn’t even his principal concern, its failure the mere embodiment of a wider malaise. Instead, the collapse of the Brexit process is proof of his new analysis: that British democracy does not work and does not even exist. Worse, that every organ of the state and political life, be it the parties, the media, the courts – parliamentary democracy itself – are malign and work against the interests of “the people”. Never before have we had a major political force that operates with that basic reflex.
Goodhall concludes,
For Brexit party success will surely change the alchemy of the Tory makeup. Indeed, it already has, setting the seal on the end of Theresa May’s premiership and ensuring the all-but-certain election of a no-dealer in her stead. Far from a Conservative turn to the kind of broad, centrist Christian democracy to which Theresa May once aspired, her party may follow the Republicans in becoming a hard-edged populist movement. In an age where “one-nation” seems impossible and where we are at least two, Farage and his success will force them to choose. Out of fear, they will choose him
For the last 6 weeks I've followed the @brexit_partyuk, from its very first rally to its last. The Tory party might be about to transform. If so, it started with the rise of this new force: an assault on British political life. My special report. https://t.co/2FVX81r47Q
Goodhall clearly has his finger on one essential aspect of National Populism.
With a belief that the “elite” is working against the “people” it splits the world into the camp of implacable enemies and the real “folks” (as Farage, speaking American says).
This is anti-pluralism.
The Sky journalist notes,
Being at those rallies, it struck me how many of my friends would listen to what they heard on the stage and the sentiment of those in the crowd and feel complete loathing and fear, at the same time as those around me cheered with joy and expectation. We no longer just disagree with each other, we don’t even begin to understand how our fellow citizens think.
This chimes with the analysis offered by Jan-Werner Müller in What Is Populism? (2016).
He argued that “only some of the people are really the people” and at populism’s core is a rejection of pluralism. Populists will always claim that they and they alone represent the people and their true interests.
Not only liberals should be concerned.
Democratic socialism is the expression of a plurality of interests, against different forms of oppression and exploitation, brought together in a common purpose for socialist objectives.
Its origins lie in institutions, like the labour movement, which were built by people themselves. In this century left wing and radical campaigns and trade unions are also the created and runby the membership democratically. The political parties of the democratic socialist left, unlike Stalinist parties, and despite a tendency to their own “oligarchical” structures, are in principle based on member-wide democracy. A wide spectrum of views, social democratic, ‘revisionism’, types of democratic socialism, various forms of democratic Marxism, are part of this movement.
The democratic basis of politics lies on different versions of this belief, put forward his later writings by the Socialisme ou Barbarie thinker, Claude Lefort,
For Lefort democracy is the system characterized by the institutionalization of conflict within society, the division of social body; it recognizes and even considers legitimate the existence of divergent interests, conflicting opinions, visions of the world that are opposed and even incompatible. Lefort’s vision makes the disappearance of the leader as a political body – the putting to death of the king, as Kantorowicz calls it – the founding moment of democracy because it makes the seat of power, hitherto occupied by an eternal substance transcending the mere physical existence of monarchs, into an “empty space” where groups with shared interests and opinions can succeed each other, but only for a time and at the will of elections. Power is no longer tied to any specific programme, goal, or proposal; it is nothing but a collection of instruments put temporarily at the disposal of those who win a majority. “In Lefort’s invented and inventive democracy,” writes Dominique Colas, “power comes from the people and belongs to no one.
Farage and the National Populists wish to monopolise the political space and make this “power” belong to their “people”.
They, the embodiment of the ‘real’ people, that is those who voted for Brexit, the “somewhere” people, the genuine salt of the earth types with roots, in the land and memory of the country and the ancestors of the nation.
Above all the National Populists equally deny the ” uncertainty” of politics and wish to impose their, ‘real’ majority views on the state and the inhabitants of a country.
Many of the present day populist parties, using as David Runciman (How Democracy Ends. 2018) and many others note, new communication technology, have formed ‘parties’ and movements as business start-ups, run by the leadership, and typically one ‘charismatic’ figure.
They claim to stand for the real People against the Oligarchy – the elites – and “globalism”.
In some respects Farage resembles what Lefort called an “egocrat” in the totalitarian mould (Un Homme en trop. Essai sur l’archipel du goulag de Soljénitsyne. New Edition. 2015).
His wishes run through the party organs.
Clearly the age of Stalinist, Fascist and Nazi “total” terror is ended and it would be seriously wrong to compare the Brexit Party to these “conspiracies in broad daylight” with their Gulag, Camps and mass murder.
Müller predicted that “..with their basic commitment to the idea that only they represented the people”. Once installed in office, “they will engage in occupying the state mass clientelism and corruption, and the suppression of anything like a critical civil society. (What Is Populism? Page 102)
The Brexit Party is, above all, a vehicle for the demand to end the complexity of politics and to impose the figure of its leader in the “empty space”, the seat of power than anybody and nobody can occupy in democratic institutions – the Sovereign. It wishes to make social life ‘transparent’ contest between itself and its targets, the EU and the non-people.
Nothing can be gained by ‘listening’ to the demands of the political forces of the Brexit Party.
The attempt by ‘left populists’ to speak to this audience in the hope that they can give a voice to some of the ‘democratic’ aspects of their demands in unable to grapple with the way that the thrust of National Populism is against democratic pluralism.
In many respects they are more of a danger than the ‘dark enlightenment‘ of the far right that seeks a new form of openly anti-democratic politics.
National Populists are, to cite Chantal Mouffe in her use of Carl Schmitt , “the enemy” (The Return of the Political. Chantal Mouffe. 2005).
This has already been Farage’s impact in the UK this month.
European elections 2019: two days before the vote, the RN firmly installed at the top of the polls.
Le Monde.
Selon la dernière étude Ipsos-Sopra Steria pour « Le Monde », la liste RN devance de deux points celle de LRM. L’estimation de la participation augmente fortement, à 47 %.
According to the latest Ipsos-Sopra Steria study for Le Monde the RN list is two points ahead of LRM. The estimated level of participation has increased sharply to 47%.
The party of Marine Le Pen, the Rassemblement National, RN, (ex-Front National) is at around 25% while President Macron’s list, La République En Marche (LRM) with the centrist party, the Modems, ( Mouvement démocrate) of François Bayrou is at 23%
The once ruling right-wing politicians (under the Presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy 2007 – 2012) grouped in the Les Républicains have only 13%
The RN no longer advocates withdrawal from the European Union.
The hard-line sovereigntist far-right, which backs Frexit, with ‘social’ policies of nationalisation and anti-austerity with an end to uncontrolled immigration (resembling the British red-brown alliance), of Debout la France of Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, and Les Patriotes of Florian Philippot stand at 3,5% and 0,5% respectively.
According to these figures the Party of Jean–Luc Mélenchon, La France insoumise (LFI), has continued its decline and stands at 7,5%.
The Socialists, Parti Socialiste (PS) have their own alliance, PS-Place publique. The list is led by Raphaël Glucksmann, of Place Publique, a socially liberal forum of intellectuals. he is the son of the anti-Marxist New Philosopher André Glucksmann. Glucksmann, fils, is a one-time dabbler in “neo-conservatism” with a controversial advisory role to the former President of Georgia Mikheil Saakachvili . They are hovering at just over 5% at 5,5%
Both the Communists, the Parti communiste français (PCF), and the alliance of Benoît Hamon (former French Socialist presidential candidate in 2016, 6,36% of the vote), Génération.s, stand well below the 5% needed to get MEPs (both at 2,5%)
It is worth noting that Génération.s, is linked to DieM25,
This initiative, promoting a Green New Deal, very much led by Yanis” Varoufakis, which has a European candidacies across the continent seems unlikely to make an impact.
The far left Lutte ouvrière is at 0,5% and a Gilets Jaunes slate (Alliance Jaune) is at 1,0%
Génération écologie, the historic bearers of “écologie intégrale”, who have aligned with just about everybody in the long career of Brice Lalonde are at 0,5%
TheParti animaliste, which backs animal rights, tops all three of them with 1,5%.
There was an important article in le Monde yesterday which judged that any alliance between the very disparate forces of the European nationalist populists is likely to unravel fairly quickly.
By the “spécialiste du populisme et des droites radicales Gilles Ivaldi.”
The failure of the French left to present a united front is clearly a major obstacle in efforts to win electoral support, leaving the way open for the RN and Macron list duel.
But this is not all.
The National Populist leaning (suitably mashed up in a Mouffe antagonistic articulation) left magazine Jacobin, could not be wider of the mark with this claim (yesterday):
Given the state of the Left on most of the continent it seems unlikely to benefit from a breakup of the European Union. If recent trends are any indication, the kind of broad social base and political power necessary to implement a bold, socialist exit from the EU is still quite a way off — Jeremy Corbyn being the hopeful exception.
Anybody looking at the Labour Party’s probable European elections result (which is certain to see a big vote for non-Labour Remain parties by Labour supporters) will laugh at that “hopeful exception” comment.
Most people, certainly anybody on the left, would shun Steve Bannon.
Not so ‘red-brown’ George Galloway
He chose to have a little chat with his new mate in the dictatorship of Kazakhstan.
“Kazakhstan heavily restricts freedom of assembly, speech, and religion. In 2014, authorities closed newspapers, jailed or fined dozens of people after peaceful but unsanctioned protests, and fined or detained worshipers for practicing religion outside state controls. Government critics, including opposition leader Vladimir Kozlov, remained in detention after unfair trials. Torture remains common in places of detention.”
A fairly fiery panel happening now, especially with comments by @georgegalloway, talking about people angered with and pushing back against out of touch elites. I wish someone would talk about the country and region that they are in, though. https://t.co/1OXtJCdj3Y
“Theresa May has resigned” announced George Galloway. “Let me give you a hug,” Steve Bannon replied. I pulled a camera out just as they let go of tight embrace but here is the far right and far left very much on the same page in Almaty #Kazakhstanpic.twitter.com/96YNBmhv0X
The above appearance at the “Eurasian Media Forum (EAMF)” – hosted by a free-speech denying dictatorship, follows Steve Bannon’s campaign to woo national populists, beginning with those standing in the European Elections.
The European elections today have led, to misery in company, for all the major parties.
They are predicted to see a revival of the Liberal Democrats, the swift descent into the bin of the new ‘Change’ party, a consolidation of the Green party vote, the Labour campaign for excellent Euro-MEPs that has barely taken off, and the Conservatives trailing down amongst the also-rans. UKIP, trying to establish itself as the voice of the pure far-right, is hard to predict, but there is little doubt that the National Populists of the Brexit Party, will be the winners.
Communist Call for Boycott set to get biggest Support.
It is expected that the Communist Party of Britain will claim, following the lead of the Sparticists (“Down With the EU! No Participation in Its Pseudo-Parliament!) abstention will get the biggest numbers, at projections that put the no-vote percentage at possibly over 50%
While the CPB’s Morning Star prepares to spend Sunday evening celebrating this is perhaps the most significant consequence.
Without much direct political power, but bound to be seized on the Conservative contenders in their looking Party leadership election the Brexit Party is now the nearest British equivalent of Marine Le Pen national populist Rassemblement National in France, Italy’s la Lega, of Matteo Salvini.
Everybody, not least Labour strategists will now be already beginning to digest this change in the political landscape.
One approach will be to ‘learn’ from Farage.
Outside those who – like the Lexit Left – who have a mobile app that tells them what the ‘working class’ Brexit thinks if it backed the Brexit Party, they might begin with those a few paces closer to National Populism.
In a somewhat shamefaced article, reflecting the fact that the ‘forum’ that originally published it, the ‘left wing’ Full Brexit which contains supporters of Farage – Lee Jones, whom we cited a few days ago says,
To become anything more than a single-issue protest party, TBP would need to develop a more substantive policy platform, but this would be highly likely to intensify the party’s internal contradictions, and push TBP further to the right. Like its singular appeal to democracy, TBP’s ability to field candidates from the left, right and centre is a short-term strength, maximising its electoral appeal. However, it is also a long-term difficulty, because it is not clear that the party’s founding cadre share anything beyond their common concern for democracy. The more the party seeks to develop a concrete platform, the more these divisions will expose themselves.
The thesis that thieves will fall out runs up, the academic informs us, against this.
The party’s internal character, moreover, makes it highly unlikely that leftist forces can triumph in a struggle to define what TBP stands for.
First, as noted earlier, the left is mostly conspicuous by its absence. There are some noted far-left figures standing, but the bulk of the candidates are essentially petit-bourgeois types and middle-of-the-road professionals.
Second, the money and organisational heft at the centre of what has so far undoubtedly been a slick, professional campaign are unlikely to be converted to progressive causes.
Third, and most importantly, TBP completely lacks any internal democratic structures. The party’s 85,000 registered supporters are not party members; they have no say over how the party is run. This is a deliberate design by Nigel Farage, based on his experiences battling UKIP’s internal factions, which he blames for being unable to professionalise the party. Although TBP is brand new, and arguably its institutional structures, like its policies, are potentially up for grabs through internal struggle, it is unlikely that Farage, or party chairman and business magnate Richard Tice, will gladly relinquish their domination. If not, then they will remain the ultimate arbiters of any struggles over the party’s future.
Many readers of this Blog, not living in Britain or Ireland, will not be aware that, “some noted far-left figures” include people like Claire Fox, who has been a prominent broadcaster on the BBC, and that the network around Spiked, beginning with Brendan O’Neill, are also constantly in the mass media, from the Sun, to Sky Press Review, and – well, let’s say a lot more. If anybody knows about the infinite ability of Gramscian strategies for hegemony reduced to the simulacra of news, opinion, and large gobs, it is them.
So he is plain wrong to push the existence of this red-brown front to the margins. In terms of political perception Fox citing Shelly has an importance, just as Marine Le Pen’s claim to the legacy of Jean Jaurès in the days of the Front National did.
Yet, Sovereignty Jones is right on the limits of this kind of political influence a network like the Spiked/RCP or any other internal group could have.
Farage, we note, has already avoided, despite pleas from the red-brown George Galloway, having the wheezy crook on his team – a man who could, potentially be a real rival.
Does anybody honestly think that the loud-mouths of Spiked (ex Revolutionary Communist Party have the bottle to stand up to the milkshaked man?
Jones opines,
The lack of internal democracy is not only a glaring contradiction for a party claiming to stand for democracy; it also compounds the lack of accountability associated with an absent manifesto. For all of these reasons, it is most likely that TBP will develop as a populist party of the centre-right, or what Eaton and Goodwin call a “national populist” party. Ironically, and regrettably, this would deepen the convergence between British and continental European politics.
Note the next, final, sentence,
To call this “far right” is hysterical, immoral, and deeply insulting to many millions of people. It distracts attention from the true source of the current crisis, which is not Nigel Farage’s political wizardry, or slavering hordes of xenophobes, but the reluctance of the political establishment to accept an instruction that they themselves solicited.
This is clearly a call to “listen” if not “artculate” the Brexit Party’s demands through other vehicles.
Populist Politics and Democracy.
There are some points to add on the lack of democracy in populist parties built around a leader, whose necessary charismatic ‘function’ is (problematically) a pillar of Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason (2004).
This seems to operate regardless of formal party structures.
Lee Jones would benefit from some further references about how “internal struggles” end up in National Populist Parties, even ones with more internal voting democracy and ownership than the Brexit Party.
There is a famous recent case in France.
When he expressed serious differences Florian Philippot, an out gay man, once Marine le Pen’s right-hand (“directeur stratégique de la campagne présidentielle de Marine Le Pen), got short shrift and was turfed out the Front National, (now the Rassemblement National), in no time at all.
His views were “social sovereigntist”, against privatisations and for leaving the Euro (considered to undermine national monetary authority) not too far from some of the Full Brexit.
Philippot’s micro-party, Les Patriots, is an extreme right group – tough on immigration – that is anti-austerity backs gay marriage, Frexit, defending welfare benefits and raising the minimum wage.
After the results on Sunday.
We predict with the certainty of a sage, that some of the themes of the Brexit Party’s, “instructions”, that is the need for Brexit, will get into the ears of labour strategists.
What they make of them, whether Labour will try to full the “floating signifier” of Brexit around the wishes of the Brexiters of all shapes and political colour, will be up for grabs.
This will be the crucial moment for the internationalist anti-Brexit left to make its mark and offer a clear alternative.
We will have to argue against those aligned to groups like the Full Brexit who continue to argue for sovereigntism and a conservative cultural ‘Somewhere people’ programme.
There is also another aspect of this election.
It is this
Love Milkshakes, Hate Racism: A short history of throwing food at the far right
With the Brexit Crisis fueling unprecedented voting shifts in the European election campaign the Pro-Brexit left ‘Lexit’ as they like to call it, (nobody else does) often feels to get away from the tiresome drag of cloud cuckoo land and escape to somewhere less mundane.
Time indeed to ihgnore the haemorigging of Labour votes to anti-Brexit parties, starting with the Liberal Democrats.
It’s there that the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) has finally found an echo for its Boycott Labour Campaign.
We need a People’s Brexit and a general election that can return a left and Labour government, which can begin to rebuild Britain for the people, not the bankers.
Respect the vote – SUPPORT a ‘People’s Boycott’ on 23 May 2019.
The Socialist Party, which is thoroughly enjoying its trip away from the harsh world, says of the European Elections.
Unfortunately, however, at this stage Corbyn and the left Labour leadership are not conveying a clear message to working class voters. A central reason for this is their continued mistaken attempts to compromise with the pro-capitalist Blairite wing of Labour – whether that is the local Labour councils cutting public services, or the Blairite MPs fighting for Labour to be seen as the party which defends the EU bosses’ club.
No mention of the pro Brexit Bosses’ Club.
No mention of the Love Socialism, Hate Brexit campaign which has captured people’s imagination across the left.
Great to see this positive statement from Labour MPs in favour of a socialist Europe being distributed in Glasgow today. pic.twitter.com/1Uv2UeMiy1
… reports from the talks have focused overwhelmingly on the Blairite demand for a second referendum, inevitably giving the impression to many Leave voting workers that Labour is not fighting in the interests of working class people and is instead focused on ‘reversing Brexit’.
No mention of Remain voting workers or the Remain supporters in the Trade Unions.
No mention of how to vote in the European election.
No mention of the Labour voters going head over fist to the anti-Brexit parties, which some polls suggest have pushed the party into third place.
Or this, somewhat optimistic claim,
A clear and unambiguous pro-Remain position from Labour would give the party a resounding 27% lead over the Conservatives, an 8% lead over the Brexit Party and a 14% increase in their overall vote, new research has revealed.
Farage understands he can only win the level of support he has by channelling the huge amount of anger about the failure to carry out the decision of the referendum. To do so he is prepared to downplay his racism, and he has some cover from erstwhile lefts who now support the Brexit party, but we can be sure that a campaign where he and Johnson are in competition (and with a myriad of fascist and extreme right parties spewing their filth) will have racism and scapegoating at their centre.
……
The only tactical vote is for Labour, because they are the only people who can beat Farage, and the higher Labour’s vote the stronger its left leadership will be. The alternative is strong Lib Dems – which will help Watson and Starmer.
How might they ‘channel’ this anger?
By joining Counterfire’s voyage to a People’s Brexit….
Note, Comrade Keir Starmer’s first appearance as an enemy of the revolutionary socialist groupuscule Counterfire.
The Morning Star with one toe in the carnival of reaction that’s taking place, dismisses worries about the far-right across Europe and Farage’s likely real political impact in the EU.
The European Union is proving to be a less reliable instrument for resolving contradictions among its member states and competing elites than either centre right, liberal or social democratic opinion has hitherto hoped.
In addition, although these right-wing populists are something of a problem for the big business and finance circles that stand behind the likes of Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron they lack the long-term cohesiveness or numbers to reshape the institutions of the EU.
Like those leftwingers who think the EU can be transformed by populating its structures, they too will find out that the real decision-making ever eludes the grasp of forces outside the charmed circle whether they come from the left or the right.
Oddly, or not so oddly given reports that some of the hard line Brexit Bolsheviks will do more than follow the Communist Party of Britain’s call not to vote Labour the editorial concludes,
The populist right – in or out of the EU – cannot meet the needs of working people. Almost uniquely our country has a Labour government in waiting that can.
The Full Brexit, supported by prominent members of the Communist Party of Britain, and ‘Blue Labour’ Family Faith and Flag patriots, not to mention Spiked ex-Revolutionary Communist Party, (and Green Larry O’Nutter, better known under his pen name of Larry O’Hara) tweets about this article:
Detailed thoughts from me on The Brexit Party, on @tfbrexit. In short, TBP is the only thing preventing the Remainer elite from scuppering Brexit and undermining democracy. But a populist party can't solve the crisis of UK's representative politics. https://t.co/Za0saiKEXz
Lee Jones is Reader in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London.
Note these words well,
It is deeply lamentable that this crucial channel for political expression is being supplied by a party led by Nigel Farage. However, the explanation for this lies not with Farage’s unique talents, or the supposed far-right proclivities of millions of British citizens, as many now claim. Farage is only able to claim leadership of a pro-democracy movement because the left has utterly failed to do so. Despite admitting the EU’s many faults and being unable to mount a positive case for it, the left bottled the referendum, clinging to a discredited neoliberal edifice. The opportunity subsequently to return to its foundational principle of democracy and lead Brexit in a progressive direction has been squandered. Most so-called leftists have merely doubled down on their ludicrous insistence that only racists and fascists can oppose the EU.
He continues,
TBP ought to be a left-wing party. By failing to reclaim the banner of democracy from the Eurosceptic right, the left has created the opportunity for Farage to return.
Despite its important short-term contribution, however, in the longer term, it is doubtful whether TBP can help resolve the problems of British political life. While the most obvious limitations stem from its leadership, the deeper problems lie in the populist form of political organisation itself.
Accordingly, whatever Nigel Farage may or may not be, TBP is simply not a “far-right” party. It has only one policy, to defend democracy and uphold the referendum result, and there is no reasonable way to define this policy as “far-right”.
The academic opines that one should approach Farage’s start-up party,
…with a sense of humility and appreciation for the important role TBP is playing in the immediate crisis of British politics.
Jones concludes,
At present, TBP stands exclusively for the enactment of a democratic majority decision – no more, no less. To call this “far right” is hysterical, immoral, and deeply insulting to many millions of people.
The next few days matter. Labour could still launch a real fight that brings together the call for an anti-austerity and anti-racist Brexit with action over the NHS, housing, climate chaos and other urgent issues.
A Socialist Critique of Laclau and Mouffe, from Discourse to Populism.
“Enfants, enfants, je vous le dis: montez sur une montagne, pourvu qu’elle soit assez haute, regardez aux quatre vents, vous ne verrez qu’enemies.”
Children, children, I say this to you, climb a mountain, providing that it’s high enough, look in all directions, and you will see but enemies.”
Jules Michelet. Le Peuple. 3rd Edition 1846. (1)
Ernesto Laclau (1935 – 2014) was a political theorist, perhaps best known as a ‘post-Marxist’. The former Professor Political Theory at Essex University, he is attributed the founder of the Essex School of Discourse Analysis, and is best known today for his book on a topic which has recently come to dominate politics, On Populist Reason (2005). The Belgium born Chantal Mouffe, his partner, has, like Laclau, passed the major part of her career in British higher education. Their joint book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1986) made a splash, as a critique of class based Marxism that tried to deal with ‘new social movements’. Readers of Marxism Today during the period would have been familiar with the two names, as well as the often virulent critiques of their turn. Norman Geras began with an attack on “a procession of erstwhile Marxists” (Post Marxism? 1987) But since that time Mouffe, like Laclau, seemed consigned to the decent obscurity of the University.
To the surprise of many in the new century Laclau and Mouffe spread their wings much further than academia. Posthumously Laclau has joined the select group of radical thinkers who have passed from youthful left activism, to being considered, not least by some players on the European left, a real influence on practising politicians. Pablo Iglesias, and Íñigo Errejón, have cited the Argentine born academic as an inspiration for the strategy of their political party, the Spanish Podemos founded in 2014. For those of an historical spirit they may indicate that the tie between radical left-wing Theory and Practice, apparently broken by the decades of Stalinism and the Cold War, and rendered even more marginal by the collapse of Official Communism, has been re-forged.
Mouffe was, and remains, very visible, at least in that select part of the political world that reads the Guardian, the New Statesman, El País, le Monde, and other European heavyweight dailies and magazines. Perhaps the high-water moment of her political influence was seen in her dialogue with leading Podemos figure, Íñigo Errejón in 2016, Podemos In the Name of the People. Mouffe has had the ear of the undisputed leader of the largest French left party now represented in the Assemblée Nationale, La France insoumise (LFI), created in 2016 by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Mouffe and Laclau and Mouffe’s influence on Mélenchon and his advisers, particularly during the 2017 Presidential Election, has drawn the attention of the francophone media. The interest, originating in his personal formation in the Argentinian left, of Laclau in Latin American populism, and relation to the Bolivarian Revolution – a key theme of the chief of LFI – in countries such as Venezuela drew attention and criticism. (2)
Left Populism.
A degree of scepticism about Laclau and Mouffe’s impact is nevertheless needed. The dispute between Errejón and Iglesias indicates that they are thinkers, and above all politicians in their own right. There are even greater doubts about whether anybody outside his inner circle marked Mélenchon’s left populist L’ère du peuple, Mouffe is clearly heard. Whether her recent suggestion that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is also “left populist” will lead a British audience to follow the “clues” for successful radicalism Owen Jones saw in the 2016 book remains less probable. Left populism has not been able to construct a ruling political bloc through on electoral victory. Efforts to go beyond ‘left’ and ‘right’ in the traditional sense have not been crowned with success. Podemos lost seats in the Spanish General Election, and Mélenchon’s La France insoumise has descended to below 10% in the poll. The Bolivarian Revolution has not turned out well, to say the least. (3)
It remains an attractive speculation that Laclau and Mouffe have created a Mirror for the Modern Left Populist Prince. The issue of Populism, which they have covered for many years, is important at the present. This is only one example of how their works might be mined for insights: “As Laclau foresaw” writes Jade Azim, “the success of populist movements depends on a symbolic signifier that can unite varied demands under a single umbrella.” For Nigel Farage, “The Brexit party’s empty signifier is Brexit, uniting a variety of voters under its banner; Farage loyalists, grassroots Conservatives, George Galloway, and the Communist Party. Its genius lies in its simplicity: an ideologically empty home for those angry at what they perceive as a Brexit betrayal by corrupt elites.” One awaits the response of Corbyn’s inner circle to her proposal that the party counter attacks with, “a unifier akin to “Get On With it”, in the context of winning security for businesses and workers alike..” Apart from the fact that even the Communist Party of Britain has yet to endorse Farage, what kind emotional affect would tie a voter to this “unifier” – which says essentially, I’m not interested. (4)
In the revival of interest in Laclau. though with more detail about his views on populism, Phil writes,
Does Laclau offer any insights? Widening the possibility for the co-option of demands is one. Indeed, what we’re likely to see before the next general election is the wholesale adoption of hard Brexit by the Tories, at least for the cameras and papers anyway. But ultimately, getting down and dirty in the guts of populism is what’s necessary. We know the logic, but the logic isn’t free-floating. It is fed. Elaborating the programme for older voters, who tend to power right populism more than any other demographic, looking at the myriad of unsaid demands and grievances the Brexit chain of equivalence scoops up, challenges us to think about ways of co-opting them and neutralising them. It’s a task easier said than done, and one much harder than Laclau’s book, but done it must be if we are to detoxify politics and banish the hard right from political efficacy permanently.
Phil observes that vagueness and a rhetoric that reveals the “materiality of words” lies at the heart of a wide spectrum of populism. This is to ignore, in Most recent writings, the importance of emotional ‘affects’. It’s is hard to believe that “re-copting” the nationalist rhetoric of, say, the Brexit Party, its cries of Betrayal, its loathing of Europe, into an alternative ‘left populism’ based on the ‘People’ can avoid giving credence to the super-charged right-wing ideas used. Indeed this has been a main charge against La France insoumise, which has sought, endlessly, to make its own chain of equivalence work. Left politics are based on new demands that break from established ideas, not to mention prejudices, and the xenophobia and racism that have fed the Brexit movement. FInally, language is not ‘out there’, the populists produced them within material party apparatuses, amply funded by sections of the hard-right bourgeoisie. They are “popular” only in the sense that a movement like 19th century French Boulangism was, a plebeian movement funded by fractions of capital that supported French monarchism, and anti-Semites engaged in a struggle with ‘Jewish’ capital. (5)
Perry Anderson on Laclau Today.
This is far from the end of the story. Works, from their joint Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), Laclau’s On Populist Reason (2005) and final writings on ‘rhetoric’, have much wider implications. Mouffe’s essays on political theory, up to Agonistics (2013) the discussion with Errejón, and For a Left Populism (2018) have an enormous range of references, from Gramcsi to Frédéric Lordon. Are the ideas of Laclau and Mouffe, to cite only a few, on the “empty” and “floating” signifier in the discursive forms that construct the People Against a Them – an Other which Mouffe was to frame in terms adapted from Carl Schmitt as the “Enemy” – guides for radical let alone socialist politics? Perry Anderson, with commendable generosity, has said that Laclau and Mouffe writings of of thirty years ago, which argued for a break with Marxist “economism” and for a “new pluralism” based on radical democracy, and for a “politically constructed collective will” were “augers of the reaction against neo-liberalism”. They anticipated the conditions for the rise of Populism, the present, “when deindustrialisation had shrunk and divided the working class leaving a much more fragmented social landscape and a multiplication of movements, of right and left contesting the established order in the name of the people” – populism, a “bug bear of elites. (6)
The New Leftist remarked critically, if, one may gives him the benefit of the doubt and imagine that he still considers himself committed to some socialist ideas, that in Laclau’s On Populist Reason“reference to socialism fades altogether, and populism take over hegemony as the more pointed and powerful signifier of the inherently contingent unification of democratic demands – which in isolation would equally well be woven into an anti-democratic discourse – into a collective will. Bound together by a common set of symbols and affective ties to a leader, and insurgent people can then confront the regnant powers of their society, across the dividing-line of dichotomous antagonism between the two.” Everything becomes an affair of “articulation” joining voices together an attempt to construct a progressive populism embedded in the “national popular” to fight this battle for a “populist rupture”. As Anderson indicated, the People against the Elite, the Oligarchy, comes also in a National Populist guise, the Nations against more enemies than even Jules Michelet could have dreamt up. How these could be articulated into a left movement, other than a ‘red-brown’ or, at best, a ‘Blue Labour’ one that sympathises with them, is never explained. (7)
There are deeper problems with the views of Laclau and Mouffe. Their exaggerated interest in constructing “popular hegemony” (federating the people as Mélenchon’s supporters call it) and blindness towards what Perry Anderson called the “normal forms of hegemony” that of the dominant classes. But assessing Laclau and Mouffe is not easy. The response leads us from theoretical abstractions that would make an E.P.Thompson belch in his tomb, to some of the thorniest issues confronting the present day left. To begin, but not end, they include the nature of the discourse theory that replaced ideology in their work, ‘rhetoric’ and ‘articulation’ in politics, Mouffe’s sketch of ‘agonistic democracy’ right up to the overlaying of class politics by ‘populism’, national identity and sovereignty. As Mouffe put it, “Introducing her latest book the political theorist Chantal Mouffe writes that post-democracy “signals the decline in the role of parliaments and the loss of sovereignty that is the consequence of neoliberal globalisation.” (8)
This complex of theory, often described as abstract, if not rebarbative, is beyond doubt influential, if hardly accessible to a popular audience. (9)
It is also profoundly wrong implying a shift and opening to Sovereigntist ideas, and has potentially damaging effects in destroying the historic class and ideological basis of the left.
Next section…..from Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, Slavoj Žižek. to On Populist Reason….
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Page 41 Jules Michelet. Le Peuple. 3rd Edition 1846
La influencia de Laclau y Mouffe en Podemos. Miguel Sanz Alcántara. One of the founders of Podemos cited in their piece, Juan Carlos Monedero, has stated that the impact of Laclau-Mouffe “populist hypothesis” on the party has been framed a posteriori. See for example Las debilidades de la hipótesis populista y la construcción de un pueblo en marcha.Mélenchon pays homage a number of times to Laclau and Mouffe in Le Choix de l’insoumission(2016). But it is far from rare for a French politician to garnish her or his intellectual authority with weighty sounding influences.
See “Boulanger’s appeal as a nationalist was added appeal in the face of disillusionment with the Republic installed on 4 September 1870 and gradually solidified during the 1870s, the Third Republic (1870–1940). To most republicans, especially since 1848, the Republic had meant “the social and democratic Republic,” but the Republic now in power seemed to foster big business and industry. The severe recession of 1882, which hit farmers and increased unemployment, particularly in construction and textiles, increased resentment against the Republic among workers, artisans, and small-businesspeople. This resentment was further increased by a corruption scandal that broke in October 1887. President Jules Grèvy’s son-in-law, Daniel Wilson, who lived in the presidential residence, was selling his influence on the president: payment to Wilson was a sure way to get the Legion of Honor. The president was forced to resign at the end of 1887.” “The affair led directly to a new right. Until Boulangism, nationalism had been linked to the Revolutionary tradition of the levée en masse (the nation at arms) and royalists had disdained it. Now nationalists began to envisage authoritarian methods. In the mid-1880s, under a journalist named Paul Déroulède (1846–1914), La ligue des patriotes (the Patriots’ League) developed a new vision: the way to rebuild the nation was to inculcate obedience among the people and authority among their leaders. Monarchists and other conservatives who had initially disdained Boulanger soon saw the value of this kind of nationalism through Boulanger’s ability to draw popular support. If they could not restore the monarchy, they could use this nationalism to aim at an authoritarian regime based on values of nationalism, deference, and hierarchy. And conservatives learned about mass politics. The Dreyfus affair would further hasten their learning process.”
Gramsci’s Heirs. Perry Anderson. New Left Review No 100. 2016. Socialist Strategy Where Next ? January 1981 Marxism Today. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Verso. 1985.
But now Mr Corbyn has suggested he’ll back a so-called people’s vote on any deal at all.
The Labour leader told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show: “I want us to get a good deal and then have a decision of the public after that.
“If we can get that through Parliament, the proposals we’ve put, then I think it would be reasonable to have a public vote to decide on that in the future.”
Much excitement followed,
Corbyn actually quite clear at the top of this #Marr interview … Get a "good deal" thru parliament and put it to a referendum. That's a change and effectively the position rejected at Labour's NEC. pic.twitter.com/cCMUBxihme
These contentious points remain as Politics Home says,
The Labour leader pledged to look “very carefully” at any fresh promise by Theresa May to protect workers’ rights after Brexit, with the Prime Minister on Sunday promising a “bold new offer” to MPs when they again vote on her EU deal.
Asked whether his party was “staunchly against” EU free movement, Mr Corbyn said: “I’m not staunchly against freedom of movement… Our manifesto said that the European system would obviously not apply if you’re not in the European Union.
“But I quite clearly recognise there has to be a lot of movement of workers… Ask any company in manufacturing or any other sector how much they need and rely on workers from Europe and indeed the other way around.”
And he added: “It would be open for negotiation, the level of movement of people between Europe and this country if we were a non-member of the EU.”
For once one can only agree with this comment from the die-hard anti-Corbyn wing of the party,
WATCH: In another sign of Labour's EU muddle, Corbyn says he would scrap free movement and replace it with "a great deal of movement". #Marrpic.twitter.com/0qrA3W5OkA
The crucial issue of a People’s Vote seems to involve no possibility of voting the remain.
Mr Corbyn also rejected a characterisation of his party’s EU elections platform as ‘Vote Labour, Get Brexit’, and said he believed it would be “reasonable to have a public vote” on any Labour-backed EU deal that gets through Parliament.
He said: “I think what would be a fair assessment would be to say ‘vote Labour, challenge austerity and guarantee living standards for the future, not a no-deal exit from the European Union which is all that is being offered by the Tory right and in a sense by the Tory Party.'”
On a second referendum he said: “What we fought the [2017] general election on was to respect the result of the referendum – and that we’ve done – to try to get a deal which guarantees trade and relations with Europe in the future, and if we can get that through Parliament, the proposals we put, then I think it would be reasonable to have a public vote to decide on that in the future.”
In other words, Remaining in the EU to transform the EU, the pillar of the internationalist left in the Labour Party and outside, is not an option promoted by Labour.
Not only is Labour not planning to Remain, but Corbyn did not put a commitment to include remaining in the EU on a ballot about the “deal” it would make with the EU.
The plan seems to be than, that Corbyn will heal the country’s divisions and secure a real “People’s Brexit” which he will then put to the popular vote.
That is, after new PM Boris Johnson has had a stab at things with his Chlorinated Trump Hard Brexit.
Senior Labour figures were engaged in a desperate battle to shore up the party’s support on Saturday night, amid warnings that its stance on Brexitwas helping to “detoxify the Lib Dems”.
With just days left before the European elections at which Nigel Farage’s Brexit party is expected to triumph, shadow cabinet ministers are among those concerned that Labour’s ambiguous position on Brexit has helped revive the Lib Dems. It comes as new polling seen by the Observer suggests Vince Cable’s party is running in first place in London and could even beat Labour overall.
One senior party figure warned: “If the consequence of Labour’s Brexit position and this European election is to essentially detoxify the Lib Dems, then that’s a real problem.” Clive Lewis, a shadow Treasury minister, said “lifelong Labour voters” would not back the party this week due to its Brexit stance. He added: “It feels like we’ve given [the Lib Dems] the political equivalent of resuscitation.”
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Labour MPs revealed they were already drawing up attempts to stop a no-deal Brexit should a hardline Brexiter replace May as prime minister, with some suggesting that revoking Brexit had to be a fall-back option.
This morning on Europe 1 Gilets Jaunes were interviewed on how they would vote.One said for Marine Le Pen’s party, the other would cast his ballot for La France insoumise.Meanwhile this scandal around the picture of a Rassemblement National aide disguised in “funny” dress as a Rabbi has been hitting the French media headlines.This is the background fromKonbini news.C’est un nom inconnu du grand public. Et pourtant, Guillaume Pradoura est bien connu de la délégation du Rassemblement national (ex-Front national) au Parlement européen. Par son curriculum vitae d’abord. Actuellement assistant de l’eurodéputé Nicolas Bay, en 7e place sur la liste RN aux élections européennes, il a été un temps colistier de Marion Maréchal-Le Pen aux élections régionales de 2015.
He is unknown to the general public. And yet, Guillaume Pradoura is well known to the Parliamentary group of the Rassemblement national (RN) (former Front National) in the European Parliament. By his CV to begin with. He is currently assistant to the MEP Nicolas Bay, in 7th place on the list RN in the European elections. He was on the same election list as Marion Maréchal-Le Pen in the 2015 regional elections.
Guillaume Pradoura s’est d’abord fait un nom au sein de la mouvance identitaire avant de rejoindre le parti de Marine Le Pen. Un engagement qui lui permit de nouer de solides relations avec différents groupes nationalistes et néonazis européens. Au point de faire jouer son réseau pour aider un jeune Français proche du Ku Klux Klan à échapper aux forces de l’ordre, avait révélé Mediapart en 2016. L’assistant de Nicolas Bay avait alors expliqué au site d’information avoir “voulu l’aider, dans une sorte de réflexe paternaliste”.
Guillaume Pradoura first made a name for himself within the identitarian movement before joining the party of Marine Le Pen. This was an engagement that allowed him to build strong relationships with different nationalist and neo-Nazi European groups. To the point of using his network to help a young Frenchman close to the Ku Klux Klan to escape the police, as Mediapart revealed in 2016. The assistant of Nicolas Bay had then tried to explain this by saying that he ” wanted to help, in a kind of paternalistic reflex’ .
He is now suspended from membership of the Rassemblement national.
The Rassemblement national (RN) announced Friday the suspension of Parliamentary Assistant to the European Parliament, RN Nicolas Bay after the broadcast of a photograph depicting him “disguised” as a Jew.
On this snapshot posted on social networks by MEP Sophie Montel, former activist of the National Front, Guillaume Pradoura is wearing a rabbi hat lined with curls. He grimaces in front of the lens, his hands twisted.
“Guillaume Pradoura is immediately suspended from the National Gathering and summoned before the conflict commission for the purpose of exclusion”, wrote Friday on his Twitter account the mayor of Hénin-Beaumont (Pas-de-Calais) and vice-president of the RN, Steeve Briois.
At the beginning of the day on Radio Classique, Nicolas Bay had played down the importance of this “very old photo, which dates from 2012 or 2013” and spoke of “bad taste”.
This picture was initially defended by his boss,
“It was a dressing up, a simple bad taste joke in a private setting” , said the former Vice President of the Front National Nicolas Bay,
Guillaume Pradoura, an aide to National Assembly leader Nicolas Bay, posing in 2013 while wearing an Orthodox Jew costume. (screenshot news.konbini.com via JTA)
JTA — An assistant of the general-secretary of France’s foremost far-right party was photographed grimacing while dressed as an Orthodox Jew and extending claw-like fingers at the camera.
Labeled by the French media as an “anti-Semitic caricature,” the image from 2013 of Guillaume Pradoura, which surfaced in social networks this week, exposed the National Rally – formerly National Front – to fresh criticism of anti-Semitism in its ranks.
Pradoura is the assistant of Nicolas Bay, ranked number 7 on the list for this month’s European Parliament elections by the National Rally under Marine Le Pen.
Bay dismissed criticism over the picture, saying that “it was a disguise, a mere joke made in bad taste made privately,” Kobini, a news site, reported Thursday.
Far-right candidate of the National Rally party Nicolas Bay, speaks during a media conference for the upcoming European elections next month in Strasbourg, eastern France, April 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias)
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party’s founder and father of it’s current leader, Marine Le Pen, has multiple convictions for denying the Holocaust and inciting racial hatred against Jews. His daughter has kicked him out of the party and vowed to stop expressions of anti-Semitism in its ranks.
For anybody wishing to understand Brexit Ireland is at the forefront.
Irish commentators, starting with Fintan O’Toole, whose Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain has marked the whole debate, have written some of the finest articles and books on the issues involved.
Sharper than a serpent’s tooth O’Tool bit the National Populist right of Spiked,
“His sneering at Leave voters smacks of aristocratic elitism.” writes the hybrid Norman surnamed Michael Fitzpatrick.
Anybody who knows Irish people, and left-wing activists in or from Ireland, will realise that a great deal is at stake.
For those who have been asleep for the last few years this is the sticking point,
A key part of the Brexit negotiations was about the border that separates Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Last month, EU leaders approved a withdrawal deal with the UK that includes an agreement on the Irish border.
Both sides committed to avoiding the return of a “hard border” – physical checks or infrastructure – after Brexit.
This is where the controversial “backstop” comes in.
The backstop is a position of last resort, to maintain an open border on the island of Ireland in the event that the UK leaves the EU without securing an all-encompassing deal.
At present, goods and services are traded between the two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland with few restrictions.
The UK and Ireland are currently part of the EU single market and customs union, so products do not need to be inspected for customs and standards.
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And that had been a problem in the UK?
That is an understatement.
If a backstop only applied to Northern Ireland, then the customs and regulatory border would essentially be drawn down the middle of the Irish Sea.
Goods coming into Northern Ireland from elsewhere in the UK would have to be checked to make sure they met EU standards.
Any separate status for Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK is seen as potentially damaging to the union as a whole.
As such, Prime Minister Theresa May continually rejected the EU’s proposal saying it would threaten the constitutional integrity of the UK.
She suggested a backstop that would see the UK, as a whole, remaining aligned with the EU customs union for a limited time after 2020.
Her proposal, published in June, contained nothing about single market regulatory issues, which are probably more important than customs in terms of maintaining a soft border.
The highly recommended Sráid Marx An Irish Marxist Blog discusses the left’s response in depth.
He analyses this aspect of the thorny subject with all the seriousness it needs, in a 3 part series,
One consequence of Brexit has been louder demands for a border poll and the legitimacy of a test of support for a united Ireland, on the basis that Brexit breaches the Good Friday Agreement (GFA).
I have argued before that Brexit does not breach the GFA although it does exacerbate its failures and does involve increased tension between the British and Irish Governments, who are the custodians of the agreement. It does catalyse increased instability and it does give rise to expectations that support for a united Ireland will have increased as a result. I have also argued that while this may be the case it is unlikely that a poll would result in a vote within the North for a united Ireland.
Those following the issue have not failed to notice that after its creation earlier this year a party in Ireland advocating Irexit, Irish withdrawal from the EU has got publicity. The Irish Freedom Party, also known as Irexit Freedom to Prosper (Irish: Éire Amach: Cumann na Saoirse).
It began with this in February.
Last weekend, a group of 600 people, drawn to an appearance by leading Brexit flame-fanner Nigel Farage in Dublin, showed that there is some public appetite for an exit from the EU like the British, or at least that more questions be asked about the direction the EU is heading in.
But it was this, in March, which grabbed wider attention:
.@IrexitFreedom have launched our national billboard campaign. We believe the best people to look after Irish affairs are the Irish people themselves. We will be making the case to be a normal , self governing and independent nation. #IFP#Irexit#Irishfreedompic.twitter.com/5YtUiEbHVn
This story covers the evidence of ongoing British far right groups trying to influence Irish people towards an Irish exit from the EU. These people do not have Irish people’s interests at heart. It is about pushing their own personal Anti-EU, right-wing messaging, while pretending the genesis of that project originated within Ireland.
The excellent article should be read in full but this should whet people’s appetite.
About a month back, after seeing endless UK based social media accounts pushing Irexit, I was drawn into trying to figure out where these accounts originated. The Irexit party seemed to have an official party website created by a fake web development company. (I did get to the bottom of who runs that but I don’t believe they are relevant to this story). However, I also noticed the unofficial social marketing campaign around Irexit, was being run under the Muintir na héireann website and social media accounts. This is where in the terms and conditions of the Muintir na héireann website, I found the first link to infamous British far right individuals. Muintir na héireann’s terms and conditions pointed to the same address as the European Knights Project and Liberty Defenders..
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Jack Sen, real name Dilip Sengupta, is a self-styled spin doctor for nationalist movements. He manages websites and social media campaigns to promote his own beliefs and those of prominent figures in far right extremism. In between his regular Skype’s with David Duke (former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan), Jack Sen took time to run for election with his associates within UKIP, only to be thrown out at the last minute for public anti-Semitism comments about labour candidate Luciana Berger’s Jewish ethnicity.
This is the conclusion:
Some serious questions do need to be asked.
Why would, after throwing him out of UKIP, Nigel Farage and/or his associates again use or aid a known neo nazi, to support the Irexit campaign?
How would Hermann Kelly, who lives in brussels working in PR for Nigel Farage’s EU party EFDD, be allowed the freedom to return to Ireland to form a new anti-EU party, without that being the express wishes of Nigel Farage himself?
Where did the Irexit campaign get all its funding from?
Where did the Irexit campaign get all its funding from?
Where did the Irexit campaign get all its funding from?
Finally it is clear that the Irexit Party do not stand alone but have the backing and support of a cabal of other “independent” candidates and parties. Why do irish people have to go to some random twitter account to see this? Why is our established media not better at explaining these interconnections to our voters? More on the interconnections here — https://twitter.com/IrexitP/status/1126986431065415681/photo/1
Parts of the Irish left, such as the Communist Party of Ireland and the Socialist Party also oppose EU membership, though the latter is not clear if this means just Brexit or Irexit as well.
The Socialist Party, which has 3 TDs in the Dail, makes this observation,
It is essential that the workers’ movement also considers the potential impact of the withdrawal agreement on sectarian divisions in the North. The draft agreement outlines a scenario in which there will be a developing East-West border. This will increase sectarian tension and weaken workers’ unity, and we are opposed to the agreement on this basis. The trade union movement should reverse its current position and come out against the draft agreement.
We have been warned that if the agreement is not voted through the UK will crash out of the EU, and a hardening of the North-South border will then be “inevitable”. If this were to happen it will increase sectarian tension and weaken workers’ unity. We are resolutely opposed to this scenario too. We do not accept that border checks or controls on the North-South border are in fact inevitable. The trade union movement must oppose, and refuse to implement when possible, such measures.
How this can be reconciled with their backing Brexit, and how such a result could happen, is, apparently a matter for the workers’ movement, in some misty land where everything turns out right if the correct line is followed.
Since the Socialist Party has yet to support Irexit we are left even deeper in the dark.
Enoch Powell was the first post-war politician in Britain to take an openly racist political position.
He, above all amongst Conservatives, is still recognised as a key political figure of the late 20th century.
What is is his legacy?
This is a helpful summary:
The ‘ultimate impact’ of Powell on the discourse on immigration and ‘race relations’ in Britain was ‘to shift it further to the right’.[7] Also taken up by Margaret Thatcher in her 1978 statements on immigration on Granada TV’s World in Action, Powell’s remarks have provided a rudimentary framework for attacks on immigration and multiculturalism ever since.
Everyone who wrote about him was certain of one thing: Enoch Powell was not a racist. He ‘said things we didn’t agree with’ (Tony Blair). He was ‘an extreme nationalist, but not a racialist’ (Denis Healey). He inspired racialists ‘but was not a racialist himself’ (Tony Benn). The Tory papers which revered him and called for parliament to be prorogued in his memory would not contemplate the possibility that he was a racialist. The unanimity was complete. Which is all very odd because the most important thing by far about Enoch Powell was that he was a racist pig of the most despicable variety.
The point is easily proved. In a private speech to lobby correspondents some years before he started speaking in public on immigration, he said, ‘Often when I am kneeling down in church I think to myself how much we should thank god, the holy ghost, for the gift of capitalism.’ Powell believed in capitalism just as a religious nut believes in the holy ghost. When fighting elections in Wolverhampton he would spell out the ‘simple choice’ between ‘free enterprise and a planned society’. He gloried in what he called the symmetry of capitalism. Ponderously, with a deliberate form of speech which many mistook for careful thought, he explained how the market drove and inspired the capitalist economy to ever higher summits of perfection. There was only one condition: that capital should be left to find its own place and its own direction.
Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, in 1968, issued dire warnings about the impact of immigration, was followed by these working class actions,
After the “Rivers of Blood” speech, Powell was transformed into a national public figure and won huge support across the UK. Three days after the speech, on 23 April, as the Race Relations Bill was being debated in the House of Commons 1,000 dockers marched on Westminster protesting against the “victimisation” of Powell, with slogans such as “we want Enoch Powell!” and “Enoch here, Enoch there, we want Enoch everywhere”. The next day, 400 meat porters from Smithfield market handed in a 92-page petition in support of Powell, amidst other mass demonstrations of working-class support, much of it from trade unionists, in London and Wolverhampton.
This was only the tip of the iceberg. At the end of April showed that 74% of those asked agreed with his speech and only 15% disagreed, with 11% unsure. The controversy divided the country, with many working class people backing Powell. One of my father’s brothers, a shop-steward in a car-plant in the Midlands, agreed with the Tory Toff. For over a decade my Dad refused to speak to him. In my North London secondary school some of the cockneys (often skinheads) and my friends had fights over ‘Good ol’ Enoch’.
Powell was also an ardent opponent of British membership of the European Union, or Common Market/European Economic Community, was it was known in the 1970s.
This was his view. on what was at stake over British membership of this alliance of states based on pooled sovereignty.
The House of Commons is at this moment being asked to agree to the renunciation of its own independence and supreme authority—but not the House of Commons by itself. The House of Commons is the personification of the people of Britain: its independence is synonymous with their independence; its supremacy is synonymous with their self-government and freedom. Through the centuries Britain has created the House of Commons and the House of Commons has moulded Britain, until the history of the one and the life of the one cannot be separated from the history and life of the other.
Do not be deceived. With other weapons and in other ways the contention is as surely about the future of Britain’s nationhood as were the combats which raged in the skies over southern England in the autumn of 1940. The gladiators are few; their weapons are but words; and yet the fight is everyman’s.
It does not take much to see these views echoed in the present Brexit debate, from the European Research Group to Spiked and the Full Brexit.
Powell as a National Populist, with race, nation, People., Sovereignty, all welded together by a demagogue.
In 1974 Powell took this line:
Powell described British membership of the European Economic Community (EEC) as “if there be a conflict between the call of country and that of party, the call of country must come first” and went on to say: Curiously, it so happens that the question ‘Who governs Britain?’ which at the moment is being frivolously posed, might be taken, in real earnest, as the title of what I have to say. This is the first and last election at which the British people will be given the opportunity to decide whether their country is to remain a democratic nation, governed by the will of its own electorate expressed in its own Parliament, or whether it will become one province in a new European superstate under institutions which know nothing of the political rights and liberties that we have so long taken for granted.
If the electoral system had been different, if ‘start up’ virtual parties, funded by right-wing millionaires and far right US allies had existed, who knows if Powell would have done. He could have led a political force, like the Brexit Party., As it was Powell’s only direct political intervention of any electoral significance was perhaps his call in 1974 to vote Labour, in the belief that they would oppose British membership of the EU.In the 1975 Referendum over EEC membership.
During the 1975 contest Michel Foot and other left figures of the Labour Party, such as Peter Shore, Barbara Castle, and the right-winger Eric Varley opposed to EEC membership notoriously appeared on platforms with Powell. Tony Benn would also campaign against the Common Market. The Communist Party of Great Britain clung onto the ‘No’s shirt tails.
Powell ended his political career as an Ulster Unionist, a group whose presence is a key to present Tory turmoil over Brexit
For reasons rooted in their own support for a Sovereign Britain free to make deals with the un-elected WTO, the remains of this patriotic left are keen to underline working class support for Brexit.
The Brexit Bolsheviks even have a direct line to how the working class thinks.
During the week the daily of the Labour boycotting Communist Party of Britain, the Morning Star had this editorial during the week.
The rising index of voters signifying their intention to vote for Farage’s Brexit business entity is the direct consequence of the failure of our deeply unrepresentative parliamentary system to give effect to the Brexit vote and, more directly, it is the product of a deepening reservoir of contempt for mainstream politicians.
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The Labour Party’s big losses are among people where the Leave vote signified working-class anger.
This is not a healthy situation. Labour needs to recapture its insurgent spirit and find a shared language with the millions of people it needs if it is to form a government.
These are among the millions who seem unprepared to vote for its candidates in next week’s election.
Yet what exactly is the electoral basis of this ‘anger’?
Yesterday Peter Kellner demolished some myths about the working class anti-Brexit vote.
The party is haemorrhaging votes in the mistaken belief that the leave tendency is driven by its working-class base
“A YouGov analysis of more than 25,000 voters suggests the following division of leave voters in the referendum, linked to the 2017 election result.
• Middle-class leave voters: Conservative 5.6 million; Labour 1.6 million.
• Working-class leave voters: Conservative 4.4 million; Labour 2.2 million. (A few of the remaining 3.6 million leave voters supported smaller parties; most did not vote in 2017.)”
“So the largest block of leave voters were middle-class Conservatives, followed by working-class Conservatives. Just one in eight leave voters was a working-class Labour supporter. To be sure, had even half of these 2.2 million voters backed remain, the result of the referendum would be different. But to suggest that the referendum’s 17.4 million leave voters were dominated by working-class Labour supporters is simply wrong.”
Kellner concludes,
None of this addresses the wisdom of Labour’s policy towards Brexit and a new referendum. All it does is indicate that its policy is specifically haemorrhaging remain votes without enhancing its appeal to leave voters. If the party’s aim was to maximise support next week by appealing to both remain and leave Britain, it is failing spectacularly.
This is obviously far from the last word on the electoral sociology of this election.
As this indicates.
Labour will see 47% of its Leave-voting supporters back the Brexit Party at the EU Parliament elections. A quarter (23%) of Remain-voting Conservatives will back the Lib Demshttps://t.co/COOknhxQCQpic.twitter.com/66LffquM0N
But the issue of those working class Brexit backers is above all a political one.
There are still Lexiters (left supporters of Brexit) who believe that the anger of what Kellner indicates is in a majority the rage of conservative (both small and Big ‘C’) sections of the working class and their counterparts in the Middle Class Tory voters, contains within it the seeds of a genuine People’s Brexit, a fight against EU ‘neo-liberalism’.
The kind of “insurgent spirit” of the Smithfield Porters…
They are unlikely to be convinced by Kellner since they have a hotline to what the ‘real’ workers think.
In case others, fed up with the whole show, think this is a battle between two nationalisms, this should concentrate their minds.
The Brexit Party combines exactly the same extreme nationalism, hard line free-market policies as Powell.
Enoch Powell would not doubt have been happy to get this kind of support:
Arron Banks gave '£450,000 funding to Nigel Farage after Brexit vote' https://t.co/cPiacjn3Ao
Many on the French left have long been wary of La France insoumise, the self-styled Left Populist Movement, “point de ralliement (rally) of Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
One issue has been its ‘sovereigntism’.
That is, putting the demand of popular sovereignty – against the ‘oligarchy’, domestic and European – at the centre of its politics.
A couple of days ago this type, Andréa Kotarac, decided that the far-right rally of Marine Le Pen, the Rassemblement national, was a better bet for this nation-centred strategy.
Former member of Mélenchon campaign team and elected regional councilor for La France Insoumise quits party, says he’s voting for far-right National Rally https://t.co/nCQnevshtj
High drama in the French campaign as a far-left candidate calls for voters to back the far right – earning the would-be MEP some choice insults from French far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Andréa Kotarac, a former regional adviser to Mélenchon’s far-left France Unbowed party (La France Insoumise), announced Tuesday that he was leaving the party and would instead back the far right in European Parliament elections in order “to block” President Emmanuel Macron’s Republic on the Move (La République en marche) party. Mélenchon responded by calling Kotarac a “stink bomb” and a “traitor”.
In fact there is already a legal process to stop Marine Le Pen’s Party using this support in their election publicity.
Tract FN sur le ralliement de Kotorac : les insoumis mettent en demeure Marine Le Pen https://t.co/ettfI1dkIL via @libe
The ‘left’ that copied National Populism so much that it joined it.
The deeply affecting Retour à Reims, (2009, translated in 2018) by Didier Eribon describes growing up gay in a hard working class area of Northern France. His parents who were manual labourers and cleaners. Eribon, who began a University career, and journalist on left of centre papers and magazines, known for his critical writing on Michael Foucault and gay politics, stayed away from the city of his youth for many years. His ‘return’ is physical, visits, but it’s principally a trip through his memories.
Reims is hard to summarise in a few lines. Even so, for once the publisher’s puff is spot on. It is “breathtaking”. Perhaps one outstanding theme is important for today, when we see national populism rise across Europe, and channel through the rise of the Brexit Party in the UK. In the sometimes harrowing pages he asked “how did people like his working class family who used to vote communist when he was a child, end up voting in such large numbers for the far right?“
That is, how did large numbers of ordinary working people once on the left become voters, if not more, for the nationalist right.
“To be a communist had next to nothing to do with a desire to establish a government resembling the one found in the USSR … In working-class environments, leftist politics meant first and foremost a very pragmatic rejection of the experience of one’s own daily life. It was a form of protest, and not a political project inspired by a global perspective.”
Working Class.
His own answer focused on this, as Steven Pool put it in the Guardian review of he recently translated English version, “the problem, as he sees it, is that the left ended up abandoning talk of the “working class”, a political concept through which people could experience fellow feeling with others in the same boat. After the turn in the 1980s and 90s towards talk of individual rights and responsibilities, by contrast, this idea of group feeling, indeed of fraternité, had been atomised. And what took its place was the cynical exploitation and fomenting of anti-immigrant attitudes by the far right, which brought the working class back together but this time under a mood of hostile nativism rather than economic solidarity. The National Front, Eribon asserts, was now “the only party that seemed to care about them, the only one, in any case, that offered them a discourse that seemed intended to provide meaning to the experiences that made up their daily lives”.
Authoritarian Populism.
In his memoir Erbion refers to the work of Stuart Hall on authoritarian populism in The Hard Road to Renewal (1988), and to Raymond William’s novel Border Country (196) inspired by his own working class origins. Hall tried to explain how people came to vote for Thatcher’s mixture of hard-line economic liberation through a cultural brand of law and order populism that ‘articulated’, gave voice to, their anxieties. Williams helped more personal insights into how somebody may move class but still be moulded by the ‘habitus’ (Pierre Bourdieu, a key reference) of his ‘popular’ (working class) background.
Erbion, who had been a Trotskyist in a group which ignored issues of identity (he does not name the tendency), as a gay man, asked, how can we neutralise this support for the far-right, or the drift to the more traditional right of his brothers?
The most recent – paperback – French edition of Retour à Reims has an introduction by ‘Édouard Louis.
The gay writer was inspired by Erbion in his own more recent literary career, books which have an international impact (En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule Le Seuil. 2014. The End of Eddy. 2017)
Louis has recently written Qui a tué mon père (2018). translated this year, Who Killed My Father. It ends in a few moving pages where he rages against the French welfare reform designed to attack “spongers”. Since the new millennium ‘reforms’, which cut disability benefits and forced his father to accept low paid gruelling jobs, raised prescription charges and which, through a reduction in Housing Benefit.
Louis’ anger is very easy to grasp in the country of Universal Credit and Pip Disability Tests.
Other themes are also easy to relate to.
For French Communist Party read the ‘traditional Labour supporting’ North.
Does this exasperation following the end of the traditional working class and welfare reforms designed to compel people to be ‘flexible’ and turn to precarious jobs, explain the rise of national populism?
Is part of its support mourning for the end of the traditional working class?
Is the Brexit Party surfing on this wave of emotion able to direct people’s hatred onto the EU.
Anybody reading Lexit (pro-Brexit) left-wing material will find the idea that somehow the salt-of-the-earth working class have been ‘betrayed’ and ignored by the cosmopolitan elites including the rights based left – not that Erbion or Louis romanticise past or present workers, beginning with their own families...to say the least!
Today the Guardian publishes this essential read which deals with some of these issues, above all how can the left tackle the support for national populist parties, like the French Front National/Rassemblement National.
It takes apart some of what might be called the mythic interpretation of the working class.
Among the old stalwarts of the centre-left, there is a simple explanation for the decline of the parties they used to lead: immigration. In recent interviews with the Guardian, Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair and the former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi all sounded the same note, declaring that Europe must “get a handle on migration” to stop right wing populism. Hardly a week passes without some candidate or columnist declaring that liberals will only regain power when they lock down the borders.
Mudde continues,
This dramatic shift in the rhetoric of ostensibly centre-left parties is part of a larger panic over how to halt the spread of right wing populism across the west in recent years. The conventional wisdom has been largely steered by a growing group of academics and pundits, often of the right or centre, who offer the same advice: social democratic parties will perish unless they take care of the “left behind” voters by limiting immigration. Some academics now even go so far as to openly defend white identity politics.
Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities,” Eric Kaufmann’s polemic dressed up as social science is a key book in this respect. Although it ends with a call for a ‘civic’ inclusive nationalism, Kaufmann’s premis is the ‘naturalness’ of ethnic dislike. Policies have to adapt to this feeling, not try to change it.
The argument that a tougher stand on immigration will revive the social democratic parties – and arrest the rise of the radical right – is based on two basic errors, which together reflect a larger misunderstanding about the historic role of centre-left parties.
The first mistake is the widespread assumption that the rise of rightwing populism and the decline of traditional centre-left parties are two sides of the same coin – both caused by working-class voters abandoning the old social democrats for the nativist message of the new populist radical right. The second misperception, closely related to the first, is that the voters who now support the populist radical right are largely the white working class that used to vote reliably for social democratic parties.
As the data shows, both of these widely repeated assumptions stand on loose empirical footing. In fact, most populist radical-right voters are not working class, and the majority of the working class does not support the populist radical right.
Comrade Cass Mude states,
In fact, most voters for populist radical-right parties were not working-class – and most working-class voters did not vote for the populist radical right. A recent study found that “only” 31% of “production workers” and 23% of “service workers” voted for west European populist radical right parties between 2000 and 2015. And while the FN and Austria’s Freedom party are exceptions – with workers constituting 45% and 48% of their electorates, respectively – the figures are much lower for other such parties, with Italy’s Lega Nord at only 17%, for example.
I could not put this better,
Social democracy is an ideology that supports egalitarianism and social justice through the framework of liberal democracy and a mixed economy. Inspired by the Marxist concept of class struggle, social democracy aims to uplift all marginalised groups. But those who argue that centre-left parties need to pander to white anxiety about immigration are essentially saying that social democratic parties are first and foremost an interest group for “the working class” – which is always, in these accounts, assumed to be white.
..
The key to reviving the fortunes of social democracy is not to pander to the nativism of part of the white working class, but to embrace the ideas and policies that are fundamental to social democracy – egalitarianism, social justice, solidarity, the right to social protection and a comprehensive welfare state. These values represented a widely shared common sense for the vast majority of Europeans in the second half of the 20th century – before their hegemony was eroded by three decades of neoliberal ideas and policies. The only way back for social democracy is to fight to make these values dominant once again.
In other words, we should be proud of our movement’s history, and seek to build a left bloc in society inspired by these values.
Democratic socialism is inclusive. Our greatest leaders, from Jean Jaurès to Rosa Luxemburg, stood for universal rights, and universal rights against oppression and exploitation.
It is no more viable to adopt right wing ‘identity politics’ – not too far from the ‘Identitarian’ far right, than it is to develop a US-style politics of coalitions between interest groups, in its academic version a multiplicity of different ‘sectional’ struggles.
Chantal Mouffe, who has been amply criticised on this Blog, says,
What I call the ‘populist moment’ is marked by the multiplication of resistances to this post-democratic situation. Those resistances are manifesting themselves in many different ways, not necessarily in a progressive way. Those resistances are, in a sense, all expressing ‘democratic demands’ – demands for more democracy, for the people to have a voice. But these demands can be articulated in a xenophobic way. This is why we have seen the development of right-wing populism that claims ‘the problem has come from the immigrants’. Those demands, however, can also be articulated in a more progressive way, as a call for the extension and radicalisation of democracy. This is what I refer to as ‘left populism’.
Although Mouffe stays away from the nativism lite of some other left populists – most notably Sahra Wagenknecht and her new movement Aufstehen (Stand Up) in Germany – she also clearly targets the white working-class voters, particularly the ones the third way lost to the populist radical right. In several interviews Mouffe has said: “When citizens go to vote they see no difference between the choices facing them. That has allowed the development of right-populism. Marine Le Pen speaks to the pain of the popular classes, telling them that foreigners are the cause of their problems. We need another, opposed discourse built on the basis of equality.”
The left populists share the assumption that the (white) working class votes for the populist radical right out of economic anxiety rather than cultural backlash. Hence, once the left provides them with a better socio-economic alternative, they will no longer care about Islam and Muslims.
Another aspect it that trying to turn around national ‘affects’ (emotional bonds to the ‘nation’) in a left direction have not only failed in Spain (not least because the Spanish ‘nation’ is made of multiple nations) but in France where La France insoumise is down to under 10% in the most recent polls.
And this has happened, a leading member who has just announced his support for the far-right party of Marine Le Pen.
Un élu régional quitte La France Insoumise et annonce qu'il votera pour le RN aux européennes https://t.co/eCaq1kIpm3 via @BFMTV
..my point is not that immigration is a good economic deal, but, first, how come those who are supposed to think in terms of good deals and bad deals don’t acknowledge this, and, second, how come those who are supposed to be critical of all this actually buy into it. In fact, when people say we cannot afford to be nice to migrants because it would be against the interests of the people, they are buying the idea that it is a bad deal. My point is not to endorse the good deal argument but to question the bad deal one. It is really about the racialisation of economic issues, about how those who are racialised (and thus considered ‘naturally’ other or radically alien) are considered worthless, and then by the same token, about how those who are considered worthless are in turn racialised and treated as ‘other’. Such an approach avoids accepting as a fact the opposition between Whites and non-Whites.
He observes,
The problem with the populist strategy, for the left, is that it’s neither left nor a winning strategy. It was even less so during the latest presidential campaign in France: everyone played that same card at the same time, including Macron, with a rhetoric of ‘centre’ populism! Of course, my argument is not just about France. The same considerations apply to the United States. But another dimension becomes apparent there, thanks to the availability of racial data. Trump’s success is not so much among working-class voters in general, but more specifically among the white working class. In a left-wing populist strategy, the racial dimension of the Trump vote is underestimated, and the class dimension is overestimated – whereas it now seems clear that his critique of the establishment was always just an illusion.
Mudde ends with these inspiring paragraphs,
Social democracy needs to reassert its ideals in a way that is inclusive of all workers. It should return to the theory rather than the practice of European social democracy – an egalitarian ideology based on solidarity with all socially weaker groups and individuals, irrespective of class, race, or sexuality. In the early 21st century, throughout western Europe, a growing percentage of the shrinking working class will be female and non-white (or of immigrant descent).
..
The revival of social democracy will require a new cultural and political infrastructure, centred, at first, outside of electoral politics. It should include the trade unions, which, despite weakened membership and power, still have better connections to working people. It should include progressive minority organisations, particularly those focused on socioeconomic concerns, and new grassroots organisations, rooted in local communities.
Above all, to fight national populism we need to build the internationalist left.
The issue of immigration was and still is at the heart of the Carnival of Reaction that followed the Brexit referendum result.
It and the rhetoric of ‘betray’ are tied together.
An alternative begins with a pro-European internationalism against Brexit, in opposition to the Brexit Party and those who wish to copy the ‘populists’.
The latest on those who have copied the National Populists.
I've been untangling the Brexit party. How did it get so professional? Why all the connections to Spiked and why is a massive PR company looming in the shadows? Astroturfers of Britain part 2.https://t.co/n6yWjgzYbC
John Rees and Lindsey German have been key people in the People’s Assembly Against Austerity and Stop the War Coalition (StWC).
As effective leader of the People’s Assembly and Convener of the StWC they have played a significant role in the most important left mobilisations of the new millennium.
Rees and German, who are also leaders of the revolutionary socialist Counterfire (a split from the Socialist Workers Party in 2010), campaigned for Brexit.
Their call for a “People’s Brexit” has got absolutely no echo in the labour movement and the wider public.
The demand for a General Election is a to will for something not in the gift of the Labour opposition.
Now they are trying to come to terms with the rise of Nigel Farage’s Plc, the Brexit Party.
They do not mention Farage backer Galloway, with whom they have a long and close bond, once.
Rees explains the high scores for Farage in the opinion polls.
Leave voters have no effective, unequivocal, voice in establishment politics. After three long years of watching the political Establishment twist and turn, squirm and prevaricate, the political system is held in even lower esteem than it was before the referendum took place.
In other words, everything that produced the Leave vote in the first place has become worse in the last three years while the political representation of those who voted Leave is still non-existent.
The secret of the Brexit Party’s success is that it has fill this void.
The Counterfire leader avoids any in-depth discussion about the Brexit Party, part of a wider, a Europe-wide, rise in national populism, its class basis, and the way a “virtual” populism can capture a voting audience. Or how the ‘sovereigntist’ politics of this brand of “insurgency” mix patriotic national “taking back control” with Hard right policies.
He misses out promoting his own hobby-horse, the defunct People’s Brexit, though loses no time in underlining that Labour has missed the boat for its “divisions”.
The Labour Party is divided and appears to many Leave voters as if it is permanently held hostage by the majority Remain Parliamentary Labour Party and constantly pressured into compromise by the second referendum campaign.
So Leave voters have no effective, unequivocal, voice in establishment politics.
Now what might an unequivocal voice be?
Obviously for Rees one that opposes, those who “dismiss Leave voters as knuckle-dragging racists who simply have to be exposed to the expertly informed opinions of Michael Heseltine, Tony Blair, Vince Cable, and Caroline Lucas until they except the revealed truth.”
No mention of Love Socialism, Hate Brexit.
💥 Love Socialism Hate Brexit is coming to the North East 💥
— Love Socialism Hate Brexit (@LoveSocialism) May 8, 2019
No mention of the strong left opposition to Brexit, and for a People’s Vote.
The People’s assembly leader has some interest in what he claims is a “couple” (actually four, Claire Fox, Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, James Heartfield and Stuart Waiton, ex-Revolutionary Communist Party members, now writing for Spiked), of left-wing Farage fanatics.
Farage has even managed to convince a couple of gullible and/or desperate former leftists to act as window-dressing for his own free-market, NHS privatising, xenophobia.
Honesty would compel him at this moment to register George Galloway’s support for Farage.
Galloway reveals why he has MUST support Brexit Party – ‘no other party I could vote for’
BREXITEER George Galloway has said it is “not a difficult choice” to support the Brexit Party in the event that Britain is made to stand in the European elections.
There is little doubt that years of close collaboration with the Man in the fedora explain this gap.
Rees stood as a candidate for Galloway’s Respect Party.
In 2012 Counterfire hailed this result, the ‘Bradford Spring’:
Years of dishonestly working with somebody widely known for what he is all too visibly today have left their mark.
Rees recommends,
Indeed, in order to avoid the appearance that Labour had colluded in a class collaborationist relationship which extracted the Tory government from the very deep pit into which it has dug itself, a more or less total surrender by the government would be necessary.
That isn’t going happen, so the negotiations need to end now because all they are doing is sending a message to disillusioned voters that the Labour Party is part of a political Establishment which has already lost their trust.
In short, it makes Farage look like the insurgent outsider and Labour look like pork-barreling insiders.
Fair enough many would say.
But this?
A return to mass rallies would be one vital step in restarting the popular dynamic of support for Corbyn.
But more is required. The essential element now missing — it’s a direct relationship with the mass movements from which Corbyn has historically drawn his strength.
Efforts to conjure up this mass movement by the People’s Assembly have come to little more than a few thousand strong demonstration in London earlier this year.
He commends “the protest outside the Tory Party conference in Manchester in the autumn called by the People’s Assembly and the trade unions.
What has changed since January?
Lindsey German argues, as one would expect, in the same vein.
Headed by the far-right politician Nigel Farage, the party is projecting itself as an honest, democratic outfit, fielding non-white candidates and some from the erstwhile left in order to appeal to voters across the board who voted leave.
Again no mention of Galloway.
German also has a history of work with the man in the jaunty head-gear.
Famously she defended this decision about the Respect Manifesto in 2005,
George Galloway did not like what he saw. In particular, he objected to the twin questions of gay rights and abortion, which, he insisted, would jeopardise hundreds, if not thousands, of votes in the East End. It was not so much the ordinary muslim voter who would be alienated, but the leaders of the mosque and groups like the Muslim Association of Britain, who might withdraw their backing and influence their followers to do the same.
..
As for the non-appearance of LGBT rights in the manifesto, comrade German made no direct reference to it, but she said: “The idea that this was not an issue is not true – we always took it up.” The other parties were always bringing it up, according to comrade German, claiming that Respect was pro-gay – and despite the fact that they had dropped it from the manifesto too!
Comrade German concluded, totally disingenuously, that the motion had been moved “in bad faith”. No, comrade, you voted for it in bad faith, seeing as you have no intention, if your behaviour at conference is anything to go by, of actually abiding by it.
Notoriously she had said: “I’m in favour of defending gay rights, but I am not prepared to have it as a shibboleth” (see Weekly Worker July 10 2003).
German cannot resist her own version of Rees’ snide attack on opponents of Brexit – including again, if not mentioned, the internationalist left.
Those who have been pushing for a second referendum seem particularly perplexed by this but it has always been obvious that treating the 2016 result as if it simply hadn’t happened, or treating the result as the work of ignorant and stupid people, would help to strengthen the likes of Farage.
No text is cited for the “ignorant and stupid” remark.
And,
The problem is that Labour has been looking less and less like an insurgency. That’s bad enough, but now Farage is claiming the insurgency mantle. Labour needs to get back out on the streets, arguing and campaigning across the country.
Slogans about insurgency – as it can be conjured up by an act of will – cannot hide the fact that those backing Brexit have contributed to the left’s difficulties.
This is the way forward.
I've just joined @Another_Europe – the organisation dedicated to fighting the politics of Brexit from the left.
You can join too, and help to build the radical, democratic movement we need. https://t.co/oUDfm4RJH7
The elite is throwing a lot of shit at the Brexit Party, but it just isn’t sticking.
Ha! Ha! Ha!
In extraordinary amount of character assassination – or rather, attempted character assassination. Claire Fox’s political past is dredged up, by those who clearly have nothing of substance to say about her political present and her arguments in defence of democracy.
""Claire Fox’s refusal to disavow the Revolutionary Communist party’s support for IRA bombing campaigns that killed innocent children (she was a senior activist at the time)." @JRogan3000 work in the archives of the RCP….https://t.co/Rz5xZrjQMx
Some photos from today's Brexit/Peterloo/Crusader Knight/Revolutionary Communist/Pro-Cromwell-Anti-Royalist/Who Fucking Knows march in Manchester. First, a personal highlight – my mum @Northernlawyer in full @RemainiacsCast garb hassling Claire Fox. pic.twitter.com/YbUgRxK8it
— Francis Xavier Sowerby Thomas (@FrankyBabes) May 11, 2019
Witness Nick Cohen’s boilerplate column in the Observer yesterday in which he bemoaned the media’s failure to shift politics away from Brexit and in a more ‘desirable’ direction – this is the wail of a collapsing establishment horrified that its fury and bluster and conspiracy theories make no impact whatsoever beyond certain parts of London.
"Brexit has as much been a failure of British journalism as British politics." Me in @ObserverUK on our inability to strip away the masks of phonieshttps://t.co/AmQVgxYGGz
Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party and National Populism.
Last week Lewis Goodhall published a widely read piece, Brexit: The conditions are ripe for the biggest backlash imaginable. The “referendum itself might be considered as mere prologue to the main populist act” the Sky political correspondent observed, “ultimately, the referendum will be best understood as the apotheosis of a eurosceptic battle, not as the populist war itself.” Attending a public meeting of the Brexit Party he observed, “I’ve never been to a Trump rally – but I imagine, from everything I’ve seen and heard – that what I experienced on the Fylde wasn’t a million miles away.”
Today opinion polls put the party that is standing in the European elections on the ‘simple’ programme of leaving the European Union with no withdrawal agreement is outperforming Labour and Conservatives combined.
The Opinium survey for the Observerplaces the Brexit party on 34%, when people were asked how they intended to vote on 23 May, with Labour slipping to 21% and the Conservatives collapsing to just 11%. Ominously for Theresa May, support for the Tories at the European elections is now less than a third of that for Farage’s party, and below that for the Liberal Democrats, who are on 12%.
The Brexit Party was formally launched on the 12th of April. It is now standing candidates across the country for the 23rd of May contest and intends to run in the next General Election. Apart from the support from former Conservative Minister Anne Widdecombe and Annunziata Rees-Mogg the sister of leading Tory Brexiteer, Jacob Rees Mogg, the party attracted attention for the candidacies of former Revolutionary Communist Party members, Claire Fox, Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, James Heartfield and Stuart Waiton now contributors to the Trump admiring libertarian Spiked. George Galloway, former leader of the ‘socialist’ Respect, endorsed the list. A microscopic group the Communist Party of Great Britain-Marxist Leninist, has joined in, calling for support and the hardest Brexit possible.
Matthew Goodwin, the author with Roger Eatwell of National Populism (2018) considers that the Brexit Party indicates that Farage’s party shows that in Britain “political de-alignment’ is underway. With some echoes of Trump’s support, the Brexit Party is part of the rise in Europe national populist parties. There are conflicts over “values”, “Brexit is certainly one of them but there are many others such as immigration, terrorism, refugees, climate change, minority rights and the steady advance of social liberalism.” Goodwin concludes that this “is also coinciding with a breakdown of tribal loyalty to the main parties, which is making it easier for new populists and other challengers to break through.” (1)
In 2014 Christophe Gilley (Le Crépuscule de la France d’en haut) developed a similar theme. The tribune of la France “périphérique”, the ‘left behind” zones away from the globalised metropolises, asserted that political disaffection led to the “marronage” (on the model of the runaway slaves called ‘maroons’ who established their own free communities in the Caribbean) of the “popular” classes from traditional political parties. For the author voting for (what was then) the Front National indicated defiance of the “modèle mondialisé” (2)
National Populism.
National Populism is a sketch of these populist parties, largely centred on Europe. From UKIP, the French Front National (now Rassemblement National) – never in government – to President Trump, Orban’s Hungary, Matteo Slavini’s Lega in Italy, the Freedom parties in the Netherlands and Austria.
To explain their growth the book begins with some reasonable sounding phrases, concern at “rapid ethnic change” a fear of relative deprivation, under the effects of “neoliberal globalisation” (whose economics are not explored). It continues with the perceived threat of “ethnic destruction” as the springboard for the National Populist demand for “national independence and identity”. The book ends with this claim, “We do not think the term “racism” should be applied solely because people seek to retain the broad parameters of the ethnic base of country and its national identity, even though this can involve discriminating against outside groups.” (3)
Goodwin’s earlier study of UKIP (with Robert Ford) described Farage’s old party as appealing to “the ageing, shrinking and left behind white working class” which Labour had ignored in its “modernising” years under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. This continues to another sweeping generalisation, “White working class voters no longer saw Labour as a party sensitive to their concerns but as part of the problem.” (4)
It is too early to map the sociology of the Brexit Party. Or to indicate to what degree ‘ethnic’ issues motivate its supporters. But perhaps Goodhall offers a clue. In an outline of the pro-Brexit forces from an after the Referendums, he states, “It was not so much people versus elites but a clear coalition of wealthy and poor, connected and isolated, northern and southern. Far from an outsider clique, its campaign leaders were senior cabinet minister The Brexit Party’s message is simple and familiar: they took your country from you, now they’ve taken your democracy too. And “they” are the elites, those who hate the culture of the people, the values of the people, the democracy of the people.”
A central feature of the Brexit Party itself has yet to be examined. It is, in the mould of a number of new European populist parties, not just Leader dominated but entirely the property of one Nigel Farage. It is, he says, “a company not a political party“. This is in many senses a trait not just of right wing populists. Farage’s rival French President Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche, was created like a business ‘start up’ and has only a gestural internal life. La France insoumise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is a “movement” a “un lieu de Rassemblement” that is a rallying point, with no competing internal platforms. Policies are decided on-high and then approved by E-Mail. As quickly as anybody who displeases the owner of the Brexit Party critics of Mélenchon discover that they are out on a limb. (5)
Farage’s outfit is everything but the creation of the ‘left behind’ the peripheral regions, the downtrodden working class. It has nothing in common with the British labour movement, created by workers themselves. It is the spin of ponces working in offices on the model of Trump and his alt-right communication specialists – a milieu Farage, along with finance capital, is intimately linked with. It is, and in this we agree with Goodwin, if nothing else, it is national populist, putting their idea of the nation above everything else, against the “non-people”, the rootless cosmopolitan internationalists. That is, it is against the left, the labour movement, and democratic politics.
Betrayal
The Brexit Party has one main story, that of ‘Betrayal”. Apart from the hard-right media, such as the Express, this is promoted by the former leftists of Spiked, “This betrayal narrative” states Chris Gilligan “that Spiked share with Farage, George Batten (UKIP’s new leader) and Tommy Robinson (former figurehead of the far-right English Defence League (EDL), and currently an ‘adviser’ to UKIP), is a recurring theme in Spiked commentary on Brexit.” Spiked itself boils it down to demanding democracy against the willful manipulations of pro-EU politicians. (6)
This portrayal of the Brexit issue as a conflict between the “democracy of the people” and the treacherous ‘Oligarchy’ may be hard to shape by advocates of Left-wing populism. Chantal Mouffe has spoken of how all demands for democracy could be taken up by the left, may find hard to reshape in their own image. The Brexit Party has, if nothing else, a “strong libidinal investment” in its national “form of identification”. Jean-Luc Mélenchon declares in an interview with El pais this week, that he continues to consider himself not in terms of left and right but in relation to ” “El pueblo y la oligarquía” , the people (against) the oligarchy Jean-Luc Mélenchon ( “Los tratados de la UE niegan a Francia sus necesidades”). But only under 10% of French voters identify with his rally as part of the People. (7)
The difficulty becomes all the more acute in that a large part of the British left, inside or outside the Labour Party has not stood up for the democracy of the peoples, a project to work with the rest of the European left to transform the European Union. There have been feeble attempts to ignore the need to confront Farage, and describe the British divisions over Brexit as a conflict between “two” rival nationalisms. Rhetoric about ‘elites’ may not have reached the paranoiac delirium of Jaun Banco’s recent Crépusculeand its attack on the “imperium” of the “oligarchie parisienne”. But we have seen in the Full Brexit (which brings together Communist Party of Britain members and Spiked writers, including the Brexit Party candidate James Heartfield), and in the writing of New Left review contributor, Wolfgang Streeck, a willingness to indulge the fantasies of the hard-right about a European Empire. (8)
Is it any wonder that the Weekly Worker prints this last Friday,
The second important motion debated concerned LAW’s attitude to the European elections – especially in view of George Galloway’s call to support the right wing Brexit Party on May 23. Perhaps surprisingly, this had been met with various degrees of approval from some Lexiteers, including comrades on LAW’s unofficial Facebook group.
Can the Labour Party’s European election campaign “unite” both sides of the Brexit debate? Given the issues discussed here, nothing is less probable. The Brexit Party is more than a virtual ballot box and Net operation: it has tapped into public opinion. Only a sustained effort to uproot them, to face them down with an internationalist pro-European stand, and work to expose their hard right, anti-popular politics, can build the electoral coalition to defeat them. If need be street action against the Brexit Bullies may be called for.
Nigel Farage flew into a rage at Andrew Marr during a heated exchange, accusing the BBC presenter of ‘the most ridiculous interview ever’. Farage grew increasingly incensed throughout the interview after Marr repeatedly brought up a series of controversial comments the Brexit Party leader had said in the past. He was asked whether he still supported ‘replacing the NHS with a private insurance based system’ and also whether he still believed global warming was the ‘stupidest thing in human history’. The Brexit Party leader also appeared to forget he had advocated a second referendum on membership of the EU, after telling Marr that conducting one would be ‘the ultimate betrayal’. Marr proceeded to play a clip from January 2018, where Farage said ‘we should have a second referendum’. Growing increasingly frustrated, he told Marr: ‘Do you want to discuss these European elections or not?
Page 174. Christophe GilleyLe Crépuscule de la France d‘en haut 2017 (2014)
Page 75 National Populism. The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin. 2018.
Page 133. Revolt on the Right. Explaining Support for the radical Right in Britain. Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin. 2014.
À propos du mouvement «La France insoumise». Mélenchon. “ les processus de « démocratie interne » sont également à l’œuvre. Mais dans le mouvement, on s’efforce de ne jamais en faire un sujet de conflictualité interne. Il n’y a donc pas de « majorité », de « minorités », pas de plateformes concurrentes, pas d’orientation générale opposée les unes aux autres. Autrement dit : le mouvement se soucie d’abord d’être inclusif et collectif davantage que formellement « démocratique », sachant à quelles violences et dérives conduisent les soi-disant pratiques « démocratiques » organisées par les règlements intérieur des partis traditionnels. Le mouvement n’a qu’une référence idéologique commune a tous ses membres : le programme.
Proud and Patriotic Socialist Labour Party on ‘Brexit Day’.
The Socialist Labour Party, founder Arthur Scargill, still exists (thanks to Steve and for more information, John).
In the news today,
SLP Welcomes Hartlepool Councillors
We are delighted to announce that Hartlepool borough councillors, Allan Barclay and Sandra Belcher, have joined Socialist Labour. On behalf of the SLP they will contest the local elections on 2nd May
With many years of service to the people of the town, Councillor Belcher who represents Jesmond Ward and Councillor Barclay who represents Manor House ward will carry the flag for Socialist Labour in Hartlepool
All our members, supporters and voters we feel sure will join us in congratulating our councillors who have declared their support for our policies. We wish them every success on 2nd May
STOP PRESS Since the local elections FOUR more Hartlepool councillors have quit Labour and joined the SLP.
Councillor Akers-Belcher told the Mail his decision came on the back of what he says has been a lack of action by the party over complaints about “ongoing bullying, harassment, racism and anti-Semitism” which he submitted in August and then again in October.
He said he had told senior officers within the party he did not intend to lead for another term, but that conflict between them continued, and that his predicted fall in support for the party across the Tees Valley has been realised because of the issues.
The resignations by Coun Akers-Belcher and Coun Marshall, who both represent the Foggy Furze wards, and Coun James, who is a ward member for Manor House, follow in the footsteps of others, who have left to join the Socialist Labour Party.
They include Coun Stephen Akers-Belcher, who was initially suspended from Labour before he resigned and is Coun Christopher Akers-Belcher’s husband, Allan Barclay, who lost his seat in last week’s local election after standing for the Socialist Labour Party, and Coun Sandra Belcher, Coun Stephen Akers-Belcher’s mother.
On Brexit they they have published this, (April).
The British people and Socialists voted to leave this bastion of Capitalism which is based on a Customs Union, a Single Market and Free Movement of Workers and Capital.
So far Britain’s membership of the EU has cost British workers jobs, an annual deficit in trade with the EU of over £85 billion, an annual membership fee of £25 billion plus being ruled be
unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.
In the name of all those who fought for freedom, I call for a ‘No Deal’ exit from the evil European Union.
Here is their call for a Boycott of the European Elections.
PRESS RELEASE
Boycott EU Elections Says Scargill
The Socialist Labour Party has repeatedly made clear it will not stand any candidates in the European elections or support any party, organisation or individual standing in these elections.
Participation in these elections is in breach of the democratic vote of the British people in 2016. The SLP’s position was clear long before that of the Communist Party of Britain and/or the Morning Star, or any other body or individual still confused.
The SLP also urges that as many Party members as possible should stand in local authority elections, thereby conveying our message on not only a local but national and international basis to voters within those boundaries.
We will never have a fair, democratic electoral system in the United Kingdom until we introduce a system based on proportional representation: a principle which was a cornerstone of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900. The French government has just conceded it will introduce democratic proportional representation for all elections, and the UK must be pressured to do the same.
Arthur Scargill Leader, Socialist Labour Party 26th of April.
Fire Brigades Union (FBU) official (Executive Council), Spiked Contributor, Full Brexit supporter, and head of the Arron Banks funded Trade Unionists Against the EU, Paul Embery, came to wider attention this April after denouncing ‘rootless cosmopolitans’.
He was told to shut up by the highly regarded trade union the FBU.
On the Nigel Farage Brexit Party supporting Spiked site Embery was unrepentant,
My interview with @spikedonline on anti-Semitism, political witch-hunts, Brexit, and the cultural gulf that separates the leadership of the labour movement from ordinary working-class voters. https://t.co/P1XD5EZx50
This really captures the divide in our society, as I tweeted, between ‘a rootless, cosmopolitan, bohemian middle class’ and a ‘rooted, communitarian, patriotic working class’.
Bohemian, cosmopolitan, all words often in the air down at the Rose and Crown.
In fact not even bleeding used chez Coatesy except in quotes.
Embery continued,
These scarlet-faced witch-finders are a threat to free speech, and they need to be faced down remorselessly.
Everyone knows Danny Baker meant no offence. But, of course, he wasn't sacked for causing offence. He was sacked for doing something that led to a Twitter storm created by people *who assumed offence on behalf of others*. This is the sad, censorious little world we have created.
Phillips left the Labour Party during the years of Tony Blair‘s leadership, rejoining after the 2010 general election. She told Rachel Cooke in her interview in The Guardian it was because her parents stopped paying her membership direct debit. Her period at Women’s Aid made Phillips “utterly pragmatic… I learned that my principles don’t matter as much as [people’s] lives.”In the 2012 local elections, she was elected as a Labour councillor for the Longbridge ward, taking the seat from the Conservatives.
Embery claims he aims to restore a “sense of belonging”,
Where we currently have disunity and atomisation throughout our communities – not least because identity politics proliferates – we must foster instead a spirit of civic nationalism that generates a sense of belonging, patriotism and shared citizenship between all of our people. (How to fix Britain after Brexit)
For some months there have been reports in the French press that the far-right Rassemblementnational (RN) of Marine Le Pen has been distancing itself from Frexit, the demand that France leave the European Union.
Some small French far-right parties continue with this policy, notably the L’Union populaire républicaine of François Asselineau and the Front National (which is the now the RN) break-away, Les Patriotes of Florian Philippott. The demand is sometimes echoed by a fringe of the Gilets Jaunes. (1)
But after speculation the RN itself formally announced this in April:
Frexit had been a key RN policy right up to the party’s Presidential campaign in 2017.
Despite this turn the far-right party still has plenty of nationalist ‘reforms’ in mind starting with the abolition of the European Commission in favour of straight-forward intergovernmental negotiations, and continuing up to plans to impose harsh controls over all forms of migration inside or from outside the EU.
But this change indicates two things.
Firstly the disaster that is Brexit has deterred others following.
The second, is that if elected Farage’s Brexit Party will not find such willing allies in the European Parliament, out to join with them to do what they can to destroy the European Union.
There are also growing indications that European national populists face an obvious difficulty. How can nationalists, whose whole raison d’être is to promote ‘their’ nation’ work with those with the same basis in other nations in an international project.
A further point arises.
Former leftist, New Left Review author and Spiked contributor Wolfgang Streeck has staked his hopes on the Fall of the European Empire and such “anti-imperialist” (his description) forces as the German AfD on the far-right. (2)
It might seem that those, some claiming to be on the left, rubbing their hands in glee at the destruction of the European “liberal empire” with the help of the national populists may have been celebrating too soon. (2)
In a change of strategy, nationalist party leaders Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini are now promising voters a far-right bloc to overhaul the EU from within. But experts say it will be difficult for nationalists across Europe to co-operate.
…
At present, the European far-right is split across three umbrella groups. In addition to its linchpins the National Rally and the League, the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) bloc has expanded to encompass the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), as well as an array of smaller Scandinavian and Eastern European far-right parties.
However, other nationalist outfits such as Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party and the Swedish Democrats sit in the European Conservatives and Reformists group, while the UK’s Brexit Party and Lithuania’s Order and Justice are part of the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group.
..
In light of this fragmentation, “Salvini is trying to unite the far right populist groups ahead of the European elections”, in a new grouping that would further expand ENF, noted Vasiliki Tsagkroni, a lecturer in political science specialising in European populism at the University of Leiden, in an interview with FRANCE 24.
An integral part of this plan is Salvini’s and Le Pen’s gambit to woo a big beast of the European far-right, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose Fidesz party was suspended from the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) – currently largest group in the European Parliament – in March.
…
Amid the inextricable difficulties Brexit has created for the UK, Le Pen and Salvini have had to pivot towards proposing to upend the EU from within because they realised they had to ditch their previous vote-losing ‘Frexit’ and ‘Italexit’ agendas.
The National Rally 2019 European election manifesto contains no reference to leaving the euro or the EU – both key planks of Le Pen’s failed 2017 presidential campaign. “We didn’t have much choice: either we had to submit [to the EU] or we had to leave it. But now we have allies,” Le Pen glossed it. Likewise, Salvini’s League dropped its anti-euro stance in late 2018, with its economic spokesperson saying that leaving the single currency is “not possible”.
“Most of these far-right populist parties have understood that telling people they would leave the EU and the euro is scary,” explained Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the extreme right at the Fondation Jean Jaurès think tank in Paris, in an interview with FRANCE 24. “And the example of Brexit adds to this: the British know what they want to get out of, but they have no idea where they’re going.”
Aurélien Enthoven, 17, son of singer Carla Bruni and philosopher/broadcaster Raphaël Enthoven, has been campaigning for the Republican Popular Union (UPR), a nationalist party that supports leaving the EU, the newspaper Le Parisien reported Wednesday.
Enthoven was seen at the party’s pro-Frexit rally on May 1, wearing a Brexit “Leave means leave” T-shirt, and, according to Le Parisien, he contributed £25 to Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party.
Note: Opinion Poll, ” L’UPR rassemble 1,5% d’intentions de vote.”
(2) “Note also that what since the refugee episode of 2015 has become the biggest opposition party, the AfD, while nationalist, is so only in the sense of isolationist and anti-imperialist – and is, strangely enough, for this reason, branded by German liberal imperialists as “anti-European”. With benevolent reading, leaving aside for a moment the party’s disgusting fits of historical revisionism, AfD nationalism amounts to unwillingness to pay for empire, with corresponding willingness to allow other countries to do their own thing; see the party’s strong belief in appeasement instead of confrontation in relation to Russia, a belief it shares with the left wing of the Linkspartei.” Wolfgang Streeck – The European Union is a liberal empire, and it is about to fall.
This is not how people on the left normally analyse the racist far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Afd).
I tried to persuade @Nigel_Farage to support my candidacy in #Peterborough to emphasise the broad democratic alliance the campaign must be and balance the candidatures of Ms Widdecombe and Ms Rees-Mogg. Now that the #Brexit Party have named their candidate I have withdrawn my own
Mr Galloway this evening confirmed he was pulling out of the race after missing out on the Brexit Party nomination which has gone to Secret Millionaire Mike Greene.
Mr Galloway tweeted: “I tried to persuade @Nigel_Farage to support my candidacy in #Peterborough to emphasise the broad democratic alliance the campaign must be and balance the candidatures of Ms Widdecombe and Ms Rees-Mogg. Now that the #Brexit Party have named their candidate I have withdrawn my own.”
Mr Galloway had never confirmed if he was standing as an independent or with a party, although he had been rumoured to be seeking the Brexit Party nomination.
Annunziata Rees-Mogg, a former Conservative parliamentary candidate who is standing for the Brexit Party in the upcoming European elections, denied rumours earlier this week she wanted to be her new party’s candidate in Peterborough.
Ms Widdecombe, a former Tory MP who is also standing to be a Brexit Party MEP, had joined party leader Nigel Farage at a Brexit Party rally on Tuesday at the KingsGate Conference Centre in Peterborough.
Mr Greene’s candidacy was confirmed earlier this evening.
The Brexit Party is contesting its first ever parliamentary election but is currently the 10/11 odds on favourite to win according to Ladbrokes, just ahead of Labour which is evens.
I am proud to be taking on the challenge of standing for the Brexit Party and rebuilding trust in democracy, in the Peterborough by-election on 6 June.https://t.co/3rajK1Laii
There was a time, a happy time for Galloway, when he was the leader of the Respect Party, MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, venerated by his close allies in the Stop the War Coalition, led by Counterfire’s Lindsey German, and his close friends, Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray, an alliance that brought together the Socialist Workers Party and (euphemistically named) ‘conservative’ Muslim Association of Britain.
Then there was a schism, yet Galloway still pulled ’em in, with his comrades in Respect Renewal, Ken Loach (now a sponsor of Labour Against the Witch-hunt), Victoria Brittain, Salma Yaqoob and Nick Wrack.
Then, the divine surprise of the ‘Bradford Spring” when he was elected as MP again in the 2012 Bradford West by-election.
More rows followed after Galloway showed an understanding of sexual etiquette and excused his old mucker Julian Assange.
One of the last faithful, Yvonne Ridley, who had sought to keep Respect “zionist free” (Respect is a Zionist free party … if there was any Zionism in the Respect Party they would be hunted down and kicked out. We have no time for Zionists,”, stood in Rotherham in 2012 and gained 8% of the vote.
Since those happy days – he was defeated in Bradford in 2015 by Labour’s Naz Shah) Galloway has made a living on RT and other media outlets.
He has become something of a poet,
This year things seemed to be looking up as Galloway contemplated becoming a modern version of Jacques Doriot, who was expelled from the French Communist Party in 1934 and founded the far-right Parti Populaire Français. Doriot culminated this distinguished career by supporting the Vichey regime, and then fighting for Hitler on the Eastern Front.
Now in a pensive mood the great man reflects after this snub:
Believe it or not this is a good piece. Corbyn needs to read it reread it and read it again. Brexit has robbed Labour of its insurgency. It’s time to claw it back | Owen Jones | Opinion | The Guardian https://t.co/f4WSyWrzCX
British workers are set to keep demanding Brexit at the upcoming EU elections.
There’s a parallel in the ‘unpardonable to stand with Farage’ line with that taken by many commentators and ‘historians’ who condemned the USSR for ‘standing with Hitler’ or, conversely, ‘standing with Churchill’ during WW2. In fact, the USSR stood with neither; she stood with the workers of the USSR and of all countries. But the tactical alliances she made enabled the Soviet Union to vanquish her mighty imperial enemies.
…
Brexit, as the CPGB-ML has emphasised since the beginning of the debate leading up to the referendum (in which 17.4 million voted to leave the EU, as opposed to 16.1 million who voted to remain), hurts European, British and US imperialism alike.
The harder the Brexit, the more the imperialists will be set back. Yes, some privileged workers will find that their privileges come under threat from this outcome, but that’s the way the winds of capitalist economic crisis are blowing in any case.
The CPGB (M-L) does not hesitate to cite the mouthpiece of the social-imperialists, RT…against ‘imperialism’.
This farrago continues:
Farage, like that other disrupter US president Donald Trump, may not realise that Brexit is against the broader interests of imperialism, but most of the other imperialists do.
…
What we are seeing on a global scale, decried as ‘populism’ by imperialist representatives and as a ‘massive shift to the right’ by the imperialist ‘left’ (social democrats, Trotskyites and revisionists), is, in fact, massive disillusionment with the effects of imperialist economic crisis and war, and consequently the established politics of imperialism.
It is the beginnings of a revolutionary temper among the masses, and only our weakness organisationally prevents communists from drawing mass support from this righteous anger and becoming a major force in British political life. This can change, but only if we adopt the correct attitude towards the working class’s desertion of the bourgeois parties: we must embrace it!
The CPGB-ML have thus decided to side with the vehicle of the most reactionary fraction of finance capital (the Brexit Party) against the working class and socialist movement.
Their modestly titled “tactical alliance” with national populists, dreamers of the British Empire, and self-serving free-market nationalists, excldues them from the left and all progressive forces.
It is to be hoped that their presence at any left or trade union event will be met with an appropriate response.
Here is their banner:
A useful history of red-brown alliances is given in this article.
The start of the Occupation of the Ruhr by France and Belgium in 1923, meant to force Germany to continue paying war reparations, however threatened this cooperation and resulted in rising nationalism in Germany, especially among the working class, and the Comintern subsequently pushed for cooperation between the Communists and the ultra-nationalists. In June 1923 Radek gave a speech to the Enlarged Executive Committee of the Comintern praising Leo Schlageter, a far-right Freikorps member who together with his unit joined the NSDAP in 1921 and engaged in sabotage against the French forces occupying the Ruhr before being executed by them in May 1923. This was a followed by a period of cooperation between the KPD and the Nazis against the Versailles Treaty during which KPD member Ruth Fischer infamously attacked “Jewish capital” in an attempt to appeal to Nazi students, and the KPD’s newspaper reprinted articles by members of the German far-right such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck even as its rank and file members were fighting against fascists on the streets.
I believe that the great majority of the nationalist-minded masses belong not to the camp of the capitalists but to the camp of the workers. We want to find, and we shall find, the path to these masses. We shall do all in our power to make men like Schlageter, who are prepared to go to their deaths for a common cause, not wanderers into the void, but wanderers into a better future for the whole of mankind; that they should not spill their hot, unselfish blood for the profit of the coal and iron barons, but in the cause of the great toiling German people, which is a member of the family of peoples fighting for their emancipation.
Known as the ‘Schlageter’ line this is ultimately the basis, a common interest between nationalists and national Bolsheviks, which is the ground of the CPGB (M-L)’s position.
It is not to be expected to have any real effect.
Except….by spreading political confusion it will undoubtedly contribute to the growth of the far-right.
A World to Win. The Life and Works of Karl Marx. Sven-Eric Liedman. Verso. 2018. Translated by Jeffrey N. Skinner. (This appears in the latest Chartist magazine).
“I have attempted to explain not only who Marx was in his time” announces Sven-Eric Liedman, “but why he remains a vital source of inspiration today.” This major biography, published in Swedish in 2015, aims to offer a “portrait of Marx unobscured by what happened after his death.”
The book is also, the Preface to this English edition explains, a counterweight to Gareth Stedman Jones’ Karl Marx Greatness and Illusion, which appeared (2016) after the present work’s original publication. Jones, he asserts, tends to overshadow Marx’s own writings through his detailed portraits of the inspiration of his thought, and the early socialist and workers’ movement. Jones saw Marx’s crowning achievement in the years when the International Working Men’s Association, the First International, began to flourish, from 1864 to 1869. In that study this was the period when the author of Capital deployed “a language with which politically aware working men at the time could identify”.
Stedman Jones is known for an interest in the way language forms class. But he also stated that Marx was buoyed up by the belief that, “the process of a transition from the capitalist mode of production towards the society of associated producers had already begun.” It was this that propelled him to reach out to the activists in trade unions and the co-operative movement, associations that could change the course of history. It is from these origins that ‘Marxism’ took political shape.
Liedman, by contrast, is inspired by the approach of the largely German New Marx Reading (neue Marx-Lektüre) of figures such as Hans Georg Backhaus. This aims to show Marx’s ideas, not the Marxism that developed inside these movements. A large part of A World to Win is taken up with the conceptual analysis of Marx’s categories, from the method announced in the 1859 Introduction to the Grundrisse, that work itself, and the “unfinished Masterpiece” of Capital.
Marx nevertheless stood out as more politically active “than any other political thinker in the nineteenth century”. “In his own time”, Liedman states, “Marx was almost exclusively known as a politician.” He was “allied with the working class” acting for their liberation, the pivot of “the liberation of all humanity.” Liedman’s account of Marx’s involvement in radical German ‘young Hegelian politics’ is largely philosophical. But he soon brings the issue of industrialisation, the Industrial Revolution to the fore. The account of the 1848 Revolutions, above all in France, lacking Jones’ familiarity with (largely French) utopian socialism and communism, Christian social thinking, and early social democratic politics, portrays the bond between social and political revolution.
The International.
In the late 1860s Marx made a significant contribution to the International. While advancing his views on the “abolition of the wages system”, this involved “compromising” with a variety of socialist, anarchist and trade union forces. Spreading the word of “solidarity” between workers’ struggles (the body’s prime aim), to the “duty of the working classes to conquer political power” allowed for leeway between opposing viewpoints. But the months of the Paris Commune in 1871 saw Marx convinced again that “bloody conflicts as part of social development that would be hard to avoid.”
Liedman is less informative than Stedman Jones on why many of the British trade unionists recoiled from the Commune. It was not just that they considered it “rash” and “hopeless”. Their lack of sympathy extended to its plans for federal self-government faced with what was already the foundation, under initial Orléanist, constitutional Monarchist, and constitutional republican leadership, of the French Third Republic. Marx’s social democratic and republican rival, Louis Blanc, the veteran of the 2nd Republic, who would go on to serve in that Republic’s National Assembly, enjoyed great influence over the British radical movement. (2)
A World to Win gives substance to the ideas that Marx developed. This ranges from a discussion of Method, from the 1959 Introduction to the Grundrisse, the traps of the ‘metaphors’ of base and superstructure, the category of the “totality”, dialectics, form and content. There is a more accessible account of Marx’s studies of technology, machinery, and the industrial revolution, its downside for the working classes, and, Liedman’s forte, science. In this the book deploys with a welcome freshness greater textual resources than other recent biographies.
Was Marx, in this context, a pioneering thinker of globalisation? Liedman’s claims (he is far from the first) about his “prophetic” insights are not wholly convincing. Joseph Addison talked in the Essay on the Royal Exchange (1711, Spectator No 69) of merchants who “knit mankind together in mutual intercourse”, and Ricardo, of free commerce creating a “universal society of nations”. Marx highlighted the planet-wide development, and, while not thinking it through, did not regard colonisation as a straightforward boon. In this respect, an observation that deserves underlining for critics of globalisation is Marx’s view, which he cites, that, “free trade expedited the classless society”.
Benefits of the Doubt.
A World to Win, as a biography must, traces out a life. Liedman gives Marx the benefit of some weighty doubts on his behaviour towards his servant Helene “Lenchen” Demuth, his personal feuds (notably with Bakunin), and the abusive, often racist, vocabulary of his correspondence with Engels, described as “roguishly nonchalant”.
A World to Win often cites one of Marx’s favourite authors, Honoré de Balzac. For Liedman one tale, Melmoth Reconciled (1835), is a “picture of capitalism” in which the capitalists “live their lives at the Stock Exchange in a pact with the Devil.” (Page 462) Others recall that the hero Castanier got for his soul an eye into “men’s thought’s. I see the future, and I know the past. I am here, and I can be elsewhere also.” After peeling away Marxism from Marx, to reveal Marx’s original picture of the “mechanism and the scheme of the world.” Liedman has many pages on the thoughts of theorists who have attempted to do the same. Little of this is accessible to those not already familiar with the terrain. Despite the great strengths of the biography, many may come away feeling, like Balzac’s Cashier in the short story, that such painstaking knowledge of thinker’s insights into the whole of creation is too much to absorb.
******
Pages 465 – 466. Karl Marx. Greatness and Illusion. Gareth Stedman Jones. Allen Lane 2016.
Page 510. Karl Marx. Greatness and Illusion. Gareth Stedman Jones. Allen Lane 2016.
There is the claim that the working class, the “popular” vote, is for Brexit.
This is contested claim (ignoring the strong popular anti-Brexit vote in major cities to begin with), and, odd, since many of the people advancing the claim say they are Leninists.
To Lenin, on a generous interpretation, socialism is the fusion, by persuasion, between Marxist ideas and the labour movement, it is not the “spontaneous” product of opinion polls.
On a less generous view Leninism claims to be a scientific standpoint celebrated by the various, not to say, teeming, micro-parties of that section of the left leading the working class by these “tribunes of the people” by a variety of stunts and tactics.
The major reason they refer to the social basis of the Brexit vote is not because they have become psephologists but because it’s the view they support.
Take this from the revolutionary socialists (self-proclaimed Leninists) of Counterfire.
Labour is winded by these results, not least because they weren’t expected, but it has to fight back in the Euros. Firstly against Farage, the fascist ‘Tommy Robinson’, UKIP and all the rest of the racist right. But as importantly, by putting an agenda which argues for a People’s Brexit (something Labour seems to have abandoned in the face of its own Remainers), and for a completely altered set of priorities on domestic issues ..
Labour, they say, must, ” Demand that general election and a People’s Brexit, and redouble efforts to campaign around other issues – climate emergency, austerity deaths, housing.”
Now one can agree with one of German’s points, that Corbyn should not do a “deal” with May on Brexit.
But this?
That we can “break through the Brexit cloud which hangs over British politics at present, and can hopefully unite those on different sides of the divide”?
By campaigning for a People’s Brexit that few have heard of and those that have have most have already forgotten the phrase.
No chance.
We can agree that fighting austerity policies is Labour’s Number one priority.
But nobody, nobody, can imagine however “hopefully” that there is unity when she calls for the very issue, Brexit, and her group’s support for it, can be thought away by other campaigns.
How exactly are they going to “fight” Farage, one might ask, if all they can say is, “we want a better Brexit than you do!”
Brexit was, is, and will be, the key issue, and Counterfire stands with the Brexit side.
Many would consider that Counterfire, and the Lexiters more widely, underestimate not the potential electoral support for Farage, but the political basis for the ‘red-brown’ alliance. This includes people in the ‘left’ Full Brexit, as well as the media promoted (from the BBC to Sky) Spiked (ex-Revolutionary Communist Party).
National populism has its ‘left’ wing with these links, and it also has its brown wing, clearly on the far-right.
This mixture, is known in France, where there are plenty of examples of such a bloc, is “confusionism”.
Yesterday brought news from the ‘brown’ side of this alliance.
Nigel Farage under fire over 'antisemitic tropes' on far-right US talkshow https://t.co/IKHef4GJZy
Nigel Farage is facing strong criticism from Jewish organisations and a series of other groups after it emerged he repeatedly took part in interviews with a far-right US talkshow host, during which the Brexit party leader openly discussed conspiracy theories, some of which have been linked to antisemitism.
A Guardian investigation has found Farage has appeared at least six times on the show of Alex Jones, who was sued by bereaved parentsafter claiming a US school shooting was faked, and was banned permanently from Facebook last week.
…
In his various appearances on Jones’s show, Farage discussed themes commonly associated with an antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish financiers are behind a plot to replace nation states with a global government.
In the six identified interviews, which date from 2009 to last year, Farage, whose Brexit party is leading polls for the upcoming European elections, repeatedly uses words and phrases such as “globalists” and “new world order”, which regularly feature in antisemitic ideas.
In the interviews, Farage also says:
Members of the annual Bilderberg gathering of political and business leaders are plotting a global government.
The banking and political systems are working “hand in glove” in an attempt to disband nation states.
“Globalists” are trying to engineer a world war as a means to introduce a worldwide government.
Climate change is a “scam” intended to push forward this transnational government.
One minute it’s former leftist Claire Fox citing Shelly’s Rise like Lions in the service of National Populism. The next it’s full conspi Bilderberg stuff.
The nutter pictured above is probably a lot saner than this lot.
Morning Star, Self-Styled Supporter of Jeremy Corbyn.
“Our view is that a mass boycott and stay-away, similar to the tactic used in South Africa when the apartheid government forced local government structures on an unwilling population, will be a massive restatement of the democratic decision to Leave.”
With this provocative analogy, an insult to the brave people in South Africa fighting apartheid, underlining that the Morning Star intends to develop its already announced anti-Labour campaign, the article contains these points
The Communist Party’s political committee (PC), reviewing the message coming back from People’s Brexit meetings in cities as far afield as Cardiff, Bristol, Derby, Cambridge, Southend, Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester, London and Norwich and some workplace gatherings around the country, confirmed the party’s decision to boycott the European elections on April 24.
International secretary Professor John Foster said: “The ‘People’s Vote’ in the biggest poll in British history in June 2016 was to leave the European Union… this should be reinforced by a ‘People’s Boycott’ of the EU elections if they go ahead.
“Britain should have left the EU and its institutions by now, almost three years after the result — but this been prevented so far by a majority of MPs and the Tory Cabinet who want to keep us tied to EU single market and customs union rules if they can’t sabotage Brexit altogether.”
…
The party’s campaign for an active boycott is the start of something much bigger. We want the maximum pressure brought to bear on parliament to implement the majority vote from the referendum.
If a boycott — in effect a massive “stay-away” — does not sharpen minds, workers taking to the streets and non co-operation in other ways can follow. We need a People’s Brexit and a general election that can return a left and Labour government, which can begin to rebuild Britain for the people, not the bankers.
A boycott is designed to take support away from all parties….
While some of its close allies in The Full Brexit and former best friend George Galloway are backing Farage, it is good to see that the Morning Star/Communist Party of Britain has not forgotten its classics.
“Firstly, it is not true that fascism is only the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. Fascism is not only a military-technical category. Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy.
Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy. There is just as little ground for thinking that Social-Democracy can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. These organisations do not negate, but supplement each other. They are not antipodes, they are twins.
Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organisations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie cannot retain power without such a bloc. It would therefore be a mistake to think that “pacifism” signifies the liquidation of fascism. In the present situation, “pacifism” is the strengthening of fascism with its moderate, Social-Democratic wing pushed into the forefront.”
Experienced comrades predict that the CPB’s tactic, apart from putting pressure on Labour to do a “Ramsay McDonald” and collaborate with the Tories to introduce Brexit, will enable the micro-party and its organ to claim that any abstention was a vote for their ‘line’.
It isn’t populists who threaten life, liberty and democracy in Europe – it’s anti-populists.
I always (note Only always?) find it perplexing when people claim that the new national populism is a threat to life, liberty and democracy in Europe.
Because there is indeed a threat to life, liberty and democracy (note to ed: add, pursuit of happiness…?) in Europe today.
But it isn’t coming from populists. It’s coming from anti-populists. (note to ed, please underline emphasis)
And so it goes…
The real danger in Europe today, in political terms, isn’t populism – it’s anti-populism. The real danger is the shrill, often violent backlash of the technocratic elites (note: nifty turn of phrase) against the rise of national populist sentiment.
..
why do the political and cultural elites, most notably in the UK, seem willing to trash democracy itself in order to crush (note, isn’t that a bit mildly put) populist sentiment?
‘Trashing’ democracy is definitely bad.
So in the spirit of populist reason and the legacy of European civilisation, like Notre Dame itself, as transmitted by the voice of this blog we ask O’Neill to explain himself to his mates in the Brexit Party.
It’s an affair whose flames are consuming more than wood and stone; they are consuming tradition, the past itself, the legacy of the Revolutionary Communist Party, O’Neill’s spiritual birthplace.
It’s something which has has led nationalist populist sentiment to take a merry turn against his lot in Spiked:
A Brexit Party candidate for Warrington has quit at the failure of another would-be MEP to apologise for comments about the IRA bombing of the town.
European elections candidate Sally Bate said she had resigned because Claire Fox refused to condemn the attack.
Fox was a leading member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) which defended the 1993 bombing.
Ms Bate said Nigel Farage should remove her from the party list and “stand together with victims of the atrocity”.
Tim Parry, 12, and Johnathan Ball, three, were killed in the IRA attack on 20 March which left 56 others injured.
An RCP newsletter at the time of the bomb stated that the party defended “the right of the Irish people to take whatever measures necessary in their struggle for freedom”.
In a statement, Ms Fox said: “Terrible things happened – mercifully, a peaceful resolution has emerged following the Good Friday Agreement.”
She added: “I do not condone the use of violence.”
Ms Fox is top of the list of Brexit Party candidates for the North West, meaning she would be the first to claim any European Parliament seat which the group wins in elections on 23 May.
Ms Bate was listed seventh.
Announcing her resignation from the Brexit Party, Ms Bate said: “I am unhappy with Claire’s statement since she has not categorically condemned the violence inflicted by the IRA.
“I stand by Colin Parry and his family and all victims of the Warrington bomb and in view of Claire’s ambiguous position on the issue I cannot continue to stand beside her as a Brexit candidate…”
Cde Rogan has today tweeted this thread which Brendan is welcome to follow:
Ms Fox was a member of the RCP when the IRA planted a bomb at the Grand Hotel Brighton in 1984 where the Tory Party conference was taking place. 2/8https://t.co/ZYNO8MEO86pic.twitter.com/8875GDa0dZ
The RCP view on the bombing was "We support unconditionally the right of the Irish people to carry out their struggle for national liberation in whatever way they choose". 3/8https://t.co/fM2FfuDMCkpic.twitter.com/vGmrbQngF5
Most people will not rush to pontificate on implications of the local election results least of all for Labour’s Brexit strategy.
John McDonnell is reported to have responded earlier today ,
“So far message from local elections: Brexit – sort it. Message received.”
Responding to suggestions that his comments signalled he was keen to strike a deal with the government in the coming days, with both main parties at risk of a drubbing in next month’s European elections, McDonnell said: “We need to get on with sorting this out, one way or the other.”
This can be interpreted in many different ways, calling for a People’s Vote, a Soft Brexit, opposing Brexit in the new conditions that have emerged, and who knows what else – all in line with different angles on a Labour resolution passed in different days.
But just now Politics Home carries this report which, following the previous remarks, will cause a deep sigh of annoyance for the majority of Labour members who are opposed to actually existing Brexit .
The Labour leader said voters had sent a clear message that Parliament must get on with approving the UK’s departure from the European Union.
His comments added to the confusion surrounding Labour’s position after Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said the issue had to be dealt with “whichever way”, suggesting the party could end up opposing Brexit altogether.
Whether or not this is how the entire leadership and negotiating team views the talks, it must certainly reflect a strong strand of opinion – and in any case it reflects the unfortunate political dynamic. Whatever the risks for the Tories, the risks for Labour if it agrees a deal are greater – as explained here. It would amount precisely to bailing the Tories out.
These talks, to the degree they are “successful”, mean Labour accepting most of the Tories’ Brexit agenda, including for instance its Immigration Bill. The political logic of this is shown by Rebecca Long-Bailey referring to discussions in these negotiations about workers’ rights as “fantastic” (!)
Concerningly, John McDonnell tweeted “message from local elections – ‘Brexit – sort it.’ Message received.” This ambiguous statement is being widely interpreted as leaning further towards making a deal.
The talks are effectively counterposed to Labour taking the fight to the Tories, as the local government election results show. Similarly they are now a risk to Labour’s campaign in the European elections, as Paul Mason explains here.
Labour members should protest about Gardiner’s comments and, more importantly, demand the party withdraws from the talks. Sign the statement calling for that here.
Comrade Owen Jones makes many points in his guarded and thoughtful analysis today, but perhaps this is the most relevant one.
There will be many siren voices arguing that there are simple answers for Labour. As long as Brexit dominates, there aren’t. The party’s left-populist message is sidelined, and it risks alienating the remain and leave voters it needs to win an election. Sometimes the honest answer is there are no easy solutions, and anyone arguing otherwise is kidding themselves.
Left populism, which Owen has admired in Podemos, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s “rallying point”, La France insoumise, is on the decline.
In last month’s Spanish election Podemos lost twenty-nine MPs and 7 percent of its votes.
La France insoumise stands at a possible 8 to 9 % (in highly unstable opinion polls) for the coming European elections – and has no prospect of governing France whatsoever.
Left populism, the idea that “the” people, including the working class and oppressed groups, can be moblised against the “elites” and the “oligarchy” has been overshadowed by national populism.
That form of populism, in the UK overwhelmingly focused against the EU, has so far only drawn fringe parts of the left into its orbit in red-brown alliances like Farage’s Brexit Party.
It puts nation, national sovereignty, above everything else, and opposes it to the ‘anti-nation’ the rootless cosmopolitans, the ‘liberals’, which to them includes the internationalist left, the ‘anywhere’ people.
But the danger that more mainstream forces will try for a simple answer which is to appeal to the ‘real people’ who are anti-Brexit and ignore Labour’s broader constituencies, and the ties that bind the labour movement to Europe.
It would be better if we “sidelined” populism, left or right, and talked about serious left-wing policies.
The left cannot build a winning political bloc without the people who are opposed to Brexit for the simple reason that many of their principles define what a ‘left’ is.
The economic and poltiical programme of a Labour government needs to be based on alliances with our other European lefts to begin with, inside the structures of the European Union.
The European elections are still going ahead and the present un-constructive ambiguity will not help Labour campaign.
George Galloway has announced he will stand in the upcoming by-election in Peterborough.
Peterborough Telegraph.
The outspoken ex-Labour and Respect MP, who also starred on Celebrity Big Brother, made the announcement on Twitter shortly after it was confirmed a Recall Petition to remove sitting MP Fiona Onasanya had been successful.
Mr Galloway tweeted: “I intend to stand in the forthcoming parliamentary by-election in Peterborough. More follows…”
He later added: “If elected as the MP for #Peterborough my first priority will be to help secure the full implementation of the #Brexit decision made overwhelmingly by the people there in 2016. I believe I’m the best placed candidate to do so and the one who’d make the biggest impact in the House.”
Leave supporter Mr Galloway has not indicated if he is standing for a party or as an independent.
If @Nigel_Farage sweeps to victory on May 23 in the #EuroElections and I am elected in #Peterborough on June 6th it will be the end of backsliding and betrayal of #Brexit by the political class.
The prospect of European Elections in the UK has enabled national populism, both right and left, a public platform.
National populism can be seen as a collection of movements and parties which pit the ‘nation’ against the ‘globalised elites’ and put politics in the service of this. Sometimes this is the the ‘people’, the British people, the ‘real’ people, the ‘real’ working class, against the cosmopolitan left.
There is Farage’s Brexit Party, an alliance of the far-right, economic liberals, and former ‘revolutionary communists’ of Spiked, and the harder right UKIP. It is backed by the one-time favourite of the ‘left’, and Stop the War Coalition campaigner, George Galloway.
The Brexit Party illustrates another feature of national populism, confusionism, between right-wing and left-wing ideas.
The Full Brexit group, which involves Labour Peer Lord Glasman, critic of ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ Paul Embery of the ‘trade unionists’ against the EU, with close links to Arron Banks, the theorists of the ‘somewhere’ versus ‘nowhere’ people, David Goodhart, other academics and members of the Labour Party, Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star), Counterfire sympathisers and ‘left’ sovereigntists.
The Full Brexit claims that it aims, “to revive a genuine left internationalism”. But its politics are equally based on the priority to the ‘national.
They include those close to Spiked, such as this supporter and signer of the Full Brexit founding statement, now standing for Farage’s party.
As a supporter of @Another_Europe I am constantly being told by Full Brexit types that I will be responsible for delivering people to Farage. But building Farage’s f***ing Party and standing as candidates for him is a little more likely to deliver people to him, isn’t it? pic.twitter.com/Jsjx9KQ66r
The pro-Brexit German academic Wolfgang Streeck, who writes for New Left Review and the Farage backing site Spiked, writes in the same vein as the Full Brexit.
Arguably the most absurd "leftist" argument for migration restrictions yet: “Would you want Nelson Mandela to be a refugee in Germany? No! He’d be a mail carrier bringing Amazon parcels to your house… he was needed somewhere else.” https://t.co/XrlLNJKR85
It is suspected that these currents, have had some influence on Labour’s decision to remain ambiguous on policy for the European elections.
The CPB and Counterfire, for example, have campaigned for a ‘People’s Brexit’, a populist appeal which fell dead in the water.
But they continue to advance their cause.
On the one hand there is the argument that Labour needs to respect the Referendum result – the principal argument of the sovereigntists. These are the voices of the ‘real’ nation, not the liberal cosmopolitans (on this see on Shiraz: Stop stereotyping the north as Brexitland’ say four Labour MPs.)
On the other there is the potential, which by a combination of threats and exaggerations, these anti-EU groups are attempting to manoeuvre Labour into accepting Brexit in the belief that they could mould it to their wishes.
This is the position put forward in today’s Morning Star:
A Labour source told the Star: “The NEC agreed to keep the party’s policy the same as it ever was, which is to carry on fighting for a general election and to support an alternative Brexit deal which puts workers’ rights first.”
What this ‘deal’ could possibly be is buried in clouds of rhetoric.
The Tories have been unable to make a ‘deal’.
What on earth is the basis that anybody can be confident that Labour can make an agreement, one that satisfies the ‘Brexit on WTO rules’ supporting ‘left’ and ensure – please – that it, “Puts workers’ rights first?”
The shifting sands, or rather quicksands, of British politics are not a stable basic on which to advance Labour’s policy in the changed circumstances.
There is a need to clarify policy, not to deal with a conference composite, which was the result of many different motions on the issue of Brexit. Not only the failure of the Tories to reach a deal but the mass demonstrations for a People’s Vote, that is a new Referendum, have changed the political landscape.
Yesterday’s NEC decision can be seen in this light.
It is said that “after weeks of debate, they are simply reiterating their plan to hold open the “option” of a public vote if they can’t get their own deal or a general election.”
Why? There is the fundamental fact that they simply don’t like the idea of holding another referendum, seeing it as disrespectful to voters and unhelpful electorally to Labour. A majority of NEC members, like the leadership, would prefer to push through a soft Brexit and get the divorce deal part of the process over and done with.
This does not explain the possible influence of the national populists in moulding the idea of ‘soft’ national Brexit.
The view, put forward by a number of ‘left’ populists (both genuinely left, such as Chantal Mouffe) and the highly suspect Wolfgang Streeck) is that the left has to appeal to the ‘left behinds’ in the present ‘populist revolts’ against ‘elites’.
This includes supporters of groups like the Brexit Party and others on the far-right, and therefore people’s ‘concerns’ on migrant workers must be ‘listened to’.
Weak on economics, they believe that a fully sovereign Parliament can break free of the capitalist world and make its own road to socialism. at which point ……
Without bothering about ‘Europe’, that is the left and the labour movement in the rest of our continent.
Next there is the issue of Labour Party democracy.
As Michael Chessum says, why did these individuals vote as they did?
Yesterday, I understand that all 9 of our (the left's) CLP reps – the people on the NEC to represent the membership of the Labour party who are 80%+ in favour of a public vote – voted against including it.
Christ knows that your average member is supposed to think about that.
So now we know. Labour’s manifesto for the European election will be just as garbled and meaningless as its existing policy. After weeks of debate, they are simply reiterating their plan to hold open the “option” of a public vote if they can’t get their own deal or a general election.
This is evasive to the point of dishonesty. They’re now aggravating the uncertainty of their conference policy by committing it to their election manifesto.
….
What kind of Brexit did people want? We never asked. Leave was all things to all people. So we spent three years tearing ourselves apart over it. And now we risk letting ambiguity embolden a Brexit that nobody voted for three years ago and nobody wants now.
The European elections raise European issues.
Being ambiguous during them is not a good strategy.
Update from John and B, Red-Brown confusionism today.
For the first time in its 99 year history, the Communist Party (CP) has called on members and supporters to campaign for a boycott of an election in Britain, in this case, the EU election on 23 May.
Labour Heartlands will be conducting a number of articles expressing the Left position on the EU elections the first of these takes a look at the CPB position who are running a Boycott on the EU elections.
Writing exclusively for Labour Heartlands Phil Katz, Eastern district secretary explains the CPB position and why the Boycott.
The ‘exclusive’ (one imagines the competition for a piece from that quarter…) article does not mention that the CPB, which claims the mantle of the old Communist Party of Great Britain, stood against Labour in a crank list which got well under 0,5 % of the vote in the last European elections….
This is one of the key points:
A plan has been rolled out to explain the decision to allies and leading trades unionists. Members and supporters are being supplied – via a ‘download day’ – with up-to-the minute analysis, campaign materials including speakers notes, films, posters, leaflets, stickers, Facebook and Twitter cards – part of a social media strategy. The focus however, is on holding face to face discussion meetings whenever and wherever possible.
Every Communist Party branch is being asked to approach local Labour movement allies, especially Labour Party members to work together to hold meetings where those who voted Leave, Remain or not at all, are encouraged to enter into dialogue. These forces will be the hub of the movement to leave the EU and galvanise support in Brexit-voting areas for a change of government.
In other words to break the Labour vote and to get people to back a small ‘People’s Brexit’ campaign that nobody has heard about…
And this takes some bleeding cheek even from the red nationalists:
Readers of this article are likely to share that aim. Our view is that a mass boycott and stay-away, similar to the tactic used in South Africa when the apartheid government forced local government structures on an unwilling population, will be a massive restatement of the democratic decision to Leave.
We urge you to boycott and say No to the EU elections and Yes to a general election.
The disclaimer at the end is to say the least ambiguous.
Editors note: Labour Heartlands have not taken an official position on the EU elections at this point.
Real heartlands that lot, they are not sure about voting Labour….
Now, were I suspicious this all sounds like a typical far-left manoeuvre.
The European elections scheduled for May 23 are illegitimate in Britain”, John Foster told the Communist Party’s political committee on Wednesday evening.
He insisted that the “people’s vote” in the biggest poll in British history in June 2016 was to leave the European Union and that this should be reinforced by a “People’s Boycott” of the EU elections if they go ahead.
“Britain should have left the EU and its institutions by now, almost three years after the result – but this been prevented so far by a majority of MPs and the Tory Cabinet who want to keep us tied to EU single market and customs union rules if they can’t sabotage Brexit altogether”, the CP international secretary said.
Boycotting the elections to a “sham European Parliament that cannot even initiate its own legislation” would send the clearest message to the political and big business establishment that the referendum result must be honoured, Mr Foster argued.
In particular, he warned against Labour presenting itself as an anti-Brexit party, as some of its leaders and European candidates are intent upon doing.
Whether Labour members will have to organise to defend themselves against the ‘boycotters’ and various ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ and anti-EU red-brown groups, some of which have a thuggish record, is a live issue.
Meanwhile one of the Morning Star’s old favourite columnists is proceeding.
In a rambling editorial, which begins with the reflections that, “today the Italian people celebrated their Festa della Liberazione, which marks the overthrow of fascism which set in train the establishment of a social republic based on the value of labour.” the mouth piece of the hard-line pro-Brexit on WTO terms Communist Party of Britain Morning Star suggests the following,
There can hardly be a more suitable candidate for the Brussels talking shop than a motor mouth Trotskyite turned right-wing libertarian.
The election for which these oddballs present themselves is wholly illegitimate. But it presents real dangers for Labour if the party presents itself exclusively as the anti-Brexit party which some appear to want.
One of Labour’s candidates, the SDP turncoat and Blairite privatiser Lord Adonis, has advised Brexiteers not to vote Labour. The millions of working-class voters who voted Brexit in the June 2016 “people’s vote” might well take him at his word.
There is a strong case — rooted in a respect for the people’s democratic instincts — for an active boycott of this unnecessary, irrelevant vanity parade.
In other words, don’t stand up to the far right.
Don’t stand up for internationalism.
This is the group that this little lot backed during the last European elections: No2EU – Yes to Democracy.
Alex Mayer MEP said: “For as long as Britain is in the European Union we need British MEPs standing up for the people of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire. Only this week I was in the Parliament voting for research funding, for better rules on sustainable finance and to improve working conditions for people on zero hours contracts.
I am delighted to head a strong team of Euro candidates. We will fight for local investment, action on climate change and cracking down on tax dodgers.”
The full list of Euro candidates for the East of England is:
Nicked from John: Let#scelebrate the launch of the Brexit Party with a cartoon. Oh, and my Twitter thread on Claire Fox, the RCP and their backing for Irish Republicanism.
In our days in the 1970s we had an International Marxist Group (IMG) member as President of the Student Union.
You do tend to keep in touch with what’s happened in your old manor.
Just after I left I learnt that a group, which became the Revolutionary Communist Party, had a base at Warwick.
Their publications indicted that they were far-left. I knew them from the days when they were the RCT (Revolutionary Communist Tendency) and used to shout at us lot in the IMG, for not being real Marxists.
Step forward this type.
WATCH 📺 | @Fox_Claire on her decision to stand for the @BrexitParty_UK in the European Parliament elections: "I met so many voters saying 'I'll never vote again' that I felt it was about time someone on the Left stepped up and said 'I stand with you!'" 👊 pic.twitter.com/NAxAbYkIgh
With the news that "ex-communist" #ClaireFox is standing for the #BrexitParty of #NigelFarage (with the backing of @spikedonline – Ed. Brendan O'Neill), let's have a look at the views of the RCP/LivingMarxism/Spiked on Irish Republicanism over the years. 1/11
From Alf Garnett Rants Against Climate Change Demos to Split.
The Socialist Party, apart from the split in the PCS union, has apart from its hard-line pro-Brexit stand, and links with the likes of the Arron Banks national populist Trade unions against the EU’ has not campaign has not made the news these days.
Even the Alf Garnett rants have not won it a wider audience.
Rant against climate change demos by the hard-line pro-Brexit ‘Socialist’ Party,
“R’s insufficient programme and its rejection of politics inform its strategy…”
In reality, the manifesto leaves capitalism intact while seeking to remove its worst aspects. But this vague vision of an alternative society is utopian – and would not even mitigate the effects of climate change.
The idea of individual martyrdom is typical of a middle-class approach, and contrasts unfavourably with the democratic, collective traditions of working-class struggle.
Perhaps this latest row will get people’s attention note the bit, “further reflection of this capitulation is in shown in the Euro election where the main slogan of the Irish section’s candidate is “for a socialist feminist”.
“To all CWI members.
Declaration of a split from the CWI.
The Non Faction, Faction (NFF) last week circulated an open letter signed by a series of IEC members, (full and alternates) together with some visitors and translators who attended the IEC meeting in November 2018 together with some CWI members who were not present. In their statement the NFF rejected the decision of the International Secretariat to convene a meeting in November 2019 and appealed for the IS and the openly declared international faction to reconsider its position and commit to participating in an IEC meeting in August. Now they have taken the decision to convene a meeting of the IEC in august themselves. This action is part of the objective of the NFF to carry through a “regime change” in the leadership of the CWI. We entirely reject this action which is ithe declaration of a split from the CWI.
In the statement the NFF once again ignored the central political issues of difference which have clearly emerged in this debate. As we stated at the IEC in November 2018 there are clearly two main divergent trends developing in the CWI. This has been clarified during the course of six months of debate. It is clear that there is a decisive difference now on the crucial issues of orientation, perspective and programme.
“Socialist feminist” a major step backwards.
It is evident to us that some sections of the CWI have buckled to the pressures of ‘Identity Politics’. Others have gone even further and have or are in the process of capitulating to them. This was recently demonstrated in the debate in US in Chicago. Andy M (US NC) who led off and replied for the NFF – no US EC member was present – argued that the IS “did not understand the new world situation” and comrades argued that the womens movement was detonating the struggles of the working class. A further reflection of this capitulation is in shown in the Euro election where the main slogan of the Irish section’s candidate is “for a socialist feminist”.
This divergence is reflected by a turn away from systematic trade union work in a number of sections and abandonment of an orientation and emphasis on the centrality of the working class. This is clearly reflected in Greece and the non- Trotskyist approach of the section towards intervening in the environment movement and the approach taken towards the workers in gold mining industry.
There is a major divergence between the NFF and ourselves on the question of a systematic and consistent orientation and intervention to the working class and its organisations. We defend this orientation and in doing so up hold the historical foundations on which the CWI was build. The NFF are opposed to it and are moving away from it. This is not a secondary issue as the NFF allege. It is a crucial question on which there needs to be agreement in order to establish a “principled revolutionary unity”.
The leadership of the NFF evade serious debate on these crucial questions of divergence. In debate after debate they have alleged that the IS is conservative, out of touch and now represents “the old guard”.
They have tried to rally support on the basis of an emotional appeal for “unity” but evade explaining what the principled political basis of “revolutionary unity” is based on. The only thing that unites the leadership of the NFF is opposition to the IS. The failure to debate the political issues and only call for “revolutionary unity” without political agreement is the receipt for a split.
Throughout the debate the NFF have denied that it is a question of “regime change”. However, as Sascha S made clear in his recent statement this was explicitly posed by Eric B (Belgium) at the IEC meeting in November. Now other representatives of the NFF have also posed the same issue in recent debates. Paul C (representing the NFF in England and Wales) explicitly posed this in a debate in the eastern region. Now the removal of Peter T from the IS has been raised in a debate in the US and the representative of the NFF in the debate, Andy M, failed to comment on this.
Regime change
It has been revealed during the debate that some NFF members have been preparing the ground for a regime change for a number of years. From Austria comrades report that they were informed some IEC members were organising against the IS in 2016. Younger comrades in England and Wales were told by Danny B that they would have an important role to play “especially if there was a split in the CWI” at about the same time!
All comrades have the right to oppose the IS and argue for a different political approach. However, this should be done openly and honestly. This was not done by these comrades. This dishonest method has sunk to new depths during the course of the debate. All members of the CWI need to pose the question if there is to be regime change – which is the right of comrades to propose – what is the political basis to elect a new leadership? The only unifying stance of the NFF is to deny that substantial political differences exist and opposition to the International Secretariat. We have published our political platform. What is the political platform of the NFF if it carries through a regime change? Comrades will search in vain for a political platform they all defend. We are confronted with a non, faction, faction with non principled principles! A regime change of this character will destroy the CWI as a viable Trotskyist international organization which we are not prepared to accept.
The NFF demand that the COC resumes its functions. Yet this body is perceived by the NFF as an “alternative to the IS” which we reject. We reject the calling of the IEC in August by the NFF as an attempted coup or preparation for a coup against the current IS.
The NFF claims that the IEC majority represents the majority of the CWI. We do not accept this. As we have explained the IEC as currently composed is not representative of the CWI. Its composition is weighed towards the smaller groups like Cyprus, Poland, or Australia with 1 full member whose active membership is less than some branches in other sections! Or Russia with 25 members and 2 full IEC members and not a single full timer. Greece with 302 members has 4 IEC members the same as England and Wales with 2000 members. 3 sections – Cyprus, Australia and Russia – have a total of 66 members and 4 IEC members!
Against the background of a political and theoretical abandonment of Trotskyism by the NFF leadership we cannot agree to participate in or recognise the August IEC which is aimed at enacting a regime change which will mean the destruction of the Trotskyist principles the CWI was founded upon. We have defended and will continue to defend the Trotskyist methods and principles on which the CWI was founded and continue to build it on those methods in the coming period. We therefore appeal to the comrades not to participate in this meeting called by the NFF on a non-principled political basis, which in reality is a split from the CWI.
Those participating in this are placing themselves outside the CWI and in a rival organization. We appeal to comrades to support the international conference called by the international faction ‘In Defence of a workers’ and Trotskyist CWI’ and the programme and platforms which we have defended. This is the road to build a powerful Trotskyist international based on the working class and the methods of the CWI.”
“Against the background of a political and theoretical abandonment of Trotskyism by the NFF “
Harsh words….
They appear to have split on the basis of some of their sections having some kind of of way of relating to mass politics.
That is, against the Millies’ standard practice of refusing to work with anybody on an an equal basis as opposed to the normal practice of this funny sect, which thinks, bizarrely, that it is a leading force for socialism (let alone ‘Trotskyism).
Their criticisms of ‘identity politics’, lety aline their hostility to Climate Change demos, have the odour of another age: what they mean is working with other people on the left.
They have done that, “we are in charge” stuff since the anti-Poll Tax movement and the ant-racist campaign, and, one could list their hollow fronts at length.
It looked ridiculous, from a groupuscule of aged dogmatists, in the past and now….
One would suggest that the weakness of their politics has been cruelly exposed over Brexit, which they stridently backed, even to the extent of supporting the Arron banks linked right-wing Trade Unionists against the EU.
They publicly supported the hard right Brexit project, the extent of being key members of the NO to EU Yes to Democracy front of the labour aristocrats of the CPB and the RMT
The right-wing trajectory of the anti-European Union Taafe group continues...
“I am the ex-Mayor of Sunderland. I am Chris Williamson MP. I am Asa Winstanley. I am Marc Wadsworth. I am Jackie Walker. I am Tony Greenstein. I am Ken Livingstone. I am the Palestinian people”.
Galloway’s old mates, John Rees, Lindsey German not to mention his former bag-man, Kevin Ovenden have been quite as mice about their leader’s turn to the far right.
Branding anyone to the “right” of you as “racist” even “fascist” is a significant reason for the alienation of many working class people from Labour, now overwhelmingly liberal metropolitan and university educated. A labour movement without workers is a non-sequitur. #Brexit
The Red-Brown alliance develops, George Galloway is to back Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party for the Euro-elections.
Following the lead of former rivals, the ex-Revolutionary Communist Party/Spiked/Institute of Ideas now supporters of National Populism,..(1)
Brexit is the opposite of Nazism. It is a cry for national independence, which the Nazis loathed. It is a campaign for democracy, which the Nazis destroyed. Nazism was hateful and anti-human — Brexit is positive and democratic.
Yesterday Galloway has tweeted his backing for Farage added, (1)
This is a tactical judgement. I’m serious about #Brexit I’m even more serious about democracy. The Conservatives and the Blairite 5th Column have rendered both parties redundant in the European Parliament elections, as my critics will shortly see.
We confidently predict that this red-brown alliance will receive more support.
As Jim says,
It appears he is not on his own. Chelley Ryan is a Corbyn cultist and a prolific tweeter and Facebook poster who has also posted for Red Labour and writes for the Morning Star. She has tweeted in support of the Brexit Party.
There have been others on social media.
Is this just Stalinist fraying at the edges or is there more to it?
Sadly because the left failed to set up a lexit party, they left the platform to Farages new party and UKIP. If someone prominent on the left now stands on a platform with Farage and puts a Lexit case is this really so bad. Do we really want ppl only to hear one narrative!?
— Chelley Ryan 🖐️ #DangerousHero4PM (@chelleryn99) April 18, 2019
Can pple please not send me messages telling me I support the Brexit party. What I support is someone's right to join a non proscribed party & challenge the rhetoric that emerges from it. The ppl listening to Farage now have to listen to a voice from the left too! https://t.co/iftSBsBWrE
— Chelley Ryan 🖐️ #DangerousHero4PM (@chelleryn99) April 18, 2019
— Brexit Future #StandUp4Democracy🇬🇧 (@BrexitFutureUK) April 17, 2019
A political party launched less than a week ago is topping a national poll. If you didn't see this coming, you haven't been paying attention. https://t.co/F5Ljr1nsPw
This is the only Realpolitik decision that could possibly be made after all the insults & betrayals-the Euro Election will be OUR referendum on Brexit-a 2nd vote Remain camp has been demanding, marching about & gathering dodgy petition signatures for from all around the world.
Perhaps this tiff is forgiven now….”In an article in The Australian newspaper, 15th January 2009, ‘Critics of Israel giving voice to anti-Semitism’, I stated that George Galloway, British MP for the Respect party, had called for a boycott of ‘Israel’s shops’ and that this meant that he was calling in practice for a boycott of Jewish shops. This was incorrect and I now understand that he was calling for a boycott of ‘Israel’ shops which is a mobile retailer operating in shopping malls and who sell Israeli goods and was not referring to ‘Israel’s shops’. I apologise to Mr Galloway for the mistake, and I withdraw the suggestion made in my article that he was showing or encouraging anti-Semitism in calling for this boycott. Frank Furedi, 9 February 2009″.
Le terrible incendie a failli détruire le chef-d’œuvre de l’esprit et de l’histoire qu’est Notre-Dame. Après une immense vague d’émotion, sa reconstruction est l’affaire de toutes et tous, de ceux qui croient au ciel, comme ceux qui n’y croient pas.
The terrible fire nearly destroyed the masterpiece of the spirit and of history that is Notre-Dame. After an immense wave of emotion, its reconstruction is the business of everyone, of those who believe in heaven, as much as those who do not believe in it.
Last November in the Weekly Worker, a leading force in Labour Against the Witch-hunt, ‘Carla Robert’ of Labour Party Marxists wrote,
Similarly ridiculous is the case of Edinburgh Labour Party member Peter Gregson, who is currently “under investigation”. We will not be surprised if Gregson is also either told to undergo the JLM’s pro-Zionism training and/or referred to the NCC.
Labour Against the Witchhunt calls on Labour’s NEC to reject the allegations of anti-Semitism against Peter Gregson, condemns his suspension by the GMB trade union and calls for the immediate restoration of his full membership rights.
But, spotters of LAW’s tortured inner workings will have noticed at the time,
Although Peter’s petition is a good idea, challenging Labour’s NEC to revoke its adoption of the IHRA definition, we cannot support it. Firstly, we disagree with some of its wording – eg, before it adopted the full IHRA definition on September 4, Labour did not allow “full freedom of speech on Israel”. On the contrary, the witch-hunt was in full flow long before that. Secondly, some of the formulations in Peter’s supporting documents internalise the racism of Zionist ideology, failing to distinguish clearly between the Zionist movement and the Jewish population, and attributing a non-existent collective political identity to “the Jews”, eg, “the Jews have so much leverage here [in the UK]”.
LAW leading light Tony Greenstein wrote in January,
Although Labour Against the Witchhunt didn’t support Peter’s petition because of problems with its wording we recognise that it represents a significant opposition in the Labour Party to the attempt to curtail if not abolish freedom of speech.
Of course the corrupt and racist GMB has never had freedom of speech. The regional barons ruled without opposition. The union exists primarily for the benefit of its highly paid officials not its membership. However even Roache and co. will have difficulty defending this particularly iniquitous decision. If Peter’s expulsion is not revoked then GMB members should join another, genuine trade union.
It goes without saying that, while Gregson is not anti-Semitic, he can certainly be criticised for his eccentric politics – in the words of Jewish Voice for Labour, he is a “loose cannon”. For example, he admits that his initiative can be described as a “death-wish” petition, in that it is “sticking two fingers up to the NEC” by “brazenly breaking the IHRA rule”. He adds: “It is important now for more of us to come out and openly breach the IHRA, whilst never being anti-Semitic in the true sense of the word.”
Such brazen defiance is a matter of tactics, of course, but it must be said that in current circumstances it is not exactly a wise move. Firstly, the forces opposing the witch-hunt are extremely weak and are hardly in a good position to mount a successful challenge of this sort. Secondly, the “death-wish” petition does the right’s work for it by identifying hundreds of Labour members as easy targets.
Gregson also makes himself a target through his inappropriate choice of words. For instance, he has claimed that “Jews” in Britain have “leverage” because of what he describes as a general feeling of guilt over the holocaust. When this clumsy phrasing was criticised by JVL – surely it is the Zionists, not undifferentiated “Jews”, who would try to turn any such sentiment to their advantage? – he was not prepared to admit his error or change his wording. His response is: “… we suffer in the UK from holocaust guilt. Thus, all Jews have leverage, whether they want it or not, because all Jews were victims.”
However, we must not let this hold us back from defending him.He is a victim of a rightwing witch-hunt, aimed at defeating the left and regaining control of the party for the Blairites.
Pete Gregson insisted denier Nick Kollerstrom was ‘Holocaust sceptic’, and was condemned by fellow LAW member Tony Greenstein
Labour Against The Witchhunt (LAW) – which was launched to defend Labour activists accused of antisemitism – has been rocked by a bitter rift over one of its member’s open support for a Holocaust denier.
Tony Greenstein, LAW’s vice-chair, who was himself expelled from Labour over his use of the word “Zio” and for mocking the phrase Final Solution, has clashed with another of the group’s supporters .
Peter Gregson – who has been backed by LAW since being expelled by the GMB union over alleged antisemitism – had urged Mr Greenstein and his allies to support a petition he started, which included links to an article by Ian Fantom of the conspiracy theory Keep Talking group.
In that article, Mr Fathom writes approvingly of Dr Nick Kollerstrom – author of The Auschwitz ‘Gas Chamber’ Illusion.
But in emails sent to LAW’s leading members – including expelled Labour activist Jackie Walker, her partner Graham Bash and Tina Werkman – Mr Greenstein initially attempts to persuade Mr Gregson to “cut links” with the Mr Fanthom and Mr Kollerstrom, saying the association “would be incredibly damaging” for LAW.
He writes: “I must ask you to remove all references to Ian Fantom’s article from your petition update which directs people to Kollerstrom’s holocaust denial article on the website of the well-known Holocaust denial site CODOH.”
In his March 22 email, Mr Greenstein also refers to wording in Mr Gregson’s petition saying: “It is bad enough that you yourself used the word ‘exaggerate’ in terms of the Holocaust.”
…
He writes on March 23 that Mr Greenstein is “exhibiting the kind of shrill neurosis for which the left is rightly famed. And is why of course so many in the left are doomed to obscurity, for they slam the door hard shut at every opportunity.”
Mr Fantom has previously shared conspiracy theories blaming Israel for 9/11. But Mr Gregson writes of him: “I have spent time with Ian Fantom. I believe he is OK. I do not have a problem with his politics.”
In his own furious response, Mr Greenstein writes back at 2.54 am, setting out detailed evidence of Mr Fantom’s support for Mr Kollerstrom, noting that the article Mr Gregson links to says Mr Kollertrom “had been targeted in a witch-hunt”.
“You can call me whatever you want but I am not going to have holocaust denial being debated or legitimised under the guise of ‘free speech’,” Mr Greenstein writes.
“It’s like debating the rights and wrongs of murdering 50 Muslims in New Zealand last week, or perhaps that too didn’t happen?
“I am removing you from the LAW Facebook and will leave it to the LAW Steering Committee as to whether you are removed from LAW membership too.”
In a further message on April 3 – still copying in much of the LAW leadership – Mr Gregson writes: “Tony is stating he will seek to damage my reputation by making LAW shun me if I do not do as he asks. If that is not a threat, then I’m a chinaman.”
No response to this article has yet been seen.
Informed sources suggest that since he began, earlier this year, being published by the racist Islamic Qatar dictatorship’s Al Jazeera Greenstein has become more careful with his ‘robust’ language.
We still expect some broadside…
On the up, a couple of days ago Labour Against the Witchhunt, was celebrating Ken Livingstone’s decision to join their campaign.
“Former London mayor is announced as Labour Against The Witchhunt’s honorary president”
Face au fascisme on ne pense plus; il ne faut plus penser – c’est tabou. L’antifascisme est une forme plus évoluée, plus subtile que l’antisémitisme, mais pas moins contre-révolutionnaire. Il crée une attitude de réflexe et de haine.”
Faced with Fascism, one stops thinking; one mustn’t think any more – it’s taboo. Antifascism is the more evolved form, subtler than anti-semitism, but no less counter-revolutionary. It creates a reflexive attitude of hatred.
Groupes radicaux pour l’abolition de l’argent et de l’État
(citations of his cherished nuggets, 1031 pages long, from the Situationists, James Madison, Gandhi, Pastor Neimöller, Edmund Burke, George Orwell……)
Alain Soral has been condemned to a year in gaol for Holocaust denial. As the would-be sorcerer’s apprentice of a Red-Brown alliance, his balance-sheet has until recent years largely been a negative one. The most public initiative, the ‘anti-Zionist’ electoral list he helped organise with Dieudeonné, with the support of a few former leftists, and Tehran inclined Islamists, was a failure.
Égalité et Réconciliation¸ trumpeting the cause of workers and peoples, with right-wing national values, against globalist elites, appeared submerged in the malestrom of populism. As part of a “conspi” turn it could be said that Soral, who never fails to inject anti-semitism into the public domain, helped set out some markers, but little more. His site has had a small, if real, (according to reports) echo amongst the anti-gay marriage and anti-‘genre theory’ movement, which combined the traditional far-right, Catholic ‘ultras’ and some conservative Muslims. To escape from this impasse Soral has recently tried to engage – before his imprisonment has temporarily cut this short – with the Gilets Jaunes…with more success, if still limited.
It is the fashion in some quarters to look at the Gilets Jaunes through rose-tinted spectacles. After all, what could be more heartening than to discover, as perhaps prophesied by Jean-Claude Michéa, the work of those “en bas” in revolt against the neoliberal elite. The left which has, since, apparently the Dreyfus Affair, sought to integrate the left into a world ruled by finance is shaking. Woven in the by those who have been “solidaires depuis toujours”, acting through the heart of their “idenitité populaire la plus spécifique”, the French People have arisen…. (Notre Ennemi le capital. 2017)
No doubt there are worthy projects to wrestle inside the Gilets Jaunes movement, and fight for leftism and below within it. Reports, though not those broadcast by the professionals of tinting roses, the SWP, if their most recent General assembly (not universally recognised) indicate that they have decided to not offer any recommendation to vote for the coming European elections. A victory of sorts, though one finds it hard to imagine the good faith of any leftist sitting in a room with those who argued for supporting for a variety of hard-right lists – as happened..
Instead we have Étienne Chouard, a teacher, whose Mother worked for the – some might say – elitist Tel Quel literary and theoretical journal of Philippe Solars, known for its 1960s structuralism, ultra-Maoist phase, and violent ‘anti-totalitarian’ turn in the 1970s. He says he is “a seeker of the original cause of social injustices”. The blogs he runs, such as Plan C, and his own personal site, advance the cause of “une Constitution Citoyenne, écrite par et pour les citoyens.”
Chouard is popular amongst the Gilets Jaunes – significant enough to be cited at length in the media, the latest appearance being in Saturday’sLe Monde(13.4.19). His audience on social networks is astronomical. He is probably the best known promoter of one of the Gilets Jaunes central demands, direct democracy through the idea of government by referendum. “référendum d’initiative populaire”. A one-time leftist, who dabbled in anarchism and the ultra-left, and who claims inspiration from Cornelius Castoriadis he has expressed sympathy for Nigel Farage, yet voted Mélenchon in the last Presidential elections. The life-long grass-roots activist has now declared that he will back François Asselineau, a hard-right Frexit (French Brexit) campaigner who runs the small UPR. It is also opposed to NATO. Le Monde notes he is far from alone amongst the Gilets Jaunes in backing this far-right party.. (12.4.19. Gilets jaunes » : François Asselineau et le « Frexit » font recette sur les ronds-points) that the UPR is known for promoting “conspiracy” ideas. (1)
Chouard is the ideal type of “ confusionism”, melding together the far-right ideas with leftism. But this rhetoric does not stop at issues such as the European Union. As the reader of (one can believe this, see above) over 3,500 books on philosophy, politics and stuff, he has views on many areas. His freethinking has led him to express opinions doubting the official version of 9/11, and to express interest in the conspi site, Réseau Voltaire. Chouard has also had ties, notable ties, with Alain Soral over the years. His notorious description of Soral as a “resistant” did not go down well. He has stood back, preferring the calmer waters of the UPR, for his own red-brown alliance, from aligning himself with the sulphurous holocaust denier.
Despite the jolly film (judging from its trailer…) J’veux du soleil, by François Ruffin, there seems, as yet little indication of the français de souche amongst the Gilets Jaunes, reaching out to minorities, the “urban nomadic proletariat”. But he doubtless found somebody prepared to listen to Michéa when it comes to official left and liberal anti-fascism.
“François Asselineau‘s ‘souverainiste‘ platform has two main targets, the European Union and the United States.[32] He insists that France should leave the Eurozone,[33] the European Union, and NATO.[32] According to Asselineau, the EU and NATO “as seen from Washington…are the political and military side of the same coin, that of the enthrallment of the European continent to their ‘buffer zone’ so as to surround and contain the Russian continental power”.[33] He says the process leading to European unification was launched solely upon orders from the American government.”
