Now is the season for all good conspiracies to come to the aid of the party

I live a strangely conservative  with a small'c'. At as my want I waste every Sunday reading several newspapers, one is extremely reactionary, one is marginally reactionary and the other one is the O

Observer. Perhaps I should explain myself as to why I waste my Sundays reading such things as the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times. I really have no explanation, other than many years ago a friend told me that the Mail was as good as a comic and having grown up in Scotland with the Sunday Post I suppose I needed some light relief. The reason we get the Sunday Times is because for the rest of the week Marie does the Times crossword, Not a very good reason but sadly it's all got.

This Sunday all three papers displayed what can only be described as a conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories, if you think the world is being taken over by strange little alien creatures men may have obviously bought British national newspapers and are spewing their irrational theories of world domination to a gullible public.

It should be added that the BBC appears part of the alien empire, and here's one for those who scour blogs and twitter accounts for threats of violence and bullying let me make it clear that if I ever got the chance I would love to punch John Humphrys right in the mush. I expect the police who appear to masquerade as the cleaning agents  of all things naughty in the Labour Party may well turn up to get me. Thank Christ John Humphrys is not Jewish, otherwise who knows what will happen..

Of course the conspiracy that I'm talking about is that one bubbling in the Labour Party, it would appear that the party I was readmitted to about  15 months ago is a hotbed of vicious dangerous evil anti-Semitism. Round every corner and every dark smoky room there lurks a ferocious anti-Semites. At this point I better lay my cards firmly on the table,, but those who heard me say this before it's no surprise but when I was around 14 or so the first political activity I took part in when I first joined the Young Communist league was Street activity with the yellow star movement. That was inthose days and organisation made up of AJEX( the Association of Jewish ex-servicemen) the Young Communist league, the Young Socialists and young trade unionists. What we did in those wild and rough times was to bully, and intimidate, and disrupt public meetings. These were on street markets like Ridley Road East London and they were meetings organised by an outfit called the Union Movement (Nothing to do with trade unions) and organisation founded by Sir Oswald Mosley the leader of the wartime British union of Fascists. In the 1960s they were spreading their racist  aetiology on the streets of London, attacking Commonwealth migrants and the Jewish community in that part of London. What we did was simply prevent them speaking, and quite literally gave them no platform because we destroyed their platforms, their loudspeakers and their leaflets.

Today an awful lot of people talk about fighting anti-Semitism indeed they make an awful lot about fighting anti-Semitism, I don't remember many of them on the streets when we were physically fighting anti-Semites.

It is perhaps an interesting aside that when we were mobilised to get along  to a fascist rally we travelled in London black cabs driven by Jewish cabbies from the TGWU. In those cabs There was always lively discussion and frequently we talked about the issue of Israel and Palestine, the discussions were often heated and on occasion I got a smack in the mouth from a Zionist comrade whoDidn't quite agree with my analysis. However when the cab stopped and we confronted our common enemy all disagreements from the cab were forgotten, we knew who the real enemy was.

What is distressing me if the fact that too many people cannot distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Of course it's not that simple and I very much doubt if many of the founding fathers of Zionism would find themselves in agreement with what the government of Israel and the religious parties of Israel are doing today. Many of the founding fathers were practical socialists and they were internationalists in the best sense. It is impossible after the genocide of World War II not to support a homeland for the Jews of Europe, perhaps the issueIs how Israel was created and by whom. That is however old history and we are where we are, and the only way forward for everyone is the two state solutionThat amongst others Jeremy Corbyn endorses and argues for, as long as millions of Palestinian people are dispossessed and remain in hideous camps  as refugeesfor decadesThen there will never be peace. I am still waiting, as the flames within the Labour Party off and higher and higher for just one of those MPs and peers to criticise the state of Israel for the events on the Israeli- Gaza border over the last few days.

There is without doubt some dangerous anti-Semitism in some parts of the Labour Party, that is not new, Ernest Bevin was no friend of the Jewish people. All my life I have always known on whose side I'm on, I will fight anti-Semitism and every other manifestation of racism that rears its head anywhere.

But I will never under any circumstances join a demonstration against the leader of the Labour Party with the likes of Ian Paisley junior, and some of those evil Tory hypocrites. Can I remind you as I always do of the words in Ruthie Gorton's song" to understand oppression is to be a Jew-so free Palestine now"

Northamptonshire County Council is once again in La -la land

For the first time in ages Northamptonshire is becoming newsworthy, it's all over the press, the radio and the television, even BBC Look East appears to be remembered that Northamptonshire is in their region. It is of course because Northamptonshire is now the first English county that appears to be going bankrupt – the fact that all seven Tory MPs have condemned the Tory leadership on the county council and indeed the majority of the backbench County councillors have also called for the Cabinet to resign – an unprecedented moment in our local history.

Of course it's been a long time coming, I have been around in Northamptonshire local politics since 1973, indeed I was elected at the great local government reorganisation that took away county borough status from Northampton and created the two tier system that we have at the moment. It was obvious from day one that the system was a lash up. It seemed to those in central government that it was a tidy solution to problems surrounding local government, and in some places it may have worked, but not in Northamptonshire. It could never work in a county like this, Northamptonshire was always called the county of'spires and squires', that may be true in deepest rural Northamptonshire but as sure as hell it never resonated in an industrial Midland town like Northampton, or indeed some of the smaller industrial towns like Kettering and Corby.

The old rural district councils served a very different role and their history was bound up in a different range of services which they supplied reluctantly to the citizens. The absurdity of the creation of a two tier system in Northampton was so clearly illustrated in the separation of functions between a housing authority and one supplied social services. Many of the problems associated with social housing were also the problems of poverty, overcrowding, inadequate housing, and urban living.

There were arguments that suggested that policing and fire services and even to some extent education should be provided on a larger canvas but reality has always been that the needs of the urban community of Northampton town are not compatible with those of sleepy villages mostly populated by commuters to the larger cities or the living dead.

It was a top down solution that did not work but of course central government of whatever  colour can't resist reorganising local government. This seems to be a philosophy in Westminster that says you have a problem in local government – reorganise!.

Time and time again these reforms have been disastrous. And all have come from some bright-eyed wonk in a Whitehall office, someone thought it would be a good idea to introduce Cabinet government in locally, replicating what went on in Westminster, with an all-powerful executive and entire herd of backbenchers unable to play any part of observers. It might work if you have a cabinet like Mrs May, but it won't work in County Hall. Then of course we had the brilliant idea of of creating Police and Crime Commissioners,Replacing a police authority comprising of local people from all over the county with one elected person, the first time  they tried in Northamptonshire the votewas a paltry 19% and what did we get,Adam Simmonds,the first elected Muppet in history.. Then of course there is the talk always of elected mayors, once again aping the American system. But really all we are seeing is a concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands.

And when you do that without any adequate scrutiny what you get, it seems to me you get chaos bad judgement and frequently what appears to be criminality. The Cabinet government in Northamptonshire is a disaster, there is no other word for it. An experiment that has failed  miserably and has allowed public services to be destroyed from the top downwards.

Probably the worst consequence of local government reform has been not simply the control in the hands  of a small group of mediocre  local politicians but the increasing power of a small group of mediocre senior managers, who, endlessly with ideas to reconstruct, to reconfigure and to reduce  local government. We have a situation where decisions are taken that affect the lives of thousands of people by a small cabal of disinterested professionals and people who like exercising power  without responsibility.

All our problemslocally are ideologically driven by people both the administrators and the so-called political leaders who care only about one thing and that is doing what central government tell them to do and only tells them to do is to cut services to live up to the credo of austerity for all except of course those in power.

Sometimes a film or book arrives just the right time.

This week at the Errol Flynn cinema the film'The Post' directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks was shown. The film was a story of the struggle by the Washington Post, its owner Catherine Graham and its editor Ben Bradley to publish the Ellsberg papers that exposed the decades long cover-up by American presidents, starting with Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson and then of course Richard M Nixon.
It might be considered a historic film in the context that the Vietnam War that was the subject of the leaked documents is now history and that ubiquitous politicians argument" it's time to move on"Might be considered fitting, the sort of thing politicians and more specifically presidents say when they want to cover up an unpleasant truth.
The evidence that Ellsberg uncovered was shocking, it was clear that in the 4000 page it pages of documents that he smuggled out that presidents since Kennedy had known that the war in Vietnam was a cruel deception of the American people that allowed hundreds of thousands to be injured and killed and the greater number of Vietnamese civilians to be murdered in a war that everyone at the top of the United States government knew was unwinnable.
As the news filtered out that the Washington Post and the New York Times both had the information and were going to publish the pressure from the White House and the Pentagon was ferocious, threats of imprisonment were made by the State Department and the CIA( I have no doubt) t to prevent the publication, the allegation of treachery and intimidation of journalists and publishers of both newspapers never let up stop
It of course all stemmedFrom within the White House where a paranoiac, narcissist and bully was the Republican president, Richard Millhouse Nixon. He was a man didn't trust anyone and who despite having taken an oath to uphold the constitution of the United States strangely appeared to have forgotten that important sentence in the constitution about the rights of free speech.
There are many faults in America but the one thing that is really worth holding onto is the constitution that the founding fathers, in my view the most influential being John Adams and Ben Franklin, not to mention Tom Paine, it was a constitution for its time although the principles are universal. It is true there is the clause which the national rifle association claim if the defence of bearing arms by everyone but then that calls was originally written in order that state militias could defend themselves from the possibility of attack by the British government. But the written constitution of the United States is a fine humanitarian document that deserves to be part, with modifications, of every state that claims to be civilised.

But of course Batman people of America hadn't imagined their criminal like Nixon would ever occupy the White House, of course there had been criminals in their posts earlier but in the main they were the sort of criminals that flap about  on the backbenches of the current government ( after they've been slung out of the Cabinet but being naughty boys). Nixon was a special creature and his impeachment was far too late in coming.
The bravery of Graham and Bradley was a brilliant portrait of why newspapers should not be owned by greedy corporations, multimillionaires, and international tycoons. We know historically that so many outlets both in America and in this country have been run by tiny cliques who have used the press for their own purpose, be it supporting fascism of just making themselves filthy rich.
The right to publish was taken right up to the Supreme Court and in a major ruling that denied the executive the right to stop publication two things happened. The supreme justice reminded the court that freedom for the press was enshrined in the constitution and was the intention of the founding fathers to make sure that it would ever remain so. The second thing that the film showed was a furious Nixon in the White House instructing his flunkies that the Washington Post would not be allowed ever again in the White House not even to report his daughter Julie's wedding. His hatred of the Washington Post became a leaf motif of his presidency and to the jolly of all those watching the film the end sequence had a report from the police in Washington talking about a break-in in an office in central Washington.

I think Steven Spielberg has made an astonishing film but not a historical exercise, it could not be more topical than today just think we have a Republican president in the White House who has all the characteristics of Nixon, a man so thin-skinned and indeed so empty headed that every piece of news he doesn't like he describes as fake news, significantly he frequently singled out Washington Post and indeed the New York as  his biggest enemies. Marx said the history repeat itself versus tragedy and then as farce.Trouble is I don't think we are living through a farce however if you want to be positive and you see the glass as half full rather than half empty and you know that every ticket you buy to see'The Post' will annoy Trump mightily- go see it!