“Taking Back Control”: Brexit, Putin, to Free Trade in Public Services, and Low-Quality Food.
Getting Brexit Done means “Taking Back Control”……
During the EU Referendum those who backed Leave talked of “taking back control”.
There were those on the left who denounced the EU as a “capitalist club”. They wanted a “People’s Brexit”, a ‘Left’ Brexit.
The former Labour MP Ronnie Campbell spoke for his camp when he said he wanted to “take back control of UK laws, taxes, budgets, and public spending”.
For the alliance of Blue Labour, the Communist Party of Britain, Labour Lexiteers, members, and supporters, of the Brexit Party, The Full Brexit, the phrase gave voice to a “popular revolt against the status quo”.
“The Leave campaign’s slogan, “take back control”, resonated with millions of people whose interests are no longer represented in British politics.” Brexit, and the restoration of National Sovereignty, gave the UK the “opportunity to reshape Britain for the better”.
After the result the Lexit (pro-Brexit left) campaign issued this statement.
It began,
The Leave vote is above all else a rejection of the entire political establishment by millions of working class people who have been left to suffer austerity for decades with few defenders among the mainstream parties.
The Leave-Fight-Transform (Pro-Brexit) campaign from the same stable asserted in August 2019 that,
the left must ensure the 2016 referendum result is implemented, so that the UK breaks with the treaties, institutions and laws of the EU as well as the structural racism of Fortress Europe.
Locating the origin of racism in the EU was a bold move, one yet for Brexit Britain to challenge.
But it looks as if the break with what is left of the its treaties, institutions and laws is underway.
In a statement on Brexit Day (3rd of February 2020), the pro-Brexiteers issued a statement on the ” likely terrain for the battle”.
They predicted a “crisis in Britain’s ruling class”, a phrase battle-hardened leftists find handy for any time in history.
A trade deal with the US looked fraught “with tensions”. But some light for the left was there, “Johnson wants to be free to engage in state investment. That requires a ‘Canada-plus[i]’ deal with the EU.” A step forward. “This new vision, brought on by economic necessity and the wishes of a section of British capital, as well as by the political reality of how Johnson won his majority, is rather different from the delusional, harking back to empire vision beloved of Tory Brexiteers in the European Research Group.”
Things were not so bad (compare above “crisis”). Indeed, “…much of British capital is confident that it can cope with whatever happens in post-Brexit Britain, providing the City of London’s banking and financial interests are kept safe.The EU, they predicted, would negotiate a way out. The Tories would try to respond to the “concerns” of those who voted for them.
The Brexit left claimed that conditions for a real struggle looked bright: “What couldn’t be done has been done: a major country has broken with the largest trading bloc in history.” After Labour’s historic election defeat, the post-Brexit terrain offered an “opportunity for the left.”
Today there are two major news stories about “taking back control” Brexit-style.
The first is on the post-EU trade negotiations,
MPs have defeated an attempt by Tory backbenchers to ensure parliament has a vote on any post-Brexit trade deal.
An amendment to the Trade Bill currently going through the Commons would have given MPs and peers a say on any new agreement signed by the government.
Jonathan Djanogly, the Conservative MP who led the rebellion, had argued that the US congress approves similar deals.
He accused the government of taking a position of “less scrutiny than we did as a member of the EU”, because EU trade deals are subject to a vote in the European Parliament.
Free of EU ‘neo-liberalism’ the government can agree with Donald Trump to open up UK public services to US businesses, and our shops to low quality American food.
Brexit is said to offer many more such opportunities.
It seems that Jeremy Corbyn had the clairvoyance – along with hundreds of anti-Brexit commentators – to foresee this.
Yet, as this tweet indicates…
Then we have this:
This story is still developing.
We note that Arron Banks, who gave money to ‘Trade Unionists Against the EU”, a campaign led by Paul Embery, a supporter of the Full Brexit, and promoted during the Referedum by the Socialist Party, gets a mention,
Government rejects ISC’s call for inquiry into Russian interference in Brexit referendum.
Here is the statement from the Committee itself.
Press release from the Intelligence and Security Committee, July 21:
There have been widespread allegations that Russia sought to influence voters in the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU: studies have pointed to the preponderance of pro-Brexit or anti-EU stories on RT and Sputnik, and the use of ‘bots’ and ‘trolls’, as evidence.
The actual impact of such attempts on the result itself would be difficult – if not impossible – to prove. However what is clear is that the government was slow to recognise the existence of the threat – only understanding it after the ‘hack and leak’ operation against the Democratic National Committee, when it should have been seen as early as 2014.
As a result the government did not take action to protect the UK’s process in 2016. The committee has not been provided with any post-referendum assessment – in stark contrast to the US response to reports of interference in the 2016 presidential election. In our view there must be an analogous assessment of Russian interference in the EU referendum.
Observers predict that the Morning Star is about to carry a story attacking ‘anti-Russian hysteria” and “Putin Bashing”.
(1) Report:
Case study: the EU referendum
Morning Star Defends China Against Labour “enthusiastically climbing aboard the New Cold War bandwagon”.
“Labour is enthusiastically climbing aboard the New Cold War bandwagon.” Morning Star.
In 2019 the Morning Star carried this story.
What did British Communists make of ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ in 2019?
EARLIER this year Communist Party of Britain (CPB) representatives took part in a joint delegation of Communist parties from northern Europe and North America following an invitation from the International Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
CPB general secretary Rob Griffiths was accompanied by women’s officer Carol Stavris and national election officer and executive committee member Jonathan Havard.
There were also two delegates from the New Communist Party and three from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist Leninist). There were other Communist Party representatives from Canada, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the US.representatives from Canada, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the US.
The Communist Party of Britain (CPB) delegates took a serious, if broadly sympathetic, approach to the Chinese Communists’ claim to be building socialism. It discussed efforts to deal with environmental and social problems. The report was not uncritical of Chinese policies on using private enterprise, above all on the lack of fully independent trade unions.
But in recent weeks the daily, wholly independent of the CPB, has been warning about a New Cold War and anti-Chinese propaganda.
Not just that, it has printed some extraordinary material, attacking Labour’s defence of human rights in China.
A few days ago, as the issue of China has been taken up by the Labour Party, the Morning Star published a strident article by Carlos Martinez.
What are the politics of the writer?
In 2018 Martinez published on his site Invent the Future this defence of the Chinese regime.
The evidence indicates that China continues to be a socialist country.
If the first century of human experience building socialism teaches us anything, it’s that the road from capitalism to socialism is a long and complicated one, and that ‘actually existing socialism’ varies enormously according to time, place and circumstances. China is building a form of socialism that suits its conditions, using the means it has at its disposal, in the extraordinarily challenging circumstances of global imperialist hegemony. No socialist experiment thus far – be it the Paris Commune, the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Mozambique, or indeed Bolivarian Venezuela – can claim to have discovered a magic wand that can be waved such that peace, prosperity, equality and comprehensive human development are achieved overnight. China is forging its own path, and this is worthy of study and support.
In the Star article he gives a hostile account of the Labour Party’s defence of human rights.
Labour should not be parroting Trump’s anti-China cold war rhetoric
In the interests of peace and progress, we need to push for respectful, friendly and mutually beneficial relations with China, says CARLOS MARTINEZ.
After outlining President Trump and US politicians ‘bipartisan’ approach against Chinese “predatory” economic practices” and the
zany and totally unfounded smear about the forced sterilisation of Uyghur women.
Martinez turns to the UK.
We find that, “Boris Johnson government, instinctively Atlanticist and desperately pursuing a post-Brexit trade agreement with the US at almost any cost, is largely parroting Trump’s line.”
What concerns the writer is that the Labour party has gone along with this “zany” pile of accusations about brutality, attacks on democracy and “China Bashing”.
Those of us who stand for peace and for mutually beneficial cooperation between Britain and China might hope that the Labour Party would provide some meaningful opposition to the government’s reckless behaviour. Unfortunately the indications thus far are that Labour is enthusiastically climbing aboard the New Cold War bandwagon.
The reaction at the Party’s highest levels has been deplorable.
Shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy has been actively promoting anti-China propaganda and pushing the Tories to take a harder stance against China, for example urging that action be taken against British businesses that are “complicit in the repression” in Hong Kong (ie that don’t actively support the riots).
While Nandy’s words might bring disappointment to socialists, progressives and peace activists, they were at least welcome in certain quarters: notorious right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes celebrated the “welcome change in Labour Party policy – standing up to, rather than cosying up to despotic regimes.”
There is worse.
Nandy’s position is however positively nuanced in comparison to that of Stephen Kinnock, Shadow Minister for Asia and the Pacific, who accuses China of promoting its “model of responsive authoritarian government” worldwide. Kinnock describes the ‘golden era’ of Sino-British relations, inaugurated during the Cameron government, as being an “abject failure” in which Britain had “rolled out the red carpet for China and got very very little in return”.
He asserts that Labour is joining in the “US-led New Cold War on China.
It therefore seems that the Labour leadership in its current incarnation is moving towards unambiguous support for the US-led New Cold War on China. It’s particularly demoralising that, with a few honourable exceptions, most notably Diane Abbott, the Labour left isn’t currently putting up any serious resistance to this dangerous trajectory.
To cap it all,
While very few Labour MPs have spoken of the dangers of a New Cold War, John McDonnell has recorded a histrionic (and hopelessly one-sided) denunciation of the Chinese state’s alleged mistreatment of the Uyghur Muslims. Apsana Begum has repeated these tropes in parliament, claiming that when the Chinese government celebrates its successful suppression of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement’s murderous bombing campaign, its “definition of terrorism is troublingly vague”. The usually-excellent Claudia Webbe has called on the government to “oppose state-sanctioned violence” in Hong Kong, choosing to ignore the United States-sanctioned violence of separatist protesters.
Martinez concludes,
This is all frankly disastrous and worrying.
The Morning Star has continued in this vein.
Anybody might think the Morning Star and the Communist Party of Britain is still in mourning over its loss of influence over the Labour leadership.
Others will still be reeling at the claim that reports of human rights abuses in China, and the horrific treatment of the Uighurs, are “zany”.
The Labour Party Takes a Stand: Impose Human Rights Sanctions on China.
Labour Movement is Taking a Stand.
Lisa Nandy Shadow Foreign Secretary says,
This afternoon we expect the Foreign Secretary to suspend our extradition treaty with Hong Kong. This would be a welcome step, but we must do more.
Keir Starmer statement,
China: Keir Starmer urges Boris Johnson to impose human rights sanctions
‘What we have argued for is sanctions in this country against Chinese officials who have been involved in human rights abuses’ says Labour leader
Here is the Labour Leader.
The respected journalist Ian Birrell writes in the ‘I’ today,
We are witnessing a genocide of the Uighurs – it’s time for action, not apathy
The world said never again, and yet it is averting its gaze from the mass incarceration of Muslims in China.
The world can no longer have any doubt over Beijing’s grotesque activities in western China. This is not “deradicalisation”. It is an attempt to eliminate an ethnic group, which is the textbook definition of genocide – and it is increasingly well-documented in leaked records, snatched videos, personal testimonies and even those piles of impounded hair.
As the echoes from history grow louder, we should remember the warning of the great Hannah Arendt, a writer and thinker forced to flee her German birthplace by the Nazis, that evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
These are some labour movement initiatives:
Paul Mason and Lura Parker writes,
Labour must speak on China with a distinctive voice, which genuinely seeks to defend human rights – not just in parliament but across the movement. That’s why we’ve set up the Labour Movement Solidarity with Hong Kong (UK), an alliance of people from all wings of the party who want Labour to take consistent action in defence of democratic rights in Hong Kong.
They continue:
In some parts of the labour movement, there is ignorance and denial about what the Xi regime is doing. The Morning Star newspaper, funded by UK trade unions, regularly casts the Hong Kong protesters as reactionaries. It has downplayed Hong Kong police brutality, even showcasing pleas from pro-Beijing stooges on the LegCo to supply them with tear gas, and actually justifying the national security law.
We should instead have a strong, principled alternative voice inside our movement, which can simultaneously tell the truth about Beijing’s attacks on human rights – from Hong Kong to Xinjiang, where a million Uighur people have been herded into “re-education camps” – and oppose Trump’s anti-Chinese rhetoric and racism.
The Fall of the House of Andrew Murray? UNITE’s McCluskey Succession Battle Hots Up.
Andrew Murray, “Leaving the EU” was a “democratic impulse”
In the 1970s it used to be said that, “The Communist Party can float an idea early in the year. It goes to trade union conferences as a resolution and it can become official Labour Party policy by the autumn. A few years ago we were on our own, but not now.”
These days the group that claims to carry the flag of British Communism, the Communist Party of Britain, has more modest achievements.
UNITE’s chief of Staff, Andrew Murray, who belately left the CPB in 2016, after joining the old Communist Party of Great Britain in 1976, followed by active membership of the party linked to the Morning Star, has had more modest successes.
He has taken against “the poisonous seeds of the politics of personal identity and human rights”, “rancid identity politics”, the “newly declared culture war”, and the “Brexit derangement syndrome” of those opposed to leaving the EU (Pages 97, 214 – 5. The Fall and Rise of the British Left.)
Apart from Spiked, always ready to denounce the Woke Taliban, Murray’s bundle of views on these issues is not popular. On the left they seem to have been swept to one side, above all by the Black Lives Matter movement, which, is clearly one for human rights and has been accused, by right-wingers of waging a “culture war”.
This is no doubt a reason why Murray has backtracked a little.
The working class has become, he writes in Tribune this weekend(Class Politics After Corbyn), largely a “sociological classification”, a”mass of wage labourers without collective institutions or an ideological project”. In Marx’s early terms, it is a “class in itself” but not a “class for itself”.
The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.
The Poverty of Philosophy (1847).
In the absence of this unity, and political direction,
The space has been filled to some extent by what is now termed ‘identity politics’. Mention the term and right-wing columnists will start foaming about the demands of women and black people, above all, to have their identities as such recognised, and the specific and intensified oppressions which have shaped that identity addressed. The labour movement may have been ahead of the curve here, but not by very much.
In fact, identity politics has an ancient pedigree within class politics. For example, the Labour Party in the East End of London was bitterly divided in the 1930s between its large Jewish and Irish elements. The former were stalwart opponents of fascism at home and abroad, while the latter were not, due largely to the influence of Catholicism — indeed, priestly influence won much of the Irish element in Stepney Labour to a pro-rebel or at least neutral position in the Spanish Civil War.
At this point Murray wanders further into history, and finds solace in abstract reference to ‘imperialism’, “As in the USA, any approach to class politics has to be framed not just by the eternal verities of exploitation but also by an acknowledgement that the working class has been shaped by the experiences of imperialism and its concomitants of racism and relative privilege on a global scale.”
The left was indeed ahead of the curve but not because it confronted cultural clashes in the past, which one could extend to religious and national differences in Scotland and cities like Liverpool.
The 1980s, a formative time for Murray’s faction, Straight Left, was caught up in debates begun and collected in The Forward March of Labour Halted? Eric Hobsbawm, (1981) Tribune’s editor Ronan Burtenshaw may, like many, assert that with 80% of people today working in the Service Sector they are still objectively working class. But Hobsbawm was right to indicate that the decline (if not vanishing) of heavy industry and manufacturing, the closely knit politics based on work and community has effects which we can see today.
As Hobsbawm wrote, “the development of the working class in the past generation has been such as to raise a number of very serious questions about its future and the future of its movement.”
Murray visits the North and meets people who have difficulties with the use of migrant labour. A ” brand-name retailer had established a warehouse creating around a thousand jobs — but few if any were advertised in the local job centre. Instead, the work was subcontracted to a labour agency which recruited exclusively in Poland. ” This example could be found around the country, and not only in the ‘left behind’ areas.
Only wishful thinking can ignore this. There is no easy answer. There is nothing on the horizon like the kind of struggles portrayed in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) on the exploitation in the Chicago meat-packing industry, which could draw different nationalities together.
But for Murray there is a common cause that united at least some people, Brexit.
I asked: ‘When people around here voted for Brexit what problem did they think they were solving?’ The answer: ‘Everything.’
He continues,
The desire for an alternative reality attainable through democratic endeavour remains alive, despite the marginalisation of the concept of political alternatives throughout the neoliberal era.
Leaving the EU was the issue that this desire came to hang its hat on in many areas. This was a democratic impulse which Labour, despite a radical leadership committed to popular initiative, got itself on the wrong side of. These are the people Labour left behind in the dash to support a second referendum.
Murray was a key Corbyn adviser, drafted in to help on issues such as Brexit (“Labour should stay neutral in Brexit ‘culture war’, warns Corbyn ally“. October 2019)
He is not ‘neutral’ now.
Taking sides for Brexit – that is dividing people – is a stand, Murray claims is to be against an institution which is “an effective constitutional bulwark against democratic choice in its member states on major economic questions.”
In other words, all the reasons why people voted for Brexit, and one hopes that even the UNITE Chief of Staff is aware of less noble ones than democracy, are less important than this.
Arguing backwards from what he sees as the neo-liberal nature of the EU onto the intentions of Brexit voters Murray claims they were following a “democratic impulse”.
The urge may have driven them to support a campaign backed by the free-market right, the fancy may have taken them to dream of a People’s Brexit as a stage on the British Road to socialism. But somehow, just somehow the ” democratic empowerment” of the vote now leaves Labour with new possibilities, away from “liberal fiat” ” It now falls to Keir Starmer to lead the long march from the security of North London to the battleground industrial hinterlands.”
That a majority of people in work voted to stay in the European Union, that manufacturing and industry (such as it is) are hit by Brexit, that many working class people backed Remain out of hard-headed self-interest, including an interest in the protections offered by the EU’s ‘liberal’ legislation, is beneath Murray’s radar.
Above all, if it was conflicts over , and dislike of the use of migrant labour is a form of “class politics”, then what kind of political class for itself is being created?
It is hardly one of class unity.
The trade union movement has been called the greatest movement for human rights in history, but what kind of sectional rights against others is he responding to?
What kind of future, what kind of bread-and-butter improvements can be campaigned for on that basis?
Is it a surprise that Murray’s team is breaking up?
Last week the hard right Express ran this story,
LABOUR PARTY civil war could be in the offing, with a fierce critic of Sir Keir Starmer edging towards a breakthrough in the battle to succeed Len McCluskey as general secretary of Britain’s biggest trade union, Unite.
..
Last week Mr Beckett issued a warning to the Labour leader, accusing him of punishing the working class for the coronavirus crisis.
He tweeted: “Boris Johnson & Keir Starmer, I have a message for you both.
“We won’t stand idly by while you dump the pandemic fall out on the working class.”
Mr Beckett has been tipped to see off the challenge of Steve Turner, a union official that has played a leading tole in industrial disputes involving industry sector giants British and Bombardier.
Beckett is proud of this record,
Things did not go according to plan.
Communist Party of Britain Celebrates 100th Anniversary of the Founding of Communist Party of Great Britain.
Virtual Beano Planned by CPB (Register Here)
“A middle aged man in a shabby raincoat stood outside the TUC’s central London headquarters that cold November morning in 1991 selling the Communist newspaper, the Morning Star, The Morning Star had dedicated supporters prepared to turn out in all weathers to sell the paper. But this was a bad morning – he sold only 18 copies.”
“Yet 213 people passed him on their war into the TUC for a meeting – the forty-third and last Congress of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Henceforth CP). They were there to wind up their party after seventy-one years and created a new organisation which rejected mst traditional Communist beliefs and ways of working”.
The Enemy Within The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party. Francis Beckett. 1995.
This month the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) is celebrating ‘100 years’ of the Communist Party.
Where will you be on 1 August? On that day, one hundred years ago, in the wake of war and revolt across Europe, Britain’s Marxists formed a new kind of revolutionary political party. It served only one master, the workers. It was a party the rich could not buy.Its members could be found in every arena of class struggle,
Their General Secretary Rob Griffiths, a former lecturer, was a leader of a faction around the Morning Star which fought a bitter battle to retain control of the daily. Names from the later stages of that factional struggle, ‘Straight Left’ (Andrew Murray, Seumas Milne, both part of the inner Corbyn circle), Socialist Action, Tariq Ali (thanked by Murray for his “support and political commitment” in last year’s The Fall and Rise of the British Left), and the Leninist, forerunner of the Weekly Worker, appear in Francis Beckett’s postscript.
Many dispute the claim that the present Communist Party of Britain is the inheritor of the CPGB.
That’s as it may be.
But few people are aware of, or care, about what happened to their temporarily victorious rivals in the old CPGB, from their rapidly fading Democratic Left, New Politics Network to Unlock Democracy..
A common view on the left is that the CPB was, until the December General Election, preparing to celebrate its first return to political relevance since the 1970s, when the CPBG’s Industrial Organiser Bert Ramelson exercised influence within the trade union movement.
In 1973 Ramelson said: “We have more influence now on the labour movement than at any time in the life of our party. The Communist Party can float an idea early in the year. It goes to trade union conferences as a resolution and it can become official Labour Party policy by the autumn. A few years ago we were on our own, but not now.”
In the 2019 book written by Andrew Murray (who until 2016 was a member of the CPB), he railed against the “preference for individual rights over the collective” “the poisonous seeds of the politics of personal identity and human rights”, “rancid identity politics”, the “newly declared culture war”, and the “Brexit derangement syndrome” of those opposed to leaving the EU (Pages 97, 214 – 5. The Fall and Rise of the British Left.)
Alas. After December’s result Murray’s work fell stillborn from the press. Yet if it did not hearald the triumph of a Labour government a few of the ideas it floated have become popular, at least amongst the contributors of Spiked.
The CPB, which advocated not voting Labour and abstaining in the 2019 European Elections, has mulled over the election result.
For them Brexit was a key issue,
Labour’s fatal abandonment of its principled position over Brexit, was most concentrated, where the Brexit Party gained a strategic wedge of votes, where the Red Wall collapsed and where the Tories were able to mobilise people who don’t usually vote.
Labour’s 2019 loss: hard truths for the right wing NIck Wright.
Put simply, anything other than accepting the Brexit Referendum result was wrong. Allowing the hard-right Brexit project to get a hold was the way forward. Promoting the Communist Party of Britain’s own pro-Brexit, ‘People’s Brexit’, position, would have doubtless been a bonus.
Or as Murray – who was a key Corbyn adviser on Brexit, explicitly says in the Morning Star’s sister journal, the US Jacobin owned Tribune,
Leaving the EU was the issue that this desire came to hang its hat on in many areas. This was a democratic impulse which Labour, despite a radical leadership committed to popular initiative, got itself on the wrong side of. These are the people Labour left behind in the dash to support a second referendum.
There is no recognition of the role the pro-Brexit stand of the anti-EU left, including the CPB, played in legitimising the Get Brexit Done message of Boris Johnson, and helped carry him to election victory.
In response to Labour’s defeat the CPB now call for a new Popular Front.
CP PROPOSES ‘POPULAR FRONT’ ALLIANCE AND ‘TRIDENT DIVIDEND’
Reminding the executive meeting on Soviet Victory Day that capitalist crisis can lead to fascism, Mr Foster urged trade unions, trades councils, People’s Assembly, CND and other campaigning groups to build a ‘Popular Front’ alliance against Tory policies that would put the interests of monopoly capital above those of working people and their families.
Unity could be developed around a left-wing programme for public ownership, democratic economic planning and progressive taxation. It was also essential to halt rent evictions and extend the pay furlough, Universal Credit or tax credits to all workers, claimants and students in need.
During the present pandemic, Britain’s Communists said workers should take collective action to refuse to accept unsafe practices or conditions during this pandemic and take every opportunity to strengthen workplace trade unionism.
In a detailed organisational report, assistant secretary for membership Alex Gordon revealed that more than 60 people had applied to join the Communist Party in April, taking recruitment to the highest level since the 2003 Iraq War.
They have not forgotten an internationalist approach to the culture wars:
Years ago, communist party historian VG Kiernan wrote a path breaking book, the ‘Lords of humankind’ in which he mapped the culture wars of imperialism, with crude attempts to capture high moral ground, as a prelude to wars of greed and land capture. A thesis worth remembering when trying to make sense of the current propaganda war against People’s China, in which Muslim believers are reported to be forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, with women forcibly sterilised. The current press campaign against China, follows a path of cultural racism and imperialism.
The Morning Star itself devotes much of its space to the old theme of attacking the Labour Party. Labour’s new leader Keir Starmer is in their sight. They are happy to publish would-be damaging outbursts,
Sir Keir would only win an election with the left’s support, he said, dismissing theories of the left’s “demise” as “greatly exaggerated.”
Mr McCluskey urged Labour members on the left not to become “demoralised’ and called on Sir Keir to stick to the policy pledges he made during his campaign to replace Mr Corbyn — including renationalisation of utilities and rail, a green new deal, abolition of tuition fees and higher taxes for top 5 per cent of earners — to promote party unity.
He revealed that he would push for a meeting of left-wing allies in coming weeks.
Anniversary Reading.
There is much to say on the 100th Anniversary.
Perhaps we could begin by looking at the history of the CPGB.
There is, it hardly needs saying, a vast literature on the CPBG and British Communism. There are many many important books to look at.
This Blog would recommend Raphael Samuel’s The Lost World of British Communism (2006) to those who wish to begin to look at the CPGB’s history.
Samuel describes the final years.
CLASS POLITICS: THE LOST WORLD OF BRITISH COMMUNISM (PART III)
The schism in British Communism, like many of those in Marxist political formations, resembles nothing so much as a war of ghosts in which the living actors are dwarfed by the spectres they conjure up. The debate on the ‘British way’—the major issue at the 1977 Congress when the present schism first emerged—echoes the never-resolved debate on ‘parliamentism’ which nearly paralysed the cpgb at birth; while the argument for the ‘broad democratic alliance’ mirrors the turn from the ‘class against class’ politics of the Comintern’s Third Period (1928–34) to those of the Popular Front—an analogy which has been strenuously promoted by the supporters of Eurocommunism.
..
Totemic importance is attached to its long-term programme, The British Road to Socialism—‘the most comprehensive strategy for the Left in Britain’—despite its origins in now suspect notions of ‘People’s Democracy’. ‘Democratic centralism’ is strictly insisted upon, being used not only to expel individual dissidents but, in the case of London and Lancashire, to dissolve entire Party districts. The Party continues to despatch fraternal delegations and to take comfort from the success (or relative success) of brother or sister parties. (The Japanese Party seems recently to have joined the Italian as a possible model.) The cpgb goes through all the motions of being a great national party. It fields candidates at general elections, even though, to judge by the results on the 11th of June, it no longer has even the semblance of local support; it launches economic and industrial ‘strategies’ even though there are no longer factory branches to carry them through; it publishes statements on the issues of the day even though there is no longer a daily paper to print them.
…
The hatred and contempt with which each side treats the others—as also the bewilderment and distress of the silent majority of Party loyalists—seems now to exceed that in the Labour Party at the height of Bennism. In the Eurocommunist camp, as then on the Labour Left, it is typically expressed in generational terms—‘Why don’t you just die?’ was the shout of one of the new wave ‘pluralists’ when, at a recent aggregate, an old-timer attempted to speak.
One book that should be read as essential background is Paul Flewers, The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union 1929-1941 (2008) It is a brilliant account of reactions within Britain to the Soviet Union during the industrialisation and forced collectivisation programmes of the 1930s.
It is hard to project yourself mentally back to the years which shaped the CPGB, whose influence outside of left circles only really took off in the 1930s.
Claude Cockburn’s The Devil’s Decade (1973), is a book (by a key supporter at the time) about the 1930s that gives the broader political struggles that shaped the CPGB, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement and their role backing the Republic during the Spanish Civil War and the “Unity” campaign with Labour. Cockburn’s revealing autobiography I Claude (1967) This goes from Cockburn’s deep involvement with the CPGB and international Communism, up till his final break – the repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Cockburn is witty without losing an appropriate sense of the gravity.
There is also novel covering a later period, The Rotten Elements, (1969) Edward Upwood,
…the second book in Upward’s The Spiral Ascent trilogy and continues the story of Alan and Elsie Sebrill a few years after the first one. When it was first published this book was subtitled A Novel of Fact because one of its aims was to give an historically accurate picture of policies and attitudes in the British Communist Party during the late 1940s. The phrase rotten elements was sometimes used in the party to refer to members who deviated seriously from the correct party line.
The previous novel ended as World War II was starting. This one starts some time after the end of the war. Elsie and Alan are happily married with two children, a boy and a girl. Both are committed members of the Communist Party and Elsie is the branch secretary of the local party. However, there is a problem. Both – but Elsie in particular – feel that the Party is deviating from the correct Marxist-Leninist line.
….
Alan and Elsie raise the issue of the Party in Britain deviating from the true Marxist-Leninist path. There are several doctrinal issues here but two are key. Lenin had always maintained that true communism could only be obtained by the violent overthrow of capitalism, imperialism and the bourgeois state. The British party clearly seems to be deviating from this view. Related to this is the attitude to the Labour Party (which, at the time this novel takes place, was the governing party in Britain). The view of the Sebrills is that the Labour party is a bourgeois, imperialist party and must be overthrown to bring about true revolution. The British Communist Party line seems to be that it is merely one stage on the way to communism and that the party can collaborate with it, if it and they are moving to a more socialist system.
Apart from The Enemy Within, this Blog would also recommend another of Francis Beckett’s books, Stalin’s British Victims, Sutton Publishing, 2004
In his new book, Stalin’s British Victims, Beckett researches the stories of four women who suffered under Stalinism. He shows just how far the leadership of the British party was aware of what was going on, and demonstrates the almost indestructible ideological commitment that led communists to deflect, ignore, explain or deny the evidence of their own eyes.
The most poignant story that Beckett tells is of Rose Cohen, co-founder of the CPGB and admired by the party leader, Harry Pollitt, who went to live in Moscow with her Russian husband in the late 1920s. In 1937, first her husband and then Rose herself were arrested. Pollitt, Beckett establishes, interceded for her with the authorities, but to no avail. She was tried, sentenced and quickly executed for being a British spy. Years later her niece Joyce Rathbone set out in search of her lost cousin, born in the same year as herself and brought up in Stalinist orphanages, forbidden to talk about his parents.
…
So Pollitt and his fellow party leaders knew that old comrades were being despatched by Stalin, and thought some of them innocent enough to want to try and save them. They also experienced the brutal snubs delivered to those foreigners who poked their noses into Stalin’s purges. However, as Beckett shows, this did not prevent Pollitt’s strenuous public defence of the Moscow trials. In March 1938, three months after Rose received a bullet in the base of her skull, Pollitt declared in the Daily Worker that these trials of “political and moral degenerates” were a “mighty demonstration to the world of the power and strength of the Soviet Union”. Did he think Rose had become a “degenerate” and that her dawn extinction in the Lubyanka was a salutary lesson to the world about the revolutionary resolve of the first workers’ state?
There is little to say about the moral credibility of the Party’s past after that.
Galloway Launches New Scottish “Unionist” Front, the “Alliance for Unity”.
Galloway to Unite all Scottish Unionists.
Even experienced Galloway Watchers find it hard to keep up with the latest initiatives from the dapper gent.
We expected this:
But this……
GEORGE Galloway has suggested that a Unionist alliance will defeat the SNP in the 2021 Holyrood elections.
The pro-Independence National reports,
The former Labour MP announced his plans to return to Scottish politics last week.
He tweeted: “My plan is simple. The pro #Unity candidates don’t oppose each other in the constituencies and we form joint lists for the 2nd vote. If we do that we win. The SNP loses. The era of Grudge can be at an end #Alliance4Unity”
Support is growing for the wizard plan.
There is one problem there, a small one no doubt for the socialist stalwart.
The Tory Party in Scotland is often known under its full name of the Conservative and Unionist Party, as a two second Web search confirms.
If there is one thing my Scottish Labour Party (activists and supporters) family hated more than the Scottish Nationalists (SNP), it’s the Tory Unionists.
Not exactly an unusual take on the left.
But then neither is loathing Nigel Farage, who is also one of Galloway’s best mates,* along with the curious gang who cadre his Workers Party of Britain, notably the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
*George Galloway backs Nigel Farage’s new Brexit party
George Galloway, Keith Bennett, China and “Elite Grooming”.
Keith Bennett, “political Groomer”?
In the latest Private Eye there is a piece, “Elite Grooming” about the 48 Group Club.
This is how the Club describes itself.
The motto of the 48 Group Club is ‘Equality and Mutual Benefit’ and it echoes the words of Zhou Enlai, China’s much-respected Premier from 1949 to 1976, who first used that phrase in 1953. Over the ensuing years, this commercial group, funded by its members, grew to be the most respected name in China-Britain trade, a name well known throughout China. The Group provided support and consultancy services to British companies entering China’s markets.
PE leads by saying that one-time members, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson ad Jack Straw have recently sought to distance themselves from this body. It is “accused in a forthcoming book of “grooming Britain’s elites to advance Beijing’s interests”.
This is a story that has recently run in the Mail, (5th of July) “Blair, Peter Mandelson and Jack Straw have been linked to club which is objecting to book that claims to reveal how China is infiltrating the West.” The Mail (8th of July) has also claimed, “Former chancellor George Osborne ‘is linked to the pro China 48 Group Club’ amid claims the organisation is ‘grooming’ Britain’s elite with Beijing propaganda.”
The PE article concentrates on the deputy of the body, one Keith Bennett.
Bennett, the Eye points out, is a “an old stalwart if the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)” (CPGB, M-L).
The article lists Bennett’s membership of the Stalin Society, “full-on Pyongyang propagandist” who was “also honorary clerk to the all-party parliamentary group on North Korea”. There is also his role in the Hands off China Campaign and attacks on the “imperialist media” who “never tires of attacking China over its so-called ‘human rights violations”.
The piece does not go into the way that the CPGB (M-L) supplies the cadres of George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, an organisation no doubt not yet on the radar of the “imperialist media”.
What are the politics of this group?
The ferociously pro-Brexit ‘party’ has this vision of the future,
In tandem with these measures will be the coordinated action of workers and government to ensure that the ever-increasing productivity of labour, arising today from the development of robots and artificial intelligence, is put at the service of lightening the drudgery of work and not replacing the working class. We reject a future of parasitism where the British people, through the operation of the City of London, degenerate into an unemployed feckless rump living off cheap imported food and the plastic-electronic consumables of global capitalist anarchy.
Here he talks of him as a “comrade and friend”.
Galloway interviewed Bennett 14 months ago.
Keith Bennett of the Hands off China Campaign speaks on George Galloway’s Weekly programme “The Real Deal” on Press TV.
Here is the Deputy Leader of the Workers Party of Britain, a long-time CPGB (M-L) cadre.
Wikipedia states that the CPGB (M-L) faces this allegation
The party receives funding in donations from businesses owned by Central Committee member Keith Bennett, a business magnate and consultant with investments and factories in China. There is suspicion that the funding from business interests in China is the main reason behind the parties refusal to criticize the Beijing regime for abuses of workers.
Former MP Chris Williamson is another person now orbiting in Galloway’s circles.
One has to ask: is there some kind of ‘anti-elite grooming” going on here?
…..
More on China from Jim:
China, Trump and Huawi: my enemy’s enemy is not always my friend
Labour NEC: Tendance Factional Guide to the Candidates.
Labour List today offers a survey of the Over 170 members standing in Labour’s NEC elections.
Our top-team of experienced cadres has been working hard overnight on our own guide to the Candidate Statements 2020.
Slates, commonly known as ‘factions’.
Labour to Win.
This is the slate of Progress and Labour First.
Progress scores a few points for left-wingers in two areas, it “opposes Populism” and takes an anti-Brexit line. However, it was “founded in 1996 to support the New Labour leadership of Tony Blair”. It defines itself as a voice for “Progressives“. This is a term with a long history, back to the American ‘”progressive era” (1890s to 1920s) fellow-travellers of the old Communist Parties. At present it is used by people as varied as American liberals (those called ‘left-wing’ by Trump supporters) , backers of the former Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, and France’s centrist President Emmanuel Macron.
The word today is without serious local attraction or resonance in British politics and the left in the rest of Europe.
Most of the ideas of Progress are as vacuous as the SWP’s hopes for revolutionary socialism, “Most of all, we believe the United Kingdom is a country of which we could all be truly proud. It contains all the ingredients for a country that could help people to get on and make the most of life. What we need are new ideas, new leadership and a commitment to change the way that Britain works. We have faith, that given the potential that our country has, we all have real reasons to be hopeful about the future of our community, our country, and our world.” (Our ambition for our country).
Labour First is a factional instrument of the old Labour Party right. “Labour First is a network which exists to ensure that the voices of moderate party members are heard while the party is kept safe from the organised hard left, and those who seek to divert us from the work of making life better for ordinary working people and their families.”
Its factional record is poor (New Statesman 2015),
Labour First, founded in 1988, is a pre-Blairite pressure group seen as the voice of the party’s traditional right. Headed by campaigner and former councillor Luke Akehurst, this faction supported ABC (Anyone But Corbyn) in the leadership election, while Akehurst himself backed Yvette Cooper. In the deputy race, it emphasised its ties to Tom Watson
They claim to be Keir Starmer’s best friends. This kind of claim to closeness to the winner is familiar on the left amongst the groups that discovered warmth for ‘Jeremy’ after many years of attacking the Labour Party as a pro-capitalist organisation.
Left-wingers are certainly right to accuse this alliance as drag backwards to the kind of centrist politics that lack bark and bite. They are expected to try to perform the role of left groups in demanding an ever-growing list of demands on the Labour Leader to follow their own ‘moderate’ politics, not his, or those of the largely left-leaning Labour membership.
A factional point to note is that the Progress/Labour First list supporters do not advertise their slate’s existence in their candidates’ statements.
Luke Akehurst (perhaps their best known candidate) says simply, “I recommend also voting for Baxter, Paul, Payne, Singh Josan, Tatler, and Black, Griffin, Sherriff.”
This contrasts with the rival left list,
Gemma Bolton says,
I am supported by the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance. I am fighting for a socialist Labour Government that will deliver the radical change we need.
Please also support Yasmine Dar, Ann Henderson, Nadia Jama, Laura Pidcock and Mish Rahman.
Their principal rivals are backing the above.
They are the
Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance (CLGA).
The first point to note is that the CLGA was originally a genuine ‘centre” and “left”alliance (Note, the Tendance was involved in this).
The Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance’s founding groups were originally Labour Reform, a centre-left democratic group within the Party founded at a meeting in Birmingham in November 1995, and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, the left wing democratic grouping, who subsequently brought in other more left-wing groupings from within the Labour Party. Private talks with trades union representatives to build a broader base had failed on union demands and this initiated the inclusion of a much broader Left group from the grassroots, including Labour Left Briefing [Liz Davies] and the then-Editor of Tribune, Mark Seddon. Successful efforts were also made to include the Scottish Left.
While the original CLGA Co-ordinator, Tim Pendy, (Labour Reform), is at present languishing in the wilderness of the red-brown Full Brexit, and something called the ” Democratic Left Movement” many of the players are still around on the left, notably Ann Black.
Labour List sums up the present line-up
The CLGA comprises Momentum, which is the biggest membership organisation, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD), thought to be the second largest, plus the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) and Red Labour.
The smaller groups include the Labour Briefing Co-operative, Labour Assembly Against Austerity, the Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Kashmiris for Labour, Grassroots Black Left and new joiner Labour Women Leading (an alternative to the Labour Women’s Network).
JVL has defended former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone,[5] supported Jackie Walker[36][37] as being a victim of a “vituperative campaign… based on this sliver of quasi-fact”,[38] deemed accusations of antisemitism against Moshé Machover as “ill founded”,[39][40] opposed and condemned the expulsion of Marc Wadsworth[41][42] as being “punished in advance of investigation and hearing of the case”,[43][44] welcomed the lifting of Derby North MP Chris Williamson‘s suspension[45] and called the National Executive Committee‘s ruling not to endorse him as a Labour candidate for the 2019 general election a “dangerous development for everyone who stands for justice for Palestinians and for democracy and freedom of expression in Britain, including within Labour”.
Many people would defend Moshé Machover and, perhaps, Marc Wadsworth. Those behind Livingstone, Walker, and, above all Chris Williamson, will be fewer in number.
It is to be doubted if their endorsement will help the slate win wider support.
On their candidates not many people on the left, and certainly not socialist internationalists and democrats will wish to be associated with Yasmin Dar’s past participation public celebrations of the Iranian regime’s anniversary.
The other candidates of the CLGA, Ann Henderson, Nadia Jama, Laura Pidcock and Mish Rahman have serious supporters.
The AWL comments,
Laura Pidcock has taken a pro-Brexit position. What about broader internationalism? Yasmine Dar has repeatedly attended Islamist events celebrating the “Islamic revolution” in Iran, i.e. the Islamist counter-revolution that crushed Iran’s workers, women and national minorities.
Lara McNeill and Ellen Morrison are both linked to the Stalinist left in Young Labour and have been actively involved in witch-hunting the socialist left and shutting down democracy in sections of the party and left where they are active.
Smaller Lists.
Another group of candidates are running with the Tribune label.
This is not associated with the magazine of that name, now owned by ‘left populist’ US Jacobin. The UK ‘Tribune’ specialises in attacks on Keir Starmer and claims that the ” Israeli “secret services” are involved in Labour Party politics (“The shame of the new ‘Tribune’ and its editor“)
The Tribune group of MPs, not to be confused with Tribune magazine, has endorsed three ex-parliamentarians as NEC members’ section candidates. This is the grouping in Westminster that was reformed in 2005.
The Tribune group is chaired by Clive Efford. As a whole, it was not critical of Jeremy Corbyn during his leadership, apart from the party’s handling of antisemitism at that time. It fully supports Keir Starmer.
- Theresa Griffin – Former MEP for the North West (2014-2020)
- Paula Sherriff – Former MP for Dewsbury (2015-2019)
- Liz McInnes – Former MP for Heywood and Middleton (2014-2019)
Open Labour is particularly worth noticing,
CLP rep candidates:
- Ann Black – Former NEC member (2000-2018), South East regional board member, Oxford & District secretary
- Jermain Jackman – British singer (winner of The Voice UK), founder of the 1987 Caucus (a collective of young Black men in Labour)
Experienced Cde DW says there are good reasons to back these candidates:
… Dave Anderson, the former Blaydon MP who stood down in 2017 and appears to have distanced himself from any faction, and a fascinating note from one Aram Rawf who says “In twenty years I have gone from being an asylum seeker on the back of a lorry to being a Labour councillor.” What he does not say, is that he won office for Labour in the hostile environment of Thanet, the place that Farage coveted for his abortive career on the green benches
Labour List covers some of the other Independents (see article), though far from all.
Surely one outstanding candidate should have been included?
Brian Precious.
The Tendance recalls the Cde’s writings on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
L and M assert that social antagonisms emerge when identities are threatened, rather than when they are fully constituted – contra the classical Marxist (Hegelian) formulation of a general antagonism and showdown between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in advanced capitalism. L and M proceed to critique the Marxist understanding of antagonism in terms of “contradiction” , rejecting it on the basis that, for such a conception to be viable, it requires the presence of things which are absent in an antagonistic situation: namely, fully constituted identities: Logically, in order for proposition A to be contradicted by proposition not A , we must, in the first place, have “fully A” and “fully not A” .But in antagonism, identities are in a state of flux: Two things which are in antagonism to one another are in a situation where the “partial presence” of one of them prevents the coming to full presence of the other, and vice-versa. Think of looking at one thing close to your eyes and another thing far away; you can’t focus on them simultaneously: The sharpness of one produces the blurring of the other.
..
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have deepened, enriched and updated the revolutionary tradition.
Now Cde Precious says,
Our 12.12.19 debacle was caused by a disastrous shift in our Brexit policy and a ferocious media campaign attacking Jeremy Corbyn personally. Antisemitism was massively exaggerated so as to be weaponized. This created the fear and intimidation typical of a witch hunt, as in Arthur Miller’s “” The Crucible “”.
On 12.12.19 we went down to our worst defeat since 1935. The big difference between our 2017 near-victory and our 2019 disaster is the change in our Brexit policy. It is long past time we faced up to this elephant in the room.
On 23.6.16 many Labour voters didn’t suddenly become xenophobic little-Englanders. They voted leave as they saw the EU as a threat to jobs, services, houses and democracy.
Only Labour has the policies to answer these worries. I am totally committed to our 2017 manifesto and our 2019 manifesto without the suicidal Brexit shift.
Still crazy after all those years!
Update:
On the wilder fringe Skwawkbox has yet to issue his instructions on who to vote for in the NEC elections and has decided to devote himself full time to attacking the Labour Party Leader.
Momentum: Issue of Trans Rights Continues to Shake Left Labour Slate.
Trans Rights, “Conversations on the issue are currently ongoing”.
An indication of their negotiators’ position can be seen here.
Indications are that the joint list was hard to create.
Scattergood’s statement is welcome for admitting that the 8 Hours negotiations were “difficult” and it does not take much imagination to see what kind of ‘factors’ might have been behind this, above all the unrelenting hostility of fringe groups, Jewish Voice for Labour, Red Labour (“Red Labour will call out attacks on the left, backsliding on policy, the top down operation of the leader’s office“) and sections of the Labour Representation Committee towards any form of accomodation to the present Labour Party Leadership.
This section from the statement from the latter groups is worth noting,
All three of our organisations argued strongly for the inclusion of Jo Bird following her impressive performance in the recent by-elections to the NEC. We share the disappointment of all Jo’s supporters that she is not on the slate and we will be holding our left candidates to account in terms of opposition to the witch hunt against the left and other important issues Jo highlighted.
9th of June: NEC Elections – response to the united left slate
The present controversy over Trans Rights – that is the alleged positions of some of the candidates on the list – is unlikely either to make the slate credible for the wider left or to resolve the controversies the diehard anti-Starmer factions wish to create.
Observers consider that the left of the party would be better working out a positive strategy of developing new policies to deal with the Coronavirus crises, the challenges that Brexit poses for internationalists, and a socialist alternative to the Johnson national populist ideology and its use of state intervention.
This is a good start,
A plan for the recovery should be rooted in real-life experiences, and should be able to be expressed in a language people recognise. The sorts of plans that for example the Women’s Budget Group has put forward for a “care-led recovery”, making the case for investment in care work to create jobs, or the proposals from Autonomy and others for radical changes in how, when and where we work speak to the fundamental issues raised by the crisis. Instead of the grandiose promises of the Tories, Labour can develop an economic programme keyed to the fine-grain detail of people’s lives and experiences.
Fighting “backsliding” and the organisational efforts to unite what is turning out to be a diverse groups of political forces opposed to Starmer is not a step in that direction.
Particularly as this looms:
Keir Starmer: Poll Boost for 100 Days of Leadership.
Starmer is doing better in the polls than his predecessors.
Net scores for leaders at around 100 days: Ed Miliband -21 Jeremy Corbyn -32 Keir Starmer +24 First impressions matter in politics, and Starmer has made a good one. (Chris Curtis).
Today sees many accounts of Keir Starmer’s first 100 Days as Labour Leader.
On Labour List Sienna Rogers writes (100 Days of Starmer) that,
The new leader has adopted a softly, softly approach to opposing the government and a ruthless one for internal party politics.
…
He has forged a slim but reliable majority on Labour’s national executive committee, replaced Jennie Formby with a general secretary who is widely considered to be on the party’s right, and sacked his Corbynite leadership opponent from the shadow cabinet. The Labour frontbench has been thoroughly overhauled, both in terms of who’s on it and the tone that they take in interviews. The leadership has slowly ramped up criticism of the Tories over Covid-19, but caution is still the watchword for media engagement.
She continues,
The core objective of Starmer’s team appears to be ‘detoxifying’ the Labour brand. If we’re assessing these 100 days on that basis, the leader’s brilliant personal approval ratings certainly give cause for optimism – but the party has some catching up to do, still lagging behind the Conservatives in voting intention despite their calamitous response to the crisis.
Faced with the divisions on the Labour Left, with a substantial fringe unable to accept Starmer’s legitimacy, it looks probable that the Labour leader will consolidate support on the National Executive Committee after the forthcoming internal party elections.
Toby Helm in the Observer yesterday (100 days on, Keir Starmer’s quiet revolution takes hold) accurately reflects the reactions on the wider left to Starmer’s “ruthless” actions inside the Party..
Laura Parker, who has backed the internationalist Another Europe is Possible campaign, is cited,
.”….there has been no mass resignation from the membership, says Laura Parker, the former national coordinator of Momentum, because Starmer stood on a leftwing programme which he has stood by.”
She asks,
Why would people leave when the centre of gravity has shifted? It may not have shifted as far to the left as some people want. But it is an anti-austerity, pro-common ownership party. It is a pro-peace party, and it is not a ‘relaxed about the filthy rich’ party – far from it,” said Parker.
She believes it is probably too early to judge Starmer, as Covid-19 has drowned out everything else and given the new Labour leader no real chance to show his true policy colours. But she sees definite signs that the entire movement wants to come together under him if it can.
“The vast majority of people do want to turn a page,” she said. “That does not mean the left is about to abandon all its principles, but there is an appetite for building more harmonious relationships.”
Indeed. We could do without the contrived attacks on Starmer’s “Blairism”and the claims of a wave of activists leaving, instead of a few individuals and a a hostile mood amongst those who placed high hopes in Corbyn.
But there is room for the kind of strategic questioning offered by Peter Kenyon in the left journal Chartist,
Peter Kenyon looks forward to a dismal future for Britain and its children post-Brexit
Labour remainers are engaged in one last bid to persuade Labour Party leader Keir Starmer to speak out about Brexit. It is a difficult ask. The new leadership wants the Tories to own the issue. But how to fix that in the minds of voters?
…..
Starmer needs to make a statement, without necessarily calling for an extension, about the consequences of Johnson’s plate-spinning. Lastly, now is the time to remind voters that there is no sector of the economy that will benefit from maximum divergence except the disaster capitalists represented by the current Cabinet.
In framing a starker set of messages about the future, they will need to be targeted at those newly-elected Tory MPs from so-called ‘red wall’ seats. Make them squirm. Unbelievably, they won their seats with promises of hope. What hope can there be for their constituents and their children when their local manufacturing base is having its heart ripped out by the Tories? Divergence from the EU means just-in-time supply chains will be wrecked with delays at ports, and the risk of tariffs. This is just one of the consequences of Johnson’s ‘fuck business’ policy. Agriculture is similarly at risk.
On the more radical left (also from the internationalist Another Europe is Possible anti-Brexit campaign) Michael Chessum also appears in the Observer Toby Helm article.
He says,
For now, though, the party, like the country, is getting to know Starmer. Michael Chessum, a former member of Momentum’s steering group, says the sacking of Long-Bailey and appointment of Evans have split the left and caused irritation.
“But,” he said, “most members are probably willing to tolerate this, as long as the new leadership honours its promise to maintain Corbyn’s radical policy platform. The question is whether Starmer can really do this while at the same time completely changing Labour’s personnel and tone.”
Michael delicately refers to the self-righteous blasts that followed Long-Bailey’s dismissal, a reaction that has only served to isolate the professional anti-Starmer current further.
This is how some of them reacted:
Today they are reduced to this:
Susan Press, a long-standing activist on the left of Labour, reflects a more widely shared take.
The anti-Starmer left, many of them from groups inside and outside the Labour Party favourable to Brexit and whose campaigning against the EU helped bring Boris Johnson to power, have struggled to find more than a role.
They are reduced to this kind of snipping:
Today Labour supporters and activists are beginning to digest this in full.
Conner Ibbetson writes,
Starmer vs Corbyn: how does Labour’s new leader stack up?
Since taking office as leader of the Labour party, Sir Keir Starmer has been presented with a tough set of challenges; unite the party following a crushing general election defeat, tackle the issue of antisemitism, and win back Labour’s key voters. Add to that list the COVID-19 pandemic and a resulting surge in support for the Government, and you’ve got a truly monumental task ahead of you – so what do Labour voters and the general public make of him 100 days in, and how does he stack up against his predecessor?
This is a crucial point:
Distancing himself from Corbyn could prove a winning strategy for the new Labour leader. When compared to Corbyn, Starmer is seen as universally more appealing to both Labour voters and general voters, by both the general public and Labour voters themselves. Overall, 60% of the public think Starmer best appeals to the general voter, compared to 56% who think he appeals to Labour voters more than his predecessor.
Among Labour voters, 73% back Starmer as most appealing to the general voter, while only 7% still hang on and say Jeremy Corbyn had a better appeal.
When it comes to who Labour voters think best appeals to the party, the majority still side with Starmer (65%) however 14% of Labour voters still opt for Corbyn.
Looking at younger adults under the age of 25, while a sizeable portion back Starmer in both cases, the group is split (40% and 39%) on which leader they see as most appealing to general voters and labour voters respectively.
Ibbetson concludes by saying that voters consider that Starmer has moved the party to the right, “a third (35%) of the general public thinking Starmer has already moved the Labour Party more towards the political right, with only 3% saying he has shifted the party towards the left. Approaching a fifth (19%) say the Labour Party has remained in the same place for now.
This will doubtless crop up frequently, “Among Labour voters, two fifths (40%) say Keir Starmer has shifted the party towards to the right, with 18% saying the party has stayed the same under his leadership.”
A poll is not a political analysis, and one would hesitate to call all of Corbyn’s policies, or rather his lack of clear ones on issues like Universal Credit or foreign policy, the gold standard of left wing politics.
We Need to Talk About Jacobin – “Srebrenica massacre” “used to justify more war and US intervention”.
“Helped justify later interventions, including the ongoing strikes against ISIS.” Jacobin.
To commemorate the anniversary of the Srebrenica Mass Killings the US left magazine Jacobin, which owns the British ‘Tribune’, published this piece:
The Srebrenica Precedent DAVID N. GIBBS
This article has one central theme:
…the widespread belief that Serb forces had committed genocide played a critical role in legitimating the idea of humanitarian intervention, in the Balkans and throughout the world. After Srebrenica, US interventionism would increasingly be presented as a genocide prevention enterprise.
…
Viewed from a humanitarian standpoint, the US response to the Srebrenica massacre was a lethal fiasco. But despite the ugly facts of the episode, a mythology emerged from Srebrenica that emphasized the supposedly benign character of US intervention. In this telling, US policy was the savior of the Bosnian people and the defender of human rights more generally.
Gibbs has little analysis of the break-up of Yugoslavia (nor why some on the left opposed this) and sees everything through the lens of ‘humanitarian intervention’.
There is a second theme.
The Srebrenica massacre was surely a horrific act, but did it constitute genocide? In a controversial 2003 decision, the ICTY tribunal answered in the affirmative. Its determination that the Srebrenica massacre amounted to genocide has been widely questioned among academic authorities on the topic.
His article does not exactly deny genocide but calls the Srebrenica mass ethnic murder a “massacre” and, ina range of claims, which specialists can address, seeks to apportion blame more widely. How far this is true is, as indicated, a matter for those with deep knowledge of the history of the events. This is an extremely partisan field and since some of the people engaged in it are, let’s just say, not friends of the Tendance all one can say is that Gibbs offers only an interpretation. Bu then Gibbs is, to be it politely, somebody who has ploughed this furrow for over a decade. The approval of the World Socialist Web Site indicates it…
But the article has a political intention for the present day.
If one applies the Gibbs criteria, the ” deliberate mass killings of exceptional size and scale, generally in the range of the hundreds of thousands or millions” where would leave the recent genocide of the Yazidis? The UN Commission of Inquiry stated in 2017, ““The Commission of Inquiry calls on the international community to recognize the crime of genocide being committed by ISIL against the Yazidis and to undertake steps to refer the situation to justice,” said the expert panel in a statement marking the third anniversary of ISIL’s attack on the Yazidis.”
As stated, the article has this much wider purpose,
Twenty years later, Srebrenica is still shaping US foreign policy. NATO interventions in the Balkans served to legitimate both the Atlantic Alliance and US hegemony, and the new language of human rights and genocide prevention has helped justify later interventions, including the ongoing strikes against ISIS.
For Gibbs, channelling his inner ‘anti-imperialism of fools’, the US Western help for the Kurds to fight against Daesh is the “fault” of the West’s claims to stand for human rights. Aiding the Kurdish SDF in its stand against the genociders of ISIS was a Western “intervention”, part of its “hegemony” justified in the name of the “language” of humanitarian intervention which can be traced back to reactions to Srebrenica.
It’s as if an act of mass murder is somehow the ’cause’ of every kind of Western intervention, every kind of duplicitous ‘human rights’ language, a kind of pennant of Western hegemony.
It’s as if there is something “new” about human rights.
If human rights are universal then surely there are times when they can “trump” formal national sovereignty?
Humanitarian intervention can, as the Kurds in Kobane (to cite just one example) know, can be a demand from the people themselves.
Gibbs’ way of looking at mass murder as the bunting of species arguments in favour of preventing genocides is distasteful to say the least.
Such a conclusion perhaps only tops the rest of this curiously timed article.
What does this show about Jacobin?
It indicates a deep crisis of moral direction.
Jacobin, “a leading voice of the American left”, lost its way sometime last year.
A vocal supporter of “left populism” in Europe, and Bernie Sanders in the US, 2019 saw defeat after defeat for its favourite parties. Protest Party, and “lieu de rassemblement” (rallying point) for the People Against the Oligarchy La France insoumise went from 19,9% for the candidacy of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round of the French Presidential contest of 2017 to 6,3% in the European elections. The Greek left party Syriza lost control of the government in July to the right-wing New Democracy. In Spain Podemos went from 69 seats in the 2015 Congress to 35 after last November’s General General Election. In December the British Labour Party was beaten in a Tory landslide, a party some saw in terms of right-wing national populism.
These were not just temporary setbacks.
In La Chute de la Maison Mélenchon (201(9) former LFI leading activist, the political scientist Thomas Guénolé, described the rally as a virtual democracy run top-down by its would-be’charismatic’ leader. “La France insoumise , c’est moi” (Page 121). (1) Guénolé pointed out that the sociological breakdown of LFI electoral support could not be seen as a new bloc, or “articulation” of the people; it closely resembled the vote for François Hollande, the former Socialist president elected in 2012.
In La Chute Mélenchon’s failure, as the Tribune of the People, the embodiment of the Republic (famously saying “la république, c’est moi”), was to follow his own bent and the advice of those who believed in left-populism. He refused to recognise the electoral basis of his momentary rise in left-wing voters who saw him – as the other parts of left fragmented , with many going over to Macron’s centrist La République en Marche, as the best placed on the left to oppose the far-right Marine le Pen. As the author puts it, “he said he united the people, but in reality he briefly brought together the voters of the left (“a dit qu’elle unissait le peuple, mais ce qu’elle a fait, ‘c’est unir l’électorat de gauche” Page 224).
THis did not last. Mélenchon has never been able to negotiate as an equal with other left parties and groups. In the recent French local elections he had to recognise his uneven local implementation and accept a secondary role on a few lists with other left forces, leaving his own party as a marginal player.
LFI represents, as Guénolé indicates, the failure of left populism to replace the division between right and left by one which pits the “99%” against the “oligarchy”, the Casta, the “elite”. Its decline cannot be put down to the personal faults of bombastic leader raised in the sectarian school of the Trotskyist current known as Lambertism and years of internal Parti Socialiste factionalism. The political strategy of trying to seize national sovereignty in the name of a federate people has not led to a single electoral victory. Those who float the idea of some kind of ‘progressive nationalism’ and a dose of this populism, to help the British Labour Party regain its lost support, have lost any European model to follow.
Podemos, a democratic party willing to negotiate a left coalition with Spain’s Socialist Party, the PSOE, has discretely dropped this left populist’ core. Left Populist theorist and amateur politician Chantal Mouffe set down a benchmark for the current in her book, ” in conversation with Íñigo Errejón”Podemos: In the Name of the People (2016) Errejón now runs his own micro-party Más País with 3 MPs in Spain’s National Assembly. Podemos has also seen the split away of its leftist wing, la Izquierda anticapitalista (June 2020. Anticapitalistas leave Podemos.)
Despite these set-backs (we would leave it to those familiar with the US to write on Sanders), and the wider issues of what happened to the ‘populist’ left in Latin America, Jacobin nevertheless published this during the pre-lockdown Spring,
Left-Populism Is Down but Not Out
GIORGOS VENIZELOS YANNIS STAVRAKAKIS
We argue that it is not the populist core that is responsible for this outcome, but instead the leftist one.
(Left) Populism does not necessarily entail a form of reformist politics. It is, rather, one way with which a leftist programmatic package (regardless of its degree of radicalism) can develop its capacity to form coalitions, articulate demands, and mobilize supporters in order to construct a collective identity and acquire a form able to undermine the status quo within representative systems. In this sense, all communist, socialist, social-democratic, and radical-leftist projects can be populist, too. A Left program which, let’s say, pushes for redistribution, free health care, or free education can frame these demands in a populist way, i.e., by aiming to regain popular (neither national nor class) sovereignty.
A more restrained analysis, has been made by Lewis Basset.
The Left Must Address a Historic Crisis of Representation
A broad survey of the left-populist parties that have attempted to wed themselves to extraparliamentary movements reveals today little but vacated intent. Podemos’s “circles” have all but disappeared, LFI’s equivalent failed to develop, while Momentum in the UK functioned not at all as a social movement and only a little better as an intraparty faction. But it would be a mistake to blame all this on leadership “betrayals.” Rather, both leaders and movements are limited by an atomized social context.
…
Elsewhere, economic growth and employment levels had finally begun to recover, while “centrists” had found a source of continuity via Emmanuel Macron in France, Pedro Sánchez in Spain, Joe Biden in the United States, and, perhaps, Keir Starmer in Britain. But the dynamics of this new and profound crisis will provide the context in which popular demands will again go unanswered — and in which new alignments of voters can once again emerge.
Make of that what you will.
In the meantime perhaps in despair Jacobin’s European Editor backed the losing side in the recent Momentum faction fight.
Others suggest that Jacobin’s loss of political direction is more serious.
*****
(1) A fuller account of this book would deal with Guénolé’s personal dispute with LFI, and issues with, for example, the running of its media operation, Le Média and financial skullduggery. See La chute de la maison Mélenchon”, autopsie de la France insoumise Par Hadrien Mathoux.
Guénolé’s Petit guide du mensonge en politique, (
Hagia Sophia: Target of Erdoğan’s National Populism and Culture Wars.
Religious and National Populist Culture Wars.
The BBC’s Orla Guerin reports,
A change is coming to Hagia Sophia, which has endured since the 6th century, outlasting the Byzantine empire and the Ottoman era. Now, once again, it will be a mosque. But Turkish officials say Christian emblems, including mosaics of the Virgin Mary which adorn its soaring golden dome, will not be removed.
Making changes at Hagia Sophia is profoundly symbolic. It was Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, who decreed that it should be a museum. President Erdogan is now taking one more step to dismantle Ataturk’s secular legacy, and remould Turkey according to his vision. The Turkish leader – who presents himself as a modern day conqueror – is making no apologies for the change. He says anyone who doesn’t like it – and plenty abroad don’t – is attacking Turkey’s sovereignty.
Reclaiming Hagia Sophia plays well with his base – religious conservatives – and with Turkish nationalists. Critics say he’s using the issue to distract attention from the economic damage done here by the Covid19 pandemic.
But many in the international community argue that the monument belongs to humanity – not to Turkey – and should have remained unchanged. They say it was a bridge between two faiths, and a symbol of co-existence.
The progressive Peoples’ Democratic Party, the HDP, (Halkların Demokratik Partisi (HDP), Partiya Demokratîk a Gelan) [party, (an associate member of the Party of European Socialists ) which holds 58 seats in the Turkish National Assembly, has condemned the move.
THis is already being greeted by religious reactionaries.
Religious prejudice overrides history.
The significance is lost of nobody who knows the history of Turkey, and for people across the world who care about our common cultural heritage.
Secularists have made their views known.
This is the motive:
Turkey’s ruler Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his organisation, the Justice and Development Party (: Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi), illustrate a national populism prepared to go further than culture wars against democrats and religious minorities.
The hounding of dissidents, the imprisonment of political opponents, and his blood-stained interventions in Syria and against Kurds across the region, not to mention his open use of Turkish forces to bolster his preferred side in the Libyan civil conflict (Erdogan Is Libya’s Man Without a Plan.) , are more significant than this move to stake his claim as an international leader of hard right Islamism.
Yet this bigoted and deeply insulting move is noxious in itself.
Factionalism in the Time of Coronavirus Part 13: George Galloway to “return to Scottish Politics”.
Galloway to Work His Magic in Scottish Politics.
Lucky 13 for George Galloway:
Former MP George Galloway to return to Scottish politics after row over border
George Galloway is planning to return to Scottish politics after becoming involved in a social media row over a proposed quarantine for tourists arriving in Scotland from England.
The former Labour MP confirmed to The Courier he is to move back to Scotland after a weekend of debate on Twitter, sparked by a group of protesters who staged a demonstration at the Scottish border.
It’s hard to say that George Galloway is a factionalist.
His own party, the Workers Party of Britain, is staffed by members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) who stand for monolithic unity and spend their leisure hours watching Box Sets of the Speeches of North Korea’s hereditary Marxist-Leninist Monarchy.
Better to say that Galloway is a man of many ventures.
There were those happy days of the marches against the invasion of Iraq, a leading role in the Stop the War Coalition and cosy meetings with John Rees and Lindsey German. Then…..Mr Galloway went to Washington! The dapper gent had a distinguished Parliamentary career after the Bethnal Green earthquake that “gave birth” to the Labour Party all over again, and the regime-changing Bradford West Spring that made the city an “Israel-free zone.” Galloway declared that he would rejoin the Labour Party if Jeremy Corbyn was elected Leader. Only jealousy in high-places stopped this dream coming true.
A man of many parts Galloway has shaken up British political, cultural and intellectual life. His friendship with Nigel Farage helped heal the divisions opening up in the UK over Brexit. There were his much-loved house-sharing escapades as a madcap cat. A well-regarded manual, the Handbook for Fidel Castro, was a world best-seller. There was a successful theatrical venture, Dusty Springfield, the Musical. There was the project for a series of children’s books, set amongst the Spice islands of Indonesia, “Red Molucca the Good Pirate.”
Now we learn George Galloway is to return to lead his ain folk.
The move is widely seen to cap a successful political career and rewarding personal life.
Campaigning has already begun:
Watch out Scotland!
Factionalism in the Time of Coronavirus Part 12: Left NEC Slate Faces Transphobia Row.
It was already controversial, but hours and hours of negotiating (8 ! hours) resulted in a united left list for Labour’s NEC: Labour left groups agree single NEC slate of six CLP rep candidates – without Lansman.
Labour List’s Sienna Rodgers comments,
It was understood that Momentum co-founder and former chair Lansman had hoped to be endorsed by the CLGA for the upcoming NEC elections, as he vowed to focus on his NEC duties when stepping down from the organisation.
They are:
- Ann Henderson
- Gemma Bolton
- Laura Pidcock
- Mish Rahman
- Nadia Jama
- Yasmine Dar
….
Now a new row has broken out over one of the agreed candidates.
The candidate is accused of Transphobia.
The news is just breaking, and her name is emerging:
Background:
NEC Elections – call for a united left slate
Jewish Voice for Labour, Labour Representation Committee and Red Labour, are working together with the other nine organisations represented in the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance (CLGA) to arrive at a list of candidates that every party member can be assured will stand firm in defence of the policy gains of the Corbyn period: for a democratic party equally accessible to all members regardless of their background; for open selection for all post holders; and for natural justice, transparency and fairness in internal processes.
We and other CLGA member organisations are currently reviewing prospective nominees for the nine CLP places on the NEC, with the proviso that it may be better, strategically, to nominate a smaller slate of 6 in order to maximise the vote for left candidates.
The two largest and best-established left groups – Momentum and Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) – bear a large part of the responsibility for ensuring that this time there is no factional wrangling of the kind that has undermined left unity over the last two years. Other groups involved need to play their part in generating the purposeful and flexible spirit necessary to select a set of able and principled candidates that all will support.
Working together, Jewish Voice for Labour, the Labour Representation Committee and Red Labour have become influential actors in this important, complex and fast-moving situation. We will do our best to keep members informed, and to campaign actively for the success of the unity slate of left candidates.
While all this is happening many people are looking at this list which unlike the above is actually “centre left”.
Given that there are 9 CLP posts up for election there is space for people to vote for the 6 ‘list’ candidates and 3 others……
In the meantime Skwawkbox is working hard on his full time job of attacking the Labour Party,
Here
A ‘New State Capitalism’ Post-Covid 19 ?
Is a ‘New State Capitalism’ on the cards?
Without a doubt, Trump and the Brexiteers did not foresee needing state ownership of industry and explicit state direction to achieve their goals. There are plenty of ways the state fosters, guides, and shapes private capital. Capitalism is never without the state, except in some libertarian utopia. State ownership just makes this relationship more explicit.
March the 26th 2020. The Specter of State Capitalism. Ilias Alami.
Editorialising in the March/April issue of New Left Review the radical left journal peered at the effects of the global pandemic.
It found, to at least the learned New Leftists’ surprise, that Covid-19 had rescued the role of the Nation State.
….the political agencies taking charge, one by one, are nation-states, summoned back from the secondary status to which laissez-faire ideology had consigned them—and now resuming, as if in war time, their foundational responsibility for public safety. The virus has been a Rorschach test for ruling parties and national-political cultures alike. In the us, a bellowing hypochondriac in the White House, ambitious state governors honing their profiles, a bi-partisan Congressional bail-out for big business and tougher sanctions on Iran. In the uk, Churchillian sentiment plastering over critical shortages and medics’ deaths. In the eu, assorted neoliberal regimes squabbling over how to press home their prior political agendas.
In the latest issue of journal (No 123 May-June 2020). the economist Robert Brenner leads with an article outlining that the US response has focused on the public safety of one group above all others. A “corporate bailout”, a”Billionaire coronavirus bonanza” is the description of the US government’s handling of the economy during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Escalating Plunder offers an overview of how pro-Trump businesses have taken advantage of public largesse during the pandemic. Benner asserts that “the success of so many famous non-financial corporations in securing loans at artificially reduced prices that has made the headlines, it is actually the lenders, the financiers, who have benefited most decisively.” He observes that the Trump Presidency has not taken control of the economy in the process, “The persistence of such a hands-off approach to the economy’s leading producers and financiers on the part of the bipartisan political-economic establishment at a time of such profound crisis.”
The conclusion? That this “plunder” means that redistribution of wealth is the main effect of a primary political intervention in the “assets markets” and the “whole economy”.
This is the politically driven intention, the
way that they can assure the reproduction of the non-financial and financial corporations, their top managers and shareholders—and indeed top leaders of the major parties, closely connected with them—is to intervene politically in the asset markets and throughout the whole economy, so as to underwrite the upward re-distribution of wealth to them by directly political means. This is, indeed, what Congress and the Fed have accomplished with their large-scale and extended corporate bailout in the face of plunging production, employment and profits. The politically driven upward redistribution of wealth to sustain central elements of a partially transformed dominant capitalist class, as the response to a seemingly inexorable process of economic deterioration, has been at the heart of the politico-economic evolution which has brought us to this point. What we have had for a long epoch is worsening economic decline met by intensifying political predation.
At a Zoom meeting this week, which the writer of this Blog participated in, the political and economic effects of the crisis were talked about. Many suggest that there are more radical changes underfoot than “Predation”.
The left is beginning to talk of government measures as steps towards a kind of “state capitalism”. That something similar to a war-time command economy might be in the making, at least in Britain and the rest of Europe. As mass unemployment looms other perspectives have also appeared.
- Introducing new fiscal rules that delay the Conservative Manifesto pledge to have debt falling as a share of GDP to 2024, but maintaining the Government’s commitment to keep debt interest below 6% of GDP.
- Sweeping tax reform now to ensure borrowing is brought under control equitably and without harming growth. This means reviewing the 1,100 tax reliefs that exist, focusing tax rises on accrued wealth, including by revaluing council tax, removing distortions in the tax system, for example those that favour large digital firms, and announcing a long-term review of the tax treatment of debt and equity financing. Any immediate tax cuts should be focused on cutting the cost of employment through reducing the burden of employer NICs, rather than a VAT cut aimed at boosting consumption.
- Establishing a new Restructuring Agency, modelled on the Industrial Revitalisation Corporation of Japan, to manage the estimated £30 billion of government-guaranteed loans that are expected to go bad and ensure the high levels of corporate debt generally do not become a drag on investment and the economic recovery.
- Investing £30 billion directly into high growth companies, such as the British Business Bank, British Growth Fund and British Patient Capital, using convertible loans that can be turned into equity if not repaid, to ensure firms can assess capital to invest without just taking on ever more debt.
- Rapid action to prevent labour market scarring, by hiring 13,000 Universal Credit work coaches, targeting job subsidies on absorptive sectors and guaranteeing every young person a chance to earn, train or serve their community.
- Establishing a new Right to Retrain for adults, including a £50,000 repayable loan, available to all adults without a degree at any stage of their career for full and part-time students, funded via the National Skills Fund.
- Double Further Education funding and launch a radical wave of reform of the sector to give colleges five years of funding certainty, improve take up of higher value subjects and to rationalise qualifications.
It’s not hard to see that some of these policy proposals, above all a “Restructuring Agency” and direct investment (‘picking winners’ as free-marketeers used to call it) and the “debt for equity swaps” raises the issue of state capitalism explicitly.
It confirms that Alami (above: The Spectre of State Capitalism) seems to have hit on something early,
COVID-19 and the generalized economic crisis it has catalyzed may hasten changes toward explicit forms of state capitalism in the West. Yet, a decloaked state at the helm does not necessarily mean a more progressive and just economic system (just like it does not mean a move toward state socialism). Who will bear the brunt of the costs of the current transformations, and who will benefit from the consolidation of the ‘new’ state capitalism, will be the outcome of a tense political process.
Researchers are beginning to think along these lines.
The rise of State Capitalism in the post-COVID-19 era
In this article, which appeared a couple of days ago, Christopher Dembik offers an interesting angle,
Marxism, which has been the subject of renewed interest since the GFC, defines state capitalism as a social system combining capitalism with ownership or control by the state which basically acts like a single huge corporation. It differs from Communism in the sense that in a state capitalist system, private property continues to exist alongside a big government that dictates the path the economy is heading to. State capitalism has been around for almost as long as capitalism itself. In 1791, Alexander Hamilton, first ever U.S. Treasury Secretary, presented an ambitious project to protect America’s infant industries with tariffs from international competition. It marks the birth of the idea of educative protectionism which will be theorized a few decades later by the German economist Friedrich List after a stay of a few years in the United States.
The author roots changing forms of state capitalism in recent developments,
In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, Eurasia Group’s president, Ian Brenner wrote a celebrated book in which he claims that the GFC announces the end of the free market. His bold statement turned out to be partially correct. During the turmoil, Western governments had to play a bigger role in the economy as driving force for recovery, but they disengaged themselves very quickly as soon as the economy showed signs of picking up.
Dembik argues that, “This time is different”
State capitalism might become a more permanent state of the economy, at least in some countries, due to the nature of the current crisis, which differs from previous ones, mainly for two reasons. First, it is not a “normal” recession. While on average 60% to 70% of businesses are hit in a “normal” recession, the COVID-19 crisis has affected almost 100% of businesses in some countries where strict lockdowns have been implemented. Coronavirus scars and depressive effects will persist longer than most believe. Policymakers, with a massive inflow of liquidity into the economy, have delayed and postponed a lot of pain but they have not eliminated it. The second economic wave is about to start, characterized by massive unemployment and an unprecedented number of bankruptcies.
In countries most exposed, the relative share of the private sector in the economy will dramatically decrease, consecutively leading to a bigger public sector which will employ directly or indirectly a big chunk of the workforce. In addition, governments are likely to rely increasingly on quasi-permanent subsidies to protect domestic companies and appease social discontent resulting from the crisis.
The effects of climate change could also further destabilise the economy.
Second, another crisis will emerge soon with potential ripple effects more devastating than the coronavirus. CO2 levels in atmosphere reaching a new record and Artic oil spill caused by melting permafrost are two unpleasant reminders that climate change has not taken a break while we were focusing on the pandemic. Many people might consider big government is the only way to tackle the consequences of climate change and especially avoid leaving the poor even farther behind.
So where does this leave the ‘new state capitalism’?
Interventionism, of the kind advocated by the Onward group, and (potentially) an economy directed with aggressive sovereignty towards the European Union, is being put in place at the same time as the privatisation of public services and ‘openness’ towards the government’s friend in the White House, and low-quality US imports,
The Pro-Privatization Shock Therapy of the UK’s Covid Response
The outsourcing bonanza has coincided with Britain’s tense talks with the European Union over the terms of a new, non-member relationship. The Brexit transition period, during which Britain is still following EU rules, concludes at the end of the year. Negotiations to resolve myriad difficult, outstanding issues have already been set back by the pandemic, yet Boris Johnson has refused to countenance an extension. For Leave.EU hardliners, a no-deal Brexit is not unwelcome: it would, as they see it, set the nation free to forge ahead as Global Britain, a sort of deregulated “Singapore-on-Thames,” as some Brexiteers have enthused.
One result – not in line with previous cases of Naomi KLein’s ‘Shock Therapy‘- may well be to reinforce what Paul Mason has called “national neoliberalism“.
The policies of the government only loosely resembles some war-time measures only in the sense that public debt is used to boost the economy. There is no direction of labour, or of production. It is only ‘state capitalist’ in the sense that the government is (temporally) paying wages (the furlough scheme), for those in employment, and encouraging the provision of capital, it has little power over the use of capital. Competition between different capitals is far from over. If it is theoretically possible that some kind of 1960s interventionist policies may become embedded in government policy, these will be to encourage enterprises, not to control them.
What seems to be shaping up is an economy, in the UK, organised by the state for the protection of the internal market, social handouts (for now) to stave off mass destitution and unemployment, gifts (including discounted eating out) to shore up the electoral base of its national populism, and plunder (“a handout of pandemic contracts to the private sector”) for the government’s crony capitalists.
Nothing in this anaemic ‘state capitalism’ is a step towards socialism.
Boffy says,
It’s inevitable that governments are going to have to bail out aircraft producers, carmakers, airlines and airports. Those bailouts are going to run into hundreds of billions of Dollars, Pounds, Euros etc. There is no reason that the EU is going to help bailout British companies as Britain heads for Brexit. The EU as a $14 trillion economy can easily mobilise the resources to bail-out its strategic industries, even running into tens or even hundreds of billions of Euros, though it will require large-scale borrowing, leading to a sharp rise in interest rates to do it. But, Britain with its puny $2 trillion economy will struggle to do so. But, unless the UK government does borrow and find the funds to bail-out these industries, they will go bust, and it will lead to a more rapid concentration of capital in the EU. The funds the government is going to have to find for these bail-outs are huge, dwarfing what Sunak has already spent, and promised yesterday.When the UK government bailed out the banks and finance houses in 2008/9, the total cost came to £2 trillion. The financial sector accounts for a disproportionately large part of the UK economy. Even so, imagine the total cost then of bailing out the rest of the economy, or even just a large part of it. When the initial proposals for bailing out the banks were put forward, the original figures were only a fraction of what the actual number turned out to be. That was the case just in Britain, but, as Sraid Marx described it was done quite deliberately in getting approval for bailing out the Irish banks.The cost of bailing out large parts of the UK economy which is facing going bust as a result of the lockdown, unless such bail-outs occur, will make the bail-outs of the banks seem like small beer. The total cost is more likely to be around £20 trillion. British workers are going to be paying the price of this insane policy of lockdown for decades to come in the form of higher unemployment, and all of the health problems that goes with it, as well as slower growth, resulting from the need to cover the interest payments on all of this debt.
Cancel Culture. “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”. From Rowling to Chomsky.
“The task of Marxist politics is to defend these freedoms” – Ralph Miliband.
JK Rowling joins 150 public figures warning over free speech
BBC,
Some 150 writers, academics and activists – including authors JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood – have signed an open letter denouncing the “restriction of debate”.
They say they applaud a recent “needed reckoning” on racial justice, but argue it has fuelled stifling of open debate.
The letter denounces “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism” and “a blinding moral certainty”.
Several signatories have been attacked for comments that caused offence.
“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” says the letter.
US intellectual Noam Chomsky, eminent feminist Gloria Steinem, Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and author Malcolm Gladwell also put their names to the letter, which was published on Tuesday in Harper’s Magazine.
The appearance of Harry Potter author Rowling’s name among signatories comes after she recently found herself under attack online for comments that offended transgender people.
A comrade writes (B),
I don’t have an issue with the principles outlined in the letter, but I really think the idea of ‘cancel culture’ is perpetuated primarily by people who are performatively ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’. Like that person yesterday who was decrying mathematics as western imperialism on one side, and the likes of Andrew Doyle and Julie Burchill on the other. They feed off each other.
This looks like the best way to look at this.
When we come down to it, one of things the socialist left should do is to stand with liberal principles on issues of freedom of expression and non-conformity. Surely the bedrock of the diversity is multiple standpoints.
Marxists like Ralph Miliband took this view.
..the civic freedoms which, however inadequately and preariously, form part of bourgeois democracy are the product of centuries of unremitting popular struggles. The task of Marxist politics is to defend these freedoms; and to make possible their extension and enlargement by the removal of their class boundaries.”
Page 189 – 190. Marxism and Politics. Ralph Miliband. Oxford 1977.
To our shame this powerful tradition on the left has been overshadowed by the legacy of left regimes which turned their backs on civic freedoms.
You could say that the present dispute is much more minor, that it’s the hobbyist left versus the media version of the national populists. “Stifling debate”, moral panics, hysteria, controversies, like the TERF wars and the Western (if not US dominated) rows over racism (which ignore present-day Africa to begin with), the nationalist baiting, and the Brexit Party supporting Spiked, are more concerned with “speech and thought” than anything else.
Yet it’s hard to deny that restriction on debate, people being howled down, getting into serious difficulties for their opinions, not their acts, has become a problem.
Are these only culture wars?
People mention that in the US you can get sacked at the drop of the hat – one fall out from these attacks – without any real employment protection.
It is also the case that this is not an issue confined to the lands directly cited by the authors of the letter, or just a matter of cultural “conformity”.
It only takes a minute to look at countries, from the, Russian Federation politics, China and Hong Kong, to Erdoğan’s Turkey, to see limits on freedom of expression leading to court sentences and prison.
Human rights, and expression is one of them, are the bedrock of the left.
I do have a serious problem with Chomsky though….and not just because he’s a supporter of Labour Against the WItch-hunt:
And this,
Not to mention those who shunned Charlie Hebdo…
American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky views the popularisation of the Je suis Charlie slogan by politicians and media in the West as hypocritical, comparing the situation to the NATO bombing of the Radio Television of Serbia headquarters in 1999, when 16 employees were killed. “There were no demonstrations or cries of outrage, no chants of ‘We are RTV’ […]“, he noted. Chomsky also mentioned other incidents where US military forces have caused higher civilian death tolls, without leading to intensive reactions such as those that followed the 2015 Paris attacks.
Here’s the letter.
A Letter on Justice and Open Debate
Harper’s Magazine.
Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.
Momentum, “must and will lead criticisms of Keir Starmer” say new Co-Chairs.
Momentum new Co-Chairs: Gaya Sriskanthan, co-chair of Labour New York and Andrew Scattergood, West MIdlands Firefighter.
With a new leadership in place Momentum has lost no time in setting out its future plans.
Gaya Sriskanthan, co-chair of Labour New York, who has been based in America working on a variety of Climate Justice initiatives, since 2010, and Andrew Scattergood FBU West Midlands regional secretary write in the US owned Tribune, that they will back “workers and trade unions locally, on the ground and where it matters”, including in the Tower Hamlets dispute between a Labour Council and its employees.
The new leadership intends to make it a priority to tackle the newly elected Labour Leader.
We must and will lead criticisms of Keir Starmer, especially if he continues to attack the Left, dismiss vibrant social movements for systematic change, such as Black Lives Matter, and abandon the radical policy that so many Labour members, and much of the wider country, want.
They conclude,
We must continue to develop transformative socialist policy and set an agenda for change. We must organise in every region and nation, in our CLPs and in support of workplace struggles. We must scale up political education and candidate training, to help support a new generation of socialists.
Over the two years of our term, we are determined to make Momentum a vital hub for all of this, and if you are a member, or if you are considering becoming one, we invite you to get involved. We are only just beginning.
Labour List has also reported that Sriskanthan intends to “deepen Momentum’s links with US progressive forces” – though who they are and what they are doing after Bernie Sanders’ withdraw from the Democratic Party race remains to be clarified.
Another vision outlining ambitious plans for Momentum comes the New Socialist side in the Guardian yesterday.
This is a recent New Socialist Editorial:
Editorial: The Sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey June the 25th
“The sacking of Long-Bailey requires a drawing of a firm line. Socialist Campaign Group members on Labour’s front bench should resign.”
Solidarity with Palestinians and with Black people in the United States, victims of a single imperial system, is a basic principle for socialists. In sacking Long-Bailey for the flimsiest reasons Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner have shown what they think of this solidarity. It’s time for members of the Socialist Campaign Group to make clear what they think of them.
In the Guardian this week Tom Blackburn, a founding editor of the same New Socialist writes – one assumes after having slightly calmed down…
This pandemic has shown there is still a vital role for Momentum in the Labour party
the fundamental problems with Momentum today are rooted in its lack of political clarity, as previously argued by Momentum Renewal candidate Max Shanly. Originally rushed into being in 2015 to defend Jeremy Corbyn’s embattled leadership of the Labour party, Momentum has struggled to develop any substantial objectives beyond this original purpose.
Many would consider that the editor of the journal named after the Labour Party’s 1980s Theoretical Journal, the New Socialist, shows little respect for Momentum founder Jon Lansman. Lansman created Momentum as an arm of the left inside Labour’s grassroots to support Corbyn after mature reflection on the weaknesses of the 1980s left.
The intention, clear to anybody with familiarity with the failures of the main left organising group of the time, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, was the create an outward looking group that would avoid the factionalism, divisions, and rule-book thumping style of this part of the “Bennite” Left.
Blackburn outlines, not without regret, that Momentum worked by supplying “the Labour left’s organisational muscle for winning votes at party conferences and in candidate selections, provide an auxiliary PR operation for Corbyn, and turn itself into a well-drilled election campaigning machine.”
It is hard, if not impossible, to imagine how it could have been anything else.
Momentum had got a lot of people together to support Jeremy Corbyn. That was its attraction. Many of them had exaggerated hopes about Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral chances, and a rose-tinted take on the politics he embodied uncharacteristic of the critical left. Not a few admired him intensely. What kind of political, New Socialist, debate, discussing the pros and cons of whatever the Corbyn leadership decided, could Momentum engage in?
The tiger-like defence of everything Corbyn and his circle ever said about Israel and Palestine, or ‘Zionism’, indicates that this was not a vehicle for “socialist political education” or developing independent left-wing policies and ideas.
Momentum did not develop further into a virtual rally, a fan-club peddling an intellectual defence of ‘charismatic’ ‘left populist’ leadership in the mould of Jean–Luc Mélenchon‘s La France insoumise. Although it was a bad sign when he was an honoured guest at a Labour Conference fringe meeting of World Transformed in 2018, and presented as as close counterpart to the former Labour leader.
That’s all to the good – as the way such movements can react to criticism illustrates: Jeremy Corbyn should never have apologised over anti-Semitism claims, says French far-Left ally
Momentum was, in effect, a CLDP plus: factionalism plus effective work in helping Labour at elections.
Blackburn, regardless, returns to the hopes of the past envisages an ambitious future for Momentum,
if it is to find an effective post-Corbyn role, must go much further. Its local branches, largely withered on the vine, need to be revived. With Labour’s community organising unit facing an uncertain future under the new party leadership, it may be left to Momentum to fill the void as best it can (albeit with much more limited resources). In addition, it will need to offer a lead with regard to socialist political education, organising in constituency parties, helping to build new labour movement institutions organically rooted in working-class communities, and strengthening bonds with the trade union movement.
Momentum has already launched a programme for recruiting and training left wing Labour council candidates, and this should be developed further.
No doubt Labour Council leaders and councillors across the country will already be rejoicing at this prospect.
Yet, it’s still back to the old factionalism.
For starters, it is now faced with the unenviable task of engineering a single leftwing slate for the impending elections to Labour’s national executive committee (NEC). The NEC elections that took place concurrently with the recent Labour leadership contest saw leftist votes splintered hither and thither among rival Corbynite candidates, handing the party’s right wing a majority which (unlike the left under Corbyn) it has not hesitated to use.
In the last few days Momentum has begin to outline how it will put forward candidates for Labour NEC. to take part on the eternal inner-party struggle.
There will be no “open primary” to choose candidates, people who put themselves forward will be decided by the NGA, and then presented to the CLGA (the oddly named Centre Left Grassroots Alliance, the title being a relic of when it was a genuine bloc of Labour Reform and various groups on the Left, including the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy).
As can be seen below, they cannot resist having a dig at the “right of the party” for not giving them “enough time” – a point made by the new co-chairs, Sriskanthan and Scattergood (“As a newly-elected NCG, our priority right now is to deliver a unified Left slate for the National Executive Committee (NEC) elections. The punishing timeline imposed by the Right of the party has left us no time to pioneer open primaries for Momentum (though we will in time), so our focus now is on delivering a united Left slate of committed socialists that can win. “).
I might be wrong on this but aren’t these elections held around this point every year?
A more ambitious programme of work is outlined in the Clarion.
Momentum: what needs to change?
Mohan Sen.
Along with ideas about supporting workers’ struggles, building links with left campaigns (Labour Campaign for Free Movement, Black Lives Matter), and “getting Labour campaigning again”, from holding vast Zoom meetings to a “real world decision-making conference” Sen states,
Momentum’s public message is, generally speaking, lowest common denominator anti-Toryism and soft social democracy, cut with bits of Stalinism and extreme statism (eg presenting the police as “heroes” and any activity the existing state as socialist). It will obviously take a while to seriously sort that out, through serious political argument.
Pushing for Momentum to seriously promote working-class and liberation struggles and socialist policies and demands (like taking over the banks as part of transforming the economy in a “Socialist Green New Deal”) will help. In any case, recognition that the political message is inadequate and needs shifting is necessary.
Today, on Labour List, Sabrina Huck makes the case for putting trans rights at the forefront of Momentum’s strategy.
The challenges ahead for Momentum’s new leadership
….Last month it was announced that the Tories will row back on plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act. Instead, the government is planning to bring in new legislation to ‘safeguard’ women’s spaces like refuges and public toilets. A new white paper is rumoured to be published at the end of July. It is safe to assume that bitter battles will be fought over the new white paper and the legislation that derives from it. Keir Starmer has so far been ambiguous on trans politics too, so there is a worry that the party will not step in to speak up on the issue. In this case in particular, it is important for the organised Labour left to campaign and apply pressure on the frontbench to make a stand.
On the evidence the post-Corbyn Momentum looks like set to continue an inward looking group without wider appeal.
You might begin to think that the description “Hobbyist” might have a use.
Unkind commentators suggest that Momentum would be wise to follow Karl Marx’s actions when the First International was falling apart. He transferred the General Council to New York City.
A Left For Itself. David Swift. Review: Left-Wing Hobbyists and Labour’s Future.
A Left For Itself. Left-Wing Hobbyists and Performative Radicalism. David Swift. Zero Books. 2019.
Neil Kinnock – one of his rare memorable statements – once said (roughly) that the left talk amongst themselves in a way they would never do to a stranger next to them at a bus stop. As the ‘culture wars’ reach new heights over Defund the Police, a slogan that takes learned explanation and knowledge of US politics, a left-wing backlash Labour Party against ‘Blairite’ Keir Starmer reaches a low crescendo, and outrage spreads over J.K.Rowling’s latest intervention in the debates over transexuality, it is hard not to feel some agreement with Labour’s one-time leader.
David Swift, the author of For Class and Country, The Patriotic Left and the First World War (2017), begins his polemic against “left-wing hobbyists, performative radicals and the ‘identity’ left’ by stating, that the “great radical movements of the twentieth century” trade unions, feminists, by “people of colour and gay people” “were always dominated by those who needed to change their own lives”. Today it would seem that the “post-materialist” politics predicted by sociologists in the 1970s rule a left that has little connection to neighbourhood and work.
Today often, “left wing activists are there through choice, sometimes to campaign for abstract issues that don’t affect them or anyone they now”. The result is that the British left is dominated by those pushed by “altruism” instead of need. They are a new “labour aristocracy” pushing their “elite culture and esoteric concerns”. A chapter on Gender Identity, ends with words on “trans warriors”, another on the cultural tastes of “post-modern leftism” underlines their isolation. “For left wing hobbyists are their identity, their raison d’être, and the source of their self-worth”. Obsessed with “language, semantic and aesthetics”, stuck in their niche, they are unable to concentrate on “getting into power and improving people’s lives.”
Swift, the historian, draws on the far-from unknown chronicles of the British labour movement. He offers evidence of pro-Empire opinions, anti-Jewish and anti-immigration views, from Henry Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation’s rants against “Jewish money lenders” to trade unions and the Fabians. He also suggests that the left continues to ignore the surge of patriotism and anti-German feeling in all classes, including the “working class left” during the First World War.
For Swift those who come from long-standing socialist families often remain as insulated from the hard facts about this history as the most recent student of Discourse Theory. This is hard to believe. My English grandfather, a Clarion Cyclist, joined up in 1914, swept away by patriotic fervour and no doubt the specious arguments of the author of Merrie England. Sparse in his words about that conflict, having been in the trenches, they were restricted to the kind of comments found in Henri Barbusse’s harsh front line account Under Fire (1916). They were not reflections on patriotism. Nor has this background led – as far as can tell from many years of activism on the left this is the norm – many to ignore conflicts over immigration. There were bitter rows over Enoch Powell extending from workplace (or in my case, my North London Comprehensive) to relatives. It would be easy to extend the story up to the present. It would take a very isolated, or wilfully ignorant, activist to ignore that.
For some years our comrades have taken apart the “anti-imperialism of fools”. The term was coined on our quarter of the left. A Left For Itself has little trouble dispatching the Bubble Bolsheviks, from Seumas Milne to others in the previous Labour leadership. Criticism of Israeli policies and solidarity with the Palestinians has developed beyond traditional internationalist support to become an “all-consuming obsession”. The majority of the left ignored the atrocities of Daesh (a small fringe regarding them too as “anti-imperialist”) and continue to ignore the mass killings and torture carried out by the Assad Regime in the Syrian civil war. One can agree that this part of the left has a “White Knight syndrome” that ignores a virulent strain of anti-semitism, that has grown in tandem to a wider sue of conspiracy theories ‘complotism”.
Is there a way forward by recognising people’s deep attachment to Britain, and the “more reactionary aspects with patriotism in the UK” and to the monarchy? What kind of “radical patriotism” might be developed? One of the greatest socialist leaders of the last century, Jean Jaurès, once said that too much internationalism drew people away from their country, and that a lot of internationalism took them back. The word Jaurès used, was “patrie” a better one would have been “pays”, country, territory, people, region, carries broader meanings than La Patrie, the fatherland, or the Nation. It’s where we live and grow to love, revile, learn its history, carry the memories of the past, and to which we become deeply attached. (1)
The quiet affection that we have for these things close and dear to is what makes us. At the same time we are “citizens of the world”. The effects of migration, cultural mixing, and planetary Web interaction – are part of the immediate world we live in. Recognising this, by aligning internationalist values with where we are, could be called rooted cosmopolitanism.
National Populism.
The difficulty for the left is not just that few on our side are emotionally stuck on the Royal Family and the Union Flag. It is that the ‘nation’ has become a lot more than background. The word is part a political project, National Populism, the people standing behind their national identity against the ‘globalist elite’. The idealism of the Hobbyist Left is as nothing compared to those prepared to vote for abstractions like Sovereignty, Brexit, and freeing ‘Britain’ from the globalist European Union.
What kind of future could the left offer if it defines itself towards the Nation rather than the “economic ill-winds” that are blowing in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic? The experience of left populism, which has followed Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau in attempting to ‘articulate’ the left’s strategies with the ‘affects’ of the people for the Nation, is one of electoral failure. The current’s best-known parties, Podemos and La France insoumise, are in electoral decline in France and Spain. This suggests that adopting radical left nationalism is not an easy way out.
A Left for Itself might seem to be a horse from the Spiked stable. The ex-RCP magazine cites the book on Gender issues. This impression is bolstered by the book’s endorsements from Matthew Goodwin, the joint author (with Roger Eatwell) of a book not unsympathetic to its subject, National Populism (2018), and Eric Kaufmann, author of White Shift (2018) about immigration and ethnic change and argues for a new cultural contract, and “multivocalism” that includes “white identity”.
Yet, at least one hopes, this support could be misleading. It’s the message that counts. There is absolutely no doubt that those who prefer the politics of street theatre and the seminar to the hard work of building support for left politics in the broad population have played a role in Labour’s election defeat.
When “right wing populists are on the rampage” the left should listen to David Swift’s provocative, well-argued, polemic. Not only to disagree, but to help us turn our backs on Performative Radicalism.
(1) “Un peu d’internationalisme éloigne de la patrie, beaucoup y ramène.”
Counterfire to Spearhead Fightback Against Labour’s Keir Starmer.
Fighting “Starmer’s rightward shift” “in the workplaces, the communities and on the streets”.
Last week the Convenor of the Stop the War Coalition (StWC), Lindsey German, asserted,
…there is no road to success for the left inside Labour.
The battle is on: and the left can’t win in Labour – weekly briefing
She observes,
Perhaps the most important reason for the failure of Corbynism was that there was none of the ruthlessness towards the right that we now see being used against the left.
We are informed that
Many Labour lefts backed Starmer despite the fairly obvious writing on the wall. This was for a variety of reasons: the shock and demoralisation of defeat and the call for ‘electability’; the continuing Brexit debate (where the People’s Vote campaign did real damage to the Corbyn left); the promises of Starmer that he would unite the party; the continuing rows over antisemitism.
These look pretty convincing reasons to have backed Starmer.
Most socialist internationalists (unlike Counterfire) opposed Brexit and saw no reason to go along with the pro-Brexit supporters around Corbyn.
Is anti-semitism within Labour, a hysterical ‘anti-Zionism’ with plenty of complotism around it that shades and indeed is, full of prejudice, an imaginary problem?
Most people think it is neither manufactured nor dreamt up.
The issue remains open as to what role the left can find within the Labour Party
But those who intend to make a hobby of “fighting” in the party have lost before starting.
Few wish to listen to them and their loud-mouthed insults.
So perhaps German is right to say that,
the fight is going to be outside of Labour, and organising inside will be an extremely pale shadow of that, with very high likelihood of failure on every major front.
The future is to go back to the left strategies of the early years of the new millenium,
We desperately need a mass socialist party in Britain, but Labour is not going to be it. At present there is no such party on the horizon, however there are hundreds of thousands who would identify with it. There are also major struggles ahead as we face unemployment, pandemic and attacks on workers. The building of such a party will most likely come from working in those campaigns and perhaps with an organised split from Labour (although this is unlikely to contain MPs). It has to be centred on those struggles and not on electoralism.
German has learnt a lesson from the massive electoral failures of previous efforts to create a “mass socialist party” outside of Labour: its inability to do well through “electoralism” – the ballot box.
Her comrades have plenty of experience in this area, one thinks of the prominent role Lindsey German and John Rees played in George Galloway’s Respect Party….
The piece ends, “whether you stay or go, the key thing is to fight.”
How many battalions do these people have?
Counterfire runs what remains of the People’s Assembly, and has an influential position within the Stop the War Coalition, now comments on the actuality of the Revolution.
It has now launched an appeal on the lines sketched by German.
Starmer takes Labour right: It’s time for an extra-parliamentary left
In a statement the groupuscule (around 100 members) states,
Counterfire energetically supported the Corbyn project while always pointing out the pitfalls and the limitations of a purely parliamentary strategy for change. It’s very important now that we are clear about the new situation. Starmer’s witch-hunting of the left, his positioning as a reasonable and loyal opponent of this calamitous government shows that the attempt to transform Labour has been defeated. But this doesn’t mean that the phase of popular opposition is over.
Pausing to note the Tories’ “arrogance and incompetence” and the Black Lives Matter protests, they state,
..the fight is on. But it’s not going to be fought in the Labour Party, it is going to take place in the workplaces, the communities and on the streets.
This leads them to assert,
We urge everyone who is sickened by Starmer’s rightward shift to get involved in this kind of mass politics – building workplace organisation, supporting the People’s Assembly, fighting every cutback and closure on the ground.
Counterfire urges the creation of working class movement.
Counterfire has been at the heart of the resistance since we launched just ten years ago. Our online support is growing daily, our website is read by tens of thousands every week, but we need active, participatory socialist organisation everywhere to create the kind of working-class movement that can win.
Counterfire is now committed to organising “a dynamic extra-parliamentary left in every part of the country.”
Extra-Parliamentary, that is, as an alternative to the Parliamentary Road to Socialism, the Labour Party.
Some might suggest that a major factor in this turn is that Lindsey German and John Rees – and their ex-(and present) Communist Party of Britain mates – no longer have the ear of a friendly Labour leader who put up with their enthusiasms, rages, and belief that politics is decided by street theatre.
Factionalism in the Time of Coranavirus Part 11: Chris Williamson Gets Close to Galloway’s Workers Party.
Getting Close up to Galloway and pro-Brexit ultras of the Workers Party – aka as the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
Chris Williamson was reported to be organising a ‘grass roots’ event, the ‘Festival of Resistance’ on the 20th of June but we learn from his site, “The Resistance” that,
In view of the ongoing Coronavirus calamity, we have decided to postpone the Festival of Resistance that was planned for the weekend of 20 June this year.
The festival has now been rescheduled for the weekend of 17/18 October in Derby, where we will aim to have an array of excellent speakers, workshops and films.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism asserts that speakers are already lined up,
The Resist Festival is due to feature controversial speakers including the rapper Lowkey, the outspoken academic Noam Chomsky, the activist Max Blumenthal and representatives from the ‘yellow vest’ protests in France.
This is one of his most recent public interventions,
Williamson has some new best friends:
This follows an earlier chum-fest with Galloway in May:
Chris Williamson’s views on the opinions of the Deputy Leader of Galloway’s Workers Party, Joti Brar, (Anti-imperialist, communist, media worker, truthseeker, mum. Workers of the world, unite; we have a world to win! @CPGBML @WorkersPartyGB )are not known.
Here are some of them, “Joti Brar is an active member of the Stalin Society, the website of which contains articles denying Soviet wrongdoing in the Katyn massacre, the Ukrainian Famine (Holodomor), and the Moscow Trials which they blame on the Nazis, dismiss as propaganda, or describe as fair process, respectively.”
Williamson could not stand as the Labour candidate in his Derby North constituency in the 2019 General Election as a result of his active suspension. He resigned from the Labour Party and stood as an independent candidate. He won 635 votes, losing his deposit and coming bottom of the poll.
Sizewell C will “destroy the most important part of the county’s Heritage Coast.”
Stop Sizewell C!
This was reported on June the 30th.
UK regulator receives application for new Sizewell nuclear reactors
Britain’s nuclear regulator said on Tuesday it had received an application for a licence to build two nuclear reactors at Sizewell in Suffolk county, north of London, from EDF Energy subsidiary NNB Generation Company.
Yesterday the East Anglian Daily Times (EADT) published this article by Paul Geater.
Will the Suffolk coast fall victim to coronavirus as government splashes the cash?
I’ve never disguised the fact that I feel that the proposed Sizewell C power station would be a disaster for East Suffolk and would effectively destroy the most important part of the county’s Heritage Coast.
Those who have meet Paul Geater, the main political journalist on the regional paper and the Ipswich Star, will know that he must have good reason before expressing himself so strongly.
One of the things that spurred him is, “It’s a part of the world that is very important to me – I was born at Eastbridge and lived within five miles of Sizewell for the first 27 years of my life.”
The article continues,
Until now I’ve always been optimistic that the proposals for this plant, which would be built on what is – effectively – part of the Minsmere Nature Reserve, would be scrapped because the economics just don’t make sense.
However, I’m now beginning to fear that the Suffolk Coast – with all the jobs it provides in tourism, leisure, and wildlife management – will be fall victim to the coronavirus pandemic as the government looks for projects to throw money at in the hope of creating jobs to get Britain out of the 21st century’s Great Depression.
I’ve always felt that the environmental arguments don’t really cut any ice with EDF and the other groups promoting Sizewell C. Yes their promoters will smile and nod earnestly when confronted by genuine concerns from organisations like the RSPB and National Trust as well as local residents – but when push comes to shove they don’t seem prepared to make any real compromises or do anything to limit the damage they would cause.
For many people this will be a crucial point.
They still seem hell-bent on destroying the Eastbridge marshes, an integral part of the Minsmere ecosystem, to create their new campus while the station is being built. Villages would be ruined by traffic because there is no proposal to bring in material by sea as they did when Sizewell B was built.
And that ignores the fact that nuclear-generated electricity is much more expensive than that from the sun or wind.
The well-known local figure calls to reject this latest move, which many consider to be on the point of being slipped through while attention is diverted elsewhere.
…by rejecting it, there would be a real boost to the local economy. Jobs in the tourist and leisure sectors would be ensured for years or decades ahead. Villages would be protected and the Suffolk coast (hardly the unemployment blackspot it was when Sizewell B was built in the 1980s) would be able to evolve and retain its wonderful character.
Local people recognise that. I know that many who welcomed Sizewell B have been appalled at the plans for Sizewell C and the way it is being planned with no thought to the local environment.
That is the least you can say.
Those affected have been screaming about the destruction to be wrought by new roads, vast car parks, and the rest, for some time.
The local councils recognise that. Both Suffolk County Council and Suffolk Coastal were broadly supportive of Sizewell B. That isn’t what you hear from the planners and councillors at either the county or East Suffolk Council now!
Geater underlines the loss to the local tourism and leisure sectors.
But he finishes saying that “money isn’t everything.”
It certainly is not.
The areas affected are both environmentally highly significant – the status of Minsmere hardly needs underlining – and very dear to many people’s hearts.
The local campaign Together Against Sizewell C notes the plans will,
– devastate the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty which provides a rich and varied mosaic of habitats that are a haven for an amazing variety of wildlife including iconic species such as bittern, marsh harrier and otter,
– split the Sizewell Marshes Site of Special Scientific Interest in half with a new permanent elevated road,
– be constructed on the boundary with RSPB Minsmere, with 24/7 light, noise and air pollution being a huge threat to the internationally important nature reserve as well as the wider environment,
– result in the loss of acres of valuable farmland,
– threaten homes, land and businesses with compulsory purchase,
– see road building and alterations for 25 miles around the site, including 7 new roundabouts within an 8-mile radius of Sizewell,
– add hundreds of HGV journeys to and from the Sizewell site every day, causing unacceptable levels of CO2 and NOX emissions,
– harm the flourishing and sustainable tourism industry of East Suffolk affecting businesses around the much visited towns of Aldeburgh and Southwold and many popular villages as well as RSPB Minsmere and the National Trust’s Dunwich Heath,
– see up to 2 million litres of mains water consumed each day of nuclear power station operation, in addition to the huge volumes used during construction, in one of the driest parts of the country,
– see tons of fish and other marine life sucked into the cooling pipes along with an estimated 2.5 billion gallons of sea water per day, see article re Hinkley Point C(same design as SZC): https://www.burnham-on-sea.com/news/concern-over-hinkley-point-c/
– require nuclear waste to be stored indefinitely on our crumbling, sinking coast as sea levels rise,
– create a huge upfront carbon footprint during construction and from the mining, milling and fabrication of the uranium fuel together with an unknown carbon footprint at the back end of operation – see why nuclear is not the answer to climate change
This Blogger knows the area well.
I’ve been walking around there since mid-teens. In my twenties my parents had retired to nearby Firston (one of the places affected by car-park plans), and were active in Leiston Labour Party as Chair and Secretary for some years in the 1980s. An uncle (by marriage) grew up in a hamlet by a local village, Theberton (nearly bordering Eastbridge).
The Eastbridge Eels Foot Inn, by the marshes, is one of the best pubs in Suffolk. The walks around the area, some of which I know like the back of my hand, are outstanding. The reserve called Sizewell Belts, is of special interest, and is free to visit (Minsmere is a RSPB reserve, although you can walk alongside it, including on the coastline).
On one walk, in the direction of Weselton I saw my first Adders, one another, my first Mistletoe, and enormous Red Deer. Alas I have never spotted the Otters,who have been encouraged, (and helped by some re-introduction) since the 1980s.
The Leiston Communist Writer and activist Lee Chadwick (1909 – 2003) lived in a house on Leiston Common, not far from the Reactors, and in the heart of the sites that will be touched by the new development.
One of her best books, In Search of Heathland (1982), begins with a chapter titled, “Our Vanishing Heathland”.
She wrote,
Leiston and Sizewell commons today lie within the Suffolk Coastal Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and the 34 miles f the Suffolk Heritage Coast. Notwithstanding this, the building of a second and possibly a third nuclear power station at Sizewell is under discussion and at the time of writing seems likely to prove the focus for another form of popular struggle concerning the use of one-time open land.” (Page 66)
Lee, who participated in the 1980s campaigns – as did my parents – would surely back Together Against Sizewell C (TASC).
Unfortunately we hear from the organisers that UNITE, which has a strong Branch at Sizewell, is not so inclined. TASC says that the UNITE led organising committee of the annual Burston Rally, a rural labour movement event that claims to support Green causes, “won’t even allow us (us being TASC) to have a stall at the Burston rally.”
Paul Geater writes that, “The fear is that while locally there is a great deal of disquiet, the further you move away from the Suffolk coast, the attitude changes.”
Let’s hope he is wrong on that point>
Back TASC!
To: Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
STOP SIZEWELL C HUGE NEW NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT IN SUFFOLK A.O.N.B.
More information on the TASC site:
Together Against Sizewell C.
TASC has been actively campaigning, since 2013, to stop EDF’s plans to build two EPR nuclear reactors on Suffolk’s fragile Heritage Coast. Sizewell C and all its supporting infrastructure will devastate untold acres of the wildlife-rich Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB and its SSSI, as well as irreparably damaging RSPB Minsmere. The area, a 30 mile radius around the site, will change from rural tranquillity to brutal industrialisation.
Here is a tweet from their Twitter Feed.
Here is more news:
Spiked Network’s New Front: “Don’t Divide us” Exposing, “racial division being sown in the name of anti-racism. “
Spiked, Brexit Party ex-MEPs, Learned Pundits, Minstrels and Wordsmiths, try to heal divisions over Race.
Some might say it’s odd, a new front set up on the issue of race, that says “don’t divide us” whose three main initiators are: a former Brexit Party MEP and ex-Revolutionary Communist Party stalwart, Claire Fox of the ‘Academy of Ideas’, a one-time Brexit Party candidate and author at Brexit Central, and Spiked, Inaya Folarin Iman, and “anti-woke” glee and mirth-man, and – do we need to say? – Spiked contributor Andrew Doyle.
But it is so…
The Spiked Network (for more on this group see SPIKED FOOTNOTES) has geared into action…
Racial division is being sown in the name of anti-racism
….activists, corporations and institutions seem to have seized the opportunity to exploit Floyd’s death to promote an ideological agenda that threatens to undermine British race relations.
The power of this ideology lies in the fear it inspires in those who would otherwise speak out, whatever their ethnicity. But speak out we must. We must oppose and expose the racial division being sown in the name of anti-racism.
The consequences of this toxic, racialised agenda are counter-productive and serious.
- Under soulless acronyms such as BAME and POC, all ethnic minorities are robbed of individual agency, and assumed to be victims of injustice.
- Free speech is being eroded by a McCarthyite culture of conformity in which to question the new dogma means to risk one’s livelihood and reputation.
- Calls for the wholesale destruction of historical statues, symbols and works of art are fuelling an unhealthy war against the past and stirring up culture wars in the present.
- An obsessive focus on the impact of colonialism threatens to turn history into a morality tale, rather than a complex, three-dimensional understanding of the past.
People will instantly agree that what we need on the issues of race and colonialism, slavery and ethnicity and nationalism, is the kind of complex nuanced debate that this little lot promoted as members of the Brexit Party, united behind the calm, anti-racist, leadership of Nigel Farage.
Or indeed by their on-line magazine Spiked:
Or: ‘The left is turning into a Woke Taliban’
They are surely right to conclude that “We will not be divided – by reactionary racists or culture warriors – who refuse to see us as individuals beyond our skin colour.”
Our ace-reporters are working on this right now, but look at some these tasty anti-division names that have backed this new Spiked Front:
William Clouston, party leader, The Social Democratic Party.
Recent healing Tweet:
Ben Habib, businessman; co-founder, Unlocked; former MEP (Brexit Party, modestly not mentioned…).
Christina Jordan, former MEP, South West England (Also Brexit Party, unmentioned).
Mercy Moroki:
Ed Husain, author The House of Islam: A Global History
Helen Pluckrose, specialist in the appealing sounding “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship”.
Courtney Hamilton, Writer, (not mentioned: Author at spiked).
Another gleeman Simon Evans – he sounds a right laugh!
Forward Momentum Slate Wins – Tears for ‘Tribune’, Lavery and Bastani as their ‘Renewal’ faction loses
Tears for ‘Tribune’, Lavery and Bastani as their faction loses..
” Labour MPs such as Ian Lavery, Paula Barker, Sam Tarry and Charlotte Nichols, plus Tribune‘s Ronan Burtenshaw and Novara Media‘s Aaron Bastani, had all signed up to back the Renewal initiative.”
” the candidates selected by FM – said to include key workers, shop stewards and community organisers – were described by the campaign as “representing a break with the current leadership faction”.
It was bitterly contested fight, involving anonymous Twitter feeds attacking some of the Forward Momentum candidates for links with the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.
Described as a less than edifying bun fight this is the result (on a turn out of 8,580, tiny in comparison with Labour’s growing membership of over 580,00).
Victory for Forward Momentum candidates as Lansman steps down
Labour List. Sienna Rodgers
Forward Momentum candidates have swept to victory by winning all member representative seats in Momentum internal elections that saw co-founder Jon Lansman step down.
Forward Momentum put forward one of the two main slates in the contest. The group pitched itself as ‘anti-continuity’ with a focus on democratising the organisation, and held open primaries to select candidates.
Momentum Renewal was the rival platform, more closely associated with Lansman. It stressed the importance of “left unity” within Labour and being “rooted in working-class communities”.
FM candidates won all 20 places in the members’ section, which gives them a majority on the NCG. Renewal candidates were elected by MPs and councillors to the four office holder posts.
That is, Renewal holds the “4 representatives of Labour public office holders.”
“the candidates selected by FM – said to include key workers, shop stewards and community organisers – were described by the campaign as “representing a break with the current leadership faction”.
The Clarion has a report,
Forward Momentum sweeps election for Momentum NCG
Mohan Sen.
Momentum reform group Forward Momentum has won all 20 seats elected by members on the Momentum National Coordinating Group.
The four seats reserved for and elected by public office holders (MPs and councillors) were all won by conservative left / Stalinist slate Momentum Renewal. It remains to be seen if Momentum Renewal will try to use the ‘fake seats’ on the NCG allotted to various organisations to gain advantage. It will be hard given how comprehensive their defeat is.
(Full results here. Candidates outside the two main slates did poorly.)
This rejection of the conservative, demagogic and witch-hunting campaign Momentum Renewal ran is a good thing for the movement.
It at least opens up possibilities for changing Momentum.
Forward Momentum is a real mixed bag politically, with widely differing perspectives – even on what democratising the organisation means, let alone wider political strategy.
A serious debate about left strategy, demands and campaigning – which didn’t get very far during the campaign – is needed.
It is very positive that two candidates who endorsed Momentum Internationalists‘ socialist platform – Abbie Clark and Ana Oppenheim – were elected on the Forward Momentum slate. We were sorry to see Nadia Whittome MP, who also supported the MI platform, narrowly lose out in the office holders’ section.
Poor old Skwawky thinks he has managed to scramble on board the Forward bandwagon:
So far, (written a bare hour after the results were announced) the losers are keeping their chins up.
Keeping the Flag of the Bolivarian Revolution flying Bastani looks to set to continue his work in heralding the latest act of Maduro, and attacking the Labour leader.
It remains hard to see what role Momentum has today.
From its creation, as a group pledged to support Jeremy Corbyn, engaged in some serious election work in 2017, it has struggled to define its role.
Was it to become a “social movement”, the yeast in amongst the people that gave substance to a British ‘left populism’?
Was it, as it described itself, building socialism “in the community”? A ” a people-powered, vibrant movement”.
The claim that Momentum has been, “Harnessing people-power, technology and networks, we’ve won seats for Labour, changed minds about the solutions to the biggest crises of our time and altered the direction of travel for British politics. Our aim is simple: we’re creating a society for the many, not the few.” looks pretty empty after the 2019 Election Disaster.
Now some of the left seem happier spending their time attacking the popular and respected Labour leader, Keir Starmer.
Flaking away from the Party the self-pitying left seems on the up:
Nobody with morals or self-respect should remain in Labour.
Nobody with any with morals, intellect or self respect should now remain in the Labour Party. Throughout Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, the party was constantly sabotaged from within: the plotters praying that electoral defeat would help restore the hegemony of the right wing careerists – and it has. They have won.
And so it goes..
Many will be happy that Momentum has seen a clear out of the loyalists who used Momentum to ensure factional control of Labour Conferences in the interests of the Corridor Clique that thwarted, notably, internationalist opposition to Brexit.
Beyond that there is little to indicate that Momentum has found a new positive direction away from its past factionalism.
Frank Furedi draws “Boundaries” to defend the “civilisational accomplishments of humanity.”
The “war to uphold the precious gains of civilisation is being lost.”
Critics of Spiked magazine, and its offshoots, The Academy of Ideas and its work in founding the red-brown Front, the Full Brexit, do not often discuss the work of its founding pundit, Frank Furedi.
A sheave of references, in the duller corners of publications on social policy, crime, and psychology, indicates that the former revolutionary Marxist has some kind of academic standing. The assistance of Google reveals, for example, a citation in this work which begins, “In this article I examine the attractions and shortcomings of the “positive” neohumanisitic turn in organizational theorizing and how positivity might be developed. “
One can see why he enjoys the heady moments when he can escape from this to the Spiked/ex-Living Marxism network’s annual beanfeast.
Events reported in 2010, and surely on the next occasion more convivial after their alliance with the Brexit Party and the success of Spiked contributor Munira Mirza, as Cabinet Head of Policy.
The fifth annual Battle of Ideas was held over a weekend last October at the Royal College of Art in West London. There was a route you could do, a circuit, up the stairs at one end of the windowless basement and down them again at the other, and I did it many times, bag dragging at my back. Each day was divided into five time-slots, each slot into ‘strands’: the Battle for Energy, Battle for Work, Battle for Reproductive Choice; or Breakfast Banter, Café Controversies, Bookshop Barnie.
The talks themselves had titles like ‘Working for the State: Public Service or Gravy Train?’, ‘India’s Future: Slumdogs or Millionaires?’ So much stuff, so much Horrible Histories alliteration, so many dispiritingly either-or questions: out of 74 talks, I spotted just one whose take-home message I couldn’t immediately guess. It was on ‘football, greed and the recession’, it was called ‘Who Ate All the Pies?’, and I’m afraid I don’t know the answer, because I went to ‘Rethinking Freedom in an Illiberal Age: Securing Rights or Celebrating Liberty?’ instead.
Jenny Turner reports from the Battle of Ideas
Furedi’s latest work, puffed in Spiked (Why Borders Matter: Why Humanity Must Relearn the Art of Drawing Boundaries. 2020.), he explores the idea that “The rejection of borders between nations and communities runs in parallel with the unbounding of cultural norms in all dimensions of social life.”
Just in case you hadn’t got this he today offers a summary of the work,
As I note in my new book Why Borders Matter, the ability to ‘tell right from wrong’ has been compromised by the cultural devaluation of boundaries, such as those between good and evil; adult and child; man and woman; human and animal; and private and public. All of these symbolic boundaries have been called into question in recent decades.
Readers of Spiked will have guessed that the (two part) article is a lengthy rave against “Identitarians”, identity politics, political correctness, and the “culture war” being waged by the new “counter-cultural establishment”.
(it) has successfully marginalised conservative and classical-liberal ideas, be they tolerance or democracy, within institutions of socialisation, such as schools and universities. And it has turned many cultural institutions, from the arts to the media, against humanist sentiments and ideals associated with the Western tradition that runs from Classical Greek philosophy through the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Even classical socialist ideals of solidarity and internationalism have been torn asunder by the politicisation of culture and identity.
Furedi asserts that, “These developments take the form of a one-sided war against the past in general, and the legacy of the West in particular.”
In a passage that bears the most royal of purple he writes,
Having gained hegemony, members of this countercultural establishment are now less and less afraid to impose their own values on the rest of society. From their standpoint, Boris Johnson is an elite outlier, and his defence of Churchill offers them a reminder that there are still obstacles to the realisation of the project of detaching society from the legacy of its past. They now constitute the cultural establishment, and people who wish to defend the statues of Churchill or Abraham Lincoln are their countercultural adversaries.
It would be facile to dismiss this (who in fact is in Government?).
But within Why Borders Matter (or as far as Goggle Books unearths) are a number of substantial claims that go to the heart of political philosophy and political practice:
- That human beings need limits in order to grow, that political rights (in the tradition of Edmund Burke) are not only national constructions, but should remain circumscribed by these boundaries.
- That national sovereignty and the border security it establishes helps one of these needs, a “sense of belonging”
- That attempts to deterritorialise sovereignty and citizenship rights reduces people to “their most abstract individual qualities”, depriving them of “the cultural qualities which give their lives meaning”.
How those who argue, against these views, that human rights are universal, that there are no national frontiers or limits on the right (for example) not to be tortured, murdered, oppressed, starved or beaten, are linked to attacks on a “principled commitment to the civilisational accomplishments of humanity.” is not explained.
In Spiked Furedi cites Hannah Arendt’s conservative reaction to mid-1960s student radicals questioning established values of right and wrong. Arendt’s also famously argued that human rights without national legal systems to back them up are meaningless. In despair at the way people were left stateless and without rights in the 1930s and in the aftermath of the Second World War) the political philosopher talked of the “right to have rights”.
This is a deeply felt and pondered claim, and one that can only be answered by political action to make sure that the rightless are given protection. And rights, unless, and we hope this is not the case, Ferudi is arguing that boundaries once drawn mean that they are permanently excluded.
The liberty to grow and flourish in our own freely determined conditions, of the kind outlined by John Stuart Mill and by Marx’s ideal of a society in which the liberty of all is a condition of each person’s development, is a better goal for the foundation for “belonging” than a host of customs controls and the ownership of a passport.
Nevertheless this is not an abstract question of an intellectual conversation about human “qualities” but of the mechanisms that might make such potentials, that is substantial, rights real.
But, one of the facts about globalisation, the world wide exchange of news and direct communication, is: How we ignore what is happening outside our “borders”?
Do we have any responsibility to act on one of the most basic moral impulses, human sympathy?
Leaving issues of war, oppression and rights to national states, run by political parties who may be hostile to rights – the national populists or straightforward dictatorships – is a real concern, from Poland, the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China, Brazil, Turkey, not to mention Syria.
Furedi would leave us trapped in a bubble, without any answers to the demands that solidarity make on people.
And what ‘cultural meaning” does Assad’s Syria give to people slaughtered in a civil, not “culture” war?
It is precisely the sovereigntist, Spiked, quarter that has argued. not just against armed humanitarian intervention in these conflicts, but against anything more than gestual solidarity with the millions whose lives are at risk.
It’s as plain as a pikestaff that if there is a culture war in the West Furedi is an “identitarian” on one side, that of the rights of tradition, the Land and the Dead (la terre et les morts – as a founding figure of the French far-right, Maurice Barrès , put it ) He stands for the cemetery of the past against the universalism of the future…
Spiked’s claim to stand for the “the so-called “traditional ideals”, or, more bluntly evokes two sources.
The first is the most obvious. Furedi’s book seems, consciously or unconsciously, to base its title on this book, In Praise of Borders (Éloge des frontières. 2010)”. In this, the endlessly prolific writer and academic Régis Debray defined limits as needed to make sense of the world. “The border is what gives meaning to our world. It is the first response to the nothingness of space and existence. ” How can we bring order to chaos?” By drawing a line. By separating an outside from an inside . ” The deeper reason at work lies in the deep-laid, multifarious connection between borders and identities.”
Debray accused sans-frontiérisme of “économisme”, treating culture and polities – summed up in the goals of the international charities like Médecins Sans Frontières – as part of the “global marketplace”. It is the bearer of “technicisme”, aligning the world to the same standard, of unbounded absolute values. At the heart of the wish for a borderless world is imperialism, through the call for universal Law and human rights is Western power imposed through NATO.
The second is that Spiked is, out of design or not (and few of its contributors seem to be French speakers), echoing themes peddled on the French sovereigntist thinkers, who have become increasingly right-wing and national populist.
The analysis of the “culture wars” by one of the best known far-right writers in France the historian Éric Zemmour, may lack the sociological guff about, “the corrosive influences” of the cultural contradictions of capitalism generational conflict and the individualism of the post-war world.
But…..
In Le Suicide français (2014 – free to download here) is a long (534 pages in the French edition) Zemmour laments about French decline, at the hands of the post-68 cultural rebels, who have become the new establishment. In this Potemkin Republic the watchwords of 68,: “Dérision, Déconstruction, Destruction”, have undermined the foundations of society, family, and work.
The French left has become a vehicle for metropolitan elites, a supporter of the mass immigration that is underlining France’s ancestral values, its cultural heritage and the Republic’s national economy. In its place it encourages a bohemian “cosmopolitanism”, cultural consumption and mixing. Trapped in its postmodernism and political correctness the left despises the People, the victims of this New World Order. This Zemmour, Ferudi fashion, contrasts with true Enlightenment cosmopolitan idealism, which used to spread theories, ideals and civilisation.
Zemmour has been, liked Spiked, a supporter of the anti-elite protests by “Peripheral France’, the Gilets Jaunes. At present, nobody will be surprised to hear, he is frothing at the mouth at Black Lives Matter and the toppling of statues and getting rid of memorials to slave owners and colonialists (in fact I guessed the latter without reading, but a brief check shows pages of his latest rants on the topic).
No doubt his anti-immigration views would make Zemmour unacceptable – for how long? – to Spiked.
But there are others who would perhaps be more acceptable.
Zemmour is only one of a host of French writers obsessed with the themes of defending civilisation against multiculturalism, identity politics, political correctness, . they range from supporters of Marine Le Pen, such as Christian Bouchet, France’s Melanie Phillips, Alain Finkielkraut, to former leftists like Michel Onfray who has just launched his own ‘red-brown’ journal, Front Populaire, bringing together right (including the extreme right, Éléments pour la civilisation européenne) and left wing supporters of sovereigntism. There is name for this political current, national populism.
Is this the kind of search for meaning and cultural belonging Furedi has in mind?
Tribune Attacks ‘Starmarism’, Morning Star speaks for “whole Left” against Sacking of Long-Bailey.
“A safer pair of hands, a less disruptive force, than even the Tories.” – Tribune.
How Keir Starmer Sabotaged Rebecca Long-Bailey
The Editor of Tribune, Ronan Burtenshaw is beside himself, “From her earliest days as shadow education secretary, Keir Starmer set about undermining Rebecca Long-Bailey – because her socialist politics and loyalty to trade unions were incompatible with his leadership.”
The socialist politics Rebecca Long-Bailey represents has no place within Starmerism, as the other Left members of the shadow cabinet will realise in due course. His political project is to present Labour to the British establishment as a safer pair of hands, a less disruptive force, than even the Tories.
The chief of the re-vamped and US-owned journal, announced as a monthly in 2018, now reduced to a quarterly appearance, also asserts,
To many onlookers, Rebecca Long-Bailey’s sacking might have seemed strange. After all, she was fired for sharing an interview by someone else in which they made a claim which was only marginally incorrect. (The Israeli police do, in fact, train the US police and encourage the use of “excessive force” against those who “pose little or no threat.”).
He concludes,
Starmer’s determination to be seen as sensible by the business and media elites is also incompatible, in any longer-term sense, with unity with the Left. It is not possible to present yourself as unthreatening to capital with principled socialists as part of your coalition. And so, they were always going to be sidelined – it was a matter of time.
It would be interesting to see what plans, and with what troops, Burtenshawn has to threaten capital and to challenge the “powerful”, and all those business and media “elites”.
The would-be general of the revolt concedes,
Such an approach might win an election.
So what is he wittering on about?
That Starmer might succeed without toppling the statues and moments of capital?
Perhaps he could ask his close allies:
The Morning Star, totally independent of the Communist Party of Britain, which called to boycott Labour and voting for any party in last years’ European election, said of the Long-Bailey’s dismissal,
Sacking Rebecca Long Bailey is an attack on the whole left
Attempting to dismiss references to the relationship between the Israeli and US security forces as “an anti-semitic conspiracy theory” is a cynical bid by the Board of Deputies to warn people off attacking the Israeli government at a time when its plans to annex the West Bank are arousing widespread condemnation.
Using it as an excuse to sack Long Bailey looks like a cynical bid by Starmer to drop a shadow minister whose refusal to attack teaching unions and parrot his irresponsible push for schools to fully reopen more quickly showed up the weakness of his opposition to a Conservative government whose mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic has cost tens of thousands of lives.
In other words Starmer acted against Long-Bailey because of his own failings, an inability to stand up to a Cabinet which is causing tens of thousands of deaths. Not only is the Labour leader unable to stand up to the mismanagement that is leading to people dying, his “cynical” move is against trade unionists in the teaching profession and in line with a further “cynical bid” bu the Board of Deputies to prevent people attacking Israeli plans for the West Bank.
Some might suggest that this looks a bit like a conspiracy!
Today the paper which likes to speak on behalf of the “whole left” says,
Editorial: Covid-19 is still a crisis – but Labour isn’t grappling with it
Where’s Labour? Hinting that it is now ready to drop the radical Green New Deal programme developed by the previous leadership.
Keir Starmer’s spokesperson says that new climate commitments will be written “in four or five years’ time,” that is in line with the parliamentary electoral cycle which he assumes is immune from external factors.
That shows no desire at all to try to work with, let alone lead, those fighting to transform this crisis into an opportunity for far-reaching change in the present.
Pause.
The Morning Star believes that Brexit is an “opportunity” for a ‘people’s’ then a ‘socialist’ Brexit.
Now it seems to think that Covid-19 and the Green New Deal are further opportunities to begin “far-reaching changes”.
With such an abundance of fruitful chances, how many more opportunities can we deal with?
Fact Checking.
The furious Tribune boss and his friends in the Morning Star has yet to respond in full to this:
Did Israeli secret service teach Floyd police to kneel on neck?
Channel Four FactCheck.
It seems Ms Peake’s original claim is based on an article in the Morning Star from 1 June, which states: “At least 100 Minnesota police officers attended a 2012 conference hosted by the Israeli consulate in Chicago, the second time such an event had been held.”
The article has been shared over 40,000 times on Facebook, according to analytics provided by the website Crowdtangle.
This description appears to be supported by a report from Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) at the time of the event. By the MPR account, the conference took place in Minneapolis and was “put on by the Israeli consulate in Chicago, the FBI and Minnetonka police”. (Minnetonka is the neighbouring city to Minneapolis).
Which techniques were taught?
The Morning Star piece alleges that those attending the 2012 conference “learned the violent techniques used by Israeli forces as they terrorise the occupied Palestinian territories under the guise of security operations.”
The article does not explicitly claim that Israeli forces taught American police to kneel on a person’s neck at the conference.
The only link to this tactic in the story is made by an activist, Neta Golan, who told the paper: “When I saw the picture of killer cop Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd by leaning in on his neck with his knee as he cried for help and other cops watched, I remembered noticing when many Israeli soldiers began using this technique of leaning in on our chest and necks when we were protesting in the West Bank sometime in 2006.”
Ms Golan is quoted as saying: “it is clear that they [Israel] share these methods when they train police forces abroad in ‘crowd control’ in the US and other countries including Sudan and Brazil.” The information in square brackets is from the Morning Star’s copy.
The article mentions a 2016 report by Amnesty which lists US police forces that have “all traveled to Israel for training” and “thousands of others” that “have received training from Israeli officials here in the U.S.”
After yesterday’s controversy involving Maxine Peake and Rebecca Long-Bailey, Amnesty International told the New Statesman: “the precise nature of the training offered to US police forces by Israeli officials is not something we’ve documented”.
They added: “Allegations that US police were taught tactics of ‘neck kneeling’ by Israeli secret services is not something we’ve ever reported”.
Beyond the speculation of one activist, there is no information in the Morning Star article that would support the claim that the specific practice of kneeling on a person’s neck was taught to US police by Israeli forces.
Or indeed Jim’s latest post which signalled a justified scepticism about anything that appears in the Morning Star, wholly independent of the CPB and owned by the co-op that it is,
It is quite possible to feel sorry for RLB – and to doubt that she is personally an antisemite – whilst recognising that she’s been an idiot and that Starmer, operating in the real world, had no choice but to sack her (not least because the EHRC’s report into antisemitism in the party is on its way, and expected to be highly critical).
Others have noted the flaws in the article Long-Bailey retweeted,
Rebecca Long-Bailey’s sacking: such a fine line between stupid and clever
George Chesterton.
The first point – echoing the sentiments of so many charming hard-left voices of the past five years that anyone who didn’t like Jeremy could “fuck off and join the Tories” – is all very well for Peake, but for a shadow cabinet minister to put a tick by such a knuckleheaded suggestion, even after the crushing defeat, betrays a lack of nous that would make Chris Grayling blush. According to Peake, Labour voters who didn’t vote for Corbyn should “hang their heads in shame”. Perhaps the electorate should apologise. But again, couldn’t Long-Bailey see what this self-harm had achieved? People literally had fucked off and voted for the Tories.
He concludes,
..let’s get this straight: Long-Bailey is praising an article in which an actor bad-mouths her new boss.
Quite.
Update, some reverberations:
Rebecca Long-Bailey Sacking: Momentum Mobilises to “Win Back Power.”
Ronan Burtenshaw, editor of Tribune, says Starmer acted to “protect the reputation of the Israeli occupation’.
In recent weeks Keir Starmer, elected Labour leader with 56,2% of the party members’ vote, has managed to dent Boris Johnson’s in the House of Commons. He has raised issues, including the Tories’ handling of the Coronavirus panademic, and the rubber-stamping a Tory donor’s property development, that have further weakened the Conservatives position. Starmer’s approval rating keeps rising in the opinion polls.
This news now dominates the Labour landscape.
Now, according to many on the left (overwhelmingly those who never supported him), the sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey has struck a blow against the Corbyn legacy and socialism.
Momentum is using the sacking to mobilise to “win back power” in the party.
The Editor of Tribune (now owned by the US left-populist Bhaskar Sunkara, (New owner of relaunched bi-monthly Tribune magazine says ‘Morning Star will cover the beat and we’ll do more analysis‘) is perhaps not widely taken seriously.
But John McDonnell is.
McDonnell immediately received these replies (by people this Blog knows),
The Guardian’s Heather Stewart reports on widely shared explanations for the sacking.
One Starmer-sceptic also pointed out that Long-Bailey, who represents a leave-voting constituency, had been sympathetic to Brexit, during the bitter internecine battle over the party’s stance that raged throughout last year.
Perhaps it didn’t help, either, that Starmer was visibly irritated last week when Boris Johnson wrong-footed him at prime minister’s questions by pressing him to say he thought it was safe for children to go back to school.
Starmer’s allies insist he has worked closely with Long-Bailey on schools policy; but some more centrist Labour MPs have accused her of listening too intently to teachers’ unions, and not enough to parents, as she warned about the risks of wider reopening.
For these reasons he may not lament her departure from the frontbench, but Starmer’s allies insist he would deal just as determinedly with claims of antisemitism even if they came from a close political friend.
Starmer’s removal of Long-Bailey has rekindled Labour’s civil war
A measured repose comes from Paul Mason.
The claim that Israeli police forces taught the US police the “neck kneeling” that murdered George Floyd has been denied.
The same link was made recently by Tariq Ali, who has supported a variety of political parties and is at present believed to be a member of Labour.
I would now like to come to another part of the world which ironically links the knee on the neck to George Floyd to this region because a lot of the American police forces have been trained in Israel. Not just the Americans but many from right-wing countries in South America. And the methods in dealing with protests or ordinary citizens is virtually the same. You can find lots of photos of Israelis when these people are brave enough to take photographs with their knees on the neck of Palestinians.”
Coronavirus, War & Empire: Arundhati Roy & Jeremy Corbyn in Conversation w/ Tariq Ali
Many consider that some on the left are so anxious to tie in Israel and Zionism to anything that they jumped on the opportunity to get them implicated in George Floyd.
Perhaps they will claim that the French police, who have been caught up in (justified) accusations, have been instructed by Israel.
‘I’m Suffocating’: Details of Chokehold Death in Paris Renew Scrutiny of Police
New York Times. June the 23rd. 2020.
Cédric Chouviat, a 42-year-old deliveryman, died in January after officers pinned him to the ground and put him in a chokehold, police tactics that are increasingly being called into question.
…
On Monday, Le Monde newspaper and Mediapart, an investigative news site, both reported details of the videos in which Mr. Chouviat can be heard saying “I’m suffocating” seven times over a roughly 20-second period as the officers arrested him.
More: Violences policières : avant la France, comment certains pays ont limité le recours à la clé d’étranglement et au plaquage ventral. Radio France. 20.6.20.
Update:
Long-Bailey continues to gain support….
Tankies Fuck Off: Anarchists “Make enemies” of the Chinese Communist Party and “any leftist willing to challenge Washington’s destabilisation efforts from the core of empire.”
“Vile”, Says Alex Rubinstein of the Radical Left Grayzone.
Always ahead of the curve Spiked magazine carried this story yesterday,
“Why the West must stop bashing China. Phil Mullan.
In words dear to the heart of every sovereigntist and national populist Mullan wrote,
“….what is illegitimate and should be challenged is other governments’ interference in China’s own affairs. Just as problems in the US are for American people to resolve, and problems within Britain are for British people to sort out, the same applies with regard to China’s national sovereignty.
Repression against Chinese people, the same as the repression meted out by authoritarian regimes anywhere, will not be resolved by other governments or international bodies stepping in with economic or other weaponry. External state intervention in a country’s affairs is a repudiation of democracy at the higher nation-state level.”
As anger grows one can understand the outrage at the pipsqueaks who carried out this action:
They certainly look xenophobic!
The AWL Paper Solidarity gives the latest,
Chen Ying.
The National Security Law would punish acts deemed to constitute secession, subversion, terrorism, collusion and foreign interference in Hong Kong. It bypasses the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini constitution established in 1997 as the basis of the One Country Two Systems framework. It cuts through the Common Law approach to justice, and undermines a judiciary which is supposed to be independent of the executive branch. The Chief Executive has powers to nominate which judge should preside over specific National Security court cases. Even within the government’s inner circle, the Executive Council, opinion is divided whether there will be jury trials for National Security court cases. In special cases, China can take over a case and conduct the trial in the mainland instead of in Hong Kong.
All parties on the democratic camp have already declared their opposition to this National Security law. The next move from Beijing is now expected to be using the National Security Law to disqualify pro-democracy candidates in the forthcoming September Legislative Council elections, unless they swear allegiance to this new law.
Spiked, Shifting the “Overton Window to the Right” from Brexit to Racism.
Spiked is also at the heart of a Red-Brown Alliance over Brexit.
Heartfield, born James Hughes (he modestly took the name of the great German anti-fascist photomontage artist John Heartfield), was one of many enraged by the colonial upstart’s critique of Spiked.
But the one-time cadre of the Revolutionary Communist Party soon regained his composure:
Evan Smith’s argument that Spiked had helped shift politics to the right, and its detailed, well informed, account of the cyber-cadres past in the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) has hit the spot.
Coming after Nick Cohen in the Observer we can take stock of the impact of this network.
How a fringe sect from the 1980s influenced No 10’s attitude to racism
Previously dismissed as a fringe group on the outer limits of political discourse, more recently Spiked has become an influential force in shifting the Overton window to the right in the UK.
To understand how it has come to occupy this space and its rhetorical style, particularly concerning issues of race and racism, it is worth looking at the long road from the RCP to Spiked, via the journal Living Marxism (later titled LM).
This is a brilliant account of the RCP (this Blog has a copy of the pre-RCP journal of the faction, then known as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency…). The evolution from Living Marxism to Spiked, and the Institute of Ideas, Smith points out, is a singular one,
the trajectory of its cohort from the far left to the hard right. While the story of former leftwingers becoming rightwingers is not new, the fact that the leadership of the RCP seemed to transition en masse makes it a compelling story.
This is pretty unique. French Maoism, famously, the Gauche prolétarienne (GP), included individuals who moved rightwards, and ex-activists were at the origin of the anti-Communist and anti-Marxist group of “nouveaux philosophes”, although their leader, Benny Lévy discovered the Torah and Orthodox Judaism. Their denunciations of the Gulag were however framed in liberal terms, including, in some cases, a defence of human rights. Nobody would say that they were more than a current of ideas, without any formal ties.
The ex-RCP by contrast is often seen as a much more self-conscious network, all railing against what their guru Frank Furdei calls the “countercultural establishment” and the “moral depletion of the West”.
Yet….
As people have pointed out, it is equally odd that,
There is, in this respect, no largely ex-RCP group, large, small or micro-splinter, which claims their ‘heritage’ or to continue the battle for Marxism. They had no split, like the original home, IS/SWP into the RCG (and all the others), nothing like the break up of the WRP, or the kind of fragmentation into micro-fragments left groups normally undergo, That’s right. Very few people who dropped out of the RCP went on to keep up any political involvement — but then this might be related to the fact that we mainly picked up people new to politics. There are some people, pals of mine, who are a ‘Continuity RCP’ in that they still support earlier RCP politics, but they don’t have a group.
With the influence of a prominent figure from the Spiked network on the government’s Commission on Racial Equality, Munira Mirza It’s their impact on government policies on race and multiculturalism that has come to the fore.
Smith notes,
These preoccupations have proven to be well suited to a moment in which the right has reduced racism to a component of a “culture war” being waged by the “woke” left.Mirza’s previous comments on Spiked about institutional racism, diversity and multiculturalism reveal the mindset in which this new proposed commission on racial inequalities has been cast. They also reveal how the fixations of a contrarian, right-leaning, libertarian website, established by disillusioned leftists, has become part of the mainstream discourse in the UK.
But the impact (however we may measure it) of Spiked has extended not just to the Tory Cabinet, it has extended to what could be called a ‘Red-Brown Front’, that is an alliance of left and national populists, over Brexit.
Whether there is any kind of organised ex-RCP ‘entryism’ or not, nobody can doubt that Spiked has been able to work with a remarkable set of allies in building bridges between national populism and a section of the Lexit (pro-Brexit) left.
These include their own alliance with Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party right up to the ‘Full Brexit’.
The nominally left-wing Full Brexit (“FOR POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY, DEMOCRACY, AND ECONOMIC RENEWAL“) is a much broader initiative. It includes apart from Spiked/RCP James Heartfield and many, many, others, there are Blue Labour figures such as Maurice Glasman, his ally, the FBU, Trade Unionists Against the EU and anti-rootless cosmopolitan campaigner, Paul Embery (both Spiked contributor), well-known intellectuals and activists from the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), such as Prof Mary Davis, Nicholas B. Wright, New Left Review top writer, Prof Wolfgang Streeck, self-identifying leftists like Prof Costas Lapavitsas…Labour and other national sovereigntists, and a host of odd-balls and ……..
Bob from Brockley outlines its creation,
One LM initiative in the post-Referendum period was “The Full Brexit”, an avowedly left-wing pressure group launched in the summer of 2018 to reframe the Brexit narrative as one about “democracy” rather than just bashing immigrants.
Bob outlines the Spiked network inside this Red-Brown Front.
Alongside a smattering of Blue Labour social conservatives and Lexit Marxists, a good half of its 20 founding signatories are RCP network members. Academic Chris Bickerton has been a Spiked contributor since 2005, when he was a PhD student at St John’s College, Oxford. Philip Cunliffe, Furedi’s colleague at the University of Kent, is another long term Spiked activist. Pauline Hadaway, another academic, is a veteran of the Living Marxism days. James Heartfield was a paid RCP organiser. Lee Jones seems to have been recruited at Oxford around the same time as Bickerton. Tara McCormack is an RCP veteran, as is Suke Wolton. Bruno Waterfield write for Living Marxism.
Other signatories aren’t part of the network but have been promoted by Spiked: Paul Embery and Thomas Fazi for example (Fazi is also connected to the 5 Star Movement and recently retweeted an antisemitic tweet from someone with “Nazbol” in his user name). Many are also involved in Briefings for Brexit, which has several RCP veterans on its advisory committee, and some are involved with Civitas.
This is a peculiar form of left-right crossover politics.
Cross-over is a mild statement.
What other political initiative would be publicised in the Morning Star and Spiked?
Video: The Full Brexit in conversation – the British left after Brexit.
Morning Star January 31st 2020.
Trade unionists and academics from the socialist left met in London, January 28, to discuss the political prospects after Brexit – and after the disastrous 2019 election result.
Spiked 14th of March 2019:
Why we’re campaigning for a Full Brexit
Meet the leftists making the case for Brexit’s transformative potential.
Today Spiked ploughs its anti-woke furrow,
Multiculturalism is fuelling division
Ferdie Rous.
We need a shared identity and sense of history to make politics work.
Yesterday on Spiked Heartfield chanted his old refrain,
Labour has finally admitted it lost the working class
spiked and others have been pointing this out for decades. But Labour activists would not listen.
But let’s not forget the active help of Spiked, and their left allies in the Red-Brown Front, the Full Brexit, in swinging British politics to the right, and sowing the seeds for a Get Brexit Done victory by the Tories.
Why I’m standing for the Brexit Party James Heartfield. (May 2019).
In the event Heartfield bottled out and did not stand in the January General Election..
His national comrade Claire Fox (ex-RCP, and a Spiked Stalwart) became a Brexit Party MEP in that month…
Is the Spartacist League Bankrupt?
Nifty Headlines Already Missed.
George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) is set in a world where literature is becoming a commodity in the age of mechanical reproduction. Against the current and the pressure to produce pot-boilers, Edwin Reardon battles for the cause of art. The backdrop of the novel is obscure disputes fought out in ” the valley of the shadow of books”, the British Museum Reading Room.
A brief moment of happiness comes when the author meets a kindred soul, Biffin. Sophocles comes up. “For half an hour the two men talked Greek metres as if they lived in a world where the only hunger known could be satisfied by grand or sweet cadences.”
Many people, well, at least one, like to compare the world of Leftist Trainspotting to New Grub Street. From our garrets we do not visit the Reading Room, but a greater virtual library. Ancient Greek poetry is replaced by the hard-to-decipher texts of leftist groups and their doings.
The latest topic is something of a bombshell, is the Spartacist League Bankrupt?
For decades the Sparts, the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), have been a feature on the left. Last year their founder, James Robertson (1928–2019) passed away, and received a fitting tribute from, amongst others, Tendance Coatesy and James Robertson (a guest post).
Celebrated in the UK for their Private Eye Columnist Dave Spart, the group serves as a technical template for creative home-made placards, most recently by leading members of the Lambeth Left.
They have brought joy and comfort in an otherwise dull political world:
Now we learn, from eagle-eyed Spotter Paul F, reading one of the famously accurate publications of a Spart splinter, ( Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International) that they may be in trouble.
Silent Amidst Mass Upsurge Against Racist Oppression
Spartacist League Declares Bankruptcy
Amid the most massive protest movement in decades, as it has continued week after week, the Spartacist League has not published a paper, put out a leaflet or posted a single statement on its website on the killing of George Floyd or the mass protests against racist police terror. And this despite the fact that the core issue posed is black oppression, which the SL, from its inception, crucially emphasized as key to proletarian revolution in the citadel of imperialism.
…
At the same time, we noted that the SL/ICL’s flagship publication, Workers Vanguard, has now shrunk to four pages, with an issue skipped in April.
…
The current Workers Vanguard (29 May) that they are selling consists entirely of a “translation of a revised article from a March 2020 supplement” – that is, an item originally published two months previously – to the paper of their Greek group. (Discussing some of the ongoing internal turmoil, the most recent issue of the ICL’s theoretical journal had publicized the expulsion, on accusations of racist conduct, of two members who were involved in the Greek group’s work.)
Alas the financial collapse of Spartacism is not behind this.
Their silence speaks volumes: the SL’s abject abdication is a declaration of political bankruptcy.
Zeev Sternhell (1935 – 2020): Historian of Fascism and Pioneer of ‘Red Brown’ Studies.
General Boulanger and the original Red-Brown Front.
In Memory of a Great Voice, Zeev Sternhell, 10 April 1935 – 21 June 2020.
Israeli historian and political scientist Zeev Sternhell, a peace activist and one of the leading thinkers of the country’s left, has died aged 85, Jerusalem’s Hebrew University said Sunday.
Polish-born Sternhell, head of the university’s political science department, was an outspoken champion of Palestinian rights who strongly criticised Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Hebrew University president Asher Cohen hailed Sternhell, a professor emeritus there who was awarded the prestigious Israel Prize for political science in 2008, as “among the most important researchers” to emerge from the institution.
“His innovative political science research, which was translated into many languages, brought a deep change in the academic perception of ideological movements, specifically radical movements,” Cohen said.
Ayman Odeh, head of the Arab-led Joint List in Israel’s parliament, wrote that “during his childhood in Poland, Sternhell experienced the terrible results of fascism, and throughout his life had the courage and strength to research and fight it.
“For decades he was a significant voice for Palestinian human rights and against the occupation in the territories.”
The article continues,
His academic work also delved into the “French roots of fascism” and stirred lively debate and controversy, according to former student Denis Charbit, now a lecturer at the Open University of Israel.
Sternhell was a “very demanding” professor, but also one “attentive” to his best students, Charbit told AFP.
In addition to academic writing and books, he regularly published opinion pieces in Israeli newspapers, most notably Haaretz, many of which were critical of settlers.
On one occasion Sternhell called the settlement movement a “cancer” in Israeli society, and in another instance said a settlement should be attacked with tanks
Sternhell continued his political combat,
After receiving the Israel Prize in 2008, he was wounded the same year by a bomb planted outside his house by a right-wing extremist.
Sternhell himself said the attack was testimony to the “fragility” of Israeli democracy.
In an interview with Haaretz later that year, he warned of the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories and the condition of Israel “not respecting the national rights of others”.
In a 2014 interview with Haaretz, during Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, Sternhell warned that the Jewish state’s democracy was “facing collapse”.
“The Israeli democracy is eroding, and the signs (of emerging fascism) exist,” he said.Tamar Zandberg, of left-wing party Meretz, said Sternhell’s lasting legacy would be his work towards “a strong and not occupying Israeli democracy”.
Communication Minister Yoaz Hendel offered his condolences to the Sternhell family, noting that while he didn’t share many of Sternhell’s opinions, “prominent intellectuals like him, from right and left, are the foundation to our existence as the people of the book”.]
According to Haaretz, Sternhell died as a result of complications following surgery.
He is survived by his wife, two daughters and several grandchildren
Zeev Sternhell was at the centre of not just of Israeli political debate, but amongst the left and anti-fascists, in Europe, above all in France. Awarded a Ph.D. in 1969 from the Institut d’études politiques de Paris, for his thesis on The Social and Political Ideas of Maurice Barrès, a key figure in the culture and ideology of the nationalist right, he had a great influence had, far wider than academic circles and far beyond the hexagone.
I first came across his books during the mid-1980s in the Bibliothèque municipale Place Jules Joffrin, 75018 Paris in The study, Ni droite ni gauche. L’idéologie fasciste en France, 1983; transl. Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, has an enduring impact. This was reached many people on the left, as has been testified on hearing of his passing.
Sternehell’s work has found new audiences with the rise of national populism, and the creation of ‘neither right nor left’ red-brown fronts across Europe, from the pro-Brexit alliances in the UK to the defection of many parts of the sovereigntist left in many countries to the nationalist ‘anti-metropolitan elite” right. His account of the literary and polemical figure of the nationalist Maurice Barrès and his appeal to La terre et les Morts (Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français. 1972), the homeland heritage and the living memory of the dead, evokes ideas one can find amongst defenders of the ‘somewhere’ folk who criticise the ‘anywhere’ people.
In La Droite Révolutionnaire, (First Edition, 1978) Sternhell proposed that late 19th century and pre-Great War France was the cradle of fascist ideology. France was, in Sternhell’s eyes, an ideal field for studying pre-fascism, and, full blown, “neither left nor right” fascist thought. His focus began on General Boulanger’s 1886 campaign, an anti-parliamentarian movement which, following defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870 1871) of demanded ‘revenge’ against Germany, – the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France – and a clear out of the ‘cabals’ in the name of the People. His campaign was backed by Monarchists, Bonapartists, Maurice Barrès, some republicans and revolutionaries from the Blanquist tradition, and nationalists.
A part of the early French socialist movement saw in the movement a protest against (as Sternhell put it) ” les grands seigneurs de la finance.” Some saw in Boulangism a patriotic reaction against Parliamentary and social elites, that they could turn towards the left. Anti-Jewish sentiment, organised anti-semitism, appeared, leading to the creation of the Ligue antisémitique de France in 1889. Others from the socialist movement considered that the left should stand firm behind republican democracy and reject Boulanger: Le Bilan Boulanger. 1888 (M. Lissagaray)
In Ni droite ni gauche: l’idéologie fasciste en France (First Edition, 1983), Sternhell turned to the 20th century. In the years preceding the Second World War these movements drew together calls to “workers of all classes” against banking “hyper” capitalism, drew on the romance of the nation, and opposition to the liberalism of the Enlightenment and the elites of the Third Republic. This, he argued, indicated that fascism originated and continued to operate as a synthesis of socialist ideas and nationalism.
The book surveyed anti-parliamentarian nationalism (the ‘ligues’), “planiste” sections of French social democracy (Marcel Déat), the Monarchist and anti-Semite Action française, the mass parties of the later 1930s, the Parti Social français (PSF), the Parti Populaire français (PPF) of the renegade Communist Jacques Doriot, and a mixed bag of admirers of National Socialism and Mussolini.
Last year Sternhell edited and contributed to an important study of pre-war French far right movements, L’Histoire refoulée. La Rocque, les Croix de feu, et le fascisme français. Sous la direction de Zeev Sternhell. 2019.
In 2006 Sternhell published a study of anti-Enlightenment thought, Les anti-Lumières: Une tradition du XVIIIᵉ siècle à la guerre froide. Edmund Burke and Thomas Caryle took their place alongside Herder and Charles Maurras as those defend the “moral capital” of tradition against what Frank Feurdi, from the Red-Brown sie Spiked calls “the counter-culture establishment”. (The birth of the culture wars. This century-long conflict is born of the Western elites’ loss of cultural and moral authority. Spiked 19.6.20).
Sternhell, by contrast, defended neither cultural nor moral authority nor tradition.
His work was offers us landmark historical studies and a brilliant exercise of the “critical tradition” of the Enlightenment.
As he wrote, “Aucun ordre établi n’est légitime du seul fait qu’il existe. La justice et le bonheur sont des objectifs valables et légitimes…l’homme est capable d’aller en avant, a condition qu’il fasse appeal a la raison.” (Les anti-Lumières: Page 796).
“No established order is legitimate by the mere fact that it exists. Justice and happiness valid and legitimate objectives …humanity is able to progress, on condition that we use our capacity to reason.
Let that be Sternhell’s epitaph.
Labour Defeat: Labour Left Alliance Blames Expulsion of Greenstein and Walker; Counterfire for not offering sole option of a People’s Brexit.
“Witch Hunt” Chief Reason for Labour Defeat.
There’s been time for people to digest the report on Labour’s election defeat,General Election Review
Cross factional, evidenced-based, from the ground up, their conclusions have been discussed by some very cross factions have now responded..
‘Labour Together’ Report: It was the witch-hunt, stupid!
(Thanks to Newshound David Walsh)
On the reasons for the defeat….
“But the report manages to spectacularly miss the key reason. The 15 Labour grandees (including Lucy Powell who took part in the 2016 chicken coup) appointed to run the review focus on platitudes like “Jeremy Corbyn was deeply unpopular” – but the authors seem to chiefly blame Corbyn’s character for that, rather than make any attempt to get to the bottom of what happened in the last five years.
We are happy to help: It was the witch-hunt, stupid (to paraphrase the Clinton adviser James Carville).
These masterminds of the new grassroots left continue,
Instead of calling out the lie that the Labour Party was overrun by antisemites, the Corbyn leadership sought to appease right-wing saboteurs, pro-Zionist groups and the self-appointed leadership of “the Jewish community” who set out to obstruct the new members and the move towards socialist ideas. The Corbyn leadership behaved as though they believed this lie. The ‘leaked report’ shows that in the process they displayed an inability to recognise real antisemitism, while eagerly trying to get rid of prominent activists like Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Ken Livingstone and Chris Williamson, none of whom can be accused of even a trace of antisemitism.
Indeed!
Corbyn’s decision to try to appease the witch-hunters made him into a sitting duck for the right inside and outside the party. The establishment media gleefully got in on the action. And if a lie is repeated often enough, it becomes the truth. This is, in our view, the chief reason why many working class voters turned away from the Labour Party at the general election of 2019.
Stand firm Cdes!
The Labour Left Alliance believes it is therefore of utmost importance that we learn the lessons from this massive defeat. Appeasement never works.
Here is their latest event:
Counterfire, creating the kind of surprise you get when you find out that the Pope celebrates Mass, believes that Labour should have backed Brexit.
Labour’s election result: drawing the wrong conclusions – CounterBlast
Alex Snowdon.
Labour’s failure last December really was a result of one dominant factor. It killed its electoral chances by capitulating over Brexit. It did terrible damage by supporting a second referendum and disregarding the result of the 2016 referendum which, however narrowly, clearly provided a mandate for leaving the European Union.
What Labour should have done is to support Counterfire and the Morning Star’s idea of a “People’s Brexit”.
Labour lost the election by dropping its sensible position of 2017 – to respect the referendum result and outline a version of Brexit relatively favourable to working class people – in favour of an incoherent fudge that satisfied nobody and looked weak.
The Policy ‘imposed’ on Labour, which included offering a new Brexit as outlined above dreamt up by the Four Ms, Karie Murphy, Seumas Milne, Andrew Murray and Len McCluskey was fudge. We should have presented to the electorate only one option: a better Brexit.
…progress was subsequently reversed due to a major political error on Brexit. As the new leader, Keir Starmer, was in the vanguard of those demanding support for a second referendum, it seems unlikely that Labour will now learn the correct lessons.
Well, that’s that.
Two very different takes on the report.
Anticapitalist Platform attacks “campaign of abuse and guilt by association”in Momentum Election.
“that this campaign has been allowed to flourish in the midst of Momentum’s election is an indictment of the democratic deficit at the heart of the organisation.”
Momentum’s response to the report on Labour’s election defeat (Election Review 2019) contains this reference to “wrecking”.
Some people in Momentum seem to spend their time fighting ‘wreckers’.
The anticapitalist Platform (linked to the journal, Red Flag) have issued this declaration on the Momentum National Executive Committee Election – voting began on the 16th of June. (1)
A Statement on the Conduct of the NCG Election
As socialists we stand for maximum democracy and debate within our movement in order to clarify political differences and put competing ideas and strategies to the test of experience.
Throughout the Momentum NCG election, supporters of, and those who have worked with, the AWL group, have been subjected to a campaign of abuse and guilt by association which violates all democratic norms of the labour movement.
This includes vetting candidates for the supposedly ‘open primaries’ held by Forward Momentum, barring candidates from participating in ‘hustings’, and an anonymous Twitter campaign demanding “NCG candidates disavow [the AWL]”. This is a transparent attempt to bully candidates into repudiating the democratic choice of members if supporters of ‘Momentum Internationalists’ are elected.
As supporters of Red Flag we make no secret of our irreconcilable opposition to the politics of the AWL, most significantly in the context of the Labour Party, their equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. This leads them to brand principled opponents of Zionism as ‘political’ or ‘leftwing’ ‘antisemites’, which serves as a spurious ‘left’ cover for the Labour establishment’s witch-hunt.
Needless to say, this charge of antisemitism is one we reject with contempt. We understand that many defenders of Palestinian rights, including many courageous Jewish people, equally reject the AWL’s position on this issue, being themselves the target of right wing Zionist abuse. Nevertheless we are sure they will reject witch hunting and demagogy in reverse. Principles always pay in the long run.
The truth is, what their opponents, or at least the instigators of the campaign, really object to is the AWL’s consistent record of support for rank and file democracy in the trade unions, advocacy of the class struggle, and solidarity with democratic revolutions in the semi-colonial world. It is these remnants of the AWL’s original allegiance to Trotskyism that arouses the antipathy of this constellation of cliques, whose only common ground is their pathological hostility to the ideas of revolutionary Marxism.
The fact that this campaign has been allowed to flourish in the midst of Momentum’s election is an indictment of the democratic deficit at the heart of the organisation, and testament to the debased political culture prevailing in a disoriented and demoralised labour movement.
This witch-hunt is a deliberate distraction intended to divert attention from the poverty of the main factions’ platforms, which have nothing credible to offer on the key issues facing our movement: learning the lessons of the Corbyn movement and adjusting our strategy to meet the challenge of coronavirus, the economic crisis, and the emergence of a powerful anti-racist street movement.
All socialists and democrats should oppose demands to anathematise candidates because they belong to a different political tradition. It is wrong in principle, and it actually reveals the real attitude of such people to Momentum’s members and their democratic right to choose their own representatives.
Momentum, the Forward Momentum and Momentum Renewal slates, and MPs like John McDonnell, Richard Burgon, John Trickett, and others who have endorsed prominent candidates, should publicly condemn this undemocratic behaviour.
Those who persist in mounting intimidation campaigns against political opponents are aiding the right wing party leadership who recognise these pathfinders for the anti-socialist purge as temporary allies on their road to rescuing Labour for the ruling class.
This is a genuine and welcome statement.
It goes without saying that this Blog strongly disagrees with the assertion that the present Labour leadership is “right-wing” and preparing an “anti-socialist purge”.
We also have no intention of reproducing the latest quasi-pornographic tweets from Momentum Against the AWL which have passed the limits of decency.
It is worth noting that the wider ‘anti-wrecking’ wing of Momentum was involved in blocking attempts at Labour’s Conference to commit the Party to an internationalist anti-Brexit position.
Their conference factionalism is notorious.
Here they go again.
The Labour Party Marxist is now engaged in the Momentum elections
Affiliation and a line change (18.7.20)
the LPM fraction in the OG voted against the LLA “encouraging” people to vote in the current Momentum NCG elections, and against endorsing any candidates, on the basis of not lending the organisation credibility. However, on reflection, and especially having listened to criticisms from the CPGB’s Provisional Central Committee, we have reconsidered our position. We see little point in standing ourselves, but we will support leftwing candidates who do. There remain disagreements within LPM’s fraction on the OG. Of course, they concern only matters of tactics. Our differences are entirely secondary, but we shall argue them out, openly if necessary.
There are those on the right in the LLA who believe Momentum is reformable. It is welcome then, that on this issue at least, we find ourselves with the majority (see LLA’s excellent ‘Can Momentum be reformed?’ online document5).
Either way, vote for principled leftwing candidates in Momentum, but do so with no illusions in Momentum.
(1) Labour List: The end of the parliamentary road. An anticapitalist platform for Momentum Urte Macikene.
Labour Election Review 2019: Leadership and Brexit, initial Left Internationalist thoughts.
“Concerns over the leadership, Brexit position and deliverability of the manifesto damaged Labour’s chances.”
It will take a while to digest the full report but these are some initial responses, from a left internationalist, that is, from an activist in the anti-Brexit left.
One of the reasons to speak as the impact is being felt is that there are already efforts to use the report to blame those opposed to the hard right Brexit project for our Party’s defeat.
Here was a view, expressed by somebody believed, not least by himself, to be one of Corbyn’s close friends(1st of June 2019),
Vilayat Khan: So, let’s start with Corbyn and the Labour Party. How would you assess Corbyn on Brexit?
Tariq Ali: I think Corbyn’s position is correct. I think to make Brexit into the major divide of the British politics is crazy. Given that whatever finally happens, whether it’s Brexit or Remain, the problems of ordinary people, working people are not going to be solved. Brexit is very much a debate, I think, within the elite, and I think people voted, large numbers of people voted for Brexit to kick the establishment and to say you can’t get away with everything.
..
And ever since it happened a large chunk of the English establishment has been trying to reverse the referendum. So that’s what is going on, and for Corbyn it’s a serious problem because half of Labour supporters voted for Brexit, especially in the north. So he can’t ignore them. The choice, which the right of the Labour party is offering him is to agree to a second referendum now, campaign around it and Remain, and basically ignore the Labour supporters in the north, in other words, send some working class supporters in the arms of the Brexit party. That’s unacceptable.
In the coming days we can expect a lot in this vein. There will be claims that the metropolitan liberal Labour “elite”,by pushing for a Second Referendum, ignored the Brexit proletariat and drove the working class into the hands of Johnson. They will be strongly made by those who themselves campaigned, like Ali, for a Leave vote. Given the track-record of the national sovereignty left it would not be surprising if they try to apportion blame to groups like Another Europe is Possible, which mobilised the internationalist left, and had a strong presence at the hundreds of thousand strong protests against Brexit, for the catastrophic election.
In a fact-denying exercise some are already trying to make the claim,
Jon Trickett and Ian Lavery, the two most outspoken proponents of Brexit in Corbyn’s deeply divided top team, said: “Let’s be clear, people lost trust in Labour after failing to deliver change after 13 years in government. This was brought to a head when the party ignored the democratic vote for Brexit; it was the excuse that allowed loyal Labour voters to finally break with a party they felt had been ignoring them for far too long. (Guardian)
This is not going to wash.
More broadly, as one of the authors of the Review, James Meadway, point out (below), the report avoids “superficial explanations”.
This the Election Review 2019.
Labour List notes that,
The project commissioners included MPs Ed Miliband, Shabana Mahmood, Lucy Powell, plus journalist Ellie Mae O’Hagan, TSSA’s Manuel Cortes and former John McDonnell aide James Meadway.
These are key findings,
The report notes that Labour “lost support on all sides” in 2019 – around 1.7 million Leave voters and around one million Remain voters in net terms, compared to 2017 – and failed to attract swing voters.
Labour lost roughly equal numbers of Remain (1.9 million) and Leave (1.8 million) voters between 2017 and 2019. But it also gained around 900,000 Remain voters, while only winning over around 100,000 Leave voters.
Although one of Labour’s aims under Jeremy Corbyn was to attract non-voters, it was also identified that the Conservatives were more successful than Labour in turning out non-voters in 2019.
In summary,
It says the “broad consensus” across the party, reflected in the survey results, is that concerns over the leadership, Brexit position and deliverability of the manifesto damaged Labour’s chances.
The report, Election Review 2019, says,
- There is a broad consensus across our Party – mirrored in the results from our survey of Labour members – that a combination of concerns about the leadership, Labour’s position on Brexit and our policy programme damaged Labour’s chances in this election. Our weaknesses going into this election were interlinked, and indivisible. They catalysed long term trends between Labour and our voter coalition.
- This was an election where people were more often voting against the scenario they feared most, rather than for the party they liked best. We failed to provide a believable narrative for change, that enough of the electorate could vote for.
- Concerns about Labour’s leadership were a significant factor in our election loss in 2019. ‘Stop Jeremy Corbyn’ was a major driver of the Conservatives’ success across all their key groups including previous non-voters, and among all the swing voters Labour lost to the Tories.
- In 2017, Jeremy Corbyn’s personal poll ratings dramatically improved over the campaign. Had these levels been maintained, Labour’s vote share in 2019 would have been 6 points higher. The very low poll ratings on leadership going into the 2019 election cannot easily be disentangled from the handling of issues like Brexit, party disunity and anti-Semitism.
- The Tories won the 2019 election primarily by consolidating the Leave vote. In contrast, Labour lost support on all sides. Compared with 2017, in net terms, Labour lost around 1.7 million Leave voters; and around 1 million Remain voters. We also failed to attract swing voters, winning over far fewer swing voters than at any other recent election, and turning out fewer new non-voters than in 2017.
- Non-voters (both those who did not vote in 2017 but turned out in 2019, and those who voted in 2017 but not in 2019) played a critical role in the Conservative success. According to analysis conducted by Datapraxis, well over 4 million voters turned out in 2019 who had not voted in 2017. In 2017 Labour benefited much more from 2015 and 2016 non-voters but in 2019 the Tories overtook Labour among 2017 non-voters, by turning out many older and Leave voters as well as some younger voters.
- Whilst individual policies polled as popular, resistance to Labour’s reform programme came as people evaluated the overall package in our manifesto. Affordability, and the negative impact on the economy or their own personal finances were raised as concerns by voters. Unlike in 2017 many thought our manifesto was considered as unrealistic, risky and unlikely to be delivered.
- Labour suffered a meltdown in Scotland, polling well below even the Tories, with the SNP making significant gains. The SNP gained at Labour’s expense among key swing voter tribes. Brexit, the UK leadership and our position on a second Independence referendum were key factors in our loss.
The Guardian puts two issues at the heart of the defeat,
Jeremy Corbyn was deeply unpopular
The report is unflinching in its analysis of how the leader’s appeal to voters plummeted between 2017 and 2019. Had his popularity stayed at its peak level, it says, Labour’s vote share in 2019 would have been 6 percentage points higher.
By September 2019, it finds, 67% of voters disliked Corbyn, most strongly, and only 12% liked him. It links this to issues including Corbyn’s handling of complaints of antisemitism in the party, Labour’s Brexit position, and a perception of disunity due to events such as the defection of MPs to the short-lived Independent Group.
The report says research suggests an “intense” dislike of Corbyn was a key factor among voters who switched from Labour to the Tories; they raised issues such as antisemitism, perceived support for terrorism, and unaffordable policies.
The views of one 52-year-old woman who voted Labour in 2017 are summarised in the report as: “Frightened at the possibility of a Marxist government. Disgusted at Corbyn being a terrorist sympathiser. Most disturbed about plan to nationalise BT as I fear it would allow a Labour government to spy on internet users.”
4. A confused Brexit policy
In a poll of Labour members carried out for the report, 57% named the Brexit policy of promising a second referendum on any departure deal as the single most unpopular and challenging idea to sell to voters, citing views such as “dithering”, “dire”, and “reflecting division”.
This, the report finds, repelled both leave and remain voters. Of those who voted Labour in 2017, the party lost 1.9 million remain voters and 1.8 million leave voters in 2019. Given the generally pro-remain views of Labour voters, this represented a much higher proportion of leavers.
For many of those who changed their choice between 2017 and 2019, voting for another party in the European elections in May provided “a conveyor belt” away from Labour, the authors say.
Even those who stayed with Labour seemed to do so despite the party’s Brexit policy rather than because of it, with majorities of remain and leave backers saying they preferred to either stop Brexit entirely, or “get Brexit done”, respectively.
Comments.
Corbyn’s Popularity.
It would take a fully hyped up fan of the 2018 Jez-fest to ignore that Jeremy Corbyn was not liked by the electorate.
It is hard to criticise the former Labour leader about this, above all because it was made clear (at least to those who cared to know) that he had initially not wished to stand for that position.
But doubts were always there.
One aspect that was visible was an approach to the issues on which he made a mark, within the Labour and wider left.
Corbyn’s political history is tied to a particular vision of internationalism.
For some activists on the left his campaigning had an edge of the ‘anti-imperialism’ which always measured international issues through the lens of supporting, however ‘critically’ states and movements opposed to the USA, from Venezuela to Cuba, the Palestinians en bloc, even Iran, when they were standing up to Washington. Issues such as human rights, evoked in abstract, tend to melt when conflicts with America arise.
More to the point electorally what kind of appeal does this campaigning have for either activists or for the wider public?
Chatting to Tariq Ali and Roy, Corbyn recently referred to his work with the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) which has done precisely nothing to defend the Kurds, the Yazidis and Syrian democrats against Islamist genociders, and the Assad regime,
Like you, I wish that Stop the War didn’t have to exist, but it does, and here we are all these years later. And the derivation of those wars has been the refugee flows of the Middle East, has been the wars all across the Middle East, has been the refugee camps in Libya and Lebanon and so on.
This is his lament and call,
….the arms still flow to Saudi Arabia that have been used to bomb the people of Yemen, the war carries on in Yemen. The refugee crisis of the Rohingya people moving into camp (inaudible) continues. The refugee crisis in Libya, and Lebanon continues and others do. And so we do need a global movement that recognises the real threat to world security is health and poverty inequality. The real threat to global security are wars based on the abuse of human rights and the thirst for grabbing somebody else’s resources. The real threat to our security is actually the environmental crisis. That we should be facing in the future.
7th of June: Coronavirus, War & Empire: Arundhati Roy & Jeremy Corbyn in Conversation w/ Tariq Ali
Charitably this illustrates a wide-ranging concern with global issues.
Another, less favourable judgement is that Corbyn come across, even in a friendly environment, as a bit of talker, a high-pitched waffler, not a doer.
Even less kindly, most electors would have given up listening early on.
Brexit.
Was Labour’s confused position the result of pressure from ‘liberal metropolitan elites’?
Was it an honest effort to reconcile largely pro-Brexit working class voters with the views of the majority of Party members?
Many people in a position to know doubt this.
There is old mucker again: Jeremy Corbyn ‘would be campaigning for Brexit if he was not Labour leader’, says long-time ally Tariq Ali (Independent May 2016.)
“The Labour leader was forced to refute comments by his brother Piers that his pro-EU stance is a ‘party management’ issue.”
These claims did not disappear after the Referendum.
When Jeremy Corbyn announced on Tuesday that he would back a second EU referendum in all circumstances and campaign for Remain against a Tory Brexit, it marked a victory for the pro-EU movement inside the Labour party. The Labour leader resisted pressure to make the shift for months, worried about the potential loss of voters in Leave-supporting areas. He was persuaded to make the move by an alliance of MPs, grassroots members and union leaders.
But he has still refused to clarify whether Labour would campaign for Remain or Leave in a general election, a sign of the considerable influence of his four key allies, dubbed “The Four Ms”. The group — Karie Murphy, Seumas Milne, Andrew Murray and Len McCluskey — have been the strongest advocates for Labour to back Brexit.
Reported the Financial Times in July 2019.
The “compromise” that resulted was not just for a Second Referendum.
It was for a renegotiated deal for Brexit which would then be put to a popular vote.
If it wins the election, Labour wants to renegotiate Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal and put it to another public vote.
Rather than backing either Leave or Remain during the election campaign, the party will remain neutral until a later date.
Should a referendum under a Labour government be held, voters would be able to choose between a “credible Leave option” and Remain.
The party would organise the referendum within six months and decide which position to back at a special conference in the build up.
In other words, you could back Labour to get a better Brexit, or because you wanted a ballot on whether Leave should take place.
It was this which looked, for the obvious reason that it was ” “dithering”, “dire”, and “reflecting division”.
Few bothered to go into this for the obvious reason that if you wanted Brexit there were other alternatives on offer.
Others may suggest that the Four Ms, with Corbyn behind them, equally played a major part in what the Guardian calls, the “dysfunctional ‘toxic culture’ (that) led to defeat…”
More to follow…
Factionalism in the Time of Coranvirus Part 9. the Election Campaign for Momentum’s National Co-ordinating Group (NCG).
Huda Elmi, a senior elected figure for CLPs on the Labour Party’s NEC.
Experienced Leftist Trainspotters, and even a few other Labour Party activists, have been following with interest developments in the election campaign for Momentum’s National Co-ordinating Group (NCG).
It should be recalled that there are people on the left who did not become involved with Momentum whose stress on the importance of one individual, Jeremy Corbyn, was not universally accepted.
More recently Momentum has been seen as a block on efforts within the Labour Party to oppose Brexit such as the call for a Second Referendum.
In these elections there are serious ideas being debated and this seems a good outline of the two main slates,
One of these factions, Momentum Renewal, is seen as the continuity group, with its candidates broadly aligned with Lansman. Meanwhile its rival, Forward Momentum, is more closely associated with the former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, who has given his backing to the group.
…
There are also fundamental policy distinctions between the two factions. Forward Momentum appears to advocate a more member-led structure, with decision-making opened up to ordinary activists.
“Since joining, I have been disappointed by some the decisions of Momentum,” says Ana Oppenheim, who is standing as a Forward Momentum candidate in London. “Very often it felt like a mailing list, instead of the movement we were promised, where people can discuss ideas, learn from each other and run independent campaigns. It felt like we were given a line to follow from the top.”
As evidence, Oppenheim points to the way Momentum treated its members during the recent Labour leadership contest. The group didn’t allow members an open vote on who it should support, instead presenting the Momentum leadership’s favoured candidates (Long-Bailey and Angela Rayner for deputy leader), with members merely allowed to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Sam Bright puts his own interpretation on how Momentum has been run,
In late 2016, there was an attempt by the Trotskyist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) to infiltrate Momentum and seize power. In response, Lansman put in place a constitution to cement his power and prevent a coup. Ever since, control of the group has been tightly guarded by Lansman and his acolytes, even when they were arguing for more participatory democracy in the Labour Party.
There are a lot of reasons for what Lansman did to maintain his own position.
The include attempts by the ‘Socialist Party’ (fresh from standing candidates against the Labour Party, and support for a virulently anti-EU anti-Labour slate in European elections) to participate in local Momentum meetings, to an attempt to create its own private own front, “Trade Union Momentum”(January 2016. Steps towards setting up Trade Union Momentum)
For opponents and critics of Lansman the only ‘coup’ was the one which kept his group’s hold on the reins of Momentum. Those disputing this came from a whole raft of non-Lansman activists, and included an attempt to create ‘Grassroots Momentum’, a group that included people who are very very far from being connected to the AWL –
Momentum Grassroots conference: Against Jon Lansman (2017)
Over 200 Momentum members attended the first gathering of the newly established Momentum Grassroots network. It could have easily been much bigger, had it not been built as a ‘delegate’ event – a decision which was overturned at the beginning of the meeting by a clear majority of the branch delegates (see interview opposite).
The organised left was there, of course: there were about two dozen members and supporters of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty/The Clarion and a handful of supporters each of Workers Power (Red Flag), Socialist Appeal and Labour Party Marxists. The Labour Representation Committee and Nick Wrack’s Labour Party Socialist Network had a few members present, though neither seemed to make a coordinated intervention.
The meeting elected this body.
Steering committee
The following were elected:
Matt Wrack,137
Sahaya James, 95
Tracy McGuire, 93
Jackie Walker, 93
Nick Wrack, 89
Simon Hannah, 82
Delia Mattis, 82
Kevin McKenna, 80
Jill Mountford, 75
Graham Bash, 71
Rosie Woods, 71
Rida Vaquas, 69
Lee Griffiths, 69
Alec Price, 67
Pete Radcliff, 64
Ed Whitby, 63
Tina Werkmann, 61
Jan Pollock, 58
Richard Gerrard, 56
Joan Twelves, 53
In the present Momentum elections this has caught people’s attention:
Responses:
Here, genuine it is claimed, is another intervention.
In an insightful article On the right to organise, Ed Mustil asks,
Why does any of this matter? After all, who cares who wins elections to the ruling body of an almost-certainly busted flush of an organisation?
Yet this is attention-grabbing:
Candidates standing for positions on Momentum’s National Co-ordinating Group (NCG, ostensibly the organisation’s leadership body) have been asked by an anonymously-run twitter account to sign a pledge “disavowing” and “pledging not to work with” the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL), a Trotskyist group.
The anonymity of the authors of the pledge makes it impossible to know for certain, but this seems pretty clearly to be a factional manoeuvre by some supporters of the Momentum Renewal (MR) slate in the NCG elections. Momentum Renewal broadly seem to represent continuity with the way Momentum has been run since 2016. They are fighting to retain control of the organisation in the face of a challenge from the Forward Momentum (FM) slate.
Mustil looks at the history of broad political tendencies, currents of thought, and organised factions within the Labour Party.
This is a striking feature which Labour shares with only a few other labour and socialist parties, such as the French Parti socialiste (PS). The PS, which was founded as an organisation (in 1969) from different groupings, including the old Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière, SFIO. Post the Epinay Congress of 1971 this has continued to be formed through the way they present conference resolutions (“textes d’orientation politique, appelée «motions», déposés par les courants du parti”). Along the election of the Party General Secretary, these are presented, votes tallied, and if possible ‘synthesised’ (compositing).
In Britain there is not such official recognition, but the same kind of currents of opinion exist.
Organised factions and political groups have always existed in the Labour Party. In fact, the party itself began as a coalition of such groups — you couldn’t even, as an individual, be a member of the Labour Party until 1918. Some such groups have maintained more or less their own party structures: the Independent Labour Party (members: Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald), the Socialist League (members: Stafford Cripps, Clem Attlee).
Others have been less formally organised (the Bevanite movement in the 1950s). Some have been based around a publication: Labour Briefing (supporter: Jeremy Corbyn), Tribune (supporter: Michael Foot). Some have been Marxist (Militant, Socialist Appeal, AWL), some Blairite (Progress), some soft left (Open Labour). People of like minds will come together to organise. You can no more prevent this than King Canute could turn back the tide, and there is nothing inherently bad or weird about it. If we are to be the party of the whole labour movement, the right of these groups to organise must be vigorously defended.
On the Right to Organise describes the latest faction in the following terms,
For the sake of brevity, I’m going to refer to this undeclared faction as the Goons, since they on the one hand can be childish and unserious, and on the other hand can behave like thuggish bullies.
The AWL itself publishes support for other Pledges:
Left pledges in Momentum election
There will no doubt be further interventions, tweets and comments made during the Momentum elections.
Our Ace-Reporters are out there now, tracking them down!
See also : The issues in the Momentum election – by Momentum Internationalists
Blue Labour Resurfaces in Pétainist Controversy.
Not “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” but “Work, Family and Community”.
Blue Labour is a pillar of the alliance between supporters of the Brexit Party (Spiked/ex-Living Marxism), the Aaron Bank funded Trade Unionists Against the EU,the Communist Party of Britain, and sundry ‘sovereigntist’ anti-EU types, from red Tories to leading New Left Review contributor Wolfgang Streeck, the Somewhere, as opposed to the Anywhere People.
Its leading thinker, Maurice Glasman, a noble member of the House of Lords, has not been idle in the present crisis.
In the promiscuous forum of Web events the Baron of Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill, has found time to discuss the weighty issues of the age in the comfortable companionship of old friends from the Spiked Network.
After this pleasant evening, displaying his preternatural intellectual endowments, the Brexit campaigner has enjoyed reflecting on the wisdom of the illimitable pretensions of Catholic social doctrine.
It is Catholic social thought that has guided me through the 2008 crash, Brexit and now the coronavirus. It has been my inspiration and I will be eternally grateful to Catholics and the Church. It was a very generous gift. In the darkest moments, it lights the way.
Lord Glasman: How Catholic Social Teaching rescued me from an academic crisis
This deft piece in the Catholic Herald could serve as a springboard for further popular instruction, from the 2008 crisis, pandemics, the glory that is Brexit, to the Universal Church’s centuries-long striving for equitable social institutions.
Alas, efforts to corral the rock of St Peter on the side of society’s efforts to “defend itself” may well have hit a snag.
Yesterday this lot hit the leftist headlines, the result of their own reference to another Catholic social thinker, Philippe Pétain.
The Vichy regime and its leader enjoyed great support from the Church hierarchy and many believers, (see on this, “Vichy : un régime clérical.” More than half of young people between the ages of 14 to 21 belonged to pro-Vichy youth movements” Les mouvements de jeunesse catholique connaissent un véritable essor sous Vichy, entre 1940 et 1944 près de la moitié des jeunes âgés de 14 à 21 ans, appartenait à un de ces mouvements.”)
Vichy was permeated with “corporatist” ideology. Corporatism opposed class struggle Marxism, finance (‘globalism’), and promoted revived national and community values. Nobody would contest that the Vichy ‘National revolution’ had many other sources and policies, but this attempt to run the economy and society, however much a mask for German rule, was not a simple smoke-screen.
People can be excused for thinking that claims to balance ‘rights’ and duties’, to devise an alternative to Marxism and liberalism, “« le marxisme n’est qu’un aspect prolongé des doctrines libérales »” was not too far off Blue Labour’s ideas of “mutuality and solidarity”. (Un laboratoire de la doctrine corporatiste sous le régime de Vichy : l’Institut d’études corporatives et sociales Steven L. Kaplan)
It is well known that Vichy was the first regime to establish the 1st of May as a bank holiday in France.
Le , le maréchal Pétain instaure officiellement par la loi Belin le 1er mai comme « la fête du Travail et de la Concorde sociale »23, appliquant ainsi la devise Travail, Famille, Patrie : par son refus à la fois du capitalisme et du socialisme
These aspects of history should not make us forget the courage of those Catholics who resisted Pétain and Vichy, some of the best human beings in French history.
It is to register that “Catholic social doctrine” is not a block of granite resting on the side of progressive causes.
Look at Hilaire Belloc, one of the best known social thinkers, amongst his many accomplishments.
The British-French essayist became a corporatist of sorts.
This is his best known account of the origins unrestrained capitalism,
The Servile State (1912)
The Immemorial past of Europe is a Servile past. During some centuries which the Church raised, permeated, and constructed, Europe was gradually re- leased or divorced from this immemorial and fundamental conception of slavery ; to that conception, to that institution, our Industrial or Capitalist society is now upon its return. We are re-establishing the slave.
In his efforts to find a corporatist solution to this servitude Belloc equally didn’t exactly stand firm against fascism and antisemitism…
Today it would not be surprising to see forms of national populism trying to modify the hard-line free-market thrust of their ‘national neo-liberalism’ with corportaist suggestions about bringing people together through social justice in national communities.
You could say that Blue Labour, backers of a Brexit and enablers of the Johnson-Cummings project, form part of that wing of national populism.
After the initial tweet by Young Blue Labour a – less complicated – history lesson followed:
Then,
The Scooby Gang running Blue Labour – ‘gotten’ followed this by another American contribution- Howdy Pardners!
But “skepiticism” did not last
For some of us this reference to Dempsey is up there with the Vichy stuff…
Spiked Red-Brown Network’s Munira Mirza to set up Government, “Race Inequality Commission.”
Red-Brown Front Now in Charge of ‘Race Inequality Commission.”
The Guardian leads with this story,
Munira Mirza has doubted existence of institutional racism and criticised ‘culture of grievance’.
…..
The revelation of Mirza’s role was met with dismay from experts and MPs. The Institute of Race Relations thinktank said it would be hard to have confidence in the commission’s outcomes.
“Any enquiry into inequality has to acknowledge structural and systemic factors. Munira Mirza’s previous comments describe a ‘grievance culture’ within the anti-racist field and she has previously argued that institutional racism is ‘a perception more than a reality’,” a spokesperson said. “It is difficult to have any confidence in policy recommendations from someone who denies the existence of the very structures that produce the social inequalities experienced by black communities.”
Diane Abbott, the Labour MP and former shadow home secretary, said: “A new race equalities commission led by Munira Mirza is dead on arrival. She has never believed in institutional racism.”
Then there is the possibility that Trevor Phillips will be involved….
The daily also refers in a separate article, Munira Mirza: PM’s ‘nonsense detector’ who has attacked racism claims,to her Living Marxism background.
She became a member of the Revolutionary Communist party, contributing to its magazine Living Marxism. But she got frustrated at what she saw as the narrow-mindedness of the left, and embarked on the journey across the political spectrum that resulted in her being hired by Policy Exchange, the modernising Tory thinktank, and ultimately took her to Downing Street.
Her comrades in the RCP are now the pillars of a red-brown Spiked network that combines support for a Hard Brexit, and the (former) Brexit Party, free-market “risk-taking ” economics, wages the “culture wars” on behalf of the “somewhere” people against liberal metropolitan ‘elites’ , and the ” the chattering classes”. Fighting the “woke PC Establishment ” they foam with hatred for the Black Lives Movement.
Their national populism, national sovereignism is not a million kilometres away from Boris Johnson’s Tory version of, er……National Populism and national sovereignism.
If this ideology has an economics it’s not far off the Brexit Buccaneering Project of Dominic Cummings.
A groupuscule that began as a faction within a faction at the far arial boundaries of the left, marked perhaps only by a singular loathing of the Labour Party “the main instrument for winning the working class to the stratgey of the bourgeoisie” (Who Needs the Labour Party? 1978), trade unionism and the welfare state, now finds its whelps within the inner circles of the Tory Party.
Is Mirza in any sense still part of the network?
Brendan O’Neill, Spiked’s best known Gombeen man, said after Johnson’s gang had replaced Theresa May in July 2019,
On top of these ministers we have Boris’s new senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, the strategic whizz behind Vote Leave, and his director of policy, Munira Mirza, friend of spiked and a committed Leaver. Downing Street is now a Leave bastion. This is progress.
Read what Bob has to say on this:
Bob From Brockley writes,
July 27, 2019
THE RCP’S LONG MARCH FROM ANTI-IMPERIALIST OUTSIDERS TO THE DOORS OF DOWNING STREETThis week it was announced that Munira Mirza would be joining new prime minister Boris Johnson’s team as head of Number 10’s policy unit. Mirza, mis-identifed by the Independent as “an academic at King’s College London” (her actual job there is running their “cultural strategy”), was Johnson’s Deputy Mayor for Culture and Education during his City Hall tenure. Last month, the new crop of Brexit Party MEPs taking up their well-paid if “stupid” jobs in Brussels included Claire Fox, professional BBC talking head with a reputation as a contrarian libertarian.
Regular readers will know what Mirza and Fox have in common: they are both long-term members of the network that emerged out of the Revolutionary Communist Party and its magazine Living Marxism (LM). I’ve written before about the LM/RCP network, best known today for its web magazine Spiked, and this post draws together some of that material given the party’s importance in our current, Brexit political moment.
……
By late 2010, I wrote that the RCP had probably been more influential than any other bit of the British far left in the last decade. They gave a veneer of intellectual respectability to denialism about climate change, have acted as PR agents for the agribusiness, airline and pharmaceutical industries, aided and abetted AIDS denialism and its enormous death toll in Africa, given succour to Serb nationalism at its most aggressive, helped Boris Johnson capture London, provided ideological cover for cuts in the funding for arts, reduced the number of decent free festivals in the parks of London, and, arguably, were the architects of David Cameron’s election victory.
Mirza drew closer to the Conservative Party in this period. She married Dougie Smith, Cameron speechwriter and co-ordinator of Tory thinktank Conservatives for Change (Cchange), on whose board sat Nick Boles, along with politicians such as Francis Maude and Theresa May – as well as once running Fever Parties, a London-based organisation that apparently hosted “five-star” orgies for swingers. (Cchange was originally closely linked to Policy Exchange, originally called Xchange, and their personnel overlaps.) Johnson promoted Mirza from advisor to deputy mayor. By 2018, the New Statesman’s Stephen Bush was tipping her as a possible Tory mayoral candidate.
Going full Brexit: from Red Front to red-brown front.
…
One LM initiative in the post-Referendum period was “The Full Brexit”, an avowedly left-wing pressure group launched in the summer of 2018 to reframe the Brexit narrative as one about “democracy” rather than just bashing immigrants.
Readers of this Blog will be all too aware of the Full Brexit, and the way this alliance of sovereigntists from Blue Labour, ‘trade unionists against the EU’, the Communist Party of Britain, and other ‘left’pro-Brexit forces (including one of New Left Review’s stars) with Brexit Party members and supporters, helped both Brexit and a Tory win.
This kind of political confusionism – the blurring of boundaries, the accumulation of disparate causes in a common hatred of ‘elites’, the EU, helped power the Johnson faction into power.
More:
And there is this:
The arrogance of waging a culture war by introducing this factional operator into a key post on the issue of racial neutrality is breath-taking.
More will no doubt follow….
Today the guru of the Red-Brown Front got star treatment on GMB.
Update: (On RCP) and Mirza
Spiked Online, Ireland and Brexit.
John Rogan (Medium).
Amongst MIrza’s many contributions to her old national comrades’ web site Spiked is this:
September 2017. Lammy review: the myth of institutional racism
“This review could do more harm than good for black Britons.”
.. framing this review publicly in terms of institutional racism and racial bias within the criminal-justice system only clouds the reality of what is happening and in the end could lead to worse outcomes for ethnic minorities.
Other articles available here:
Factional history.
Turkey Attacks Iraqi Home of the Yazidis, site of ISIS 2014 Genocide.
Turkey Bombs Sinjar: Yazidi Lives Matter.
Yazidi Exile Council of Sinjar calls to “stop Turkish attacks”
Survivors of the ISIS genocide in Shengal were among the targets of the Turkish state that carried out a massive aerial bombardment on several locations in South Kurdistan tonight.
As part of its genocidal all-out war against the Kurdish people in various parts of Kurdistan, the Turkish state has launched a wave of large-scale air raids in southern Kurdistan, northern Iraq tonight.
20 fighter jets of the Turkish army are reported to have conducted the massive campaign which started at around 00:00 local time. The strikes targeted several positions in the regions of Qandil, Maxmur and Shengal (Sinjar), including a refugee camp and hospital.
This is a heart-rending call:
The Yazidi Exile Council of Sinjar (Shengal) released a statement and asked: “What use did it have to end ISIS if Turkey is allowed to kill us anyway?”
The statement of the Yazidi Exile Council of Sinjar (MŞD) reads as follows:
“Today, 15 June, 2020, Turkey again bombed Sinjar, Iraq in a targeted and intended strike against the Yazidis. In one night Turkey bombed the survivors of a genocide 8 times. It is likely that a hospital was deliberately hit.
How many of our people is Turkey allowed to kill before this finally ends? Will the US and EU Members stop Turkey killing us? What use did it have to end ISIS if Turkey is allowed to kill us anyway? Why was all the money spent on defeating IS if Turkey is allowed to do the same now?
It is well known that the Yazidi religious community is the oldest religion in Mesopotamia. The Islamic State attacked the Yazidi religious community on August 3, 2014, and a cruel genocide was carried out. After this genocide, we Yazidis decided to found our own self-governing forces and fight against IS. Since we received no help at the beginning and afterwards and were left defenseless to the IS by the local armed forces. We then founded YBŞ, the self-governing armed forces of Sinjar, on January 14, 2015. To date and during the liberation of Sinjar, we have lost hundreds of Yazidi men and women in the fight against IS.
Even after that, we received no support from the United States, the United Nations or the European Community in any way for the reconstruction or the further fight against IS. Since the liberation from the IS terrorists, the Turkish state has repeatedly attacked the region in and around Sinjar. Since October 2019, simultaneously with the invasion of the Turkish state in North-East Syria, the Turkish state has bombed the region of Sinjar five times before today. Several Yazidi self-governing militants were killed in these previous attacks by the Turkish state.
We however refuse to become Turkish proxies! That is why Turkey bombs us and calls us ‘PKK’. The US confirmed officially that the PKK left Sinjar. The YBŞ is part of the Iraqi army. All the world knows that Erdogan is a dictator who calls everyone ‘PKK’ or ‘terrorist’ and who says ‘no’ to Erdogan. We continue even now to say ‘no’ to Erdogan. We will not become his subjects under his control.
The Turkish state repeatedly attacks the Sinjar region and bombs the YBŞ positions. Based on these facts, there is no doubt that the Turkish government wants to continue the genocide of the Yazidi religion and empty the Sinjar region. Turkey wants to force all ethnicities and religious groups to become its proxies and servants. We refuse that and that is why Turkey decided to wipe us out.
We appeal once again to the United States, which controls Iraqi airspace, to stop Turkey from attacking the Yazidis. In the five previous Turkish attacks since October 2019, many civilians have already been killed and injured. The Yazidis pose no threat to Turkey. Nevertheless, the Yazidis are exposed to the attacks of the Turkish state without protection. It is incomprehensible to us Yazidis why the international public silently accepts the attacks by the Turkish state and does not stop their NATO partner in his violations of human rights.
We call on the United States to close Northern Iraqi airspace, particularly around the Sinjar region, with immediate effect for the Turkish state to stop Turkish air strikes. We expect a written confirmation of this measure. And we emphasize again that we are not a threat to Turkey, nor to any other country or religion. There is simply no justification for this Turkish aggression against us!”
Turkey carries out airstrikes against Yazidi areas of Iraq’s Sinjar
The Jerusalem Post reports,
Turkey launched waves of airstrikes against what it claimed were Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) elements in northern Iraq. The airstrikes shook mount Sinjar, an area that is home to the Yazidi minority and where ISIS carried out a genocide against Yazidis in 2014.
The area has been unable to recover because of constant threat of Turkey’s airstrikes and the presence of armed groups, militias and checkpoints. The PKK and its affiliates fought ISIS near Sinjar in 2014 and although Turkey labels the PKK a “terrorist organization,” affiliates of the PKK in Sinjar never carried out any attacks on Turkey.
The genociders are beginning to face justice:
Far-Right Fringe Protests: Will the Culture War Still Take Place?
Evan Smith (see, Toppled statues and the free speech culture war) asks:
Yesterday’s clashes in London centred on the antics of a few thousand far-right piss-heads.
London protests: More than 100 arrests after violent clashes with police
They behaved true to type.
For those reading this Blog who are not familiar with the name Keith Palmer, the man was a true hero in every sense of the word.
Keith Palmer, GM (1968 or 1969 – 22 March 2017) was a British police officer who was posthumously awarded the George Medal, the second highest award for gallantry “not in the face of the enemy“. Though unarmed, he stopped a knife-wielding terrorist from entering the Palace of Westminster during the 2017 Westminster attack; he died from wounds he received in this attack
The BBC states,
MP Tobias Ellwood, who gave first aid to PC Palmer as he lay dying after being stabbed in the grounds of Parliament by Khalid Masood in 2017, said the image of the man urinating next to the memorial was “abhorrent”.
He told the BBC: “He was fully aware of what he was doing, he should step forward and apologise.”
For many people, beginning with leading figures involved in the Black Lives protests, and extending to the left and independent anti-fascists, it was not a good idea to engage in confrontations with the far right rabble.
PM Boris Johnson had been inciting opinion against BLM protests and the left.
It seems as if the Tories are more than willing to engage in a US style “culture war” – at a time when a massive recession looms .
The Guardian headlined on its front page yesterday, “Boris Johnson ‘stoking fear and division’ ahead of BLM protests
Critics say PM’s claim that George Floyd protests ‘hijacked by extremists’ is dangerous”.
In the same daily, Johnathan Freedland offered an account of how these cultural clashes work in the very different political culture of the US, and how they might develop in the UK,
The right loves a culture war, because such a battle changes the subject – almost always shifting from ground on which they would lose to ground on which they can win.
Let’s imagine the initial focus had remained instead on a demand to tackle discrimination in policing and criminal justice, expanding to include the higher death rates from Covid-19 among black Britons. Johnson and others in power would now be on the defensive, forced to promise action.
But once the focus shifted, they could exhale with relief. Not only is a debate about statues or faulty TV shows a handy distraction from the specific injustices at the heart of all this, it also splits the coalition, even the consensus, that had, remarkably, formed in revulsion at Floyd’s killing. Once statues of Gandhi and Mandela are also boarded up for their own protection, as they now are, it means precious unity has been lost.
In France the Comité Adama has taken up issues of discrimination in policing and the legal system, focusing on justice against the police (Death of Adama Traoré) See also, yesterday: Comment le comité Adama est devenu le fer de lance de la lutte contre les violences policières. BFMTV.
ITN carries the story:
Assa Traoré wears a t-shirt which says “Justice for Adama, without justice you will never have peace.”
She knows the price of peace – Adama is her brother.
He died four years ago detained by French police after running away from them because he wasn’t carrying his identity documents.
She has been campaigning ever since.
All these years on, the officers involved in his detention have just been cleared of any involvement in Adama’s death.
That decision has triggered protests across France and led to her brother being dubbed the ‘French George Floyd’.
Yesterday they also demonstrated.
Not without difficulties, as this self-policing against would-be ‘casseurs’ (those who attack and smash after marches) illustrates.
Far right ‘identitaries’ tried to disrupt the protest.
David Lammy has taken up one of the issues Feedland highlights:
Lammy takes an approach to the statue issues which many will agree with:
After the scuffling and fighting it is unlikely that anybody is going to want to side with yesterday’s would-be defenders of Churchill.
Yet there are those who not only wish to fight the culture wars but to oppose the far-right (on this issue) in the streets,
Weyman Bennett, co convenor Stand Up To Racism said
“It is right to take a presence on the streets – we should not let the fascists go unopposed. For the past two decades we have been told when Nazis march ‘ignore them and they will go away’. This simply is not true.
“Without the encouragement of Boris Johnson pretending that the issue of Bkack Lives Matter is reduced down to statues. He has not engaged on the key point about racism and its systemic nature in this society.
“Johnson’s callous disregard for black people’s lives in the current Coronavirus crisis and also for the mistreatment by the police and the court system, is an other attempt to reinforce racism and we must reject reject this and demand justice. No justice no peace”.
Weymann Beynett is a leading member of the SWP.
Here is his plea during the EU referendum, when the SWP and the ‘Lexit’ left stood on the side of the hard-right and backed the Johnson, Cummings and Farage Brexit project and opposed internationalists.
Stand up to Racism: Keep racism out of the EU Referendum – Weyman Bennett
Around 5,000 Nazis and racists gathered in Parliament Square, central London, on Saturday. Hundreds of the thugs tried to carry out a violent attack on Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters.
It’s a warning of how the British far right is hoping to initiate a right wing backlash against the BLM movement.
But they can be humbled. That was underlined late in the day on Saturday when several thousand people who had seen the pictures of the far right answered calls from musician Megaman and others to come to central London to oppose them.
…
Up to 300 supporters of Stand Up To Racism (SUTR) joined a counter-protest in Hyde Park where they faced abuse and intimidation from the far right.
..
The fascists’ 5,000 was small compared to the 50,000 that came out last Saturday and the monster march last Sunday.
BLM organisers had planned another central London demonstration for this Saturday. But called it off out of fears of clashes with the far right and coronavirus concerns.
The far right may feel confident after their protest. But seeing tens of thousands of people—black, white, overwhelmingly young, and militant—on the streets is the best way to demoralise them and make sure they cannot regroup.
There are others who take an even more forthright position.
These responses do not look like calls for unity:
And there is this:
The Malcolm X Movement has a web site.
Its last pubic event was in 2017.
Here is one in 2016,
The Malcolm X Movement proudly hosts the premier of a hard-hitting, informative and inspiring look at African and Libyan popular anti-imperialist resistance entitled Nato War on Libya (53mins). We are also hosting at the same event a book launch of a collection of writings about the martyrdom of Muammar Gaddafi entitled On the Martyrdom of Muammar Gaddafi: 21st Century Fascism and Resistance. One of our MXM coordinators – Sukant Chandan is the editor of the book and the filmmaker of the doc.The event takes place this Sat 29th Oct at 6pm at Marx Memorial Library, EC1R 0DU (£5 suggested entry). The Libyan community are kindly and generously providing free Libyan snacks and refreshments at this event.
Le Monde Diplomatique Publishes “Comedian” Chris McGlade as Pro-Brexit Voice of the Working Class.
Chris McGlade, “kicking back at the metropolitan liberal elite.”
“To defend the value of our votes, working-class communities had no choice but to vote Conservative, thanks to their betrayal by the Labour Party, writes Chris McGlade” – now supporter of George Galloway.
Le Monde Diplomatique is one of the world’s best known political publications.
“Worldwide there were 71 editions in 26 other languages (including 38 in print for a total of about 2.2 million copies and 33 electronic editions).”
It has claims to be on the left.
In the February issue (French edition, I have a Sub.) the monthly published a lengthy account of the British Labour’s electoral defeat by a Chris Bickerton, Pourquoi le Labour a perdu. Chris Bickerton. Bickerton is a supporter of the ‘Full Brexit‘ initiative.
This is a pro-Brexit alliance between members of the Communist Party of Britain, the socially conservative “anti-immigration and pro-family‘ Blue Labour current, including anti-rootless cosmopolitan campaigner Paul Embery the Communist Party of Britain, the British representative of the ‘Lambertist’ Trotskyist movement, Labour Party and other left sovereigntists, and supporters (when it existed) of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. The Full Brexit also includes a number of hard to classify anti-EU figures, from the Greens, ‘red-Tories’, and individuals who could be generously called ‘eccentric’.
Many of the Full Brexit are part of the Spiked ‘network’, whose origins lie in the Revolutionary Communist Party, such as former RCP cadre, James Heartfield, (born, James Hughes) who initially was going to stand as a Brexit Party candidate in the General Election in Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency.
Spiked’s present day campaigns include fighting “woke culture”, environmentalism, and censorship. It is now engaged in sustained attacks on the Black Lives Matter movement (today, “The tidal wave of woke sentiment, unleashed in the name of anti-racism, threatens the very foundations of liberal democracy.”)
Chris Bickerton has contributed to the Spiked site, the last time in 2017. More recently, immediately after the UK General Election, he has written for the Guardian, Labour’s lost working-class voters have gone for good. The Guardian notes that, he ” teaches politics at Cambridge University and is a founding member of The Full Brexit.”
While the British daily does not explain what the Full Brexit is, the paper at least it signals the affiliation.
Le Monde Diplomatique contents itself with listing that Bickerton is “Politiste, université de Cambridge.”
Next to this article (in the print edition) is the following which does flag out the Full Brexit (without explaining the nature of this alliance of left sovereigntists and the far-right populist Brexit Party).
This is what McGlade says,
I’ve been a member of the Labour Party. I flirted with Militant when I was 18. I was in three trades unions. All my family are working-class, Irish immigrant stock and Labour supporters for decades. We’re not brainwashed, but we all voted Conservative.
The Labour Party no longer represents working-class people in the northeast. It no longer speaks to us. It doesn’t think like us. It’s not us anymore. We have no voice. And, so, we voted for the only party who were offering to respect what we voted for in 2016. Yesterday, we voted in Redcar for democracy and the worth of our vote. If we’d lost that through a pack of middle-class progressive liberals getting elected and holding a second referendum, we’d have lost everything. They’ve taken everything off us up here, even our party. Our vote, our only protection against them, couldn’t be taken away from us as well.
In recent post Tendance Coatesy expressed scepticism about the credentials of this type.
As political activists are all too well aware, it’s something of a boastful excuse for people to claim to have been Labour supporters, “for decades” when they are about to justify their right-wing views and vote for the Tories or the extreme Right, UKIP or British National Party.
A justified reservation, though it turns out a lot more than a pinch of salt is needed to take McGlade seriously.
On Tendance Coatesy David Walsh comments,
Chris McGlade ? The new working class hero of Le Monde Diplomatique is well known to many of us on Teesside. He is a clown (both professionally as a self-styled stand up comedian) and as a….well….clown. He is an obsessive conspiracist. In the 1990’s / early 2000′ I was the leader of the local unitary council. In that period he was obsessed by what he saw as huge conspiracies involving developers, local councils and secretive quasi masonic bodies.
He first battened on to me with a series of comments that I was in receipt of huge back handers from industry and builders – all handed to me in the time honoured fashion of A4 sized brown envelopes. (I did point out that if I was getting such bungs, I’d want it done electronically, and (b) if it had to be brown envelopes, then the passing on of the goodies must not, as he alleged, be done in the lounge of the largest pub in the town………)
He dwells on his past as a steelworker, although I have no memory of him putting in any shifts anywhere on South Tees, and being a fervent leftie and working class Labour supporter. Again, if he was, I, and others, would remember all those leafleting sessions and canvassing that was the lot of us all then……. but memory in a funny thing. Still, he now neatly fits the needed narrative for our times if you are from the Lexit, Brexit Spiked / Red Brown Front, so the working class hero is made flesh and blood. BTW Welcome Back.
Comrade David Walsh is clearly on to something.
Here is some of life-long ‘Labour’ supporter McGlade’s past,
(Northern Echo. 2005),
CAMPAIGNING comedian and a former London policeman have joined the race for the Redcar seat at the next General Election.
Jonathan Lehrle, chief of staff to Shadow Foreign Secretary Michael Ancram, has been unanimously selected as Tory candidate by Redcar Conservative Association.
Chris McGlade, who made his name as a stand-up comic before leading a campaign against Redcar’s Coatham Enclosure plans, will stand as an Independent.”
Here is some of his present.
In February the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) had this account of Chris McGlade speaking at George Galloways ‘Workers’ Party’ meeting,
Comrade Galloway closed the morning session by introducing a working-class poet and comedian from Teesside (northeast England), Chris McGlade, whose heartfelt and moving contribution received another standing ovation.
Welcome to Le Monde Diplomatique’s new political pundits.
Culture Wars, Black Lives Matter, and Labour’s Future.
Culture Wars: Protesters have pulled down a statute of Christopher Columbus outside the Minnesota State Capitol.
“Parts of the left have spent the months since Keir Starmer was elected leader attacking him for “losing the working-class base” through his social liberalism. Now he’s faced with attacks from the same corner for failing to support the destruction of the Colston statue.”
Paul Mason. To defeat the far right, Labour must lead the anti-racist movement
In his analysis of the Black Lives movement Paul Mason makes the cutting point that recently a certain left press, from the Morning Star downwards, was full of attacks on the “metropolitan liberal” Keir Starmer and the internationalist pro-EU left. The Bluff Workers of the Red Wall would not put up with this North London elitism.
Things have changed.
This week the Morning Star took it upon itself to comment Editorially,
Colston’s toppled statue links the anti-racist and anti-imperialist causes
KEIR STARMER’S description of the toppling of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol as “completely wrong,” like Priti Patel’s claim that it was “utterly disgraceful,” show their distance from what has become an international movement against racism.
They recommend creating “building the broadest possible anti-racist alliance – one which connects racial oppression to capitalism. A movement that targets a system of which the whole working class are the victims and an imperialist global order based on exploitation and war.” – an alliance, one assumes, which keeps Keir Starmer at a distance.
Such a movement would develop a consistency the Labour leadership lacks, as it tries to square sympathy with anti-Trump protesters in the US with support for Washington’s aggression abroad.
While pondering on just what US “aggression” the Labour Leader supports we should not that other spokespeople for the Red Wall have stood their ground.
Anti-rootless cosmopolitan campaigner Paul Embery (promoted by the Socialist Party as head of Trade Unionists Against the EU during the referendum), (1) says,
Now, in stark contrast, his old anti-EU muckers in the Socialist Party are ready to advise Black Lives protesters,
Black Lives Matter protests sweep country: How can the movement win?
Sir Keir Starmer told LBC radio: “It shouldn’t have been done in that way, [it was] completely wrong to pull a statue down like that.” With this comment, and also in his approach to Covid, he has shown that he is not prepared to stand up for working-class people and defy the Tories – in bronze or in parliament.
The movement will have to build its own leadership through a testing of ideas and organisation as it develops.
And what would that involve?
To be on the side of this movement means drawing on the conclusion of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers: “You can’t have capitalism without racism”.
What does that mean for building the Black Lives Matter movement? It means building a mass united movement of working-class people with anti-racism at its heart; that fights for workplace safety and PPE for all who need it; for fighting trade unions; for free education; for democratic working class control of the police, and for a future for all young people. It means building a new mass party of workers and young people because we can’t trust the capitalist politicians with our lives and our future.
And it means fighting for the alternative to capitalism – socialism. Capitalism is outmoded. It can’t offer us a future. Join the Socialist Party to help us raise these ideas in the new movement.
The militantly pro-Brexit George Galloway’s new party has its own take.
Socialist Worker publishes this appeal, from the USA, by Michael Brown.
we need to take these rebellions and uprisings to their most radical conclusions.
Already we have certain sections of the state—particularly the Democratic Party—that are offering concessions.
At this point, we need to be demanding and raising reforms but keep in mind that the system is rotten.
It needs to be uprooted, branch and root entirely. We’ve exhausted all other social means.
The power is in the streets. It’s not enough to write to your congressman or circulate a petition anymore.
And first and foremost the ruling class is scared because people are looting and burning, and defying curfews. That type of militant power in the streets is what we need.
The revolt runs deep—take it to its most radical conclusions
Others from the pro-Brexit camp remain reserved.
Pontificating Prelate Giles Fraser, once the darling of protesters against neo-liberal globalisation, now a Tory voter retweets,
Are there different approaches, ones that avoid the naked opportunism of sections of the left, and the reactionary response of the Blue Labour and Red-Brown Spiked?
As with all his writing Paul Mason’s important article should be read in full.
Key points include that the movement shows two striking aspects:
The first is an expression of power and solidarity by black Britons. Though the London demos have been multi-ethnic, when seen as black community events they are unparalleled in size. The university students, the taxi drivers, the cleaners, the church congregations, the football teams, the DJs and the civil servants of black London were drawn together in one place. These were not “activists” – they were families and friends mobilised together.
The second aspect of these events is they are a political project. They reflect the desire of multi-ethnic urban communities to decisively roll back the racism they see pervading their everyday experience: they have had enough, and a response has been coming for years.
He continues,
And that leads to the third characteristic of this moment. It is a major challenge to the Labour Party.
….
The black community, like everyone interested in politics, understands that there will not be a progressive government in this country unless Labour can take back its former northern heartlands. But the implicit question posed by the recent demonstrations was: “OK, but on what basis?”
Neither the Socialist Party’s call for a “mass united movement” around their own party, nor the SWP’s belief that “militant power in the streets” is on the political agenda, look likely, or are designed to help this objective. Nor are they likely to win many converts.
But taking back voters is a hard subject. Labour has to be convincing, not just story-telling It is far from sure that we can will into being an alliance of the ‘Red Wall’ and socially liberal internationalists with a counter-movement and narrative, around the themes Mason suggests, the “family, fairness, hard work and decency” agenda.
If we are talking about a political project deft national populism Tory, far right, and Red-Brown , one that can relate to Keir Starmer’s team in the Labour Party, but with a much broader appeal and some solid policy behind it.
I’d start looking at some of the ideas coming from new alliances of the greens, centre left socialists and social democrats, and*significant figures of the radical left, that are emerging in France around l’initiative commune, on radical changes to create an open modern and decent welfare system, raising working standards and pay, better, public services, tax reform, ecological transition (the ‘Green New Deal’, for more details see Au cœur de la crise, construisons l’avenir (2)
These efforts to bring people together for a positive future are encouraging, and should expand to include the issues Black Lives Matter raise.
Without this kind of compass plunging directly into the ‘culture’ wars looks a risky task.
To begin with the sheer size and breadth of the moment we undergoing looks fraught with difficulties.
As Joseph Harker says in the Guardian today,
Black Lives Matter’ risks becoming an empty slogan. It’s not enough to defeat racism
If I hear one more white person say “Black Lives Matter” I think my head will explode. The slogan, powerful when first popularised by black people after the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012 in the US, has now become so ubiquitous as to have lost almost all meaning. A way for people to endlessly repeat “I hate racism” while doing nothing to actually stop it.
When even Boris Johnson can say “Black Lives Matter” – the same Boris Johnson who talks of African piccaninnies, of “bank robber” burqa wearers, who leads a party riven by Islamophobia but refuses a proper investigation into it, and who was part of a government that deported black British citizens, and continues the injustice of the hostile environment to this day – well, you know the slogan’s cultural appropriation is complete.
This brilliant article reminds one of this comment today:
Some further points can be made.
My own ancestors in Ireland, Glasgow and the East End did not get much of the Imperial “surplus wealth” or, I could cite Ireland as an obvious case, benefited from racism……
This Blog suggests that while the culture wars around the issues of racism are important we should not end with statues from the legacy of the slave trade, British imperialism, or wider European colonisation.
It is not just a reckoning with the past, or present day American or European black lives that matter.
Certainly this is not helped by pulling stuff from television.
Given the state of the world this looks pretty small.
As internationalists we should be fighting the prejudice and disdain which has led many, including on the left, to ignore the millions of Syrian lives at threat from the Assad regime and the millions of African lives at risk in present day horrific civil conflict.
In the first instance we await the Morning Star’s support for the victims of the Baathist regime.
*******
(1) Paul Embery speaks at the TUSC meeting in Cardiff photo Ross Saunders (Click to enlarge)
Ross Saunders and Dave Reid, Socialist Party Wales
The ‘Socialist Case Against the EU’ tour held a lively and fraternal meeting in Cardiff on 9 June.
The tour is organised by the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), which supports a Leave vote, and includes transport union RMT and the Socialist Party.
14th of May Le Monde.
The list of names indicates the breadth of the appeal.
On peut y trouver les ténors de la gauche et des écologistes : les députés socialistes Olivier Faure et Valérie Rabault, les députés européens Raphaël Glucksmann et Aurore Lalucq, la présidente de région Occitanie, Carole Delga, et les maires Johanna Rolland (Nantes) et Nathalie Appéré (Rennes) ; les écologistes Yannick Jadot, Sandra Regol, Eric Piolle et Eva Sas ; les amis de Benoît Hamon, Guillaume Balas et Claire Monod ; les communistes Ian Brossat et Pierre Laurent.
Ils ont été rejoints par un large panel associatif et syndical et de nombreux intellectuels progressistes. On peut remarquer ainsi les signatures personnelles des anciennes ministres passées au monde des ONG Cécile Duflot (Oxfam) et Najat Vallaud-Belkacem (One), de l’ex-président d’Emmaüs Thierry Kuhn, de l’urgentiste Rony Brauman, des anciens syndicalistes Bernard Thibault, Bernadette Groison ou Annick Coupé, des altermondialistes Gus Massiah et Christophe Aguiton. Des intellectuels de renom ont aussi paraphé l’appel, tels Thomas Piketty, Julia Cagé, Pierre Charbonnier, Dominique Méda et Sandra Laugier.
Labour Against the Witch-hunt leaders ask, “Why is the Nazi holocaust more important than the Slave Trade and the Death of 10 million Africans in the Belgian Congo?”
Greenstein’s Blog can be read here;
Greenstein does some calculations and comes up with an answer:
It would be interesting to hear US and British activists from Black Lives Matter take up the issue of the the vicious rule of the Belgium Congo – a private domain of King Leopold ll (somebody whose name Greenstein does not bother to mention).
It is a live issue in Belgium, and has been for some time.
This, Greenstein fails to mention.
If this pair are interested in the history, which they show few signs of familiarity with, the best known English language study is King Leopold’s Ghost (1998) by Adam Hochschild.
One can read an account of one of the principal sources of information about these horrific abuses (set up following the harrowing investigations by the Irishman Roger Casement in 1903, here: Commission d’enquête sur les exactions commises dans l’État indépendant du Congo `1904.
Not that Walker or Greenstein are interested in this history.
The point is simple “white lives matter more” – Jewish lives.
Jackie Walker is a member of the Board of the Labour Representation Committee. *
Both are office holders in Labour Against the Witch-hunt,
- Ken Livingstone
- Alexei Sayle, comedian
- Professor Moshé Machover, Israeli socialist and founder of Matzpen
- Ian Hodson, president of the Bakers Union
- Ken Loach, film director
- Noam Chomsky, author and activist
*
Election of Officers
Equalities Seats. BME: Jackie Walker
Update on the LRC
Stan Keable from labour Party Marxists and Secretary of Labour Against the Witch-hunt, writes in the Weekly Worker(28.5.20),
The Labour Representation Committee’s executive has decided to ‘postpone’ the planned June 27 online conference till some time in September. Why?
…….
we suspect that the real reason for the ‘postponement’ is political. Indeed, it is very likely that the real reason goes by the name of John McDonnell, the LRC’s president. The fear is surely that, if the conference went ahead, it would have been attended by many victims of the ‘Anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ witch-hunt. To address such a conference could end McDonnell’s glorious political career in the Labour Party with his expulsion. After seeing what happened to fellow MPs Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy, he knows that is a real prospect.
He comments,
John McDonnell has undergone a sickening political decay. He, like Momentum owner Jon Lansman, helped lever the Labour Party into adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s so-called ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism: a definition which equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Not only that: McDonnell supported the reactionary “zero tolerance” doctrine in the face of the blatantly dishonest witch-hunt against socialist and leftwing activists. Such treachery, such a failure to stand in solidarity with wrongly accused comrades, whose innocence he cannot have doubted, should not be passed over in silence. He certainly should have been stripped of his position as LRC president.
Further update:
We are reliably informed that Walker left the LRC Committee because they withdraw from the Labour Left Alliance (LLA).
She is listed as a supporter of the LLA.
” Tosh McDonald, former president Aslef, Doncaster councillor
Asa Winstanley, journalist
Jackie Walker
Graham Bash
Chris Williamson
Professor Moshe Machover
John Dunn, Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign.”
Year Zero Zealots Topple Statues – where will it end? Spiked and Nigel Farage ponder…
Year Zero Zealots Topple Statue of Brexiter and Spiked Editor Brendan O’Neill.
Tom Slater was a prominent supporter of the Brexit Party and deputy editor of the site, Spiked.
He posted this in May 2019.
Vote for democracy – vote Brexit Party
….vote for the Brexit Party tomorrow, an alliance of democrats from all political and social backgrounds that is making one simple demand in these elections: respect the electorate. It is the only party that is making a positive case for Leave and for democracy; which is not just asking for your vote in this election but is demanding that every vote you ever cast in future be respected and acted upon.
In 2019 Bob from Brockley posted this invaluable article outlining the political background to the Spiked site and network:
THE RCP’S LONG MARCH FROM ANTI-IMPERIALIST OUTSIDERS TO THE DOORS OF DOWNING STREET
Bringing his account up the present Bob describes how the former Revolutionary Communist Party, reconverted into ‘Spiked’, played a role in creating the Brexit Party – after having helped form the ‘red-brown’ Full Brexit alliance of Blue Labour, ‘anti-rootless cosmopolitan’ campaigner Paul Embery, New Left Review star, Wolfgang Streeck, the Communist Party of Britain, Labour Lexiteers, Soverieigntists and a variety of other National Populists.
Here is a key section.
The RCP then played a key role in the creation of the Brexit Party, again providing “left” cover for a deeply right-wing project. Otto English in Byline Times documents how, in February 2019, a film-maker, Kevin Laitak, a disciple of Furedi, began turning up at local Leavers of Britain groups, telling campaigners that he was making a short film about rank-and-file Brexiters.
He then recruited activists who might consider standing for the new BXP, who were then called by a woman called Lesley Katon. Katon told would-be recruits that she was the co-founder of a group called ‘Invoke Democracy Now’, whose activists, English notes, included Claire Fox, as well as Luke Gittos, the legal editor of Spiked, Brendan O’Neill, its editor, Living Marxism alumni Tessa Mayes and Munira Mirza, and Mick Hume, former editor of Living Marxism (for more on Invoke Democracy Now, see Colin Lawson).
Katon herself has several LM connections, and among the candidates emerging from this process were In addition to her client Claire Fox; Katon’s colleague David Bull who spoke at a Spiked event in 2003; James Heartfield, a long-time RCP cadre; Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, a former RCP activist and Spiked contributor; and in Scotland long time Spiked writer Stuart Waiton. Of these, only Fox was placed high up enough a regional list to get sent to Brussels.
Today we have this from Slater.
Slater whinges:
we shouldn’t celebrate the toppling of the statue, either. For it symbolises some of the more strange and regressive aspects to this new ‘anti-racist’ movement that has burst on to our streets and TV screens in recent days.
the frenzy with which a mob of protesters yesterday pelted the statue with paint, ripped it down, stomped on it, rolled it to the harbour, and then tipped it into the water was, frankly, unhinged.
This growing obsession with what are, at the end of the day, inanimate objects is one expression of the stifling politics of victimhood that has engulfed anti-racist politics, and a warped view of history that accompanies it.
By no coincidence whatsoever we now have this…
Good Morning Britain’s panel erupted into a fierce row as Nigel Farage condemned the toppling of a slave trader statue, and was accused of racism.
The Mirror continues,
Nigel compared the Black Lives Matter movement to the Taliban and refused to comment on whether he thought it was right or wrong to topple statues of Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler.
“I understand why they did it, but don’t forget those same people have been destroying historical monuments in Syria that are thousands of years old,” blustered Nigel, whose microphone was eventually muted so the other guests could speak.
And so it goes.
Backing the Protests against Racism and Standing by Labour Movement Guidance to Protect Against Covid-19.
The toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol is welcome.
This Blog also notes with sympathy these protests:
Today we hear more and more calls to topple the statues of the Beligum King who brutally ruled vast tracts of Central Africa as his private kingdom.
In the UK:
Here is the Johnson response to the latest protests, (BBC)
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said anti-racism protests at the weekend were “subverted by thuggery” after some demonstrators clashed with police.
Mr Johnson said people had the right to protest but engaging in violence was a “betrayal” to the protesters’ cause.
Thousands of people attended largely peaceful demonstrations in cities across the UK at the weekend.
But unrest in London on Sunday led to eight officers being injured and 12 people being arrested.
In Bristol, police confirmed there would be an investigation into “criminal damage” of a statue of Edward Colston – a prominent 17th Century slave trader – which was ripped down by protesters in a move Home Secretary Priti Patel condemned as “utterly disgraceful”.
While the Metropolitan Police’s Supt Jo Edwards said following a “predominantly peaceful protest” in the capital, officers were faced with “scenes of violence and disorder” which were “entirely unacceptable”.
People will rightly ignore the Prime Minister’s bluster.
Yet some problems cannot be wished away.
On Shiraz Socialist, Jim Denham writes.
The dilemma: should you protest in a coronavirus pandemic? And if so, how?
Under ‘normal’ circumstances there’s be no question that all socialists (indeed, all decent people) should be joining these protests.
The problem (at least in the UK) is the continuing prevalence of Covid-19 and the continuing need to socially distance. Many of the protesters (especially young people) have taken the conscious decision to risk breaking social distancing (which is virtually impossible to adhere to on a demo or at a rally) because they regard the anti-racist cause as more important. Fair enough, perhaps: but those making that choice are not just risking their own health, but also the health of everyone else they come into contact with.
For trade unionists demanding the highest health and safety standards at work, this presents a real dilemma – and it also makes it impossible to argue for trade union support for the UK demos.
One reaction is whataboutery.
Lindsey German of Counterfire leads the charge, referring solely and exclusively to the issue as follows,
Here in Britain, we have had Priti Patel warning that the demos will help spread the virus – something that worried her not in the slightest when she welcomed VE day parties, the opening of garden centres and crowds on beaches. The government has, however, avoided major confrontation so far – a sign of its overall weakness. However, it is prepared to use force to crack down if it feels that it can.
Some are already claiming that nobody who is not a “person of colour” should comment critically on these protests.
Socialist Worker offers justifications for ignoring social distancing.
Most people are wearing masks,” he said. “The necessity of the movement overrides the virus.”
Several placards read, “Racism is a pandemic.” There was a sense that the threat posed to black people by police violence and racism was at least as significant as the threat posed by the virus.
“We are in the midst of a pandemic, but racism is a pandemic too,” recruitment worker Yvonne told Socialist Worker. “Everyone needs to fight it. It’s not something black people can get rid of by ourselves.”
Sunday’s march was made up of young black and white.
Racism may have spread across the country, with deep roots.
It is a threat.
But what justification is there for providing conditions in which they virus can spread?
The labour movement is trying to help those engaged in fighting it.
How anybody override that effort?
This is a TUC statement (2nd of June) on that aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic,
Commenting on the announcement today (Tuesday) by Matt Hancock that Kemi Badenoch will lead a further enquiry into why black and minority ethic (BME) people are more at risk of coronavirus, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said:
“The government has known for months that the virus has hit black and ethnic minority people hardest – in their health, jobs and wallets.
“Rather than just warm words, the government must now show that Black Lives Matter with urgent action to protect BME people at work and to give all key workers the pay rise they have earned.
“BME communities must have confidence that their health is being taken seriously.
“The government needs to put in place a funded action plan to tackle the egregious inequality BME people still face, and must be fully transparent about how it is considering BME communities in its policy decisions.”
TUC guidance for Health and Safety reps on social distancing at work
1. Eliminate
Can the risk of breaking social distancing be eliminated using alternate working methods like home working? If not:2. Reduce
Can the risk of breaking social distancing be reduced by limiting the number of workers in any given area or supply more welfare facilities? If not:3. Isolate
Can the risk of breaking social distancing be isolated by separating areas of the workplace? If not:4. Control
Can the risk of breaking social distancing be controlled through supervision, clearly marked areas of access and two metre markings similar to supermarkets? If not – or if the risk still can’t be sufficiently avoided – then issue PPE.5. Personal Protective Equipment
Following the risk assessment, clear and identified PPE should be issued free of charge. Regulation 4 of the PPE states:Every employer shall ensure that suitable personal protective equipment is provided to his employees who may be exposed to a risk to their health or safety while at work except where and to the extent that such risk has been adequately controlled by other means which are equally or more effective.
This means that PPE should not be the first means of controlling the risk of contracting Covid-19 in the workplace
6. Discipline
Through proper training, advice and clear understandable policies and notices including posters.
The issue of the social distancing the TUC backs has come to the fore in these protests.
In Spiked Michael Cook crows at the reaction to US protests.
If you can remember that long ago, there was a time when the only protesters defying the Covid-19 lockdowns in the United States were small crowds of roughnecks from flyover country, waving flags and brandishing placards at state capitals.
…
Now, crowds of tens of thousands have gathered to protest the appalling killing of George Floyd in cities across the country. Most of them are ignoring social distancing. If the public-health advice is correct, hospitals could expect a spike in coronavirus cases.
So are these protesters freeloaders? According to an open letter signed by hundreds of health workers, they are heroes. Lockdown critics may deserve to die without ventilators, but protesters against racism should be encouraged, praised and supported. The public-health response ‘must be wholly different from the response to white protesters resisting stay-home orders’, says the letter. ‘White supremacy is a lethal public-health issue that predates and contributes to Covid-19’, it continues.
In Belgium the leading francophone daily, Le Soir, reports that the absence of social distancing at protests has been less than well received.
Polémique sanitaire après la manifestation anti-raciste à Bruxelles
And the world:
But the issues Shiraz raises remain.
Take the national populist right, and its cheerleaders in the Red-Brown Spiked web site.
Spiked writers backed the far-right Vox protests in Spain against social distancing (Spain is in revolt against the lockdown, and other national protests against lockdown measures across Europe (The mass arrest of anti-lockdown protesters in Berlin shows we have given up our freedoms far too easily.)
The Italian extreme right, and ;pandemic deniers, have demonstrated in recent weeks.
In Brazil the national populist President Jair Bolsanaro has joined in.
Bolsonaro greets anti-lockdown protesters as coronavirus cases rise in Brazil – video
In effect those flaunting social distancing rules are not just putting people’s heath at risk, they are playing the game of the far-right opponents of lockdown.
How can we criticise them when we excuse the same behaviour?
No cause or group can over-ride the need to protect lives.
Coronavirus is a physical reality that cannot be wished away.
Clashes
The clashes in London and elsewhere are also a live issue.
A respected local councillor in Ipswich, one of those who led the call to get local Tory councillor suspended for his racism tweets,
(This is the Tory)
How can we answer the views of people like Alisadair, people who form the backbone of our movement?
Now we have Keir Starmer.
Those who reject this approach need some serious responses.
Lawlessness is perhaps easier to excuse than spreading the pandemic.
Weather Underground Call to “Attack and Dethrone God” Behind Black Lives Matter Protests – Fox News.
Attack and Dethrone God: ‘Trending’.
This is a story, believe it, circulating today,
With the social unrest and Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the nation in the wake of the killing of George Floyd refusing to die down, extreme reactions have started surfacing on virtual platforms like Twitter and one of them is #AttackAndDethroneGod. It is not too difficult to understand who is the target of the Twitter trend and with it, the name of the once-famous Weather Underground Organization (WUO) is also doing the rounds. President Donald Trump has recently expressed his intention to designate the left-wing anti-fascist Antifa movement as a terror organization in the wake of the Floyd protests and with the surfacing of the WUO’s name now, it is clear that the US is now trapped between extreme conflicting ideologies.
This if the Fox News broadcast that sparked the prairie fire.
The Jerusalem Post reports this story, tongue firmly in the cheek.
Riots, like military org., ‘attack and dethrone God’ – Former FBI agent
Turchie claimed that “Praire Fire” highlighted six main points that the WUO intended on executing in order to achieve their goals, the last of which was titled “attack and dethrone God.”
Former FBI deputy counterterror director Terry Turchie told Fox News‘s Laura Ingraham on Friday when speaking on the news that the riots occurring throughout the United States in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police is not unlike the extreme leftist Weather Underground Organization (WUO), claiming one of its intentions was to “attack and dethrone God.”
…
“They had a major goal, and that goal was to form a communist revolution,” Turchie said. “They call themselves communist-minded men and women, and in 1974 they authored a document called ‘Prairie Fire,’ and they outline their strategy and they outline the way they could get to that strategy and actually bring down the US government.”
Turchie claimed that “Praire Fire” highlighted six main points that the WUO intended on executing in order to achieve their goals, the last of which was titled “attack and dethrone God.” Turchie did not clarify what he meant by this last strategy.
They continue,
“Police racism then and police racism now is a phony issue,” he concluded. “It has always been a phony issue. It is the issue that communist societies use to literally tear apart Americans and to be devisive. Those categories of people you have on that screen, those are the kind of victimhood that they look for to kind of bring in the focus, large groups of people, and get them on the team here.”
The point stating “attack and dethrone God” received massive backlash online, with many Twitter users who support the Black Lives Matter movement amid the riots joking that they surely intend to do so.
This Blog recommends the following book for the history of he Weather Underground:
Jacobs, Ron (1997). The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. London: Verso
You can download a copy for free from Libcom here.
Preface
I first became aware of Weatherman in the fall of 1970, after opening a copy of Quicksilver Times and reading about the group’s assistance in Timothy Leary’s escape from a prison inCalifornia. Although I personally preferred the antics of that other psychedelic prankster KenKesey, the fact that a political organization had aided the unreservedly apolitical Leary to escape fascinated me
This is the last paragraph.
On January 6, 1994, one of the last of those charged in the Days of Rage went to court. Twenty-five years after the first national Weather action, Jeff Powell ended his life underground to face riot charges. He was fined $500 and placed on probation. Nearly a quarter-century after Weather called on the youth of America to bring the war home, Powell, a foot soldier in the Days of Rage, finally surrendered.15
The claim about the Weather Underground are not voices crying in the wilderness.
To just how wild the US right is these days the following is a windy straw;
The Democrat Party these days has actually ended up being more extreme than the Weather Underground, raising the concern what traitorous red line should the Democrat Party cross prior to the leaders are detained for sedition, and the Party dissolved for being a company that has just one goal: The basic improvement of our Constitutional Republic, into a totalitarian socialist state.
Former Corbyn Adviser Andrew Murray on Keir Starmer and the Brexit Fall Out.
Andrew Murray, Former Corbyn Adviser, Anti-Imperialist.
Le Monde Diplomatique, it’s no secret – as we used to say- is no friend of the European Union. Its Director, Serge Halimi, welcomed Brexit, but has wistfully remarked that it happened too late. In approximate translation he wrote in the March English language edition of the monthly, Brexit hasn’t freed EU of US
The UK’s decision to leave the EU has come too late. Brexit could have been good news for the EU, given that the UK is the state that has incarnated free trade since the 18th century industrial revolution, also alignment with the US since Winston Churchill’s ‘special relationship’, financialisation since the City of London began dominating the economy and politics, and flint-hearted neoliberalism since Margaret Thatcher’s reign. Britain’s departure could, in particular, have served as a reminder that the EU is not a prison: just as new states may join, existing members should be able to leave. On this score at least, the UK’s politicians have, after much delay, respected the will of its people, and that lesson in democracy has value right now.
It has not been too late for the soveriegntist inclined journal to publish – in its French edition – articles from supporters of the red-brown Full Brexit (with no indication of the nature of this alliance of the Lexit left, Communist Party of Britain, Faith Family and Flag, ‘Blue Labour’, former Trotskyists of the Revolutionary Communist Party, now stalwarts of the Brexit Party – members, and elected MEPs) and assorted odd balls). Pro-Borders New Left Review star, social conservative, and Full Brexit backer Wolfgang Streeck, is another light in this little galaxy of national sovereigntists.
Thus Chris Bickerton, author at the red-brown Spiked, which is now engaged in a war on the Black Lives Matter movement, has passed from their site to Le Monde Diplomatique. This pundit on Labour’s defeat, (Pourquoi le Labour a perdu. Chris Bickerton. February 2020.) As can be expected the article blamed metropolitan youth and elites’ dominance of Labour for refusing to accept withdrawal from the EU, supporting internationalism at the expense of the ‘real’ people in the Labour heartlands. Continuing the promotion of Brexit contained a lengthy justification for voting Tory, by an alleged Labour supporter and …a backer of the Full Brexit, a gleeman called Chris McGlade, (« Je suis travailliste, j’ai voté conservateur »).
Such is the august publication which has welcomed Andrew Murray, Former Communist Party of Britain stalwart, leading figure in the, Stop the War Coalition (StWC) , Solidarity with the Anti-fascist resistance in Ukraine, UNITE Staff chief, and ‘adviser’ to Jeremy Corbyn on, amongst many things, Brexit.
The piece – alas not widely circulated in the British media – is titled:
There is an English version, but I do not have a sub to this, so the French will have to suffice.
Murray starts well (this bit is available without the sub…)
Starmer urged Labour to move beyond factionalism, probably optimistic given that the party has always hosted a range of competing tendencies, even in the years of Tony Blair’s ultra-centralising neoliberalism; the best Starmer can realistically hope for is to lower the fevered temperature of the ultra-polarised Corbyn years. However, he did not propose to move away from the main policies the outgoing leader had championed — public ownership of railways and utilities, major boosts to spending on public services to be partly funded by increasing taxes on the rich and big business,
He generously concedes that the Labour membership made a clear choice (translation…)
Mr. Corbyn has given way to Sir Keir Starmer, the former Labour spokesperson, who won 56 % of the vote among party activists, supporters and unionists – a score barely less impressive than that obtained by Mr Corbyn in 2015 (59.5 % ).
Here comes the down side.
The ancient and, present, chair of the StWC laments, nevertheless, the loss of some of Corbyn’s keynote traits,”Le premier de ces traits est l’anti-impérialisme.” Noting that Corbyn would have a job getting through his ideas, indeed a “scenario in which a parliamentary majority would support nuclear disarmament, much less a withdrawal from NATO.” There is a reference to the Middle East and the problems faced by any attempt to break the ” alliance with Washington or a reversal of British policy in the Middle East”. Whether this refers to the government’s and Corbyn’s refusal to back opponents of Syria’s President Assad, to concentrate on justice for the victims of Daesh genocide, or to his more vocal backing for the Palestinians, is not clear. What is, is that Corbyn ran up against the “Atlanticist” alliances that dominate British politics – including President Trump’s active support for Brexit.
The anti-imperialist writer continues. Starmer has no record of backing social movements – movements Murray locates in mass demonstrations, such as the ones held by the StWC and anti-austerity protests, heavily backed by his own union, UNITE.
The crunch moment came when the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the Labour membership, ignored the advice of Murray to accept Brexit (a cause he, too modest to mention, embraced fervently).
The “notables of the party did not cease thereafter wanting to reverse the verdict of the referendum, by demanding a second ballot rather than the negotiation of a soft Brexit”. This opened up a division between,
….parliamentarians and most members on the one hand and the majority of working class voters. somewhere else. The difficulties of the left in imagining a world outside the European Union ended up sounding the death knell for Mr. Corbyn’s project.
If only we had the will and the imagination to dream of a real People’s Brexit!
If only Labour had ignored the mass protests against Brexit – just as Tony Blair had the StWC demonstrations against the Iraq War .
Instead the party listened to its ranks, in which “the elites of North London” were over-represented.
For Murray Brexit was, and continues to be, not a conflict between internationalists and sovereigntists,. It’s between these ‘elites’ and the “majority of working class voters”.
The present piece eschews the colourful description of pro-EU internationalists, infected by “Brexit derangement syndrome” , the malady of “human rights” and “rancid identity politics”, see Andrew Murray. The Fall and Rise of the British Left. Verso, 2019.).
But even so…
Casting aside his own claim to be neutral in this Brexit ‘culture war’ Murray declares,
The fracture within Labour, between the proponents of liberalism and the partisans of democracy, got the better of Corbynism.
So it is said. Liberalism is against democracy – a sentiment that without a doubt warmed the hearts of the editors of Le Monde Diplomatique.
Commenting on the Coronavirus crisis, with justness, that, “The United Kingdom is one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic, “
In conclusion Murray states,
In this sense, the crisis of today merges with that of yesterday. No matter how much Mr. Johnson claims he will overcome it, the promises of right-wing populism are likely to prove no less hollow than those of neoliberal centrism.
The contribution of Murray’s allies in the Full Brexit to the triumph of right-wing populism – their support for the illusion of a “people’s Brexit’ – is left unmentioned.
Lundi Matin, Heirs of the Situationist International, on the US Protests.
Home of ‘Insurrection”.
Lundi Matin, the “le foyer insurrectionnel du web” has, as was predictable, has published material celebrating the revolt in the USA.
NOUS AVONS CONSTRUIT CE PAYS ET NOUS ALLONS LE DÉTRUIRE PAR LE FEU, S’IL LE FAUT !
Let us set the mood.
With a background in situationism, and council communism, not to mention a claim to the traditions of Socialisme ou Barbarie (2020: Retour sur le débat et la scission de Socialisme ou Barbarie en 1963,) and very very obviously the “comité invsible“, the review Lundi Matin is keen to stress the difference between long-term organised political activists (‘integrated’ into the ‘system’) and youth in revolt, ” militants minoritaires mais “responsables” à la masse jeune et énergique qui impulse la révolte.” They stress the latter’s self-organisation. For all the novelty of latter theorising these themes continue (2020. MANIFESTE DES NON-TRAVAILLEUR.ES.S DE L’ART) They pit absolute opposition to existing affairs against everything else. In these events, reform, a more equal society, has run up against the walls and fortifications of historical, entrenched, racism. (1)
The weekly has had a print version of some of its issues, published bi-annually, by La Découverte, indicating its wider impact, or ambitions, within the French radical left.
In words that have been taken from the pages of Internationale situationniste, (1957 – 1972) they talk of a “une forme immorale de joie” in the act of revolt,, but do not predict any outcome. That is, the offer no programme, no political strategy, no way of securing mundane change in US society, no idea of how to get rid of the gibbering President Trump.
In an interesting section Lundi Matin cites Robert Hurley, a respected American translator of Foucault, Deleuze, Bataille (hard to summarise, see link) Clastres (radical anthropologist) and Tiqqun, the journal forerunner of the Invisible Committee.
This is what philosophers call an aporia, that is to say an insoluble problem in a given framework. One of these aporias is that the “white and western” framework in which we operate has been built around a vacuum created by the exclusion of entire parts of humanity. In this specific case, it is black. So when black people “go into action”, it is this very void that is revealed. I believe that is why the situation is considered to be “revolutionary”. What is incredible in this sequence is that it is not the only void, not the only nothingness that emerges, insofar as we manage to conceive different types of void.
The current situation certainly looks a lot like the previous uprisings and waves of riots. We obviously think of the reactions that followed the beating of Rodney King. What seems to me different today, however, is that there is no longer any liberal consensus linked to the idea of social progress associated with it. As I said, the participants operate in the middle of a sort of void, no one believes that repairing it is possible. This as such produces massive anger. We see hundreds of potential killers amongst the police attacking us on the streets and so even if “justice” were obtained for George Floyd, it would only represent a brief respite that would last only a day or so a week at most. The intensity of the situation probably also owes a lot to the management of covid19 and the pathetic prospect of the next elections.
Hurley’s translation:
More in this vein:
MINNEAPOLIS : RÉCIT DE LA PRISE DU COMMISSARIAT (Police Station).
Lundi Matin decorates their articles with tweets.
Such as these: from this group (cited above) who declare, “Violence is first of all the conditions imposed on us, the police defense of them and, unfortunately more rarely, that which we throw back in their faces.”
Our Newhounds found this other tweet from the Acid Communist League:
On setting fire to a Trade Union building in Washington:
Lundi Matin do mention the antifas, but not much.
They note that they have been singled out (that is, scapegoated) “Là-aussi les “antifas” avaient été pointés du doigt”
After these heady words, that is phrase-mongering, it is with relief that we turn to the good sense of Spencer Sunshine’s latest:
Also worth following:
*******
(1) For Reference. The Situationist International on the Watts Riots of 1965
The Decline and Fall of the
Spectacle-Commodity Economy
The Los Angeles rebellion was a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards. Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, a sector of the proletariat unable to believe in any significant chance of integration or promotion, the Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally. They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything. Through theft and gift they rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle: “To each according to their false needs” — needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects. But once the vaunted abundance is taken at face value and directly seized, instead of being eternally pursued in the rat-race of alienated labor and increasing unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the potlatch of destruction. People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. The flames of Watts consummated the system of consumption. The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.
Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle — a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, the blacks are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities.
The Watts youth, having no future in market terms, grasped another quality of the present, and that quality was so incontestable and irresistible that it drew in the whole population — women, children, and even sociologists who happened to be on the scene. Bobbi Hollon, a young black sociologist of the neighborhood, had this to say to the Herald Tribune in October: “Before, people were ashamed to say they came from Watts. They’d mumble it. Now they say it with pride. Boys who used to go around with their shirts open to the waist, and who’d have cut you to pieces in half a second, showed up here every morning at seven o’clock to organize the distribution of food. Of course, it’s no use pretending that food wasn’t looted. . . . All that Christian blah has been used too long against blacks. These people could loot for ten years and they wouldn’t get back half the money those stores have stolen from them over all these years. . . . Me, I’m only a little black girl.” Bobbi Hollon, who has sworn never to wash off the blood that splashed on her sandals during the rioting, adds: “Now the whole world is watching Watts.”
Conclusion of The Coming Insurrection. L’insurrection qui vient. Comité invisible. 2007.
Power is no longer concentrated in one point in the world; it is the world itself, its flows and its avenues, its people and its norms, its codes and its technologies. Power is the organization of the metropolis itself. It is the impeccable totality of the world of the commodity at each of its points. Anyone who defeats it locally sends a planetary shock wave through its networks. The riots that began in Clichy-sous-Bois filled more than one American household with joy, while the insurgents of Oaxaca found accomplices right in the heart of Paris. For France, the loss of centralized power signifies the end of Paris as the center of revolutionary activity. Every new movement since the strikes of 1995 has confirmed this. It’s no longer in Paris that the most daring and consistent actions are carried out. To put it bluntly, Paris now stands out only as a target for raids, as a pure terrain to be pillaged and ravaged. Brief and brutal incursions from the outside strike at the metropolitan flows at their point of maximum density. Rage streaks across this desert of fake abundance, then vanishes. A day will come when this capital and its horrible concretion of power will lie in majestic ruins, but it will be at the end of a process that will be far more advanced everywhere else.
From To Our Friends. À nos amis. 2014.
The uprising lasts a few days or a few months, and brings about the fall of the regime or the exposing of every illusion of social peace. It is itself anonymous: no leader, no organization, no demands, no program. The slogans, when there are any, seem to reach no farther than the negation of the existing order, and they are abrupt: “Clear out!,” “The people want the system to fall!,” “We don’t care about your shit.” “Tayyip, winter is coming.” On TV, on the airwaves, the authorities pound out their same old rhetoric: “they’re gangs of çapulcu [looters], smashers, terrorists out of nowhere, most likely in the pay of foreign interests.” Those who’ve risen up have no one to put on the throne as a replacement, perhaps just a question mark instead. It’s not the bottom dogs, or the working class, or the petty bourgeoisie, or the multitudes who are rebelling. They don’t form anything homogenous enough to have a representative. There’s no new revolutionary subject whose emergence had eluded observers. So if it’s said that the “people” are in the streets it’s not a people that existed previously, but rather the people that previously were lacking. It’s not the people that produce an uprising, it’s the uprising that produces its people, by re-engendering the shared experience and understanding, the human fabric and the real-life language that had disappeared. Revolutions of the past promised a new life. Contemporary insurrections deliver the keys to it. The shifts made by the Cairo ultras were not those of groups who were revolutionary before the “revolution.” Before, they were only gangs capable of organizing against the police. It’s from having played such an important role during the “revolution” that they were forced by the situation to raise questions usually reserved for “revolutionaries.” There is where the event resides: not in the media phenomenon fabricated to exploit the rebellion through external celebration of it, but in the encounters actually produced within it. This is something much less spectacular than “the movement” or “the revolution,” but more decisive. No one can say what an encounter is capable of generating.
This is how insurrections continue, in a molecular fashion, imperceptibly, in the life of neighborhoods, collectives, squats, “social centers,” and singular beings, in Brazil as in Spain, in Chile as in Greece. Not because they implement a political program but because they trigger revolutionary becomings. Because what was lived through shines with such a glow that those who had the experience have to be faithful to it, not separating off but constructing what was missing from their lives before. If the Spanish movement of plaza occupations, once it had disappeared from the media radar screen, had not been continued in the neighborhoods of Barcelona and elsewhere via a process of communalization and self-organization, the attempt to destroy the Can Vies squat in June of 2014 would not have been placed in check by three days of rioting by the whole Sants district and we would not have seen a whole city participating in rebuilding the site that was attacked. There would have been just a few squatters protesting against another eviction in a climate of indifference. The construction in question here is not that of a “new society” at its embryonic stage, nor an organization that will eventually overthrow an authority so as to constitute a new one, it’s the collective power which, with its consistency and its intelligence, consigns the ruling power to powerlessness, foiling each of its maneuvers in turn.
Italy’s ‘Orange Vests’, “Gilet arancioni”, Protest Against Coronavirus Lockdown Measures.
Italy, ‘Orange Vests’, “Pandemic Never Existed’.
Cast your mind back.
October 2018.
The Gilets Jaunes were a mass protest movement in France, initially demanding cheap petrol, relaxation of speed limits and low taxes they expanded into a large direct action in which serious acts of violence, by protesters, and police, took place. They developed into a larger movement in which some far-right and radical left voices were heard This is, in this Blog’s view, a fair instant summary of their ideology:
An opinion poll published by the Elabe Institute showed that in the presidential election in May 2017, 36% of the participants voted for far-right candidate Marine Le Pen and 28% for far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon in the 2017 presidential elections. Five Le Monde journalists studied the yellow vests’ forty-two directives[39] and concluded that two thirds were “very close” to the position of the “radical left” (Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Philippe Poutou and Nathalie Arthaud), nearly a half were “compatible with” the position of the “far right” (Nicolas Dupont-Aignan and Marine Le Pen), and that all were “very far removed” from economically “liberal” policies (Emmanuel Macron and François Fillon)
Some people on the British left admired the revolt against Macron. Some tried to imitate the activism of the ‘Yellow Vests. An attempt to do so, by the groupuscule that runs the People’s Assembly, Counterfire, collapsed faced with the presence of far-right Pro-Brexit supporters clad in identical colour vests (perhaps not such a coincidence….).
We have not heard a lot about the Gilets Jaunes in recent months, although they launched a ;protest as lockdown began in France.
A couple of days ago the Gilets Jaunes most fervent UK admirers, the Red-Brown Front Spiked, carried this bleat, by Fraser Myers, .
Where was the outrage when police were maiming protesters in France?
While the rioting in the US is tacitly condoned and understood as a righteous expression of anger, the yellow vests’ populist uprising was looked at with horror. The sad truth is that even when the gilets jaunes were being maimed and brutalised, they did not elicit much sympathy among the political class on these shores.
Spiked, which has recently expressed support for the far-right Vox party’s demonstrations against Cornavirus restrictions in Spain (Spain is in revolt against the lockdown. This dissent is welcome., now has an opportunity to shine anew.
CNBC reports,
Remember the “yellow vests” movement that brought France to a standstill in late 2018? Now, Italy is seeing its own grassroots, anti-government, populist movement: The “Orange Vests” or “Gilet Arancioni.”
Hundreds of protesters wearing orange vests or jackets gathered in Rome on Tuesday, chanting “Liberta’!” (“Liberty!”) to protest the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis and calling for it to resign.
Described as a “rightist-libertarian” and “turbo populist” movement by the Italian media and modeling themselves on the yellow-vested anti-government movement seen in France, the leader of the “Orange Vests,” former Carabinieri General Antonio Pappalardo, has said that the coronavirus pandemic did not exist.
The story refers to its source in La Repubblica – Il 2 Giugno dei Gilet arancioni, folla in piazza del Popolo e insulti a Mattarella – and continues,
The pandemic does not exist, it’s total bulls–t,” Pappalardo told a rally in Bari on Sunday, Italian news agency ANSA reported. “The coronavirus is not lethal, it only kills the already sick over 80s. Enough with the lies and falsehoods, you have terrified the Italian people,” he reportedly said.
Similar demonstrations were seen in Milan and small rallies in other regional capitals at the weekend. Speaking to a crowd of orange-vested supporters on Tuesday in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo — many of whom were defying a government order to maintain social distancing and to wear masks in busy public spaces — Pappalardo made similar claims, alluding to a high-profile doctor who said at the weekend that the virus “no longer exists clinically.”
“Now virologists also say that this coronavirus is nonsense,” Pappalardo told the crowd as he argued against the use of masks. In addition, Pappalardo called for Italy to return to using its former currency, the lira.
The comparison with the Gilets Jaunes is widespread.
The left wing daily Il Manifesto leads with the straightforward line that they are conspirationalists, conspis.
. Hundreds of people, many without masks, against the “government of terror” that “invented the Coronavirus”
The crowd was varied, although tattoos and shaved heads predominate. Manyare animal rights activists (especially women), and anti-vaxination campaigners. (shouts of) “Freedom and sovereignty”, “God honour and country”,
Italian Wired has denounced this demonstration of neo-fascist and ‘Orange vests” as an affront to the victims of the pandemic,
In the homeland of the Gilets Jaunes the story has reached News 24.
They describe them as “right-wing libertarian” and “turbo-populist” (an endearing expression, and not a dynamic one, it’s as if they are some kind of wonky petrol driven machine, spraying out noxious gases):
Décrit comme un mouvement “de droite-libertaire” et “turbo-populiste” par les médias italiens et s’inspirant du mouvement anti-gouvernement à gilets jaunes vu en France, le chef des “gilets orange”, l’ancien général des Carabiniers Antonio Pappalardo, a a déclaré que la pandémie de coronavirus n’existait pas.
One thing is clear, they are very keen on sovereignty.
RT, as ever reliable, is enthusiastic:
These protests have a lot in common with the German and other fringe movements against restrictions imposed to contain the pandemic.
And of course, the ideology of Spiked…