How careless to make the same mistake!

What is ir about the Labour Party?
It is widely  accepted that the first and fatal mistake that the Blair/Brown government made in 1997 was to continue to impose the spending constraints they inherited from the Tories.
Remember the slogan 'Things can only get better'?
Well they never could get better when you started your administration with both hands and both feet tied together.
It's true that they were able to make small reforms and some of them significant,but the minimum wage legislation was never likely to end poverty-one of Keynes five 'giants'- and reforming zeal perished on the rocks of banker happiness!

So now we have Miliband and his brave new world,and what does he promise?
Why to continue the attacks of folk on welfare and in order to buy the votes of the deserving rich pledges to continue austerity.He also drives his parliamentary party into the coalition lobby.

Lets make it clear, the poor are not,have not, and never will be responsible for the crisis of capitalism.
At the same time the object of government is not simply to pay off the National Debt,or indeed to drive down the deficit. 
The national Debt has been with us since Henry VIII wanted to build a navy to fight France, and over the centuries has fluctuated wildly.The Attlee Government in 1945 faced a much higher debt, a broken infrastructure and a war damaged country, and yet it managed to create a health service,a massive housing programme,a welfare state and nationalised the major industries that the private sector had ruined.

The lesson of that government,just as the lesson of Roosevelt's New Deal was simple, don't blame and punish the poor,but take bold decisions to rebuild the nations' infrastructure.
This dreadful coalition has built its entire strategy on blaming people for the crisis in capitalism,demanding that wages are restrained, that contracts are torn up, that public services are sold off at knock down prices and worst of all that the poorest are made to pay even more.
The demonisation of people on welfare benefits has been the leitmotif of everything this lot have done.
The potent mixture of scroungers,welfare cheats, greedy migrants and the undeserving poor have sent a frisson of terror through the respectable poor.
There is masses of evidence that the hardest hit section of welfare claimnts are the elderly,the disabled and those in work on rock bottom wages and zero hour contracts.

And if that is not enough every piece of legislation is designed to turn the screw a bit tighter,even their own flagship legislation,'the bedroom tax' is a failure and only adding to the distress of social housing tenants and increasing rent arrears.

So we should expect boldness fro the Labour Party, I well remember Neil Kinnock describing Labour local authorities as 'battered shields' against Thatcherism.

With the emasculation of local authorities (aided in part by New Labour!) the best we can expect is that the Parliamentary labour Party will stand up and vote against further attacks on working people.
OK its only a vote, but at least it would offer hope that something better might come along.

Yet only 13 Labour MP's voted against the Government, over 100 strolled into the coalition lobby.
In fact the voting record of the SNP,PC and the Green Party MP was far better that that of the people's party. 

Shame on you all.
So here is a simple question to the Labour Party hopefuls in Northamptonshire-if you were in Westminster-how would you have voted on the welfare cuts?
So far all we have seen from all of you has been nothing more than party platitudes, and even they have been few and far between.
Is the new Labour orthodoxy akin to being political trappists?

There is a dark shadow of fear passing over this country, a rising tide of reactionary thought and a Labour Party afraid of its own shadow,

Now is the time for boldness-is the Labour Party up to the challenge? 

But when your dead.....

The last week has seen the loss of two outstanding and inspirational socialists from two generations.Both Bob Crow and Tony Benn will be mourned by most folk in the socialist movement for the contributions that they made in reminding people that the ideals of socialism are far from dead.
What is shocking is the number who are jumping on the sadness of their deaths to proclaim how inspirational they both were in their lifetimes,when for most of the time they were vilified and traduced.
There have of course been the usual caveats-"I didn't agree with much of what they said but they were blah blah blah..."
Bob not unnaturally came in for more weasel words, the sycophantic bleatings of Boris Johnston were at considerable odds to what he had been saying about Bob only a few days ago.The silence from the leadership of the Labour Party said it all

Truth to tell Bob Crow was the most effective trade union leader of his generation, and his capacity to lead from the front produced the best conditions for his members despite the austerity.
Bob believed that nothing was too good for the workers and his philosophy  echoed the words of Brecht in the 'song of the patch and the overcoat'- I don't want a new patch for my overcoat, I want the whole bloody overcoat!

Bob also led his union out of the unequal relationship with the Labour Party that unions have 'enjoyed' for decades.The railway workers have for generations been led by donkeys, from the corrupt anr treacherous JH Thomas in the 1920's to the slimy and pathetic Sid Weighell in the 70's.
Jimmy Knapp was a considerable improvement on all that had gone before but Bob was a real step change.
No surprise that in a period of rapid decline in trade union membership, only RMT put on over 20,000 new members.
The crocodile tears shed for Bob were perhaps best explained by the fact that there are some in the Labour party that hope by appearing 'sincere' and 'well disposed' to Bob and his union they can lure the union back into the straightjacket of Labour party affiliation.
I hope the members are as wise to the Labour Party's tricks as they are to the wiles of management.

The death of Tony Benn has also unleashed an outpouring of synthetic grief. The notion that he has somehow become an iconic figure for the Labour Party, and as Tam Dalyell  described him as a 'prophet not a king' is more in the spirit of 'thank christ he too has gone'.
Everyone and their hampster is now an expert on Tony Benn,and how he brought the Labour Party to the brink of disaster and drove those nice SDP types out of the party.

Those of us who lived through the SDP episode know what was really happening.Those miserable opportunists and careerists were the ones who wrecked the party, they took delight in trampling on the socialist aspirations of many, and in fact the bastards won!
Blairism and Kinnockism  were the real heirs to Jenkins,Owen and that clique.Truth to tell the vicious attacks on Tony and others on the left was what fatally damaged the Labour Party.They never wanted the Labour Party to win on a socialist programme. 

Now is the time when that dreary Gerald Kaufman quote about the 1974 election manifesto being the 'longest suicide note in history'- no it was the last manifesto that put clause 4 of the Party at the centre of its political programme,and you all remember what happened to Clause 4 under New Labour.

many of us stayed in the Party because we hoped that things might get better and when people like Tony were still around it sometimes seemed that there was a small still radical heartbeat somewhere in the core of the party.

The price we paid was the total destruction of a party that had at its whole purpose the advancement of 'Labouring people'-after all that was why it was called the Labour Party in the first place.
It was created by the organisations of the labour movement to fight for and defend the interests of working people, and that was why it recieved the funds to do that from the trade unions.

But of course not any more, rather a handout from Lord Owen and Tony Blair instead of the pennies from the workers, and indeed as the Co-operative passes into the hands of the money men and the international speculators, where is the future?

If we are to undertand the legacy of both Bob Crow and Tony Benn  we need to start again,we need to build a new movement once again from the bottom up.Bob had it right,and in his heart of hearts I suspect the 'icon' knew that too.  

Everyone is an expert now!

Who would have believed it? A few short weeks ago most people thought ,if they thought about it at all,that Ukraine was part of Russia and Crimea certainly was,and indeed always had been.
I must admit I always thought that they were all one and the same and I grew up in a household that had Soviet Weekly delivered alongside Boxing News and the Daily Worker!
My Dad never really got the hang of the Morning Star, till his dying day he always called it 'the Worker' and as a matter of fact with regard to Soviet Weekly they sent that to him free because he had been a subscriber since the 1940's.
I probably knew more about the Donbass coal field than I knew about any mining areas in Britain, other than of course the heroic miners of Fife and the equally heroic ,or almost as equally heroic men of South Wales.In our house it was a stretch of great imagination to think that there were coal mines in England.
Mining was a celtic occupation,rather like deep sea fishing and goading the English.
Yet the news over the last few weeks has concentrated on events in Ukraine,which again as a child I knew as 'the' Ukraine in the way that I knew things happened behind 'the' urals and anyway it was all part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

I knew Uncle Joe was a Georgian,ut that was OK too because Georgia was part of the USSR- the 'unbreakable union of freeborn republics' as described i the Soviet national anthem.

Now I should be used by now to the breakup of the Soviet Union and all those pesky small and like Ukraine enormous separate republics but even now its fairly difficult to make the separations

And if its hard for us, think how difficult it must be for so many millions of citizens of the former USSR.
Especially the older folk, who lived through or were directly affected by what they still call the Great .Patriotic War.Twenty-maybe thirty million Russian people died in the fight against fascism.They didn't much care if they were Georgians or Ukrainians or Tartars or whatever, they were Russians fighting for their homeland.
Now the war did throw up contradictions, there were some within the minority peoples who  saw the war as a situation where they could escape th Russian hegemony,and of course there were still remnants of the White Russian forces who sided with the Germans in the hope of defeating the Communists.
So I', not surprised that there are lingering distrusts amongst sections of the community and that is easily fanned by both sides.
It is ironic perhaps that Leni believed in the rights of small nations to self determination and one of the best statements ever written about the rights of small nations was  by JV Stalin when he was Commissar for National Minorities .
But of course socialist history is littered with ironies and contradictions.

However it does seem that what is going on at the moment in Ukraine is a nasty powrplay etween competing oligarchs, their stooges and the jockeying for power bases.
I have no doubt that amongst the crowds in Kiev there are many genuine radical democrats who hated the corruption and exploitation of their country.A genuine yearning for self determination that today every Scot should be acutely aware of(other than that numpty Darling!) but within that movement there lurk some very unsavory elements- anti-semites,racists,the worst possible nationalists-and of course the ususal band of free marketeers,opportunists and criminals

Yet on the other side there is the mirror reflection of Putin and his oligarchs, gun thugs,motor bike gangs,and corrupt officials and politicians.

What we are seeing is the criminal bands fighting amongst themselves for the spoils whilst the people get trampled in the middle.
Its a battle we have seen repeatedly in the Middle East, in the Balkans and almost anywhere where gangsters fall out!

And people wonder still why China is resistant to any attempt to break up the Peoples Republic!

And on the other hand....

Harriet Harman has never given any evidence of being a political thinker of any great depth or indeed of any great consequence.She always appeared to be in the right place at the right time and demonstrated the knack that so many in the Parliamentary Labour Party have of not upsetting too many people.

The closest I ever came to her was once in the Commons car park when Tony Clarke and I were waiting for a taxi when Phil Hope, the shining pale pink MP for Corby pushed past us to climb into a cab with the memorable excuse:
"I'm off to a party at Hattie's!"
Such comradeship at the heart of the Labour Party.

That encounter with the elite of the Party however does not detract from the witch hunt that is being carried on against Harman by the odious 'Daily Mail'.

The fact that she was the legal officer for the NCCL in the 1970's merely indicated the route to parliament that many aspiring politicians took in those days, and was in fact a far more honourable and useful route than the political assistant,intern and party hack route so favoured today.

NCCL was ,and indeed is still, the sort of organisation that civilised nations always need.It is true that in the 1970's there was a libertarian tinge to the organisation, and in many ways it was imitating the American trends for outrageous extremism,but that does not detract from the good work that it was undertaking in the fields of human rights,anti-racism,against homophobia and all the other causes that required a progressive stance.
Inevitably some oddball fringe elements  crawled in under the 'libertarian' banner, and its worth remembering that many of them were quite right wing and reactionary.
NCCL as a campaigning group for civil liberties had often to defend the rights of quite unsavory individuals and even groups.
I have no doubt that PIE(Paedophile Information Exchange) was no more than five men and a dog(and I bet the dog was not a willing member!) but as so often happens with self promotion,they bullied their way in.
Gay Liberation as a movement was just finding its feet in this country and was under constant virulent attack from many quarters-not least the 'Daily Mail', it has many other things on its collective mind to worry about -and the five men and a dog pie outfit was low on the priorities.
And if it was low on the GLF priorities, it was almost certainly far lower on the paid officers of NCCL's  agenda.
Harman has nothing to apologise for, and indeed even if she had,who would she apologise to,and for what exactly.On that basis should the family of Thatcher apologise to the victims of Jimmy Savile for hugging the old brute in public?

The most interesting aspect of the 'affair Harman' to my mind is the contrasting coverage given this week to her and Peter Bone, the right wing xenophobic Tory MP for Wellingborough.

Credit to 'The Times' for bringing out the story of the Police investigation into Bone's alleged criminal behaviour in defrauding the County Council of many thousands of pounds in benefits for his mother-in-law's care in a nursing home.
If the CPS decide to bring charges, then that is far more significant an event this week than Harriet harman's alleged pecadillos over 30 years ago.
Strange how silent the 'Daily Mail' appears to have been on that story!

Events that move so fast

I wonder how the Michael Gove analysis of World War 1 would have stood up if communications had been as fast then as now?
I wonder how many people would have shared the pompous arses' view that somehow it was a great war and a glorious moment i British history had our forebears had I-phones and facebook and the rest of modern communications?
The events over the last few hours in Kiev have demonstrated just how graphically and brutal war can be.
In 1914 cinematography was still in its infancy, and the press as well as being slow was also heavily censored by the military.
Reading a review by Rowan Williams of a new biography of Wilfred Owen in the New Statesman two things struck me.
Firstly how long it took for the full horrors to sink in, Owens poetry was published posthumously , and by the way its strange how the Gove talks glibly about 'Oh What a Lovely War' and 'Blackadder' and  manages to omit the work of eye witnesses to the slaughter like Owen and Sassoon and others.But then perhaps Gove only read Robert Graves and left it at that!
Secondly and even more moving in many ways was the illustration that accompanied Williams review.It was a stark black and white photograph of five young soldiers who had just finished basic training and were preparing to go to the front.The casual insouciance of the youngsters, a couple with fags in their mouths was tragic.The uniforms,already crumpled,seemed far too big for them, as if they were wearing someone elses' castoffs.
And in a sense they were, they were wearing the cast offs of a ruling class who thought that there was glory to be won somewhere along the Somme,an officer class who thought they were going to do daring=do's  in the way of their forebears.
They hadn't bothered to see that war had become slaughter on an industrial scale.
I doubt if any of those five children came back in one piece.
It's hard not to be angry when time and time again we see the same young men and women being sent into each new killing field, unprotected and innocent,hoping above hope that the war that they are engaged i will somehow be the 'war to end all wars' but sadly never seems to be.
Now I am no pacifist and I believe that sometimes we have to take up arms because what we are confronted with is simply too awful to contemplate.It was absolutely right for the people of Spain and the International Brigades to confront Franco, and because the rulers failed us over Spain it was right for us to confront and defeat Hitler,although the cost was far too high.
Similarly there have been 'just' wars since then too, the Vietnamese people,the Palestinians,the people of South Africa,but it is frustrating to know that throughout the last century if working people had stood together in their class interest then there would have been no wars.
If German workers had not been beguiled and lied to by their Keiser and the Russians by his cousin the Tsar and the British by their cousin George, then millions of lives would have been saved.
Ironic really that the European Royals were all sending armies to rip great lumps out of each other when it could all have been solved on somewhere like a playing field at Eton.
Jackets off boys and a bit of a punch up behind the bike shed-first one to draw blood gets to keep Africa!
But then of course those states were fighting for something tangible,control of the worlds natural resources,what I find impossible to comprehend is how anyone in their right mind can be persuaded to go and kill aother person,or wear an explosive vest or massacre innocent strangers simply ecause 'my God is better than your God!'
What on earth is all that about?
Did the enlightenment pass them all by?
And to go back to my original point, with the instant images of death and destruction on the worlds TV screens every night is the world still full of numpties who cannot see how pointless it all is?
The youngsters who went to the trenches in 1914 had no idea what was awaiting them, as soon as they knrw it was too late,but so many who fought echoed not simply Owen but Harry Patch, the last survivor of WW1- it just wasn't worth it.

But I guess there are still people like Michael Gove, who wonder around with beans in their ears.

Without ideology-politics becomes a dangerous diversion

The Withenshaw by election was bad news for all the political parties.Well at least for the three main parties.I find it impossible to think of UKIP as a political party, it is an ill assorted collection of prejudices wrapped up in the Union Jack and masquerading as a political force.
It is nothing more than every right wing bunch of trailer park trash fitting what they laughingly call a 'political vision ' round a set of xenophobic views.
It is however the popularism of the gutter that makes it so dangerous, its like every little beer garden outfit that likes to blame everything else on somebody rather than something.
It had its predecessors all over Europe and North America.The Poujadists in France, the America First lot,the Mosleyite Blackshirts, O'Duffy's Blueshirts.

Nasty little fascist groups that threw their weight around and roared out defiance to anyone who would listen.
Of course they were absurd and of course they mostly came to nothing, but one or two of these 'movements' did become something-in Spain,Italy and Germany their posturing  did win support.

In times of anomie it's often hard to forget that people grasp at straws,and sometimes a mass hysteria emerges and creates a maelstrom of fear and resentment.In those conditions all political bets are off,and even the most absurd and inchoate ideas catch a mood.

Let me put it clearly, the crisis we are living through, or rather crises,are the products of unrestrained capitalism.The free market is neither free or a market, it is a method of social control that allows international capitalism to plunder the world with no constraints.
It is little wonder that we are facing an ecological disaster-for plundering and ravaging scare resources are what the world's oligarchs are all about.

I'm no conspiracy theorist, I suspect the Bilderberg likes to think of itself as a conspiracy of sorts, the rich and powerful gathering together to plot world domination.But even with Lord Mandelson and the forty million pound former leader of the 'Peoples party' on hand, their gatherings are just window dressing.
Capitalism has entered the phase of dog devour dog, or maybe more precisely fat cat lap up other fat cat. 

In order to sustain itself for a few more squalid years our rulers need a few diversions to keep us plebs under the thumb and more importantly at each others throats.
A few diversions, so they throw in a bit of religious bigotry,nothing better to get the old juices of prejudice going that a bit of the 'my Gods better than your God' routine.If that fails there are lots of other useful scapegoats to fall back on.Gay people,black people,women people,foreign people,poor people,old people,young people....Name your own particular resentment and there you are!

Of course just as the prejudices are transnational, there was a time when we had a solution to their hated.There was a time when working people realised what these power structures were up to and we organised resistance.We realised that the only way ordinary folk to resist was by combing together.We realised quite early on that education was the most potent weapon we had.

I don't care how far you go back, take for instance the Founding fathers of America, those great leaders who understood the strength of the Enlightenment-what did John Adams write into the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ?Why free and universal education for boys AND girls!  

Or forefathers also understood that working people need to make alliances, with each other and with others,workers by hand and by brain.

And they also realised quite early on that as capital was international,so labour needed to be international too.
We know to our cost that the capitalist class play off not simply one group against another,but one nation state against another too.Forget the rights of small nations to self determination,forget any cultural hegemony, just remember you can move your factories and plants anywhere on the globe, and the dispossed labour will follow.

There was a time when the Labour Party was proudly internationalist,OK its true that the best it could do was the miserable Second International and that folded because of the First World War.There were too many ill formed jingoists  in both the Labour party and the SDP in Germany to understand that they were being sold the most outrageous pup in history.
However there were brave men and women in both parties that refused to follow the lie that it was a war of national pride and honour.
And that strain of internationalism existed in the sadly deformed Labour Party right up until the creature Blair destroyed all that was good and decent about the Party.

So we have a Party that cannot see the writing on the wall and thinks nothing has changed.I really don't care what happens to the Tories and the Liberals, they in truth were history about the start of the 20thc.They have simply taken a long time to fall off the perch.However what I do care about is the future of the only movement that can resist the last redoubt of capitalism.The rise of UKIP is once more part of a pattern we saw several times in the last century,only this time there is no world Communist movement to resist the far right, there is not even a social democratic base from which to resist, and the Trade Union movement is fragmented and weakened worldwide by the insouciance of parties like the Labour Party who ant to break links with organised labour in order to be more like the 'democratic' parties of advanced capitalist states.
It's a sad illusion, and the resistible rise and rise of the far right needs to be understood and fought.Remember comrades,those of you who think that they are simply the right fighting amongst themselves and the social democratic force can slip through un noticed-look carefully are Wythenshawe, and while the vote was good this time, the poll was under 20% and the writing id clearly on the wall.   

Another year-another bout of xenophobia

So on January 1st 2014 every reporter that could stagger out of bed was hanging about airports like bad smells waiting for the hordes of Romanians and Bulgarians to turn up to claim benefits.

What utter bollocks!
It's true Keith Vaz and a dreadful Tory called Reckless turned up to surround one young astonished Romanian and they in turn were surrounded by the Daily Mail's flying circus of bigots with biros.
Sadly the Mail reporters were outnumbered by reporters from the BBC.The non-story was the lead item on both evening news broadcasts, along with the statutory appearance of a muttonhead from 'Migration Watch'.
The BBC now dignify that xenophobic outfit with the designation 'think tank'.
The last time that bunch of race zealots had a thought that was anywhere near rational or accurate Mafeking was still waiting to be relieved!

The hysteria that the press and the coalition government has been whipping up over the last few weeks has been distasteful in the extreme.We are constantly being told that the Lib-Dems want out of the coalition.
Well if they want a reason to ditch the Tories,then the scaremongering about migrant workers is the best case so far.It is something that should offend every liberal conscience that lurks under the yellow bird of freedom.
Yet they are surprisingly silent.
Why?
Is the allure of being a party of government and sharing red boxes and ministerial salaries far more important than principles?
You don't need to answer that question.
The Labour Party are surprisingly quiet too,it would seem that however squalid the lie and however exaggerated the scare stories are, the loyal opposition are sitting firmly on their hands.

The tempting of migrant workers is of course very tempting for unscrupulous employers.They get skilled workers already educated and trained in their home countries for a scandalously low wage.They are allowed to drive down wages and conditions and encourage slum landlords to exploit vulnerable workers.
What is worse still is the tacit agreement to weaken the economies of already poor countries by luring away skilled workers,often from the professional services to further denude the home countries.
The reactionary governments in Romania and Bulgaria collude with the coalition to further reduce living standards everywhere.
And labour's response?
Keith Vaz at Luton airport!
What needs to happen is that Unite the Union needs to have organisers at every entry point and ensure that every worker coming to Britain has a union card and union protection.Further the Unions must make it a condition of support for Labour that we are not satisfied with a minimum wage, but we want a living wage for everyone who works in this country.
Migrant workers enrich and enhance this country, and should be welcomed without equivocation-but the Labour movement needs to protect them and ensure that everyone has a living wage.

If trade unionism is to survive it needs to be international.If the bosses can open offices in Bucharest to recruit workers-then on what street is the Unite Office in Bucharest!