Sunday 26 July 2015

You know things are getting bad when they call in Blair!

It seems to me that the leadership of the Abstentionist labour party must be  getting into a blue funk over the leadership election when they drag out the living dead to rubbish Jeremy Corbyn.
Its come to a pretty pass when Blair,Mandelson. Hutton. Milburn, the four arseholes of the apocalypse are wheeled out to save the party they ravished for all those years.
I think perhaps the most crass and sickening manifestation of this dreadful panic was the intervention by the dreadful John Mann, the MP for Bassetlaw.
What is it about the Labour Party in that part of Nottinghamshire.For years they had Joe Ashton, the beloved Sun columnist and frequenter of Northampton massage parlours as their member,only to replace him with Mann.
He managed to issue an open letter to Jeremy accusing him of doing nothing when Council run children's homes were covering up child abuse.As it happens Jeremy did raise the issue with several organisations involved, not least Islington Council, led at the time by one Margaret Hodge,Labour Mp for barking, and also on the Council was another Blairite MP, Stephen Twigg.
Nice one Johnny boy!
But then smear and innuendo is the stock in trade of these so called MP's,none of whom have any idea of what politics, and specifically socialist politics is really about.
The surge of support for JC is paralleled by events in Scotland, and it was an absolute delight to see the SNP take over the Labour front bench last Wednesday when Parliament was discussing of all things giving greater powers to Manchester.
But then what can we expect from a party that abstains on the Welfare Bill debate because they didn't want to appear as,well an opposition!
If they had turned up and behaved like a grown up political opposition they would have defeated the government.After all they had the boc of SNP members. the Lib-Dems ,Plaid,the Green Party MP and even the Democratic Unionists.
For fuck sake! What sort of Labour party is it that can be outflanked on the left by the DUP !
The attacks on JC are as vicious and unprincipled as they were on Tony Benn back in the 1980's.
And its the same old same old warhorses having a go, the Murdoch Press, well indeed every section of the British Press,as well as denizens of the House of Lords, and the now familiar voices of 'respectable' newspaper columnists.
To think that David Aaronovitch ,now favoured son of the Times has joined in-did the great lump learn nothing from his late father and fine Marxist economist Sam ?
Obviously not.
I fear that with the chorus line of Labour 'supporting' millionaires living up to say that they will give the Party no more of their booty, many of the weak willed and weak-minded will panic and vote for Burnham or Cooper.
Dear God they are even pulling out the spectre of Militant to frighten the horses!
It is possible that jeremy will not win, however a bit like the SNP in Scotland this battle may have unleashed forces that the whey faced 'statesmen and women' cannot control.
It may be that the young who are drawn to radical solutions will not get back in their boxes, and rather like events in Scotland,Jeremy's campaign will bring forth many Mhari Black's to challenge the hegemony of the spineless and cowardly!

Friday 17 July 2015

A terrible beauty is born?

A few weeks ago I wrote Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour leadership election off as a bad job.I was perhaps too hasty and worse still I may have been wrong.
It would appear that JC (interesting initials when you come to think of them) may have a lot more going for him.There appears to be mounting fury amongst the Blairistas and dire warnings in the Murdoch Press.
Of course it could all be flannel and old tosh to scare the Mondeo men and Worcester women to death and to strengthen the paws of the three other dwarves!
I'm not surprised the Tories are gloating and indeed I have suggested elsewhere that Lord Ashcroft, if he really wanted to cause havoc and unleash the weasels of war the best thing he could do with his millions is buy a few thousand Tory supporters a three quid membership package of the Labour Party.
Whichever numbskull in the LP hierarchy suggested that wheeze should be included in Cameron's list  of new peers immediately.
But it might,it just might,suggest that lurking in the much diminished ranks of ordinary party members there is still a serious and heartfelt desire for real change and real fight.
maybe the collective woms of compromise have looked at Scotland and seen the shallow nature of the Labour party up there and have decided that to continue to support this bunch of careerist mediocrities is no longer worth a candle.
Who knows?
Without a paper of its own, they even snuffed out Labour Weekly decades ago, then they snuffed out conference and then they have been systematically snuffing out wards and constituencies all over the place.
It would seem that the only purpose members who aren't millionaires can offer is being leaflet distributors at election time or 'listening posts' for any passing celebrity careerist.
Perhaps members are at last getting it-without a vision and a purpose what's the point of the Labour Party?
When the acting leader thinks its a good idea to abstain on the Tories proposed welfare cuts, and Chuka Thingy thinks the only point of the party is to get people like him elected!
They remind me of Groucho's remark:
"If you don't like my principles,here's some others!"
Suppose JC wins what will happen/Well fairly obviously the PLP will be in uproar and many will leave immediately in a huff to form the SDP Mark 2.They could even complete the real Blair project and merge with the Liberals, and perhaps become the Liberal-democratic-social -mountebank party!They would of course take with them their rich backers,a handful of the living dead in the Lords(I expect Lord Sugar of Rubbish would rejoin) and some trade unions whose leaders  want a retirement berth on the red leather benches.
But we perhaps can suppose that some MP's would listen to party members and realise that the purposeof an opposition in Westminster is to,well,oppose.
A group of left Labour MP's aligned with the SNP as an anti-austerity bloc could really bollox up the Tories and the 'moderates' for the next four years.
And who knows, the people of this country might realise it's better to fight on their feet than capitulate on their knees.
And who knows, a 'terrible beauty ' might be born.
just imagine how redoubtable a large parliamentary grouping might be with Mhari Black leading it alongside JC himself.
    

Sunday 5 July 2015

Who writes the hostory?

Today the people of Greece will vote in a referendum  that in the words of an Athenian will determine whether the country starves quickly or a bit slower.Either way the Government and people of Greece are being used as an example to the other peoples of Europe:
"Do not defy the power of the market,do not think that you can defy austerity-we will crush you like a butterfly on a wheel"
And who will do the crushing? Why the international financiers,the bankers,the IMF and the governments of the powerful European states, you know the ones-those that had their debts written off after WW2, because their governments were compliant 'democracies'.

Of course these governments of financial rectitude and their pure driven snow bankers never did anything underhand or corrupt did they?
Consider therefore the case of a guy Akis Tsochatopulos,.a former Greek defence minister who is currently serving a 20 year stretch in chokey for bribery and corruption, and who was bribing and corrupting this mainstream Greek politician,why a German arms dealer called Ferrostaal,who flogged the Greek government a bunch of submarines and Akis creamed off quite a bit for himself.

Of course borrowing money and allowing corrupt arms dealers to get their paws on public money is not new.The national debt started in England with Henry V111 when he wanted to buy a few boats to fight the French.
So here's the deal, corrupt Greek governments, of Centre Right or Centre left buy tons of military hardware from Germany and other European 'allies',and of course the dear old USofA,they discover the cost of all those subs,fighter planes,tanks and what have you, plus the middlemen's cuts get obscenely high and then the debtors come knocking on the Greek peoples door asking for repayment.
Merkel wants her money that was used to pay her dodgy arms dealers!-and who pays?
Not the corrupt politicians of Greece but the pensioners and the young and the unemployed and the sick!
Whilst billionaire's yachts drift at anchor off the Greek islands-the people need to be austere.

It is interesting that many of the people who now suffer are the sons,daughters and grandchildren of the men and women of Greece who fought the Nazis to a standstill in the resistance,whilst the Greek elite were cosying up to the fascists.
And the colonels who led a military coup to destroy Greek democracy 
I am reminded of a song from Ewan McColl's Festival of Fools, a warning to the leaders of the junta from the young of Greece:
"We are the young ones,
The readers the writers,the copiers,
We are the young and small,
And we are the writing on your wall!"
If ever a song was prophetic, it was written when the Greek Queen Fredrika ,a fascist sympathiser was visiting London and Greek students were arrested for protesting about her visit.
They were the mothers and fathers of the young in the streets of Athens today, and indeed they are the writing on the wall.