By Reuters Staff
The 21-minute clip, titled “THE TRUTH ABOUT COVID-19”, can be found here .
British Red-Brown Front Hails UK Anti-Lockdown Protests, The New ‘Gilets Jaunes’.
“The anti-lockdown demo had a lot of the characteristics of the Leave campaign and the Gilets Jaunes in France – largely working class, militant and without any input from the left.”
Leading ideologue of the Red Brown Front Spiked hails New Gilets Jaunes.
40 % des Gilets jaunes sont très complotistes.
40% of yellow vests are conspiracists.
ENQUÊTE COMPLOTISME 2019 : FOCUS SUR LE MOUVEMENT DES « GILETS JAUNES »
Conspiracist ideas, including anti-Semitism, flourish at the extremes, above all on the far rights, and, as a result amongst the Gilets Jaunes.
Hartfield should rejoice at this development in France:
QAnon at Protest Against Coronavirus Rules in London.
QAnon Join London Anti-Lockdown Protest.
Plenty of fash and New Age confusionnistes.
Note this from Bob:
Update: This is contemptible.
The Spartacist League Resurfaces as Anti-Lockdown Movement.
“For the last year, the position of the ICL was to accept the lockdowns as necessary. We repudiate this position. It was a capitulation to the “national unity” rallying cry that all classes should support the lockdowns because they save lives.“
The Spartacist League is the the United States section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), formerly the International Spartacist Tendency. After the death of their founder James Robertson in 2019 their public presence was reduced, In 2020 this announcement appeared: “18 August 2020: Until further notice, Workers Vanguard will have an irregular schedule.” But the Central Committee is said to have grouped around a new red base in Hades.
The parasitic bourgeoisies have responded to the pandemic with the means that best serve their interests, forcibly locking up their entire populations at home, pending vaccination.
The bourgeoisies’ lockdowns are a reactionary public health measure. Workers must oppose them! Lockdowns may well temporarily slow the spread of infections, but they weaken the fighting ability of the working class. By shutting down whole branches of industry and services, they have caused an economic crisis and thrown masses of people into unemployment. Closures of schools and childcare facilities have increased the oppressive burden of the family. State repression has been severely increased as democratic and working-class rights have been gutted. Gatherings, protests, travel, strikes, union organizing: all have been restricted or banned. Lockdowns aim to prevent working-class struggle, the only way workers can genuinely protect their health and combat the social causes of the crisis.
…
Faced with the utter bankruptcy of the established leaders of the workers movement and their pseudo-Marxist lackeys, the vital question posed for the class-conscious proletarians is the need for a leadership based on the revolutionary program of Trotskyism—authentic Marxism-Leninism. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) strives to build an international Leninist vanguard party, the essential instrument for bringing revolutionary consciousness to the proletariat and achieving workers power. Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution!
For New October Revolutions!
—International Executive Committee of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
19 April 2021
Whether their British section will back Piers Corbyn remains to be seen:
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie: Beyond powerlessness.
Published last year Sortir de notre impuissance politique, (Fayard) was a short, strong polemic on the stagnation of the Left. The philosopher and academic Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, interviewed on on France Inter argued that left wing politics had become “ritualised” around certain forms of defensive action. Left wing activists operated ” more like automatons than strategists. We resort to ritual, instituted forms of action: demonstrations, strikes, occupations , even violent riots…”without any form of offensive strategy that can bring about a new society. “We go out in the streets, we take selfies on Instagram, but we do not act politically”. The brochure made a real splash, not least because the author is actively engaged in grassroots radical left politics. (1)
Some people remarked that “une conception réaliste de l’État, de la Loi et de notre expérience comme sujets” had a fairly abstract alternative for the left. Examples of direct action, taken from the US Black Panthers were out of kilter with the European Left’s experience and that more recent forms of this kind of politics, on green and climate issues, are not wide-ranging enough to base a whole new politics upon of deal with the reality of political power. One point made, which had some resonance, and stirred up controversy was how the “« débats d’extrême droite (far right) ou semi racistes » had contaminated parts of the left. Part of a wider critique of what is become known as ‘confusionnisme’ one can see parallels in the wake of Brexit and alliances such as the Full Brexit, between the hard right Brexit Party and a variety of ‘left’ groups and individuals. This drift has been the case across Europe.
La Conscience politique. (2019 is a wider ranging study. It is a critique of the way political abstractions continue to dominate actual politics. He argues that keep using totalising categories (The people, general will, popular sovereignty), and mystifying narratives (the social contract, deliberative democracy) or still abstract notions (the legislator, the body politic, the citizen) which we recognize most of the time the fictitious character, while affirming the need to resort to them. The conflicts between nationals and non-nationals as raising deep, ‘ontological’ difficulties, creating an ‘illusion’ of common interest’ is not matter of political philosophy alone. (page 162) Sovereignty alone, as anybody who followed the Brexit process will realise, is as much a dominant aspect of British politics, as the ‘philosophically inclined French political culture.
As with Sortir de notre impuissance politique, the book is better at identifying problems than offering an alternative. I would not recommend his account of Hobbes, which largely ignores the libraries of studies on the author the Leviathan. But in offering an outline of “une conception réaliste de l’État, de la Loi et de notre expérience comme sujets.”Violence is, he argues, the defining moment of the state’s horizon. Lagasnerie elegantly and forcefully has begun some necessary rethinking of politics.
This essay, published in English on the Open Democracy site, is a good introduction to his writings,
We can only move beyond our powerlessness by conducting a critique of the traditional forms of political action. In fact, we must ask ourselves: what it is we do when we use the established modes of democratic dissent. Are we taking action? Or are we simply protesting to express our disagreement? If our protests accomplish nothing – or, in any case, only rarely produce substantive changes – doesn’t this mean that the normal forms of action function as traps?
When we resort to them, we feel we are taking action; when in reality, we do nothing more than express our discontent. Haven’t the traditional forms of protest lost their efficacy and become routinized?
(1) “Le passage de Geoffroy de Lagasnerie dans la Matinale de France Inter, le 30 septembre, a déclenché une impressionnante réaction en chaîne. Polémique sur Twitter, billet salé de Géraldine Mosna-Savoye sur France Culture, édito de Daniel Schneidermann dans Libération, sans parler des cris d’orfraie compassés du Point et du Figaro. “Les Inrockuptibles .
Laurence Fox gets Farage backing in war to the death with Count Binface.
It’s a a war to the death for the Vote in London.
The Gammons are cheered up with this news:
Nigel Farage backs Laurence Fox in London mayoral race
Nigel Farage and the Reform party today threw their support behind actor and activist Laurence Fox to become the next Mayor of London.
Cde Binface has hit back
The Gammons are clearly flustered…..look at this success!
British MPs “China is committing genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province.”
A “growing movement in western democracies,”
British MPs voted to declare that China is committing genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province.
The motion passed on Thursday does not compel the government to act but is likely to mark a further decline in relations with China. In response, Beijing’s embassy in the UK accused the MPs of having “cooked up” the motion “with a view to discrediting and attacking China”.
Nigel Adams, the Asia minister, admitted there was credible evidence of widespread use of forced labour, internment camps, and the targeting of ethnic groups. The actions amounted to clear and systematic abuse of human rights, but he said the UK’s longstanding position was that determining genocide is for “competent national and international courts”.
The shadow Foreign Office minister Stephen Kinnock said ministers needed to go further by widening the pool of Chinese officials sanctioned, ending further formal economic consultations with China, and advocating for the UN general assembly to request an advisory opinion from the international court of justice on the question of genocide.
This is, as the Guardian says, a growing movement across the world. Here is what leading French radical leftist and MP, says:
Laurence Fox on 1%. Alt-Left sites back Binface.
Count Binface tying with Laurence Fox in London mayoral race.
Independent.
Mr Fox, who has struggled to gain any headway with his anti-woke agenda over the past month, has previously claimed his new party had raised £5m in donations.
Binface taunted his rival on Twitter over the latest survey result – pointing out he had spent “zero” money and had still managed to match the Reclaim candidate. (Independent)
Novelty candidate Count Binface is tying with anti-lockdown activist Laurence Fox in the London mayoral contest, new polling has found.
The former Lewis actor – who launched his Reclaim Party campaign last month with a promise to “unlock” the capital from all Covid rules – has only 1 per cent support.
Count Binface, the satirical politician created by comedian Jon Harvey, and the Ukip candidate Peter Gammons are also on 1 per cent backing in the race, according to the Savanta ComRes poll.
Mr Fox, who has struggled to gain any headway with his anti-woke agenda over the past month, has previously claimed his new party had raised £5m in donations.
Binface taunted his rival on Twitter over the latest survey result – pointing out he had spent “zero” money and had still managed to match the Reclaim candidate in the polls.
Mr Fox has promised to “reclaim” Londoners’ personal freedoms during the public health crisis, and to erect hundreds of new military statues and plaques.
A confirmed vaccine sceptic, the actor-turned-controversialist has said that he would refuse to get the Covid jab until after 2023 – when he claims all the tests needed to convince him of its safety would be completed.
“It’s not going to do me any harm [not having it], is it?” Mr Fox has told the Guido Fawkes blog. “I think people should do what they want with their own bodies in terms of vaccinations. It should be private, like voting.”
The latest poll shows Labour incumbent Sadiq Khan on course to take City Hall again, with 41 per cent support. Tory candidate Shaun Bailey languishes well behind on 28 per cent, while Lib Dem Luisa Porritt is on 8 per cent and Green Sian Berry is on 6 per cent.
Well established rumour has it that Binface has the support of respected alt-left sites, Skwawkbox, The Canary and Novara Media.
Where is Piers Corbyn one might ask….not to mention American cult businessman Brian Rose?
Update.
Socialist Worker Calls for Labour Vote…
” in most places socialists will have to vote Labour. “
Who should socialists vote for on 6 May?
Labour has no policies to challenge the rich or a deadly system that has failed so clearly and completely during coronavirus.
Nevertheless in most places socialists will have to vote Labour.
We want to see the Tories lose. If Boris Johnson and his coterie emerge with smiles on their faces after these elections, it will depress many activists. It will encourage the idea that the Tories can escape from any disaster.
Exceptions.
More fundamentally, Labour is still not the same as the Tories. It retains some withered connections with working class organisation through its links with the trade union leaders.
The exception is where a small number of credible socialist candidates are standing. For example, in the Liverpool mayor election Roger Bannister of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition has consistently won respectable votes. He is confronting’s Labour’s capitulation to the Tories in the city.
The choice would have been wider if Labour lefts such as Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell had reacted to Starmer’s assaults by creating a new party.
Bad Labour….
But they remain trapped in the iron cage of Labour. They remain in a party that won’t even let its former leader be a Labour MP, and which this week suspended a councillor for calling prince Philip a “massive racist”.
Exception, back the ‘real’ nationalists in Scotland.
In Scotland we can’t call for a Labour vote. Here a central issue before voters is whether the Scottish parliament will have a majority for an independence referendum—and Labour remains staunchly unionist.
At the same time many pro-independence forces, in the Scottish National Party and Alba, are completely unacceptable because of their pro-capitalist and bigoted politics. So in Scotland we say vote left and fight for independence.
Movementism.
The poverty of choice at the ballot box reflects a deeper crisis of the left.
Over three million people have died because of the ruling class handling of the pandemic. Hundreds of millions, particularly in the poorest countries, face being abandoned without vaccines, or hurled into poverty by lost jobs and slashed wages.
But socialist forces have not yet emerged on a mass scale to challenge the system.
Filling that gap through struggle and socialist politics is far more important than any vote.
It looks like the SWP don’t see much promise in TUSC, or can be even arsed to the mention the Communist Party of Britain…
The SWP has survived the Comrade Delta Crisis. It has managed as best it could. Unlike the mythomaniacs of the Socialist Party/TUSC it has never claimed to be Jeremy Corbyn’s oldest and bestest Friend. There is some slight distance from the Communist Party of Britain and its backing for the Bosses’ Brexit. Will their present mouvementiste strategy win them support? There is now a young bloke selling Socialist Worker in Ipswich.
Gammon Left: Skwawkbox Publicises Pub Landlord, “My Gaff My Rules.”
“Traditional old English pub”,
As local election campaigning gets underway, and people deliver Labour material across the country, the anti-Labour site Skwawkbox can find nothing better to do than try to heap ordure on the Party.
For Small Businessman Walker this incident dwarfs all others
The screeching one commented,
“The bizarre aspect of this is that Starmer demanded schools re-open last September ‘no ifs, no buts, no equivocation‘ – and sided with the Tories to fight against unions who were asking for masks in classrooms. So you’d think if that kind of lethal foolishness was going to get a welcome anywhere, it would be in the pub of an anti-masker angry about kids wearing masks in class.
But after Starmer refused to sign a letter calling for a parliamentary investigation into Boris Johnson’s lies, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving (pseudo-)leader of the opposition.
Starmer responded well,
This was good as well, (Manchester Evening News)
GMB’s Dr Hilary clashes with pub landlord who threw Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer out of his pub
He attempted to explain his reasons for being so angry at the Labour party – which he has supported his entire life.
But it soon became clear the hosts, and Dr Hilary, who was also on the ITV news programme, were not impressed by what he was saying.
“I think with the greatest respect Rod, I think you should stick to pulling pints rather than advising the government about policy on the biggest pandemic, public health issue for the last 100 years,” Dr Hilary hit out.
“If we ignore a pandemic and we say lockdown doesn’t work, how do you think this spreads in the first place? It’s very simple, you have to have lockdown in a pandemic that kills people.”
Referring to a comment Mr Humphris made about more elderly people dying, Dr Hilary continued: “And if you’re saying at 83, it doesn’t matter if you die, you’re saying that people like Prince Philip, the last 16 years of his life were meaningless and worthless, we can’t allow that to happen, you can’t be that ageist.
The class solidarity between Walker and his new best friend continues.
A pub landlord in Bath has accused one of Keir Starmer’s minders of assault after being manhandled when he tried to demand that the Labour leader leave his pub:
The man, apparently a former longtime Labour voter who believed Starmer had failed him in his lack of opposition to Boris Johnson’s handling of the pandemic, was trying to tell Starmer to leave because he disagreed with Starmer’s support for lockdown and for masks in schools – bizarrely, since Starmer long demanded schools re-open and sided with the Tories to fight teaching unions who were asking for facemasks in classrooms.
Starmer had earlier told the man, “I don’t need lectures from the likes of you”.
Top Gammon Left Expressed their backing for the Pub Landlord on Skwawky’s site,
* Exactly, that reaction is far more than Masks/No Masks!
That is because we have Thatcher’s Neolabour Pestilence Occupying The People’s Party AGAIN!
The People now face This Dangerous Tory or That Dangerous Tory, after loosing 2019, and we must Unite, Plan and Get The Bastards Out!
Even if we end up with a tiny, but LOUDER & PROUDER UK Labour Party fighting for the People. Better 10/20/30 UK LP MPs Fighting and Standing up for The People than ~180 Standing up for themselves and The Establishment.
*AFTER 14 MONTHS of the BBC panic-stirring everyone about a pandemic that has not raised the rate of (usual) death outside the average for the last 20 years, you believe anything they report?
In fact 2020 had the LOWEST number of deaths (all causes) for any year since 2001.
*100% Agree, It is when I hear the Fire in the Belly of Zarah, Apsana, Bel, Cleaudia, that I know even if we end up with only those 4 Democratic Socialists UK Labour Party MPs, in the HoC,, The Voice of The People will be heard VERY LOUD & VERY CLEAR!
If we take back some seats lost in 2019 ie Laura P & Laura S, bring Jeremy back, we will stand to have a Truly Democratic Socialist Government in NO TIME!
Of course we will continue to be faced with all the same Lie/Smear attacks of 2015 to 2020, if not much worse, but our Attackers will no longer be inside our Community, it will all be External attacks! BLISS!
France: Conspiracist Group Held Over Abduction of 8 Year old Girl, ‘Mia’.
“News channel BFMTV reported the four were also being investigated by the anti-terror prosecutor for alleged terrorist conspiracy. They are said to have discussed possible attacks on Covid vaccination centres.“
France seeks conspiracy theorist over 8-year-old’s kidnapping.
France 24.
French prosecutors announced Tuesday an international arrest warrant for a leading figure in conspiracy circles who is suspected of helping to organise the kidnapping of an eight-year-old girl that gripped the country last week.
The girl, identified as Mia* , was found with her 28-year-old mother Lola Montemaggi on Sunday by police in Switzerland, following an intense five-day search after she was taken from her grandmother’s home in Poulieres, eastern France.
Five men as well as Montemaggi have been detained over the abduction, which saw three of the men pose as child welfare officials to convince the grandmother to hand Mia over.
Prosecutors say that the plot was code-named “Operation Lima,” and that they had walkie-talkies, camping gear, fake licence plates and a budget of 3,000 euros ($3,600) to cover expenses.
They said the mother’s associates in the kidnapping plan were anti-system activists who believe that “children in care are unfairly taken from their parents.”
After questioning the suspects, investigators say they may have been helped by Remy Daillet, known to French police as a proponent of extremist conspiracy theories and a populist takeover of the state.
Daillet, 54, was a former regional leader of the centrist MoDem party (of Francois Bayrou) before he was excluded in 2010.
….
According to Le Parisien, French investigators say Daillet may also have encouraged a vehicle ramming attack on a police station in Dax, southwestern France, in November.
Last summer, they say he used a fake social media account to praise vandals who defaced a prominent Nazi massacre memorial at Oradour-sur-Glane, with slogans denying the Holocaust.
Mia’s mother had lost custody of her daughter and was no longer allowed to see her alone or speak with her on the telephone.
Hundreds of police were mobilised in the search, which ended on Sunday morning at a squat inside an abandoned factory in the Swiss municipality of Sainte-Croix.
Mia was returned to her grandmother’s care on Monday, while Lola Montemaggi remains in Swiss custody while awaiting extradition.
“…all shared “the same community of ideas”. “They are against the State and mobilised against what they call the health dictatorship, (that is France’s anti-Covid programme and lockdown) explained the prosecutor. For them, children in care are unfairly taken from their parents. ” Close to conspiratorial, survivalist or far-right circles, some of them were monitored by the DGSI (French General Directorate for Internal Security, Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure, and had been suspected of preparing an attack against an undefined target.”
The Canadian.
In one of his videos, he defended the idea of a popular coup against a background of dramatic music, claiming that when he is in power he will abolish almost all taxes, cancel the wearing of the mask. “Scientifically useless” and dismantle 5G. It also intends to ban “Aerial spraying, called “chemtrails” “, a reference to the contrails left by airplanes in the sky. Rémy Daillet also wants to do “Stop the abusive placements of children”, an argument to which Lola Montemaggi, the mother of little Mia, would have been sensitive.
Mia, 8, was kidnapped last Tuesday, at her mother’s request, by several men while she was staying with her maternal grandmother in the Vosges. Her mother was no longer allowed to see her alone or to speak to her on the phone.
BBC, France Mia kidnapping: Four men held over abduction of girl aged 8.
None of the four, aged 23 to 60, has criminal records, however three are described as known survivalists – a type of anti-state individual living on the fringe and often linked to the far right.
The prosecutor said one of those involved in the abduction considered himself a “dissident” in the style of fictional gentleman thief Arsène Lupin. Another believed he had saved the child’s life, although he admitted he might have been manipulated by the girl’s mother.
Custody of Mia was given to her maternal grandmother last January after her mother reportedly told a family judge she wanted to “live on the margins of society”. Prosecutors said she had previously expressed the desire to sell up and live in a motor home “under the radar”.
Enlèvement de Mia : retrouvée avec sa mère dans une usine désaffectée, la petite fille “en bonne santé” sera remise à sa grand-mère. La Dépêche.
Abduction of Mia: found with her mother in an abandoned factory, the “healthy” little girl will be handed over to her grandmother
French Left, a ‘Pact of Mutual Respect’ for the 2022 Presidential Elections.
Left Pact of Mutual Respect.
About twenty representatives of the main French left-wing parties gathered this Saturday in Paris at the call of the ecologist Yannick Jadot (Europe Ecologie les Verts, EELV). They will meet again in a month to discuss their proposals for the 2020 presidential election. They included the socialists Anne Hidalgo and Olivier Faure, the Communist (PCF) Ian Brossat, Sandrine Rousseau (EELV National Secretary) Éric Coquerel (la France insoumise LFI), Pôle écologiste ( principally, Générations, Génération écologie,) – Julien Bayou, Éric Piolle, Benoît Hamon (former Socialist Presidential candidate in 2017, Corinne Lepage , Raphaël Glucksmann, of Place publique, the Parti radical de gauche, and a small group of former supporters of President Macron, the Nouveaux Démocrates.
The Communist daily, L’Humanité, states today,
Présidentielle 2022. Réunion de la gauche : une salle, deux ambiances
A pact of “mutual respect” was concluded between the progressive forces, meeting on Saturday. But the eagerness of the ecologist Yannick Jadot and the Socialist Party to move forward on the basis of a common candidacy has aroused tensions.
PCF spokesperson Ian Brossat came to say that the left “would collectively benefit from focusing on issues that preoccupy the working classes, such as employment or deindustrialisation”. He also affirmed that it is necessary to work for an on working for the legislative elections which is not conditional on agreement for the presidential contest” . The representative of the La France insoumise (Mélenchon’s Rally/Movement I, Eric Coquerel, himself has presented “tracks on the sharing of wealth, labour time” promoted “the idea of the VI th Republic” and the need to conduct “joint mobilizations “.He even offered to organize the next meeting at the headquarters of his movement. What the audience rejected, preferring to remain on neutral ground. Leftist radical Guillaume Lacroix raised the issue of secularism, and Anne Hidalgo wished for a truce on the subject to focus more on social issues. And, as expected, Yannick Jadot (Greens) proposed a “government contract”, approved by Olivier Faure (Parti Socialist) . In short, everyone arrived with their agenda already written, and wished to share this with the others present.
Le Monde is more upbeat, while underlining that differences on the left remain strong.
Réunion des gauches : les lignes d’accord et de désaccord se précisent
twenty or so party leaders also decided to organize “joint responses” to major government reforms: unemployment insurance , pensions, (in reaction to Macron’s planned ‘reforms’ climate change legislation and the President’s law on ‘global security’ (banning people photographing the police images and increasing surveillance – widely seen as a threat to civil liberates and which met public protest). They also agreed that, if everyone develops their own separate programme for 2022, it will be necessary to discuss them. A new meeting will therefore take place at the end of May in order to discuss each other’s proposals. Associative platforms and citizen initiatives such as “Never again” or “2022 in common” will be invited to this new meeting and public debates are being considered.
The principal message, Le Monde and other news sources state, is that there are serious moves afoot to reach agreement between the Ecologists (EELV) and the Socialists (PS) ” l’unité retrouvée entre écologistes et socialistes”. La socialiste Anne Hidalgo(Mayor of Paris) comme Yannick Jadot ont souhaité que s’enclenche dès samedi un nouveau cycle de discussions pour les partisans d’une candidature commune du noyau PS-EELV. (new round of negotiations between the PS-EELV axis). This willingness to work together amongst top figures of two parties is not necessarily shared by all the leadership or members.
La France insoumise have declared that they are satisfied with the meeting but that they will not accept unity with other parties if the result is a muddle, only working together results in clarity. They will not accept a programme that compromises with the neo-liberal authoritarian system, Their ambitions centre on Mélenchon’s Candidacy for President, and making a pact of non-agreession. Other differences incube that Mélenchon continues to declare that he wishes to renegotiate a series of European Treaties, a view opposed by much of the left present on Saturday.
Strategically the LFI is said to base its campaigning as a ‘ pôle de radicalité’ attracting workers the excluded, and those who have abstained from voting in the past, while the Greens and Socialists aim to win over former voters for Macon’s La République en Marche. A few Greens continue to believe that the LFI can work with a broader, “arc humaniste’ (Présidentielle: derrière l’union gauches-écolos, le périmètre en question)
Further to the left sadly there does not seem to be much mutual respect inside the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste (NPA) .
The National Political Council of the NPA met this Sunday, April 4. During the day, among other things, we exchanged about the upcoming electoral deadlines, and we collectively determined an overall calendar of discussions concerning the presidential election.
In the wake of this meeting, Anasse Kazib, member of the NPA and of the “CCR-Permanent Revolution” announced, on social networks, his “pre-candidacy” for the presidential election of 2022. This announcement, which was actually scheduled since several days, was therefore made outside any decision-making framework of the organization.
This was the response from the factionalists:
PRÉSIDENTIELLES 2022
A propos d’un communiqué du NPA sur les Présidentielles
A statement was issued on behalf of the NPA leadership to challenge the fact that Anasse Kazib presented his presidential pre-candidacy at the National Political Council on April 4. This press release is both false and illegitimate. Below is the focus of Permanent Revolution.
Left Gammon Magazine.
New: Rival to Skwawkbox, Novara Media and the Canary.
Some would say this response is almost sacrilege….
But….here’s a rip roaring validation:
And,
No to mention the Whippet Party:
Spiked is not happy:
Neither are the left Gammons:
Tribune, “The Centre Cannot Save Democracy” But Moderate Constitutional Reform Can.
Democratic Left: Whippet Party Demands Northern Independence.
The American, left populist review Jacobin, owned ‘Tribune’ is a curious animal. Since the collapse of left populism, the Bernie Sander’s campaign that had got nowhere fast, the Spanish Podemos’ welcome of political reality and government alliance with the Partido Socialista Obrero Españo (PSOE), Corbyn’s defeat, and the realisation that in France Jean-Luc Mélenchon is going to be stumped in the charismatic Leader’s third attempt at running for President in 2020 they have lost direction. For its critics the principal target of the self-identifying left magazine seems to be Keir Starmer and the Labour Party.
Into this political void had stepped a new voice. New being a relative term. Revived might be a better one. The old tunes are the best ones. Tribune has now turned to the themes of the past, hollowed out democracy, ‘post-democracy’, the ‘political centre’ or, what political confusionniste Tariq Ali has called the ‘extreme centre’. (The Extreme Centre: A Warning. 2015)
These were themes popular in the late 1990s, with the writings of Jacques Rancière“Post-democracy is the government practice and conceptual legitimisation of a democracy after the demos, a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and dispute of the people and is thereby reducible to the sole interplay of state mechanisms and combinations of social energies and interests.” (La Mésentente: Politique et philosophie, 1995) And Colin Crouch, “A post-democratic society is one that continues to have and to use all the institutions of democracy, but in which they increasingly become a formal shell. The energy and innovative drive pass away from the democratic arena and into small circles of a politico-economic elite.”( Coping with Post-Democracy. 2000)
Students of politics always had a hard time getting to grips with the idea that societies where elections take place, different political parties run for office, there were hard battles over voting, getting people elected as representatives to national bodies right down to local, even parish councils, were ‘post’ democratic. Many were struck by the way that ‘alternatives’ to this state of affairs appeared to centre on forms of ‘populism’ that mobilised the ‘people’ against the ‘elite’. The best known case of populism that had got elected, national populism, was Trump and MAGA. That did not look very democratic at all…
Most people had forgotten about the original debates from another era.
Enter Tribune,
The Centre Can’t Save Democracy. Grace Blakely.
Blakeley argues that ‘post democracy’, that is liberal led government stopped political decision making influencing the way the economy is run – a curious claim one would think in the light of how governments have responded to the Coronavirus pandemic. Almost entirely limiting her international scope to the country of the owners of Tribune and the UK, she declares, “The neoliberals achieved with technocracy what classical liberals had achieved with limited suffrage: insulating management of the economy from popular pressure.” After a bit Carl Schmitt and the ominously titled Globalists by Quinn Slobodian she declares,
when it came to the realm of dominium — that is, the realm of the economy, conceived as entirely separate from that of politics — the influence of the masses had to be limited. Democratic governance of the economy always generated the danger of ‘economic nationalism’, in which the narrow, short-term class interests of the masses would be placed above the general interest, which entailed constructing and maintaining an efficient and stable market system.
The Tribune article continues,
The justification for the hollowing-out of democracy that has taken place in recent years was always that technocratic governance would support the efficient operation of the market. Central bank independence, for instance, would prevent the ‘politicisation’ of monetary policy by placing these decisions in the hands of independent economists. But this change has simply placed far more power in the hands of the ruling class — central bankers now heed the whims of financial lobbyists as much as politicians in their decision making.
The message of this squib is that real democracy cannot be furthered by the post-populist revival of the centre.
The political centre has seen its fortunes revive both in Britain, with Keir Starmer, and more particularly in America, with Joe Biden, not because it has any particular answer to this dynamic — but because it persuades people that it can be ignored. Faced with the disaster of Boris Johnson and Trumpism, it does not promise to make things better, only to prevent them from getting worse. And this, for many people, is enough. But it cannot last in the long term.
Instead we need a socialist take on democracy. Like the enthusiasts for Charter 88 several decades ago, and indeed the very liberal-minded Will Hutton, The State We’re in: Why Britain Is in Crisis and How to Overcome It (1995), Blakeley declares that,
“In the UK, constitutional reform — from removing the House of Lords, to dissolving the City of London Corporation, to a substantive local and national devolution agenda — would amplify the voices of working people within the British state. Deepening economic democracy — by reviving the trade union movement, expanding democratic public ownership, and building new democratic, publicly-owned financial institutions — would assist organised labour in its struggle with capital and help us to mitigate the effects of climate breakdown.”
It is hard to disagree with this programme. If we cannot revive the trade union movement by good intentions other reforms are welcome. Will Hutton and others around Charter 88 have argued for this democratic platform aligned to financial reforms for many years. Perhaps Tribune could add “stakeholding” (codetermination of companies) to the list. Hutton still promotes the cause.
Nevertheless this approach has got off on a wrong foot from he start. It ignores two important aspects of how politics and economics have developed in the new millenium.
The first is that Blakeley is fighting yesterday’s wars against ‘globalists’. What is the dominant feature of politics at present is the rise of national neo-liberalism. This is not just in its populist form, now apparently out of the way with Trump’s defeat, but in the shape practised by the Johnson government. Used by Paul Mason in Clear Bright Future (2019) the term is fleshed out by French economist Jean-François Bayart (Sur le national-libéralisme, une conversation avec Jean-François Bayart 2017). In the UK the present government practices a mixture of economic liberalism, that is the marketisation of state functions, private sector dominance, free trade, with the promotion of national identity and nationalist ideology.
The second issue is summed up by Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar
“In responding to the nationalist populist challenge there should be no triangulation. Blue Labour is a dangerous dead end that will only split progressive alliances. At the same time, absolutist positions must be avoided. Too often within contemporary social movements a narrow kind of identity politics is promoted, where solidarity is impossible because only personal experience is said to count. Similarly, there are still Remainers so incensed by the EU referendum result that they insist only a reversal of the decision will suffice. No element—liberal, progressive, socialist—can afford these indulgences. In opposing the illiberal, nationalist right the crucial lesson from the 1930s is crystal clear: unite against the main enemy.” (The populist delusion. The right has won the early battles, but the left can still win the war. Prospect. March 2021.)
In other words, identity politics, of the right (Blue Labour, Spiked, and the Tory ‘Common Sense’ faction) the identity politics of the actually existing liberal meritocratic US inspired left, are real political problems. Political liberalism which defends liberty can be an ally of the left. A central unifying issue is the defence of pluralism, and we need the centre to defend that, democratic diversity, and what Claude Lefort called the development of rights promoting movements. The right against national neo-liberalism, and national populism, means that without formal alliances we still need to recognise that on the issues these create there is a wider opposition within which the left, the internationalist left, needs to work.
Blakeley misses these issues altogether, clutching at straws she concludes,
Party reform is, of course, the sine qua non of this entire agenda. As long as social democratic parties continue to act as the voice of the liberal portion of the ruling class, and not of the working class, they will remain unable and unwilling to fix the deep divides that plague their societies. One of the biggest missed opportunities of Corbynism was the failure to democratise the Labour Party: that goal might be off the cards for now, but the Left needs to be fighting to defend the gains that were made and to prevent a further slide towards cartelisation.
And they wonder why the influence of magazines like Tribune is negligible.
Leave.EU Goes Full Fascist.
Carnival of Reaction: Leave EU has become an openly racist far-right campaign.
They are based around Foxhole: an alt-right ‘news’ site.
Welcome to the Foxhole, a news website that goes against the grain of our media elites and speaks to the concerns of normal people.
Dissatisfied with the glaring flaws of the mainstream media – the skewed perspective, the partisan selection of stories, the ruthless suppression of anything that goes against their chosen narratives – we hope the Foxhole will serve to bring more attention to stories that ordinary people care about.
With the internet coming under stricter control, as Big Tech companies impose restrictive limits on what information you are permitted to share and consume, we’re keen to cultivate a new avenue to spread awareness of the essential stories that the establishment media and Silicon Valley would rather push from view.
We see this site as a digital foxhole – a defensive position on the battlefield of information warfare, protecting us from an onslaught of corporate censorship and allowing us to better represent the views and concerns of millions of ordinary people who are badly served by the established press.
The site is run by a small team of young news hounds, looking to keep alive the grassroots ethos of the 2016 referendum.
We’re powered by the support of the public. If you want to help this project continue to grow and reach more people, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter, read and share our content, and consider becoming a Foxhole Member for just £3 a month to enjoy the site without ads.
This is how they began.
The campaign was co founded by Bristol based businessman and UKIP donor Arron Banks, with property entrepreneur Richard Tice and early financial backing from Jim Mellon“
Leave UK was marked by its hardline anti-immigration stand, “an anti-immigration viral video produced by Leave.EU during the campaign was faked, and that the group appeared to have staged photos of immigrants attacking women in the United Kingdom.”
Arron Banks was involved in dodgy funding scandals.
One that caught people’s attention was this:
1.9m was donated to Grassroots Out, with smaller sums going to Trade Unionists Against the EU, Ukip, Veterans for Britain, and the TV station Wag TV, which made a pro-Brexit documentary
Trade Unionists Against the EU, headed by anti-rootless cosmopolitan campaigner Paul Embery, was promoted by the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition TUSC: The socialist case against the EU: TUSC tour continues. The Socialist. 2016.
Paul Embery, London secretary of the Fire Brigades Union and national organiser of Trade Unionists Against the EU, pointed out: “The EU is rampantly pro-austerity and that approach has caused suffering throughout Europe, a collapse in living standards, the rise of the far-right and the decimation of public services.”
There also a link to Labour Leave:
Labour Leave fined over donation from Arron Banks’ company Left Foot Forward.2019
The Electoral Commission has now fined Labour Leave after finding that the group failed to declare two donations, each worth £10,000. These were non-cash donations of office space and services (including PCs) by Better for the Country Limited and Labour Leave leader’s John Mills Limited.
Labour Leave was fined a total of £9,000 by the Commission for failing to properly declare donations before and after the referendum. Labour Leave say the lapses were due to ‘administrative errors’.
The donation from Better for the Country Limited is notable as Arron Banks is a Director of the company. Banks founded the controversial, unofficial Leave.EU campaign, and donated large sums to UKIP ahead of the 2016 referendum.
As the Guardian reported in February: “Leave.EU was fined £15,000 [by the Information Commissioner’s Office] for using Eldon Insurance customers’ details unlawfully to send almost 300,000 political marketing messages, and a further £45,000 for its part in sending an Eldon marketing campaign to political subscribers. Eldon was fined £60,000 for the latter violation.”
Leave EU still exists though what the relation with ket player Banks is these days is not clear.
Guardian January 2021.
-According to domain name registration records, the organisation, founded by businessman and activist Arron Banks, picked the former. The website is now registered in the name of Sean Power, the chief executive of the Ireland-based professional services company BSG.
When asked, however, Power, who is based in Waterford, insisted that he had no involvement with the organisation. When informed that his name and contact details were present on the registration, he said he would be “looking into the matter”.
Leave.EU has had some time to consider its move. The organisation is named after its web address, but .EU domain names can only be held by businesses or individuals based in the EU or wider European Economic Area.
This is how they are now:
Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) Runs 330 Local Election candidates – down from 650 in 2014.
There’s a lot of Corbynistas gloating at every poor opinion poll score for Labour. Keir Starmer, they say, lacks the common touch of Jeremy Corbyn, the popularity of his politics and the successes of his election campaigns. He is too moderate. A “resurrected New Labour project” is in the making.
Some have turned to the Whippet Party of Northern Independence, others to the revolutionary pro-Chinese state Marxism-Leninism of the Morning Star and the Communist Party of Britain.
An older grouping has now launched its own foray into electoral politics. Interestingly it comes from the hardline pro-Brexit Socialist Party and union RMT who worked with the CPB in what was described as a ‘left wing version of UKIP’, NO2EU, an electoral alliance, headed by Bob Crow, between the RMT, the Communist Party of Britain and the Socialist Party, subsequently led to the formation of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition.
Here is the TUSC campaign.
TUSC: Launching a working-class electoral alternative in London
On Friday 9 April, over 70 attended the online campaign launch rally organised by the London Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), gearing up for the London elections on 6 May.
The rally was chaired by James Ivens, a London Socialist Party organiser. He opened the rally by reiterating the point that “TUSC candidates standing for the Greater London Authority (GLA) are standing to be the hot breath on the back of the necks of cutter-Khan, Starmer the abstainer, and their resurrected New Labour project”.
Candidates update: now it’s over 330 standing for TUSC on May 6
Candidates now agreed include an executive council member of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU); four members of UNISON’s national executive; two members of the UNISON Local Government Service Group Executive, plus the secretary of Glasgow Unison, the branch which led the magnificent equal pay strike in 2018; a former member of the RMT transport workers’ national executive; leaders of the ‘NHS workers say no’ campaign and two of the original McStrikers.
And along with a number of former Labour councillors standing as TUSC, we now have two TUSC candidates who were previously general election candidates for Labour in December 2019, just 14 months ago.
TUSC’s local election campaign had made such an impact that the Wikipedia page on them does no include anything more a brief reference to its existence. The 330 candidates is down from the 2014 local election candidacy when they ran 650. TUSC gained no seats (and, in one ward, no votes) and lost three anti-cuts councillors in Leicester and Hull. They retained one affiliated councillor each in Warrington, Walsall and Hull, and two in Southampton. In the 2016 elections, TUSC had three councillors in Southampton under the banner of Coxford Putting People First, Kevin Bennett having lost his seat in Warrington; Hull Red Labour and Walsall Democratic Labour also lost their remaining seats. Following the 2018 elections, TUSC retained at least one affiliated councillor in Coxford, Southampton, following the re-election (as Independent – Putting People First) of TUSC national steering committee member Keith Morrell. Two other former Putting People First councillors also retain their seats as Independents, but the group has since dissolved.[Morrell resigned in 2019.
The Socialist Workers Party which had been part of TUSC left in 2017.
The Socialist Workers Party has decided to suspend its membership of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC).
TUSC has provided a structure for trade unionists, campaigners and socialists to stand in elections against pro-austerity politicians.
It’s not a decision we take lightly.
…
Our small electoral united front would make it harder to achieve a larger united front with the Labour left.
The SWP, TUSC and Labour—how do we take on the Tories?
That move was influenced by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership but, despite his absence, they have not gone back on it. At present the SWP, prefers, like their own split, Counterfire, movementist politics, the belief that street protests and strikes are the way forward for the left to any electoral front.
Howie’s Corner sums up some other reasons for their decline.
“Militant” stands 330 candidates under the TUSC banner in local elections
This intervention is much weaker than in the past as the Socialist Party had a major split before the pandemic losing perhaps some 400 members plus the bast bulk of their version of the Fourth International though Peter Taffe managed to hang n to the CWI’s money much to the chagrin of his former allies around the world.
The SP also managed to lose the bulk of it’s experienced and well placed trade unionists inside the PCS union who now organise around Socialist Voice and remain cheerleaders for Mark Serwotka. The remains of Militant’s supporters have rallied around Marion Lloyd who failed in her challenge against the leadership though remains on the unions NEC
The new breakaway group Socialist Alternative (Note, Tendance Coatesy covered this split: Socialist Party, (former Militant) in Total International Split over those who have “buckled to the pressures of ‘Identity Politics’) . is barely able to publish a regular newspaper and the other grouping Socialist Appeal remains buried in Labour operating against party rules with some 400 plus supporters and a fortnightly paper.
Socialist Alternative would no doubt differ: SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE CAMPAIGN DAY A SUCCESS!
On 10 April, Socialist Alternative members up and down the country held stalls and attended protests on NHS pay, gender violence and Kill the Bill – part of a nationwide campaign day. We are proud to be part of a diverse range of working class movements, always seeking to offer a way forward and raise the need for socialist change. The day’s activities saw hundreds of people taking our leaflets and buying the new copy of our paper – with more than 340 sold in less than a week. Photos of a selection of our activities are posted below!
Poor old Socialist Appeal keeps humming the same old tune:
Starmer and the right wing: Leading the Labour Party ‘over a cliff’
None of these groups, from the CPB to TUSC, offer a serious left wing electoral alternative to Labour.
In the meantime the Tories have been making hay:
Hong Kong: Chinese State Imprisons Pro-Democracy Activists.
Protest against sentencing today, Friday, Apr 16 6pm, Chinese Embassy, London.
Hong Kong pro-democracy figures given jail terms of up to 18 months. Guardian.
A group of high-profile Hong Kong pro-democracy activists including the media mogul Jimmy Lai have been sentenced to jail terms of up to 18 months for organising or attending “unauthorised assemblies” during mass protests that rocked the city in 2019.
In the latest blow to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, Lai and the veteran activist Lee Cheuk Yan were each sentenced to 12 months in jail. Another activist, “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung, received the longest sentence, of 18 months, while Martin Lee, an 82-year-old barrister widely known as the father of Hong Kong democracy, and Margaret Ng, a 73-year-old barrister and former legislator, were given 11 and 12 months respectively, both sentences suspended for two years.
Anti-Blasphemy Protests in Pakistan Reach New Pitch: All French Citizens Advised to Leave Pakistan.
A Reminder of what Blasphemy Laws Can Bring.
Pakistan Islamists clash over French cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammad
Reuters two days ago,
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) -Thousands of Pakistani Islamists clashed with police for a second day on Tuesday in protest against the arrest of their leader ahead of rallies denouncing French cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad, officials said.
.
At least one activist and one police officer died from wounds suffered overnight after Islamists blocked highways, rail tracks and main entry and exit routes, paralysing business in almost all major cities.
Police fired tear gas to disperse the protesters, government official Naveed Zaman told Reuters, adding that they had refused to leave until the release of their leader, Saad Rizvi, who was arrested on Monday.
Rizvi is the head of an extremist group, Tehrik-i-Labaik Pakistan (TLP), that rose to prominence making the denunciation of blasphemy against Islam its rallying cry.
Pakistan to ban Islamist TLP party after deadly clashes Deutsche Welle.
The Tehreek-i-Labaik Pakistan (TLP) party, which has widely denounced perceived acts of blasphemy against Islam, has organized three days of protests in which more than 100 police officers have been injured. The group opposes the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in France, and also the French response reaffirming the right to “blasphemy” after schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded last October.
The TLP has demanded that the government expel the French ambassador and endorse a boycott of French products.
Anti-French sentiment has been simmering for months in Pakistan since the government of President Emmanuel Macron expressed support for Charlie Hebdo’s right to republish the cartoons, deemed blasphemous by many Muslims.
France 24. Today,
Clashes erupted on Tuesday between TLP supporters and police officers after the group’s leader, Saad Rizvi, was detained hours after encouraging thousands of his supporters to take to the streets in cities across Pakistan.
Two police officers died in the clashes, which saw water cannon, tear gas and rubber bullets used to hold back crowds.
Rizvi has been charged with instigating murder.
TLP supporters brought the capital Islamabad to a standstill in November last year for three days with a series of anti-France rallies.
Announcing the decision to outlaw the TLP, Pakistani Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid told reporters in Islamabad that the government did not want “to be known as an extremist nation at international level”.
But the TLP is backed by a majority Sunni sect of Islam with a massive following in Pakistan, that will make it difficult to enforce any ban.
Pakistani extremists groups also have a history of popping up with different names after being outlawed.
Blasphemy is a hugely sensitive issue in conservative Pakistan, where laws allow for the death penalty to be used on anyone deemed to have insulted Islam or Islamic figures.
Islamist racists in Street Protests.
Pakistan’s Imran Khan slams French President Macron’s views on Islam
The Pakistani prime minister has also sought a ban on “Islamophobic content” on Facebook. Imran Khan’s criticism of Emmanuel Macron comes at a time when he is under scrutiny for rising religious intolerance at home.
Pakistani Islamists have a long history of attacks on Freedom of Expression. Here demonstrators express support for the racist killers who attacked Charlie Hebdo and murdered our comrades: 2015.
Thousands marched in several Pakistani cities on Sunday against the publication of Prophet Mohammed cartoons by French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, two days after similar protests were held across southern Asia.
The largest rally on Sunday was held in the financial center of Karachi by Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), Pakistan’s main Islamic party, and according to police estimates it was attended by some 25,000 people.
This indicates a wider lesson:
French Communist Party to stand 2020 Presidential Candidate, Fabien Roussel.
Fabien Roussel PCF Presidential Candidate.
Présidentielle: le PCF opte pour une candidature «quoi qu’il en coûte» Mediapart (adapted).
For the first in fifteen years the French Communist Party, the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) has determined that it will present a Presidential candidate. That is, if a earth-shaking realignment does not take place on the left agrees on a united candidate.
Last weekend, during a national conference organised partly by videoconference, two-thirds of the around a thousand party delegates voted to present the candidacy of Fabien Roussel for the next presidential election. A candidacy that the national secretary of the PCF and deputy of the North promises to carry “right to its conclusion” and which must be ratified by a final vote of the members, on May 9th.
In 2017 the PCF had backed Jean Luc-Mélenchon and his Rally/Movement La France insoumise (LFI) in their bid for the Presidency. That option is, for the Communists, no long viable. Not only was the Mélenchon operation,, in common knowledge a populist leader with a “controversial” personality, a far from unifying machine, but, “Communist and LFI candidates competed in the following legislative elections, fratricidal duels, in most constituencies, especially in the red suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis and Val -de-Marne.”
The last time the PCF ran for the office of Head of State, Marie-George Buffet, in 2007, they had only got 1.9% of the votes. More recently, in the European elections of 2019, where they ended with a score of less than 3% – the threshold necessary for the reimbursement of the campaign. For the first time in the history of the European Parliament French Communist MEPs were not returned to Brussels.
Avec Fabien Roussel, les communistes retrouvent le goût du risque
Explaining their differences with Mélenchon,
Some of the PCF cadres are still pushing for a new rapprochement with the rebels but they are in the minority in a family where every vote counts. The Communists have a strong argument: they no longer believe in the strength of the double presidential candidate (11% in 2012 and 19% in 2017). A leader said (of Mélenchon) curtly: “He can’t get the same score as the last time, it’s over, he’s burnt out.” Harsh words, shared on the left and among environmentalists. Yet les Insoumises still believe in their star.
At 11% Mélenchon is at present topping the poll for left and green candidates for the 2022 elections. The Green (EELV) Yannick Jadot is at 6% and the Socialist (PS) Anne Hidalgo is at 7%.
There are, as this Blog has reported, welcome moves for left unity in some areas, such as the Haut-de-France, for this year’s regional elections in June. How far a “dynamic” towards wider unity will spread is an open question.
Reporting on these developments the US left-populist magazine Jacobin says.
MP Fabien Roussel — national secretary of the Communist PCF — has declared his own presidential bid within his party. On Sunday a PCF national conference endorsed the idea of an independent presidential run, which would be the party’s first since 2007. The wider PCF membership, slated to vote on the project from May 7–9, will also likely have the option to vote for a competing resolution which calls on the party to build unity before the first round of the presidential election. For what it’s worth, PCF members have bucked party leadership before: In the fall of 2016, they voted to endorse Mélenchon’s campaign, rejecting the national conference’s vote for a PCF candidate.
In Northern France, A Divided Left Is Finally Coming Together Cole Stangler.
There are a number of problems with this. Conflicts between LFI and the PCF have grown since 2016. Mélenchon is an outstanding speaker in a political culture that prizes oratory. His left populism won him 7 million votes (19,58 %) in the 2017 Presidential election. But in practice the way he operates is as a one-man band with retainers and followers, unable to tolerate internal pluralism. LFI operates as an autocracy. There are no internal currents, and no mechanism for ‘supporters’ (there are no members properly speaking, except the top clique) to dissent. As Thomas Guénolé says there is “True democracy and self-management in words, but centralised and authoritarian management in reality.” (La Chute de la maison Mélenchon 2019).
A third time Mélenchon candidacy is unlikely to be backed by activists who have experience of this side of La France Insoumise. And that’s without wider political disagreements on the left.
China’s New Morning Star Friends and other Fellow Travellers.
Morning Star platforms ‘Marxist-Leninist’ defence of Chinese Regime.
“Perhaps China’s current ability to tolerate paradoxes is the most notable legacy of Mao – that dedicated admirer of contradictions.” (P 465) “An adaptive ‘guerrilla-style’ mode of policymaking”, “”Maybe that is why China, for the time being, can be ruled by a party that continues to emphasise its Marxist-Leninist-Maoist heritage, whole proclaiming the necessity of market forces; that proclaims its possession of a ‘comprehensive plan’ at a time when China is more complicatedly diverse than at any point in is history. Maybe this explains also why I has a leader who has revived Maoist strategies fifty years after his family were torn apart by Mao’s policies.”(P 465)
Maoism: A Global History. Julia Lovell. 2019.
The one-time pro-Soviet Communist Party of Britain has taken to admiring the Chinese Communist Party.
Quotes from Mao festoon party members’ tweets, the CPB has taken to calling itself ‘Marxist-Leninist'(an old orthodox Official Communist tag, but one these days largely confined to the remaining fragments of Maoism) and they have produced this:
It seems as if the CPB, lacking the Beacon of the USSR, has, in desperation, found a new Socialist Fifth of the World.
Enter the latest sally.
Xinjiang: staying afloat in a wave of disinformation
Kate Woolford, a member of the Southampton Young Communist League and social media editor of Challenge (The YCL journal) writes.
“The latest red scare propaganda targets China and its autonomous region of Xinjiang. Many people will have seen statistics that refer to “one million Muslims” being held in concentration camps and various other human rights abuses — even “genocide.” It is crucial that the public are aware of where the main allegations come from and gain a picture of what is really going on in Xinjiang.”
Scales no doubt fall from our eyes when, after a farrago of ad hominem attacks on small number of reports abut the persecution of this minority we come to,
According to CGTN, “From 1990 to 2016, thousands of terrorist attacks have been launched in Xinjiang, killing large numbers of innocent people and hundreds of police officers.”
In response, China has launched campaigns to crack down on violent extremism, separatism and terrorism with a focus on re-education. The camps were built to de-radicalise Muslims who had been victims of Etim’s ideas — this is the point of the mass mobilisation in the region that has led to false allegations of “genocide,” “forced sterilisation” and “torture.”
In the spirit of fairness, after having rubbished any report of bad treatment of China’s Uighur minority China expert Kate Wolford cites the Chinese state’s own line:
“the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China puts the state’s case forward plainly.”
“Faced with this severe and complex problem [religious extremism], Xinjiang has upheld the principle of addressing both the symptoms and the root causes in the fight against terrorism and extremism, by striking hard at serious terrorist crimes, which are limited in number and by educating and rehabilitating people influenced by religious extremism and involved in minor violations of the law.
“In accordance with the law, it has established a group of vocational education centres to offer systemic education and training in response to a set of urgent needs: to curb frequent terrorist incidents, to eradicate the breeding ground for religious extremism, to help trainees acquire a better education and vocational skills, find employment and increase their incomes and most of all, to safeguard social stability and long-term peace in Xinjiang.”
At the camps residents are taught Mandarin — the lingua franca spoken by 73 percent of the Chinese population — taught technical skills in order to help them find work when they leave and offered mental guidance to overcome radicalised ways of thinking.
Of course, as is the case everywhere in the world, the severity of a sentence depends on the scale of the crime and the willingness of a person of acknowledge their guilt.
The people in the re-education centres are assessed on how much harm they have been caused, their willingness to receive training and whether they have already completed a prison sentence but might still require further rehabilitation.
The people in the centres are provided with free education and once the trainees reach their expected criteria, they are offered certificates of completion and can leave. Depending on the reason they are there, many are allowed to go home to visit their families once or twice a week.
It is absolutely not a campaign to stop them practising Islam — religious activities are protected by Article 36 of the constitution: “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief. No state organ, public organisation or individual may compel citizens to believe in, or not to believe in, any religion; nor may they discriminate against citizens who believe in, or do not believe in, any religion.
The lengthy piece ends with this:
“We cannot ignore the drive to war against China. Fear of speaking out against atrocity propaganda because of its upsetting and controversial nature will only lead to the manufacturing of consent for war. Western intervention led to two million people dying in Korea, 2.4 million people dying in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, three million people dying in Vietnam among millions more elsewhere.
Given the history, given the body count, socialists have a duty to vehemently oppose the idea that our countries should be able to interfere in others; denouncing the false narrative on Xinjiang is now part of that duty.”
This is how the Chinese state has reacted to reporting on the issue;
BBC journalist leaves China after Beijing criticises Uighurs coverage
John Sudworth’s relocation to Taiwan comes after ‘months of personal attacks’ over reporting of alleged abuses of minorities
Here is some more History.
. “From October 1050 to October 1951, the regime eliminated somewhere between 1,5 and 2 million people. (P 24) this time, death sentences were fewer, formal executions many suspects killed themselves. “The objective was to produce a docile population by transforming almost every act and every utterance into a potential crime.”(P 241)
The Cultural Revolution A People’s History, 1962—1976 Frank Dikötter 2016.
Here are some more Fellow Travellers: John Ross, former leader of the International Marxist Group (IMG),
The main theme of the fellow Travellers of Chinese Communist Party is that its development of the productive forces in the country is a miracle. The lack of democracy, human rights, is less important that “this extraordinary successful political project”. The regime has “extraordinarily” increased the ‘real’ freedoms of the population. Happiness is the CCP.. (Martin Jacques).
Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today, was famously the betist of bêtes noires of the Communist Party of Britain. Speculation is growing that he will be invited back to their pages.
Left Internationalists do not agree:
Update: there is also this,
‘FIND OUT THE FACTS ON THE UYGHURS’
The Communist Party of Britain is urging labour movement bodies not to rush to judgment on the Uyghur question in China.
Mr Griffiths said the reports of ‘genocide’ from a network of right-wing institutes and pressure groups funded by the US, British and Australian governments are recycled uncritically in the Western media.
As one of many international delegations to visit Xinjiang, he had seen for himself that mosques are open, the Uyghur language can be seen and heard everywhere, and the majority of top state and political officials are Uyghurs, not Han Chinese.
Morning Star Hails “much-needed intervention” as Communist Party of Britain Stands Against Labour in Local Elections.
Candidates Against Labour, “for a sovereign, united and internationalist working class.“
The Morning Star, independent of the Communist Party of Britain, and owned by the co-op, leads with this Editorial Britain’s communists and the May elections: a much-needed intervention.
For many years British Communists have stood ‘witness candidates’ in elections. This year the Communist Party of Britain is running in local elections.
They are engaged in a battle across the country. Who are our enemies, who are our friends? They ask.
TOMORROW sees the launch of the Communist manifesto — the Communist Party (CP) of Britain’s manifesto for the Scottish, Welsh and English local elections, that is.
Revolutionary Left.
The party is standing its biggest slate of candidates since the 1980s after six years in which it didn’t stand — calling, as did much of the revolutionary left, for maximum support for Labour during the Jeremy Corbyn years.
Much of the labour movement remains sceptical of voting left of Labour. Despite the party’s lurch right under Keir Starmer, there is a widespread belief that a non-Labour vote only helps the Tories in England and Wales, and the SNP in Scotland.
Here is the Communist Party of Britain standing up to the right:
Labour Movement Welcome.
Labour’s poor projections nationally — with polls placing it about 10 points behind the Conservatives — can encourage this caution. Yet there are good reasons the renewal of communist election campaigning should be welcomed across the movement.
The British government’s handling of coronavirus has been catastrophic. We have one of the highest death tolls anywhere in the world and the deepest recession in Europe. Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved, hundreds of thousands would not have lost their jobs, had Britain adopted the zero-Covid strategies implemented by countries as diverse as China and New Zealand.
Follow the successful models of Cuba and Venezuela!
As countries which have successfully kept deaths and disruption to a minimum have proved, Covid-19 did not need to provoke a prolonged crisis. The worst-affected countries have been the heartlands of neoliberal capitalism — western Europe and the United States in particular. In Latin America, the contrast between the performance of socialist-led countries such as Cuba (40 deaths per million) and Venezuela (62) and neoliberal ones like Ecuador (995), Colombia (1,308) and Brazil (1,673) has been especially dramatic (figures from statista.com).
Covid has put the status quo to the test and found it wanting. There are plenty of people who recognise that. The point is regularly made from trade-union platforms and at online meetings.
But the pandemic struck Britain just as Labour was transitioning from a socialist leadership to a restorationist (??? Note to Subs, translate) one that has rowed back on the Corbyn movement’s searing critique of economic inequality and social injustice while stressing its support for (fawning on) “business as usual.”
With a handful of honourable exceptions, this has deprived institutional politics of voices drawing out the lessons of the pandemic to challenge the capitalist system itself.
Public Debate.
Yet we sorely need a public debate on an alternative economic and political strategy: one that understands the role of the market in creating the jobs crisis, the housing crisis, the climate crisis — and outlines real solutions to these, which must involve a big expansion of public ownership and economic planning.
Labour is not raising these issues. In a campaign in which it seems determined to compete with Priti Patel’s increasingly authoritarian Tories for the “law and order” vote, and in which it has even been caught distributing race-baiting anti-Gypsy and Traveller leaflets, the importance of an intervention from the left is paramount.
Learn from China’s Example of Racial and Political Tolerance!
Standing Against Labour Will Help Left Unity.
Far from undermining left unity, the left within Labour will be strengthened by the promotion of socialist solutions to the crisis and by leftward pressure on Labour candidates across Britain.
But besides that, we know that Labour’s long assumption that working-class voters have nowhere to go has been exploded by events — for years now in Scotland, more recently elsewhere. Refusing to challenge Labour from the left has not upheld its vote: it has simply meant disillusionment and anger at a party that no longer seems to represent ordinary people has been expressed by not voting at all or by voting for parties to its right.
The left has lost a lot of ground across Britain over the past year. We cannot sit out the first significant Britain-wide platform for political debate since the pandemic struck. The Communist Party’s election campaign will be a significant contribution to the revival of a militant and combative socialist movement.
What serious spotters want to know is if there are any contests between Communist candidates and the Socialist and Trade Union Coalition (TUSC), and the Monster Raving Loony Party.
Socialist Workers Party (US) “anti-scientific thought police try to erase the existence of women” by recognising Transgender rights.
SWP (US) World’s Oldest Trotskyist Party Goes Confusionist.
The US left is now having its own ‘Spiked’ Moment.
Don’t say ‘mother’! Speech code is blow to fight for women’s rights
Liberal social engineers are striking blows to women’s rights as they push laws and regulations that eliminate the word “mother.” This is the latest front in their drive to deny women’s oppression under capitalist rule and to hide the long struggle for women’s equality that has made gains and strengthened the working class.
..
Manchester University in the U.K. announced March 6 new guidelines that replace the words “mother” and “father” with the “gender-neutral” terms “parent” or “guardian.” And Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals Trust has new guidelines that replace the term “breastfeeding” with “chestfeeding.”
All of this is bad for the working class.
A friend of mine who went for prenatal care was referred to by a medical professional as a “pregnant person,” because a transgender “man” can have a baby. At a public forum in Louisville, Kentucky, on a woman’s right to abortion one of the invited speakers lectured participants that we should say “a person’s right to abortion” for the same reason.
Some good news: female human beings give birth to 385,000 babies in the world each day. That’s how the human race continues to exist. If a few of the mothers don’t identify as women, that’s their prerogative and they shouldn’t face discrimination, but it doesn’t change reality.
…
Campaigning broadly among working people, Socialist Workers Party candidates find a welcome response to our program, which starts from the capacities of working people to join together to change our conditions and to advance our self-confidence and class consciousness— the opposite of identity politics. A good reason to join the SWP campaigns!
Brendan could not have said it more clearly.
Now it obvious that the Tendance, which comes from the ‘Paboite tradition loathes the US SWP from the depth of our being, but even so, we are shocked.
This was the founder of their Party, James P. Cannon.
They asked, “What have you against him?”
I said, “He wears a corduroy suit up and down Greenwich Village, with a trick mustache and long hair. There is something wrong with this guy.”
I wasn’t making a joke, either. I said, people of this type are not going to be suitable for approaching the ordinary American worker. They are going to mark our organization as something freakish, abnormal, exotic; something that has nothing to do with the normal life of the American worker. I was dead right in general, and in this mentioned case in particular. Our corduroy-suit lad, after making all kinds of trouble in the organization, eventually became an Oehlerite.
The Dog Days of the Left Opposition. 1994.
Update: Background to the Present Evolution of the SWP:
Balance Sheet on the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.A.)
Adopted by the Fourth Internationalist Tendency National Conference, September 2, 1990.
Our platform briefly described the programmatic revisionism of the Barnes leadership on five crucial questions: the application of the theory of permanent revolution; political revolution in the deformed and degenerated workers’ states; the recognition of the interdependence of the three sectors of the world revolution; the application of the transitional method and the united front to the class struggle in this country; and, “defense of workers’ democracy as a necessary basis for the functioning of the working class movement in general, and of the Leninist party in particular.”
The death agony of the Socialist Workers Party. Louis Project. 2017.
In the recent past, there have been such shocking developments with this sect-cult of probably around a hundred members with an average age of 55 or so that I have decided to file this report. I don’t think there is much point in trying to connect its paroxysms with the tasks facing the left today except maybe to indicate that “Leninism” can produce some remarkable pathologies.
How an organisation becomes a cult
Barry Sheppard’s The Socialist Workers Party 1960-88 (Volume 2: Interregnum, Decline and Collapse, 1973-88) reviewed by Patrick Scott.
To briefly summarise Volume 1, dealing with the 1960s and early 1970s. Amongst many things Sheppard takes us through the Cuban revolution, the black civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the growth of the women’s and lesbian and gay movements. The US SWP certainly did not get everything right in this period. But it was definitely a revolutionary organisation that actively intervened in a broadly positive way into the class struggle and the major political and social movements that arose though struggle. At the time the party was also the largest revolutionary organisation on the US left with well over a thousand members. How therefore can we square this with the burnt out shell of a sect that the US SWP and its satellite organisations (sometimes referred to as the Pathfinder Tendency) have become today?
The Rise of Right Wing Identity Politics.
“‘Identity politics allows the privileged to pretend to be oppressed’” Brendan O’Neill. (Spiked)
Identity politics have become the plaything of the right and an array of confusionnistes. Farewell Woke. Goodbye gender politics. Adieu, Intersexuality. The magnetism of the national neo-liberalism of the British Government, and ;the claims of National Sovereignty have worked their effects. The politics of the identity and, nation, and flag, right wing identity politics are everywhere. There’s even a ‘left’ version, claiming to speak for the ‘real’ working class, not the shifting cosmopolitans of the left,, and a variety of nationalist (SNP) and regionalist forms (Northern Independence Party, NIP).
Post Brexit you would have thought that Sovereigntist politics, left’ or right would have lost traction. But from the pages of Spiked to the launcher of GB News, it’s the right wing, the nationalist populists, who are leaders of the pack.
“Andrew Neil launches 24-hour news channel to rival BBC and Sky.”
Nowhere have the voices of the new identitairians been louder than in the London Mayoral Elections.
From the London mayor: The full list of candidates standing at the 2021 election
Piers Corbyn and the Let London Live movement demand an immediate end to all lockdowns and restrictions imposed on the people in the name of fighting a virus.
If elected as Mayor of London Piers Corbyn calls on the people to “refuse to abide by coronavirus restrictions on freedom, life and liberty. I will instruct the police to stop enforcement of coronavirus rules and regulations in London. We will stand up as a beacon of hope to the people of the world.”
..the breakthrough for the pandemic industry had to wait for the next opportunity which came in 2020 with the SARS-COV-2 “pandemic” which they had been preparing by means of simulations and catastrophe planning exercises, like an army prepares for war. …..It is not a conspiracy theory to say that there is no pandemic.
Confusionist, Conspiracist, one-time International Marxist Group activist, and, for term, a Labour Councillor in the 1990s: He has actually got on the ballot.
Piers Corbyn, Let London Live
Peter Gammons United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). There is no need to comment further
Social Democratic Party (SDP), canal historique, now a hard-line pro-Brexit groupuscule:
David Kurten Heritage Party: “a socially conservative political party in the UK, standing for free speech, traditional family values, national sovereignty & financial responsibility.”
This chap, already familiar to our readers:
And, naturally, old matey Fox:
To round it off there’s this, (Spiked) Julie Burchill.
Harry and Meghan can’t hold a candle to Prince Philip
He showed the self-obsessed duo what a life of public service really looks like.
Just as I could never vote Tory until it became clear that this was the only way to get Brexit done, so I could never stand up for the queen’s theme song until Harry and Meghan rocked up with their passion project – ‘The Grabdication’ as I coined it – to make it all about them.
16 Monster Raving Loony Candidates (and one TUSC) in Kingston on Thames Council By-Election.
Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) Faces Tough Competition From Monster Raving Looney Party.
Newshound David Walsh writes,
In this strange week where nothing political is stirring – anywhere – and nowhere on the left, please see the attached notice of nominations for a mundane by election in the Chessington South ward of Kingston upon Thames Borough Council. This follows the death of a Lib Dem Councillor.
When you open it, you will see that beside the three main parties , there are 13 candidates for the Raving Monster Looney Party – ranging from the Lady Dave Pither to the Count of Casual Corinthians via Captain Coily. In a ward where the last elections saw the Tories fighting off the Lib Dems in the mid one and a half thousands, and Labour trailing in with a couple of hundred it seems an odd place for Loonyism. Street view shows solid upper middle England villas and detached houses, and Google Earth shows a lot of big gardens with the blue dots of swimming pools. For the Loonies to have got the 130 signatures is a job of industrial enterprise. Odder still, the contest also sees a TUSC candidate – they must have found a hidden proletarian enclave that escaped me. See PDF from the council.
A total of 13 candidates for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party are standing for just one seat in Kingston’s Chessington South by-election, possibly setting a record for the number of candidates a party has contested in a single-seat election.
There is nothing in the rules against this stunt, and there have been occasions in the past where two or three candidates have stood for one political party in a seat.
But it obviously makes it harder for a political party to win if their votes are split between several candidates. But then maybe that’s the point…
The story continues.
Loony candidate A. Gent Chinners tweeted about the political ploy stating: “It’s going to be a squeeze getting all 13 of them into that seat!”
He told MyLondon that despite “this massive plan of mine taking up far too much time” it was something he’d always wanted to try and arrange in a local election “and this one just seemed right what with lockdown.”
Speculation is growing in the international workers’ movement as to whether TUSC will manage to beat the Official Monster Raving Loony Party in a crucial contest in the proletarian heartlands.
Prince Phillip: Mixed Responses to 8 Days of National Mourning.
Not a Real, but an Ersatz Patriot says Morning Star.
Partisans de la ligne de la Tendance! Respond to the passing of Prince Phillip with dignity.
Quiet Mourning, and Condolences to the Family should be the hallmark.
Alas, this well meaning advice does not seem to have been universally followed.
This is what is happening (Telegraph).
“Britain has entered eight days of mourning for the Duke of Edinburgh during which flags will be flown at half mast, TV presenters will wear black and Parliament will pass no new laws.”
“MPs are expected to wear black armbands while they are at work, and armbands are likely to be worn at sporting events this weekend. A-two minute silence will be observed at the Grand National at Aintree on Saturday.”
Parliament will scale back its work in a similar way to periods of “purdah” before elections. No new laws will be passed, no Government announcements will be made and no ministers will give interviews or tweet about policy unless it is specifically to give public health guidance.”
“Major TV channels responded to the Duke’s death by cancelling planned programmes and showing tributes instead. Presenters and newsreaders were told to wear black or dark clothes and black ties. The official Royal family website was replaced with a single memorial page to the Duke, while the Prince of Wales’s website was suspended.”
This is excessive, as Cde Osler has remarked, Christians only have four days to mourn the death of Christ – a somewhat more important passing for millions of people.
No wonder that this was a reaction.
Within six hours of Prince Philip’s death being announced the BBC had received so many complaints about its wall-to-wall coverage of the news that it opened a dedicated complaints form on its website.
The BBC curtailed dozens of broadcasts on Friday, taking the nation’s most popular television and radio channels off air and reduced dozens of other broadcasts on stations across the country, in order to provide uninterrupted coverage of tributes to the Queen’s husband.
This lot have no idea of how to react either:
Socialist Worker: Queen mourns as another racist bites the dust.
Prince Philip looked like the living dead whenever he left hospital during recent health scares. On Friday, he was just dead.
The racist royal finally snuffed it after 99 years of privilege, triggering “Operation Forth Bridge”, the British government’s plans for the funeral. In line with his wishes for “minimal fuss”, there will only be eight days of official mourning for the queen’s husband.
The anti-Labour and national Sovereigntist Morning Star attacked the Duke of Edinburgh for being a real patriot.
They began by making a side-swipe at the Labour Party.
“The diktat from the Labour leadership that the party’s election campaign be immediately suspended until further notice will doubtless be obeyed.”
The paper, independent of the Communist Party of Britain and owned by the Co-op will no doubt carry reports of Communist Campaigning in local elections in the coming days.
To the Daily the Royal Family are not genuine patriots.
“Philip himself — second cousin to his betrothed and the princely son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg — personified the nonsensical conceits of an ersatz patriotism in which the closely related royal families of European nation states and Russia shared class interests and family links while the peoples over whom they ruled were dragooned into war and inter-imperialist conflict.”
From the Red-Brown Front there’s more appreciation:
Frank Ferudi writes in Spiked,
Even though I am not a royalist, I always admired Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. He was often criticised in the media for his many so-called gaffes. However, his formidable track record of saying unfashionable things in public can be taken as a positive testimony to his refusal to follow the rules of media training.
It’s all about me:
I first encountered Prince Philip accidently in Nakuru, Kenya in 1972. I was travelling around doing interviews for my PhD thesis on the Mau Mau revolt. He was running so fast on the street that his posse of bodyguards could barely keep up. Occasionally he would stop to exchange a few words with some locals and then move on. at struck me was the effortless way he conducted himself and the affectionate reaction he got from the people he talked with
Even though I am not a royalist, I always admired Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. He was often criticised in the media for his many so-called gaffes. However, his formidable track record of saying unfashionable things in public can be taken as a positive testimony to his refusal to follow the rules of media training.
Unlike most of the other royals, Philip was often ‘off-message’. In a world in which royalty comes wrapped in the accoutrements of celebrity culture, Philip stood out as a genuine individual who was reluctant to express himself through a script written by public-relations advisers.
I first encountered Prince Philip accidently in Nakuru, Kenya in 1972. I was travelling around doing interviews for my PhD thesis on the Mau Mau revolt. He was running so fast on the street that his posse of bodyguards could barely keep up. Occasionally he would stop to exchange a few words with some locals and then move on. What struck me was the effortless way he conducted himself and the affectionate reaction he got from the people he talked with.
The next time I met Prince Philip was three decades later at the Royal Geographical Society in London
The former leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party concludes, “Yet despite all the small-minded and sneering criticism he faced from the new cultural establishment, Philip had a good run. In decades to come, he will be remembered as someone who turned out to be a very human prince.”
We await the response of Baroness Claire Fox, if her ladyship can surmount her grief and write a tribute.
“Our condolences to the Queen and her family.” – Republic.
Children add to the floral tributes for Prince Philip outside the Henry VIII Gate of Windsor Castle
Buckingham Palace has announced the passing of Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh, at the age of 99.
Campaign to replace the monarchy with an elected head of state:
Northern Independence Party Fails to Register as Political Party for Hartlepool Election.
More Borders Party Want to Run an Independent County.
The full list of candidates standing to be Hartlepool’s new MP has been published.
People will vote on 6 May after the by-election was triggered by the resignation of Labour’s Mike Hill last month.
These are the candidates (listed alphabetically by surname):
- David Bettney, Social Democratic Party
- The Incredible Flying Brick, The Official Monster Raving Loony Party
- Hilton Dawson, The North East Party
- Gemma Evans, Women’s Equality Party
- Rachel Sara Featherstone, The Green Party
- Adam Gaines, Independent
- Andrew Michael Hagon, Liberal Democrat
- Steve Jack, Freedom Alliance, No Lockdowns, No Curfews
- Chris Killick
- Sam Lee, Independent
- Claire Martin, Heritage Party
- Jill Mortimer, Conservative Party
- John Prescott, Reform UK
- Thelma Doris Walker, Independent
- W. Ralph Ward-Jackson, Independent
- Paul Daniel Williams, Labour Party
There are already theories
Plans for the restoration of the Heptarchy continue:
Galloway goes NIP: call to break up Scotland into Unionist enclaves and Nationalist fiefdoms.
More Borders Galloway: Independence Leads to Break up of Scotland.
Borders are back in fashion…..on the left. A decade ago one of France’s best known believers in the Gauche républicaine Régis Debray wrote Éloge des frontières , In Praise of Frontiers. Full of guff about the moral and intellectual necessity of borders, and the way they help flourish diversity, it marked the return of Giuseppe Mazzini’s 19th century call for a world of “free, independent, republican nations.”
Another left wing writer, the German Wolfgang Streeck has become interested in the progressive potential of national frontiers. As Jerome Roos explains, “In recent years, Streeck has increasingly been tempted to fill this void with a reassertion of national borders as the last-remaining expression of ‘organised’ political control against the ‘destabilising’ external forces impinging upon it – irrespective of whether these are flows of ‘hot money’ or actual people fleeing poverty and war.[101] These calls for stricter border control in turn hinge on a rather one-dimensional and underdeveloped theorisation of the impact of globalisation on the international border regime (From the Demise of Social Democracy to the ‘End of Capitalism’: The Intellectual Trajectory of Wolfgang Streeck).
After the Brexit vote Debray wrote L’Europe fantôme (2019). Imagining a “post-European era”, the end of “mythe galvanisant, cet ersatz de messianisme”, the “plaything of elites”‘an “empty monument” under the Shadow of Uncle Sam…The real Europe is plural, because to exist we need differences, to separate ourselves off.
Streeck, less a prophet, lost his honour in his own country and this one by active involvement in the Full Brexit Red-Brown Front between Brexit Party supporters, Blue Labour, national sovereigntists and the Communist Party of Britain.
From these prominent contributors to the New Left Review blog, Sidecar, to the political confusionism of the post-Corbyn left. Pro-border left wingers who back the Scottish National Party and Scottish independence have seen others join them in recent months. There is the restoration of the Heptarchy for Northern Independence Party, and now, the pro-Unionist George Galloway and fervent Brexiteer….
Galloway puts forward ‘bizarre’ plan to partition Scotland if country votes for independence Telegraph.
in a suggestion described as “bizarre” by opponents, he said ‘regions’ should be able to secede from an independent Scotland, if the country was to vote for separation, and instead remain a devolved part of the UK. He cited Edinburgh, Aberdeenshire, Orkney, and Dumfries and Galloway as parts of Scotland that may demand to stay British rather than be part of an independent state. (Thanks David)
The Daily Record,
The former MP, who is heading the All for Unity, said places like Shetland, the south of Scotland, Aberdeen and Edinburgh would not want to become “part of a separate Scottish state dominated by the Central Belt”.
Galloway said: “I think the demand for it would become unstoppable. starting in Orkney and Shetland. I don’t believe that they will allow themselves to be dragged into an independent Scottish state.”
“I know in Dumfries and Galloway where the great majority, more than two thirds oppose separatism, the demand to remain in Britain would probably become the settled will of the people there.”
“It may be the Edinburgh the financial sector, Aberdeenshire with its with its fishing with its farming with its oil related activities, might very well begin to demand in a way that might become unstoppable.”
He added: “It’s not my view, I wouldn’t wish it to happen, but it would be an extraordinary irony if the break up of Britain gave birth to forces which then began to break up Scotland. The country would be eating itself.”
The saga continues,
Left Wing, Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA), opposed to rare earth mining project wins Greenland election.
A left-wing environmentalist party opposed to a controversial mining project won a clear victory in Greenland’s parliamentary election, according to results released Wednesday.
With 36.6 percent of the vote, Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA) was ahead of Siumut, a social democratic party that has dominated politics in the Danish territory since it gained autonomy in 1979.
“Thank you to the people who trusted us to work with the people in the centre for the next four years,” IA leader Mute Egede said on KNR public television after the results were announced.
IA, which was previously in opposition, is expected to grab 12 out of the 31 seats in the Inatsisartut, the local parliament, up from eight currently.
INUIT ATAQATIGIIT, (Site)
Inuit Ataqatigiit (lit. ’Community of the People’, Danish: Folkets Samfund. (Wikipedia)
The opposition Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA) party has won the early parliamentary elections in Greenland.
After votes were counted on Wednesday morning, the left-wing indigenous party made strong gains receiving 36.6 per cent of the votes, according to official figures.
The previous ruling Siumut (Forward) party – traditionally the strongest political force in Greenland – finished second with 29.4 per cent of the votes.
IA leader Múte Bourup Egede, 34, will be the first to try to form a new government, needing at least 16 of the 31 seats in the Inatsisartut parliament for a majority.
The snap election had been brought forward to 2021 after the previous coalition government of Kim Kielsen collapsed amid an internal power struggle. Kielsen was replaced as President of Greenland by Erik Jensen in late 2020.about:blank
Campaigning was also dominated by a dispute over a controversial mining project for the extraction of uranium and rare earth.
The debate over whether international companies should be allowed to mine in Greenland led the centre-right Democrats to pull out of the coalition.
According to the US Geological Survey, the sparsely inhabited island has the world’s largest undeveloped deposits of rare-earth metals.
These materials are used worldwide in a variety of products including smartphones, wind turbines, microchips, batteries for electric cars, and weapons systems.
In 2019, former US President Donald Trump privately discussed the idea of purchasing Greenland from Denmark in a bid to expand American territory.
Alas,
The suggestion was met with uproar in Copenhagen and dismissed by Danish authorities.
International interest in Greenland has continued as major powers, including China and Russia, are racing to establish their presence in the Arctic Circle.
The Guardian elaborates on this point,
At the heart of the election was a proposed international mining project by Greenland Minerals, an Australia-based company with Chinese ownership, which is seeking a licence to operate the Kvanefjeld mine in southern Greenland.
Apart from uranium, estimates show the Kvanefjeld mine could hold the largest deposit of rare-earth metals outside China (which accounts for more than 90% of global production). The calculation has led to international interest in Greenland’s natural resources.
Revolutionary Defeatism in Hartlepool.
Rachel Swindon: Corbynista Ultra, Revolutionary Defeatist.
“The Londoncentric Labour simply doesn’t give two hoots for the opinion of the working class northerner. They might be good at platitudes, and if they are it’s probably the only thing they are any good at, but apart from a few damn good socialists, the rest of the Labour Party is an anti-socialist, anti-working class, tool of the establishment, they bear the torch for the metropolitan liberal elite. They are the attacks dogs of the rich and powerful.
We used to just call them “Tories”.“ Split The Left Vote? Thelma Walker *IS* The Left Vote In Hartlepool
The anti-Labour site, Skwawkbox is revelling in this:
Weasel Walker is spending his last days, that is until his mates in UNITE pull the plug in the midst of the Hotel and Conference Centre scandal that’s erupted, trying to inflict maximum damage on the Labour Party.
Madness, they call it madness…Canary chief chirps up,
One time European leftists back restoration of Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy.
There is one explanation for this pack’s stand:
In this case the crew wishing Labour defeats do not want their own ruling class defeated, they want the party of the labour movement to lose.
They join the red-brown front at Spiked:
Labour deserves to keep losing
Brexit was only its most egregious betrayal of the working-class voters it claims to represent.
This Blog does not wish ill on anybody in this contest but the Tories…
Historical note: The Myth of Lenin’s “Revolutionary Defeatism” Hal Draper.
(1) On the one hand, we have the leading anti-war internationalists like Trotsky and Luxemburg who were against both camps of imperialism in the war; against voting war credits; for irreconcilable class struggle during the war; for transforming the fight against the war into a fight for socialist power; for breaking with the International of the social-patriots of both camps. They counterposed, to the military victory of their own government’s imperialism, the victory of their own working-class struggle for socialism. To the military victory of their own government, they did not counterpose a desire for its military defeat. They counterposed their own socialist solution to any military outcome, victory or defeat, on the plane of the inter-imperialist conflict.
These anti-war socialists were not “defeatists”.
(2) On the other hand, we have tendencies which were for the defeat of their own government and at the same time pro-war on the basis of a position politically identical with that of their fellow social-patriots across the state lines.
But in the case of the position peculiar to Lenin, we have an attempt at a different kind of “defeatism” – one which sought to combine some variety of “defeat of your own government” with the anti-war policy of opposition to both war camps.
Lenin attempted to combine defeatism and an anti-war line.
Note that this is put in a manner precisely opposite that of the Lenin-myth, which has come to paint “defeatism” as the inescapable and necessary expression of anti-war line, which cannot see any problem at all in making such a combination.
Northern Independence Party in 2% Breakthrough Support for ‘left’ Resurrection of Ancient Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms.
“I trust that to very few of you, at least, I need dwell on the sublime origins of these legends. The very names of your borough] bear witness to them. So long as Hammersmith is called Hammersmith, its people will live in the shadow of that primal hero, the Blacksmith, who led the democracy of the Broadway into battle till he drove the chivalry of Kensington before him and overthrew them at that place which in honour of the best blood of the defeated aristocracy is still called Kensington Gore. Men of Hammersmith will not fail to remember that the very name of Kensington originated from the lips of their hero. For at the great banquet of reconciliation held after the war, when the disdainful oligarchs declined to join in the songs of the men of the Broadway (which are to this day of a rude and popular character), the great Republican leader, with his rough humour, said the words which are written in gold upon his monument, ‘Little birds that can sing and won’t sing, must be made to sing.’
So that the Eastern Knights were called Cansings or Kensings ever afterwards. But you also have great memories, O men of Kensington! You showed that you could sing, and sing great war-songs. Even after the dark day of Kensington Gore, history will not forget those three Knights who guarded your disordered retreat from Hyde Park (so called from your hiding there), those three Knights after whom Knightsbridge is named. Nor will it forget the day of your re-emergence, purged in the fire of calamity, cleansed of your oligarchiques.
Is this ancient spirit of the London townships to die out? “
How Regionalism Might Spread to London: The Napoleon of Notting Hill. C. K. Chesterton. 1904.
A couple of days ago the Guardian published this dish on the Northern Independence Party (NIP).
Is the Northern Independence party more serious than it looks?
In recent years, the north of England has become a blank slate for whichever stereotypes the London-based media wants to foist on it. Whether the topic of debate is the “red wall” or “left behind” voters, there is usually an assumption that northerners are socially conservative (patriotic, Brexit-y, even a bit racist). “Northern safari” media features, in which journalists parachute into former mining villages to gather vox-pops from disgruntled, often elderly voters, have tended to back up the point.
Now, a new political movement, the Northern Independence party (NIP), has started to make the case that the north can and should be a place of radical potential rather than a reactionary backwater.
…
NIP’s tactics are a challenge to established parties that need to raise their game and reconnect with younger voters who don’t seem to feature much in the political debates of the 2020s. One of the latest NIP mottos states: “We joke but we’re serious”. They might just be on to something.
It’s all go with the Nips, or Weasels, Stoats, Seals, Ferrets or Santa’s Little Helpers.
NIP has received a serious broadside from Prometheus writer Ed Mustill.
AGAINST REGIONALISM, AGAINST SEPARATISM, FOR CLASS POLITICS
Anecdotally it appears that a layer of what we might call the post-Corbynite left are considering supporting the NIP. Twitter handles are now adorned with red and yellow icons, as 21st century socialists bizarrely adopt the imagined motif of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom from the 7th century.
More than that alt-news sites like Skwawkbox, Novara Media, and the Canary, has puffed the Nips.
He continues,
A strong Twitter game has rapidly pushed the NIP towards 50,000 followers. Sparse on details, the party promises a referendum on northern independence, professes democratic socialism and advocates socially progressive positions.
The centrepiece of the NIP’s political offer is a referendum on the creation of an independent state in the north of England to be called Northumbria. The borders of this state, whether it is to be a republic or keep allegiance to the Windsors’ crown, and the currency it will use are all apparently questions to be settled at a later date.
Pointing that national self-determination is not some student union joke, or an idea from organs like the Suffolk Gazette, but (at present) a deadly serious matter for Kurds, Uighurs and Palestine, Mustill states,
There is only one small problem with applying the principle of self-determination to the north of England: there is no Northumbrian nation. No-one describes their national identity as Northumbrian. There is no distinct Northumbrian language or culture. There is, broadly speaking, a ‘northern’ identity, which is often defined negatively as against the south, and London in particular. But within this the north is home to a patchwork of local and regional identities, many of which are quite different to one another, and none of which constitutes a national group.
Mustill hits the nail on the head by effectively locating the self-identifying socialists of NIP with the right-wing identity politics of the ‘somewhere’ people railing at the ‘anywhere’ foreign, rootless cosmopolitans.
Their professed enemies – the ‘Westminster elite’ and the City of London that so imbalances the British economy – are the English ruling class, albeit described using lazy populist rhetoric. But they are defined as enemies not primarily in class terms but rather because they are not here but elsewhere. There is a comparison to be made with the Brexit movement. Many who supported Brexit were genuinely opposed to the undemocratic nature of the European Union and perhaps objected to its economic agenda, but the fundamental problem the Brexit movement had with Brussels was that it was over there, it was foreign.
Arguing that calling for more borders is the last thing we need at present he says, ” erecting more national barriers that “will somehow provide solutions to social and economic problems” is a dead end. In fact it’s the basis for the red-brown identarian politics of fronts like The Full Brexit, the Paul Embery Blue Labour vision of patriotism, flag, faith and family reduced to absurdity.
The self-identifying internationalists of Left Unity have now given backing to this motley crew of confusionists.
This highly recommended article concludes, “Is anger at Keir Starmer or frustration with the Labour Party enough to propel you to devote the next 10, 20, or 50 years of your political energy to resurrecting the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy?”
Why, we ask, stop there? G.K. Chesterton, not normally considered a writer of the left, foresaw a day when the Great Wen itself would splinter into independent statelets. The point is, what began as a joke by the King, Auberon Quin, got taken seriously by one “earnest young man who takes the cry for regional pride seriously – Adam Wayne,” A is the little Napoleon….
Northern Independence Party Application to Register as Political Party Refused.
Another Application is in the post.
They had some good times, the weasels -ferrets, seals and stoats of the Northern Independence Party. Puffed by alt-news sites like Skwawkbox, and warmly welcomed by other anti-Labour forces, not to mention self-identifying left wingers.
Only today:
Alas,
They are putting a brave face on this.
We hope they get right, perhaps on their third attempt, or the tenth.
Marine le Pen: Presidential “first Choice” for French 25 to 34 Year olds.
Marine le Pen: Presidential “first Choice” for 25 to 34 Year olds,
Le Monde has this story “If abstention remains officially the first choice of “first-time voters”, the voting intentions for young people in their late twenties and early thirties are for Marine Le Pen vote while 18-24 year olds lean more towards Emmanuel Macron.”
While the intention to abstain remains strong amongst those in the 25 to 34 cohort, “only 20% want to vote for Macron. Marine Le Pen has increased her backing from 23% in 2017 to 29% today.
“What is very striking,” says the deputy director of the polling institue Ipsos, “is that these young people, even more than the wider population, have deserted the traditional parties that were the Socialist Party and the Republicans (conservative right wing . They are looking for something else, something radical. In 2017, it was Mélenchon and partly Macron, today it is still a little Mélenchon and much more the greens, but support for the Rassemblement National has grown significantly.“
The historical links between Marine Le Pen’s party and its extreme right violent founders, illustrated by her father Jean Marie Le Pen’s comments on the gas chambers as a “detail of history”, no longer appear to repel large numbers of voters.
46% of young people believe that the RN is an honest party, that it is “capable of having a vision of the future for France” (45% among RN voters, 49% among 18-30 year olds).
An accompanying interview with the sociologist Anne Muxel is headlined:
“« Le clivage gauche-droite a perdu de sa pertinence chez les jeunes.”The left-right divide has lost its relevance among young people.
In effect that while backing the Greens or La France insoumise could channel the same anti-system protest vote casting a ballot for the far right, Muxel draws a parallel between the protest, radical vote, on the extreme right is and support for La France insoumise, She argues that Jean-Luc Mélenchon had known how to attract a a section of young people unhappy with the with the in-government official left. He also had a very good campaign aimed at young people, using their channels and vectors of expression.
The RN has also, it is widely reported, largely succeeded in a process of “detoxification” or “de-demonisation” of its brand which began with Marine Le Pen’s ascension to leadership of the Front National, name change to the Rassemblent National, (‘re-branding’) in 2017 and continues with her (formal) resignation of Party leader to stand for next year’s Presidential elections as the candidate for “all French people,”
One of the most important reasons for this development is that the French left is fragmented, Mélenchon is not a unifying figure, and people, young or old, cannot see a an alternative ‘bloc de gauche’ as a serious contender in the Presidential elections against either Macron or Le Pen.
The FT has the story today:
French politics: Macron faces test of character as Le Pen’s popularity grows
Victor Mallet
It would be a political earthquake as disruptive as the UK referendum vote for Brexit in 2016 and the election of Donald Trump as US president later that year. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s extreme right Rassemblement National party, is doing so well in the polls that she threatens to foil Emmanuel Macron’s re-election bid and could win next year’s presidential vote to become the country’s first far-right leader since the second world war.
….
The latest opinion polls suggest Le Pen has a real chance of winning, representing a significant threat to the French establishment and the unity of the EU.
..
Next year, according to the latest opinion polls, Le Pen could lead in the first round and therefore be assured of a place in the final, and if it is Macron that makes it through as well then he is currently forecast to win by as little as 53 per cent to 47 per cent, according to a Harris Interactive-L’Opinion poll in March. The front républicain system is crumbling because many leftwing voters say they will abstain. Some may even vote for Le Pen, whose strongholds are in the industrial towns of the north once dominated by communists.
As Turkey Invades Iraq to attack Kurds, Turkish fascists assault Kurdish cultural centre in Lyon.
This lengthy article in the Guardian by Bethan McKernan in Istanbul and Adam Gnych in Amedi, northern Iraq, is heart-rending and through. It is essential reading.
Kurds in ‘mountain prison’ cower as Turkey fights PKK with drones in Iraq
Yesterday there was a sad reminder that supporters of the Turkish state and Erdoğan’s Islamist regime are prepared to extend their violence to Europe. Attackers, said to be from the extreme-right Islamist and nationalist Grey Wolves violently attacked a Kurdish cultural centre in Lyon. Banned in France after they defaced a memorial to the victims of the Armenian genocide, the group is still active.
Quatre membres de la communauté kurde blessés dans une attaque à la Guillotière.
The Mesopotamia cultural space, located on rue Mazagran, was reportedly taken over by 20 to 25 attackers, armed with iron bars, on Saturday at the beginning of the afternoon. Four people were injured.
It happened very quickly, they broke everything, ”reports a member of the Mesopotamia cultural space, located rue Mazagran, in Lyon 7 th . This place, frequented by members of the Kurdish community, was attacked Saturday, around 2:30 pm, by “twenty to twenty-five” individuals, armed with iron bars, according to this indirect witness. Four people were present inside the small room at the time of the events. All were injured.
The victims are between 30 and 40 years old and had been beaten with baseball bats, iron bars and weapons with blades, according to firefighters.
Commentators already note that banning the fascist organisation the Loups Gris (Grey Wolves), with links to the Turkish state, had not prevented this assault.
Today protests against the fascist attack took place in Lyon. Around 300 people took part. The window of a Turkish grocery shop was broken. The police used tear gas to break up the demonstration.
Alt Right Ipswich Tory MP in Shock as Ipswich Central Tory Club Has No Union Flag.
But No Flag at Ipswich Central Conservative Club.
Tom Hunt MP: Kids should be ‘educated’ to like compulsory Union flag flying
A CONSERVATIVE MP has come under heavy fire on social media for suggesting that people who do not wish to see the Union flag flown outside every school should be “educated” into thinking otherwise.
….
Social media users have been quick to condemn the MP, saying that his use of “educated” in quote marks sounds like “a veiled threat”.
Many said it was a move towards “Americanisation”, and suggested the Tories aimed to have children recite a pledge of allegiance to the flag as they do in schools across the US.
Richard Littler, creator of the satirical Scarfolk town, wrote: “‘What the flag actually represents’ and ‘compulsory’ don’t belong in the same sentence.
“Double whammy lack of self-awareness and comprehension. Extra points for making ‘educated’ sound like ‘we’ll kick the sh*t out of you until you comply’.”
Author Chris Brookmyre added: “Symbols famously mean absolutely the same thing to everyone who views them. And if this particular one doesn’t, Tom wants to ‘educate’ you until it does.”
Shock as Ace Reporter W reveals that this Morning, Ipswich Central Club had no Union Flag.
The Conservative Central Club is a few metres from Sainsbury’s, down a back alley way. An Ace Newshound took this picture today. I just walked by it and can confirm the trusty Newshound’s report.
The ICCC was founded in 1883 by a group of local business men. They bought the old Masonic lodge in St Stephens Lane and opened it to like minded individuals. As such the ICCC has been around over 120 years.
ICCC is located at the very heart of historic Ipswich, which has networks of narrow streets built along medieval lines, numerous timber frame houses and flint churches. There are also notable buildings from the Georgian and Victorian eras.
We pride ourselves in providing a comfortable place for people to visit and enjoy at any time of the day or evening, we call it “a little oasis” in the middle of Ipswich.
We in East Anglia have a worthy successor to Alan Partridge:
150 Years Ago the Paris Commune Adopted Secularism.
Vive La Commune! Décret, datant du 3 avril 1871.
“150 years ago today, the Paris Commune decreed the separation of Church and State and established secularism as one of the fundamentals of the workers’ movement.”
The Paris Commune, Considering that the first of the principle of the French Republic is Liberty; Considering that freedom of conscience is the first of freedoms; Considering that the budget of the religious bodies is contrary to the principle, since it is an imposition on citizens against their own faith; Considering, in fact, that the clergy were complicit in the crimes of the monarchy against freedom,
Article I: The Church is separate from the State.
Article II: The religious budget is abolished.
Article III: The so-called mortmain property, belonging to religious congregations, movable and immovable, are declared national property.
Article IV: An investigation will be made immediately on these goods, to ascertain their nature and put them at the disposal of the nation.
From Lucien’s Blog:
“Our secularism, the permanent protest of a class on the move against all the forces that tend to paralyze it, really deserves to concentrate all the fury of the social conservatives. (…) Our secularism is however sure to win, because it expresses the instinctive tendency of a class towards its economic liberation. ” (Marceau Pivert, 1932)
“One day or another, the vast majority of the international proletariat will agree with Rosa Luxembourg to appreciate exactly the religious phenomenon and to adopt a tactic of proletarian anticlericalism in accordance with the demands of the class struggle”
(Marceau Pivert, 1937)
Pour une laïcité prolétarienne
Solidarité avec les luttes sociales et féministes contre les cléricalismes, les intégrismes religieux, le capitalisme et le patriarcat rétrograde.
See also:
Batley Grammar: Two More Members of Staff Suspended.
The Left and Labour Movement Should Defend Secular Freedom.
Two more members of staff at Batley Grammar School have been suspended, it has been reported.
The school had apologised and suspended a teacher pending an investigation following a protest over the cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad being shown in a class last week.
The picture had been used as part of a religious studies lesson, and the teacher involved has since been suspended and gone into hiding with his partner and four children.
It has since emerged two other teachers have also been suspended although this information was not made available to the public.
According to Mail Online, one ‘school source’ said: “Two other teachers are also being investigated but the school has been trying to keep it secret because they don’t want attention being drawn to the fact that this went beyond the actions of one person.”
It is understood they were aware the material was going to be used, but were not in class when it was shown.
LBC continues:
Batley Multi Academy Trust said in statement on Wednesday that an inquiry panel would begin work within a fortnight and said: “We understand everyone will want clarity as soon as possible.”
It said: “We’re grateful for the constructive engagement with all our stakeholders over the last few days with regard to Batley Grammar, one of the schools within our trust.
“We believe the right way forward is for an independent investigation to review the context in which the materials (which caused offence) were used, and to make recommendations in relation to the Religious Studies curriculum so that the appropriate lessons can be learned and action taken, where necessary.”
This Blog does not usually recommend the Weekly Worker, still less ‘Eddie Ford’, although it is well known that many of our section of left contributed to its pages in the past, but one of the best articles on the issues raised is in this week’s edition, (extracts)
Blasphemy laws old and new
Outraged, the local mosque mobilised its supporters, forcing the school to adopt remote learning. Mohammed Hussain of the Batley-based ‘Purpose of Life’ group – a registered charity – declared that the teacher “has insulted two billion Muslims on the planet” and “we cannot stand for that”, sharing the teacher’s name on social media with a letter condemning him. Taking it upon himself to speak for the entire ‘Muslim community’, as so often happens, he went on to state: “We do feel that, if this had been something that offended the LGBT community or something that was anti-Semitic, he would’ve been sacked on the spot.” For Hussain, the teacher’s resignation “should be forthcoming immediately.”
Similar sentiments can be heard from the protestors. One of them was quoted in various media outlets as saying the western world “is at a loss in understanding the reaction” from the Muslim community, as they are “required to stand up when prophet Mohammed is insulted, and when all the prophets are insulted, including all the prophets of the Old Testament, including Jesus” – the British “Muslim community” everywhere needs to review the materials being taught in their children’s schools. Showing images of Mohammed, we are told, should be as unacceptable as using the word ‘nigger’. Just beyond the pale.
This begins with something on everybody’s mind.
The very first thing to say is that this is an extremely serious matter. In October last year Samuel Paty, a school teacher in Paris, was horrifically beheaded after he too showed Charlie Hebdo cartoons during a class about free expression. In that sense, very similar to Batley. It is widely reported that the teacher there, who loved his “fantastic job”, is now in fear for his life – as are his family. He was whisked away from his home on “police advice” after receiving constant death threats. He is unlikely to return to Batley, let alone his job.
Secondly, we should support the immediate reinstatement of the suspended teacher – the lesson was precisely designed, presumably, to elicit critical thinking and philosophical inquiry. In which case, why not show the cartoon? Teachers should be free to show cartoons, pictures or quote texts that are relevant to the subject. After all, how can you conduct a lesson on blasphemy otherwise? Thirdly, Kibble was totally wrong to make his wretched apology – it will only encourage a climate of censorship.
There are wider issues, as religious figures push for the banning of views they dislike.
Many of those protesting outside Batley grammar school, and beyond, want the UK to resurrect its blasphemy laws. The common-law offences of “blasphemy” and “blasphemous libel” were formally abolished in England and Wales in 2008 after an amendment was passed to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.1
And in Scotland the blasphemy law was only formally abolished this month after the new Hate Crime Bill passed its final parliamentary vote. There is now a new offence of “stirring up hatred” on religious grounds, meaning that Scots could be subject to prosecution if their behaviour is deemed “threatening or abusive”.2 As a consequence, the threshold for prosecution for “stirring up hatred” on religious grounds remains lower than in England and Wales – inevitably having a chilling effect on freedom of expression north of the border. This only leaves Northern Ireland, where blasphemy continues to be an offence under the common law, despite an attempt in the House of Lords to abolish it in 2009.
”””
This Blog covered the SWP line. This is a excellent answer.
According to the SWP, there is “a big difference between ridiculing a religion such as the establishment-backed Church of England and mocking the beliefs of the poor and oppressed” – apparently Islam is above analytical criticism, sceptical questioning, let alone biting humour, and can never be the belief of the rich and powerful. Ignorance in the extreme. Religions are almost always cross-class phenomena. The Church of England unites Elizabeth Windsor and Justin Welby with the worthy poor who huddle in church every Sunday. Roman Catholicism is the religion of Francis I, a bloatedly rich bureaucracy, and huge numbers throughout the Americas, Europe and Africa. The same with Islam. Sunni Islam unites the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, the fabulously rich king of Saudi Arabia, with millions throughout the world. The same goes for Shia Islam, the Mormons and Judaism. Vicars, priests, imams and rabbis form a privileged middle class with a material interest in maintaining their hold over their congregations and fuelling hostility to secularism and anything that smacks of criticism.
There are countries with state churches, like England. But more widely it is not just the wealth of the pious religious bourgeoisie behind institutions of faith, right to their most extreme forms. Political Islamism enjoys the financial and political support of capitalist dictatorships, from Saudi Arabia to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The conclusion is absolutely spot on.
We do not want to unnecessarily offend religious people like modern-day zealots from the League of Militant Godless.5 Rather, we want to be freely able to use Marxism to investigate the truths and untruths of religion. Religion is profoundly human – bearing all the characteristics and contradictions of class society. In that sense, as Marx argued, religion is an encyclopaedia of humanity’s complex history.
Lest we forget, this is what actually existing Blasphemy laws are like,
Junaid Hafeez, a university lecturer in Pakistan, had been imprisoned for six years when he was sentenced to death in December 2019. The charge: blasphemy, specifically insulting Prophet Muhammad (P.B.H.) on Facebook.
Pakistan has the world’s second strictest blasphemy laws after Iran, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Hafeez, whose death sentence is under appeal, is one of about 1,500 Pakistanis charged with blasphemy, or sacrilegious speech, over the last three decades. No executions have taken place.
But since 1990 70 people have been murdered by mobs and vigilantes who accused them of insulting Islam. Several people who defend the accused have been killed, too, including one of Hafeez’s lawyers and two high-level politicians who publicly opposed the death sentence of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman convicted for verbally insulting Prophet Muhammad. Though Bibi was acquitted in 2019, she fled Pakistan.
Opinion: Is Pakistan’s blasphemy law a result of the ulema-state alliance?
Suffolk Communists in bid for comeback.
Communists to Build on Suffolk’s CPGB Heritage.
Leiston had an active Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) branch, founded in 1934, which existed for decades, until the end of the CPGB. Communist Paxton Chadwick was the Chair of the Council after the Second World War. There is a pamphlet by John Saville.
At his funeral in 1961, “held at Golders Green crematorium” J Gollan, the General Secretary of the Communist Party gave the oration. “Paxton Chadwick was one of the great British natural history illustrators of the twentieth century.”(Page 27) There was an exhibition of his works in Ipswich Christchurch Mansion in the 1990s.
A good article is on the site of the Country Standard: Leiston- “Suffolk’s Little Moscow”
“As a classic single-industry town the employer/worker relationship consisted of a blend of paternalism and repression. At first there was a fear of activism but as unemployment grew so dependence on the company decreased.
Paxton Chadwick was returned as a Communist Councillor for Leiston in 1938 as the first Communist Councillor in Suffolk (Rural Norfolk also had Communist councillors).
During the war Chadwick was called up into the anti-aircraft arm of the Royal Artillery where he continued to carry out council work and produce a wall newspaper for his unit. Chadwick ended the war as a Captain. As chairman of Leiston council , he introduced a regular “open nights ”where electors could quiz councillors”, secured affordable housing, clean water, fought to abuses in the private rented sector, fought for improved war pensions and led the campaign to save the local Grammar school.
There were links to the famous Summerhill School Paxton had taught in the Art Department and acted as part time sectretary to A.S. Neill. Paxton’s second wife, Lee Chadwick had worked. She became a writer, and the author of one of the best books on the natural history of the Suffolk Sandlings In Search of Heathland (1982) continued the work after Paxton passed away, and was active in the period of the above Leiston Leader copies. At the time my parents were lay officials in the local Labour Party (Chair and Branch Secretary and worked with her and he Communists on issues such as CND led Peace campaigning and Sizewell Nuclear Power station. They made the news in the 1980s when the local Tories forgot to put in their nominations for the Town Council elections and two (the Country Standard says 1, but I had heard that 2 Communists won).
Lee Chadwick was greatly liked by many people, and respected, both for her writing and her open-minded approach to left politics. She was on the Euro side in the disputes which tore apart the CPGB in the 1980s. These points are also of interest.
Leiston had a Communist councillor in the 1980’s and the Leiston Leader continued into the 1990’s.
Paxton Chadwick Close, Leiston is one of the few roads in Britain named after a communist
I understand that Bill Howard a signalman at Saxmunden was the last Communist Councillor in Leiston in the 1980’s (he lived at Waterloo Avenue, Leiston
The Communist Party was involved in both English Folk revival’s and key to this was the Eel’s Foot Public House, Eastbridge, where A.L. “Bert” Lloyd Communist and Workers Music Association founder, recorded a famous BBC radio Folk session on 13th March 193
The present Communist candidates, from the Communist Party of Britain are from the opposing side, often called ‘Tankies’.They are no doubt respected and liked by their own supporters.. Internationalists point to their backing for the hard right Brexit and support for the Chinese Regime which few would consider socialist.
Anti-Labour Site Skwawkbox Boosts Northern Independence Party.
Seal, Stoat, Ferret, Whippet, or Polecat: Northern Independence Party Boosted by Weasel Walker.
From their website –
“Northumbria was a historical kingdom, formed when Deira and Bernicia merged in the 7th century. It means ‘North of the Humber’, and covers much of the area we now consider ‘the North’. We have chosen this name because this period was the last time the North was united in an independent country.”
Thelma Walker, the former Labour MP and now Northern Independence Party candidate in the Hartlepool by-election, tonight accepted an invitation to debate Labour candidate Paul Williams live on Socialist Telly.
Walker accepted less than 15 minutes after Socialist Telly extended the invitation
The Weasels have already inspired a new movement:
Day of Action and Bristol Protest to Defend David Miller.
Another Bristol Protest.
A coalition of Labour Left organisations has called a lobby to ‘Defend academic freedom and free speech’ for tomorrow March 31 in Bristol.
Bristol University is currently investigating Professor David Miller, teacher of political sociology, for alleged antisemitism. “Nothing could be further from the truth”, says the Labour Campaign for Free Speech. “Professor Miller is a highly regarded academic who has spoken out against Zionism. That is why he has come under fire. Professor David Miller’s job at Bristol University is at stake, because he dared to speak out on Zionism. This is an important test case – should he be sacked, this will result in even more attacks on academic freedom.”
Organisations in support of the March 31 action include Labour Campaign for Free Speech, Labour Left Alliance, Labour in Exile Network, Support David Miller Campaign, Labour Representation Committee, Labour International Left Alliance, Bristol and West Labour Left Alliance and a number of local left groups.
They will assemble at 2pm outside the Wills Memorial Building of Bristol’s University to express “solidarity and support for Professor Miller”.
Labour Campaign for Free Speech.
The claim that Miller is a “highly regarded academic” is not widely shared, nor that the controversy around him is primarily about free speech. However he clearly has the right to his views, however odd and unacademic. This is an interesting claim by these groups:
The proposed policing bill would make it illegal to cause “serious annoyance” – with punishment of up to 10 years in jail. Worse than that, the law is to be applied even if “somebody is put at risk” of so-called “serious harm” (like ‘annoying’ somebody) – ie, if no action has taken place. The bill would make it an offence if just one person complains about feeling “serious distress…annoyance…[or even] inconvenience”.
We hope these principled free speech defenders will stand up for the Batley Teacher in this row.
Batley Grammar School students are said to have been left “wordless and distraught” following the news a teacher accused of showing pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad is “fearing for his life”.
Yesterday (Monday), the suspended teacher’s father spoke out for the first time since protestors swarmed to the school’s gates calling for his son to be sacked.
Socialist Worker, which does not seem to be involved in the David Miller considers that no issues of freedom of expression are involved. Protests after teacher shows racist cartoon to Muslim pupils.
Bigots and Islamophobes want to defend the ‘right’ of a teacher to show pupils an offensive image of the Prophet Muhammad. But parents are right to be angry.
They cite an individual with a “colourful past” an authority on the affair.,
Mohammed Shafiq from the Ramadhan Foundation denied violence at the peaceful protests.
He instead feared the incident “will be hijacked by those who have an interest in perpetuating an image of Muslims”. It is alarming that the Department for Education chose to amplify those divisions by attacking the parents and pupils,” he added…..
The cartoons in Charlie Hebdo are intended to humiliate people who bear the brunt of institutional and state racism. The Tories use their version of free speech as an excuse to offend and scapegoat minorities.
Stand Up To Racism said, “In educating students we must be clear—insulting the Prophet Mohammed is not freedom of speech, it is racist abuse.”
Here’s the background of the friend of the SWP and new expert on the Batley affair ;
In January 2014 Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate Maajid Nawaz, a secular Muslim, posted a “Jesus and Mo” image on his Twitter account.[25] The image depicts Jesus saying “Hey” and Mohammed saying “How ya doin'”.[26][27] Shafiq then posted on Twitter “We will notify all muslim organisations in the UK of his despicable behaviour and also notify Islamic countries.”[28][29] Shafiq further Tweeted “Ghustaki Rasool Quilliam,” so linking Nawaz’s anti-extremist think tank with an Urdu term which means “defamer of the prophet”,[30] which under Islamic law is a crime that carries a death penalty.[31] Maajid Nawaz has since received a number of death threats.[25][29][32] Shafiq also reportedly organized an on-line petition to Nick Clegg to have Nawaz removed as a Liberal Democrat candidate,[30] though when the organizers of the petition, named as SA et al., were contacted by the press they distanced themselves from Shafiq.
Chris Williamson Backs Northern Independence Party.
Socialism in a Few Counties.
The Proudfoot dynasty, with deep roots in the Shire and Hobbit history and who founded the party, have found their candidate.
The far-right Express and alt-news site says, “
Northern Independence Party in by-election sparks panic for Labour Party
FORMER West Yorkshire Labour MP, Thelma Walker, will represent the Northern Independence Party in the Hartlepool by-election.
A few says ago the anti-Labour alt news site the Skwawkbox ‘reported’
Former Labour MP Walker ‘encouraged to stand’ for Northern Independence Party in Hartlepool
Skwawkbox understands that Ms Walker is ‘being encouraged to stand’ and will accept the nomination if no local candidate comes forward. NIP will complete its selection and announce the party’s candidate on Sunday.
The Grayzone Has it in for ‘UK Trotskyist’ Gilbert Achcar and…Noam Chomsky.
Democrats back letter on Syria and the ‘anti-imperialism of fools’.Grayzone Reveals ‘UK Trotskyist’ Achcar First Circulated it.
This welcome letter was published a few days ago:
Erasing People through Disinformation: Syria and the “Anti-Imperialism” of Fools
By: Multiple signersMarch 27, 2021
Disreputable writers and outlets, often operating under the aegis of “independent journalism” with purportedly “leftwing” views, are spreading corrosive propaganda and disinformation that aims to strip Syrians of political agency
[The following Open Letter was a collaborative effort of a group of Syrian writers and intellectuals and others who stand in solidarity with them. It is signed by activists, writers, artists, and academics from Syria and 34 other countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America, Oceania, and South America, and appears in multiple languages: English, Arabic, French, Spanish, Greek, and Italian.]
Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising ten years ago, and especially since Russia intervened in Syria on behalf of Bashar al-Assad, there has been a curious and malign development: the emergence of pro-Assad allegiances in the name of “anti-imperialism” among some who otherwise generally identify as progressive or “left,” and the consequent spread of manipulative disinformation that routinely deflects attention away from the well-documented abuses of Assad and his allies. Portraying themselves as “opponents” of imperialism, they routinely exhibit a highly selective attention to matters of “intervention” and human rights violations that often aligns with the governments of Russia and China; those who disagree with their highly-policed views are frequently (and falsely) branded as “regime change enthusiasts” or dupes of western political interests.
The divisive and sectarianising role played by this group is unmistakable: in their simplistic view, all pro-democracy and pro-dignity movements that go against Russian or Chinese state interests are routinely portrayed as the top-down work of Western interference: none are autochthonous, none are of a piece with decades of independent domestic struggle against brutal dictatorship (as in Syria), and none truly represent the desires of people demanding the right to lives of dignity rather than oppression and abuse. What unites them is a refusal to contend with the crimes of the Assad regime, or even to acknowledge that a brutally repressed popular uprising against Assad took place.
It continues.
But they do not rightfully belong in that company. No one who explicitly or implicitly aligns themselves with the malignant Assad government does. No one who selectively and opportunistically deploys charges of “imperialism” for reasons of their particular version of “left” politics rather than opposing it consistently in principle across the globe — thereby acknowledging the imperialist interventionism of Russia, Iran, and China — does.
These writers and outlets have mushroomed in recent years, and have often positioned Syria at the forefront of their criticisms of imperialism and interventionism, which they characteristically restrict to the west; Russian and Iranian involvement is generally ignored. In doing so, they have sought to align themselves with a long and venerable tradition of internal domestic opposition to the abuses of imperial power abroad, not only but quite often issuing from the left.
Often under the guise of practicing “independent journalism,” these various writers and outlets have functioned as chief sources of misinformation and propaganda about the ongoing global disaster that Syria has become. Their reactionary, inverted Realpolitik is as fixated on top-down, anti-democratic “power politics” as that of Henry Kissinger or Samuel Huntington, just with the valence reversed. But this maddeningly oversimplifying rhetorical move (“flipping the script” as one of them once put it), as appealing as it might be to those eager to identify who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are at any given place on the planet, is really an instrument of tailored flattery for their audiences about the “true workings of power” that serves to reinforce a dysfunctional status quo and impede the development of a truly progressive and international approach to global politics, one that we so desperately need, given the planetary challenges of responding to global warming.
The evidence that US power has itself been appallingly destructive, especially during the Cold War, is overwhelming: all across the globe, from Vietnam to Indonesia to Iran to Congo to South and Central America and beyond, the record of massive human rights abuses accumulated in the name of fighting Communism is clear. And in the post-Cold War period of the so-called “War on Terror,” American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have done nothing to suggest a fundamental national change of heart.
But, America is not central to what has happened in Syria, despite what these people claim. The idea that it somehow is, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, is a by-product of a provincial political culture which insists on both the centrality of US power globally as well as the imperialist right to identify who the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are in any given context.
The ideological alignment of rightwing admirers of Assad with this kind of authoritarian-friendly “leftism” is symptomatic of this, and indicates that the very real and very serious problem lies elsewhere: what to do when a people is as abused by their government as the Syrian people have been, held captive by those who think nothing of torturing, disappearing, and murdering people for even the slightest hint of political opposition to their authority? As many countries move closer and closer to authoritarianism and away from democracy, this seems to us a profoundly urgent political question to which there is yet no answer; and because there is no answer, all across the globe there is growing impunity on the part of the powerful, and growing vulnerability for the powerless.
About this, these “anti-imperialists” have no helpful words. About the profound political violence visited upon the Syrian people by the Assads, the Iranians, the Russians? No words. Forgive us for pointing out that such erasure of Syrian lives and experiences embodies the very essence of imperialist (and racist) privilege. These writers and bloggers have shown no awareness of the Syrians, including signatories to this letter, who risked their lives opposing the regime, who have been incarcerated in the Assads’ torture prisons (some for many years), lost loved ones, had friends and family forcibly disappeared, fled their country – even though many Syrians have been writing and speaking about these experiences for many years.
Collectively, Syrian experiences from the Revolution to the present pose a fundamental challenge to the world as it appears to these people. Syrians who directly opposed the Assad regime, often at great cost, did not do so because of some Western imperialist plot, but because decades of abuse, brutality, and corruption were and remain intolerable. To insist otherwise, and support Assad, is to attempt to strip Syrians of all political agency and endorse the Assads’ longstanding policy of domestic politicide, which has deprived Syrians of any meaningful say in their government and circumstances.
We Syrians and supporters of the Syrian people’s struggle for democracy and human rights take these attempts to “disappear” Syrians from the world of politics, solidarity, and partnership as quite consistent with the character of the regimes these people so evidently admire. This is the “anti-imperialism” and “leftism” of the unprincipled, of the lazy, and of fools, and only reinforces the dysfunctional international gridlock exhibited in the UN Security Council. We hope that readers of this piece will join us in opposing it.
It seems to have got up somebody’s nose.
Max Blumenthal (born December 18, 1977) is an American journalist, author, blogger, and filmmaker. Blumenthal established The Grayzone in December 2015; he is the website’s editor and one of its contributors.
Achcar is an Arabic speaking francophone ( well known to a large public in France) who writes for the left wing Le Monde Diplomatique, this blogger recalls articles in the Diplo for many many years. He now teaches in London.
Achcar was raised in Lebanon where he obtained degrees in philosophy and the social sciences at the Lebanese University. He took up residence in France in 1983, and completed his doctorate in social history and international relations at the University of Paris VIII, where, in 1991, he began teaching political science, sociology and international relations. In 2003 he took up a research position at the Marc Bloch Centre in Berlin, which he maintained until he assumed a professorship at SOAS.
I note this on the French Wikipedia entry on Achcar, ” Il a participé à l’élaboration d’un ouvrage sur la politique étrangère des États-Unis avec l’intellectuel controversé Noam Chomsky: 2009 (avec Noam Chomsky), Perilous Power: The Middle East & U.s. Foreign Policy: Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War, and Justice, Paradigm, (deuxième édition revue et augmentée).
Red-Brown Professor, Paul McKeigue, close comrade of David Miller, “fake Russian spy and the undercover Syria sting.”
Assad Apologist and Close Comrade of David Miller
Observer : The UK professor, a fake Russian spy and the undercover Syria sting
This story is the depths. One of the leading members of David Miller’s red-brown “Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media” was prepared to inform on people, with potentially life-threatening consequences, to the Putin regime. There is little doubt, had the agent been real that the Assad regime would have heard as well.
Who is this creature?
A more sceptical academic than Paul McKeigue might perhaps have wondered if the emails flooding into his inbox from “Ivan”, a purported Russian spy, were too good to be true.
The Edinburgh genetics professor – who devotes large quantities of his private time to pursuing fringe theories claiming that attacks on civilians are staged to smear the government of Bashar al-Assad – dived eagerly into his new correspondence.
Over three months he filled hundreds of pages with speculation, including accusing journalists, researchers and diplomats of working as conduits for western intelligence agencies. He revealed the identity of a confidential source, and shared information she gave him.
Ivan appeared to share many of McKeigue’s own personal obsessions, particularly his desire to discredit investigators who compile evidence of war crimes committed in Syria. And he claimed access to both ready cash and secret intelligence.
But McKeigue was not writing to a Russian spy, or even a man called Ivan. The email account was controlled by a group of staff at one of the organisations he hoped to discredit, who say they went undercover because of concerns over the tactics McKeigue and his allies were prepared to deploy in an effort to defend the Syrian government and its Russian allies.
diplomat at the Geneva embassy, first secretary Sergey Krutskikh, was corresponding with fellow members of the “Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media” on encrypted systems.
This is an alliance of far-left academics and researchers who claim western journalists, NGOs and others act on behalf of the CIA and MI6 to undermine the Syrian government, including faking evidence of civilian deaths and chemical attacks.
It includes the controversial Bristol University professor David Miller, who has been accused of antisemitism by his own students, a claim he denies, and the blogger Vanessa Beeley, who has frequently visited Syria on government-sponsored trips.
Group members have questioned the veracity of chemical weapons attacks in Syria and claimed Russia was framed for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018.
They were also part of a years-long public campaign against the White Helmets, a civilian rescue organisation that enraged pro-Syrian and Russian factions by recording atrocities as they tried to save lives, then sharing the footage.
Shiraz has an excellent report on the story, which began with a report in the Times and then the BBC and is still unfolding: Pro-Assad academic tried to grass up human rights activists to Putin.
Meanwhile fellow Red-Browner Chris Williamson retweets another pro-Assad tout; (Chris Williamson Retweeted
‘Anti racist’ groups back ‘parents’ at Batley Row.
“This is not about free speech.”
The Morning Star reports,
..anti-racism groups accused ministers of stoking divisions.
Manchester-based Ramadhan Foundation chief executive Mohammed Shafiq said: “It is alarming that the Department for Education chose to amplify those divisions by attacking the parents and pupils rather than looking [at] how we can come together to have a respectful discussion and seek an end to this issue.”
Stand up to Racism co-convenor Weyman Bennett told the Morning Star: “I think we should show solidarity to people facing Islamophobia and not allow the government the right to try and exploit divisions.
“This is not about free speech. This is about building an equal environment without discrimination.”
The Muslim Council of Great Britain said that the grammar school was right to acknowledge that the material was “inappropriate” as it is “universally understood to be highly offensive to Muslims.”
The representative body said that the case “illustrates the importance of close engagement between schools [and] parents regarding issues not on the national curriculum.”
Burley Islamists Call on ‘Entire British Muslim Community to Review Material Taught in Schools, including whether it has reference to “inappropriate relationships” and sex education.
Batley Blasphemy Protests: Suspended Teacher Receives Police Protection.
En soutien au journal “Charlie Hebdo”.
The Guardian reports:
A teacher displayed satirical cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. The teacher has been suspended pending a formal investigation.
Gary Kibble, the head of Batley grammar school, apologised to parents for the inappropriate use of the cartoons, taken from the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, during a religious studies lesson this week which sparked a protest outside the school on Thursday morning.
“Upon investigation, it was clear that the resource used in the lesson was completely inappropriate and had the capacity to cause great offence to members of our school community for which we would like to offer a sincere and full apology,” Kibble said in an email sent to parents that promised further investigation.
Images on social media showed about 30 to 40 protesters, many wearing masks, outside the school, with police at the entrances to the school grounds and the road outside. The Huddersfield Examiner reported from the school that the protests were peaceful as children arrived, with the start of the school day delayed until 10am. West Yorkshire police said that no fines or arrests were made.
However, the Department for Education spokesperson condemned the protests which it said included issuing threats and was “in violation of coronavirus restrictions”. A spokesperson described the protest as “completely unacceptable”
A demonstration that took place outside a school after a teacher showed a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed in the classroom was “disturbing”, a cabinet minister has said.
Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick said the protest was “not right” and that “we shouldn’t have teachers feeling intimidated”.
“That is not a road we want to go down in this country so I would strongly urge people concerned about this issue not to do that,” he told Sky News on Friday.
Mr Jenrick added that reports the teacher is now in hiding are “very disturbing”.
The National Secular Society has criticised the protests and the school’s response.
The NSS is planning to write to the school, to ask for an explanation of its rationale and urge it not to pander to demands for blasphemy taboos.
Reports suggest the teacher warned that some members of the class may find the cartoon offensive, before using it to prompt a discussion about killings that have taken place after the publication of Muhammad cartoons.
School’s statement
In a statement, the school said: “The school unequivocally apologises for using a totally inappropriate resource in a recent religious studies lesson. The member of staff has also given their most sincere apologies.
“We have immediately withdrawn teaching on this part of the course and we are reviewing how we go forward with the support of all the communities represented in our school.
“It is important for children to learn about faiths and beliefs, but this must be done in a sensitive way.
“The school is working closely with the governing board and community leaders to help resolve this situation.”
NSS comment
NSS chief executive Stephen Evans said the protest was “an attempt to impose an Islamic blasphemy taboo on a school”.
“Teachers must have a reasonable degree of freedom to explore sensitive subjects and enable students to think critically about them.
“Schools will understandably want to promote community cohesion and inclusiveness. But this cannot be achieved by pandering to religious groups who wish to dictate what can and cannot be taught.
“And the school’s weak response will fuel a climate of censorship, which is brought on by attempts to force society as a whole to accommodate unreasonable and reactionary religious views.”
Note
In October last year a school teacher in Paris, Samuel Paty, was killed after he showed cartoons of Muhammad from Charlie Hebdo magazine during a class about free expression.
Affaire Mila: Ten People to Stand Trial For Threatening Young Woman For Her Views on Islam.
Anti-Gay Hate Against 16 Year Old Who Criticised Islam.
Mila case: ten people to be tried in June for harassment and death threats against the teenager
Le Monde has just reported.
Five additional people are sent to the Paris Criminal Court for attacking the adolescent from Isère after the publication, in November, of a new controversial video on Islam.
On Monday, six people, aged 18 to 35, had been placed in police custody in Paris, Seine-et-Marne, Gironde, Isère, Bouches-du-Rhône and Bas-Rhin , in the framework of the investigations carried out by the ‘ pôle national de lutte contre la haine en ligne (national Pole against online hate,’ recently created at the Paris prosecutor’s office. On Tuesday, the custody of a man was lifted without prosecution at this stage and a minor was taken into police custody in Val-de-Marne. The latter was released “the same day for further investigation,” said the prosecution.
Two people already convicted
Five other people, aged 18 to 29 and arrested on February 9 in Loire-Atlantique, Moselle and Calvados, will also appear on June 3 for “online moral harassment”, and, for two of them, “ death threats “.
The story goes back to a young gay woman publishing a statement on social media, calling Islam a variety of colourful names. She attacked the religion, not Muslims.
Among her original remarks, she described Islam as a “religion of hate”.
“She never made any racist comments, just used teenage words that were a bit vulgar,” the lawyer said.
The BBC has had a report this year,
Five people have been detained on suspicion of making death threats to a French teenager who posted videos critical of Islam, prosecutors say.
Mila, 17, had to change schools last year after an Instagram video for her friends in which she criticised Islam was widely shared on social media.
She then posted another video on social media site TikTok last November which prompted a new wave of online threats.
This underlines just how serious thing had got,
She was getting about 30 hate messages a minute at one point, her lawyer said.
France’s online hate crimes task force took over the case.
Mila, who is known in France only by her first name, is originally from the eastern Isère region. Her story has revived debate in the country on freedom of speech as well as protection for schoolchildren from online bullying.
A schoolteacher was murdered last October close to his school near Paris, days after showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to a class discussing freedom of expression.
Mila had published in November on the social network TikTok a new video in which she sharply attacked her detractors. The teenager had shared on Twitter screenshots of the death threats received, some referring to the assassination of Professor Samuel Paty in October 2020 in the Yvelines. The prosecutor’s office in Vienne (Isère), which opened an investigation in mid-November, gave up at the beginning of December in favour of the National Pole against online hatred. Read also Delphine Horvilleur: “The Mila affair questions: what God would be upset to be so mistreated? “
A high school student in Villefontaine (Isère), Mila was forced to leave her school after having published in January 2020 a first video that went viral in which she was vehemently critical of Islam. Two people have already been sentenced in 2020 to prison terms for death threats against the girl. Others are indicted in the investigation into the death threats of January 2020 and the dissemination of his contact details.
Festival of Brexit: Morning Star and Socialist Worker to get Top Billing.
Nostradamus of the Left to get top Billing.
“The festival is said to aim to celebrate creativity and foster unity among the British public, with the event’s organiser Martin Green describing the events as “open, original and optimistic”.”
I thought this was the wits of the Internet or that April the 1st had come early, but apparently not.
A celebration of British weather and a grow-your-own food initiative will be among the festivities.
A celebration of the British weather and the largest grow-your-own food project of modern times will be among the events being staged for a nationwide festival of creativity aimed at bringing the UK together in 2022.
Organisers of the £120m festival, commissioned by Theresa May’s government and supported by Boris Johnson, announced 10 teams who had successfully pitched ideas.
Labour in Exile Network Forms ‘Ghost’ Party.
Tina Werkmann expands her fronts: In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie…
Tina Werkmann is a busy bee. She has a leading position in every one of the above groups. The former stalwart cadre of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), Weekly Worker, has a new initiative. A ghost Labour Party. Most people think she is a well-liked person and a serious leftist, but she has, in the last few years, gone off the wall politically.
Most Cdes would struggle to call her ‘Labour’ in any sense.
In the day this was her sphere of ‘influence’
Now:
Suspended Labour members to form ‘shadow’ party to fight ‘purge’
GHOST” local Labour parties are to be formed by suspended members of the party in a fight against their purge, it was revealed today.
Since Sir Keir Starmer became Labour leader last year, scores of party officers and hundreds of members have been suspended or expelled over motions of support for former leader Jeremy Corbyn.
…….
The plan is to resist what is considered to be a purge of the left, according to Labour In Exile Network (LIEN).
LIEN member Terry Deans said the shadow party “will be real Labour, the real grassroots party working on a truly democratic basis.”
Mr Deans, who was suspended by the party last year, said: “I believe Starmer was hoping that by suspending or expelling people he would drive many others on the left to leave the party.
“But most have decided to stay and fight — many by setting up ghost Labour parties.”
Mr Deans has been suspended because Bristol West CLP passed a motion to reinstate Mr Corbyn to the Labour Party.
Following an investigation by Labour’s national executive committee (NEC), the Falklands war veteran was suspended for 12 months and denied the opportunity for a hearing.
Mr Corbyn had his membership suspended in October last year for saying that the extent of anti-semitism in the party “was overstated for political reasons by our opponents.”
His comment came in response to a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) on the anti-semitism allegations.
He was reinstated by a panel of the NEC, but Sir Keir, ignoring a warning by the EHRC against political interference in such cases, refused to readmit his predecessor to the parliamentary party, leaving him to sit as an independent to represent Islington North.
LIEN is holding its first public “fightback” meeting at 7pm this Saturday (March 27). Register here for the meeting: mstar.link/LIEN
A more pathetic shambles of a group could not be imagined.
That the Stals of the Morning Star give it a puff says it all.
Bristol, “selfish, self-indulgent, self-centred violence.” Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees.
“These people were living out their fantasies of being revolutionaries.” Marvin Rees.
Last night, in French terms, the arrival of ‘casseurs’, autonomes, who smash things up at the end of marches was small Bristol beer. But If the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery had infiltrated the Bristol demonstration ‘Kill the Bill’ – how the Old Bill laughed! – they could not have been more delighted. We do not know if the people who carried out the acts of violence were coppers’ grasses, but they will be thanked by every backer of the government’s crack-down on protests.
Not to mention the far-right:
The greatly respected and liked Labour Mayor of Bristol said,
The violence and damage that have emerged from today’s protests are unacceptable and have nothing to do with the real work we are doing to tackle political, economic and social inequality.
I recognise the frustrations with the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. I have major concerns about the Bill myself, which is poorly thought-out and could impose disproportionate controls on free expression and the right to peaceful protest. It also misses as much as it includes, such as measures that could reduce violence against women and girls. We will raise our concerns.
Smashing buildings in our city centre, vandalising vehicles, attacking our police will do nothing to lessen the likelihood of the Bill going through. On the contrary, the lawlessness on show will be used as evidence and promote the need for the Bill.
This is a shameful day in an incredible year for Bristol. We have faced times of great confrontation particularly surrounding Black Lives Matter and the events that followed. We have had numerous protests. Our police, city representatives and I have been able to point out with pride that we have faced these moments of conflict without the physical conflict that others have experienced. Those who decided to turn today’s protest into a physical confrontation and smash our city have robbed us of this.
What they have done has more to do with self gratification than it has to do with the protection and advancement of those of us from communities most likely to be marginalised and mistreated by our political and legal systems. For five years Bristol has built homes, fed its families, prioritised mental health, recruited black and Asian magistrates, organised work experience for our young people who are least likely to be able to get it. We have addressed poverty and introduced a whole new city approach to welcome in and support refugees and asylum seekers. That’s what matters, That is what makes a difference. Smashing buildings, injuring police officers and burning cars will do nothing to support the children experiencing digital exclusion, or the women, men and children looking for refuge from domestic violence and abuse.
Speaking as someone himself – and whose brothers and sisters, along with our poorest communities – would be disproportionately likely to receive injustice, today’s actions do nothing to bring us closer to justice.
This is a geezer with his feet on the ground:
Anti Labour Canary founder comments,
Mendoza is an ass.
Not to mention these toss-pots.
This is more serious comment.
Our comrades in France talk about the same actions frequently, often the Black Blocs, it happens so often they have got the word “casseur” (literally smasheruper). Look at the Comité Invisible, Lundi Matin is their latest version. This is not a mass movement like the one against Poll Tax but vanguard anarchist autonomes.
Covid Conspiracists: The ‘White Rose’.
“A virus that is less dangerous than the flu, is being used as an excuse to turn the world into a new kind of global communism.”
Pursuing our exploration into confusionist right ‘left’, and extreme right, this is the latest:
The creator of the rapidly growing ‘Sabmyk Network’ is said to be a Berlin art dealer with a record of media manipulation.
They face competition from this rival cult (Hat-To Trev).
Mask mandatory? Social distancing? Lockdown after lockdown? Loneliness and depression? Forced vaccination? Ruined businesses and livelihoods? Silent genocide through depopulation? We say NO! We have recognised that the covid restrictions are destructive and deeply dehumanising. A virus that is less dangerous than the flu, is being used as an excuse to turn the world into a new kind of global communism. For the sake of our children, and their children, we peacefully resist this evil evolvement. We say NO! to new normal because it is entirely abnormal and inhumane.
This is deeply distasteful:
In the midst of World War II a German underground movement called Die Weisse Rose (The White Rose) distributed leaflets calling on people to passively resist the Nazi regime.
One of their leaflets stated that every single human is entitled to a practical government that guarantees the freedom of every single person and the wellbeing of the community. Every human should be able to reach their natural goal, their earthly joy, autonomously and by their own accord. The White Rose spoke to people’s conscience and urged them to wake up from their dangerous lethargy.
…
Even though, we are not suffering the lack of food or the danger of bombs dropping on our homes, there are remarkable parallels in The White Rose’s appeal to the current coronavirus crisis. All around the world we have been brainwashed into panic over a virus from which the vast majority of people don’t get ill of, yet alone die of. Listen to the experts—doctors, professors, virologists and epidemiologists—who explain why lockdowns are pointless. We have always lived with viruses, and we will need to live with this one too.
Covid-19 is not more dangerous than the seasonal flu. The disproportionate and dehumanising restrictions are a disgrace to humanity. People protesting against lockdowns are being arrested and treated like criminals for gathering and exercising their right of free speech.
Claire Edwards
“COVID-19” was long pre-planned in documents and simulation exercises emanating from the eugenicist Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation. A platform with 200 detailed levels is provided by the World Economic Forum led by Klaus Schwab, a technocrat and promoter of transhumanism, in order to provide
detailed instructions on how the “COVID-19” pandemic is to be used to implement a global monetary reset1 and digital currency, technocracy and totalitarian government worldwide under the guise of socialism and environmentalism, with China as the model, and enslave humanity through a sinister vaccine conspiracy.”
She is an old Trooper,
The video shows a woman named Claire Edwards sharing numerous conspiracies about the pandemic. The caption says that Edwards worked for the United Nations between 1999 and 2017.
A U.N. spokesperson told Reuters that Edwards did work for them as a Conference Services Officer between 29 May 1999 and 28 March 2017, but confirmed she is “no longer professionally affiliated with the United Nations.”
This article will only address the primary claims in the video.
“The COVID-19 pandemic was planned by Bill Gates”
The video says: “COVID-19 was long pre-planned in documents and simulation exercises emanating from the eugenicist Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation.”
There is no evidence that the coronavirus pandemic was deliberately planned or that Bill Gates has any links with such a plan.
This conspiracy theory, along with other misinformation that references Gates, has already been debunked by Reuters here.
“5G spreads COVID-19”
The video says: “Wireless technology suppresses the immune system. 5G is implicated in COVID-19 through correlations between the locations of the 5G rollout and morbidity and mortality.”
There is no connection between the coronavirus outbreak and possible 5G health effects.
Reuters has already disproved allegations relating to 5G here and here.
“There is no pandemic”
The video says: “There is and was no pandemic…Mortality is at a lower level than in previous years.”
This is false. Reuters has debunked claims relating to annual death rates here, here and here.
As of Nov. 3, figures from the World Health Organisation (WHO) show 1,201,000 people have died globally due to COVID-19: covid19.who.int/.
Dr Vernon Coleman is a leading figure, he is also pretty well known.
Vernon Coleman (born 18 May 1946) is an English conspiracy theorist, anti-vaccination activist, AIDS denialist, blogger and novelist who writes on topics related to human health, politics and animal issues. Coleman’s medical claims have been widely discredited and described as pseudoscientific. He was formerly a newspaper columnist and general practitioner
One sign of their appearance in public:
They seem to have a network,…
11 071 members
Please post photos of your sticker sightings in the chat room (t.me/thewhiterosechat), so the admins can put them up on the main channel!
Posters purporting to be from lockdown sceptic group The White Rose appeared in parts of Middleton over the weekend
Many people will feel that their use of the name the White Rose is obscence.
The White Rose (German: Weiße Rose, pronounced [ˈvaɪ̯sə ˈʁoːzə] (
listen)) was a non-violent, intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany led by a group of students from the University of Munich, including Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell. The group conducted an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign that called for active opposition to the Nazi regime. Their activities started in Munich on 27 June 1942, and ended with the arrest of the core group by the Gestapo on 18 February 1943.[1] They, as well as other members and supporters of the group who carried on distributing the pamphlets, faced show trials by the Nazi People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof), and many of them were sentenced to death or imprisonment.
Red Brown Front: Gamon, New Agers, join Far Right Demo Against Covid Lockdown.
T
James Heartfield, Top former Revolutionary Cadre (Revolutionary Communist Party/Spiked) Paraded with this Geezer Today.
Gammon and New Agers on the march.
The Red Brown Front:
The Red Brown Front is Fascist Front: Smash the Red Brown Front!
