<a href="http://web.archive.org./web/20200907133526/https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/">Tendance Coatesy

Sticking to failed politics

“We call on SoC to withdraw their official complaints to the Party and to issue appropriate apologies to Carol, Brian and Jackie.”

Jewish Voice for Labour is the latest group to have got entangled in the row over Socialists of Colour.

This is their statement:

We are astonished at recent actions of Socialists of Colour that appear to be threatening to split the anti-racist movement, and in so doing empower the right.

Socialists of Colour (SoC) was formed earlier this year with admirable aims including: “To support strong socialist and anti-racist activists running in election” and “To provide a space for political education and raising consciousness for People of Colour”. It has disgracefully failed in both aims at its first hurdle.

SoC posed a number of questions to all candidates standing for the CLP section in the NEC election. Wisely all but one of the 6 candidates in the Grassroots Voice team did not respond. Such tests of political virtue are all too often converted into attack weapons. And this is exactly what has happened. Two of the left candidates who answered their questions have had their replies published, with a full screen headline bearing the notice CONTENT WARNING, followed in each case by a statement that: “Some responses from this candidate we believe include openly antisemitic and/or racist views”. Socialists of Colour have followed this up by complaining to the Labour Party about their responses – which in the current climate is almost bound to lead to their suspension and elimination as candidates.

Two left candidates received this treatment. They are Brian Precious and Carol Taylor-Spedding. Their answers can be found here and here. When asked to name“one Black socialist man who inspires you” Taylor-Spedding took the feminist route and preferred to nominate several Black Labour women, including Diane Abbot and Dawn Butler as well as Jackie Walker, a black Jewish woman who had been “expelled unjustly from the party”.

The allegations against Precious are even less clear. Possibly saying that only “0.1% of members charged with antisemitism, let alone disciplined or expelled. Israel is institutionally antisemitic via its ethnic cleansing of the (semitic) Palestinians since 1948.” That, and maybe calling on all Labour members to support Jewish Voice For Labour, is, presumably, what condemned him.

When asked to explain their allegations of antisemitism, SoC stated: “We believe that defending or apologising for Walker’s behaviour is an attempt to discredit valid antisemitism claims and is therefore, in our belief, racist and/or antisemitic.”

With this statement, they have bought into the myth that accusation equals guilt and have joined forces with the right in the witch hunt. Lamentably, these attacks on genuine, anti-racist socialists will undermine our essential united struggle. Fighting racism in all its forms is at the core of JVL’s commitments, and this – from a group we thought were allies – is disappointing in the extreme. Jackie Walker was not expelled for antisemitism and we stand by our position that the allegations were without substance.

We call on SoC to withdraw their official complaints to the Party and to issue appropriate apologies to Carol, Brian and Jackie.

There is a petition circulating which supports one of those suspended.

This workshop at The World Transformed, virtual or not, is expected to be a hot one!

Image may contain: text that says "23:55 39% Decades of Labour and anti- racism: A history of struggle and hope SEMINAR SUN 20.09.20 5PM-7PM GMT+1/ BRITISH SUMMER TIME"

Antisemitism Reading Group, run by Eran Cohen and Keziah Berelson, and fully booked. Socialists of Colour are involved in this workshop.

For those interested in further background on the Labour Left Alliance (the group that kicked off the protests against Socialists of Colour) see;

Cub reporter of the Labour Party Marxist, “Clive Dean” gives the low down.

August 22-23 saw the second conference of the Labour Left Alliance. Like most things these days, it took place online, but over 120 delegates and observers were officially present (as things progressed some fell away).

Arguably, the LLA had arrived a year too late. It was conceived at the end of the 2018 Labour Party conference, when activists realised that a leftwing coordinating organisation was urgently needed, fulfilling the role abdicated by Momentum. Labour’s annual conference had just rejected open selection of MPs, but had revised the trigger ballot mechanism instead, as a route for Constituency Labour Parties to remove wayward Westminster careerists. Success for the Corbyn project required a major clear-out of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and that needed a clued-up campaign. But then nothing happened for nearly a year.

Following protracted negotiations between the Labour Representation Committee, Red Labour and Labour Against the Witchhunt, the appeal for a Labour Left Alliance was finally launched in July 2019. Very quickly the 1,000-signature target was achieved, and local groups began to affiliate.

But it was not plain sailing. The different approaches of the LRC and LAW became apparent as the organisation became active, and at the end of October 2019 the LRC decided to withdraw its backing, stating that “serious disagreements exist around both the political orientation of the LLA and the character of what should be built in the short term”. For the LRC, the LLA was moving too fast and was doing too much. Incidentally, recently the LRC and Red Labour have set up the rather more sedate ‘Don’t Leave, Organise’, which has not organised much at all. Perhaps that is the model they had in mind for the LLA.

More on the site of the Weekly Worker, organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee).

Other rows continue to develop…

Disgusting behaviour. From supporters of Jackie Walker. This level of harassment over a ‘content warning’. The behaviour of some long term POC labour members towards Socialist of Colour is a reason why many POC socialists don’t want to join their circus. https://t.co/dV4O93Ffwy

— Chardine Taylor Stone (@ChardineTaylor) September 3, 2020

Written by Andrew Coates

September 5, 2020 at 7:38 am

Posted in Anti-Fascism, British Govern, European Left, Human Rights, Israel, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left, Racism

Tagged with Anti-Semitism, Jewish Voice for Labour, Labour NEC, Labour Party, Socialists of Colour, Weekly Worker

Extinction Rebellion, Citizens’ Conventions and Socialism.

French Citizens’ Assembly delivers a roadmap for stabilizing the climate

Extinction Rebellion demand climate emergency bill [Video]

Emergency Politics.

Climate change is back on the political and activist agenda. Hundreds have been arrested during Extinction Rebellion protests in Britain this week.

The noble art of window smashing— protesting for Extinction Rebellion https://t.co/F5blM9UKs2 @XRebellionUK ✊

— Clare Farrell (@ClareTotty) September 4, 2020

But what is the direction of the movement? What are its politics?

Some people think that the issue is so important that it over-rides existing political divisions, that we can no longer have confidence in an ideology.

One of them is socialism:

Just to be clear we are not a socialist movement. We do not trust any single ideology, we trust the people, chosen by sortition (like jury service) to find the best future for us all through a #CitizensAssembly A banner saying ‘socialism or extinction’ does not represent us 🙏🏽🙏

— Extinction Rebellion UK 🌍 (@XRebellionUK) September 1, 2020

The Morning Star responded,

The most generous interpretation of this tweet is that XR wants to build the broadest possible coalition in favour of radical action on the climate, and does not want non-socialists put off.

If so, it was self-defeating: activists from many organisations attend large demonstrations and nobody was likely to assume that the communist banner, emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, spoke for everyone there.

By aggressively rejecting its message, XR achieves the opposite, signalling that not everyone is welcome on its demos. This may be deliberate: the organisation has a number of wealthy backers and it may fear that big money would be withdrawn if it becomes seen as a socialist movement.

The editorialist, a Cde Davidus Spartacus, continued,

But the problem with the assumption that such an assembly could address the climate crisis is the same as that of XR’s whole tweet: it wilfully ignores the central role of the capitalist system in driving climate chaos.

Socialism or extinction? XR’s tweet and a capitalist crisis

Why did XR Tweet this statement?

What is the current Campaigning of XR aimed at?

There are some past parallels and influences that have contributed.

A parallel can be drawn with the 1980s campaigns against Cruise Missiles. There was a widespread feeling that nuclear war remained an imminent threat. During the 1980s E.P.Thompson coined the term Exterminism.This highlighted the drift towards conflict propelled by a military structure and politics, that in the process of endless development, ” the USA and the USSR do not have military-industrial complexes: they are such complexes.” The movement against nuclear war is not a programme of resistance for the working class against its rulers; it is ‘the defence of civilization, the defence of the ecosphere — the human ecological imperative.’

exterminism itself is not a ‘class issue’: it is a human issue. Certain kinds of ‘revolutionary’ posturing and rhetoric, which inflame exterminist ideology and which carry divisions into the necessary alliances of human resistance, are luxuries which we can do without.

Edward Thompson.

NOTES ON EXTERMINISM, THE LAST STAGE OF CIVILIZATION

New Left Review No 121.1980.

Today we hear of a “dual-edged crisis facing humanity”, the climate crisis. The science is definitely on the side of those protesting on the issue of climate change.

But what of their strategy and tactics?

Anybody watching the Extinction rebellion in action can see some echoes of this CND tradition, right back to the direct action of the Committee of 100 of the 1960s.

One can see Extinction Rebellion as related to such movements, particularly as “Extinction Rebellion is a loosely networked, decentralised, grassroots movement which, like the Committee of 100, is prepared to break laws and risk arrest. Anyone who takes action in pursuit of “XR’s three goals and adheres to its ten principles, which includes non-violence, can claim to do it in the name of XR.” “anyone who plans an action that drives forward XR’s three goals and adheres to its ten principles, which includes non-violence, can claim to do it in the name of XR.”

But how could these actions move beyond protest to tackling the causes of global warming?

Previous radical green and other direct action movements, such as Zad occupations in French ecological he Nuit Debout camps, like that La Place de la République, the alter-globalisation Occupy! camps have been marked by the idea of “direct democracy” and “consensus decision-making”. This means lengthy, really lengthy, debates, that majorities can be overruled by minorities, and, as unkind people have suggested, there is a right of veto by the loudest and thickest).

Few would suggest that is going to work to gain national support and undertake the kind of structural change Extinction Rebellion aims at.

So they have now adopted the idea of a Citizens’ Assembly on the Climate Emergency,. Those taking part are chosen at random. This also has supporters on the radical left, who like to remind people of the use of selection by lots to call up people in Ancient Greece for popular Assemblies that decided on legal cases, and took political decisions. “The Athenians believed sortition to be democratic but not elections and used complex procedures with purpose-built allotment machines.”

Given modern sensibilities the “random” aspect could be modified by ethnic, gender and age categories to ensure that a Citizens’ Assembly is a full tranche of the different groups in the population. How you would do that is anybody’s guess.

Peter McColl argues in Extinction Rebellion and the left (Left Foot Forward) that,

A Citizens’ Assembly is a participatory approach that takes a demographically balanced group of citizens and allows them to create proposals for a way forward. In Ireland this helped to deliver the long-running demand for equal marriage.

It’s not hard to work out why this approach appeals to some in XR. There has been a sustained and very effective attack on ideology over the past 40 years. This has left many to believe that socialism is unhelpful, a barrier to progress, and something that will get in the way of the change we really need. I believe none of that. But it is what we are told every day of our lives, and it’s unsurprising that this is what people believe.

For some, the response has been to attack the concept of the Citizens’ Assembly. This is also a problem. Throughout the twentieth century, the socialist movement actively fought the capitalist class, using mass mobilisation to win on many occasions. And it is attractive to believe that this is still something we can achieve. Indeed it is important to make the case that progressive change – from winning the vote for women to ending apartheid – is possible.

Ireland and Scotland may offer examples of how such conventions work. The latter is however dominated by people who already agree on nationalist break-away and will be able to devote their time to discussing, “the establishment of a legal framework providing the option for a referendum through the ‘Referendums (Scotland) Bill’ and cross-party talks to identify areas of agreement on constitutional change.”

But there is another example of a Citizen’s Assembly on issues closer to Extinction Rebellion’s heart,

Earlier this year.

On Sunday 22nd June, a unique French body, the “Citizen’s Convention for the Climate” delivered a milestone proposal to the Ministry for Ecological Transition, including far-reaching measures for cutting national carbon emissions from buildings, transport, agriculture and other sectors so as to meet a goal of reducing carbon emissions by 40% by 2030. The citizens’ group, commissioned by Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, was composed of 150 people randomly selected by mobile phone numbers. The group spent nine months exploring the climate challenge, interviewing dozens of experts and ultimately approving a series of 150 proposals to accelerate climate action.

The US populist magazine Jacobin has an opinion on XR, and offer a useful article that also discusses the French case.

Extinction” Is Exactly the Choice We Face MARK MONTEGRIFFO

Extinction Rebellion leaders have dismissed the idea that protests for climate action have anything to do with “socialist ideology.” But refusing to take political positions — and to relate green politics to the interests of the social majority — will reduce environmentalism to an ineffective moral protest.

What of Macron’s Assembly?

President Emmanuel Macron has accepted just 3 out of the 149 recommendations from a citizens’ commission following the gilets jaunes protests. Although such deliberative democracy has been praised in Ireland, for example — paving the way for its reproductive rights referendum — it contains an assumption that solutions could be found inside the context of our current neoliberal capitalism, so long as the discussion was participatory enough.

This is an odd way of reading the following, “qu’il retient les 149 propositions des citoyens à l’exception de trois“,that is Macron kept all but 3 of the proposals ! (Ce que Macron écarte ou retient de la Convention citoyenne pour le climat). Perhaps Jacobin writers will one day learn that writing the exact opposite of what happened is not a good idea.

The problem is that in the actual legislative process many have got lost…

The source of the problem is that it is being suggested by XR activists, that as long as we “participate” good sense will emerge. But apparently not by voting – one can only assume that in elections people get nobbled….

for this reason, XR proposes “sortition” — selecting citizens by lot, as an alternative to voting.

As Montegriffo points out, this idea is more than a floated demand. It refers to an actual Bill in the House of Commons, proposed by Green MP Caroline Lucas.

There is a campaign to support the “Climate Emergency Bill”, Climate emergency bill offers real hope.

From these cooler years of the early 21st century, we look to a bleak future. A future where the Earth continues to heat, with more extreme weather, with parts of our planet made uninhabitable, leaving millions homeless and destitute. A future where we face the threat of mass extinctions, for which we are responsible.

We will need all of our ingenuity and imagination to prevent this future from unfolding. As we see in the response to Covid-19, people can come together, and our governments can – when they need to – do the “impossible”. The climate and ecological emergency bill was introduced in parliament today by the Green party MP Caroline Lucas with our support. Drafted by scientists, academics and lawyers, it will – if backed all the way by MPs – strengthen the Climate Change Act and ensure that Britain has a comprehensive strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and restore our natural world.

This is the relevant section of the legislation,

Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill

What’s new in the Bill? An emergency citizens’ assembly(CA) will be convened to help both the UK Government and Parliament create and review the strategy to achieve the bill’s objectives. The CA will empower MPs to take bold decisions and allow people to have a real say in the pathway of, not only a fair and just transition to a zero carbon society but of one leading to a thriving natural world.

Why? Fundamental societal changes are required if we are to tackle the climate and ecological crisis, head on. In order to prevent a ‘yellow vest’ effect, it is essential that citizens are involved in decisions that will significantly change their lifestyles. Citizens’ Assemblies are a tried and tested route to engaging citizens in the democratic process. CAs empower politicians to arrive at recommendations that will address very difficult decisions -decisions that will have a profound impact on society. Whilst six-cross-party select committees did commission the Climate Assembly, UK, (CA,UK), the CA,UK’s remit fell well short of the scale and scope required to address the climate and ecological emergency: recommendations were advisory only, members were tasked with identifying a pathway to the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target with no mandate to question the target itself, and the assembly was not called upon to consider adaptation or biodiversity.

The CEE bill’s integration of an emergency CA means that the assembly members will be tasked to fully contribute to the recommendations for and the review of, the bill’s ‘strategy’ to meet the ‘objectives’, alongside both government and parliament. In this, the most exceptional of times- this dual-edged crisis facing humanity-the engagement of CA in collaborating in emergency policy-making will allow the government and parliament the public mandate to implement the necessary fundamental societal changes.

The potential futility of such an Assembly faced with an even less sympathetic executive than French President Macron is obvious. Also obvious is why on earth people selected by lot (fancy name “sortation”) should be entitled to decide on answers to the “crisis facing humanity” with no democratic control on their actions. Cynics may suggest that this sounds like a more elaborate version of “consultations” on legislation, a possibly useful source of ideas, but nothing path-breaking.

Above all, the idea that all is needed “in order to prevent a ‘yellow vest’ effect” suggests that the XR stunts are designed to threaten people with disruption unless they agree to this scheme.

We shall leave readers to enjoy Montegriffo’s concluding wordy, polemic,

“what the movement is missing — or not stating clearly enough — is that the climate crisis is the result of neo-liberal capitalism, and a global system of extraction, dispossession and oppression.” Without this, Extinction Rebellion is more of an organization seeking to make a splash in the media, than a “movement” as such.

And,

This also leaves XR open to other, dangerous influences. I was myself one of the admins behind Extinction Rebellion’s social media presence, and saw instances where activists, or individuals posing as activists, have disseminated eco-fascist propaganda. On occasion, we would receive messages asking whether this was official Extinction Rebellion material. Having to clarify that your group is not in favor of population control laws is probably an indication that the politics of the movement is not as clear as it could be.

The campaign continues:

The #HS2 crime against nature and humanity has always been about the ‘snouts in the trough’ at the same time. @gailbradbrook speaking now in parliament square. “It’s a nonsense and we all know it”. #WeWantToLive #NHSNotHS2 pic.twitter.com/7DPFKRAvaF

— Extinction Rebellion UK 🌍 (@XRebellionUK) September 4, 2020

here

Written by Andrew Coates

September 4, 2020 at 5:49 pm

Posted in Anarchism, Anti-Fascism, Europe, Greens, Human Rights

Tagged with Democracy, Ecology, Extinction Rebellion, Greens, Socialism, XR

Conspiracy Theories and QAnon: Ideologies for a Mass Society?

with 10 comments

Ideas for a Mass Society?

Conspiracy theories are a symptom of a failed status quo – the left must offer progressive alternatives, writes @paulmasonnews. https://t.co/b7bcDc6ShH

— New Statesman (@NewStatesman) September 2, 2020

Is conspiracy thinking gaining ground across the world? Sunday’s anti-Lockdown rally in London has gained a lot of attention. Some on FB who claim to be on the left give the protest credibility, arguing that there are real concerns about restrictions on people’s freedoms, that the event was not “really” right wing”that this pandemic will be used to remould the world, with tighter, top down, medically led authoritarian governments with intrusive surveillance and excessive monitoring.

In this week’s Workers’ Liberty there is a vivid picture of one of the theories that has gained popularity, QAnon.

What exactly do QAnon followers believe? The answer is complicated. By this point, QAnon has snowballed into an all-encompassing super-conspiracy. Believers frequently disagree with each other on details, but there’s room for you in the movement whether you believe that the Earth is hollow or that it is flat.

QAnon centres around a supposed military intelligence officer, “Q”, who is exposing a corrupt cabal in the US government by posting cryptic messages on anonymous imageboards. The first “Q drop” — referring to Q’s arcane messages — appeared on 4chan’s neo-nazi /pol/ board on 28 October 2017. The drops later migrated to 8chan, a site infamous for its popularity among mass shooters and paedophiles.

Other foundational beliefs are: There is a deep state run by Satan-worshipping paedophilic Democrats, who drink the blood of children to satisfy their adrenochrome addiction. (In real life, adrenochrome is the product of the oxidation of adrenaline, and has no addictive properties.)

Whipping it up for “The Storm” Levente Zékány

In Les Origines du populisme published at the end of last year the writers that the failures of the right and he left have left the way open for radical “anti-system” parties. They cite Hannah Arendt, that what we are witnessing is the “passage tumultueux” from a “société de classe” a une société de masse” faite d’individues abandonnés a eux-mêmes au milieu des désordres du monde”. A mass society in which individuals are left alone faced with the world’s tumult, is fertile ground for many forms of ‘anti-system’ ideas.

Mashalleling substantial research they argue that the old class aligned politics has been eroded to the point where in a “mass society” people are mobilised through their resentment, lack of trust in others, and cultural issues. If, in France, there is now a substantial working class vote for the far-right Rassemblement National, it is not a result of wage-earners casting their ballots for the the RN as workers but to show their “défiance générale a l’égard des institutions et du reste de la société.” They, unlike those inclined to favour radical left protests against the ‘system’ are not inclined to demand wealth redistribution, but search security. So that despite there being class divisions, however altered by the decline of industrialisation and production, people’s political consciousness, they argue, are polarised according to different “champs de force” (force fields), notably on immigration, and “valuers d’ordre cultural”.

The Communist vote in France for example, has declined from double figures to a couple of percentage points while the same social groups show a majority backing the RN. . This does not mean that former Parti Communist français voters have migrated to the racist right. It is their contemporary “sociological” make-up. The only legacy the researchers can trace is that the radical left Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France insoumise I support does show a political connection with areas which showed past Communist voting.(1)

Conspiracy theories could be said to represent this defiance at the degré zéro of confidence in other people and institutions. They are personifications of forces that appear to threaten security. There is some evidence, in France and elsewhere, that there is a cross-over with support for right-wing populism. Full-time proponents of conspiracy theories are on the far-right who draw on a tradition going back to 1930s fascism and beyond and would wish to see a general front of the “people” against the enemy, the cosmopolitan leftists and their puppet-masters, the globalists. Its most recent manifestation is in protests against rules trying to stem the spread of Covid 19 by means such as mask-wearing. (« L’adhésion aux différentes théories du complot est un trait caractéristique des “antimasque’’ »). These display every kind of reaction to destabilising outside forces, the means used to bring in the New World Order.

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism has been described as a “story of the deterioration of the state ….woven together with her story of the loss, across all classes, of common interests and a shared world.” (2) In the complex book that tied to uncover the patterns that led to Nazism and Stalinism, Arendt talked of the effects of imperialism – in Rosa Luxemburg’s sense of a drive for expansion and exploitation of ‘non-market’ societies – as creating a ‘mass society’. At the top there is a free-booting class of buccaneers fighting it out in the world market. The politics that resulted eroded civic duty, republican and democratic values,

“When, in the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen and ‘thought in continents’, these private practices and devices were gradually transformed into rules and principles for the conduct of public affairs.”(2)

In the same pile was the “mob” people without any stable place in society. There was tribal nationalism, insisting that “its own people is surrounded by a ‘world of enemies”. There was a “. break down of class system, rise of “one great unorganised, structure less mass of furious individuals…” “The chief characteristic of mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.”(3) , Arendt asserted that ““Totalitarian movements are mass organisations of atomised, isolated individuals.”(4) Conspiracy thinking was their mainstay. They manufactured an ideological a “fictitious world”of plotting enemies. These ideas were sustained by parties, undemocratically run (by the leader principle or Stalinist ‘democratic centralism’) , in effect, secret societies operating the plain light of day. Their audience lapped their propaganda up, unmasking the “true” cabal running the planet.

Can we say that the Web is a mass communication vehicle for such a “fictitious world”.

Paul Mason suggests that in some respects we can,

At a literal level, QAnon purports to explain what neither liberalism nor Marxism nor mainstream conservatism can: why the world doesn’t work; why nothing changes; why power elites persist. But at a sub-literate level it serves a function that Arendt identified in the ideologies of both Nazi Germany and the USSR: to promote irrationalism. Observers of QAnon networks have likened their activities to a collaborative roleplay game: you have to work out what the cryptic “Q-drops” mean, and to do so you have to consult other atomised and confused people. It’s fun, it creates structure and meaning, and then – when you take to the streets over, for example, a road closure proposal by the local council – you “find each other”.

…….

Arendt understood that the purpose of conspiracy theories was to make people knowingly complicit in irrationalism: to shut them off from facts, analysis and reason, and to create a closed world in which everything makes sense. In the “lying world” created by Nazi propaganda, she wrote, “through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.

It is these “uprooted” masses, people without confidence in others, without trust, without a stake in movements that they have confidence in, that can be swept up in conspiracy thinking. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, make it available, and a participative experience, at the touch of a keyboard. The world of those who individually ‘uncover the truth’ is in this respect, the opposite of the anti-democratic 1930s totalitarian party structures.

The QAnon conspiracy theory, however, is not the work of a single person: unlike the Nazis, we have a networked information society and the “wisdom of crowds”. The theory has a life of its own, and is being deepened and made more comprehensive with the addition of health and lifestyle lunacies, and the Covid-19 conspiracies.

How far the growth of these ideas can be explained in terms of “mass societies”, a society of alienated individuals held together by a culture industry that served the interests of capitalism remains open. Arendt’s theory is more precise than the Frankfurt school’s general picture of cultural “production”, although one might add to her picture a tendency to grasp at the individualist ‘irrationalism’ of a variety of fads, including belief in conspiracies. But her portrait was of the political conditions in which organised bodies of the far-right manufactured and sustained conspiracy thinking as a weapon of struggle, under very different conditions than post-war prosperity and today’s relative economic disjunctions and the processes of a deeper globalisation than the globalisation at play in the 19th century.

There are, at present, no mass totalitarian movements, with disciplined numbers of armed supporters, willing to fight their enemies. National Populism is not totalitarian but claims a monopoly of voice to command a nation’s Sovereign power. It appeals to those “standing outside society’s political representation” with a call to join together against an enemy, not to place them in concentration camps. Its class support may be wide but the class fractions whose driving it are a combination of those who benefit from national protectionism, and, most visible in the British case, the most reactionary elements of finance capital who profit from inter-state competition and markets hemmed in by the same nationalist imperatives without inter-state regulation.

National populism is based on national neoliberalism, private enterprise states, farmed off public services, and efforts to return to a battle for economic advantage on the world market. It has yet to find enduring roots, or structures. but what it has bears little direct resemblance to the totalitarian wave of the 1930s. Trump is a loud-mouth at the head of a 19th century caucus party that’s adapted to the information society. The French Rassemblement National, for example, has, to begin with, only just over 20,000 members and has so far served more as a warning, and a unifying call to back the Macron centre than a government-in-the-waiting. The recent Presidential victory in Poland of the Law and Justice Party has as in Hungary, consolidated an authoritarian, paternalistic state, but has not swept opponents into exile. The Islamist populism of Erdoğan has put opponents in gaol, and is prepared to act to restore Ottoman imperialism yet has not driven dissenting masses into camps.

Britain has only experienced a simulacrum. The Brexit Party were founded by businessmen, railed against foreigners and the EU, headed the British European Polls in 2019, and vanished, with the cash, into their pockets. Johnson dallies with national neo-liberalism and patriotism on behalf of a team of pick-pockets and chancers. And its international project is an effort to grab the coat-tails of Trump….

Zékány observes,

People are thoroughly dissatisfied with the political establishment. They feel powerless, and on some level they know that the ruling class — although they wouldn’t use the term — doesn’t care about them. The years pass, they keep voting, and things don’t seem to get any better. Inequality is growing, and has been growing for years.

The immediate thought is, what can we do about that? How can we build, as Mason proposes, ” a political and social alternative to the present” To begin with he says we need to explain “, what’s wrong with QAnon, and climate denial, and the “plandemic” myth, needs to be the subject of sermons, school curricula and, above all, the speeches of serious politicians.” How could we encourage a politics built on trust and projects that recognise the class structures that hold people back, exploit them and divide them in a common project to redistribute wealth and change things for the better?

The last group would not include those in the Labour Party and left fringes who spend most of their time attacking the new Labour Leader, Keir Starmer.

******

(1) Les Origines du populisme. Enquête sur un schisme politique et social (2019) . Yann Algan Elizabeth Beasley Daniel Cohen Martial Foucault

Le populisme est le produit de deux secousses telluriques. Premier séisme : la montée d’un immense ressentiment contre les partis et les institutions politiques. Face à l’échec de la droite et de la gauche à contenir les excès du capitalisme, la radicalité « anti-système » a brisé les compromis que l’un et l’autre camps étaient parvenus à édifier. Deuxième séisme : la fin de la société de classes, au profit d’une société d’individus pensant leur position sociale en termes subjectifs. Une nouvelle polarité en résulte, qui sépare les « confiants » des « méfiants » envers autrui. La droite populiste surgit au croisement d’une double méfiance – à l’égard des institutions politiques et à l’égard de la société. Elle prospère sur le désenchantement démocratique, tout en renouvelant le clivage gauche-droite. Fondé sur des données inédites, cet ouvrage se révèle essentiel pour comprendre le présent et l’avenir des sociétés démocratiques.

(2) Page 220. Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World. Second Edition, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. Yale University Press. 2004.

(3) Page 138.The Origins of Totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt. André Deutsch. 1986 (1951) See also. Hannah Arendt Politics, History and Citizenship, Phillip Hansen. Polity Press. 1993.

(4) Page 317,The Origins of Totalitarianism.

(4) Page 313,The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Labour Left Alliance in Ferocious Row with Socialists of Colour.

with 11 comments

Vice Chair of Labour Against the Witch-hunt Speaks out.

Yesterday this story ran on Labour List.

We asked these Q's to NEC candidates to get their views on anti-racism. Some answers included openly antisemitic and/or racist views. We have included content warnings on the profiles of these candidates and believe there is NO situation where it's justified to vote for them. pic.twitter.com/cKyk3PNvdv

— Socialists of Colour 🌹 (@SocOfColour) August 31, 2020

The Labour Party is understood to be investigating complaints of alleged racism submitted by Socialists of Colour activists against three national executive committee candidates, LabourList can reveal.

The anti-racism group, which organises within Labour and outside of it, sent a series of questions to each party member who has put themselves forward for the internal NEC elections currently taking place.

After the responses were provided to the activists and published in full on their website, Socialists of Colour complained to Labour about the statements of Brian Precious, Carol Taylor-Spedding and James Chespy.

A Socialists of Colour steering committee member told LabourList: “A number of responses to our questions we disagreed with but could be put down to political difference. However, there were some that entered into clear-cut racism and antisemitism, which Socialists of Colour do not in any way endorse.

“Responses that warranted content warnings for their antisemitic and racist content included the defence of Jackie Walker, who was expelled from the party for antisemitism, the denial of institutional antisemitism, perpetuating conspiracy theories and comments around certain communities being more predisposed to commit crime.

This is the crucial section,

“We are also deeply worried about the erasure of antisemitism especially in the face of the EHRC investigation into the party. Some of these issues have been picked up by the party, with Brian Precious’ original candidate statement being taken down due to antisemitism and then replaced.

“It is evident that party vetting processes when it comes to candidates are not thorough enough and do not have conclusions that effectively hold candidates, or people who should not be candidates due to their racism, to account.”

The responses labelled by SoC with a “content warning” included a defence of Jackie Walker. Local party rep candidate Taylor-Spedding said Walker was expelled from the party “unjustly” once her high-profile case concluded.

Exercising her right of reply, Taylor-Spedding told LabourList that the accusation of antisemitism “does not make any sense” because Walked was expelled for bringing the party into disrepute rather than for antisemitism itself.

Walker was expelled from Labour in March 2019 for “prejudicial and grossly detrimental” behaviour. She had suggested at a 2016 event that Holocaust Memorial Day should be “open to all people who experienced holocaust”.

The Labour Left Alliance, a group on the party’s left, has launched an open letter that says Socialists of Colour are “entirely mistaken” in their conclusion that Taylor-Spedding’s statement was racist.

This was also noted,

Brian Precious, another member seeking nominations while standing to be a local party representative, described the view that Labour is institutionally antisemitic as a “smear”, amongst other comments found to be antisemitic by SoC.

The Labour member from Burnley also received criticism for his original candidate statement, which was published by Labour on its own website before reportedly being replaced with a different statement.

Precious’ statement on the Labour website now reads: “Antisemitism was massively exaggerated so as to be [weaponised]. This created the fear and intimidation typical of a witch hunt, as in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible”.

🚨 CONTENT WARNINGS 🚨

We put a content warning on 3 candidates who answered our NEC questions. They are:
-Carol Taylor-Spedding
-Brian Precious
-James Chespy

As a transparent group, we feel it is important to point out the answers which we deemed antisemitic and/or racist.

— Socialists of Colour 🌹 (@SocOfColour) September 1, 2020

Many people thought that it was odd that the people singled out by Socialists of Colour were people pretty unknown to the left, left alone the wider Labour Party. One, somebody this Blog has encountered, Brian Precious, used to be interested in the obscurities of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’ writings. James Chepsy’s politics would have remained in decent obscurity without this row.

Carol Taylor Spedding, also unknown until recently, however has developed a more public presence.

A candidate for the NEC elections Taylor Spedding is supported by the Labour Left Alliance.

Left Horizons call to vote for her:

Fight on a Socialist Platform:

Alec Price

Roger Silverman

Carol Taylor-Spedding

She is also backed the paleo-Trotskyists of Socialist Appeal,

Socialist Appeal believes that – alongside backing the Grassroots Voice slate (with 1-6 STV preferences) against the right wing – left activists should also offer their support (with CLP nominations and 7-9 preferences) to the ‘For Socialism’ platform of candidates: Alec Price, Roger Silverman, and Carol Taylor-Spedding.

Labour’s civil war: We must take the fight to the right

These are views she has expressed.

Carol Taylor-Spedding took part in the Labour Left Alliance online hustings on 27 July. Her speech starts at 21:05 and she says "we must call out the myth of an antisemitism crisis in the Labour Party" (23:36) and promises to campaign against the Board of Deputies' 10 pledges. >>

— Steve Cooke (@Steve_Cooke) September 1, 2020

No doubt there were grounds by supporters of Taylor-Speeding to object to this statement.

But we hardly expected this furious reaction:

We believe that you are entirely mistaken in your assessment that this answer constitutes an example of the serious accusation of racism and urge you to immediately take off the content warning. You should also issue an apology to Carol for the distress you have caused her and the damage you have caused to her democratic right to stand for the Labour Party NEC.

Firstly, Jackie Walker – a black Jewish woman – was not expelled for antisemitism, but for the catch-all phrase of “bringing the Labour party into disrepute”. Specific charges of racism or antisemitic behaviour were not brought against her. Any charges of this nature that were mooted or decided on in a trial-by-media would have had to stand up in a legal hearing. Jackie, an anti-racist campaigner, was one of the first victims of a political campaign by the right in and outside the Labour Party directed against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, a campaign which in December 2019 led to Labour’s defeat and Corbyn’s resignation.

When you give your reasoning, “We believe that defending or apologising for Walker’s behaviour is an attempt to discredit valid antisemitism claims and is therefore, in our belief, racist and/or antisemitic”, we note that the premise is false. Not only was Jackie Walker not expelled for “valid anti-semitism claims”, but nowhere in Carol’s answer does she defend or apologise for Jackie Walker’s (undefined) “behaviour”. The statement disagrees with Jackie Walker having been expelled. Therefore, on its own terms, your accusations are false and you have no basis for the damaging actions you have taken.

You are declaring Carol guilty of antisemitism merely by association, which has consequences for every Labour Party member. Nothing that Carol wrote is in any way “openly antisemitic”. Carol has simply stated that she believes Jackie Walker was ‘expelled unjustly from the party’. Members have a democratic right to disagree with, appeal, or even take legal recourse against party sanctions if required. Supporting that is not the inherently racist act you have claimed it to be.

Allegations of antisemitism and racism can be very harmful and damaging, and not just to the electoral prospect of a candidate, but also their entire reputation politically and personally. Unfounded, politically motivated, vexatious accusations of racism are a wound to all who seek an end to racism.

We also have to express our concern that NEC candidate Jermaine Jackman is listed as one of the nine people behind the website ‘Socialists of Colour’, which, since it contains a slander of a rival candidate, is surely a serious conflict of interest, and could be judged to fall foul of the NEC candidate code of conduct. We urge Jermaine to publicly disassociate himself from the slanderous comments and repeat our request that Socialists of Colour remove the accusations which put him in this situation.

Lastly, we note that you give no “content warning” when it comes to candidates like Luke Akehurst who in his answer to you declares his support for the imperialist war on Iraq, in which hundreds of thousands of working class Iraqis were killed.

Please do the right thing by taking down the accusations immediately and apologise.

We encourage all CLPs to nominate Carol and other socialists for NEC to ensure the defence of members rights and party democracy.

URGENT: Please sign our letter to “Socialists of Colour’, who have made a serious error by labeling NEC candidate Carol Taylor-Spedding as “antisemitic” – and might yet be persuaded to drop their false allegations. Sign by emailing info@labourleft.org https://t.co/GfeudnKxzg

— Labour Left Alliance (@LabLeftAlliance) September 1, 2020

Roger Silverman, NEC candidate
Alec Price, NEC candidate
Chaudhry Qamer Iqbal, NEC candidate
Ekua Bayunu, NEC candidate
Steve Maggs, NEC candidate
Cate Tuitt, NEC candidate
Carol Taylor-Spedding, NEC candidate
Esther Giles, NEC candidate (treasurer)
Moshé Machover, Hampstead & Kilburn CLP
Jackie Walker, anti-racist campaigner
Tina Werkmann, secretary Labour Left Alliance
Tony Greenstein, first Jewish member to be expelled!

Full List on link: Open Letter to the group ‘Socialists of Colour’

Labour list has added this,

This article was amended at 9.45pm. Walker did not complain that Holocaust Memorial Day failed to commemorate genocides other than that in World War Two, but suggested that it should be “open to all people who experienced holocaust”.

We do not expect that these signatories endorse Greenstein’s remarks.

Greenstein’s language is no surprise.

Since I quit the Labour Against the Witchhunt group, after realising it was more interested in supporting antisemites than campaigning for a fairer disciplinary process, its vice chair Tony Greenstein has occasionally been in touch to share his thoughts. pic.twitter.com/KqreZ58COf

— Steve Cooke (@Steve_Cooke) September 1, 2020

Greenstein has used this kind of abuse so often and for so long (including to my good self) that most people have become inured to it.

He is part of the kind of political world these people inhabit.

Written by Andrew Coates

September 2, 2020 at 10:32 am

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Free Speech, Israel, Jews, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left, Racism

Tagged with Anti-Semitism, Labour Left Alliance, Labour Party, Left, Monster Raving Greenstein Party

On the Eve of the Trail of the 2015 Terror Attacks Charlie Hebdo Republishes Caricatures of Mohammed.

CHARLIE HEBDO REPUBLIE LES CARICATURES DE MAHOMET QUI EN AVAIENT FAIT LA CIBLE DES JIHADISTES

Charlie Hebdo Will Never Give Up.

On the eve of the trial of the attacks of January 2015 Charlie Hebdo republishes the cartoons of the prophet who made the weekly the target of jihadist terrorists.

BFMTV:

Charlie Hebdo: selon Philippe Val, d'autres médias étaient censés publier les caricatures de Mahomet pic.twitter.com/cyvwoJP3uv

— BFMTV (@BFMTV) September 1, 2020

Their own Tweet:

Numéro spécial : Tout ça pour ça.

Retrouvez :

👉 Un florilège des charognards du 7 janvier 2015
👉 Procès : la parole aux familles
👉 Sondage exclusif @IfopOpinion : la liberté d'expression c'est important, mais…

Disponible dès demain ! pic.twitter.com/NyiTmva6Kr

— Charlie Hebdo (@Charlie_Hebdo_) September 1, 2020

This is Le Monde’s report:

« Nous ne nous coucherons jamais. Nous ne renoncerons jamais »: « Charlie Hebdo » republie les caricatures du prophète Mahomet qui avaient fait du journal la cible des djihadistes https://t.co/tLqm5EISgO

— Le Monde (@lemondefr) September 1, 2020

Here is another.

"We Will Never Give Up": Charlie Hebdo Says Republishing Prophet Cartoon https://t.co/qd3yVZwQX4 pic.twitter.com/ssyCxSRvQB

— NDTV (@ndtv) September 1, 2020

Report in English.

France’s Charlie Hebdo reprints Mohammed cartoons for trial

France 24.

Agence France Presse.

French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the target of a massacre by Islamist gunmen in 2015, said Tuesday it was republishing hugely controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to mark this week’s start of the trial of alleged accomplices to the attack.

“We will never lie down. We will never give up,” director Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau wrote in an editorial to go with the cartoons in the latest edition.

“The hatred that struck us is still there and, since 2015, it has taken the time to mutate, to change its appearance, to go unnoticed and to quietly continue its ruthless crusade,” he said.

Twelve people, including some of France’s most celebrated cartoonists, were killed on January 7, 2015, when brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi went on a gun rampage at the paper’s offices in Paris.

The perpetrators were killed in the wake of the massacre but 14 alleged accomplices in the attacks, which also targeted a Jewish supermarket, will go on trial in Paris on Wednesday.

The latest Charlie Hebdo cover shows a dozen cartoons first published by the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in 2005 — and then reprinted by the French weekly in 2006, unleashing a storm of anger across the Muslim world.

In the centre of the cover is a cartoon of the prophet drawn by cartoonist Jean Cabut, known as Cabu, who lost his life in the massacre.

“All of this, just for that,” the front-page headline says.

– ‘The right to blaspheme’ –

The editorial team wrote that now was the right time to republish the cartoons and “essential” as the trial opens.

“We have often been asked since January 2015 to print other caricatures of Mohammed,” it said.

“We have always refused to do so, not because it is prohibited — the law allows us to do so — but because there was a need for a good reason to do it, a reason which has meaning and which brings something to the debate.”

The paper’s willingness to cause offence over a range of controversial issues has made it a champion of free speech for many in France, while others argue it has crossed a line too often.

But the massacre united the country in grief, with the slogan #JeSuisCharlie (I Am Charlie) going viral.

“A thousand bravos,” Zineb El Rhazoui, a former journalist for the weekly, said on Twitter, calling the republication of the cartoons a victory “for the right to blasphemy”.

The former director of Charlie Hebdo, Philippe Val, also hailed a “remarkable idea” for defending freedom of thought and expression in the face of “terror”.

In a nuanced response, the president of the French Council of Muslim Worship (CFCM), Mohammed Moussaoui, urged people to “ignore” the cartoons, while condemning violence.

“The freedom to caricature is guaranteed for all, the freedom to love or not to love (the caricatures) as well. Nothing can justify violence,” he told AFP.

The suspects, who go on trial from 0800 GMT on Wednesday, are accused of providing various degrees of logistical support to the killers.

The trial had been delayed several months with most French courtrooms closed over the coronavirus epidemic.

The court in Paris will sit until November 10 and, in a first for a terror trial, proceedings will be filmed for archival purposes given public interest.

National anti-terror prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard dismissed the idea that it was just “little helpers” going on trial since the three gunmen were now dead.

“It is about individuals who are involved in the logistics, the preparation of the events, who provided means of financing, operational material, weapons, a residence,” he told France Info radio on Monday.

“All this is essential to the terrorist action.”

© 2020 AFP

I’d rather die standing up than live on my knees." – Stephane Charbonnier (1967-2015)#CharlieHebdo #JeSuisCharlie pic.twitter.com/AgiIm04y7x

— Amy Mek (@AmyMek) September 1, 2020

Written by Andrew Coates

September 1, 2020 at 3:29 pm

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Fascism, Feminism, Free Speech, French Left, Islamism, Nationalism

Tagged with Charlie Hebdo, freedom of speech, French Politics, Islamism

BBC “Left-wing comedy shows to be axed”. It’s the Culture Wars, innit?

Statement on the BBC Licence fee

“Whether we want a culture war or not, it’s clear that one is upon us.” Tom Hunt Ipswich Tory MP.

While the alt-left media ineffectively rails about the BBC the troops of the right have been waging a war of manoeuvre against the public service broadcaster.

Their foot soldiers have been mobilising across the Land.

Tom Hunt is a very right wing MP for Ipswich.

This has been one of his main campaigns.

I spoke in the Chamber yesterday supporting the Immigration Bill that will end EU freedom movement & uncontrolled mass immigration. Immigration must have people’s democratic consent. Labour voted against the Bill & are wedded to open borders. pic.twitter.com/jDazLjajAP

— Tom Hunt MP (@tomhunt1988) May 19, 2020

As squaddy in the Culture Wars Hunt has been doing sapper work. He’s been singing Rule Britannia morn till noon, and defending ‘mainstream opinion’ on the widely followed call to “strip the Sussexs of their titles” and saying that that Boris Johnson’s government has taken many a “correct decision”.

For the first time in a long time I agree with you. Highly inappropriate and potentially damaging to our diplomatic relations with our most important ally. https://t.co/UcY5U0OaMe

— Tom Hunt MP (@tomhunt1988) August 22, 2020

The battles continue as a new front has opened up.

Whether we want a “culture war” or not, it’s very clear that one is upon us. We can put our fingers in our ears and pretend it’s not happening or can do something about it. https://t.co/DxzIBgZzRI

— Tom Hunt MP (@tomhunt1988) August 24, 2020

The issue of the BBC has played hard in the Tory fringes.

A few days ago Tom Hunt, MP for Ipswich took time off from attacking migrants (Tory MP calls for UK to cut all ties with EU amid ‘unacceptable’ migrant crossings) to…attack the BBC.

TOM HUNTS THE BEEB: Tory MP Says It’s Time to #DefundTheBBC: A TOP Tory MP has changed his view on the BBC Licence fee and has called for reform. Tom Hunt, MP for Ipswich released a statement explaining his changed view on Britain’s public broadcaster.… https://t.co/ndqgHAb73c pic.twitter.com/oMUNGobTeU

— The Conservative Defender (@ConservativeUK4) August 30, 2020

This is long and rambling, extracts:

STATEMENT ON THE BBC LICENCE FEE: Like many, I’ve had concerns about the BBC for a number of years now. The coverage of Brexit and last year’s General Election are just some of the high-profile examples of where the Corporation’s output has fallen below the standards the public expect from their national broadcaster.

However, I’ve always stopped short of joining others in calling into question the future of the licence fee. For me growing up, the BBC represented a unique part of our national identity and the role it played in our country’s life always gave me an emotional connection which I wouldn’t have with any other broadcaster.

I also recognised that the BBC has come in for criticism from both Conservatives and those on the radical Left over the years so perhaps the BBC was getting somewhere near the middle ground.

This has been my view on balance until the last few months where the BBC’s coverage and the actions of many of its publicly funded executives and journalists have unfortunately become completely out of control; leading me to reflect seriously on whether the licence fee continues to be justified.

…

While the BBC has been making plans to cut back what makes the licence fee stomachable, it’s been chipping away at many of our most cherished cultural institutions. And has been played like a fiddle by woke Leftists who have demonstrated their determination to radically change the character of this country.
This has now reached an unbearable crescendo with the farce over the Last Night of the Proms.

The reports of plans to expunge ‘Rule Britannia!’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ entirely and then the BBC’s announcement they would be played without their lyrics, represent an assault on one of the most important nights in our cultural calendar.

…

Many will have read the disgraceful comments by the Executive Producer of the BBC’s Songs of Praise programme likening the singing of Rule Britannia to Nazis singing about gas chambers because of the slave trade.

In her rush to apologise for the history of this country, she must have forgotten the blood and treasure the Royal Navy spent in abolishing the appalling Atlantic slave trade and how we can be proud of that today.

This is by far not the only abject failure of impartiality by those paid well to keep their biases in check. The article on exam results by Newsnight’s policy editor, Lewis Goodall, which took the front page of the left-wing New Statesman magazine last week, didn’t even pay lip service to the principle of impartiality in its hostile and partisan attacks on the Government.

…

The woke, metropolitan and censorious worldview that the BBC is offering no longer interests vast swathes of people up and down the country, many of which have become frustrated at being obliged to pay for content they don’t want, cuts to content they do want and an organisation which fundamentally doesn’t represent them and doesn’t even look like it wants to.

Hunt continues, and continues, spickle covering his statement.

Now:

@RobertLindsay Have you seen this in The Daily Telegraph? Under his new BBC there wouldn’t be #comedy like #CitizenSmith because it is too #LeftWing. This is disturbing. Well, it is to me. #BBC #DirectorGeneral #BBCDirectorGeneral pic.twitter.com/pvhHVeJqUM

— Nick Jury (@TheRealNickJury) September 1, 2020

The Telegraph article looks like an effort to ward off the Hunts and their troops.

BREAKING: The new Director General of the BBC will axe comedy shows that mock the regime.

This is absolutely shocking.#ToryDictatorship #ToryBritain https://t.co/rANX9Kgjlw

— Gordon Bennett (@RadishRave) August 31, 2020

The Corbynistas are confused:

This prominent sage sums up their dilemma:

BBC “left wing” comedy died a while ago. It was replaced almost entirely by a sneering liberal comedian class who stigmatised socialism, along with working class life and politics.
Now the fascists are coming for those sneering liberal comics too.
Well, we warned you.

— Kerry-Anne Mendoza (@TheMendozaWoman) September 1, 2020

Moaning Mendoza’s warnings went unheeded…..

Channel Four is set to show Funny Cow (2018), a slice of cinema verité about Northern Comics from the Red Wall. IT’s got some rip-roaring comedy about ‘Pakis’, women and gays.

That will go down well on the BBC.

We hear that the BBC is thinking of a pilot for a series in which Maxine Peak will reprise her role..

It seems to be the case that the “culture wars” have reached a new stage.

As Nesrine Malik says in the Guardian.

….culture-war skirmishes are no longer a sideshow to our politics – they are the politics. They are how rightwing electoral prospects are now advanced; not through policies or promises of a better life, but by fostering a sense of threat, a fantasy that something profoundly pure and British is constantly at risk of extinction. What our most successful politicians understand is the insatiable public appetite for these falsehoods, the wish for these lies to be true – for Britain to be a precious damsel in distress rather than a battered country impoverished by the misrule of its governing class.

The right’s culture war is no longer a sideshow to our politics – it is our politics

From the Spiked national populists we learn however,

Who started this culture war?

Tom Slater.

The identitarian left stirs up cultural conflict and then blames it on everyone else.

…who started this culture war? Maybe it’s the people who have been charging around demanding that statues be toppled, speech be censored and now songs not be sung in the name of equality – rather than the people who, in the face of all this guff, dare to say ‘hang on a minute’.

À la lutte!

Written by Andrew Coates

September 1, 2020 at 10:35 am

Posted in Anti-Fascism, British Govern, Capitalism, Culture, East Anglia, Free Speech, Ipswich, Labour Party, Left, Nationalism, Populism

Tagged with BBC, Culture Wars, National Populism, Spiked, Tom Hunt

Piers Corbyn: From International Marxist Group to Red-Brown Charlatan.

with 14 comments

Ex-International Marxist Group activist now stands with Holocaust denier David Icke and the far-right.

More of evidence of far right involvement in the covidiot event at Trafalgar Square today. The main speaker was the holocaust denier David Icke. Flag in pic 2 is flag of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. QAnon (pic 3) is a neo nazi conspiracy theory pic.twitter.com/bZxNdODVHp

— FarRightWatchWales (@NoToHateInWales) August 29, 2020

The Guardian carries an article, on the demonstration, Coronavirus sceptics, conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers protest in London.

But, this, written in a respectful tone, is how it talks about three of the best-known participants..

Among those due to speak were Piers Corbyn, the weather forecaster and older brother of the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the former newspaper columnist and health journalist Dr Vernon Coleman, and the conspiracist celebrity David Icke.

Although the demonstration focused on coronavirus restrictions, those taking part espoused anti-authoritarian grievances ranging from the lockdown to the imprisonment of Julian Assange to claims of elite child sexual abuse.

On the eve of the protest, Corbyn told the Guardian that a number of groups had come together to join in with the demonstration.

“In terms of whether you believe that the virus is a hoax or not, whatever is happening now is less than or equal to a normal flu, so the lockdowns and all that goes with them is unjustifiable in any terms,” he said.

“We are calling for MPs to refuse renewal of the Covid Act [Coronavirus Act], and if they do not, we will campaign to have them removed from office.”

One of the aspects of Piers Corbyn which is not given a wide airing is the revulsion that his former comrades in the International Marxist Group (IMG) and others on the radical left feel about his present politics.

In the 1970s Piers was better known on the left than his brother.

From Imperial College to the Squatters’ movement, he was a well-known figure on the left. He was active in the IMG, standing in 1977 in Lambeth Central for a GLC election under the group’s name. Not everybody appreciated his efforts to create a Squatters’ union. Like the rest of the British section of the Fourth International he joined the Labour Party and was a party councillor in Southwark between 1986 and 1990. He remained in the Borough, and people speak of him in the 1990s selling left publications in his local pub.

Corbyn appears in the 2006 BBC Documentary ‘Lefties‘, in the first episode, Property is Theft, about squatting in the 1970s.

PIers made a career forecasting the weather, forming WeatherAction, in 1995. The meteorologist was still sending out EMails about his prognostic power to leftists (using a wider list) when the Internet began to take off in the new millennium. He fell out with the same left when he began promoting climate change denial in the same decade, and was pushed out of left-wing politics. His thinking was wildly at odds with his former Fourth International comades, who took an Eco-Socialist turn at the same time and joined the fight for “Global Climate Justice”.

Interviewed in 2016 (Guardian) he was without regrets: “Like his brother, physicist and meteorologist Piers Corbyn is a man of revolutionary zeal. His own battle, however, is against all this ‘climate-change nonsense’…

He has certainly changed, and not just because of his climate change denialism.

This is one of the leaflets he has been distributing this year.

We must “unite against the globalist common enemy”, the “Nazified NHS”, “AntiFa and BLM are funded by mega billionaire Soros. The (BLM) concerns and attacks on statues are “orchestrated by the richest most evil men and mega corporations” to “divert your attention and bring in a ‘New Normal’ – New World Order” “Covid ..is nothing more dangerous than a cold or flu.”

Most people would say that somebody who produces this material is not entitled to any respect whatsoever.

This is the far-right charlatan yesterday in London.

Piers Corbyn explaining how bad vaccines, that Covid hasn’t been proven to exist and more. A must see and share 🙏 pic.twitter.com/oKlQbLAm3e

— jon kirby (@jonkirbysthlm) August 27, 2020

These are some more of this friends.

Today's anti-vaxx demo in Trafalgar Square featured Piers Corbyn, David Icke and a neo-Nazi with a British Union of Fascists flag from the 1940s. The Corbyn rallies used to attract some ghastly misfits, but they can't hold a candle to this bunch of sinister, unhinged lowlifes. pic.twitter.com/seVcjASVop

— Never Again (@Never_Again2020) August 29, 2020

And these:

Big overlap between Syria chemical weapons truthers and Coronavirus truthers https://t.co/SSLB74bWqy

— Bob From Brockley 🥤 (@bobfrombrockley) August 30, 2020

There is a view that the a core group protesters who assembled against the Lockdown in Trafalgar Square come from a long-established fan-base of David Icke. Others, from Save Our Rights UK organisation, Q Anon, ‘Wellness’ anti-Vaxx campaigners, and anti 5-G obsessives, are of a more recent ilk. They are political confusionism, a mixture of right and left united against an enemy that they define in their imagination.

This is an international phenomenon as this report on a demonstration in Ireland last week indicates,

Gardaí investigate how Dublin anti-mask protest was organised

A Garda investigation has begun into an anti-face mask rally held in Dublin at the weekend on suspicion it breached coronavirus regulations prohibiting the organising of events.

Separately, a number of disturbances at the rally were also under criminal investigation, including one incident during which men who were armed with sticks or batons clashed with others present. *

They wore black caps and scarves covering their faces, as well as PPE-type latex gloves, and clashed with a number of other men present in what appeared to be a pre-planned attack. One man suffered significant injuries before gardaí restored order. *

The event was organised by the Health Freedom Ireland, which says it is a non-political organisation, with support from Yellow Vest Ireland.

….

Other speakers included members of the Irish Freedom Party which wants to “regain control” of Ireland’s border to more closely control immigration.

Berlin yesterday:

Massive QAnon turn-out at the anti-COVID measures demo in Berlin, Germany. Many flags / signs hailing @realDonaldTrump including in the colors of ultra right “Reichsbürger“ who want the German Reich back. Some told us they believe Donald Trump is an angel. #Germany #COVIDー19 pic.twitter.com/RGt54Dyjzr

— Frederik Pleitgen (@fpleitgenCNN) August 29, 2020

There is a sharp political edge, one underlined by Piers Corbyn: the anti Bill Gates and above all, George Soros, theme.

Soros is a hate figure for the far-right and some on the ‘anti-imperialist’ left (see above picture about Syria).

George Soros Conspiracy Theories Surge as Protests Sweep US.

USNews and World Report.

George Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist who has long been a target of conspiracy theories, is now being falsely accused of orchestrating and funding the protests over police killings of Black people that have roiled the United States. Amplified by a growing number of people on the far right, including some Republican leaders, online posts about Soros have skyrocketed in recent weeks.

They have been accompanied by online ads bought by conservative groups that call on authorities to “investigate George Soros for funding domestic terrorism and his decades-long corruption.”

We can add Piers Corbyn to that list of conspiracy theorists.

The leftist rhetoric about the New World Order, first used in the 1990s after the First Gulf War, has been moulded after a well established pattern into a rant about mysterious figures controlling the planet.

It is said that there is a special place in Hades for renegades from the IMG who turn to the far-right.

Worse than this (story not verified):

With @Piers_Corbyn before his arrest today at the London freedom protest. Piers arrested for organising an event big than 30 people. Try 30,000 plus!! Apparently he'll be ok as he's used to it, been arrested many times since the '70s.

Wearing my Hydroxychloroquine works t-shirt pic.twitter.com/5XIadMZ4Hm

— Hydroxychloroquine Works #HCQworks (@_JulietJohnson) August 29, 2020

Written by Andrew Coates

August 30, 2020 at 10:35 am

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Conspiracies, European Left, Fascism, Greens, Left, Trotskyism

Tagged with Conspiracies, Covid 19, David Icke, Fascism, Ireland, Piers Corbyn, Red-Brown Front

Political Confusionism: Anti-Lockdown Conspiracists, from Fascists to Anti-Vacs, Fill Trafalgar Square .

La défiance imprègne notre société » : le discours antimasque, nouveau terreau complotiste

British Union of Fascists Flag: Anti-Vac and Conspiracy Right-Wing Mingle with Trafalgar Square Demo.

A sizeable crowd has gathered in Trafalgar Square, holding signs warning that coronavirus is a 'scam' and a 'hoax.' https://t.co/JyHIraEtRL

— Metro (@MetroUK) August 29, 2020

The London protest brings together Piers Corbyn and David Icke, and a raft of other far-right conspiracy activists.

Along with various other conspiracists: https://t.co/OXPKSLEd1v

— Bob From Brockley 🥤 (@bobfrombrockley) August 29, 2020

Reports:

Thousands have gathered in London's Trafalgar Square for anti-COVID-19 lockdown protest — they claim #COVIDー19 is a hoax.

Demonstrators are calling for 'no more lockdowns, 'no to vaccinations' and 'no to government lies'.

– No social distancing
– This is criminal pic.twitter.com/ePG2Wz52ST

— Rose Movement🌹 (@Rosemvmt) August 29, 2020

Here is another shot of them.

Anti-mask, anti-lockdown protest in central London #coronavirus #antimask #lockdown #London #TrafalgarSquare #wearamask #protest https://t.co/l8a19NmEvb

— London News Journal (@journal_london) August 29, 2020

The far-right conspiratorial background of the march’s principal organisers is well-known.

There is David Icke and Piers Corbyn. Corbyn has taken to railing at the ‘New World Order’, George Soros, and the ‘Nazification’ of the NHS.

Here he is this afternoon:

Piers Corbyn explaining how bad vaccines, that Covid hasn’t been proven to exist and more. A must see and share 🙏 pic.twitter.com/oKlQbLAm3e

— jon kirby (@jonkirbysthlm) August 27, 2020

They are part of a Europe-wide (and further afield in North America and Australasia) movement that brings together ‘anti-vaccination campaigners, ‘civil liberty’ anti-‘big government’ rightists, and straightforward racists.

These cross-overs in this latest outbreak of political confusionism are already being charted.

Le Monde, a few days ago carried a detailed report highlighting the cross-over between those who hold anti-lockdown ideas and conspiratorial right-wing thinking.

As indication they pointed to a Facebook site which had renamed itself from Zemmour (the surname of a French far-right-wing anti-immigrant historian) to “Non au masque” (no to Masks).

In an opinion survey of 800 members of these Web platforms it was found that 52% believed in the Illuminati (against a whopping 27% of the general population!), 56% believe in the Great Replacement by Immigrants (against 25%), and 52% in a Zionist “plot” against France (22%).

In the UK the culture warriors and identitarians of Spiked are also stirring the pot.

Britain was often a pretty unfree place before 2020. But this year illiberalism has gone into overdrive. The state now dictates that we must cover our faces in certain places or face a fine.

Yesterday: Not a single healthy child has died from Covid

A new study confirms the virus poses a negligible risk to children.

With the evidence mounting that kids are largely safe from Covid, it is clearer than ever that schools are safe. Those who want to hold up the return to education are massively over-stating the risks. In fact, they are causing harm to children by restricting their lives in the name of protecting them from a negligible threat.

Let’s stop scaremongering and get schools back to normal.

More Background from Hope Not Hate.

THE UK’S EMERGING CONSPIRACY THEORY STREET MOVEMENTS.

New conspiracy theory-driven street movements, spreading dangerous QAnon, 5G and anti-vaccine propaganda, have held dozens of small protests in the UK recent months. These groups are collaborating and gathering momentum.

Last Saturday, over a hundred protesters marched to Buckingham Palace, where a section angrily chanted “paedophiles” outside the gates. Some protestors bore signs referencing QAnon, a baseless US-centric conspiracy theory alleging that President Trump is waging a secret war against a cabal of powerful Satanic paedophiles, alleged to be kidnapping, torturing and even cannibalising children on a giant scale. The conspiracy theory, which has strong undercurrents of antisemitism, has spread rapidly in the US and developed pockets of support in Europe in recent months.

The outfit behind the protest, Freedom for the Children UK (FFTCUK), is the British branch of a new American group, which held scores of gatherings across the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand last Saturday. FFTCUK itself organised events in eleven cities across Britain, and whilst some were tiny, others, including Manchester , were hundreds strong.

Whilst FFTCUK’s deliberately vague branding appears to have attracted many concerned by genuine child trafficking, several of the group’s central UK organisers have expressed QAnon beliefs. The iconography of the theory was displayed by attendees at events around the country, as well as numerous references to broader Satanic ritual child abuse conspiracy theories.

FFTCUK is just one of a constellation of conspiracy theory-driven protest groups to have emerged during lockdown, which, despite being founded on diverging issues, appear increasingly willing to pool their efforts. FFTCUK’s Manchester event was supported by Stand Up X (SUX), a homegrown anti-5G outfit which, since launching in May, has organised dozens of small anti-lockdown events.

This Saturday SUX is, alongside a number of other groups, co-organising what may be the largest conspiracy theory protest in recent months, as David Icke, a major British conspiracy theorist and antisemite, is set to speak against the lockdown in London alongside prominent anti-vaccine activists.

Today is Saturday.

40,000 PEOPLE!!!!! BIGGEST PROTEST TO DATE THANK YOU EVERYONE WHO SHOWED UP. WE DID IT 😃#londonprotest #wedonotconsent #nolockdowns #Covid #BBC #news #media #protests #boris #sadiq pic.twitter.com/I9mlrbGxWX

— StandUpX (@StandUpX2) August 29, 2020

Written by Andrew Coates

August 29, 2020 at 3:59 pm

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Conspiracies, Fascism, Free Speech, Left, Populism

Tagged with Anti-Lockdown Protests, Covid 19, Fascism, Political Confusionism, Spiked

Plans for UK Right-wing US-style Opinionated Television “News” Station.

Rivals plan Fox News-style opinionated TV station in UK

Fox's Media Bias and Climate Change | Discover Magazine — *The Worst is Yet Upon us: Fox Style ‘News’ to Come to UK.*

As the ‘culture wars’ manufactured by right-wing identity politics continue, and Brexit opens the opportunity for deregulation the right is bidding to become an active player in ‘news’ provision.

Anybody familiar with Tories and Brexit patriots in the flesh will know that the campaign underway against the BBC has resonated amongst their circles. There is a sheer nastiness amongst the right, a real national populist mood against all forms of left wing and even liberal opinion.

The silent majority has begun to stand up against this cultural Marxist revolution. https://t.co/UB9YTYTYre
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) August 27, 2020

Listening to people you can see that while Farage is transparently looking for ways to continue his business revenue, financial and political, he has also continued to tap into a continuing groundswell of national populism. With the arrogance of their patron, Trump’s UK operators would like to shout their message at everybody.

This now looks no longer like barking in the wilderness. As the British left has concentrated on attacking Keir Starmer the Tories plans for extending the ‘free market’ for the wealthy are extending to the media. The attacks on the BBC are only a prelude to reshaping broadcasting.

From Times Radio, which few listen to, to television the right want to have a hold on fabricating the news.

Conservative David Frum on Fox: “We thought we could control it but it ended up controlling us.” https://t.co/SgepGP9u1Y
— Matthew Blott (@MatthewBlott) August 29, 2020

The Guardian reports today,

Tim Waterson .

This article is setting off alarm bells.

Rival efforts are under way to launch a Fox News-style opinionated current affairs TV station in Britain to counter the BBC.
One group is promising a news channel “distinctly different from the out-of-touch incumbents” and has already been awarded a licence to broadcast by the media regulator, Ofcom, under the name “GB News”. Its founder has said the BBC is a “disgrace” that “is bad for Britain on so many levels” and “needs to be broken up”.
A rival project is being devised in the headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s British media empire by the former Fox News executive David Rhodes, although it is unclear whether it will result in a traditional TV channel or be online-only.

The first project has close links to the US national neo-liberal right, Murdoch’s politics are too well known to need repeating here,

This character does not look a welcome import.

GB News is the work of a company called All Perspectives, controlled by two British-American executives who are associated with the US billionaire John Malone. (1) Known as the “cable cowboy”, Malone chairs Liberty Global, the owner of Virgin Media, as well as the parent company of the Discovery television network.
Andrew Cole, one of the co-founders of GB News, also sits on the board of Liberty Global. He told the Guardian he hoped to be able to discuss the project in September, but he has previously made clear his views on the broadcasting landscape.

(1) From Wikipedia: “Malone’s political beliefs have been described as libertarian.^[36] He is on the board of directors for the (hard right) Cato Institute. He donated US$250,000 to Donald Trump‘s inauguration in 2017, with colleague Greg Maffei, Liberty Media, and Liberty Interactive each donating a further US$250,000.”

This is from a puff for him in The Gentlemans Journal,

In recent years, Malone, like fellow magnate Rupert Murdoch, has supported Donald Trump – an unsurprising move given that he is a former chairman of the Libertarian think tank, Cato Institute.

Speaking to a Liberty Media investor day in 2016, Malone forecast a stronger American dollar, accelerated growth and some inflation under a Trump presidency. “I think the deregulatory aspects of a Republican administration will be favorable. I think the likelihood you will see government intervening to support one particular industry’s goals, relative to another’s, is probably less risky today,” he told investors.

In January this year, Malone and Liberty Media were among the biggest contributors to the president’s inauguration, donating a collective $1m to the festivities.

What can you say?

Howdy Pardner!

The problem of getting rid of broadcast rules remains to be solved by Dominic Cummings.

The challenge both projects face is the UK’s strict broadcast rules on due impartiality, enforced by the media regulator. One possible route around them is to follow the lead of the radio station LBC, which has achieved record audiences by realising that the rules can be interpreted to allow strongly opinionated presenters, so long as they are balanced out elsewhere in the schedule with alternative viewpoints.
A similar model has been followed by Piers Morgan’s outbursts on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, which regularly become talking points online and drive substantial traffic to tabloid newspapers. News UK’s TalkRadio has pushed this tactic further, with regular debates on culture war hot topics rapidly turned into clips shared on social media.

In other words Piers Morgan is a pioneer of reducing news to “talking points”.

Just to cheer us the Guardian article ends with this,

One of the great unknowns of any such project is the role of Nigel Farage. The former Ukip leader left LBC amid staff anger over his comments on migrants crossing the Channel, but he has the potential to deliver a ready-made anti-BBC, pro-Brexit audience. He has recently appeared on the Sun’s YouTube channel and TalkRadio, both owned by News UK.

This video is why Trump needs to win. A Biden victory will lead to a total breakdown in law and order. https://t.co/V2dUDrD0BJ
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) August 28, 2020

Faced with this many would hope that the endless whinging from some on the left against the BBC would stop.

Written by Andrew Coates

August 29, 2020 at 10:16 am

Posted in Britain, Capitalism, Europe, European Left, Fascism, Free Speech

Tagged with Brexit, Fox News, Media, NIgel Farage

Decline and Fall of the Alt-Left Media.

KEIR STARMER SAYS HE WANTS THE S*N TO ENDORSE HIM AND THE LABOUR PARTY

How A Small Group Of Pro-Corbyn Websites Built Enormous Audiences On Facebook

“But I don’t know anything about the subject, I’ve had no experience, I’ve got no testimonials, and I can’t write’. ‘It doesn’t do to be too modest,’ said the new alt-Left media tycoon ‘It’s wonderful what one can author when one tries.” (Decline and Fall. 2020)

In 2017 Jim Waterson of Buzzfeed UK (defunct) wrote,

They’ve been mocked, ignored, and dismissed as conspiracy mongers – but a small group of hyperpartisan British media outlets have quietly built enormous audiences on Facebook in the space of just two years with relentlessly pro-Corbyn coverage.

…

……articles by Another Angry Voice (who?) and other similar alt-left media publications such as The Canary, Evolve Politics, and Skwawkbox are consistently and repeatedly going more viral than mainstream UK political journalism.

The Rise Of The Alt-Left British Media

Waterson did not mention Novara Media, or anticipate later additions like Labour Heartlands, but you get the picture.

It is hard to imagine anybody writing this today.

Lack of political direction after the end of Corbyn leadership and election disaster, audiences in free-fall, these outlets are at a loss.

The late-night phone calls from anybody who matters in the Labour Party have ceased. Only a few lowly union figures, bored with Netflix, might give a bell to a chosen minion when an internal trade union battle of limited public interest is underway.

Evolve Politics, for the many who have never heard of it, now runs stories such as,

BBC COMPLETELY SILENT AS JEREMY CORBYN IS PROVED RIGHT AFTER TORIES VOTE AGAINST PROTECTING…

Skwawkbox has turned himself into a one-man anti-Labour Party band.

This is his latest,

Starmer selling access to front-benchers for £500. Plus VAT. Online.

Starmer selling access to front-benchers for £500. Plus VAT. Online https://t.co/yzBll2g4sd

— The SKWAWKBOX (@skwawkbox) August 26, 2020

Walker is only rivaled as an anti-Labour site by the pro-Brexit “Labour Heartlands”.

Unless we create our own progressive News & media outlets, we have no chance of change. Join us: https://t.co/F7iZHOq1YM

— Labour Heartlands (@Labourheartland) August 8, 2020

Labour MP shows why Labour will never be a credible Party again: Labour MP brands Brexiteers ‘absolute sh*tbag racist w*nkers’ during Rule Britannia row

The Canary specialises in rewriting MSN stories:

Donald Trump just received some terrible news about his election prospects.

Don’t even talk about the revamped US owned ‘Tribune’, who tried to scramble on the alt-media bandwagon when the wheels were about the spin off.

Their whose latest tales are grey upon grey:

How a Decade of Cuts Made School Reopening Harder.

Why They Want a ‘Rule, Britannia!’ Culture War

Historians of the alt-media blip will perhaps trace the moment these outlets fell to the time when the personalities behind them became more of a story than the alt-news they carry.

As in this spat: between the Canary’s Boss and Owen Jones:

The Left doesn't need bullshit liberal commentators policing our resistance to fascism.

They kneecapped us during the assault on anti-Apartheid activists.
They kneecapped us during the assault on Corbynism
And now they're kneecapping us on this.

Enough. No pasaran.

— Kerry-Anne Mendoza (@TheMendozaWoman) August 21, 2020

Novara Media’s co-founder Aaron Bastani is a favourite of the wits of the Internet.

This is his latest humorous effort.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism is now available as an audiobook on Audible!

What could be better than grappling with the opportunities of the 21st century while gardening, going for a walk in the clement late August weather or feeding the ducks?https://t.co/PrPXpGx1vG

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) August 26, 2020

He has still the power to inspire dislike.

The best part of this tweet is the bit Aaron left out. In trying to humiliate Hugo Rifkind, I made him look a bit of a pillock, and now his ego is bruised. So he blocked me and then took screenshots of an article out of context to try and get one over on me. Real schoolboy stuff. pic.twitter.com/76IkWLU1hp

— Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) October 11, 2018

In a successful attempt to destroy what’s left of their reputation Novara Media today published an article blaming the plight of refugees in the channel on the European Union,

Britain’s Channel Crossings Policy Comes Straight Out of Fortress Europe’s Playbook by Chloe Haralambous and Barnaby Raine.

The PHD students at the USA Columbia University, the authors, one of whom did some work a number of years ago with refugee rescue have a past (which Novara Media does not signal).

They were part of the pro-Brexit Socialist Workers Party breakaway RS21 (Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century) *(Making live and letting die: “refugees”, “migrants” and Fortress Europe Chloe Haralambous (2015) How to learn from Lenin Barnaby Raine.) Unsurprisingly Breit has not led to anything resembling their “internationalist left position”. So they blame the consequences of the hard right project of Brexit on the ……European Union.

IThe learned academics assert that,

Though it is sometimes venerated as a progressive bastion, the EU represents the united force of old colonial powers, a weapon peculiarly inimical to reform and wielded against the poor of the European periphery, African farmers and migrants from Europe’s former dominions and current imperial ventures. Anti-racists should have no truck with it.

The graduate students at a top US University take the time to denounce “continental chauvinism” – a word used for some kind of bellicose patriotism in non academic circles. Perhaps they believe the EU is about to declare ‘war’ on somebody or some country.

The need is greater than ever for a politics of principled internationalism, refusing the continental chauvinism of the EU in the name of free movement for all rather than nationalist myths. Just as tough, we need an anti-racist movement beyond the liberal humanitarianism that talks of refugee plight (helpless and deserving refugees, that is: never crafty and undeserving ‘economic migrants’) without ever connecting their struggles to the battles of native Europeans for more liveable lives.

So refugee suffering and British immigration policy can be blamed on the European Union.

Nice one.

* EU referendum: for an internationalist leave position RS21.

Written by Andrew Coates

August 28, 2020 at 5:23 pm

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Europe, European Left, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left, Nationalism, Sectarianism

Tagged with Alt-Left Media, Brexit, Europe, European Left, Novara Media, Skwawkbox

David Icke and Piers Corbyn to Speak out Against ‘Covid Laws’ and New World Order.

Note Piers Corbyn (with megaphone) as a Speaker.

There is a planned anti-lockdown, anti-mask, anti-contact-tracing – essentially anti all the “emergency” measures the government has taken – on 29th of August, in Trafalgar Square.

Many doctors and other experts will be speaking, some via video link some in person, including Dr Scott Jensen (Republican Party of Minnesota) and Dr Dolores Cahill (Note: Hard-right anti-EU Irish Freedom Party)

Next month the Coronavirus Bill is up for its first “6 month review”, Parliament can vote to end the bill, let it run for it’s full two years or even extend it. If you want to make your voice heard, join the march this weekend.

David Icke will be speaking at the end of the march.

David Icke speaking at London ‘pandemic’ freedom event this Saturday with doctors and activists. We are looking fascism in the face and it must be the one to blink (Please share far and wide) pic.twitter.com/V16ECJaZzn

— David Icke (@davidicke) August 26, 2020

Piers Corbyn:

#StopNewNormal SAVE LIVES! #StopOrGo Easy CAMPAIGN toMPs
*STOP Renewal of #Covid hoax or GO*
=>https://t.co/4hT0dCQkSg 4yourMP email, Paste inLETTER https://t.co/2DeUPjq3PC, add Poster https://t.co/bKOKymDXq6, SEND; Tell piers@stopnewnormal.net#SaveOurRights #KBF #StandUpX
cont https://t.co/oCXMw6zUiC

— Piers Corbyn (@Piers_Corbyn) August 18, 2020

This is serious Piers.

If you are reading this. I, who also in the International Marxist Group and used to admire your work in the Squatting movement, feel sick to the stomach that you have gone this far, whatever your personal issues may be.

I know that this is not just one person’s view.

Icke, were it possible, has also got a lot, a lot, worse during the pandemic.

Item:

The Woke war on the American middle class on behalf of the One-Percent https://t.co/JpkJ2EtMl2 pic.twitter.com/WiuqiltFLy

— David Icke (@davidicke) August 26, 2020

Item.

Carlson: Gates and ‘corrupt WHO’ are using the ‘virus’ and ‘global warming’ to impose mass control https://t.co/I2OVCTH18K pic.twitter.com/rySYoG2ExX

— David Icke (@davidicke) August 25, 2020

Icke’s conspiratorial ramblings are firmly located on the extreme-right.

As David Icke is trending, it's a good time to remind people that he isn't a kooky conspiracy theorist who believes in weird ideas, he's a crypto-fascist demagogue who publishes full-on Nazi apologism on his website. pic.twitter.com/TFL7OIll8c

— Marlon Solomon (@supergutman) August 26, 2020

Supporters:

David Icke starting to make more sense that all of the worlds politicians and scientists combined pic.twitter.com/v3YcRLfRPR

— JustaRegularGuy (@futurecosmonaut) August 26, 2020

Here is how far Piers Corbyn has fallen:

"We oppose all COVID VAX programs. They don't work.
"Claims 'the virus' is isolated are bananas.
"Masks are submission to #NewNormal–#NewWorldOrder. They make you ill; DON'T DO IT! #HugAgainstCovid!
"Trades Unions failed us on Covid hoax" says Piers Corbyn https://t.co/aCReiLZsH5

— Piers Corbyn (@Piers_Corbyn) August 21, 2020

Written by Andrew Coates

August 27, 2020 at 10:43 am

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Conservative Party, Conspiracies, Fascism, Human Rights, Trotskyism

Tagged with Coronavirus, Covid 19, David Icke, Fascism, Piers Corbyn, Racism Conspiracy Theory

Unidas Podemos: Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero Stand up to Far Right Harassment.

Por qué lo que sufren Pablo Iglesias e Irene Montero no es un escrache sino algo peor.

Galapagar, la frontera entre el escrache y el acoso a Pablo ...

“Some people see the home of Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero as a legitimate place to protest against the Government. “Melisa Domínguez, leader of the neo-Nazi collective Hogar Social.

Those who follow Spanish politics, a country which has a serious left and a Socialist-left governing coalition, will know that the radical “left populist” party Podemos has faced some severe challenges over the last weeks.

Supporters of the far-right Vox party have been harrassing Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias.

In the middle of August this happened.

Unidas Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias and his partner, Equality Minister Irene Montero, cut short their vacation in Asturias on Monday “for the safety of their children” after they were subjected to threats and protests in the municipality of Felgueras. Sources close to Iglesias, who is also one of Spain’s deputy prime ministers in the Socialist Party-led coalition government, told news agency EFE that the family opted to return to their home in Madrid after messages appeared on social media revealing the location of their holiday home.

Podemos leader, equality minister forced to cut short vacation due to fears for safety

This English language story on the El Paîs site (18th of August) is accompanied by many, many, more on its main pages.

In their reports the centre-left newspaper has compared the ‘protests’ of Vox to ‘Escraches’, that is, ” “publicly harassing public figures, usually by congregating around their homes, chanting and publicly shaming them. For many the daily harrying against the Podemos leading figures and their children have stepped over the boundary between pestering and stalking.

Iglesias has reacted with dignity, saying that this kind of stalking by the far-right is much less than what other people in the world have suffered for their beliefs. To put it in context, there are those who have “Payed with their freedom, their lives, or through torture, to defend their ideas and political activism. That is not our case. “

Lo que hace a nuestra familia la extrema derecha y ciertos medios es grave, pero hay que poner cada cosa en su contexto. Hay gente que ha pagado con su libertad, con su vida o con torturas defender sus ideas y hacer política. No es nuestro caso.

— Pablo Iglesias 🔻 (@PabloIglesias) August 18, 2020

His party, Unidas Podemos, says that some of the media have helped stir up the far-right.

📢 "De la mentira en la Portada a la agresión en la calle

👉🏽 Esos comportamientos periodísticos infames que atentan contra cualquier código ético y deontológico acaban poniendo una diana en la cara de los responsables políticos de #UnidasPodemos"#AcosoAPodemos

📷 @eldiarioes pic.twitter.com/9I3oJJm6iC

— Verónica Fuente (@veronicfg) August 21, 2020

Far from stopping after the end of the holiday the treatment has continued with the return home.

Today a local resident protests that they are totally bleeding fed up.

Si lo que pasa en Galapagar pasara en mi pueblo, en mi barrio o en mi ciudad, creo que yo sería el primer interesado en no dejar que una docena de fascistas ni un juez parcial manchara el nombre del lugar en el que vivo. Bien por la gente de Galapagar que defiende la democracia. pic.twitter.com/3QvjJBekkt

— Juan Carlos Monedero (@MonederoJC) August 26, 2020

It is becoming the case that this is not just a protest but something a lot worse.

El Diario. 22nd of August.

Esa persecución por ser lo que son, por ser de izquierdas, por formar parte de un Gobierno que sus acosadores detestan, por representar a un sector del país, si no es una manifestación de odio ideológico ya me explicarán qué es.

This is persecution for being what they are, for being on the left, for being part of a government that their stalkers detest, for representing a sector of the country, if it does not show ideological hatred, then explain what it is.

HuffPost today describes how a quiet, semi-rural zone, la Navata, of Galapagar, to the North West of Madrid has been transformed with the arrival of the fascist protests,

Desde mayo, la tranquilidad se ha transformado en gritos, caceroladas e insultos. La zona está plagada de policía, de Guardia Civil y de manifestantes de extrema derecha que van de excursión a hostigar al vicepresidente segundo del Gobierno, a la ministra de Igualdad y a sus tres hijos menores de edad.

Since May, the tranquility has been transformed into shouting, beating of casseroles and insults. The area is full of police, the Civil Guard and extreme right-wing protesters who go on excursions to harass the Second Vice President of the Government, the Minister of Equality and their three young children.

Then there has been a long-rumbling legal case alleging dodgy finance.

Judge calls members of Podemos leadership to testify after accusations of irregular financing.

11th of August.

The move comes after the latest in a series of accusations of wrongdoing by a former lawyer for the left-wing party, José Manuel Calvente.

A Madrid judge has called several members from the leadership of Spanish political party Podemos to appear in court for questioning after a former lawyer from the left-wing group, José Manuel Calvente, made claims of irregular financing. The Unidas Podemos party, which is made up of a coalition of Podemos and the United Left (IU), is currently the junior partner in the coalition government headed up by the Socialist Party (PSOE), and its leader and founder Pablo Iglesias is one of Spain’s deputy prime ministers.

As was first reported by Spanish news website Público, and was later confirmed by sources from Podemos, the magistrate has cited the following party members to appear in court: communication secretary and current member of Iglesias’s cabinet Juan Manuel del Olmo; party manager Rocío Esther Val; treasurer Daniel de Frutos; and employee Andrea Dedoto.

This is the latest development.

Pablo Iglesias will not have to respond to the congress on charges

August the 25th.

Pablo Iglesias, leader of Podemos and second vice-president of the Spanish government, will not have to appear before the Congress of Deputies to explain the allegations of illegal financing that fall on the party, reported the newspaper El Mundo.

Requests to appear at an extraordinary plenary session and at the Social Affairs Committee were made by PP and Ciudadanos and voted in favor by both parties and Vox. But the proposals ended up failing with the votes against PSOE, Pode, ERC, PNV, EH Bildu, JxCat and Compromís. by lawyers José Manuel Calvente and Mónica Carmona. The complaint speaks of a “corrupt sub organisation” within Podemos and alleged practices of “coercion”, “silencing” internal dissidents and “bonus” payments for those who participate in the alleged “illegalities”.

El Congreso rechaza que Iglesias comparezca en el Congreso por la financiación de Podemos https://t.co/6tDd6HFzYY

— Europa Press (@europapress) August 25, 2020

This is now for the Courts to decide on.

What should be clear though is that we should stand for shoulder with Iglesias and Montero against the fascist rabble.

Though Vox figures are careful to maintain distance between official channels and the more extremist views of their supporters, at times the line is unavoidably blurred. Until the easing of the lockdown filled pavement cafes with socially distanced revellers, for several weeks the evening’s silence was broken by Vox’s nightly protests against the government and lockdown. Protesters spanned disaffected citizens to those with Falangist sympathies – but also featured individuals with AHTR T-shirts, a key feature of online neo-Nazi dissemination – and others performing the Heil Hitler while draped in Spanish flags.

Eleanor Rosenbach

Written by Andrew Coates

August 26, 2020 at 12:01 pm

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Conspiracies, Europe, European Left, Human Rights, Left, Populism, Spain

Tagged with European Left, Fascism, Pablo Iglesias, Podemos, Spain, Vox

Arguments on the Left on “Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn.”

Five things we learned from new tell-all book on Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership

Aides feared Jeremy Corbyn was sabotaging his own campaign in ...

Debate on Labour Under Corbyn Grows.

Last December’s General Election was a catastrophe for the Labour Party.

A hard-right led Conservative Party promising to “Unleash Britain’s Potential” and “Get Brexit Done” won 265 seats and 43,6% of the vote and to Labour’s 203 and 32,2%.

This was not the disaster suffered by Labour’s counterpart in France, the Parti Socialiste (PS) in 2017. They went from governing the country under President François Hollande and being in government to marginalisation. They scored with their Presidential candidate Benoît Hamon, standing on a Green left platform won 6,36%, and 25 seats in the National Assembly (out of 577). Their defeat, the result of disillusionment with the outgoing President’s personal detachment, and cabinet’s policies, rooted in a long-term concern with power-for-power’s sake, had been helped by the defection of key figures and supporters to Emmanuel Macron and his movement, La France en marche.

Immediately after the election the PS Premier Secrétaire Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, published, after resigning his position, Chronique d’une Débâcle (2017). The book was harsh, and detailed, about the “solitary behaviour” (that is, taking decisions off his own back) of Benoīt Hamon The socialist candidate appeared to wish to “refound” the left as a whole, morally and ideologically, rather than lead his troops into battle (“à la charge supreme”). The concentration on what one could call a Green New Deal, failed to talk to the wider public. With Hamon’s “Green Party” campaign, you got a “Green Party election score (“campagne d’écologiste, score d’écologiste” Page 111). He was not, in short, “présidentiable”.

For somebody of my generation the first introduction to the genre of political insider accounts was through the memorable pages of La Vie quotidienne à Matignon au temps de l’union de la gauche. Thierry Pfister. (1985). The journalist tells the story of the first left governments under François Mitterrand. It pulled no punches either, presenting a detailed account of how Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy operated, and how he had got squeezed out. Pfister did not hide his antipathies, including towards the President, a view which he elaborated in Lettre ouverte à la génération Mitterrand qui marche à côté de ses pompes (1988). La Vie quotidienne was introduced to the world by the right-wing daily Le Figaro.

I can’t recall much sustained hatred, other than some whinging, about Pfister from his targets. Nor, on the publication of Chronique d’une Débâcle were Hamon supporters omnipresent on social media screaming at the Saboteurs of the Parti Socialiste Parallel Centre.

Thin Skins…

Perhaps French centre left and left-wing activists have thicker skins, or are used to these kind of hard-hitting accounts.

By contrast, some on the left in Britain have taken great exception to the extracts just published from Times’ journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn.

From what one can read the book lacks much of a hold on Labour Party internal currents, that is ‘factionalism’ – something which Pfister (long background on PS left), and Cambadélis (former Trotskyist of the ‘Lambertist’ brand) have in spades.

The Week gives the main points:

Labour was warned of 2019 election disaster.
Corbyn ‘could not trust’ his closest allies, “

Despite the damning polling results, “many in the room still believed” Labour could triumph, arguing that “the election of 2017 had shattered the old certainties, and Corbyn was determined to do so again”, the book says.

But to do so would “require Corbyn to summon every drop of the energy” that months of Brexit drama and anti-Semitism scandals has “drained from him”, write Pogrund and Maguire. And “those closest to him suspected he was in no state to do so”.

These fears grew during the campaign, as Corbyn began falling out with his “closest lieutenants”, whom he came to “barely trust”.

“His detractors at Westminster often contended that he had no idea what he was doing,” the book says. “For once, the jibe was accurate – though not for want of trying on Corbyn’s part.

“Strategy for the campaign he was supposed to be leading had largely been decided – or, more accurately, disagreed on – in his absence.”
Deputy (Tom Watson) considered defecting
Split with McDonnell over anti-Semitism.
Republican Corbyn bonded with the Sussexes

Poor old Skwawky has tried to his oar in over one part of the book:

Murdoch-Guardian Corbyn attack comes unstuck early on as ITV explodes claim about former leader’s wife https://t.co/OJnUp9P6MV

— The SKWAWKBOX (@skwawkbox) August 25, 2020

Many would consider that the deep disagreements over Brexit are at the heart of the account.

This is the stand of John McDonnell.

His worst fears had been realised: despite his best efforts to cajole Corbyn into supporting a second referendum, Labour was repelling pro-EU voters. As Waters sat down, the shadow chancellor delegated the inquisition to his wife. Cynthia, like Lavery, struggled at first to believe what she had been told. She had spent much of her career at market-research companies and queried whether the research was watertight. An angry Lavery went further. YouGov, attendees recall him fuming, had been founded by card-carrying Conservatives, a charge he raised with Waters and Sookoo repeatedly. He insisted that they could not and should not trust a “Tory firm”.

But McDonnell had already made up his mind: Labour must do everything in its power to win back pro-EU voters. It would refrain from discussing the detail of Brexit and extol the virtues of giving voters the final say via a second referendum. It was a strategy Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s chief strategist, had long argued against, warning that the working class could desert Labour en masse. But he was not present that day. He was also increasingly outmuscled by Corbyn’s oldest comrade, who was by then plotting Milne’s demotion. “From that point out, our strategy was to hug the remainers,” says an official present that morning.

Some now piling in suggest that Labour was wrong to offer the prospect of a Second Referendum.

Their opinion might be taken seriously if they did not come from circles, like the inner core around Corbyn, his advisers Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray, which supported Leave in the first place. Had not the Lexit (Left Exit) argued that leaving the neo-liberal EU open the way for a movement to “take back control”? Instead here was marked shift to the right. The Brexit Party (involving people that the Lexiteers worked with in the Full Brexit front) in the 2019 European election topped the poll at 30,52% and , 29 seats. It was the xenophobic right that was taking charge.

The backers of a People’s Brexit in the labour movement and left ranged from the traditional Labour Right, the patriots of Blue Labour, Parliamentary sovereigntists, to the Morning Star, Counterfire, the SWP, and national Trotskyism, in groups like the Socialist Party. They were joined by vociferous opponents of any referendum like the paleo-Trotskyists of Socialist Appeal.

This left had done all it could to keep a movement going against austerity with the People’s Assembly. As attendance at their events dwindled off the scale, they were pained to see the People’s Vote campaign bring hundreds of thousands onto the streets. It was galling to see internationalists from the independent radical left, Labour left and centre-left and Greens organise a broad campaign, Another Europe is Possible, that joined, with very visible contingents, these protests.

Lacking the courage to organise their own People’s Brexit march the Lexit left’s main public effort seemed to be to encourage an early election.

In September 2019 Lindsey German wrote on the Counterfire site,

General election: unite and fight

General election speculation grows and it looks like it may be called later this week, for a date in mid-October. The Blairites and Libdems want to delay, partly because they want a second referendum, partly because they fear a Corbyn government.”

“Labour needs to be confident that it can win against these rich and undemocratic right wingers. It needs to project this. It needs trades unions, campaigners, all those who suffer under the Tories……..

This is some of the background which could be added to the book.

But what there is remains of great interest.

Arguing, in the face of growing debate, some people are still inclined to dismiss Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn.

Phil writes,

The Hack Obsession with Corbyn

What’s interesting are the dynamics driving this continued obsessive focus on matters Corbyn, despite having sat on the backbenches for the last four months. Some comrades locate it in a generalised campaign against socialist politics – discredit Corbyn, discredit the ideas. Well, yes. And that’s why the Tory press can always find space to put the boot in, but in the age of the attention economy and social media, it’s not solely driven from the editorial offices.

……

This is the condition of establishment journalism in our period of crisis. Attention gives them incentive to bang on about Corbyn, their experience of social media gives them incentive to bang on about Corbyn, and their pooled anxieties give them incentive to bang on about Corbyn.

This might have a shred of credibility if backbench retiree Corbyn had not taken the step of publicly advocating support for a candidate in an internal trade union election.

Jeremy Corbyn backs Roger McKenzie in UNISON general secretary race – via @LabourList https://t.co/KX3502FOl9

— Emina Ibrahim (@Emina_ibrahim) August 24, 2020

John McDonnell takes another view:

John McDonnell, meanwhile, has backed another left candidate – Paul Holmes, who came third in 2010: https://t.co/W3NL5drh6U

— Sienna Rodgers (@siennamarla) August 24, 2020

The extracts continue,

Corbyn's speech post-Skripal was gutted of language blaming Russia or demanding sanctions, per leaked docs

One aide removed reference to Crimea, writing: "I’m not sure the solidarity with Ukraine part is quite balanced enough"

More from Left Out here👇https://t.co/PqMWFFs3Lt

— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) August 25, 2020

For Milne, just as for Corbyn, foreign policy was the real locomotive force of his leftism. Both understood their socialism in terms of global power, and who wielded it. In their view, the US was both a global hegemon and a force for ill in the world. They believed its imperialism ought to be resisted, and that resistance to its imperialism could almost always be justified. According to aides, Corbyn was wont to break off sensitive discussions at shadow cabinet to bend the ear of Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, “about the Western Sahara or about West Papua. Self-determination for oppressed peoples was his driving thing when it came to foreign policy”. No matter how fractious relations between Thornberry’s team and the leader’s office, Corbyn only ever wanted to talk about one thing. “Emily always knew,” says a source close to Thornberry, “that if she walked into the room, he would still want to ask: ‘Did you see that article by John Pilger about East Timor?’

To his MP critics, Milne took a similarly Manichean view of geopolitics, and during his career at The Guardian had on several occasions ended up on the same side of the argument as Putin. In March 2014 he had defended Russia’s annexation of Crimea and praised its role as “a limited counterweight to unilateral western power”. In October of that year, Milne attended the Valdai conference for Russia experts in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. There he chaired a lengthy question-and-answer session with Putin. However, he had always criticised the regime’s authoritarianism and aggression.

…

All one can say here is that this “anti-imperialism”, campism, is not, in many left-wing people’s view, internationalism.

More,

The influence of Seumas Milne became a sticking point between the Labour leader and Mr McDonnell.The huddles were conducted under lobby terms — meaning Milne’s answers could be used, but only on the condition that they were credited to a Labour spokesman rather than him personally.

What he said on March 14 was deemed so remarkable by the parliamentary press corps that the Press Association, the most conservative of media outlets when it came to questions of style and convention, defied the unspoken rule and named Milne as the Labour spokesman in question. He had not only doubled down on Corbyn’s suggestion that the government send a sample of novichok to Russia for testing, but compared the incident to the build-up to the Iraq War. “I think, obviously, the government has access to information and intelligence on this matter which others don’t,” he said. “However, also, there’s a history in relation to WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and intelligence which is problematic, to put it mildly. So I think the right approach is to seek the evidence; to follow international treaties, particularly in relation to prohibited chemical weapons, because this was a chemical weapons attack, carried out on British soil. There are procedures that need to be followed in relation to that.”

When news of the briefing reached John McDonnell’s office, James Mills, the shadow chancellor’s spin doctor, kicked a bin across the room. “That’s f***ing going to cost us the election!” Mills shouted. “That’s f***ing stupid. Who the f*** does stuff like that?”

…….

While the leader’s office happily took the speech off McBride’s hands, there was a limit to the case they were willing to make. Andrew Fisher, primary author of most of Corbyn’s Commons speeches, and Milne, who had identical views on foreign policy to the leader, sought to dilute the tone. It was gutted of any statements levelling blame at Russia, support for Nato, or anything else that Corbyn might regard as unduly imperialist in its tone.

Where Thornberry would have labelled Russia “guilty as charged”, Corbyn said: “There is clear evidence that the Russian state has a case to answer, and it has failed to do so.” A section on the importance of seeking cross-party consensus on Britain’s response — and committing Labour to supporting the government — was deleted. Thornberry’s endorsement of the government’s reprisals against the Kremlin was replaced with the more restrained: “We have supported actions taken.” A call for a European Court of Human Rights “case against Russia” turned into a more general inquiry about whether the government would consider “initiating or supporting” a wider examination of extraterritorial violations of human rights.

Corbyn's catastro**** on the Skripal case is dissected in the latest Left Out excerpt. Thornberry and McDonnell were systematically undermined and public confidence in Labour trashed – for what? https://t.co/EygPx2mmje

— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) August 25, 2020

Against the advice of the dismissers many comrades have already ordered copies of the book…

Written by Andrew Coates

August 25, 2020 at 12:08 pm

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Capitalism, Conservative Party, Europe, European Elections, European Left, French Left, French Politics, Human Rights, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left, Sectarianism, Trotskyism

Tagged with Brexit, Europe, European Left, French Left, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Labour Party

Andrew Murray on Corbyn and Anti-Semitism, “But…the Jewish community today is relatively prosperous”.

with 13 comments

Latest Extract from Left Out by Gabriel Pogrund, Patrick Maguire

In 2018, an aide visited John McDonnell's riverside bungalow in Norfolk to broker a reconciliation between him and Corbyn — after a summer of silence

Here's why anti-semitism struck at Corbyn's core and divided his team

Plus: interiew with Andrew Murray https://t.co/XBctRcfWLm

— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) August 24, 2020

This Morning I was going to write a post comparing supporters of the Corbyn nearly won in 2017, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

The leader of La France Insoumise gave a lengthy, I mean lengthy, speech yesterday to his supporters at his movement’s summer camp, okay université d’ete. The leader of La France insoumise ranged widely, he talked of the French revolution, of women’s struggles against Le Maitron (Baker’s boy, the nickname for Louis XVI), the value of Cuban doctors, the threats of ‘anglo-saxon’ Pension funds against French sovereignty, how Covid-19 was exacerbated by cross-border workers, the People, Socialism and the national Plan, Sovereignty, and his Green policies.

Addressing the issue of alliances with the French Green Party (EELV) he reminded them firmly of his 7 millions votes in the French Presidential elections of 2017.

Here he is, after a few others, ending with a rendition of the Marseillaise (Video, Two Hours long – enjoy!)

Apart from a comparison with Mélenchon there were plenty of other things to say about this Sunday Times report,

Corbyn was forced to plead for info about his own strategy, emails from the heart of 2019 campaign show

He claimed his team was excluding him, writing: "I am fully entitled to be consulted"

Yet aides felt he was wrecking plans

Left Out serialised today https://t.co/ES8Lr3Sc6N

— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) August 23, 2020

The failure to take a clear internationalist stand against Brexit, the omnishambles, the rows, the way Corbyn would not speak to John McDonnell for months (something I can personally well believe – ask me!), and the nasty asides (I hate to say it, but even I ended feeling sorry for the way some treated Corbyn).

This extract needs some serious consideration,

McDonnell listened in silence. His worst fears had been realised: despite his best efforts to cajole Corbyn into supporting a second referendum, Labour was repelling pro-EU voters. As Waters sat down, the shadow chancellor delegated the inquisition to his wife. Cynthia, like Lavery, struggled at first to believe what she had been told. She had spent much of her career at market-research companies and queried whether the research was watertight. An angry Lavery went further. YouGov, attendees recall him fuming, had been founded by card-carrying Conservatives, a charge he raised with Waters and Sookoo repeatedly. He insisted that they could not and should not trust a “Tory firm”.

.But McDonnell had already made up his mind: Labour must do everything in its power to win back pro-EU voters. It would refrain from discussing the detail of Brexit and extol the virtues of giving voters the final say via a second referendum. It was a strategy Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s chief strategist, had long argued against, warning that the working class could desert Labour en masse. But he was not present that day. He was also increasingly outmuscled by Corbyn’s oldest comrade, who was by then plotting Milne’s demotion. “From that point out, our strategy was to hug the remainers,” says an official present that morning.

Many in the room still believed. The election of 2017 had shattered the old certainties, and Corbyn was determined to do so again. Even the doubters felt there might be a path to victory, if only, as Milne had told colleagues in August, they could move the argument beyond Brexit.

There was even a a tale to heat the cockles of your heart:

Heartwarming royal friendship: Jeremy Corbyn gave Harry & Meghan book of left-wing poetry during Megxit https://t.co/VegVXS8pP8

— Andrew Coates (@Pabloite) August 23, 2020

I jest but there were good people engaged in the Labour election campaign for a transformative democratic socialist programme.

It is a tragedy.

But initial considerations, about those (from Counterfire and the Morning Star and their pro-Brexit allies in Labour) who pushed for an election, and who welcomed the opportunity offered by the LIberal Democrats decision to do for one, seem pushed aside after the news today.

This, to say the least, is going to create waves.

Corbyn aide Andrew Murray on why Jeremy Corbyn struggled with anti-Semitismhttps://t.co/BczIilGi7k pic.twitter.com/QlGewiJGv7

— Sebastian Payne (@SebastianEPayne) August 24, 2020

The Mail says,

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn couldn’t empathise with today’s ‘prosperous’ Jewish community and stopped talking to shadow Chancellor John McDonnell for months, a new book claims.

Stunning new details from the party’s largest general election defeat since 1935 have come to light in Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn, written by two journalists with front row seats to Labour’s calamitous attempt to gain power.

..

Serialised in The Sunday Times and the Times, the book details how Jeremy Corbyn ignored his chief of staff Karie Murphy who had suggested a visit to Auschwitz as a gesture after he faced criticism for failing to address antisemitism in the Labour Party.

It also reveals Mr Corbyn fell out with John McDonnell to the extent that the pair didn’t speak to each other ‘for months’.

The book claims Mr McDonnell was unhappy with the disciplinary matters against Jewish MP Dame Margaret Hodge who had questioned Mr Corbyn about antisemitism in the Commons and Mr McDonnell was furious that Jeremy didn’t intervene.

Left Out, by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire. claims top advisors knew the party was heading towards electoral disaster months before voters went to the polls in 2019, but were unable to stop it.

Murray’s statement does not indicate anti-Semitism but a reluctance to give the issue a priority.

This is nuts. Murray gave a more thoughtful and persuasive account of why Corbyn struggled with antisemitism than anyone in LOTO. And unlike many, he was happy to quoted. He's merely contrasting the material condition of Jews today vs 100yrs ago – by any metric radically improved https://t.co/hoxaALSsiv

— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) August 24, 2020

One can speculate that Corbyn, and there is evidence for this, was early on unlikely to empathise with the North London Jewish community in prosperous places such as Muswell Hill. This is near to where he first became active in Crouch End. Claims by Jewish Voice for Labour that Corbyn defended the Wood Green Jewish Community (there is no Synagogue in Wood Green, nor a ‘community’ the nearest are in Bounds Green and Muswell Hill) always sounded hollow. *

This indicates a problem which Murray does not help resolve.

*Corbyn “organised the Apr. 1977 defence of Jewish populated Wood Green from a Neo-Nazi march” (Jewish Voice for Labour) – Corbyn was a liaison for Haringey Labour Council, not the “organiser”.

Update.

Jewish Chronicle. Aleks Phillips.

In an effort to “reclaim an overwhelmingly hostile narrative”, Mr Corbyn’s chief of staff Karie Murphy is said to have drawn up a list of suggestions that might help to “soothe the nerves” of the Jewish community about the Labour leader.

The book says: “Some of Murphy’s suggestions were mundane: a round-table summit with community organisations, a series of meetings with Jewish Labour activists and MPs, outreach to Jewish communities outside of London, and a new strategy for rebutting stories in the media.

“Others were more striking. Corbyn would visit Auschwitz. He could meet children at London’s Jewish Free School. Haaretz, Israel’s liberal broadsheet, would get a set-piece interview. Congregants at a progressive synagogue and residents of a Jewish care home would get to mix with Corbyn too.”

However, all but one of those suggestions came to naught. Labour’s code of conduct was amended to “comprehensively rule out all forms of prejudice”.

The book also claims Mr Corbyn deferred to a circle of Islington friends who formed a “kitchen cabinet” to help him make decisions on how to deal with the party’s antisemitism crisis.

“To them, the communal organisations demanding the adoption of full IHRA — like the Board of Deputies — were firmly of the right, and therefore too unrepresentative to dictate policy in the community’s name,” the book says.

Mr Corbyn “harboured the same aversion” to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism as those who contended its examples “were an attempt to police legitimate criticism of the Israeli state’s conduct in Palestine”, according to “those who knew him best”, the book claims.”

Adviser suggested Corbyn did not empathise with Jews because they are ‘relatively prosperous

Written by Andrew Coates

August 24, 2020 at 9:52 am

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Conservative Party, Europe, European Left, Israel, Jews, Labour Party, Left

Tagged with Anti-Semitism, Brexit, European Left, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party

Jean Luc-Mélenchon’s weakened La France insoumise looks for Green friends.

with 3 comments

Fameuse photo

Friday: Jean-Luc Mélenchon shares platform with the Green (EELV) Mayor of Grenoble Éric Piolle.

Left populism is fizzling out. France has been one of the best known laboratories for this experiment. At one point even the English language left press was full of article about La France insoumise and its would-be charismatic leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Dullards who expressed doubts about the patriotic side of the one-time Lambertist Trotskyist and life-long admirer of French President François Mitterrand. were regularly treated to lectures on the deeply held love of France’s revolutionary history by the French left.

Yet accusations of nationalism have dogged the rallying-point, as the controversy over anti-immigration sovereigntists such as Djordje Kuzmanovic (edged out in 2018), indicated. A regional councillor, Andréa Kotarac, went so far as to leave LFI last year to give his support to Marine Le Pen in that year’s European election.

The Catholic patriot and socialist writer Charles Péguy, once wrote, ” Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique” – Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” In the case of La France insoumise it looks as if neither their mystical vision of uniting the people against the elite (Nous-le peuple, eux-les élites) nor their political hopes of “taking the power” are on course.

Readers of La Chute de la maison Mélenchon by Thomas Guénolé (2019), will know that the attempt to weld together the people an epoch their leader called l’ére des peuples. have had deep problems over the last couple of years. As the political scientist and former activist, who left LFI in a storm of controversy, wrote, the “movement” of those who ” se reconnaissent dans la démarche de Jean-Luc Mélenchon”. One cause was the lack of any democratic way of bringing supporters to that recognition other than in agreement to the leading group’s views.

“Démocratie véritable et autogestion dans les paroles, mais pilotage centralisé et autoritaire dans la réalité.”

Guénolé launched his broadside against LFI not only because it claimed to offer genuine self-managed democracy in words, but was centralised and authoritarian in reality. Having been created by the Helmsman and his inner circle, drawn initially from the party-club the Parti de gauche (PG) (which originated as a faction within the Parti Socialiste) LFI, run as a “dictatorship” it expended people’s energy in false hope. It had become concerned with the interests of an small group, not the people of the left as a whole. It could not be, he argued, in its present form, the basis for a real “union de la gauche” , toute la gauche”, from the Communists, the Greens, to the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste and Lutte ouvrière, and open to potential offers from the Socialists. This was the basis, he passionately declared, that could win elections for the French left.

The crises pictured in La Chute have not been overcome.

After having treated his 2017 Presidential score (first round) of 7 million vote (19,58 %) as his personal property, which anybody else on the left had to accept, if he cared to allow them to agree with him, Mélenchon ended up with 17 seats in the National Assembly (out of 577).

He has since seen his electoral position progressively eroded

LFI sank to 6,3% of the vote in the 2019 European elections,

This year’s poor showing in the local elections set the seal on LFI

Their

lists were for the most part eliminated in the first round or (in their rare presence) had a reduced place in the few union lists (with other forces on the left, or with Greens) where they were present, LFI have failed to meet their targets.

Après l’échec aux municipales, La France insoumise mise déjà sur 2022

At the end of June this year Manon Le Bretton, head of their internal education department, quit her official post in the latest in a new wave of discontent

La France insoumise ne parvient pas à régler ses tensions internes

Abel Mestre. Le Monde 24th of June 2020.

At the beginning of June, Le Monde obtained an internal memo, signed by some forty executives and activists, denouncing “a way of operating that endangers the future of the movement” .

One of the inner party managers, Charlotte Girard, loyal since the days when the PG was part of the Parti Socialiste, resigned. She stated that inside LFI there was no channel to express disagreements, “ il n’y a pas de moyen de ne pas être d’accord ».

A few days ago the French media carried stories about an opening by LFI towards other groups on the left and to left-wing Greens.

This bloke was on France Inter:

🗞 « Entre @EELV et La @FranceInsoumise, le débat ne porte pas sur l’écologie mais sur l’Europe et la question sociale »

➡️ https://t.co/WvZ9OCYZe7

Interview de rentrée dans @libe aujourd’hui en kiosques. #AMFiS2020 pic.twitter.com/71dquphsWZ

— Adrien Quatennens (@AQuatennens) August 21, 2020

LFI are still going on about their 2017 vote: Du côté de LFI, les cadres vantent les sept millions d’électeurs qui ont voté “Insoumis” à la présidentielle de 2017.

France Info today.

By sharing the platform with Jean-Luc Mélenchon , it is to the left wing of the environmentalists that the mayor of Grenoble (Isère) Éric Piolle sends a message….“Let us look at each other in our common fights, (…). In a family, there is diversity: we argue, we bother, but in the end (…) we have the same objectives. Our opponent it is the right, it is Macron, it is the extreme right “ , declared the mayor of Grenoble, on the occasion of the summer university of rebellious France in Châteauneuf-sur-Isère.

🔴 Piolle (EELV) aux AMFiS : « Nous changerons le pays avec ceux qui sont insoumis »

Ce vendredi 21 août, le maire EELV de Grenoble @EricPiolle était aux côtés de @JLMelenchon aux #AMFiS2020, les universités d’été de la France insoumise.

Notre article⬇️https://t.co/EENuXzrWur

— L'insoumission (@L_insoumission) August 21, 2020

The France Info (above) report notes that activists from the green party EELV are considerably more sceptical.

As well they might be!

Le Monde, which did not even bother in this article to add the word “left” to the description of LFI as “populist”, continues the saga up till this week.

Affaiblis, les « insoumis » de Jean-Luc Mélenchon sortent de leur isolement

Après des élections municipales compliquées, La France insoumise profite de son université d’été pour tendre la main à l’aile gauche d’Europe Ecologie-Les Verts.

In the meantime the social democratic wing around the Parti Socialiste, in the shape of former editor of Libêration, Laurent Joffrin, have their own plans to draw in the Greens….

Bénédicte Ferrière et Didier Le Bret – avocate et ambassadeur – s’engagent !
Vous aussi rejoignez-nous sur : https://t.co/qdfhBgGidb https://t.co/io0P55Ut0V

— Les Engagé.e.s (@_Les_engages) August 19, 2020

Written by Andrew Coates

August 22, 2020 at 4:27 pm

Posted in Capitalism, Europe, European Elections, European Left, French Left, French Politics, Nationalism, Populism

Tagged with European Left, French Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, La France insoumise, Left Populism, Populism

Galloway’s Scottish Tory-Unionist-Marxist-Leninist Alliance 4 Unity Backed by Workers Party of Britain.

The Rise Of The Alt-Left British Media

Marxist-Leninist Cadre of Workers Party of Britain Back Alliance 4 Unity.

This has indeed set the cat amongst the pigeons.

Michael Gove in talks with George Galloway to discuss protecting the United Kingdom against Scottish independence

Michael Gove has been in talks with George Galloway to discuss how to protect the UK against rising support.

Nationalists have reacted to the dapper Gent’s latest proposal on who should vote in an Independence Referendum.

Outrage as George Galloway sticks his oar in on Scottish referendum

And Michael Gove thinks he has a point.

George Galloway sparked outrage today after he spoke out about the Scottish referendum.

The controversial political figure – who advocated for Leave during the Brexit vote – said if a second IndyRef does take place then the 795,000 Scots living elsewhere in the UK must have a vote.

In 2014 those who considered themselves Scottish living outside of the country were not able to have their say. Regardless, Scotland voted 55 per cent to remain as part of the union.

It has emerged Michael Gove has held private talks on saving the Union with George Galloway, Danny Alexander and Jack McConnell among others … https://t.co/qBkDlw0eFQ

— The National (@ScotNational) August 21, 2020

7.04 mins worth every second 👏👏👏👏 https://t.co/3jLyUxQf6f

— Sharon McGonigal #4698🇬🇧🇦🇺🇳🇿🇨🇦🇺🇸♿ (@Shazza1uk) August 21, 2020

In a shock move the Workers Party of Britain (leader George Galloway) – Scotland – has backed George Galloway’s Tory-Unionist-Marxist-Leninist Front, the Alliance 4 Unity.

The working classes of Britain need to stay united. Scottish Nationalism is dangerous and divisive political manoeuvre to further fragment us. Our cause to stand alongside the workers of this island nations to bring about real social changes that benefit all. @WorkersPartyGB

— Workers Party of Britain – Scotland (@WPB_Scotland) August 22, 2020

The Party, whose deputy is Joti Brar from the Communist Party of Great Britain (M-L) and an active member of the Stalin Society, has not lost its Marxist-Leninist principles. Playing a leading role in the Gallowayite bloc with the patriotic advanced bourgeoisie they can spot anti-national pro-imperialist forces rearing their heads in Belarus.

This 'populist' street movement that has popped up in Belarus is an imperialist facade, like the ones we've seen in Hong Kong and Venezuela.

There's nothing brave or progressive about a bunch of liberals chanting pro US and EU slogans.https://t.co/pWKonlowep pic.twitter.com/8nZD8RiWlu

— Workers Party of Britain (@WorkersPartyGB) August 21, 2020

Jodi Brar says,

Be in no doubt: the media noise about #Belarus is classic #colorrevolution playbook stuff. What’s at stake is a people’s right to independence and freedom. #StopImperialism @WorkersPartyGB @georgegalloway @Rango1917 @calebmaupin @BenjaminNorton https://t.co/7QWrh4LGaN

— Joti Brar (@joti2gaza) August 19, 2020

Support is mushrooming for the new Galloway front:

👀 JUST IN: Outstanding interview with @georgegalloway in today’s Mail.

Have a read and RT this! pic.twitter.com/911fF4PVu9

— Alliance for Unity (@Alliance4Unity) August 22, 2020

Written by Andrew Coates

August 22, 2020 at 11:55 am

Posted in Animal Liberation, Anti-Fascism, Britain, Conservative Party, Conservatives, European Left, Imperialism, Left, Nationalism

Tagged with George Galloway, marxism leninism, Nationalism, Populism, Scotland, Workers' Party of Britain

Kerry-Anne Mendoza, “¡No pasarán!” alt-left doesn’t need “liberal commentators policing our resistance to Fascism”.

with 11 comments

¡No pasarán! to “Bullshit Liberal Commentators Policing Our Resistance to Fascism”.

Time was when the ‘new media’ Barons and Baronesses of the ‘alt-left’ media in the UK were talk of the day.

In fact, no time at all, since this appeared in 2017,.

The 2017 general election is driving record traffic to the loose collection of alt-left British outlets that are positioning themselves as Corbyn’s outriders, jumping on stories without much of the nuance of outlets that remain rooted in mainstream reporting traditions.

Jim Waterson continued,

The Canary – the doyen of the alt-left media outlets – first launched in late 2015 it was dubbed “the left-wing Daily Mail” by virtue of being written in a way that is accessible to everyone.

Phil had a perceptive overview,

The Alt-Left: A Critical Appreciation

You know who I’m talking about. The Canary, Skwawkbox, Novara, Evolve Politics and Another Angry Voice have been singled out by the mainstream as the authentic voices of the new socialism that has seized hold of the Labour Party and powered it to its highest number of votes for 20 years.

…

What they all share is a default (and correct) assumption that the system is rigged and the powers-that-be will conspire, collude, and collaborate to forever gerrymander privilege for themselves and their cronies.

He noted the “size of their audience”.

Alas, things didn’t turn out the way these enthusiasts hoped.

Novara (who? it’s that bloke who talks about luxury communism, or spaceships, or something), Evolve Politics (?) Another Angry Voice..

Skwawkbox, or his mates call him, Skwawky – that’s the one who’s got a bit of a UNTE leak problem, who spends his time these days campaigning to make sure no Labour government is every elected – and the Canary are still followed by a few.

Audiences are said to be in free-fall for all these outlets.

The Boss of the Canary, Kerry-Anne Mendoza, has just got herself into a fine mess.

She’s fallen out with Owen Jones, somebody she calls a ‘kiss bottom’.

The brave anti-fascist is not backing down!

There’s an Owen Jones tweet for every occasion.

A melt *and* a hypocrite. pic.twitter.com/GbBPqN2fmK
— Kerry-Anne Mendoza (@TheMendozaWoman) August 21, 2020

Here is her really at it: kneecapping and all.

The Left doesn't need bullshit liberal commentators policing our resistance to fascism.

They kneecapped us during the assault on anti-Apartheid activists.
They kneecapped us during the assault on Corbynism
And now they're kneecapping us on this.

Enough. No pasaran.
— Kerry-Anne Mendoza (@TheMendozaWoman) August 21, 2020

Here’s why:

This is a genuinely despicable tweet, belittling the seriousness of the industrialised mass murder of six million Jews. Anyone who speaks like this has no place in the left whatsoever. pic.twitter.com/g0Sfcxuamp
— Owen Jones 🌹 (@OwenJones84) August 21, 2020

Lots of Jewish people got in touch with me about this tweet, expressed their distress, asked me to call it out as a left-wing commentator, which I gladly did. When minorities on the receiving end of bigotry ask for our support, we should listen to them.
— Owen Jones 🌹 (@OwenJones84) August 21, 2020

Happy are the days of those who can pile into Owen Jones.

.@TheMendozaWoman is an absolute diamond.
Owen Jones is a sycophantic, self-important weathervane.
That is all. pic.twitter.com/9SllUwy6T7
— The Prole Star (@TheProleStar) August 21, 2020

Mendoza, who was a star Corbynista, is no longer a member of the Labour Party, although she remains a leading resistance fighter against fascism.

Perhaps she hopes that being boorish will help her media vehicle regain a lost audience.

Somebody loves her:

Ooh love me a bit of Trot on Trot action.#cranketycrank pic.twitter.com/HwKf5DThym
— Julie Cattell 😎 🇪🇺🌹#nospaceforJewhate (@cooljool80) August 21, 2020

This Blog Says:

More Power to You Cde Owen!

She's not a comrade. The solution to these horrific interventions are not private chats. The end.
— Owen Jones 🌹 (@OwenJones84) August 21, 2020

Written by Andrew Coates

August 21, 2020 at 4:47 pm

Posted in Communism, Conservative Party, Free Speech, Internet Freedom, Labour Party, Left, Uncategorized

Tagged with Alt-Left, European Left, Fascism, Owen Jones

Coming to terms with Keir Starmer: the future of the “post-Corbyn Left”.

An argument for hope — an open letter to the post-Corbyn left

Keir Starmer: fighting “the Block of Reaction Behind Johnson and Cummings”.

The last weeks have seen an outpouring from what some call a “pool of toxic emotions” about the Labour leader. In a counter-reaction there are signs are that a section of the Corbyn left is beginning to rethink. There are influential calls to end the self-absorption and relentless attacks against what they perceive as Labour Leader Keir Starmer’s ‘failure’.

Books, such as Owen Jones’ This Land, are scheduled for the autumn.

This is what Owen says,

To be clear, for those misunderstanding the tweet, wilfully or otherwise: I'm saying that rather than a self-defeating guerrilla war with the leadership, the Labour left should focus on championing issues and policies, including Starmer's own '10 Pledges'. https://t.co/9IsK7gBOqw

— Owen Jones 🌹 (@OwenJones84) August 17, 2020

It is so utterly soul-destroying to see the non-stop sniping at Keir.

This Tory Govt is the most right wing since Thatcher. They WILL do serious damage to our society (many of them, like Raab, probably don’t believe “society” even exists).

More unity and solidarity please!! 🌹

— Brian W (@IntrepidBrian) August 17, 2020

The following has been widely circulated.

It lays out some important markers.

Christine Berry ( previously Director of Policy and Government for the New Economics Foundation)

Over the last six months many Labour activists will also have experienced burn-out and grief following the 2019 election result; bitterness and resentment at the revelations in the ‘Labour Leaks’ report; disappointment and despair at the turn taken by the Starmer leadership.

The piece is important and should be read through. People can make up their own minds.

Here are few highlights,

Losing the rose tinted glasses: an honest assessment of the Corbyn years

It’s easy to fixate on the actions of saboteurs in Labour HQ, on the few thousand votes that lost Labour the 2017 election. It’s tempting to dwell on the alternate universe where we could have had a radical Labour government, where the pandemic wasn’t being murderously mismanaged by Johnson and Cummings. But here’s the thing: this alternate universe never really existed.

….

……it’s worth remembering that Corbyn was given a free pass by activists on many of the things that Starmer is now berated for — simply because they trusted the former and do not trust the latter. Starmer’s interview on Black Lives Matter was awful, but Corbyn promised more police on the beat — using anti-austerity politics to appeal to socially conservative attitudes rather than challenging them. Starmer was roundly abused for not committing to the party’s 2030 decarbonisation target, but neither did Corbyn: the policy was pushed and passed by members and did not make it into the 2019 manifesto (reportedly because of union opposition). Yes, of course the left must hold Starmer to account. But we can only do this effectively if we’re honest about what really marks him out from Corbyn — not by holding him up against a mythical and increasingly idealised version of the latter.

It is possible to expand this list. One of my gripes is that the good work on developing policies on taxation and social ownership was not accompanied by anything more than (fairly muted) rhetoric on replacing Universal Credit and offering a serious set of policies on what should replace it – an issue that affects millions of people.

….

There’s no doubt about it — despair is tempting. But it’s not helpful. Despair risks turning us all into angry armchair Twitter warriors. If there’s no longer anything at stake, why not vent your rage at Starmer and his shadow cabinet, denouncing them as a shower of ‘red Tories’? The problem is that this produces a vicious cycle: in the nature of social media, the main audience for this is actually other people on our own side, who in turn feel increasingly powerless and despairing. The left shrinks down to an embittered and isolated sect that nobody else listens to.

Berry could have added that the continued taint of anti-semitism is far from absent amongst these comments.

Next,

Some are inclined to characterise the Starmer leadership as a return to unreconstructed Blairism. I don’t think this is particularly helpful. It simply isn’t yet clear what Starmer stands for. Perhaps he doesn’t even know himself. To be sure, the Labour right are doing their level best to step into the vacuum — but their victory is not a foregone conclusion. The internal debate is still raging — there are those pushing from inside for the party to be bolder and to engage more seriously with the left. Even the Labour Together report concluded that the party must retain its economic radicalism in order to win. But this debate cannot be contested if its left pole becomes fragmented, bitter and demoralised — still less if merely engaging in that debate is enough to get you loudly denounced as a shill who’s probably angling for a job in HQ.

I am not clear exactly what a “shill” is, my North American is pretty rusty. But I assume it’s to say that anybody who comes out with anything good about the Labour leader is a toady.

It is hard for anybody (and there are those of us around) who first came across Keir Starmer in the Socialist Society and Socialist Alternatives in the 1980s and early 1990s – left activism that went on for nearly a decade – to think of the present leader as a Blairite. Let alone “unreconstructed”. He then spent another decade as a respected human rights lawyer, and some of us actually know people who worked with him to boot!

But the loud-voices of factionalists (many from very unreconstructed leftist splinters) and their gulls, are not going to be answered by saying that “perhaps” Starmer does not really know what he thinks, poor chap.

Many would suggest that Keir Starmer is a left of centre Labour leader and politician – not in the latter respect as would-be ‘populist’ of the left – committed to socialist internationalist values and human rights. It is up to his team, and our efforts as Labour members and supporters, to help him develop policies that embody transformative politics. It is also, and it is hard not to underline this too much, a good place to start by helping and supporting our elected leadership.

Berry concludes,

It might be hard to see it right now, but the UK left is still stronger than it was five years ago — and will remain so if we can find it in ourselves to act out of hope rather than rage. In decades to come, perhaps Corbynism will look like a transitional phenomenon on the way to the era-defining change we need. We have to hope so, and act as though it is true. What else is there to do?

Despite the above critical remarks there are many acute observations in the article, but one is not there: the fact that there were people on the left who called to vote for Keir Starmer. I am one of them

From those who did not there are plenty of “cries of rage and recrimination” , so many that apart from emotions (ones that seem to have clouded the what Starmer actually said on Black Lives Matter, the word “moment” far from a dismissal was, for a start, clearly a reference in terms of expressions like “an historical moment”: “an exact point in time, an “appropriate time for doing something, an opportunity, a “stage in the development of something or in a course of events” (Oxford Dictionary).

I would like to have explored a lot more what “the illusion that our job was simply to get Corbyn into Downing Street, and the rest would take care of itself.” was. Or exactly what this means, that the present leadership is “trying to game the UK’s increasingly decaying political system, rather than finding ways to change it. They don’t believe it is possible to win by challenging powerful interests…”

There is nothing to back up this rhetoric. It would be clearer to say that Starmer is not trying win over establishment opinion but public opinion, full stop. Whether it will be “challenging powerful interests – is politics on the left some kind of game in which you have to prove your fighting intentions? If there is a decaying political system what is it?

"People are sick and tired of public money landing in the pockets of businesses with close ties to the Tories” https://t.co/Zg9GzdfvOn

— Peter Stefanovic (@PeterStefanovi2) August 20, 2020

The continued hand-over of public services to useless private companies continues apace. That would be a good place to start a political and social fight-back…

Keir Starmer is not going away.

Westminster voting intention:

CON: 40% (-4)
LAB: 38% (+3)
LDEM: 6% (+1)
GRN: 6% (+1)
BREX: 4% (+1)

via @YouGov, 18 – 19 Aug
Chgs. w/ 12 Aug

— Britain Elects (@britainelects) August 19, 2020

Back in the bunker all is not well.

“Against socialist participation in Starmer’s shadow cabinet”.

Thank you for supporting the motion “Against socialist participation in Starmer’s shadow cabinet”. A PDF of the motion is attached.

Please see correspondence below from the LRC Conference Arrangements Committee, disallowing our motion on the formal grounds of being proposed by only 9 confirmed paid-up members.

One new applicant is not found on the membership database, but 5 of the 15 proposers are deemed out of time in joining or renewing their LRC membership, as they are “still to complete payment” – which appears to reflect a difficulty which applicants may encounter in navigating the membermojo self-service membership system.

Consequently, our motion is not on display on the LRC Conference web page.

Of course, we shall ask conference to overturn this decision and allow the motion to be debated.

The motion they dare not debate!

Against socialist participation in Starmer’s shadow cabinet

LRC Conference, September 5th 2020

Motion proposed by Stan Keable and another 15 LRC members

It was right to condemn the sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey from Labour’s shadow cabinet, another example of the ongoing anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism witch-hunt.

However, instead of calling for her reinstatement, the socialist left should use her sacking as an opportunity to discuss, debate and agree our attitude to participation in Keir Starmer’s shadow debate and agree our attitude to participation in Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet. It is, after all, committed to running capitalism, not replacing it. In effect, the shadow cabinet is a capitalist government in waiting.

RLB calls herself a socialist – she is a member of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs. We oppose the participation of socialist MPs in capitalist governments. Likewise we should oppose socialist MPs being members of shadow cabinets which do not aspire to challenge the rule of capitalism.

As Keir Hardie famously said in 1910, we need Labour MPs, “not to keep governments in office or to turn them out, but to organise the working class into a great, independent political power to fight for the coming of socialism”.

Take the Power Labour Party Marxist!

Written by Andrew Coates

August 20, 2020 at 12:04 pm

Posted in Conservative Party, Conservatives, European Left, Labour Party, Left, Sectarianism

Tagged with Conservative Party, European Left, Keir Starmer, labour left, Labour Party

Claire Regina Fox Campaigns for ‘Don’t Divide us’ as Calls Continue to Scrap her Peerage.

The extraordinary journey of the Revolutionary Communist Party is a lesson in politics

From champion of terror to peer of the realm: who put Claire Fox ...

A few days ago this appeared in the Sunday Times,

Why is Claire Fox, an apologist for the IRA, being handed a seat in the Lords? Attention is turning to the prime minister’s right-hand woman. https://t.co/07FRWUcDqd

— The Sunday Times (@thesundaytimes) August 15, 2020

The ructions continue.

With regal disregard Claire Regina Fox seems to be devoting her time elsewhere, to appearing on Sky Press Review.

About to do @SkyNews #PaperReview 10.30pm and 11.30pm. No revision needed to know that the exam question will be low marks in newspapers for Tories over #examfiasco

— Claire Fox (@Fox_Claire) August 17, 2020

She has a new hobby, doing good works for the Spiked Front, Don’t Divide Us.

This is the would-be Baroness’ latest:

Important article exposing how egregious critical race activism is being normalised & embedded at heart of Whitehall employment practices. Civil servants who object? Wary of speaking up in case labelled as bigots. @DontDivideUsNow hearing more & more examples across workplace s https://t.co/f79aAXmxUi

— Claire Fox (@Fox_Claire) August 18, 2020

But all is not well amongst the Spiked cadres.

James Hartfield (born James Hughes, he renamed himself after the left-wing German photomontage artist John Heartfield) spluttered at the sight of the Sunday Times article and leader.

‘Why on earth would Boris Johnson want an articulate and effective Brexiteer in the House of Lords, which threatened to derail Brexit?’ asks @thesundaytimes, clueless https://t.co/hCmxtmH5yS

— JamesHeartfield (@JamesHeartfield) August 16, 2020

Perhaps the former full timer of the Revolutionary Communist Party can also shed welcome light on this aspect of history.

"Claire Fox came to Derry in the early ‘90s as a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, preaching support for the armed struggle. "https://t.co/MdnwTFxDvY

— Andrew Coates (@Pabloite) August 17, 2020

“….the amity only lasted until the IRA’s declaration of a ceasefire in July 1997. Claire and the Comrades went bat-shit crazy. The Irish people had been sold out again! History could never be vindicated until the stain of shame had been cleansed from the face of our nationhood. The ceasefire must be renounced, the war of liberation resumed!

Claire was so distressed by this misfortunate turn of events that she stormed along to the Blutcher Street home of one of Derry’s top Sinn Feiners, banged on the door and demanded an explanation. His response that she should – to use a technical term – fuck off, appeared to dampen Claire’s fervour. Shortly thereafter, she left town, possibly grinding her teeth at the crass ingratitude of those who’d abandoned the armed struggle which she had travelled so far to solidarise with.”

Times journalist and Leader Writer Oliver Kamm has written on the very same RCP.

“The bigotry, intolerance and denialism of a far-left group that has transported itself without a break on to the other side of politics shows the dangers of dogmatism across the spectrum.”

Very good piece by @OliverKamm – The extraordinary journey of the Revolutionary Communist Party is a lesson in politics https://t.co/jN2s4Ii8KP via @CapX

— Eyre Force One (@MatthewEyre) August 17, 2020

There is a voluminous literature of ideological converts travelling from left to right (and of a few people going in the other direction). Some of it is outstanding. Witness by Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet spy, is a memoir of honesty and even beauty, whether or not you share the conservative politics and Christian faith he came to embrace. But it’s much rarer that an entire political organisation transplants itself from left to right. The Japanese Communist Party arguably did so in the 1930s, embracing imperialism and xenophobic nationalism, and far-left splinter groups (such as the followers of the French communist leader Jacques Doriot) attached themselves to fascism, but I can think of no other obvious institutional case bar one.

John Rogan has replied to the latest attempt to defend Claire Regina Fox,

"A Reply to Ruth Dudley Edwards" https://t.co/AXDRw04h88

— John Rogan (@JRogan3000) August 18, 2020

A Reply to Ruth Dudley Edwards.

I was asked by Christopher Montgomery (co-editor The Critic) to write the piece above for them which I was happy to do. He comes from Londonderry, was Chief of Staff for the DUP, was a strategist for the European Research Group (ERG) and was a director for Vote Leave. I think he would agree with me that we are not exactly political soulmates and it is an indication of the anger some on the right have over Ms Fox’s nomination that he approached me to write that piece.

Other indications of discontent within the right over this are a series of articles in the Sunday Times (one, two and three, 16 August), a piece in Conservative Home (“Neave. Berry. Gow. Three Tory MPs murdered by the IRA — an apologist for which Johnson has just sent to the Lords” 2 August) and a quote from Norman Tebbit in the Sunday Telegraph (9 August) (“I don’t know what got into Boris Johnson’s mind about it. I have got too many friends who were murdered and I think of Ian Gow and Airey Neave and, of course, I wake up every day to see my wife who was so seriously injured”). Ian Gow was assassinated by the IRA (30 July 1990), Airey Neave by the INLA (30 March 1979) and Lord Tebbit’s wife, Margaret, was left paralysed by the Brighton bombing (12 October 1984).

In one of the Sunday Times articles, it states “[a] government source said Downing Street officials had been “blindsided” by the reaction to Fox’s peerage…”. Personally, I’m just amazed they never thought to use Google to see if there might be a problem with Claire Fox’s nomination and then try to imagine what the reaction might be among some Conservative commentators.

Read the full Article (link above).

John concludes,

I’m sure there will be more discussion within Conservative ranks and articles in the press before Ms Fox swears her Oath of Allegiance and takes her seat in the House of Lords. Let’s see if it actually happens.

Written by Andrew Coates

August 19, 2020 at 11:16 am

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Communism, Conservative Party, Human Rights, Nationalism, Populism

Tagged with Brexit Party, Claire Fox, Don't Divide Us, House of Lords, RCP, Red-Brown Front, Revolutionary Communist Party

From China to Belarus, the ‘New Cold War” and the Tankies Fighting it.

International meeting calls for opposition to the ‘new cold war’ against China

Internationalists Stand With Belarusian Democrats.

In Exterminism and the Cold War (1982) Edward Thompson lead essay outlined the developing Second Cold War, the 1980s arms race, and the threat, most visible in the form of Cruise missiles, of a head-on confrontation between the Soviet and Western blocs. Weapons innovation had become “self-generating”. two “imperial formations” were “exporting the means of war” their arms race and military structures had developed together, a process of “isomorphism”, both states of “military-industrial complexes” .

Thompson, and other contributors to the book called for “the resistance of peoples inside each bloc.” European Nuclear Disarmament (END) attempted that task. A feature was that this, and other independent peace movements, tried to engage with independent forces in Europe from both camps, including democrats opposed to their own Eastern Soviet leaderships,

Is the drive to mass destruction present today? The end of the Soviet System has not meant an end to military rivalries. In the same collection of essays Lucio Magri observed that “new revolutionary forces”, supported by the New Left of the 1980s, were already evolving towards “exasperated forms of populism, incapable of furnishing any answer to real problems and therefore seeking imaginary solutions in integralist religion or regressive nationalism”. (Pag 131) . His insight could be widely extended in this millenium.

Some, however, think that the Cold War has only changed its key players,

(Meeting 25th July)

AN international cast of speakers came together on Saturday to oppose a new cold war on China, which they say is “against the interests of humanity.”

The chair, author and academic Jenny Clegg, welcomed a “truly global gathering” with people from 49 countries attending the Zoom webinar, which others were able to follow on Facebook and YouTube.

Introducing the event, author Carlos Martinez said that the US was ramping up pressure on all countries to pick a side in its confrontation with China.

US activist Medea Benjamin of the Code Pink peace campaign called for a “pivot to peace, not a pivot to Asia.”

She said that she suspected an ulterior motive when US politicians “talk free speech while shooting rubber bullets at peaceful demonstrators.

“It’s hard to take them seriously [over allegations of persecution of Muslims] when both parties have supported a two-decade war on Muslims throughout the world, torturing them at Abu Ghraib, throwing them into prisons in Guantanamo.”

US news site Black Agenda Report editor Margaret Kimberley warned: “We’re told that a million Uighurs are in prison when there is quite literally no evidence of any such thing,” cautioning listeners to remember previous scare stories about “weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and babies taken from incubators in Kuwait.”

“When the US talks of human rights, remember it has more of its population incarcerated than any other nation, that its police force kills 1,000 people a year and that its military budget is bigger than the next 10 countries combined.”

The US talked “as if China were US property not a sovereign country, but that is what results from white supremacism extended to the field of foreign relations.”

And she savaged the “vassals and lackeys known as US allies that follow the lead of the gangster state.”

Academic John Ross said it was essential to resist a US administration that was “tearing up treaties,” had walked out of the Paris agreement on climate change and was trying to “force its policies on the world.”

Other speakers included The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, Tricontinental Institute for Social Research director Vijay Prashad, Renmin University executive dean Wang Wen and many more.

It is a sad spectacle to see anybody recycling 1950s rhetoric about the faults of the US to divert attention from those of the Chinese Communist Party state. Few are those who are “serious” deny that China has massive human rights problems, from their mass ‘re-education’ of the Uighurs, repression of trade unionists, control over freedom of speech, the “surveillance state” (We Have Been Harmonised. Life in China’s Surveillance State. Kai Strittmatter. 2019. and destruction of democratic gains in Hong Kong.

But if you wish to watch this group of well-rewarded apologists for the Chinese state you can see a video of the event here.

The idea is taking hold.

The ‘West’ is on the move.

Today the same Morning Star warns of the menaces against Belarus.

“Communist parties in Italy and Russia have warned against another US-sponsored “colour revolution” similar to those that took place in Georgia and Ukraine.” states the Morning Star in a report on Belarus,

Rival Belorussian protests take place in Minsk as EU ponders new sanctions

The Communist Party of Belorussia welcomed the “unconditional victory” of Mr Lukashenko, calling it the natural consequence of the economic growth of the republic since he came to power in 1994.

It blamed the protests on “subversive work” by “specially trained instigators, from outright fascists to inveterate criminals,” saying that it enjoyed the support of at least 18 fraternal communist parties.

It warned that “foreign puppeteers” were aiming to carry out a coup in Belarus. “It is clear that if they win, the country will face bloody chaos and landslide degradation,” a statement from the party central committee said.

Here’s a Tanky Masterclass:

The tankie takes are now properly coming in. Here's one that I could see a bunch of folks buying into.https://t.co/py0SvIzXYQ

— Paul Canning (@pauloCanning) August 17, 2020

A couple of days ago the paper, which describes itself as The People’s Daily, and the “daily paper of the left” carried an attack on Paul Mason,

Socialists oppose the new cold war against China: a reply to Paul Mason

The broadside followed in the footsteps of Socialist Appeal which recently compared Mason to the “renegade Kautsky” and announced that his “Pseudo-Marxism has no place in our movement” (Storytelling, ‘culture wars’, and the Left: A reply to Paul Mason )

Paul Mason's ideas of ‘culture wars’, postmodernist ‘narratives’ based on ‘values’, and popular fronts are a dead end for the labour movement. It is only the genuine ideas of Marxism that can unite the working class and offer a way forward.https://t.co/SyeCV4q7JS

— Socialist Appeal (@socialist_app) August 6, 2020

For the Morning Star writer Carlos Martinez states,

The fundamental problem with Paul Mason is that, in the final analysis, he stands on the side of imperialism. Even his support for the left Labour project – now quickly dropped in the era of Starmer – existed within a pro-imperialist framework, rejecting Corbyn’s anti-war internationalism and pushing support for Nato and Trident renewal.

But, unlike perhaps Socialist Appeal, the ” independent researcher and political activist from London ” expects to be taken seriously.

He began, “Living in the heartlands of imperialism, you learn to expect censure if you defend socialism and oppose war.”

We trust that Morning Star will soon publish critics of the stategry of UNITE the union, whose industrial and defence policy includes backing Trident.

Rather than go further, Jim deals with the pile of ordure so I will just link to his post:

Morning Star denies Uighur genocide – spouts Beijing’s propaganda

As Edward Thompson put it, the internationalist left stands for human rights independently of “blocs” and sides. This was true in the 1980s and it remains so today.

'We will win': vast Belarus rally adamant Lukashenko must go https://t.co/Jzen4RbxIi

— The Guardian (@guardian) August 17, 2020

#Lukashenko reacts to workers chanting #Leave. “I…just like yourselves haven’t quite figured out what’s the problem” he says as workers continue chanting and ends with “Thank you”. #Minsk #Belarus pic.twitter.com/J8NoUxYl94

— Belarus Free Theatre (@BFreeTheatre) August 17, 2020

Astonishing scenes of opposition rally in Minsk. I’d be surprised if Moscow still thinks Lukashenko is saveable. pic.twitter.com/DuTUyu9Fms

— Oliver Carroll (@olliecarroll) August 16, 2020

'The end of Hong Kong': Activists warn more arrests are coming – Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières https://t.co/OJD9kR0qTF

— Andrew Coates (@Pabloite) August 17, 2020

Written by Andrew Coates

August 17, 2020 at 11:13 am

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Europe, European Elections, European Left, Labour Party, Left, Nationalism, Populism, Stalinism

Tagged with Belarus, China, E.P. Thompson, European Left, Morning Star

Stuart Christie, Class Struggle Anarchist, 1946 – 2020.

The woolly-jumpered anarchist

Class Struggle Anarchism.

“On Tuesday 1 September 1964, as Britain prepared to make its choice between Harold Wilson and Lord Alex Douglas Home in the General election I was in Madrid’s First Permanent Military court facing a drumhead court martial – a Consejo de Guerra sumarísimo, case No 1154 – 64 – charged with ‘banditry and terrorism.’

Spain’s secret police had arrested me eighteen days earlier in possession of plastic explosives and detonators to be used to blow up Spain’s fascist dictator, Generalissimo Fance, and his inner circle in the royal box at Santiago Bernabéu during the final of the Generalissimo’s cup. The penalty for this offensive was death by garrote-vil the grisly process of neck-breaking and slow mechanical strangulation by an iron collar and a bolt through the neck.”

Stuart Christie.Granny made me an anarchist. 2005.

Freedom News

16 hrs

Stuart Christie, one of the most influential British anarchists of modern times, has died from lung cancer aged 74.

Most famous for his attempt, aged 18, on the life of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, Christie went on to work closely with Albert Meltzer. Together they founded Black Flag, which was probably the most prominent anarchist publication of the 1970s.

His most enduring legacy will be as a publisher, founding both the Cienfuegos Press and, later, Christiebooks (https://christiebooks.co.uk/), which hosts possibly the largest open anarchist film archive available today. Christie leaves an immense body of work behind him, and is a great loss to anarchism not just in Britain but internationally.

The above announcement does not capture the depth of Christie’s contribution and Freedom will be looking to produce a full obituary in due course.

#OtD 11 Aug 1964 18-year-old Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie was arrested in Madrid, Spain with explosives to assassinate dictator General Franco. He was wearing a kilt, which confused the Spanish press, who described him as "a Scottish transvestite". https://t.co/xycoIRJL7K pic.twitter.com/eaj5fbWxK2

— Working Class History (@wrkclasshistory) August 11, 2020

Stuart Christie's account of his actions in a Franco assassination attempt, 1964 https://t.co/k2ldledjdM

— libcom.org (@libcomorg) August 15, 2020

Here is an immediate tribute.

Just heard that my friend and inspiration Stuart Christie has died. Stuart was an anarchist writer and publisher and a man of huge principle and vision who was supportive to so many others. What a life. Sorely missed. https://t.co/Vddumte0EN

— Bella Caledonia (@bellacaledonia) August 15, 2020

A full obituary and tribute would give an account of Christie’s trial in Spain, his eventual release, the British state’s attempt to implicate him in the Angry Brigade, and his work founding the Anarchist Black Cross (involved at this very minute in solidarity with people imprisoned in Belarus), and the publication, while based in Orkney, of Black Flag and the Cientifugos Press Anarchist Review.

Granny made me an anarchist is a reminder of the working class class struggle tradition in anarchism. Christie came from “working class Glasgow”. He refers to a number of figures from the city’s left, including Guy Adred of the Glasgow Anarchist Group, which went back to the 1930s. My dad, who grew up in Springburn, was attracted to anarchism when he left school at 14, and went to work as a packer and delivery boy in the 1930s. He talked of going to listen to anarchist speakers. A Coventry member of the libertarian left group Solidarity – which Christie was involved with in 1960, he promoted their mimeographed publication, Solidarity (Page 69) – told me about this aspect of the history of the Glaswegian anarchists.

Following activism in CND, and its direct action wing, the Committee of 100, Christie became an anarchist and was involved with the Glasgow Federation of Anarchists at the beginning of the 1960s. Guy Aldred was amongst the resilient veterans. He says that John T Caldwell and Guy Aldred had been “heavily involved in helping comrades get into Spain and in publishing the Barcelona Bulletin, which exposed the Stalinist repression in May 1937 of the Catalan anarchists and the anti-Stalinist POUM.” (Page 81)

Long time Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie passed away today. Christie bridged the gap between a generation of anarchists fleeing Franco's fascism and a new post-68 generation. His exploits are the stuff of legends. Let us continue his spirit forward. pic.twitter.com/6MxrjypKZa

— It's Going Down (@IGD_News) August 15, 2020

Just how did an 18-year-old lad from Glasgow get mixed up in a plot to assassinate General Franco in 1964? Duncan Campbell meets veteran anarchist Stuart Christie, and in an exclusive extract from his new book Christie relates the unlikely escapade that led to him being sentenced to 20 years in a Spanish jail.

More:

Wikipedia: Stuart Christie.

Stuart Christie 1946-2020 Anarchist activist, writer and publisher John Patten

Lib Com: Stuart Christie.

Written by Andrew Coates

August 16, 2020 at 11:10 am

Posted in Anarchism, Anti-Fascism, European Left, Fascism, Spain, Stalinism

Tagged with Anarchism, Spain, Stuart Christie

Open Labour’s welcome proposals for “Member-led democracy”.

Open Labour’s 11 party reform proposals for the Forde Inquiry

Open Labour - Home | Facebook

Welcome Ideas.

Many people in the Labour Party are tired of constant attacks on Keir Starmer

The below comes from a site which claims a close link with one of Labour’s main backers, UNITE the union,

Labour bans local party groups from even discussing Starmer’s craven surrender to former staff – or EHRC report https://t.co/QuF2RnXcEF

— The SKWAWKBOX (@skwawkbox) August 13, 2020

The constant attempt to undermine Labour’s new Leader extends to this:

Excl: Starmer’s local members issue further demands for action – after putting sign up on his office window: “65,000 DEAD – DO SOMETHING” https://t.co/K0ZKsdyyTS

— The SKWAWKBOX (@skwawkbox) August 11, 2020

Some left wing activists, inside and outside Labour, refer, constantly, to Jeremy Corbyn, his socialism, and his achievements, which they contrast with today’s Shadow Cabinet’s policies and actions.

There is still a great deal of disappointment swirling around, and a search for targets to blame.

Many critics are activists who worked to get Corbyn elected and have long supported Labour.

But some influential voices who join in,and amplify, criticisms of Labour and who wish to “defend our legacy” are from those who only supported Labour after Corbyn was voted leader.

Counterfire which runs the better known People’s Assembly, and has great influence on the Stop the War Coalition, is one. This was their call at the end of July “Starmer’s stampede to the right means that socialists will need to reach beyond the Labour Party to build a fighting left, argues Chris Nineham.” This message can be found debated amongst those who say they will “stay and fight” and those off for some new vehicle outside of Labour.

Counterfire’s leadership were key figures in George Galloway’s Respect Party.

What kind of politics did they have? In 2004 Counterfire leader John Rees declared in 2003, “”Socialists should unconditionally stand with the oppressed against the oppressor, even if the people who run the oppressed country are undemocratic and persecute minorities, like Saddam Hussein.”(Guardian).

Rees stood on a Respect slate in the European elections and in 2006 in a local election in East London (coming second against Labour). Do they defend that legacy?

Instead of looking to the past – and this Blog could continue for a long time in this vein…..- we should perhaps take a different approach.

Yesterday Open Labour published these proposals,

Tessa Milligan & Keiran O’Neill

Our party has never been more inward-looking in this century. But this gives us an opportunity for serious self-reflection, so that we can get our own house in order, rather than continue to allow internal crises to threaten to implode our party and rupture the labour movement.

For several years, Open Labour has been pushing for internal culture change and a healthier democracy within the Labour Party. We have repeatedly expressed solidarity and support for Jewish members and sought to put pressure on the party to root out antisemitism. During the initial coronavirus lockdown, we hosted an online workshop for Young Labour members where we discussed the need for the party to become a more welcoming environment where no one is left behind

"We must make our party a welcoming environment for all, enforce zero tolerance for bigotry and bullying, and bring our member-led democracy into the 21st century."

Tessa Milligan and @KeiranON on @OpenLabour's 11 proposals for the Forde Inquiry: https://t.co/6kBrfwfjcS

— LabourList (@LabourList) August 14, 2020

In summary these are

Co-operate with the EHRC investigation and implement its findings in full.
The Labour Party should make a statement clarifying that it considers the matters of antisemitism, all other forms of prejudice, and sexual harassment to be squarely above sectarian politics; that they must be taken seriously regardless of the factional allegiances of the alleged offenders.
The Labour Party must make clear at all levels that members must not dismiss the antisemitism issue as an anti-Corbyn or anti-left conspiracy.
The Labour Party should implement an independent complaints procedure to depoliticise these processes .
Welcome Keir Starmer’s promise to deliver antisemitism training to staff. We would also like to see equalities training delivered to party staff covering multiple forms of racism and other prejudices.
The Labour Party should carry out regular staffing audits and push to diversify party staff at all levels, to identify and solve particular areas of underrepresentation.
The Labour Party must work with its own affiliates, such as the Jewish Labour Movement, and other BAME Labour groups, when reforming internal processes.
The NEC must draft and publish a clearer code of conduct for staff and ban explicitly sectarian behaviours of the type we have outlined, for as long as people are on the party payroll.
Labour Party staff at all levels should act as neutral civil servants in carrying out the party’s democratically agreed aims, and promote a professional rather than sectarian culture.
The Labour Party should formally distance itself from social media campaign accounts that propagate antisemitism or any other prejudice, and/or undermine the party’s ability to campaign against racism, whilst purporting to speak in the name of the Labour Party or parts of the Labour Party.
The Labour Party should extend the use of the single transferable vote (STV) in internal elections that party members participate in.

The authors note,

This summer, we won a landmark campaign for a fairer, less sectarian, more democratic voting system for members to elect their Constituency Labour Party (CLP) representatives to Labour’s governing body, the national executive committee (NEC). Our organisation democratically selects preferred candidates for internal elections, and our members have overwhelmingly endorsed Ann Black and Jermain Jackman for CLP Reps on the NEC, along with George Lindars-Hammond as the new disability rep and Alice Perry for the local government section. For us, democracy must be at the heart of our approach to politics. It’s good to see other groups starting to catch up to us.

This is their conclusion.

We must make our party a welcoming environment for all, enforce zero tolerance for bigotry and bullying, and bring our member-led democracy into the 21st century.

We need to look outwards, beyond our own ranks and we need to have a bold, radical offer to the people of these islands. If we can’t do that, then why are we here? We don’t have all the answers, and we don’t pretend that we do, but we know that these 11 proposals are key to a more tolerant and democratic party that can live up the ambitions of our supporters.

Open Labour will continue to play our part in making the Labour Party.

These are welcome ideas above all the call to “look outwards”.

George Galloway and A4U Plan to Save the Union Attract (Right-wing) Backing.

Why Scotland needs a new party

Galloway Launches New Scottish “Unionist” Front, the “Alliance for ...

Story Revealed by Tendance Newshounds Develops.

Announced in July Galloway’s plan to fight for the Union in Scotland, now called,the Alliance for Union, A4U seems to have attracted growing and prestigious support,

One pro-union candidate in every constituency. What’s difficult about that? It’s for your country, to save it. Isn’t that worth disappointing some party-men and women who would be election losers anyway? @Douglas4Moray @RuthDavidsonMSP @LabourRichard @willie_rennie

— Alliance for Unity (@Alliance4Unity) August 13, 2020

The Conservative The Critic published Jamie Blackett, “educated at Ludgrove, Eton, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and later Warwick Business School (MBA)”. He is also Deputy Lieutenant for Dumfriesshire, a few days ago.

How the Alliance for Unity plans to defeat the SNP in the bitter battle for Britain.

He has an interest,

I was one of Galloway’s early recruits and am now Deputy Leader of the Alliance for Unity. I remembered George as the most effective debater by far on the anti-separatist side in the 2014 independence referendum. And like many people from all points on the political spectrum I was despairing at the utterly abject appeasement of Sturgeon by the opposition at Holyrood since 2016.

Blackett has a grand strategy…

All new political parties say that they are introducing a new type of politics but I think we must be the first party in history to promise in effect to dissolve our party as soon as we are elected. The early signs are that people like what they are hearing. After three weeks we had more followers on Twitter than the Scottish Liberal Democrats and momentum is continuing to build. The challenge is probably not in persuading the electorate that Scotland deserves better than the separatists’ authoritarian one party state but in persuading the older unionist parties that, if we are going to restore neighbourliness to the UK and especially to Scottish communities, the pro-union parties really are ‘better together’ in what promises to be a bitter fight.

Now the prolific Jamie Blackett writes for the Conservative Spectator.

How George Galloway and I plan to save the Union

… professor Alan Sked of the LSE (the original architect of Brexit), whose home is in Easter Ross, and ex-regimental sergeant major Arthur Keith of the Black Watch. I enjoyed ringing Arthur to congratulate him with the traditional Army greeting, ‘Stand by your beds!’ and we had a good chat about the similarities between the SNP and their soulmates in Sinn Fein, with whom Artie and I have had dealings in the past.

Galloway’s Workers Party could not agree more with these progressive thinkers:

We need to work towards abolishing class society, and move towards an egalitarian society, where workers get paid properly with the right conditions, being able to contribute more in society.

It's not a Utopian dream; we must mobilise and fight for it. https://t.co/pWKonlowep pic.twitter.com/Ua3F0YRusC

— Workers Party of Britain (@WorkersPartyGB) August 13, 2020

One can only wish them bonnie good luck!

George loves grand theatrical gestures; one of which was to tweet the idea that we need a big figure to bring Scotland back together again. He would offer ‘the greatest living Scotsman after Sir Alex Ferguson’, The Spectator’s chairman Andrew Neil, a plum seat if he would agree to come and be First Minister in the government of national unity. Pick up the phone Andrew!

Get to that Mobile Andy!

Have his Galloway’s old muckers in Counterfire and the Stop the War Coalition, Respect, the SWP, and all the admirers of the Bradford Spring, anything to say on the blower?

Despite speculation about potential falling-outs the Workers Party of Britain re-tweeted this

Tune in TONIGHT at 8pm as David Griffiths (@EruditeUnionist) presents this week's #AllianceBroadcast for the Alliance 4 Unity.

Live on Twitter at @Alliance4Unity and @georgegalloway, on YouTube at 'George Galloway', and on Facebook at 'Alliance for Unity' and 'George Galloway' pic.twitter.com/Vf2Hszz9zn

— George Galloway (@georgegalloway) August 10, 2020

Written by Andrew Coates

August 14, 2020 at 5:22 pm

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Europe, Human Rights, Labour Party, Left, Populism

Tagged with George Galloway, workers’ party

Socialist Action: Left Should not be “taken in” by “US Lies” about Uighurs in China.

with 9 comments

Seeking ways to tell 'My China Story'[2]- Chinadaily.com.cn

John Ross, “China has a real understanding of human rights”.

Socialist Action is a small left wing organisation, visible largely only through its web site. It originated in the International Marxist Group (IMG).

Its best known member is John Ross, who led a Tendency (‘B’) in the IMG and was effectively the group’s leader untright through to the creation of the Socialist League or Socialist Action.

Others will add their own fond memories of Ross, and the Rossites, their ability to cite Lenin, at length. Plans to ‘Bolshevise’ the organisation by schemes such as creating a ‘cell’ based structure, and later the “turn to industry”

You can read more about the IMG and related history on the excellent site, Red Mole Rising including this section, Discussing the Turn to Industry- a 1980 perspective and (more significantly, as the role of John Ross is discussed): On the Turn to Industry, the American SWP and other questions of IMG history

There were serious splits in the 1980s. The Ross faction retained the name Socialist Action and by the end of the 1980s had moved away from the Fourth International (there is no picture of Trotsky on their site) . Some of its key members, such as Redmond O’Neill, went on to become key members of London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s inner team after his victory in the election of 2000. Ross himself was Policy Director of Economic and Business Policy.

Not a great deal has been heard of them since the end of the first decade of the new millenium.

John Ross, apparently, ” better known in China under his Chinese name Luo Siyi (罗思义) is a senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China.

Ross has vocally defended the Chinese government’s policies, and the Chinese Communist Party’s record on human rights, for some time.

Here is an example from this year.

China’s human rights record is keeping people alive: British scholar

China’s human rights record is keeping people alive, said John Ross, a British senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, when talking about China’s anti-coronavirus efforts in an interview with RT.

“All the misrepresentation and nonsense which has just come now will fade away and people will understand that China is the only country that got the virus under control,” he added.

He has tweeted.

China raises 860 million people out of World Bank defined poverty, US bombs Libya & reduces it from richest country in Africa to one where African slaves are sold in markets – & it is supposed to be China that has the bad human rights record & the US the good one? What a joke

— John Ross (@JohnRoss43) August 12, 2020

Ross appears on Chinese official televison.

Now his helpers have sprung into action:

The left should not be taken in by ‘US WMD lies’ – this time about Uyghurshttps://t.co/XHvgc4sp21 pic.twitter.com/UOXcuzU1ZH

— Socialist Action (@SocialistAct) August 12, 2020

The left should not be taken in by ‘US WMD lies’ – this time about Uyghurs

Extract:

Sometimes it is necessary to wait years before the lies of US of US intelligence agencies are definitively revealed. The following outstanding piece of investigative journalism by Max Blumenthal, editor of the US website the Grayzone, is therefore extremely valuable because it catches the latest case of such US intelligence services lying in the act – this time about the Uyghurs. It shows in detail, in Blumenthal’s words, ‘the micro socio-political relationships’ in how the US security services lies about the Uyghurs were constructed and propagated. Blumenthal’s account does not need amplification and needs simply to be read in full by anyone taken in by the US intelligence services lies.

All that needs to be added here is the ‘macro’ aspect of the situation – that is why the US had to resort to the lying and falsification Blumenthal so meticulously exposes? It is because any look at the situation reveals that the US was lying.

Take the claim that there are a million Uyghurs in concentration camps in Xinjiang. If that were true there would be a mass of satellite photos that would reveal what would be the massive number of such camps and the US would be displaying them all the time. They don’t and there is only one explanation – because they don’t have such photos because the camps don’t exist. They are a fabrication of right-wing fantasist, ‘sent by God’, Adrian Zenz who Blumenthal reveals the character of in detail.

Take also the claims that ‘genocide’ is taking place against the Uyghers in Xinjiang. Take the facts.

The Uyghur population in Xinjiang grew from 5.55 million to 11.68 million in the 40 years 1978-2018 – i.e. it more than doubled. But in that period the total population of China grew by 46% while the Uyghur population grew by 110% – that is the Uyghur population grew more than twice as fast as the overall, majority Han, population of China. A very strange ‘genocide’ in which the population against which it is supposedly being carried is growing in size twice as fast as the rest of the population. We fail to recall that the Jews under the Nazis grew in population twice as fast as other Germans.

Why did this more rapid growth of the Uygur population of China than the majority Han population take place? Because under the one child policy in China, which only recently ended, Han Chinese were only permitted one child., but ethnic minorities, specifically including Uyghurs, were allowed two. This was probably precisely because China did not want to, and did not want to be seen, as discriminating against ethnic minorities. Given this situation of course the Uyghur population increased much more rapidly than the Han population. Again, it is very strange form of ‘genocide’ in which the Uyghur families were permitted to have more children than the Han Chinese. Perhaps someone will point to which of Hitler’s laws specifically permitted Jews to have more children than other Germans?

In short, the ‘macro’ facts clearly prove that the US claims about the Uyghurs are simply lies. But Max Blumenthal has done the inestimable service of ‘catching the thief with their hand in the till’ – that is showing in detail how these lies were invented and the nature and means used by right wing fanatics, the US security services, and the US media to fabricate them. They are simply the methods that were used to invent the lies about WMD in Iraq and the non-existent attack by North Vietnam on US warships in the Gulf of Tonkin. And they were invented for the same reasons – to launch US aggression.

And what should the left do about this? They should not get caught up in spreading the same type of lies as those about WMD that were used to justify the Iraq war, and the lies that were used about the Gulf of Tonkin to launch the Vietnam war.

These are very serious claims, ones disputed by nearly everybody, including the left – with the exception of the daily Morning Star.

I send a message of solidarity to the ⁦@CampaignUyghur⁩ rally today and urge support for the campaign to oppose the brutal internment and attacks on the Uyghur people and in condemnation of the Chinese state’s attempt to eradicate Uyghur culture. Solidarity . pic.twitter.com/9tlRwirC6z

— John McDonnell MP (@johnmcdonnellMP) July 5, 2020

In the Trotskyist movement only Sam Marcey (1911 – 1998) was marked by such a turn away from workers’ democracy and towards the Chinese state.

The assertions of Socialist Action are stomach-churning.

Written by Andrew Coates

August 13, 2020 at 12:57 pm

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Communism, Labour Party, Left, Marxism, Racism, Stalinism, Trotskyism

Tagged with China, Human Rights, John Ross, Socialist Action, Uighurs

Factionalism in the Time of Coronavirus Part 14: Calls for New Workers’ Party and ‘Resistance Movement’.

Life After Corbyn: don’t lose the radicalism

It’s all happening on the Home Front!

From what remains of the left (we hear that Momentum has revised its membership total down to 8000, from a high of 45k) the drip drop of criticism of Keir Starmer continues, without a pause,

Labour’s latest statement shows they agree with Nigel Farage, the Tories and the Far-Right that there “urgently” needs to be a “solution” to migrants crossing from France to the UK.

No mention of why they’re crossing. No empathy. No compassion.

Inhuman & utterly inane drivel. https://t.co/OkkCqbWtzK

— Evolve Politics (@evolvepolitics) August 11, 2020

Momentum is trying to re-merge as a force:

Momentum: Why we’re launching our first ever open primary – LabourList https://t.co/X8YM0xDcSO

— MomentumGrwOfficial (@momentum_grw) August 12, 2020

But other strategists have been plotting the way forward.

At the beginning of August the revolutionary socialist groupuscule Counterfire which runs what remains of the People’s Assembly, and strongly influences the surviving structures of the Stop the War Coalition carried this analysis, from the white-heat of the actuality of the revolution,

There has been some speculation that Corbyn might be expelled, and that he might then set up a new mass party of the socialist left. It won’t happen. Starmer isn’t stupid, he would prefer to keep Corbyn as a prisoner of the PLP so that what’s left of Labour’s radical left can be kept to heal and picked off one by one in the witch hunt. So if we need something new we are going to have build it ourselves.

Roy Wilkes concluded.

Plurality of ideas and approaches is positive and healthy. Plurality of sects competing with each other isn’t. And if we are going to extricate ourselves from the terrible predicament we find ourselves in, following over a century of failure to build an effective proletarian leadership, then our best hope is surely to force ourselves to come together, one way or another.

This is where revolutionary socialist leadership should be stepping in to the breach. It isn’t too late to change the course of history and avert catastrophe. But it soon will be.

Zooms apart there is little sign of this popping its head above the parapet.

Yet.

Chris Williamson is garnering support for his initiative, The Resistance Movement, as critics of Keir Starmer seek a welcoming political home.

Many will relish his plain speaking.

Interesting thread on the Beirut explosion. https://t.co/lSRGAEQus8

— Chris Williamson (@DerbyChrisW) August 12, 2020

The fact is: the US undeniably attacked Lebanon through Israel.
I don't need to hear the jets, or eyewitnesses detail seeing the planes, or all the first accounts about 2 bombings followed by the last explosive one.
They help, but the media/political response is enough proof.

— مايا Maya ☭ (@mayyish) August 11, 2020

They will no doubt admire how he stands up to the “Zionist” lobby,

The deplorable tactics deployed by the Zionist lobby in the UK include smears and intimidation. https://t.co/DL96Xjc1X4

— Chris Williamson (@DerbyChrisW) August 9, 2020

Last week the Socialist Party called for a “new mass workers’ party”.

Labour payouts: unions must discuss political representation

the Socialist Party has called for discussion in the workers’ movement on the need for a new mass workers’ party.

A ‘major gathering’ of trade unionists and socialists is definitely needed, in the form of a conference that can democratically discuss and debate how political representation for the working class can concretely be re-established in the situation created by Starmer’s leadership.

…

with or without the involvement of any particular individual, the need for a mass workers’ party that can discuss and adopt a socialist programme is inherent in today’s situation.

The Socialist Party has already initiated a call for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) to once again stand anti-cuts candidates in the next local and mayoral elections, following TUSC’s suspension of standing in the last local elections.

Presenting candidates who will fight for workers’ interests can only aid the discussion on how a mass workers’ party can be built, while in the meantime playing an important role in putting a socialist alternative on the ballot papers.

Yet, so far no answer seems to have come.

Socialist Worker comments,

Battles and infighting inside Labour reflect the party’s limits Charlie Kimber

Socialists should always be for the Labour left against the Labour right. But they also have to recognise that, even at its best, Labourism is not going to transform society.

A left that couldn’t effectively confront the right in its own party can hardly deal with the pressures of global capital and the state.

The obsession with Corbyn-nostalgia matters because big struggles are coming. Every day there is more news of job cuts and frequent predictions of mass unemployment.

The need for resistance focused on the workplaces and the streets, not parliament, is more urgent than ever.

At the moment the main energy of these factions has been concentrated on building Colvid-19 Action fronts, People Before Profit: Health Worker Covid, and agitating for NHS workers’ pay rises – a better way of spending their time some might say than the usual party/groupuscule building.

Glasgow Covid 19 Action Group were so proud to give solidarity to #NHSWorkersSayNO today. We would do it again in a ❤️beat.
✊#FairPayForCarers #NHSPay15 pic.twitter.com/aa9Ph2paQk

— GlasCov19Action (@Cov19Glas) August 8, 2020

Hot on their heels George Galloway’s Workers Party calls on the masses to spurn those “beholden to the Westminster brethren”.

Fantastic video from @WorkersPartyGB member @ramblinggeordie here on why you should join #WorkersPartyGB.

Watch our party zoom meeting tonight via Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube at 8pm, with @Rango1917 and valuable contributions from other party members.https://t.co/WLoTc1VwWx

— Workers Party of Britain – North East (@WPB_NorthEast) August 11, 2020

Written by Andrew Coates

August 12, 2020 at 5:24 pm

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Conspiracies, European Left, Globalisation, Imperialism, Israel, Jews, Populism, Stalinism

Tagged with Chris Williamson, Counterfire, Factionalism, Gorge Galloway, Labour Party, Left, Socialist Party, SWP

Human Rights in the Age of National Populism. Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiots? Justine Lacroix et Jean-Yves Pranchère.

Karl Marx Capital Vol 1. Chapter 6. The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power.

Les droits de l'homme rendent-ils idiots ? - Lacroix - Pranchère ...

Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ? (2019) Justine Lacroix et Jean-Yves Pranchère.

“This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.”

Earlier this year Benjamin Ward, of Human Rights Watch, wrote,

The government’s new Attorney General Suella Braverman, its top legal adviser, is on record recently arguing that the courts’ ability to hold the government to account should be restrained, and expressing her criticism of human rights.

It’s increasingly clear that Johnson plans to water down the Human Rights Act, which keeps us safe from government harm, and make it harder for British courts to intervene when the state tramples on people’s rights.

“Human rights are no longer popular”, Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchère begin Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ? with this statement from a former judge at the European Court of Human Rights, Françoise Tulkens. That they are not a “priority” for governments. Not only have we seen national populist leaders, on both sides of the Atlantic, in practice undermine human rights protections, but scorn for “droits-de-l’hommisme” has grown. The idea that rights-culture, rights-ideology, is a feature of the “nouvel ordre néolibérale” , an alliance between capitalist economics and social liberalism, remains influential on the left. Individual rights lead to individualism, people “sans appartenance et sans obligation à l’égard de la collectivité” (without belonging and without obligation to the collective) The “culture of narcissism” a demand for “respect” without concern for others, undermines the family, and “respect d’autrui” (others). The “multiplication” of rights, and obsession about them, has created bad citizens and a world of “incivilité”.

Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ? is a defence of human rights on the “champ intellectuel”. This is a crowded field. The authors begin by warning that national populism, or, as they call it, “illiberal democracy”, puts forward an ideal of “l”homogénéité nationale” in countries like Poland and Hungary that moulds politics against what Carl Schmitt called “the enemy”. This is in contrast to the democratic principles though by the thinker Claude Lefort. For the former Socialisme ou Barbarie thinker democracy comes from everybody, but democratic (institutional) sovereignty is an “empty” space (lieu vide) in that no party in the name of the people can permanently occupy it. Efforts, from identifying ‘the’ people with one party, or determining politics through a totalitarian one-party, one person, “égocrate” eats up the very incertianity that breathes life into democracy. Lefort, as they later outline, is a touchstone for the idea that human rights are self-created, part of a long process he called the “democratic revolution”. Human rights are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to create this democratic world, one that everybody can live in.

Lacroix and Pranchère do not cite Jacques Rancière. But the radical philosopher’s asserted that human rights are constantly redefined, through “dissensus” from the “outside” by the “plebe”, the “rights of the rightless” (Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?). “In this way, the ‘‘abstract’’ and litigious Rights of Man and of the citizen are tentatively turned into real rights, belonging to real groups, attached to their identity and to the recognition of their place in the global population”.This underlines the way that those excluded from the homogeneous sovereign people of national populism create new demands. Written in 1791 Olympe de Gouges’s Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne is one such claim followed by her calls to abolish slavery,. First and foremost she demanded the right for women to be equals in politics, “A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker’s platform.” The Guillotine did not stop her voice ringing throughout the ages.

Neoliberalism is an economic project, a belief in the efficiency of markets, not a belief in human rights. Hayek was opposed to human rights and any kind of social “constructionism”, opposing human rights in the same vein as Edmund Burke, with a experimental knowledge rooted in tradition. Only “néolibéralisme est responsable pour le néolibéralisme.” Against this Lacroix and Pranchère praise a side of John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Constant’s political liberalism, their resistance to authoritarianism. They can help indicate to those who draw on the human rights thought see the need to balance “liberty and equality”.

Many on the left remain suspicious of human rights. Some of this goes back to the early years of socialism. Marx’s famous reference to human rights in Capital was accompanied by support for the “legal limitation of the working day”, a modest Magna Carta. In the passage heading the present review, Jeremy Bentham was as an unlikely figure to muster in support of human rights. He was, the authors note, as hostile to the French Revolution’s founding declarations as De Maistre and Edmund Burke. More so in fact, in Anarchical Fallacies Critique of the Doctrine of Inalienable, Natural Rights (1796), he dismissed them” Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, — nonsense upon stilts.” Perhaps Benthan advocacy of the workhouse could be seen as a means to ensure the greatest good, through a felicific calculus of pleasure and pain, but of human rights ideology, there was none.

Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchère offer this way of looking at Marx’s views. In the celebrated statement that the “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” implies that we base on the liberty of all on the liberty of each individual, and not the other way around. (Il s’agissait bien de fonder le liberté de tous sur la liberté de chacun, et non l’inverse.” (Page 94)

Lacroix and Pranchère are academics, who have published on political theory and human rights. They are both based on Brussels. But, references to (mostly) French language controversies aside (they offer important insights into the writings of Marcel Gauchet for example) Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ? has striking echoes of near- identical debates in Britain and the anglophone world. In part this is the result of the curious reprise of US polemicist Christopher Lasch’ writings on the “therapeutic” roots of narcissistic politics, by, amongst many others, the French ‘original socialist’ Jean-Claude Michéa, who considers that the original fault of French socialism was to have aligned with liberalism. But, as we have indicated with PM Boris Johnson’s potential attacks on human rights legislation, these are not only issues stuck in the world of ideas. From here we move to the global ‘culture wars’, and to clashes on battle-grounds of American liberalism and conservatism, Bolsarono’s Brazil, and back to Europe’s illiberal states and national populists.

There is , it could be argued, increasing convergence between the ideas of conservatives and a certain nationalist or “sovereigntist” left. This has a more limited range, perhaps to Europe. where the stakes have involved parties of the left with influential socialist traditions that are marginal in the USA. Every one of the book’s broader account of the claims against human rights and the “culture wars” they are held to foster, every linkage between neoliberalism and human rights, every complaint against ‘ interfering’ laws and gender politics, is to be found on the Spiked Magazine (run by former Revolutionary Marxists ) site, Blue Labour (whose views on the family could be inserted into many paragraphs), in the writings of the Full Brexit supporters and in groupuscules like the Social Democratic Party (SDP).

Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ? makes a case that has its counterpart in Britain, and elsewhere, despite our obvious different historical relationship to the first French Republic’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. A defence of human rights as part of a strategy of solidarity (“une politique de la solidarité”) and internationalism open to defending both individuals and social groups fighting injustice. Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchère are to be congratulated on showing some of the way.

See also: Review: Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ?

Written by Andrew Coates

August 12, 2020 at 1:16 pm

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Capitalism, Europe, European Left, French Left, French Politics, Human Rights, Labour Party, Left, Marxism, Nationalism, Populism

Tagged with European Left, Human Rights, Jean-Yves Pranchère, Justine Lacroix, National Populism

Statement from the left-wing collective Ta’amim al-Masaref in Lebanon: ‘It is time for rage’

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Les dirigeants prévenus en juillet des risques dans le port

(Picture from L’Orient du jour.)

A statement from left-wing collective Ta’amim al-Masaref in Lebanon: ‘It is time for rage’

Comrades, we are trapped.

We are trapped between the barbarism of capital accumulation and the subsequent nonchalant greed it enables.

As our lives become more worthless by the hour, we are trapped between the military machine deployed to defend private property at all costs, and the ruling class it has vowed to uphold.

We are trapped between the death cult that is capital accumulation and its tendency to accumulate, store, bargain for better deals, negotiate and accumulate further, even at its own risk. Especially at our expense.

The August 4 blast is an immediate and irreversible ramification of the ruling class’ deliberate indispensability of the masses. The capitalist, neoliberal system was built at our expense, and always – without exception – seeks to serve the interests of the ruling class. It will never be more evident and salient than it is today the extent to which our lives are regarded as expendable and worthless.

But the blast does not propagate evenly. It rips apart working-class neighbourhoods relentless and with impunity. Wave after wave, we can feel our precarity laid bare as our windows and doors shattered, and our buildings collapsed. The explosion both accelerates our condition and decelerates business as usual. It is in this spatio-temporal reality that we are trapped.

Our livelihoods are closest to the epicentres of destruction. How could they not be, when our livelihoods depend on reproducing chaos, zombie capitalism, and our destitute condition? It slows uncovers their violence and their gentrifying displacement. As their interminable towers merely tremble, their children are kept safe by our comrades, domestic workers.

This regime functions precisely as it was constructed to: to exploit us, displace us, crush us and kill us, unapologetically and without hesitation.

They are untouchable even in defeat. They are indestructible even in catastrophe

But they are unreachable no more.

As thousands of families remain stranded and homeless, it is now our duty to occupy their luxurious homes. The ones purposefully kept empty as a form of class war, as an undying bourgeois sneer. We must occupy what they think is theirs. We must occupy what is, in fact, ours.

As this catastrophe steadily becomes militarized, it is our duty to fight against the unfolding military coup that is going to be perpetually imposed on us.

As we are living through famine, hunger, and poverty, it is our duty to supply for our comrades. To fight for food sovereignty. To divorce dependency from our bellies.

We must demand justice for our dead. For our victims.

We do not need any investigations. We know who the culprits are. Structurally, yes it is the ruling class, its third-party tradesmen, middle-men, technicians of doom, and trades of destruction.

We must form neighbourhood committees, and workers must control their own destiny, both in the production and reproduction of wealth. We must rebuild our own homes. We must share them with our comrades.

We must open public schools. Transform them into temporary hospitals for the wounded.

We must honour our dead. Celebrate their lives. Continue their fight.

We must not let them force us into normalisation. Nothing that we have lived through in our lifetimes, and in the last year, has been ‘normal’.

As we look at Palestine and Syria, we know that our struggles are intertwined, as are our regimes. Millions of Syrians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Algerians and Arabs have fought their regimes in an open war of manoeuvre that has not said its last word. We are nothing if not a continuation of this war.

We must gather the strength to emulate our comrades in 1982 who fought against the Israel onslaught of Beirut. We will fight capitalism at home as we have previously fought imperialism.

We must be inspired by our Syrian comrades who have lived through thousands of the regime’s barrel bombs and Islamist occupation.

We must draw inspiration from our Sudanese comrades in their organising and from our Algerian comrades in their perseverance.

Comrades, the time has come for us to organise and obliterate capitalism and its enablers.

It is now time for rage. For revenge. For justice. It is time to obliterate this regime, by any means necessary. We need to organise, and we need to organise now.

And with that, death to the system that kills our comrades.

Ta’amim al-Masaref in Lebanon

Beirut, 11 August 2020

This statement does not necessarily reflect the views of the Alliance of MENA Socialists.

More statements from the site of the The Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists

Founding statement,

November 24, 2017

We are an alliance of Middle Eastern socialists opposed to all the international and Middle Eastern regional imperialist powers and their wars, whether the U.S., Russia and China or Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey. We also oppose other authoritarian regimes such as Assad’s in Syria and El Sisi’s in Egypt as well as religious fundamentalism whether of ISIS, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah or the Muslim Brotherhood. Although the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah consider themselves gradualists and oppose the Jihadism of Al Qaeda and ISIS, all of these organizations share the goal of establishing a state based on Shari’a Law and preserving the current capitalist order.

We oppose capitalism, class divisions, patriarchy/sexism, racism, ethnic and religious prejudice and speak to the struggles of women, workers, oppressed nationalities such as Kurds and Palestinians, oppressed ethnic and religious minorities, and sexual minorities. We also oppose Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

We stand for socialism as a concept of human emancipation and an affirmative vision distinguished from the authoritarian regimes that called themselves “Communist.”

The effort to create an Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists, originally started in March 2016 as an Alliance of Syrian and Iranian Socialists with a trilingual website (English/Arabic/Persian) to help express the aspirations of “the Other Middle East” and to offer analyses of critical issues and new dialogues and bonds of solidarity between Syrians and Iranians opposed to their authoritarian regimes.

Since the destinies of people are linked across borders, important developments in the region –some terrifying and some hopeful—have compelled the formation of a broader Alliance.

Amongst the international press Le Monde has had extensive coverage.

These are important opinion pieces calling for international solidarity.

Tribune l « Beyrouth a plus été détruite et défigurée en temps de paix qu’en temps de guerre », clamait, il y a quelques années, un militant engagé pour la protection du patrimoine. L’explosion survenue le 4 août confirme ce constat. https://t.co/1n59XsUqOu
— Le Monde (@lemondefr) August 11, 2020

Tribune l Elizabeth Picard : « La France doit soutenir les prises de responsabilités de la société civile libanaise » https://t.co/BJoViGhcyM
— Le Monde (@lemondefr) August 11, 2020

#Liban Hassan Diab :« Le système de corruption s’est étendu au sein de l’Etat. Je me suis rendu compte que ce système est plus grand que l’Etat qui, les mains liées, n’a pas réussi à le combattre. » https://t.co/wWjtuZrGY3
— Le Monde (@lemondefr) August 11, 2020

Written by Andrew Coates

August 11, 2020 at 11:50 am

Posted in Europe, European Left, French Left, North Africa

Tagged with Beirut, Internationalists, Lebanon, Left, middle-east, Socialists

Belarus and the New International Solidarity.

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Global Solidarity Needed with Belarus Democrats,

One of the most influential books on nationalism in modern times was Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. (1983) Thinking about the nation as “an imagined political political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” a “deep horizontal comradeship”, in different styles (languages, cultures), and though the arrival of print, in which this relationship occupies people’s minds, and through the sovereign state, were hallmarks of Anderson’s approach.

Imagined Communities was at its most convincing for the case that nationalism was not just another ‘ism’, “a system of ideas, an ideology”. It was at its least plausible when it extended an argument against those who tried to battle against nationalisms which were plainly an ideology, part of political projects which projected a future for a national sovereign body based on the common “fellowship” of a people. Critics of Anderson, such as Eric Hobsbawm, pointed out that that the idea of People and Nation are no doubt created in this way (Including very imaginary inventions of tradition and organic roots). But “politics constantly tended to take up an remould such pre-political elements for its own purposes”. (Nations and Nationalism since 1780. 1991)

In this millennium a new generation of nationalists has learnt to “speak for dead people” to defend their nationalism and imagined sovereignty. National populisms, amongst other boasts, claim to give voice to the People against the ‘globalist elites’. These themes have helped sustain governments like Donald Trump’s , the election of Boris Johnson, and to propel the hardline regimes of Poland and Hungary.

The left has had a hard time finding an alternative. A few, like the editors of the journal which Benedict’s brother,{erry sustained for many years, have variously welcomed ‘anti-system’ movements of all stripes against the ‘globalising’ ‘neoliberal’ European Union, and relished Brexit as shocks to the world order, while spending their time in wishful thinking about a small American left unable to create an alternative would-be hegemonic radicalism to national populism.

Some wish to channel national feeling into left populism. Attempts to do so have not been successful, as the failure of the most explicit left-wing populist project, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France insoumise indicates. This suggests that the diversity of modern European societies may be one reason why it is not easy to mobilise and draw together the “people” against a capitalist elite, but not as difficult to speak for one group of people against an ‘anti-national’ enemy, foreigners in general and domestic groups of migrant origin.

Reflecting on his academic career in the posthumous A Life Beyond Boundaries (2016) Anderson spoke of his writing on nationalism.

I began to recognise that the fundamental drawback of this type of comparison, that using the nation and nation states as the basic units of analysis totally ignored the obvious fact that in reality these units were tied together and crosscut by ‘global’ political-intellectual currents such as liberalism, fascism, communism and socialism, as well as vast religious networks and economic and technological forces. I has also to take seriously the reality that very few people have ever been ‘solely’ nationalist. (Page 128)

People can be “gripped” by global cultural and political products and ideas, Hollywood, Manga comics, neoliberalism, Islamism, human rights, and democracy, As he observed, global forms of communication, created with the “telegraph and the steamship” had moved on. One word, Internet, plus, another, global travel. And another migration. We can communicate across the world not just through “supranational’ languages, like English, Arabic, Spanish, French, Mandarin, but in any language, if only through with the help Google translation. TO the Internet we can add migration, global travel, and migration.

It seems that many on the left, particularly the pro-Brexit left which prepared the ground for Boris Johnson’s message of Get Brexit Done, have been unable to grapple with the results of these underlying changes.

These are times and conditions not just for the rise of national populism, but for a new internationalism to grow.

In recent weeks we have seen support for Chinese democrats, protests against the persecution of the Uighurs, and a wave of deep empathy with Beirut.

But for some on the left the model of solidarity seems stuck on the late 19th century. That is, calls for solidarity between the peoples, each separate, and communicated to through vertically. It is suggested that people are constantly getting their support ‘wrong’, and should leave it to official channels; that our real business is with our “Own” imperialism.

This is not going to happen…..

Revolts in places across the world inspire direct support.

Here is – clear, simple and an intensely moving – account of one.

As much as I am trying to be neutral, #Belarus is more than just another news story for me. Found a moment to finish up a summary of what I saw in the past weeks of travelling. Whatever the result tonight, Belarusians already showed that they want change https://t.co/jCs68tGRvg

— Hanna Liubakova (@HannaLiubakova) August 9, 2020

Lukashenko may be announced the winner. But his victory won’t last long

9 AUGUST 2020

Hanna Liubakova

It's not about young people or specific social group. People of different ages, professions joined the rallies in dozens of cities. In some cities, riot police officers put the shields down in support of protesters. pic.twitter.com/nyoDC9zdRh

— Franak Viačorka (@franakviacorka) August 10, 2020

Respect and admiration to my Belarusian friends. Some now arrested by this brutal and corrupt regime. https://t.co/822dHDmr3G

— Hugh Grant (@HackedOffHugh) August 10, 2020

Reportedly the workers of Belarus' largest steelworks in Zhlobin started a strike pic.twitter.com/wc2mFqBKIm

— Tadeusz Giczan (@TadeuszGiczan) August 10, 2020

Let’s put this type of response in the dustbin of history:

The US has activated its "color revolution" network in Belarus, which is trying to overthrow the government.

Btw this Belarusian opposition media outlet is funded by numerous Western governments and billionaire oligarchs who bankroll regime-change effortshttps://t.co/RcPQ73fQFG

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) August 9, 2020

Background Articles: Why the clock is ticking for Belarus’s Lukashenko

The opposition’s wooing of Moscow may have sealed the fate of Europe’s “last dictator”.

BY FELIX LIGHT AND IDO VOCK

Belarus blues: can Europe’s ‘last dictator’ survive rising discontent?

Andrew Roth.

Written by Andrew Coates

August 10, 2020 at 12:19 pm

Posted in European Left, Human Rights, Labour Party, Left, Nationalism, Populism

Tagged with Belarus, European Left, Internationalism

The Future of a Delusion, “If our whole party had united behind Jeremy, Labour could have won in 2017 and saved tens of thousands of lives. “

with 14 comments

The 2017 election that might have been won, if it hadn’t been for a completely different result.

In his only novel, Zuleika Dobson; (1911) Max Beerbohm recounts the adventures of a femme fatale’s visit to Oxford. All the undergraduates fall in love with her. In a final proof of their passion they “leapt emulously headlong into the water”. and “plunged into the swirling stream”.

The lees of such a homage were as nothing to the claims now being made in the afterglow of this article.

Jeremy Corbyn accuses Labour officials of sabotaging election campaign

Ardour for Jeremy Corbyn has led people to declare that Labour could have won in 2017, and “saved tens of thousands of lives”, if only……

If our whole party had united behind Jeremy, Labour could have won in 2017 and saved tens of thousands of lives.

Our popular socialist policies inspired millions and won 40% of the vote.

The Forde Inquiry must deliver answers and justice. #LabourLeaks https://t.co/6xcIVFnTt4

— Momentum 🌹 (@PeoplesMomentum) August 7, 2020

There are good reasons to be outraged at the way that outgoing Party Officials are alleged to have treated the incoming Corbyn team.

On the material presented there is the strongest possible case, given in the newspapers, that “clear evidence of factional activity by senior paid employees of the party against the elected leadership of the time” exists.

We wholly sympathise with Joe Ryle on that.

I was reluctant to say anything but this is too important, the full story needs to be told.

Don’t let anyone ever tell you anything different: without the actions of some Labour Party staff we would have won in 2017. #LabourLeaks https://t.co/8OazhNBELz

— Joe Ryle (@JoeRRyle) August 7, 2020

But what has emerged is a far wider set of claims

They allege that in 2017 hostile officials set up a “shadow operation” in a Westminster office as part of efforts to plot their own election course, which included starving potential target seats of money and focusing resources on MPs not allied to Corbyn.

In the Independent this is stated,

The 13-page contribution, seen by The Independent, says: “Given that Labour was less than 2,500 votes in key seats away from forming a government, having won 40 per cent of the popular vote, it’s not impossible that Jeremy Corbyn might now be in his third year as a Labour prime minister were it not for the unauthorised, unilateral action taken by a handful of senior party officials in 2017.”

…

The messages detail at length senior staffers disappointed when Labour did better than expected in the election or polls, with some saying explicitly that they had been working against a good result for the party.

Reports underline a “shadow operation”” aimed at “starving potential target seats of money” and factionalists giving vivid expressions of joy at Labour losing.

What was the shadow operation #ErgonHouse, run out of a separate building and hidden from the party’s official #GE2017 election committee, which was uncovered more than two years later by the #LabourLeaks report? https://t.co/cJZCsRFxNc

— James Schneider (@schneiderhome) August 7, 2020

What kind of “shadow operation” was at work?

Were there people out there in the constituencies pouncing on party workers, thwarting their activities, and garbling their messages?

This will come as news to those who campaigned in target seats, such as Ipswich, which was won by Labour by a highly competent well-resourced Labour team backed by members and supporters all over town.

The “separate operation” must have been so hidden in the shades, bound in the darkness, that we, in our stupid good-humoured way. failed to notice it.

Sandy Martin won this ‘target seat” for Labour in Ipswich.

Where was it during the 2019 European Elections, when Cobyn’s team was in charge?

That was a half-hearted campaign if ever there was one.

Where was this parallel wrecking centre in December 2019….?

This is the best analysis I’ve seen of the “2227 votes” delusion: https://t.co/gjISsjii9A cc @Pabloite

— Bob From Brockley 🥤 (@bobfrombrockley) August 8, 2020

Anthony B. Masters, Royal Statistical Society Statistical Ambassador.

The 2017 general election: not that close after all

The claim relies on the smallest number of votes changing in a specific way. It ignores that, based on the same logic, the Conservatives needed only 50 switched votes for a working majority. It also ignores the fact that constituencies are not independent events.

Far more votes would need to have shifted to plausibly change the outcome.

…

By the same logic, the Conservative needed only 50 switched votes to reach 321 seats. Given Sinn Fein’s abstentions, this is a probable working majority. 528 votes would have needed to switch for the Conservatives to win 326 constituencies — a Commons majority.

We should remember that constituencies are not independent events. We can also calculate what vote share would need to switch across Great Britain. How big does a uniform national swing need to be?

That also requires three assumptions. If one party increased their vote share, that same change happens in every seat. Only switching between Labour and the Conservatives occurs. Turnout does not change.

Under those assumptions, 0.04 points from Labour to the Conservatives gives the Conservatives 321 seats. Some 0.37 points in the other direction reduces the Conservatives to 310 seats.

These two switched vote shares are equal to around 13,000 and 116,000 votes across Great Britain. The Conservatives would have needed fewer switched votes than Labour to plausibly change the outcome in their favour.

There are other considerations to take into account, too. If Labour had been closer to the Conservatives in votes, then the electoral dynamics would also have changed.

In this alternate universe, the messages and targeted campaigns could have been dissimilar. Indeed, Theresa May might not have called the election in the first place.

The ‘2,227 votes’ figure appears to be a miscalculation. Suggesting Labour were a few thousand votes from “forming a government” relies on diamond-strong assumptions. It is time to bring it to an end.

Reactions are rolling in:

Where the battle lines are being drawn over leaked Labour report

There is no easy way through, however considered the response. Corbyn’s supporters are convinced by the election betrayal; many BAME MPs and members want more than just words from Starmer about tackling toxic attitudes at Labour HQ; and the officials are insistent the law will uphold their belief they have been maligned and defamed.

If there are any compensations for Starmer, it is that this will likely play out amid the political noise of coronavirus and far enough away from an election that many voters will not notice.

The Morning Star has its own explanation for Labour’s two most recent election defeats.

Editorial: The leaked report is important – but it was not sabotage that defeated the Corbyn project

The first is that the Corbyn leadership faced deliberate, planned obstruction from the Labour Party machinery from the beginning.

Evidence of this is not confined to the report, which was not a bolt from the blue. The suspension and expulsion of thousands of members during the leadership elections of 2015 and 2016 on the most trivial pretexts — an 82-year-old was expelled for having retweeted a demand that the Green Party be included in election debates — was very obviously an effort by the party bureaucracy to stop Corbyn winning.

Nor was the attempt to bar Corbyn, the incumbent leader, from standing for re-election in 2016 a secret.

The real fight was deeper,

For five years the political front line of class struggle in Britain was not between the two main parties but inside one of them — between those Labour forces invested (often literally) in the status quo, and those who wanted socialist change.

In the end, in the sense that Corbyn’s successor is not building on the socialist project but reversing it, the former won. Or rather, the latter lost.

Because the second key lesson is easily forgotten amid justified outrage over the leaked report. The socialist project was able to advance despite their sabotage. As one of the saboteurs put it on election night 2017, “they [Corbyn’s team] are celebrating and we are silent and grey faced.”

The relentless attacks did tremendous damage. But it was only when the Labour leadership allowed its own radicalism to be blunted, subordinating its socialist message to the liberal cause of a second EU referendum and prioritising parliamentary manoeuvres over mass mobilisation, that the wheels came off.

The People’s Vote marches for a Second Referendum were backed by figures like Sadiq Khan, the Labour Mayor of London, and many Labour MPs. John McDonnell addressed a Final Say Rally in October 2019. There was radical left support from Another Europe is Possible which organised hundreds-strong contingents at protests that drew, hundreds of thousands onto the streets.

If, as the Morning Star asserts, Labour did not engage in “Mass mobilisation” why did not they, and the rest of the pro-Brexit ‘Lexit’ (Left Exit) groups, organise their own demonstrations in favour of leaving the EU?

Perhaps they were afraid of attracting the nationalist support that lay behind pro-Brexit vote and the subordination of their socialist message to the cause of populist national sovereignty.

The daily’s own conclusion is that the left should have “grappled” with its enemies within, and that it should speak to the “whole working class” – as if working class voters were not divided on Brexit.

The Editorial concludes,

If we attribute our failure to the strength of ruling-class opposition, we may as well give up on socialism: it will never go away.

The important thing is to develop strategies to overcome it. The left did not grapple seriously enough with its enemies in Labour, but it was when it ceased to speak to the whole working class that it stopped being heard.

So the real struggle is against Labour’s enemies within.

Here’s some people with ideas about that:

Paul Mason's ideas of ‘culture wars’, postmodernist ‘narratives’ based on ‘values’, and popular fronts are a dead end for the labour movement. It is only the genuine ideas of Marxism that can unite the working class and offer a way forward.https://t.co/SyeCV4q7JS

— Socialist Appeal (@socialist_app) August 6, 2020

Pseudo-Marxism has no place in our movement

All of this guff is nothing but dust being thrown into the eyes of the movement, intended to confuse and disorientate socialist activists – and, ultimately, to hide the real liberal, reactionary, bourgeois class content at the heart of Mason’s thesis.

In reality, Mason – like Kautsky – has lost his head. But at least the latter had a head to lose in the first place.

There is nothing radical to be found in Mason’s apologia for liberalism. Indeed, there are no positive suggestions for the left at all.

Most notably, in Mason’s (30-plus minute read!) essay, there is no mention of the need for the left to fight for mandatory reselection; to reverse Blair’s legacy; or to kick out the bureaucrats and careerists that have conspired against a Labour victory.

Instead, Mason has gone on record recently to defend Starmer – the right-wing Labour leader who is opening waging war on the left on behalf of the establishment, attempting to reverse all the gains of the Corbyn era.

This is a telling and textbook case study of where you end up if you abandon a class approach. The ideas of ‘culture wars’, postmodernist ‘narratives’ based on ‘values’, and popular fronts are a dead end for the movement. It is only the genuine ideas of Marxism that can unite the working class and offer a way forward.

Written by Andrew Coates

August 8, 2020 at 10:51 am

Posted in Britain, Capitalism, Conspiracies, European Left, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left, Marxism, Nationalism

Tagged with Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party, Left, Morning Star

Corbyn and McDonnell Faced “hundreds” of incidents of Factionalist Obstruction – Joe Ryle.

with 11 comments

Labour Needs to Turn its Back on All Factionalism.

Today a disturbing account of how the factional opponents of Jeremy Corbyn reacted to his leadership of the Labour Party has been published.

I saw from the inside how Labour staff worked to prevent a Labour government

The work of senior Labour staffers to stop Labour winning is only just starting to come out.

Joe Ryle Open Democracy.

Ryle has a background in climate activism and took up work for John McDonnell and Labour ” mostly unaware of all its different political affiliations and factions”.

The Evening Standard (February the 23rd 2016) reported,

Joe Ryle helped organise for activist group Momentum in London, where some MPs fear it is behind attempts to deselect them.

He also played an active role in aviation campaign group Plane Stupid, with whom he was arrested after a protest at Stansted Airport.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell under fire for employing Momentum and Plane Stupid activist

Ryle may have been aware of Labour’s factionalism because he had been a Green Party member, and Press Officer, for Keith Taylor Green Party MEP (South East England).

GIven the way the Green Party, and the European Parliament, operate, was it surprising to find this? ” We were in for quite a shock when we were confronted with the machine of Labour HQ.”

This tweet from John McDonnell indicates that his work was appreciated.

I always enjoy Joe Ryle’s wonderful creativity and absolute joy for life. Door knocking, leaflet delivering, soap box speech making, here I come. https://t.co/9EVdG7Kz3x

— John McDonnell MP (@johnmcdonnellMP) October 29, 2019

The story that has just broken will unsettle anybody, even to those familiar with machine politics.

I was reluctant to say anything but this is too important, the full story needs to be told.

Don’t let anyone ever tell you anything different: without the actions of some Labour Party staff we would have won in 2017. #LabourLeaks https://t.co/8OazhNBELz

— Joe Ryle (@JoeRRyle) August 7, 2020

Joe Ryle states,

Some of the behaviour of senior officials at Labour HQ has already been documented in the 860-page leaked Labour report. But there’s a lot more that went on behind the scenes and I think it’s important that people have the whole story.

There is plenty of detail to back his account up.

The most shocking sabotage I personally witnessed was an encounter with the notoriously difficult regional offices who were often the most ideologically opposed to the Corbyn regime. At my request, attempts were made to organise a rally for John McDonnell via one of the regional offices. Given that John was one of the most senior members of the shadow cabinet, I expected my request to be met with enthusiasm.

When I found out that the location they had chosen was in the middle of nowhere I was left flabbergasted. I was told this tactic had been used before – apparently to avoid lots of members showing up and being won round by the new regime.

There were hundreds more incidents like this that I’m aware of; press releases regularly blocked from going out, staff members briefing against Corbyn’s office, weekly planning grids leaked including the 2019 General Election grid, an almost constant refusal to share content on the party’s social media platforms and the coordination of staff resignations to damage the party. As a political first, the party’s 2017 manifesto was also infamously leaked.

Ryle continues,

.On the night of the 2017 General Election I was in the press team at the party’s HQ. I’ll never forget the deathly silence and the looks on the faces of those staffers that we knew to have been plotting against Corbyn since day one. While we celebrated robbing Theresa May of her majority, party staffers mourned in the room next door: “they are cheering and we are silent and grey faced. Opposite to what I had been working towards for the last couple of years!!”, one senior staffer allegedly wrote on WhatsApp that night, according to the leaked report.

This is serious account from somebody who is well-regarded as a party worker.

It needs a proper response.

Factionalism amongst opponents of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell was rife in key Labour Party structures.

We need to end Labour factionalism, Keir Starmer has said.

That means all. factionalism.

But is this true?

The number of extra votes in marginal seats that Labour needed in 2017 to give Corbyn a chance of being prime minister was an agonising 2,227. This will forever remain a sore point for many of us. Because as the leaked report exposed – we know that in 2017 party resources never reached many of the winnable seats that they should have, with allies of the small faction in party HQ standing in safe seats seen as the first priority.

….

Without the actions of this small group of highly experienced saboteurs, I genuinely believe we would now be three years into a Labour government investing in our NHS and public services – an outcome which surely would have better prepared the country for the Coronavirus pandemic.

The idea that Labour came within a whisker of winning in 2017 is simply not true.

NIck Tyrone, no doubt a factional opponent of the left, points out,

No, Labour did not almost win the 2017 general election. Here’s a breakdown of why – and why this is important

I’ll give the Corbynistas their precious 2,227 votes exactly where they need them so they can take those seven seats off the Tories by one vote each. For the sake of what follows, they are theirs. So, what happens if Labour gets those seven seats off the Conservatives in 2017? They won the election then, right? No, not even remotely close.

An extra seven seats would have given Labour 269, which if you are a keen observer of British politics you will note would still have put Labour someways off the 326 needed to have an outright majority in parliament and even way short of the 321 needed for a nominal majority when Sinn Fein, the speaker, etc are taken out of the equation. More than 50 seats short in fact, which is a strange way to call something a victory. So, what the hell are the Corbynistas on about then? Well, remember they took these seven seats off of the Tories, which means instead of the 317 the Conservatives actually ended up with, they now have 310. Even hooking up with the DUP only collectively gets them 320. If you add Labour’s 269 to the SNP’s 35, the Lib Dems 12, Plaid Cymru’s 4 and Caroline Lucas, you get 321. A one seat majority over the Tory-DUP configuration! Which means Corbyn would have been prime minister! Right?

Written by Andrew Coates

August 7, 2020 at 11:17 am

Posted in Europe, European Left, Human Rights, Labour Movement, Labour Party

Tagged with European Left, Factionalism, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Labour Party

China, Human Rights, and the New Internationalist Left.

False U.S. accusations against China expose its own human rights problems: People’s Daily commentary

Internationalist Left Defends Human Rights.

Human rights are criticised from two principal sides. National Populists, defend a nation’s absolute sovereign right to make laws without legal interference. Rights legislation, national and international, are the result of a “fear of democracy”. Luke Gittos writes on Spiked, “The existence of a human-rights framework owes everything to postwar elites’ attempt to exert economic and political control over the heads of European peoples.”

From another side, human rights are accused of promoting and even justifying neoliberalism. The neoliberalism of a market society would only be the theoretical deepening and the realisation of the liberal individualism of their market origins. By their absolute and uncompromising character, individual rights would only promote the figure of a bad citizen concerned only with her own interests. Andrew Murray writes, “the preference for individual rights over the collective has come to which has come to predominate on much of the Western left, a flowering of the more poisonous seeds of personal identity and human rights” (The Fall and Rise of the British Left. 2019)

“Democracy without rights is not a democracy. The majority will of the voters, as expressed at the ballot box, is not the only criterion of democracy ; it is only a consequence of these primary criteria of equal rights and freedom for all. “ wrote Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchère in Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiots ? at the end of last year,

In a powerful assault on the idea that human rights are ‘bourgeois’ and individualistic Lacroix and Prancheere take up a thread running throughout the history of the First International. Marx and Engels, despite their criticisms of flowery phrases about “right and duties” – the weight of the late 19th century democratic and national struggles led by figures such as the Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini, backed demands for social and individual rights and legislation to protect workers’ interests. These were demands going back to the limitation on the working day to which Vol 1 of Capital devotes a whole chapter.These are rights, as they remind us, that for socialists should balance both “liberty and equality”. In this respect we could say that the Trade Union movement is one of the biggest movements for human rights in history.

By the end of the 19th century socialist leaders, such as Jean Jaurès, put democratic rights, individual and collective at the centre of their politics. Many on the left continue their work. By contrast, today “Populism” is not a defence of liberty but a claim for identity “d’un peuple homogène”(Page 17) By affirming absolute national sovereignty in the name of the “people”, a ‘general will’ that exists only through their own parties, populists and others deny the real voices of individuals and conflicting classes.

Reviewing the book for the radical left Lignes de Crêtes Nadia Meziane observes that

JYP and JL methodically destroy the rhetoric of being ‘anti-system’ means being against political liberalism and the rhetoric according to which social rights and civil liberties are the individualistic and selfish corollary of economic oppression. and are opposed to social rights. this rhetoric definitively died with Stalin, but it is not the case, even in certain parts of the radical left, where pitting the ‘societal’ against social issues, has become commonplace.

That socialism was a proposal to go beyond the original human rights, and was seen as a base to be extended and consolidated, and not to be destroyed has again been largely forgotten. Jean Yves Pranchère and Justine Lacroix remind us. Deconstructing certain hypocrisies based on the formal appeal to human rights is not the same as naming them as an ideological enemy in itself. At a time when it is fashionable to support autocrats like Maduro or Assad, in the name of the destruction of the Established Order, the reminder is vital.

Review: Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ?

This is the conclusion of Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiots ?

“les droits de l’homme devraient être le nom d’une politique de la solidarité, qui ne content pas compenser l’exclusion sociale par des mécanismes d’assistance, mais qui lie les libertés civiles et politiques à une reprise de la question sociale au sense le plus large, incluent les conditions du vivre-ensemble et donc la construction d’un monde commun puisse s’épanouir l’individualité de tous.” (Page 97. Les droits de l’homme rendent-ils idiot ? 2019.)

Human rights should be the name of a strategy of solidarity, one that is not just a means of fighting social exclusion by support mechanisms, but one which binds civic and political freedoms in ways that bring back the social issues in in he broadest sense, including the conditions of community life, and, as a result, building a common world in which everybody’s individuality can flourish.

Political developments have brought China and human rights to the fore.

We are not dealing with the limits of bourgeois ‘egotistic’ rights but an autocracy whose methods, re-education, camps, forced labour, are intimately connected to the Stalinist tradition of Maoism.

The repression that hybrid Stalinist-Capitalism of the CCP state has unleashed is an assault on human rights.

Left solidarity is no respecter of national sovereignty, or the interests of nation states.

Labour has officially taken notice:

What’s happening in China is deeply disturbing and we can’t turn a blind eye to it. pic.twitter.com/kuEwcMxIlt

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) July 20, 2020

Paul Mason offers one of the best approaches to what the left should, and can, do.

Why the left has to maintain an independent and critical stance in the US-China Cold War… my @NewStatesman column: https://t.co/Fo0VnESwls

— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) August 6, 2020

Here are some of his points:

The left, and above all anyone who thinks the term “Marxism” is worth saving, should be outraged. But parts of the British left seem determined to apologise for China’s crimes against human rights and free speech.

In recent Labour meetings at which activists have tried to raise solidarity with democrats and trade unionists in Hong Kong, or with the Uighurs, they have been met by accusations that they are “promoting Western imperialism” and “media lies”.

If anybody doubts this they can see recent tweets,

https://twitter.com/Rango1917/status/1291323643310546944?s=20

Or the comments underneath this Tweet from Momentum:

Even the picture used in the fake organisations poster has been debunked.

— Lenin (@TheLeninOfLove) August 5, 2020

Former leader of the International Marxist Group, John Ross, has joined in,

In New Statestman @paulmasonnews decided attack me. I really don't care but article perfectly illustrates imperialist mentality when he can't even mention that China lifted 860 million people from internationally defined poverty – presumably they don't count

— John Ross (@JohnRoss43) August 6, 2020

Ross’ argument, recycled from 1960s Soviet Bloc interventions at the UN, is at root that giving people better material living conditions is more important than the ‘bourgeois’ freedoms of expression. Not a very good counter to criticism of political oppression, and the lack of independent trade union rights.

The former Trotskyist has been at it in the Chinese state media.

John Ross, former director of Economic and Business Policy of London, said that China has “a real understanding of human rights” and “the key human right is to stay alive.”

The right to life is among the most basic human rights enshrined in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” of the United Nations.

The so-called “human rights abuse” fabricated by some ill-intentioned U.S. politicians constitutes an affront to Chinese people’s anti-virus fight, the article said.

Paul Mason, by contrast, continues:

I am certain that the renewed salience of the Uighur question, which was ignored for years during the “golden era” of Sino-British relations declared by George Osborne, is in part being driven by the US’s newly aggressive stance on China. But the point of being a socialist is being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

This, however, seems beyond the two left-wing publications in the UK that appear committed to whitewashing China’s authoritarian form of capitalism: the Morning Star and Socialist Action.

He asks,

The problem for the left remains, as it did in the original Cold War, of how to support democracy, human rights and workers’ rights in China – and in its wider diplomatic sphere of influence – without supporting the Sinophobic rhetoric and aggressive militarism of Donald Trump’s America.

He develops the theme,

What should distinguish the British left’s approach to China is knowledge of and engagement with the workers’ movement. Beyond the outright CCP apologists there is a more widespread belief, born out of lazy cultural relativism, that it is somehow imperialist or even racist for British people to criticise China’s human rights record.

This is the clinching argument,

For those of us on the left who want to maintain an architecture of thought based on historical materialism, whose genealogy runs from Marx, through the early Communist International, the “Western Marxism” of the 1930s, the New Left of the 1960s and the anti-capitalism of today, I am afraid taking a position on Xi’s actual ideology is not a luxury.

…

Xi’s “Marxism” is overtly and systematically anti-humanist. Its endlessly repeated loops of closed and meaningless phrases make the Newspeak of Orwell’s Oceania sound positively lyrical. The forced, televised confessions of corrupt officials are – as China expert Christian Sorace has argued – part of an attempt to create “affective sovereignty”: love of the party above the state, irrespective of what it says or does.

Human rights are universal.

They will be defended against this “Marxism”.

Xinjiang – Neither Washington nor Beijing: the Left Must Stand With the Uighurs

Ben Towse,

The international left cannot duck out just because Western powers criticise China. We cannot support our enemy’s enemy, uncritically regurgitating its propaganda as the Morning Star shamefully does. But nor can we ally with our imperialist rulers.

We must think about alliances and action independent of the ruling classes. We must reaffirm the left’s understanding of the transnational working class, and oppressed peoples, as their own emancipators. In the tradition of consistent anti-imperialism, we must look to build a ‘third camp’ that makes links and solidarity across borders, opposing all our rulers and exploiters. As inter-imperialist tensions escalate into a new Cold War, update the old slogan: “Neither Washington nor Beijing, but international socialism”.

For instance, despite harsh repression, class struggle in China continues to seethe with unofficial disputes and strikes. Far from uniformly anathematising (or idolising) the entire nation, let’s seek to reach out to this potent force of Chinese workers against the state and ruling class.

Building international solidarity.

The Uyghur Solidarity Campaign UK, with which I’m an activist, has been formed to build solidarity in the workers’ movement and the left in the UK. The campaign has protested monthly at the Chinese embassy with London’s Uighur community (resuming this week after a coronavirus-hiatus), and in March we invaded the Oxford Circus flagships of Nike, H&M and Microsoft to protest forced labour. A solidarity motion passed at Labour conference last year; a range of union branches and PCS have joined the protests; and socialist MPs including John McDonnell, Kate Osamor and Nadia Whittome have got on board.

There’s much more for the campaign to do in terms of alliance-building, protest, and direct action. There are also clear international connections to make around anti-racism, state violence and reproductive freedom.

A particular goal of the campaign is worker action. From trade union history – Lancashire textile workers rejecting slave-picked Confederate cotton in the US civil war, Scottish factory workers grounding Pinochet’s jet engines, French and Italian dockers refusing to move Saudi arms in 2019 – we know capitalism’s global supply chains provide avenues for concrete action. Organised workers in businesses connected to surveillance and forced labour in China, from dockers to programmers to shop assistants, could have huge leverage.

Xinjiang – Neither Washington nor Beijing: the Left Must Stand With the Uighurs – Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières https://t.co/rWvlVLnXz5

— Andrew Coates (@Pabloite) August 6, 2020

With comrades opposite the Chinese Embassy to speak up for Uyghur freedom and human rights. @CampaignUyghur pic.twitter.com/LE9UCY7h5C

— Daniel Randall (@therubykid) August 5, 2020

Back this campaign!

As with the Uighurs, so with Hong Kong, the left must stand against the CCP's brutal authoritarianism.
A good article by @IrateBen https://t.co/azPYQ6f4wG

— Labour movement solidarity with Hong Kong (UK) (@uksolidaritywi1) August 6, 2020

Written by Andrew Coates

August 6, 2020 at 12:19 pm

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Communism, Europe, European Left, French Left, Human Rights, Imperialism, Labour Party, Marxism, Stalinism

Tagged with China, European Left, Human Rights, Jean-Yves Pranchère, Justine Lacroix, Paul Mason, Stalinism

Were the RCP/Living Marxism/Spiked MI5 Agents? Official Tendance Coatesy Statement.

with 13 comments

Brendan O'Neill Gets the Hump about “McCarthyite assaults on ...

Agents Provocateurs? (Cartoon by John Rogan)

Some years ago a poster on a leftist site asked,

Does anyone out there know what happened to the membership of the Revolutionary Communist Party? Have their ex-members become part of the anti-capitalist movement (God I hope not!) or have they simply gone into retirement living off their MI5 pensions?

Whatever happened to the Revolutionary Communist Party?

The question weighs like a nightmare.

On a page by Bella Caledonia there is reference to a past of the RCP/LIving Marxism/Spiked when “many on the left thought they were a bunch of MI5 agents”.

Discussion by Spotters fails to unearth the truth about the allegation which has focused on Claire Regina Fox, Baroness Fox, in recent days.

This Blog can finally spill the beans.

M15 only tried to recruit one Warwick University Graduate, myself.

Over a haunch of Venison and a bottle of Château Margaux, at Simpson’s in the Strand, they made an attractive offer to Cde Coates.

I declined, made my excuses and left for the Drones Club.

Inside its doors I confided in Michael Ezra.

Cde Ezra said that he would have a word with Gerry Healy.

Tariq Ali came over and intimated that he too had had to turn down tempting proposals. Yet the bright-eyed firebrand had decided that his future as a leader of the World Revolution was best furthered by work with Yuri Andropov.

An ebullient Ted Grant took out a tome by Trotsky from his bulging briefcase and began to tell us all about the help that Father Georgy Apollonovich Gapon rendered the revolution.

January 9th would not have taken place if Gapon had not encountered several thousand politically conscious workers who had been through the school of socialism. These men immediately formed an iron ring around him, a ring from which he could not have broken loose even if he had wanted to.

History of the Russian Revolution. Leo Trotsky.

That was at the end of the 1970s, and anybody who can’t remember it was there.

Many things have changed.

Some suggest that in the new millenium Claire Regina Fox, and her comrade-in-arms Brendan (future Baron?) O’Neill, are today’s Gapons, leading the masses to the revolution that is Brexit.

Others point that the key role in helping Boris Johnson “get Brexit done” is hotly disputed by groups such as the Communist Party of Britain, the Socialist Party, the SWP, Counterfire and New Left Review (that name Tariq Ali – again!).

This speculation aside, Tendance Coatesy can reveal that MI5 did not recruit Claire Regina Fix.

Bumping into my would-be handler at Poundland last week he said to me, “we would never accept anyone with a “second class degree (2:2) in English and American Literature.”

Written by Andrew Coates

August 5, 2020 at 4:36 pm

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Britain, European Left, Free Speech, Labour Party, Left

Tagged with Brexit, Claire Fox, Living Marxism, RCP, Red-Brown Front, Spiked, Tariq Ali

Tory Backlash at Claire Regina Fox’s Peerage.

with 3 comments

Baroness, the RCP was all a “long time ago”.

Things change.

Who would have imagined that a revolutionary leader of the stature of Bob Avakian, of the US Revolutionary Communist Party, “the architect of a whole new framework of human emancipation, the new synthesis of communism, which is popularly referred to as the ‘new communism'” would be backing Joe Biden for US President?

As Bob Avakian goes, so goes the nation https://t.co/iDU2twFZ0f

— Bhaskar Sunkara (@sunraysunray) August 3, 2020

Another one-time Revolutionary Communist, Claire Regina Fox, has come in for some stick about her Peerage.

Her first defence was launched through the pages of the far-right daily, The Express.

Brexiteer Claire Fox in plan to abolish House of Lords from INSIDE after peerage offer https://t.co/JmSE89e5LG

— Drummers' Ark (@drummersark) August 2, 2020

On Sky News last night, where she graced the Press Review, the one-time cadre of the RCP/Living Marxism, dismissed criticism of her acceptance of a seat in the House of Lords.

“It was all a long time ago” the Warwick graduate pointed out.

She promoted the mass line of a long march through the institutions,

Claire Fox on Sky Papers confirms her view the H of L is an 'affront to democracy' but is pleased to be given a new platform to express her views! Very smarmy but she's unelected and her views will include being able to vote on all sorts of things.
World Class Hypocrisy from her.

— DavidS1947 (@DavidS1947) August 3, 2020

Her comrade-in-arms, soon to be Baron Brendan O’Neill, spent yesterday vainly trying to dampen down the uproar by shifting the debate.

Referring to the ” friend of spiked, Claire Fox” he hectored his readers, “nobody should be given a seat in the House of Lords.” ” The Lords must be abolished as a matter of democratic urgency.” If – he sighed – such a Peerage “adds new Brexit-defending voices to a notoriously Remoaner chamber.” The “Spirit of Brexit” (speaking to O’Neill) demands that Boris gives “the people a referendum on the future of the Lords”.

Baying Brendan asks, “What about the masses’ historic call for control and influence? What about making good on ordinary people’s radical insistence on their right to influence public life?

Abolish the House of Lords

The House of Lords behaved disgracefully after the Brexit vote. Peers used their undemocratic power to try to crush 17.4m votes. This must never happen again. It’s time for a referendum on the Lords and we should demand its abolition, says Brendan O’Neillhttps://t.co/RIgu4kc6rL

— spiked (@spikedonline) August 3, 2020

Ignoring this maximum programme, Some ordinary people, members like Spiked mates, of the Tory Party, are making a minimum demand for influence on public life.

Why is Claire Regina Fox getting her seat in the House of Lords?

Neave. Berry. Gow. Three Tory MPs murdered by the IRA – an apologist for whom Johnson has just sent to the Lords https://t.co/y8zrHGZQZe

— ConservativeHome (@ConHome) August 2, 2020

Ian Birrell wrote this for the ‘I’

Boris Johnson has revealed his total moral bankruptcy with his honours list

“consider the case of Claire Fox”

She emerged as part of a small Trotskyite splinter group called the Revolutionary Communist Party that discovered the value in constant contrariness and ended up indistinguishable from hard-right ideologues. She helped run their magazine called Living Marxism, which had to shut down after it accused ITV journalists who exposed some of the worst atrocities on European soil since the Second World War of fabricating their evidence. This cabal was so desperate for attention that during the Iraq War it did not just oppose the foolish misadventure but rooted for Saddam Hussein against British troops. After the 1993 Warrington bombing, which killed two children and left 50 casualties, it defended “the right of the Irish people to take whatever measures are necessary in their struggle for freedom”. No wonder Colin Parry, that dignified father of a 12-year-old boy murdered in the abhorrent attack, condemned her peerage and lack of apology as something that ‘offends me and many others deeply.’

After citing Fox’s defence of the right to download child pornograhy, singing about killing gay men, climate denial and attack on multiculturalism, Birrell concludes,

Yet for all the revulsion at seeing this figure handed a peerage, perhaps ultimately she deserves credit for achieving so much advancement from a few offensive opinions. But anger should be directed at her new patron Boris Johnson – along with all those Conservatives who stay silent as their values are trashed before their eyes.Imagine their fury if this were a Labour appointment.

Informed sources say that Cde John Rogan was asked to write this piece as part of the backlash against the Bolshevik Baroness.

Who advised Boris Johnson to make Claire Fox, who won't apologise for her views on the IRA's Warrington bomb which murdered two children, a peer? asks @JRogan3000 https://t.co/HQbktv68FQ

— The Critic (@TheCriticMag) August 3, 2020

John Rogan says,

As I have noted, but for whatever reason, Boris Johnson’s political team in NO 10 have opted not to, all during this time Claire Fox was a loyal, long-standing member – ‘I joined the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party) in the early 80s. I’d be in it still but it was wound up at the end of the nineties.’

It would be interesting to hear what her present views are on Brighton, Birmingham and other scenes of Provisional IRA slaughter. Will they be the same as her quote regarding the Warrington bomb last – ‘My personal politics and views are well known and I have never sought to deny them, though on this issue they have remained unaired for many years’?

Who told Boris to make Claire Fox a peer and why?

Written by Andrew Coates

August 4, 2020 at 10:32 am

Posted in Britain, Capitalism, Conservative Party, Europe, Free Speech, Nationalism, Populism, Sectarianism, Trotskyism

Tagged with Bob Avakian, Brexit, Claire Fox, House of Lords, Red-Brown Front, Revolutionary Communist Party, Spiked

McCluskey’s call for a “Major Gathering” of the left: the Chesterfield Conference Experience.

Labour’s lurched right – but the left should remember its strengths as well as its weaknesses

Use European Institutions to create an “alternative ‘Social Europe’.

There has been speculation on the meaning of Len McClusky’s call for a ‘major gathering’ of the left.

Posting yesterday on the 69 year old UNITE leader’s latest intervention (What is McCluskey playing at?) Jim Denham writes,

…… how much of Unite members’ money will be spent on McCluskey’s proposed “major gathering” of the left this autumn: and who exactly is going to be involved? The Observer speculates that Corbyn himself is “likely to feature.” The Counterfire crowd who have gleefully accepted Unite’s money for the Peoples’ Assembly and the Stop The War Coalition are also likely to be involved. Presumably the CPB/Morning Star will find a way to muscle in. But what about the likes of the SWP, the Socialist Party, Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker … Tony Greenstein? Might that not be just a wee bit embarrassing, for Jeremy Corbyn?

In all likelihood, McCluskey’s “major gathering” will be a passing fancy, attracting the usual suspects, before fizzling out like the Peoples’ Assembly.

Many long-term socialists have been thinking further back.

The Chesterfield Conferences of the late 1980s, which created the short-lived Socialist Movement, could be seen as model for an autumn ‘gathering’.

The 1980s were the years of High Thatcherism, the Miners’ Strike, and the defeat of the ‘Bennite’ Left in the Labour Party. Neil Kinnock was elected Labour leader in 1983 and clashed with Arthur Scargill over his leadership and conduct of the strike. Apart from Thatcher, there a substantial challenge to the party from the Social Democratic Party and Liberal Alliance. With de-industrialisation sapping its traditional working class base the trade union movement had begun to decline. Inside the Labour Party the ‘Militant’ group was expelled. Kinnock’s main attention focused on “modernising” the party, that is, the process which culminated in Tony Blair’s Third Way.

There was no recent Labour Left leader of the party, no grass-roots body like Momentum.

Much of the Labour Left, and groups like Militant, supported traditional national roads to British socialism. They had little interest in the developing new socialist and trade union approaches to tackle Thatcher’s neoliberal reforms, and the changes that became known as “globalisation”, green politics, issues of racism and modern feminism, “non-campist” approaches to the European peace movement, or changes to the constitution that promoted human rights.

The Socialist Conferences were forums in which these topics were at the centre of discussion.

That at least was the intention.

Here is a report on the First Conference , (Spring 1988 Radical Philosophy No 48)

Chesterfield Socialist Conference

Called by the Campaign Group of Labour MPs, the Conferencevof Socialist Economists, and the Socialist Society, this conference was intended to reaffirm and redefine the socialist project in Britain for the 1990s. In his opening address, Ralph Miliband compared it to the great Leeds Convention of 1917 when socialists met to discuss the Russian revolution. In fact, history was back in fashion all weekend. Everyone was comparing the stock market crash of the previous week to 1929.

The long-awaited collapse of capitalism, it seemed to many, had once again finally arrived. Whatever the truth of the comparison, there were certainly many clashes of the old and the new at Chesterfield. Just what is to be the outcome of these clashes was the central question that the conference posed.

The three organising groups probably had quite different expectations of what would come out of the conference, and many of the 2,000 people who attended certainly did.

A set of briefing papers were issued (available from Interlink, 9 Poland Street, London WIV 300), but unfortunately these were little discussed. The three main themes of the conference, discussed in parallel sessions, were Internationalism, Democracy, and the Economy, and although there was some good discussion of the problems that socialists faced in these areas, there was also a great deal of restatement of set positions. The main session on the economy was a good example. Robin Murray spoke at length and in detail on the massive restructuring currently being undergone by the world economy, its effect on Britain, and its implications for a socialist economic policy; with particular reference to the Labour Party’s fear of intervention in industry at the point of production, and how this must, and could, be overcome. Yet none of the subsequent contributions from the floor, which were admittedly limited by the time Murray’s speech had taken up, even addressed themselves to what had been said.

Too many people at the conference, it seems, wanted it to be a rally of the faithful, rather than the beginning of a socialist glassnost. The ‘new realism’ of the Labour Party came in for much criticism, as did the Euro-communism of the new soft left. A number of left-wing Labour MPs (Eric Heffer, in particular) used the occasion to call for more struggle against Thatcherism and revisionism~ But this seemed to beg the question rather than answer it The whole problem of precisely why people are no longer engaged in struggle, why the political terrain has shifted, and how socialism can take stock of its failures and move forward again, was never really addressed. Changes in the working class and the trade union movement were not generally accepted as being indicative of a major transformation of the political terrain. Action, rather than analysis, was what was constantly demanded.

The conference was notable, however, for the wide range of its participants. Labour Party members, trade unionists, local councillors, MPs, old-age pensioners, Green Party members, and observers from Nicaragua, South Africa and Germany, along with a variety of far left activists were all present. Interestingly, the average age of participants seemed quite high.

One group which didn’t appear to be under-represented though were the Socialist Workers Party who, along with the Revolutionary Communist Party, Workers Power, and one or two other groups, attempted to block all entrances to the conference with newspaper sellers.

These groups were very vociferous on the first day, but kept a lower profile after several women speakers told them that they were no longer prepared to put up with the brow-beating fundamentalism of their arcane breed of political behaviour, which had seriously inhibited any genuine discussion in the early sessions.

However, there were a large number of workshops where interesting and lively debate did take place, showing that beyond the smaller, organised factions there is a good deal of rethinking going on. Ecological questions and the problems of racial discrimination were acutely posed as issues which go beyond traditional socialist demands, but these were not given as much space as the set-piece speeches from the platform.

There was criticism of the dominance of the platform over discussion, and this was somewhat rectified on the second day.

The biggest gain of the conference will probably prove to be the many useful contacts which were made. At a large meeting of the women present it was decided to set up an umbrella organisation, including Women against Pit Closures, which will press for 50% representation and speaking time at the next conference. The conference concluded with proposals to establish a ‘directory’ of left organisations which could form the basis of a network of contacts, and to organise a series of smaller, regional conferences leading up to another large conference in Chesterfield next May.

In this one is reminded of the early days of ‘Beyond the Fragments’, and of the first Socialist Society conference. Both of these movements, however, declined because the commonground they assumed proved to be theoretical rather than practical. It remains to be seen whether or not the Socialist Conference can overcome this problem, and the differences between its participants that were apparent all weekend, and become the force in British politics which its sponsors would like it to be. That it exists, and that it is attempting to do so, however, can only be a good thing for those interested in the growth of independent but united socialist movement in Britain.

Richard Osborne

I was not at that event, but took part in the Second Conference (also in Chesterfield) and the Third (see above) held in Sheffield.

Much of what Richard Osborne wrote rings true for the events. Some say that Chesterfield was the place where the phrase “the single Transferable Speech” was coined.

That would be to downplay more positive aspects. A sense of common purpose was created. Valuable face-to face discussions also happened. There were important policy advances, on green issues and human rights. The internationalist stand on Europe was not seriously challenged by those who believed that we could “in isolation build the basis of socialism in Britain alone”.

A full account of the conferences and the Socialist Movement has yet be written.

One aspect that should be highlighted was the way that the internationalist left put forward policies that could be said to be the forerunners of Another Europe is Possible’s politics.

Here is a document from the Europe Policy Group, Jeremy Beale: Towards a Socialist Europe.

The Policy Paper sets out the case for the socialist and green left to work with other European left forces,to “replace the EU with something quite different”. In “the meantime” the idea was to work within EU institutions, “including the European Parliament, to help generate a European socialist consciousness” and to act as a focus for common action and campaigns by the left across national frontiers. The determination of capital to complete the EU single market creates the space for demands for an alternative ‘social Europe”.

The document leaves the possibility that a left UK government might find itself in “confrontation and possible rupture with the EU and its institutions” hanging in the air.

Today we know that it is the most right-wing section of British politics and capital, its financial vultures, free trade ultras and national populists, that has succeeded in effecting a “rupture” with the European Union.

They have received objective support, and electoral comfort, from the demands of the Leave left.

This Left thinks it is entitled to attack Keir Starmer (who was a member of the Socialist Society Steering Committee at the end of the 1980s) set the agenda for new initiatives. This is despite its role, through promoting the idea that Brexit is a good idea, in Labour’s defeat.

This is the Morning Star today….

..the mass membership of the party of labour remains committed to radical change, so increasingly are the memberships of major trade unions and — as McCluskey also observes — voters were rejecting another EU referendum rather than a socialist policy platform when they cast their ballots last winter.

The question must be how we resist the further fragmentation and demoralisation of socialist forces which were not notably united or disciplined even in the Corbyn years.

A combination of twin-track workplace and community organising on the model pioneered by initiatives like Sheffield Needs a Pay Rise with local and national action by unions, in defence of jobs and pay but also to start setting an agenda for the economy we want, is a good place to start.

It is interesting that there is no mention of any “major gathering” to top off this ‘organising’.

Were one to take place it would be very hard for socialist internationalists to sit in the same room as people who blame Labour’s defeat on its rejection of actually existing Brexit and the Party call for a referendum on the issue.

Written by Andrew Coates

August 3, 2020 at 11:33 am

Posted in Europe, European Left, Feminism, Globalisation, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left, Nationalism

Tagged with Chesterfield Conferences, European Left, European Union, Keir Starmer, Labour Party, Socialist Movement, Tony Benn.

Protests Against Coronavirus “False Alarm”, Berlin, Poland and London.

with 23 comments

British Protest Against Masks, Vaccines and Tests.

Spiked, the magazine of Baroness Claire Regina Fox, has been at the forefront of complaints against restrictions during the Coronavirus pandemic.

These are just a couple of the latest of a long series of their articles.

I’m worried about all the people who think science is on their side and their attempts to ‘save lives’ are worth the cost of making those lives around them miserable.

The‌ ‌real‌ ‌maskholes

‘The lockdown has caused a humanitarian tragedy’

Barrister Francis Hoar explains why the lockdown may have been unlawful.

Germany: 18 officers injured dispersing Berlin rally against coronavirus curbs

Deutsche Welle.

Berlin police said that 18 of its officers were injured, while three were hospitalized in dispersing some 20,000 people protesting against anti-pandemic measures. Many participants dismissed the coronavirus as a “false alarm.”

At least 18 police officers were reportedly injured in Berlin on Saturday as they tried to break up a large gathering of people demonstrating against coronavirus restrictions, including the face mask requirement.

Three of the officers were being treated in hospital, Berlin police said on Twitter. It had deployed 1,100 officers to monitor the rally and disperse the crowd.

As German officials warn of soaring infection numbers, the protesters remain defiant. “The virus of freedom has reached Berlin,” said one of the organisers, Michael Ballweg.

"Lock them up finally" with pictures of Bill Gates, Health Min Spahn, virologist Drosten, Söder, Merkel and the head of the RKI. #b0108 pic.twitter.com/Ce53YEsORA

— Benjamin Alvarez (@BenjAlvarez1) August 1, 2020

The politics of the event was clearly on view.

Large crowds of far-right groups gathered in Berlin to protest against the German government's coronavirus restrictions. pic.twitter.com/5yQNFEePr5

— The Hill (@thehill) August 2, 2020

Counter protesters are welcoming the “end of the pandemic” protestors with banners “stand up against the right”. Very apparent difference: one group is wearing (the mandatory) face masks, the other one isn’t. Both are shouting “nazis raus” (Nazis, get out). #b0108 pic.twitter.com/Giixi8w32P

— Leonie Hammerstein (@hammerstein_leo) August 1, 2020

Poland:

Image may contain: one or more people, people standing, crowd and outdoor, text that says "STOP TOTALITARYZMOM"

Britain, largely ignored demonstration.

At Speakers Corner, Hyde Park for the #StandUpX peaceful demonstration
Good to meet lots of Twitter people here!
If you see me come and say hello. pic.twitter.com/kChSZJoJKM

— Charlotte Gracias (@Charlotte3003G) August 1, 2020

Guess who’s in that video clip…

WOW what a turn out yesterday at our big London protest. Thank you everyone who turned up, this was our biggest protest to date!!! Still buzzing from adrenaline 😃 #londonprotest #awake #wedonotconsent #BBC #NoNewNormal #nomasks #media #freedom #protests2020 #BillGates #boris pic.twitter.com/71tpZvaZqQ

— StandUpX (@StandUpX2) August 2, 2020

The Palestinian flag, the far-right tenor of their targets (Bill Gates, Soros) and the ‘libertarian’ tinge of the ‘patriotic Free People Alliance, indicates the political confusionism of the movement.

NEXT BIG #StopNewNormal – SaveLives RALLY AND ACTION with #PiersCorbyn
Sunday 2Aug 2pm NORWICH,
off St Stephens Street, NR1 3SH
Media/info 07958713320 pic.twitter.com/jHPuCj8CDZ

— Piers Corbyn (@Piers_Corbyn) August 2, 2020

Perhaps, with their influence in British Politics, Spiked could publicise the British protests.

Written by Andrew Coates

August 2, 2020 at 11:24 am

Posted in East Anglia, Europe, European Left, Fascism, German Left, Globalisation, Left

Tagged with Coronavirus, far right, Germany, Poland

Kate Hoey and Claire Fox in the House of Lords: Two Old Marxist Comrades Take the Ermine.

with 10 comments

Bless You Your Ladyships!

Claire Fox and Kate Hoey amongst Brexiteers to receive peerages

Kate Hoey (who claims to have been in the International Marxist Group) and Claire Fox (who definitely was a leading figure in the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) are now Peers in the House of Lords.

We – the Trainspotters’ CC – have had learned discussion on Hoey’s association with the IMG. The most reliable sources suggest she was a “contact”.

This is the claim,

Living in London in the early 1970s she became a vice-president of the NUS.[Jack Straw was NUS president at the time]. Returning from an overseas conference, she found herself sitting next to Tariq Ali on the plane. Tariq persuaded her to join the IMG, which she did in summer 1971.

In subsequent years she used to muddy this connection by claiming that she was in the Spartacus League, a short lived youth wing of the IMG. *She was never at ease with the Irish Republican Trotskyism of the IMG and was also very inimical to Gery Lawless an IMG member at the time.

She felt that having Lawless as a member discredited the IMG. Under the influence of Brian Trench [political influence of course!] she joined the IS in 1972 but her stay there was also limited.

She joined Hackney Labour party and supported the Troops Out Movement for a period before becoming a supporter of the BICO front organisation, Campaign for Labour Representation in Northern Ireland.

Nowadays the IPR group are quiet hostile to her,dubbing her TallyHoey in a recent article!

* Not to be confused with The Spartacist League of Britain, an offshoot of the James Robertson (1928 – 2019) International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

This is what she now says of this experience, (2nd of January 2016. Guardian)

She also became vice-president of the National Union of Students, and was briefly was a member of the International Marxist Group, because it “probably had better-looking young men” than other radical-left groups.

As ex-IMG myself I cannot disagree with that!

Fox, a graduate of this Blogger’s old Uni, Warwick, has left many traces, and there is little doubt about her background. Or her middle name, which JR informs us is Regina. There are plenty of people ready to speak about the well-paid public face of the Red-Brown Star of the Spiked-Brexit Party alliance. She has plenty of platforms already to give her side of the story, from BBC Radio Four to a frequent, dimming, presence on Sky News Press Review.

Discussing Opinion pages on @SkyNews at 10.30am in case you want to tune in…lots on economy post COVID. Which is not cheery, but is important.

— Claire Fox (@Fox_Claire) July 29, 2020

Here she was…

Here is Claire Fox when she ran as a candidate for the RCP in Newcastle in council elections in 1986. Pic from RCP paper The Next Step. https://t.co/45LTKEoVBR

— Evan Smith (@evanishistory) August 1, 2020

There are many RCP haters around, but before signaling our close comrades here is Otto English on form:

Otto English smells something in the air tonight…

But readers of Byline Times will remember that, when Fox became a Brexit Party candidate in the 2019 EU Elections, we raised some serious questions about her suitability as a politician.

For two decades, Fox was a key member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a fringe hard-left group formed in the late 1970s. I came up close and personal with the RCP myself while a student at the University of Kent, where many of its key personnel taught or studied and it was nothing short of a cult. The group was committed to the IRA struggle and, using front organisations – including notably the Irish Freedom Movement – it pushed the cause, while apologising for its very many violent excesses.

In 1993, the IRA targeted the town of Warrington and, in the resulting terrorist attack, two children were killed. One of them, Johnathan Ball was just three. The other, Tim Parry, 12. This revolting act of murder was met with almost universal revulsion. Even in hardened republican circles it was condemned. But the Irish Freedom Movement and RCP defended it saying that “the right of the Irish people to take whatever measures in their struggle for freedom” was justified.

Incredibly, Claire Fox was selected by the Brexit Party as one of its candidates for North-West England – a region that includes Warrington. Calls from her own party rank-and-file and from Tim Parry’s father Colin to apologise for her past position on IRA terror fell on deaf ears until she was eventually ordered by Brexit Party leaders to ring Mr Parry and say sorry. She did ring Mr Parry, but still failed to recant her position.

Clearly the patriots of the North-West didn’t notice any of this as they roundly elected her to be one of their MEPs.

Fox’s key role in the RCP was a co-publisher of Living Marxism (LM) magazine – a glossy monthly that eventually folded in 2000 after losing a libel action brought by ITN. LM, which was supportive of many a despicable regime – including Serbia – had claimed in an article titled ‘The Picture that Fooled the World’ that photos of a camp at Trnopolje had effectively been staged.

Views on Monarchy and the House of Lords:

Image may contain: 1 person, text

The quickly revised Wikipedia entry calls her now:

Claire Regina Fox, Baroness Fox

I’d add that I distinctly recall Fox being bombastic about her support for the the anti-monarchy Levellers, and the radical republican wing of Chartism, not very long ago.

The Cds in full throttle:

@DAaronovitch @Otto_English @Pabloite @cockneycampaign @bellacaledonia @bobfrombrockley @RemainiacsCast @patricklohlein @StevePeers https://t.co/DeiWWkfs68

— John Rogan (@JRogan3000) July 31, 2020

A year ago I wrote about the Revolutionary Communist Party’s path to establishment insiderdom. Today, one of their leading cadre, Brexit Bolshevik & professional BBC talking head Claire Fox, has been given a peerage by the Johnson government. https://t.co/jR98A2kXyR

— Bob From Brockley 🥤 (@bobfrombrockley) July 31, 2020

Update: Links on the RCP/Living Marxism.

SPIKED FOOTNOTES

Bob From Brockley

June 24, 2020

My post on what Boris Johnson advisor Munira Mirza and brief Brexit MEP Claire Fox have in common – a background in the formerly left-wing sect that rebranded from the Revolutionary Communist Party to Spiked – has become unexpectedly timely of late.

The RCP’s long march from anti-imperialist outsiders to the doors of Downing Street Bella Caledonia.

One Step Beyond – Smash the Revolutionary Communist Party Nottingham Anarchists,

The Brexit Party, the RCP and the American connection. John Rogan.

More to follow….

The pattern of rewards for Leavers, or Leavings, is one side of the Peerage scandal.

More spoils for Vote Leave chair @GiselaStuart. Johnson gifted her gig at Wilton Park, Gove made her non-exec of Cabinet Office. And now, a peerage. Here she is keeping her mouth shut about Vote Leave’s lawbreaking. pic.twitter.com/7bV37TAZyc

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) July 31, 2020

Then there is this:

A year later, it’s Lord Lebedev. To put it in language that even the PM understands (taken from the motto of his role model, Mayor Quimby): “Corruptus in Extremis.”https://t.co/HjZSW7RhGC

— Francis Wheen (@FrancisWheen) July 31, 2020

Interesting that while Claire Fox and Kate Hoey share a similar political milieu nowadays, the RCP campaigned against Hoey in 1989 for being parachuted in by Kinnock into Vauxhall. https://t.co/S6UcfqAZSU

— Evan Smith (@evanishistory) August 1, 2020

Labour Hub:

At least three more reasons for Lords reform

By Mike Phipps

For Kate Hoey, it’s been a long journey from the heady days of the far left International Marxist Group to the red leather benches of Britain’s Upper House. It encompasses thirty years as the MP for Vauxhall, following a controversial selection process, in which Labour’s NEC imposed a shortlist which excluded the most popular candidate, Haringey councillor and Broadwater Farm activist Martha Osamor. In Parliament, Hoey was a maverick, voting against the Labour government policy on the war in Iraq, foundation hospitals, university tuition and top-up fees, ID cards and extended detention without trial. In the 2010 leadership election she even nominated John McDonnell.

But she also opposed Blair’s ban on handguns and smoking ban and supports grammar schools and fox hunting. In 2019 she was the only Labour MP to vote against allowing abortion and same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland.

But it is for her ardent support for Brexit that she is being rewarded. She even criticised the BBC for being “embittered remainers” who were “taking delight” in “undermining our country”. In July 2018 Hoey was one of five Labour MPs who defied the Labour whip to vote with the government on a Brexit amendment, which, if passed, would have required the UK to remain a member of a customs union with the EU in the event of ‘no deal’. In doing so, the five saved the government from defeat. In December 2019’s general election, she announced she would vote in Northern Ireland for the arch-conservative Democratic Unionist Party. She has been duly rewarded.

Claire Fox is another ex-leftist who has travelled far from her Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) roots to Brexit Party MEP. But her involvement in the RCP was not just a youthful dalliance. She was centrally involved in the leadership of this weird cult for two decades, co-publishing its magazine Living Marxism, later rebranded as LM, which closed in 2000 after the courts found it had falsely accused Independent Television News of faking evidence of the Bosnian genocide. Fox refused to apologise. So why has this genocide denier been rewarded with a peerage?

Again, the answer is Brexit. Fox and her co-thinkers moved in a libertarian direction in the 21^st century and regrouped around the contrarian Spiked online website. Recent headlines include “Portland has been given over to the mob: Cowardly politicians let the protests spiral out of control”, “Keep masks out of the classroom” and “The left is turning into a Woke Taliban”. In 2019, Fox became a Brexit Party supporter and was elected as an MEP. Many of her old RCP comrades are now “fixtures in the Tory press”, noted one Guardian columnist.

Dame Louise Casey may have a less murky past, but she is no stranger to controversy. Appointed as “homelessness czar” under Tony Blair, with a mandate to reduce rough sleeping, she attacked homeless charities, including The Big Issue for keeping people on the streets. She initiated a “beggars hotline”, where people could donate money to homelessness charities, rather than giving money directly to beggars. It was axed after raising just £10,000 in its first winter, despite £240,000 being spent promoting it.

Written by Andrew Coates

July 31, 2020 at 7:37 pm

Posted in Anti-Fascism, European Left, Fascism, Left, Nationalism, Populism, Racism

Tagged with Brexit, Claire Fox, Kate Hoey, RCP, Red-Brown Front

Social Democratic Party Leader Warns, “Britain is turning into the Eastern Bloc.”

Britain is turning into the Eastern Bloc

In Spiked SDP’s William Clouston Warns of “rise of Pravda-truth.”.

The Social Democrat Party (SDP) was a centrist break-away from the Labour Party founded in 1981. It was created by the ‘Gang of Four’, Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers. A central plank of their platform was to defend “moderation” against Labour left influence, and to offer a balanced alternative to Tory and left-wing extremism. Many made their pro-European views well known as points of principle.

Stuart Hall called them the “little Caesars of Social Democracy’. The theorists of ‘Thatcherism’ said that for all their talk of “participatory democracy” they were “at present devoid of any single vestige of popular politics or popular mobilisation”. In place of pitting a simulacrum of the “people” against the “power bloc” and offering national unity around a free-market programme, they offered “participation’. This presented a potential “cross class” centrist politics. They tried to manufacture a “compromise” to replace Thacher’s uncompromising government. (In the essays collected in The Hard Road to Renewal. Thatcherism of the Crisis of the Left. Stuart Hall. 1998).

28 Labour MPs joined the Party, and one Tory. There was support in the Guardian. A prominent student Communist (ex-NUS President), Sue Slipman, and the SDP’s student organiser John Mumford, an ex Young Communist, joined. There were efforts from that quarter to justify their membership, and, despite Hall’s analysis, some around Marxism Today appeared to consider the “reformers” (as opposed to the ‘centrists’) in the SDP a potential part of a “broad democratic alliance” against Thatcher. It was suggested the SDPs tradition, if the economics was faulty the original ‘revisionist’ Crosland’s social programme was still of value.

The departing Labour leaders of the new Party formed the SDP-LIberal alliance in the year they launched. At one point they were polling ahead of both the Labour Party and the Conservatives.

The SDP’s never achieved anything other than helping keeping Labour out of power. After poor showings in repeated elections it merged with the Liberals and became the Liberal Democrats in 1989.

Man of Destiny, social marketeer, David Owen lumbered on, creating the Continuity SDP .

The party was dissolved in 1990 in the aftermath of a by-election in Bootle in which the party’s candidate was beaten by Screaming Lord Sutch‘s Official Monster Raving Loony Party.

That is, if one does not count the SDP (Canal Historique).

This has its own Wikipedia entry: Social Democratic Party (UK, 1990–present)

One reads that,

The SDP is a centrist political party combining traditions of the centre-left on economics and centre-right on defence and social issues. A formal statement of its values and aims were set out in the SDP’s New Declaration in October 2018.

“Citizens holding a traditional, patriotic or religious outlook are often bullied and marginalised, stifling the open debate upon which a free and democratic society depends.”
⁰Read more from the SDP’s New Declaration -> https://t.co/lBd6D7ZwJG pic.twitter.com/XMV03dxg2K

— Social Democratic Party (@TheSDPUK) July 30, 2020

David Owen has moved to the sovereigntist right.

This is a pronouncement he issued this year (if anybody was listening):

STATEMENT ISSUED BY LORD DAVID OWEN ON THE EVE OF THE UK’S EXIT FROM THE EU
FRIDAY 31 JANUARY 2020
I will celebrate with the all-Party Vote Leave referendum campaigners on Friday evening and in particular with those who spent the last three and a half years, at personal cost in time and money, dealing with the Electoral Commission and those who tried to use the law in the hope of overturning the people’s decision.

Interest has been created by the SDP move to the right, and further.

They backed Brexit. Strongly.

They live, like the People’s Brexit Backers, live in that special world where Brexit was going to a launchpad for social progress.

With their celebration of sovereignty and national identity they have entered into the confused area where left has and embraced the right: red-brown politics.

One not too far off the kind of Blue Labour ‘anti-woke’ politics of Trade Unionists Against the EU Paul Embery, backed during the Referendum by the Socialist Party and other ‘Lexiteers’.

Pouting Prelate Giles Fraser, once a leading supporter of ant-globalisation protests, is now a member.

The SDP's New Declaration is one of the most interesting bits of writing on politics in a long while. Definitely worth a read. https://t.co/xgjSHYcaEr

— Giles Fraser (@giles_fraser) January 20, 2019

Rod Liddle, Satan have mercy on his soul, is another.

Rod Liddle – Journalist and SDP Member

Rod Liddle is a journalist and author. A previous editor of Radio Four’s Today programme, he is currently a columnist for the Sunday Times, Sun and Spectator, of which he is associate editor. He is a member of the Social Democratic Party

I expect a Newshawk will find some link with the Full Brexit but for the moment….

This sympathetic take from last year by an ex member is interesting in showing the pressure points where they are vulnerable to what I’d consider fascist creep https://t.co/YpPlAwXXuF

— Bob From Brockley 🥤 (@bobfrombrockley) July 30, 2020

And there is this in Spiked.

On TV, on social media and in the workplace, Britons feel they cannot openly speak the truth 🤐https://t.co/fm7AYW2tRw

— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) July 29, 2020

William Clouston is leader of the Social Democratic Party.

On TV, on social media and in the workplace, Britons feel they cannot openly speak the truth.

Thirty-five years on, Eastern Europe and the UK appear to have swapped places. I first saw glimpses of this after the 2016 Brexit vote, when Leave-supporting friends in academia said they were too scared openly to endorse a view held by 52 per cent of the electorate. They feared being socially ostracised, condemned as racists or sacked from their jobs.

…

Many of us fear speaking out precisely because we feel alone and isolated, which has allowed the forceful minority of hyper-progressives to dominate our public discourse. The most potent way to disempower them is to show to those around you that decent, level-headed people do not need to play the game of Pravda-truth.

How true, how very true.

Everything evil eventually lumbers its way to Spiked.

Written by Andrew Coates

July 31, 2020 at 11:57 am

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Conspiracies, Europe, European Left, Labour Party, Left, Nationalism, Populism

Tagged with Brexit, Red-Brown Front, social democratic party, Spiked

Alain Soral: Far-Right, ‘Red-Brown’ Holocaust Denier Arrested.

with 10 comments

Soral: in French Courts Again.

France Info reports,

The far-right polemicist and writer Alain Soral was arrested on Tuesday and then placed in police custody in Paris by the brigade for the repression of personal delinquency (BRDP) for “public provocation to commit a crime or offence against the fundamental interests of the Nation “ . His custody was extended on Wednesday. According to franceinfo, Alain Soral will be referred this Thursday to the Paris prosecutor’s office.

A preliminary investigation is underway. In question, comments that the polemicist would have made on his site Equality and Reconciliation. The content of the speech is not known. His home was then searched. The reason for his arrest, “public provocation to commit a crime or offense affecting the fundamental interests of the Nation”, targets anyone threatening to attack political actors with national responsibilities.

This is not the first time that the far-right essayist Alain Soral has come into contact with justice. In January 2019, he was sentenced to one year in prison for “racial insult, provocation and incitement to hatred” by the Bobigny criminal court. The polemicist attacked a public prosecutor on his site. Last June, he was fined 5,000 euros, with the possibility of imprisonment in the event of non-payment for having contested the existence of the Shoah.

On July 6, his Youtube channels were deleted by the online video platform. The reason: “repeated breaches of the conditions of use” .

Alain Soral, de son vrai nom Alain Bonnet, 61 ans, encourt cinq ans de prison et 45 000 euros d’amende. https://t.co/swJ567GdmQ

— Le Monde (@lemondefr) July 30, 2020

In 2019, “Alain Soral sentenced to one year in prison for having described the Pantheon as a “kosher waste reception centre”

The list is long:

As of today(29th July 2020) #AlainSoral, the President of the French dissident movement 'Egalité & Reconciliation' has been incarcerated, having already been condemned for over €500 000 and more than 6 years in prison 👇https://t.co/Me51Exbar6

— Marie Maria (@MariaComak) July 30, 2020

« La justice, c’est comme la Sainte Vierge. Si elle n’apparaît pas de temps en temps, le doute s’installe » #soralenprison pic.twitter.com/fijih48dKQ

— Licra (@_LICRA_) July 29, 2020

Le polémiste d’extrême droite Alain Soral, qui prédit une « révolution fasciste », placé en garde à vue pour « provocation publique » et devrait être présenté au parquet jeudi. Il encourt cinq ans de prison et 45 000 euros d’amende. https://t.co/npuKttQyfK

— Le Monde (@lemondefr) July 30, 2020

Soral is a convicted Holocaust denier.

The list of legal cases and prosecutions against him is long and stretches back to 2008.

Procès intentés contre Alain Soral: Condemnations.

His friendship with the ‘comedian’ anti-Semitic Dieudonné has kept him in the wider, and youthful, public eye.

In fact Dieudonné’s YOutube channel was removed just before Soral’s.

Après Dieudonné, YouTube se débarrasse aussi de la chaîne d’Alain Soral

How do you say 'cancelled' in French? #Dieudonne #StopHateForProfit https://t.co/dBIqBic31d

— StopAntisemitism.org (@StopAntisemites) June 30, 2020

Alain Soral is not – the least you can say – a classical fascist.

The online politics of Alain Soral

Evelyne Pieiller wrote this article in 2013, but the account holds for today.

Visitors to Alain Soral’s Egalité et Réconciliation (Equality and Reconciliation, E & R) website see pictures of Hugo Chávez, Che Guevara, Muammar Gaddafi, Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin on the left of the masthead. Joan of Arc and Soral are on the right. The site, with its motto “leftwing on labour, but rightwing values”, is France’s 269th most popular, a few places behind the TV magazine Télérama.

The juxtaposition of Guevara and Putin, of Chávez and rightwing values is a sign of the confused political times. The big questions are, who stands for what and what does it mean to be on the right or left?

…

He has not been afraid to change direction: from (apparently brief) membership of the Communist Party in the 1990s, to the Anti-Zionist List, co-founded with the comedian-activist Dieudonné (M’bala M’bala) for the 2009 EU elections, with two years in the Front National. He stresses his “bloody-mindedness” in a way reminiscent of the late lawyer Jacques Vergès, whose funeral he attended this August.

Soral, who is also a martial arts enthusiast, is subtly but clearly a mix of eternal adolescent — his questions are intense, and he’s non-conformist in what he engages with, and ignores — and man in the street: he has the heroic, robust isolation of someone without party or support, trying to see things for what they are, despite opposition. Filmed in casual clothes, on a sofa, he is the antithesis of an academic or career politician, and picks and mixes his ideologies; this is popular online with many people who no longer have the political education from party or union membership that once shaped their views.

Many of Soral’s ideas would be unexpected on British ‘red-brown’ sites,

The new world order, “the empire”, seeks a democracy in name only, the “power of the richest” that upholds an abstract egalitarianism replacing the question of social inequality and class exploitation with societal questions, justifying this in the name of human rights.

Soral advocates “leaving the European Union, leaving NATO, and reclaiming control of our currency … to restore France’s sovereignty and give democracy some of its meaning back”, fighting the obsolescence of nation states and introducing protectionism.

Some of Soral’s principles surely strike a chord in these quarters.

His view of the nation is that, to protect the people, it should reject selfishness and “cosmopolitan profits”; this supposes that the nation has a single essence, a spirit that belongs to a particular culture, and that it must exclude amoral cosmopolitanism. Starting with a call for sovereignty in the face of supranational laws, he arrives at a near-mythic conception of the nation that will allow the creation of “a labour, patriotic and popular front against all the networks of finance and globalised ultra-liberalism” (4): what he calls a “national fraternal community, conscious of its history and culture”, uniting those who want the most equitable division of work and wealth and those who want to preserve what is good and human in the Helleno-Christian tradition, which he presumes led to the demand for true equality.

The article then enters more controversial territory where red and brown conspiracy theories of the confusionist left and right, meet. That is the world of “secret networks that infiltrate all the decision-making institutions of the empire, neutralising or corrupting political action.”

He believes that Jews are at the root of these conspiracies, linked to the rapacious US — it’s the old accusation that they are rootless cosmopolitans intent on the accumulation of capital; banks are Jewish, the press is Jewish, the destruction of national unity is Jewish. Soral hates them obsessively and sees them everywhere. He says his views are anti-Zionist, and oppose Israeli policy — but they are straight anti-Semitism, not support for the Palestinians, or mere provocation.

That is a fair introduction to Soral, although he would certainly defend the claim that he backs the Palestinians.

Soral’s ideas cover broader areas.

Soral’s views summarised:

Soral’s ideology tends to focus on seven main themes:

criticism of communitarianism
criticism of feminism
criticism of the media and the society of spectacle in general
criticism of consumerism, neoliberal capitalism and what he views as “US imperialism“
criticism of Zionism and Jewish lobbying
criticism of homosexual activism
criticism of mainstream vulgarity
the Arab–Israeli conflict
the dismantling of Yugoslavia, and possibly of France
the dismantling of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine

More recently Soral has emphasised the ‘red’ side of his red-brown politics, backing the Gilets Jaunes.

Soral also defends the heritage of ‘European civilisation’.

Soral on the Greek & Christian logos: the destiny of #France https://t.co/8DSgoLHvhI @Jonathan_K_Cook @GiladAtzmon @IsraelShamir @UnzReview @Alexis_Cossette @CasaPoundItalia @JustinRaimondo @EMichaelJones1 @LouisFarrakhan @TruNews @georgegalloway @BroNathanael @DrDavidDuke

— Alain Soral Officiel (@AlainSoralOffic) July 27, 2020

Soral’s supporters are already protesting against the arrest.

Arrestation d’#AlainSoral !

Le président d’Égalité & Réconciliation Alain Soral a été arrêté à Paris mardi 28 juillet 2020 en fin d’après-midi.https://t.co/jr29hZojVp pic.twitter.com/J0Y4NFjxcv

— Alain Soral Officiel (@AlainSoralOffic) July 30, 2020

Written by Andrew Coates

July 30, 2020 at 11:15 am

Posted in Anti-Fascism, European Left, Fascism, Free Speech, French Politics, Human Rights, Jews, Racism

Tagged with Alain Soral, Anti-Semitism, Dieudonné, France, Racism, Red-Brown

What is Keirism? Labour Membership Turns to the Future.

How Keir Starmer Sabotaged Rebecca Long-Bailey

What is Keirism?

Heres an alternative. Bit more downmarket but a real vote winner! pic.twitter.com/3l2gFbMZD5
— Guy Lucas-Bhana #BLM (@GuyLucasBhana) July 29, 2020

A couple of months ago people wrote that ” no one knows what ‘Keirism‘ is.”

On the 15th of July Clive Lewis MP said,

Has Keir Starmer done enough in his first 100 days as leader?

“No, not on policy,,” says Labour MP Clive Lewis, who says people need to hear more about “Keir-ism” #PoliticsLive https://t.co/v8gTLTnaDn pic.twitter.com/GFO4dvzhur
— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) July 15, 2020

Critics of the Labour leader prefer to use the word Starmerism.

Phil even had a whole article on the subject, reproduced by his friends in Jewish Voice for Labour.

The Weakness of Starmerism

He claims that, ” Corbynism, like its Bennite forebear, was a movement from within Labourism that pushed it to its limits, And from there, perhaps a post-capitalist anywhere?”

Now, alas,

Starmerism, if we can speak of such a thing, is getting that genie back into the bottle. It does so by ostentatiously – not a word one normally associates with Keir Starmer – gripping Tory framing without contesting it, offering weak sauce managerial criticisms where it can muster a word against the government, stamping on anything one might construe as radical or, shudder, socialist, and evacuating anything resembling hope from the Labour Party’s platform – something even Tony Blair recognised the importance of and was keen to cultivate.

While it pretends itself pragmatic, it is the most dogmatic form of Labourism. It claims to be oriented to the challenges of the present, but wants to forever impose the past on the politics of the future. Sure, the party is improving in the polls.

It might win an election on its present course (we’ll see), but going by what Keir says and does all we can look forward is the status quo under more competent management. Therefore anyone thinking what we’re seeing now is “caution” so Keir, as the new leader, can get a hearing are kidding themselves. What you see now is what we’re getting, assuming he continues to get his own way. Coronavirus plus economic crisis plus Brexit equals a perfect storm for political polarisation, and inevitably demands a response equal to the moment. If Keir Starmer isn’t forthcoming then his careful project will come to naught

Many of his comrades and fellow-thinkers are less complimentary.

At the end of June the US owned Tribune carried this article by its editor.

: Ronan Burtenshaw

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 article is reproduced in his boss’s paper, the one-time left populist Jacobin, with this title:

Labour Leader Keir Starmer Sabotaged Rebecca Long-Bailey to Undermine the Left

Yet, no doubt for, amongst others, euphonic reasons, the Starmerism word hasn’t really caught on.

Will Keirism last the course?

Perhaps we ought to take up the suggestions of Guy Lucas-Bhana and focus on giving offering to ‘Keirism’ a wider content for the ‘Post Covid Labour Alternative’.

Paul Mason recently asked,

The thing to do now is decide: does the anti-capitalist left want to be a component part of the project Labour members voted for, criticising the front bench where needed, and maintaining our distinct organisations, but pushing the whole party towards a radical economic change agenda?

Or does “stay in and fight” mean fighting the leadership and each other, in an atmosphere constantly poisoned by right-wing media trolls? In the end it’s up to us.

His answers, open to debate begin around these ideas,

We need to design the alternative ourselves and start campaigning for it, to convince the Labour technocrats to move beyond timid critiques of the Tories and advocate economic regime change. I’ve spelled out some of the concrete proposals here.

The left’s project should extend, of course, way beyond 2024 and beyond the ethos of “Labourism”. A left government would, for us, be transitional to more fundamental and radical change, above all on climate. A two-term Labour government, if it began in 2024, would stand a realistic chance of achieving the zero net carbon target, but only if we also build a social movement to make it happen.

Mass unemployment is on the horizon, the undermining of local government democracy and funding are looming, Tory abolition of the Human Rights Act is in the offing, and moves to marginalise independent Public Broadcasting are already underway.

Labour campaigns against these threats need support not in-fighting or a lash out into another break-away like the Socialist Alliance, or George Galloway’s Respect Party.

We need the positive ideas and energy Paul Mason outlines.

The Left, the Party and the Class: an essay on the future of the Labour left https://t.co/AvqpwaIWeU
— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) July 25, 2020

Inside the Party the ‘fighters’ are not on the up. It looks now as if whatever word we use, Starmerism or Keirism, Keir Starmer’s new leadership faces no serious challenge.

People are not deserting the party en masse, although yesterday 400 devoted an early evening to watching the ‘stay and fight’ event of Labour Against the Witch-hunt.

That kind of frontal opposition is, and will remain, a fringe activity.

Contrary to the wilder predictions of an exodus of members people seem to be joining the party.

‘More people have joined Labour than left’ under Keir Starmer, NEC says

The New European reports,

The GS reported party membership around 570,000 & many more have joined the party than left. It is also clear that proportion of BAME membership is rising rather than falling but much more needs to be done to improve equalities monitoring allowing fuller & more accurate reports
— Gurinder Singh Josan CBE (@gsjosan) July 24, 2020

Despite claims from the Labour left that the new leader is attempting to purge them from the party, the number of members has increased compared to a year before.

Jeremy Corbyn has been credited with growing the membership numbers, with the previous high reported at 564,000 in December 2017.

Written by Andrew Coates

July 29, 2020 at 4:14 pm

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Europe, European Left, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left, Sectarianism

Tagged with Coronavirus, Keir Starmer, Labour Party

Labour Against the Witch-hunt Hosts Debate on ‘Free Speech’.

with 20 comments

Chaired by Tina Werkmann of Labour Against the Witchhunt and the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee, CPGB-PCC), Labour Party Marxists, who “works at Labour Left Alliance”.

This important event will discuss how we can fight back against McCarthyite attempts to stifle debate on the issue of Israel/Palestine – and label those unjustly expelled and suspended as ‘unpersons’ who we are not allowed to share platforms with.

No to (self-) censorship! Discuss how we can fight back and mobilise for free speech in the Labour movement and beyond.

Speakers include Norman Finkelstein, Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, David Miller, Tariq Ali and Tony Greenstein.

Many of the speakers are too well known to need further introduction.

But note this:

David Miller, (2020)

a report in The Times detailed how Prof Miller is a director of a group known as the Organisation for Propaganda Studies (OPS), which has promoted theories about the September 11 terrorist attacks, the shooting down of an airliner over Ukraine in 2014, the White Helmets humanitarian rescue group in Syria, the anti-vax movement and the origins of coronavirus.

Ahead of a probe into his conduct, Bristol professor resigns from Labour blaming ‘the Zionist movement’

Norman Finkelstein, Verso Blog 2018:

The chimera of British anti-Semitism (and how not to fight it if it were real)

Jews have too much power in Britain. The three richest Brits in 2016 were Jewish.[12] Jews comprise only .5 percent of the population but fully 20 percent of the 100 richest Brits.[13] Relative both to the general population and to other ethno-religious groups, British Jews are in the aggregate disproportionately wealthy, educated, and professionally successful.[14] These data track closely with the picture elsewhere. Jews comprise only 2 percent of the US population but fully 30 percent of the 100 richest Americans, while Jews enjoy the highest household income among religious groups. Jews comprise less than .2 percent of the world’s population but, of the world’s 200 richest people, fully 20 percent are Jewish. Jews are incomparably organized as they have created a plethora of interlocking, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing communal and defense organizations that operate in both the domestic and international arenas. In many countries, not least the US and the UK, Jews occupy strategic positions in the entertainment industry, the arts, publishing, journals of opinion, the academy, the legal profession, and government. “Jews are represented in Britain in numbers that are many times their proportion of the population,” British-Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer notes, “in both Houses of Parliament, on the Sunday Times Rich List, in media, academia, professions, and just about every walk of public life.” The wonder would be if these raw data didn’t translate into outsized Jewish political power..

In hard to read, adjective strewn prose, Finkelstein continues,

Is it anti-Semitism to believe that “Jews have too much power in Britain”—or is it just plain common sense? (It is, to be sure, a question apart and not one amenable to simple solution how to rectify this power inequity while not impinging on anyone’s democratic rights.) Still, isn’t it anti-Semitic to generalize that “Jews” have abused their power? But even granting that a portion have been manipulated or duped, it certainly appears as if British Jews in general support the anti-Corbyn juggernaut. If this indeed is a misapprehension, whose fault is it? The tacit message of the unprecedented joint editorial on the front page of the major Jewish periodicals was: British Jews are united—Corbyn must go! Is it anti-Semitic to take these Jewish organizations at their word?

Then there is Tony Greenstein…

Marlon Solomon on Twitter: ""The NEC's case is that Greenstein's ...

At least a couple of these people (including Tariq Ali) are members of the Labour Party.

Image may contain: text that says "Reports Tina Werkmann, LAW's vice-chair, presented the steering committee's report of work. This noted the assistance LAW has provided to numerous members of the Labour Party who have been suspended or expelled. It was clear from the 'evidence packs' that criticisms of Israel and Zionism were used as proof of'anti- Semitism. LAW's help rebutting these the members were still shown the door, because this witch-hunt is not about eradicating anti-Semitism, but getting rid of the left, she said."

Reports that the Editor of the Canary Kerry-Anne Mendoza may be watching this event and could intervene have not been confirmed.

Written by Andrew Coates

July 28, 2020 at 10:26 am

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Fascism, Free Speech, International, Israel, Jews, Labour Movement, Left

Tagged with Israel, Ken Livingstone, Labour Against the Witch Hunt, Palestine, Tariq Ali, Tony Greenstein, Zionism

Morning Star Goes Lenin, forerunner of the “broad progressive anti-capitalist alliance.”

with 8 comments

“Recognition of the need for a “vanguard” party.”

A couple of days ago the Morning Star, a paper independent of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and owned by the co-op hailed Jeremy Corbyn’s Go-fund-me appeal.

Corbyn's GoFundMe success is great – what can it mean for the movement? https://t.co/kUm2pkHr1k #Labour #Corbyn #Socialism

— Morning Star (@M_Star_Online) July 24, 2020

Corbyn’s GoFundMe success is great – what can it mean for the movement?

Starmer is rolling back the socialist policies won over five years in the party at quite a pace, but socialists should recognise both that there are more of us than there were five years ago and that the policies Labour stood for in two manifestos retain significant popular appeal.

In view of the attacks on the popular appeal behind Labour’s General Election result resistance is needed.

That should inform a fightback — one which certainly involves resisting Labour’s lurch to the right, but one which also looks to the areas where the Corbyn project was weak, where it failed to cut through. Labour figures like Ian Lavery, Laura Smith and Jon Trickett are addressing important questions on rebuilding in communities long neglected by the party.

Leaving in the air exactly what “party political form” this should take to the furrows of the labour movement, whether this ahs any friends in Parliament whatsoever.

But whether it takes party political form or not, the priority should be to organise, as workers and as members of communities, to resist the gathering storm of job losses, pay cuts and renewed austerity — and in the process build a labour movement with far stronger roots in the people, that can win for workers whether or not it has friends in Parliament.

One party political form interests the Morning Star – Leninism and the claims of the Communist Party of Britain to his legacy.

This week is the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the British Communist Party. It is being marked every evening this week, by Pandemonium, a programme of online lectures and on Saturday August 1 by Red Wedge — a centenary online gala. For more details visit www.communistparty.org.uk.

Readers on Sunday could be instructed on Lenin in the pages of the daily.

"What is ‘Leninism’?" via Morning Star https://t.co/FzG4bn4Wgm

— INTERNATION (@internationNYC) July 26, 2020

What is ‘Leninism’?

MOST of the “Full Marx” answers to date have been to do with the significance of Marxism in relation to history, philosophy, economics and the environment.

But often you’ll come across the term “Marxism-Leninism.” What’s that “Leninism” bit about?

Sometimes it’s explained as “theory” (Marx) and “revolutionary practice” (Lenin).

But that would be far too simple. Marx and Engels did initiate the theoretical analysis of class society — particularly capitalism — and its dynamics.

Not being a Leninist but a First International Marxist I may have a few points of disagreement in the following.

Lenin emphasises the need for determination in implementing Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” during the initial phases of socialism if the ultimate object of the revolution — a classless society characterised by “to each according to their needs” can be achieved.

The intermediate phase, argues Lenin, must be characterised by a genuine, participative, democracy at the level of the workplace and communities, which will replace the need for a coercive state.

Following the revolution and the establishment of Soviet power Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder (1920) also focuses on issues (and individuals) of the day and again emphasises the difference between (short-term) tactics and (long-term) strategy.

Within the new post-war context of “existing socialism” (still threatened by counter-revolution and Allied and Japanese wars of intervention) and the defeat of socialist movements elsewhere, Lenin emphasises the need to work with other progressive forces in a broad progressive anti-capitalist alliance.

Not many people would say that Lenin worked during the first years of the Soviet government towards a “genuine, participative democracy”. Perhaps a historian will unearth for us as well to the 1920s use of the latest CPB term “broad progressive anti-capitalist alliance” in the ‘actuality of the revolution’ following the Great War.-

Down to the message: there is a library of critiques of Leninism, the invention of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ and Lenin’s own political practice from the left by Marxists, Democratic Socialists, Social Democrats and Anarchists. This specious account of ‘Leninism’ is a disgrace.

To begin with what was ‘”post-war” “existing socialism” from 1918 onwards (many would add that many Leninists talk of this time not as socialism but as part of the ‘transition’ to socialism)?

Whatever the causes, civil war or party messianic intolerant structure, including Lenin’s belief that he was able to read the runes of HIstory, it was about as far from democratic socialism as you could possibly get.

In Soviet Russia the Spring and Summer of 1918 began with the “arrests and harassment of non-Bolshevik activists”. They and the Socialist revolutionaries, were removed from the Soviet CEC. Yet they continued political activity. They focused on the defence of “the rights of labour” and the “defence of trade unions, with as a backdrop plans to make unions agents of “labour discipline” and “compulsory labour service” or the “militarisation of labour” exalted by Trotsky in Terrorism and Communism (1920). With their position set out in What is to be done: The Menshevik Programme July 1919 they had had a wider echo, Marcel Liebman and others record, within the official bodies .

For Trotsky the Mensheviks had in 1917, “together with the bourgeoisie, declared civil war against the Soviets”. In the Winter of 1920-1 the Mensheviks were systematically suppressed.

Two Years of Wandering is shot through with insights into those years of upheaval, the gaoling and exile of “thousands of socialists and non-party workers who (had) been so bold as to doubt the divine infallibility of the Bolshevik authorities, with all their fantasies, scandals, petty tyranny and occasional 180-degree turns. “(Page 53) From the famous 1920 visit of the British delegation to a meeting addressed by Printers’ leaders and Mensheviks, which criticised the “terrorist dictatorship of the minority”, the last Congress of Soviets at which the opposition was reluctantly tolerated, to the crackdown after the Kronstadt (1921) which marked the beginning of systematic elimination of dissent, the Mensheviks were disorganised. (3) A party that “had adapted all its tactics to the struggle for an open existence despite the Bolshevik terror.” was unable to mount any effective challenge (Page 98).

Dan was in prison during the Kronstadt revolt, which, when the news of this, following a strike wave, reached them, convinced those arrested that they were about to be shot. There were indeed mass killings. A gaoler, ‘S’ regaled Dan with tales of massacring whites. He also had this anecdote, “some Jewish trader they had arrested on suspicion that the leather he was carrying in his cart had concealed weapons under it. There were no weapons, but before letting the trader go, he wanted to have his ‘little joke’ at the expense of the ‘bourgeois’ so he stood him against a wall and ordered that he be shot – but they fired blanks. They did this three times – just to they could bring a little happiness to their prisoner when they told him he was free to go – although he could easily have died of heart failure.”(Page 121)

Sent to Remand gaol, Dan observed waves of new arrivals. Protests and demonstration were followed “on each occasion, a few intellectuals and party workers, together with hundreds of grey, non-party workers, would pass through the prison. There were tramway workers, workers from the Skorokhod, Obukhov, Putilov and Rechkin factories – all of working class Petersburg.”(Page 138) Conditions deteriorated, but perhaps what was most striking is that “once entering a Soviet prison, nobody can know even approximately how long he will be in there and how the imprisonment will end.” (Page 142)

Two Years of Wandering. A Menshevik Leader in Lenin’s Russia. Fedor Il’ich Dan. Francis King. Tendance Coatesy. Review.

But this may be to wander into the actually existed history of the Soviet Union.

What really matters for the writer of the Morning Star article is Britain,

Lenin argues that British communists should unite into a single Communist Party, that they should participate in elections as part of the process of replacing Parliament with truly democratic system of soviets, that Pankhurst’s insistence that “the Communist Party must keep its doctrine pure” was mistaken, and that while he could not deal with the question of affiliation or non-affiliation to the Labour Party, a new Communist Party should work closely with the Labour Party while retaining ““complete freedom of agitation, propaganda and political activity.”

Translation for today: the British Communist Party should continue to “work closely” with the Labour Party, and be treated with respect for condescending to do so, while being as unpleasant as it likes about Keir Starmer and any other rapscallion renegades leading the party.

The article concludes.

So, what is “Leninism” today? Lenin’s great contribution was the development of both theory and practice in the very specific circumstances of the period either side of the Russian Revolution.

As Jonathan White argues in an online lecture for the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School, we can learn an immense amount from the study of that period.

(Note, indeed, see above book from Francis King)

For those who claim the term, Leninism is practical revolutionary action based on a strong theoretical understanding in the context of specific existing circumstances — an antidote to those for whom Marxism is something purely theoretical.

But in this it is also, arguably, an unnecessary “ism.” Both Marx and Engels always argued for the unity of theory and practice.

Changing the world at the same time as interpreting it are inseparable goals. And their recognition of the need for a “vanguard” party (the subject of another answer in this series) is explicit in Marxist theory and practice.

In their Communist Manifesto, communists, organised into a revolutionary party, represent “the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country; that section which pushes forward all others” to establish a society “for the many” as a key stage in the transition to a classless society.

There is another famous quote, from the 1864 First Clause of the Rules of the First International,

That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves; …

The Principle of Self-Emancipation in Marx and Engels .Hal Draper.

Written by Andrew Coates

July 27, 2020 at 5:04 pm

Posted in Communism, European Left, Labour Party, Left, Stalinism

Tagged with Communist Party of Britain, Lenin, marxism leninism, Morning Star, Stalinism

Paul Mason, setting out an Agenda for “The future of the Labour left”.

with 17 comments

Image for post

“The future of the Labour left? “

A few days ago it was cheering to read this interview with Pablo Iglesias in Le Monde.

The leader of the radical left party, Podemos, believes that the Europe Union has turned its back on austerity and neoliberal economics.

This does not seem to have got the publicity it merits, at least in the English language media, Podemos leader Iglesias celebrates the EU "ending austerity" and "neoliberal dogmatism": https://t.co/9r4anUo95I

— Andrew Coates (@Pabloite) July 25, 2020

Spain should be the main beneficiary, along with Italy, of the European recovery plan. Are you satisfied with the deal?

It is a turning point: a historic renunciation by Europe of austerity and a way of facing the economic crisis diametrically opposed to that of 2008. There will be no “men in black” [officials of the “troika” – European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund and Commission – sent to Greece during the sovereign debt crisis], nor budget cuts. A few years ago, “eurobonds” and a united and common approach to the economic crisis seemed unimaginable. The neoliberal dogmatism that has done so much harm to Europe and its populations, especially in the South, has finally been corrected.

Iglesias does not skirt around the problems Podemos faces in with its governing partners, the Spanish Socialists (PSOE), its poor showing in the regions where there were July local elections (Mixed bag in Spain’s first pandemic elections) nor the difficulties it has faced with the “cloaques de l’Etat” who did all they could to prevent Podemos entering government.

But, give the context of the pandemic, the EU turn, agreement on a coming new Spanish budget framework, and an expansionist “neo-Keynesian” economics will be steps in the right direction. Talking of Catalan, Basque nationalist and regionalist movements the radical politician looks forward to a potential République plurinationale et solidaire”. Le Mode described Iglesias as a “Pillar of the Spanish government” – though an article just beneath it noted disagreement on PM Sanchez’s arrangements with the centre-right party Ciudadanos.

The interview was picked up in Spain.

PABLO IGLESIAS: "LA UNIÓN EUROPEA HA ABANDONADO EL DAÑINO NEOLIBERALISMO" https://t.co/zqHZJIDB2B

— Andrew Coates (@Pabloite) July 25, 2020

Back in Brexit Britain the left’s debate continues to be occupied by those who make this (US) gesture.

From last night

On Jeremy Corbyn's Defence Fund | https://t.co/Moauk7CEeD

"The defence fund is a middle finger to all that, of the little people rebelling against their party betters and hoping a just outcome can be purchased for a few quid."#SocialistSunday pic.twitter.com/OLtTdHaE9L

— Phil BC (@philbc3) July 26, 2020

The rapid accumulation of Jeremy’s defence fund isn’t just a reaction against vindictive elites, it’s a protest against the Labour leader too.

On Jeremy Corbyn’s Defence Fund

By contrast Paul Mason has written on the issues that preoccupy Pablo Iglesias.

The Labour Party faces a historic challenge: the Covid-19 pandemic has triggered state intervention, bailouts, massive borrowing, direct income support and central bank money printing all across the world. And it’s not over.

The Left, the Party and the Class: an essay on the future of the Labour left https://t.co/AvqpwaIWeU

— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) July 25, 2020

Paul Mason covers this, without the emotion-charged language that is leading many to recoil from the left.

The Labour left is demoralised and divided. Some activists are leaving the party; others want the left to become an organised opposition to Keir Starmer, producing a continuous negative commentary from the sidelines. The Labour right, and their backers in the British media establishment, are only too happy to fuel this anger with continuous trolling and calls for a purge.

The writer-activist speaks for a constituency that stands apart from any of the above,

I’m part of a left that wants to engage with Starmer’s project and to help shape it, defending its core agenda of climate, social and economic justice from the inevitable pushback from the party’s right, and by solving through practice the strategic problems outlined below.

There is a favourable political landscape inside Labour.

The Labour Together election review gives us an opening: it says the strategy most likely to bring victory in 2024 is the offer of radical economic change, combined with a new narrative and activism aimed at communities currently alienated from progressive ideas, plus a more professional party.

The left’s job is to (a) define what this big change agenda means (b) start fighting for it independently through our activism; and ( c) extend party democracy.

This Blog cannot underline too strongly the boost that Paul’s open-minded suggestions could give to left-wing morale. They are agenda-setting ideas how the left could build a credible alternative to Conservative rule. They offer the terms for fruitful debate.

The Left, the Party and the Class is a landmark.

The thing to do now is decide: does the anti-capitalist left want to be a component part of the project Labour members voted for, criticising the front bench where needed, and maintaining our distinct organisations, but pushing the whole party towards a radical economic change agenda?

Or does “stay in and fight” mean fighting the leadership and each other, in an atmosphere constantly poisoned by right-wing media trolls? In the end it’s up to us.

Spot on!

Written by Andrew Coates

July 26, 2020 at 11:03 am

Posted in Europe, European Left, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left, Spain, Theory, Uncategorized

Tagged with European Left, Labour Party, Paul Mason, Podemos

Grime artist Wiley: Temporary Ban from Twitter following anti-Semitism ‘accusations’.

Grime artist Wiley given temporary ban from Twitter amid anti-Semitism accusations

Image may contain: 1 person, text that says "Wiley accused of antisemitism after likening Jews to Ku Klux Klan topping Chart-topping grime rapper compares Jews to the Ku Klux Klan as '2sets of people who nobody really wanted to challenge' BANLIEUE"

Temporary Twitter Ban for MBE Wiley.

The tweets began in the late evening yesterday.

Wiley’s Twittering Machine showed few fluctuations, trends, peaks and troughs.

It was all low-points. An on-line horror story.

I doubt if anybody would call Wiley’s tweets a sign of “new fascisms (that) are emerging round micro celebrities, mini-patriarchs and the flow of homogenised messages.” (The Twittering Machine. Richard Seymour. 2019.)

The tweets were stream-of-consciousness anti-Semitism.

If like this Blog you had not heard of Wiley before you will not forget him now.

UK rapper Wiley has launched a long anti-semitic rant spread over a series of tweets. https://t.co/SgzEEyBCc8

— Evening Standard (@EveningStandard) July 24, 2020

I see Wiley has reached the “retweeting literal Nazis” stage of an antisemitic Twitter meltdown. pic.twitter.com/JORlzkZxuX

— Daniel Randall (@therubykid) July 24, 2020

There is no place for hate speech in our society – whether from ordinary people, politicians or the famous. Despite media coverage & widespread condemnation @Twitter failed by allowing Wiley to tweet a constant stream of unapologetic antisemitism, (1/2)

— HOPE not hate (@hopenothate) July 25, 2020

Wiley dropped by manager over anti-Semitic tweets https://t.co/SRPrji7uQ1

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) July 25, 2020

Wiley tweeting anti-Semitism unchecked for hours on end is a low point for Twitter. It is shameful to let any account do that, let alone one with such reach and influence.

— Musa Okwonga (@Okwonga) July 24, 2020

Wiley is one of my favourite musicians of all time. I wouldn’t before have doubted that he might, like a lot of people, have one or two ill-informed opinions, but seeing him go full on antisemitic fash has been horrific.

— Sunni LaBoeuf (@manlikelabeouf) July 24, 2020

Anealla Safdar, the European editor of Al Jazeera news blasted the singer – and suggested he has been racist before.

She tweeted: “Unsurprisingly, Wiley, who told British Asian pop star Jay Sean ‘I will throw Bombay potatoes on you’, ‘Your mum makes a dodgy korma’ and ‘I will slap off your dad’s turban’, in 2011, is an unhinged racist. But he still was made an MBE in 2017.”

MIrror.

Now:

Grime artist @WileyCEO dropped by record label after antisemitic social media posts https://t.co/iVJ7U2LwBz

— Jack Mendel (@Mendelpol) July 25, 2020

Grime artist Wiley has been given a temporary ban from Twitter and been dropped by his management company over accusations of anti-Semitism.

The musician posted a screenshot on Instagram this morning, showing he had been given a temporary Twitter ban but will be allowed back into his account later this morning.

He also posted a video in which he said “crawl out from under your little rocks and defend your Jewish privilege”.

However, the social media platform has been accused of “ignoring anti-semitism” because his tweets are still visible 12 hours after they were first posted.

Update: Musically informed post on Shiraz:

Wiley: two wrongs never make a right

Written by Andrew Coates

July 25, 2020 at 11:02 am

Posted in Anti-Fascism, Conspiracies, Free Speech, Israel, Jews

Tagged with Anti-Semitism, Racism, Wiley

Anne Applebaum, “Performative Authoritarianism” and Populism. Some Thoughts.

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism – A ...

“Those, however who were always truculently at loggerheads with their teachers, interrupting the lessons, nevertheless sat down, from the day, indeed the very hour of their matriculation, at the same table and the same beer, in male confederacy, vassals by vocation, rebels who, crashing their fists on the table already signalled heir worship for their masters.”

Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia. No 123. The Bad comrade.

““By the early 1950s, all was grey. ” Anne Applebaum revisited the lands of the post-war Soviet glacis, ” War-damaged capitals of the ‘ancient states;’ of the region, to use Churchill’s phrase, were patrolled by the same kind of unsmiling policemen, designed by the same socialist realist architects and draped with the same kind of propaganda posters (Iron Curtain. The Crushing of Eastern Europe. 1944 – 1956. 2012.

Applebaum portrayed the violent imposition of Soviet rule over Eastern Europe,”The nascent totalitarian states could not tolerate any competition whatsoever for their citizens’ passion, talents and free time.”(Page 185) Totalitarianism aimed to create “politically homogeneous” societies. “They “really did think that sooner of later the working-class majority would acquire class consciousness, understand its historical destiny and vote for a communist regime.”

In Red Famine, Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017) Applebaum wrote of the 5 million who perished in the Holodomor (Hunger-extermination in Ukrainian) alone. In 1933 starvation hit the USSR as Stalin’s forced collectivisation reduced the peasantry to forced labourers and destroyed agriculture. In this country, mass starvation reached a peak, a “famine within the famine” that she argued was “a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.”(Page 193)

Both books, and her earlier Gulag: A History, (2004), are memorable indictments of Soviet-led Communism. They are challenging works for those seeking some saving aspects in the regimes of ‘actually existing socialism’, or consign this recent past to history.

Applebaum has now turned her attention to populism.

Writing in the Washington Post during Donald Trump’s election campaign in 2016 she looked at new political wave.

..this loose group of parties and politicians — Austria’s Freedom Party, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the UK Independence Party, Hungary’s Fidesz, Poland’s Law and Justice, Donald Trump — have made themselves into a global movement of “anti-globalists.” Meet the “Populist International”

What was the programme of this new international? Appelbaum used something of the tone taken a couple of years on in Madeleine Albright’s warning about modern ‘fascism’, somebody who ” claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are necessary – including violence – to achieve his or her goals” (Fascism. A Warning, Madeleine Albright. 2018.) Like the former US Secretary of State she underlines the lack of limits, that is disrespect for the normal rules of law, of populists. They may not be fascists but…

the parties that belong to the Populist International, and the media that support it, are not Burkean. They don’t want to conserve or preserve what exists. Instead, they want to radically overthrow the institutions of the present to bring back things that existed in the past — or that they believe existed in the past — by force. Their language takes different forms in different countries, but their revolutionary projects often include the expulsion of immigrants, or at least the return to all-white (or all-Dutch, or all-German) societies; the resurrection of protectionism; the reversal of women’s or minorities’ rights; the end of international institutions and cooperation of all kinds. They advocate violence…

Trump is a threat to the West as we know it, even if he loses

Appelbaum’s latest book is, or at least, as a paint it, as much about her former friends and colleagues who have joined this “populist international”, as the national populism itself. A world of highly educated, hosts and hostesses, those of her circle in Eastern Europe, above all Poland (her husband’s home country), bravely stood up to disintegrating and increasingly powerless Communist states, and achieved the ends of liberalism with the regimes’ demise. Many of them, amongst her Republican circles in the US, in Poland and Hungary have moved to Trump and the national populist right of the Law and Justice Party and Orbán. They are both ornaments and technicians of governments that claim, or aim to, overthrow globalising elites. The word she uses for them is, “collaborators”.

Is “their fealty to the new order”, a conversation with Nick Cohen suggests, the result of a “lust for status among resentful men and women, who believe the old world never gave them their due”? Anne Applebaum: how my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit. Or are their career paths, one might suggest to an author who uses Adorno’s studies in the “authoritarian personality”, following the mundane tracks of youth becoming part of authority?

The nationalist strain in the views of her British Conservative, ‘Burkean’ friends, the charming dilettantes of the Spectator, and the winsome, if self-regarding, Boris Johnson, were a hidden ideology in full view.

The late Roger Scruton, caught up in the author of Reflections on the Revolution in France‘s contract between the “living and the dead” and Barrès’ “la terre et les morts” was a nationalist whose final books repeated a message he had polished over decades.

When we wish to summon the ‘we’ of political identity we refer to our country. We do not use grand and tainted honorifics like la partie or Das Vaterland. We refer simply to this spot of earth, which belongs to us because to belong to it, have loved it, lived in it, defended it, and established peace and prosperity within its borders.”( Where We Are. The State of Britain Now. Roger Scruton. 2017)

That should have been obvious.

One does not have be seized with class hatred (although it might help) to nod at James Bloodworth’s review of the book,

While Applebaum and her friends were revelling in the triumph of liberal democracy in the 90s — breathing in the pieties of the new world from the rarefied atmosphere of Manhattan cocktail parties, diplomatic lunches and garden parties at the Spectator — deindustrialised regions in Britain, America and parts of Europe were being devastated by institutional breakdown, poverty and despair. But this is surely pertinent to any discussion of contemporary populism; as Michael Lind has written for UnHerd, “the heartlands of populism are often deindustrialised former manufacturing regions such as the North of England and the American Rust Belt”.

Who paved the way for the populists?

To explain populism is an ambitious research-programme. It raises a pile of issues, as the score of so books on the topic reviewed on this Blog alone indicates.

Her articles and reviews of the new book suggest that Anne Applebaum has important things to say.

But on the evidence the writer and historian seems to begin from the assumption that this turn is recent, located if not entirely in the last decade, at least not stretching much beyond the present century. But how far back can one go to find the political and social origins of right-wing populism?

The vocabulary it uses has contorted origins. Elites, a term whose sociological and political use has roots in the Italian far-right writer Vilfredo Pareto and “oligarchy”, in Robert Michels’ iron law, could be seen as positive terms, as well as an inevitable bind of democratic politics. Who knows, somebody outside management studies might rediscover the merits of the Pareto Principle of concentrating on the minority that is the best,

Another issues comes from that many European populist parties have indeed had electoral weight only since the beginning of the new millennium. But there is an important exception. Marine Le Pen’s National Populist party, the Rassemblement National (RN), first peaked under her father’s leadership in the 1986 French legislative elections, 9.8% of the vote and (under Proportional Representation) 35 seats in the National Assembly. Since its rebranding as the RN in 2018 the rally is trying to move from the ‘anti-system’ far right to a less extreme right that poses as a national government-in-waiting.

A convincing account of the RN’s electoral performance over the years (Marine le Pen in 2017 Presidential contest received the largest share of support of all French parties from working class voters, a statistic that is not unchallenged.) and prospects cannot be written in terms of phrases about a new populist international and the “seduction of authoritarianism”. To cap this, there is the phenomenon of “red-brown” support, former leftists who now identify with national populist identity politics, and (in the case of France, and the UK), back populist parties, most visibly the British Brexit Party of Nigel Farage,

Yet, there is a rejoicing in left-wing heaven at repentant republican Appelbaum’s criticisms of Donald Trump’s “performative authoritarianism” and European national populism.

One can find a degree of common ground in the need to combat rather than understand it. The left populists who hoped to funnel the streams of resentment into their own channels of popular and socialist sovereignty, often seem to forget that point….

Written by Andrew Coates

July 24, 2020 at 6:22 pm

Posted in Anti-Fascism, European Left, Fascism, Labour Party, Left, Nationalism, Populism, Stalinism

Tagged with anne applebaum, Brexit, Donald Trump, Front National, National Populism, Populism, Stalinism

From the Decline in Working Class Politics to Labour’s ‘Civil War’.

Momentum Camden Calls for NEC Motion of No Confidence in Keir Starmer

Labour CIVIL WAR: Keir Starmer already facing party revolt ...

What We Don’t Need is a Labour “Civil War”.

After the Conservative landslide at the December elections there has been a flood of commentary about the decline of traditional support for the Labour Party.

Phil offers an outline.

The collapse in class consciousness on the part of millions of working class people who’ve entered into retirement over this last decade was a long time in the works. It was assiduously deconstructed, deracinated and deposited in the receptacle of history.

The one brake on this process preventing the collapse from happening earlier was not their links to the present, i.e. the lives of their offspring, but the living relations to the past. Their parents were their conscience, a reminder not only of where they came from but their exposure to a set of values that hadn’t changed: a collective and small p political culture of working class consciousness with a fidelity to local community, the union, and, crucially, the Labourist reflex.

As this generation dies they fade into memory and the obligation to vote the right way dies with them. Indeed, some might have felt a frisson of transgression when they ticked the box next to the Tory candidate back in December, but ultimately what mattered more to them was feeding the fears and delusions and cruelty inculcated in them over the past 40 years.

Obligation and Class Consciousness

He suggests that, ” we have the rise of conditional and transactional politics. To put it simply, larger numbers of people vote not out of party loyalty but because parties are offering and doing something they want.” (Conditional and Transactional Politics).

This voting behaviour was observed back in 1971 by Barry Hindess in The Decline of Working Class Politics. After having seen that within the Labour Party “the determination of local policy is now very largely in the hands of activists in the more middle-class areas”, and that politics, at that time did not offer a choice outside of a narrow consensus (a 1960’s version of “post-politics”),

the electorate are now less likely to vote out of a sense of class solidarity and more in terms of a sober calculation of material avantages. (Page 148)

The idea of ‘instrumental politics”, the rise of calculation made by ‘affluent workers’ in the 1960s, and, even more prominently during the Thatcher years, might offer some explanation for the detachment of people from class to individual voting. Blair and Brown made an appeal to this hard-headed constituency in order to restore “trust with the public”. They claimed to offer progress, a capacity to compete in a globalised world, based on what Peter Mandelson has called, a “A constructive partnership with business.” (Revolution revisited.2002)

Nobody would present the last election as a battle within consensual limits. Nor was what people “wanted’ and voted for clearly based on economics. Political scientists may talk of historical support patterns becoming “unglued” and the way that Johnson “Though Johnson was widely unpopular, his party also moved to the centre on economic issues, a strategy that helped sideline Corbyn’s class-based appeal. But, he “emphasised the largely identity-based fight over Brexit.“(Vox)

What did those whose identity politics led them to back ‘Get Brexit Done’ and to “Unleash Britain’s potential” cast their ballots for?

Taking Backing Control looks like a lifebuoy many new Tory voters grasped at when pinned down and asked what they were backing.

The cultural reasons for this support would be better looked at in terms of a wider shift away, with different degrees of sympathy amongst different electorates, to national populism across Europe, That is, while the UK Conservatives are a special case (not least as the oldest political party in the world) , they share part of the ideology that, as two authors sympathetic to the ideas expressed state, “”national populists prioritise the culture and interests of the nation, and promise to give voice to a people who feel that they have been neglected, even held in contempt, by distant and often corrupt elites.” Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, (National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. 2018)

It could be suggested that one way to look further at he forces behind this it is through comparative studies, looking at similar de-alignments in countries whose working class history and politics resembles in some ways Britain’s.

One book is Didier Erbion’s Returning to Reims (2018, original,Retour à Reims 2008/2019)

“I tried to understand this milieu in which I had lived, my parents’ milieu, which traditionally voted for the Communist party, and how they came to vote for the Front National, why their vote was transferred to the right and the extreme right.”

Erbion does not just focus on support for the far-right, but on the wider ‘transactional’ switch in working class support for political parties, including for the classical right-wing President Sarkozy (and which could be extended to a minority who voted Macron not Marine Le Pen).

Bearing in mind these parallels, which could be extended to more volatile, and declining support for social democratic, socialist and (the largely vanished) Communist parties across Europe, might offer a better beginning than staying within British politics.

Civil War.

Will the left follow Phil and ask the kind of cliché-free questions he, and others, have put on the table?

For the moment this is overshadowed by this news.

Labour is now in the throes of what the Guardian today calls a “civil war” (Antisemitism settlement plunges Labour party into civil war).

Antisemitism: Labour settlement plunges party into civil war https://t.co/tDBWWgf23p

— The Guardian (@guardian) July 22, 2020

Labour’s decision to pay a six-figure libel settlement to ex-staffers who claimed the party was failing to deal with antisemitism has plunged the party back into civil war, with Jeremy Corbyn publicly condemning his successor’s decision to settle the case.

Corbyn’s statement caused astonishment among the litigants in the libel action, with the Panorama journalist John Ware confirming to the Guardian that he was “consulting his lawyers” and raising the prospect of another costly court battle over Labour and antisemitism.

The anti-semitism issue, made worse by some people’s hard-line anti-Zionism, and a fringe that indulges in conspiracy theories. are serious problems.

The ‘Hobbyist’ left, which is said to have dominated Labour politics in ways that Hindess (who wrote in 1971, at a time when leftist influence inside the Party was at a low point) could not have dreamt, has come in for a great deal of criticism. Those who believed that they were bringing the fight against the ‘Iron law of Oligarchy’ into Labour structures, are sorely disappointed.

Apart from a divisive, and futile, battle against ‘Starmerism’, a range of hobby-horses are being run. The American inspired Black Lives Matter movement has some real targets. But other culture wars, cancel culture, a pile of words stacks up about issues that are as clear as mud . Some of the ideas floated are as odd as the 19th century socialists who were interested in Theosophy. Or worse.

Momentum Camden Calls for NEC Motion of No Confidence in Keir Starmerhttps://t.co/wsFJT66A3c

— Maomentum (@Maomentum_) July 21, 2020

Starmer’s statement that he needs “unconscious bias” training, is both an admission and misdirection: His racism has been conscious and consistent and has no place in an antiracist party. In the process he makes racism a personal psychological problem and not a systemic social disaster. He has brought the Labour Party into disrepute with some of its most loyal supporters, BAME communities.”

Tony Greenstein

23RD JUL 2020 AT 9:03 AM

This is a superb motion I will try and use the motion in a blog post.#

CAMDEN LABOUR LEFT

If this is one side….

We do not need this civil war.

There is little doubt however that laying the blame on Corbyn will only help those who wish to turn back to the days when Peter Mandelson and his friends ran Labour policy for ‘apirational’ people.

Written by Andrew Coates

July 23, 2020 at 12:15 pm

Posted in British Govern, European Left, French Politics, Human Rights, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left, Nationalism, Populism

Tagged with Anti-Semitism, European Left, Keir Starmer, Labour Party, National Populism

“Taking Back Control”: Brexit, Putin, to Free Trade in Public Services, and Low-Quality Food.

Government rejects ISC’s call for inquiry into Russian interference in Brexit referendum.

Boris Johnson urges Brits to vote Brexit to "take back control ...

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.

BREAKING: Tories vote down amendment to protect NHS from foreign control in Brexit trade deals https://t.co/h1sYC5EbWj
— Evolve Politics (@evolvepolitics) July 20, 2020

MPs have voted against New Clause 17, with 340 votes to 251.

The New Clause intended to protect the NHS and publicly funded health and care services in other parts of the UK from any form of control from outside the UK. pic.twitter.com/KIrFe5Slyc
— UK House of Commons (@HouseofCommons) July 20, 2020

It seems that Jeremy Corbyn had the clairvoyance – along with hundreds of anti-Brexit commentators – to foresee this.

Back in December Jeremy Corbyn provided the receipts to show the NHS was in fact on the negotiating table in a UK/USA trade deal.

The MSM called him a liar.
pic.twitter.com/2kld9ECWsO
— Ben (@BenJolly9) July 21, 2020

Yet, as this tweet indicates…

Extraordinary, also, to think that many on the Left supported a Brexit that enabled this. The changes to the country that Brexit enables – and these clauses unlock – are Corbyn's tragic, abiding legacy. pic.twitter.com/w25MYtw3N4
— Jo Maugham QC (@JolyonMaugham) July 21, 2020

Then we have this:

Brexit was always a gift to Putin because it weakened the European Union & left Britain divided, isolated. The #RussiaReport shows just how many questions remain unanswered.https://t.co/Xob9uYn3w6
— Guy Verhofstadt (@guyverhofstadt) July 21, 2020

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,

Amazing moment in #RussiaReport press conference when @lukeharding1968 asks about Arron Banks. Very very carefully, @KevanJonesMP refers him to page 13, footnote 50.

The footnote is [REDACTED] pic.twitter.com/0S4RBrGbA5
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) July 21, 2020

The UK government failed to find out whether Russia meddled in the 2016 #Brexit referendum, a parliamentary report said https://t.co/RHu7bcdm1E pic.twitter.com/Aybrxz72ak
— Reuters (@Reuters) July 21, 2020

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”.

Ten years from now, students of Brexit will presume that ‘Take Back Control’ was sarcastic.
— James O'Brien (@mrjamesob) July 21, 2020

(1) Report:

Case study: the EU referendum

Written by Andrew Coates

July 21, 2020 at 5:01 pm

Posted in Britain, British Govern, Conservative Party, Conservatives, European Left, Human Rights, Imperialism, International, Labour Movement, Labour Party, Left, Nationalism, Populism

Tagged with boris johnson, Brexit, European Left, Lexit, People's Brexit, President Vladimir Putin

Morning Star Defends China Against Labour “enthusiastically climbing aboard the New Cold War bandwagon”.