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!

A sad thing to do on Christmas Day.

It seems almost perverse to write a blog on Christmas Day, okay there is not much television, there are no newspapers today and its many hours before I confront my Christmas partridge( not mercifully on a pear tree) . However this Christmas I am more than a little disturbed, a few days ago we had a conversation with an old friend in California, Skype is a wonderful tool. Susan, our friend, who is usually the spirit of optimism, the sort of American who could well have been up along there with the founding fathers( except of course she would be a founding mother) who left the old autocracies and tyrannies of Europe to create a new world in a new continent in the spirit of the Enlightenment.

Friends of mine are often quite surprised when they hear me a hardened cynical old leftist speak warmly of the creation of America. Of course it has a history much of which is hideously reactionary that includes the destruction of the Native American people, the ruination of much of the natural resources of the country and of course the horror that was slavery.

Yet yet it's hard not to admire the courage of those men and women who founded the country, who resisted the imposition  of the British Empire and who wrote the constitution that has never been bettered in the history of mankind, although sadly today much of it is ignored and treated with contempt and outright hatred. I know Thomas Jefferson kept slaves( although his death  gave them their freedom) and John Adams may have been a bit of an old detail merchant( yet in the constitution he wrote for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts it enshrined equal education for girls) and even George Washington was a bit autocratic at times.

Yet America produced heroes who challenged the old world  and sought change for the benefit of all mankind, dear old Tom Paine, an East Anglian by birth would have been a remarkable man at any time in history.

So when Susan talked last week about the fears she has for her country drifting into some sort of tyranny, ruled by a despot it seemed to me that her world view was far too pessimistic even for someone living in the belly of the beast.

Then in Sunday's Observer there was an article by Heather Cox Richardson a professor of history at Boston College and sent shivers down my spine and I've been thinking about Susan's words  and also Prof Richardson's piece the last few days. If you have missed the article consider please the opening sentence:

'Since January there have been frightening signs that America is becoming an oligarchy overseen by dictator. From the first, Donald Trump has followed an authoritarian playbook,, beginning with his rejection of objective reality.'s early on to defend the assertion that the crowd at Trump's inauguration was the biggest ever witnessed, presidential spokesperson Kellyanne Conway explained that the administration used"alternative facts". Since then, the president has repeatedly attacked fact-based media as"fake news". Indeed, with his insistence  on alternative reality, from sometimes seems like an elderly Fox news- addled neighbour suddenly given power to make his bizarrely warped view of America  real'.

Prof Richardson goes on to say chillingly:

'But now, it feels all too real, with from delivering on the economic core of his vision.  He has slashed regulations that protect workers, walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership,attacked theAffordable Care Act("Obamacare") and gutted the government. Finally in a dramatic"win" for his administration, the Republicans last week passed a major tax overhaul that slashes taxes primarily for the wealthy and is projected to create an almost $1.5 trillion deficit. Republicans have already said that the only way to address that4 will be with cuts to Medicare and Social Security you.

Prof Robinson pointed out that for decades he has been the policy  of the Republicans that government needed to be small and that regulations and taxes weakened the power of big business to prosper because of course they argued that strong business would eventually ensure a wealthy economy that would trickle down to the poorest in society(sound familiar ?) That's why they were bitterly opposed  FDR'sNew Deal that got America out of the 1930s depression. She went on to draw attention to the policies of Ronald Reagan, whose Conservative policies which argued that government was not the solution to the contrary is problems government he argued was the problem. Of course what that meant was that the poorest in American society got poorer and the rich richer, and more than that it was a white racist policy, because of course so many  Afro-Americans were indeed the poorest and most dispossessed  section of the community.

Reagan personified the rugged Individualist, The myth of the American cowboy hero riding outTo save the virtue of the beautiful white girl.

Trump represents the spirit of Reagan with balls on(an unfortunate image), he has used in a few short months racism and misogyny and as Prof Robinson puts it:
"Brags about how he knows better than anyone how to run a successful business, how to find Isis, how to find  the"best people"for office...... Turning the government over to small cadre of wealthy businessmen, unhampered, to run the country so see fit. When Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore will his cowboy hat and rode his horse to the polls in Alabama, he was deliberately embodying Republican individualist principles.'

If you add to the tribalism and racism inherent in the American Republican right  then it's only a small short step after trashing the press, the State Department, the security services and the FBI and relying only on a small group of unreconstructed Alt-right Crazies(And remember that Nigel Farage is one of them) then the stage is set at some time in the near future for America  to fall apart in chaos  and then the strong leader will emerge taking all power in his own hands(and those of his chums) and declaring that America has redefined democracy in terms of what you would call it- how about neo-fascism?.

Best try and see the musical'Hamilton' before Trump removes the passports from the actors and declares them non-Americans.

A not very clever man has taken over the White House, could things get any worse?

Listening to Trumpy is not something I recommend to anyone of a nervous disposition. Everyday and in every way he seems to be getting more and more disconnected, not merely with his so-called job as president of the United States, but even as a mediocre passing the time of day human being.

It would seem to me that he has lost all touch with whatever reality passed between his ears. In fact the world of the Donald reminds me acutely of what used to be my favourite film, shorthand title was always Marat/Sade and it was based on the play by Peter Weiss and directed by Peter Hall. In case you don't know or have forgotten the story was about a play but on in the asylum by the inmates and directed by the Marquis de Sade. An engaging sexual pervert who gave his name to the practice of sadism. The film was in many ways cruel, complex, and yet very entertaining and the politics were probably on the right side of goodness if not morality.

What is happening in the White House today reminds me of the activities in the asylum and the disconcerting reality is that Trump has none of the finer qualities of de Sade. The play was of course a satire both on postrevolutionary France, and to some extent modern Europe. What however is happening today is very far from satire indeed it is beyond satire. There is no comedy  writer who could invent Donald Trump, I can think of no scriptwriter working in the cinema are on television who could recreate a creature like POTUS , Indeed if the most powerful man in the world needed to wear a baseball cap to remind himself that he was the president of the United States then I fear we will need for the zeitgeist.

A lot of words have been bandied about to describe just who what the president is, I have no doubt what he is he is to put it bluntly an unreconstructed fascist. People are pretending that when he tweeted the videos first put on Facebook by the woman who is the deputy leader of Britain First He could not have been unaware of who she was and what her organisation represented, it is an avowed extremist organisation that exists to spread racism, and to create division amongst people. It is a fact that it has gained the support and approval of no less an organisation in America than the Ku Klux Klan – that must say all you need to know about this organisation. By implication it would seem impossible that the most powerful man in the world would not know the source of his fake news and its purpose.

But then he already has a track record of supporting racist extremism in America, just think Charlottesville. Of course we should all realise where his political trajectory comes from, to use the phrase America First is not an echo of the American fascist movement before the start of World War II. Woody Guthrie, whose guitar always had the slogan'this machine Kills Fascists'wrote a brilliant song about the American First movement who did not want America to enter the war against Nazism and as Woody said"They say America first but they mean America next."

In an ever more complex and interconnected world isolationism is a lousy solution it breeds vision and ultimately war, there is no middle ground. It has echoes all over Europe and many other parts of the world today, it is the underlying meme that is Brexit – the political equivalent of being a Millwall football hooligan who thinks everyone hates him. Let's build big walls, customs posts, padlocked the doors and block up the windows let nobody in and with a bit of luck the rest of the world won't know we're here and then we don't have to speak to them. Whilst the notion of ourselves alone might have worked 50 or a hundred years ago it is no longer valid in this century. Those who want to cut off the rest of the world can only do so by creating a ghetto, Trump wants a ghetto where he can rule supreme for as long as his hair doesn't fall out. Farage longs for a little Englander nation that doesn't have to talk to foreign people (but of course he still happy to take a pension of £73,000 from those foreigners across the channel!)

The world has never been more interconnected and it seems more than ever that the human species must hang together almost certainly it will hang separately.

It's about time I spoke again to the Nation

Well, what a tangled web some people seem to weave.Whose covering what up?In a world dominated by a 'superpower' that manages to elect a 100 carat moron as it' President and 52% of the British population can believe a phoney statement written on the side of a bus  I suppose anything can happen.
And that appears to be the new reality,fake news has always been with us, the only difference today is that the fake news is probably the real news and the pillocks who denounce the news as fake are themselves fakes .
Right now we are in the middle of the crisis of confidence in the behaviour of members of Parliament and Cabinet ministers and who knows who else? I have no doubt that there are some shady people operating within the palace of Westminster, But that's hardly news fake or otherwise. People with power tend to abuse that in the process of self-aggrandisement and the usual construct of ego tripping.
Why should we be surprised, what bothers me, from a socialist perspective if the anyone should be surprised. Way back at beginning of the last century when the Labour Party was created it was set up to represent the interests of working people unlike the Tories and the Liberals who represented the then, as now, the power elites who owned most of the wealth and behaved with the arrogance of the ruling class. Parliament is not a neutral benevolent institution designed to promote fairness and equality or justice. For a century the Labour Party has tried to amend and to make Parliament more representative of the interests of working people. It has made some progress over the years it has sometimes defended the interests of those who elected it to represent them and has fought against the worst iniquities of the class society which we still find ourselves in.
There are some who believe that the class war is a historic war, over and done with and we all live in the Sunny uplands of a benign meritocratic society. That we are all equal, that we will have the same chance, that we all benefit from the system equally
. Yet the news about the way the rich and their hedge funds and their secret companies and their offshore investments are able to salt away billions of pounds without paying taxShould really remind us all about the society that we live in. Why even our own beloved Mrs Saxe-Coberg Gotha can manage to hide millions of pounds in some territory in the Caribbean really demonstrates what's going on. Of course we are told that dear didn't know where money was going, the old dear who guards seriously her wealth and her position, to believe that she didn't know her advisers were stuffing chunks of fortune in offshore accounts is a bit like believing in fairies are the divine right of kings.
By now Parliament should be able to put a stop to the shenanigans of those who rule, be they the old aristocracy or Lord Ashcroft. But then that is assuming that Parliament has the will or the capacity to change the power structures in this country.
And so I come back to my original point about what's going on in Westminster today that it attracting so much prurient interest, the sex lives of the denizens of the Gilded Palace. What I find disturbing is Not simply the arrogance and exploiting of positions of power but the dreadful reality that the reasons why so many of those young people who are assaulted do not report what happened to them is that they will damage their career chances. Working as an intern should not be seen as a step towards a parliamentary career, for a socialist working in Westminster is not a job in itself but a task to help the liberation of the people that they are supposed to be working for,And that is the core of the problem, MPs certainly from the Labour Party should be not professional bourgeois .politicians but rather representatives of their communities.It seems to me whether Labour representative calls himself herself a politician then that's where the rot sets in. The poet EE Cummings said of politician" he's an arse on which everyone sits except a man."
Politics is not a trade or profession, it is not a route for someone to make a career, or to get rich, or to be powerful, or to be idolised – the best people in parliament have been those who came from being elected by their workmates to represent them against the bosses to fight for their rights in the workplace and to serve not for themselves but for those who have no voice and need someone to act as a spokesperson. I despise those in the Labour Party who see themselves as politicians and not socialists, who see a career structure be it as a full-time union official, being a councillor, or being an intern or a Parliamentary Assistantis that will look good on their CV When they go for interview to a constituency party.

PCC – who needs them?

In a piece in the Times a few days ago Jawad Iqbal, a former BBC executive wrote' Police and crime commissioners, your time is up'. It struck me that it's taken the mainstream media a long time to realise that PCC's really never had time, it was an ill-conceived, dumb beyond belief, idea whose time had never come.

Of course we know what was behind the concept it was an idea that originated in the United States where they elect police chiefs, local dog catchers, and even dangerous and mediocre TV celebrities as President. The whole notion was designed to centralise political power over a public service into the hands of one person, which of course means that he or she is easily manipulated and will do what central government wants him to. PCC's are a shameless political appointment designed for greater central control and of course to allegedly save money.

The whole experience has been a disaster during the first round of elections the average turnout was 15%, during the second batch of elections the percentage went up to an average of 26%, because of course it was held on the same day as the county council elections.

We in Northamptonshire had probably the most inept and useless PCC in the short history of PCC's. His name was Adam Simmons, and his experience such as it was, he had been the political assistant a.k.a. gopher for the leader of the council, to the Tory group on the county council. Added to which it would appear now that he actually lived in Leicestershire, so much for being the local police and crime Commissioner.

Nationally PCC's control a policing budget of £12.5 billion and they have the final say in appointing a chief constable. They can also appoint their own staff and in Northampton shire's case that meant for instance one of the deputy PCC's just happened to be the Tory election agent for Simmonds election. You may have noticed by the way that Neil the PCC's deputy had any actual experience of policing, or indeed any experience of running a large complex organisation, but no matter they were loyal party placemen and women. Simmonds made a number of appointments to his staff which resulted for instance in him having the largest public relations department of any PCC in the country and indeed larger than any previous police authority.

He also had grandiose plans, to recruit hundreds, maybe even thousands of special constables, to create a policing college at Northampton University, to target crime and to bring down the crime statistics, to create a faith commission under his auspices and to pretend that he was the reincarnation of President John F. Kennedy and I understand he even installed a rocking chair in his office as well as a photograph of the late president and he called his office the West Wing.

And of course he decided to sell off the police headquarters, build a new one outside Northampton and indeed many miles away from the M1 motorway. Of course he wasn't simply moving the headquarters which by the way include a training suite, a training ground for practising riot control, a firing range and dog kenneling and motor vehicle repair shops. All of those as well as communication centre were to be spread all over the county and staff moved accordingly. Of course he wasn't going simply to close the headquarters he was going to convert the building into a free school based on religious principles (he being a passionate Evangelist) in an area where there is actually no need for extra school places. The fact that he got the county council(remember who you work for) to build a roundabout outside the putative school at a cost understood to be around a quarter of million pounds.

I suppose the creation of a super high powered mock presidential crime Commissioner might have been worth having had he not managed at the same time to reduce the number of full-time police officers, to demoralise those who still worked for Northamptonshire and all this while crime figures went up. The simple reality is that there are fewer police officers on the beat, and those that are are working larger areas with fewer officers.

Northampton-shire's experience is not unique, in Iqbal's piece he points out that crime figures in England and Wales show the biggest annual rise in a decade, with rising levels of the most serious and violent offences:
"All the more reason for precious funds to go into front-line policing – not into a discredited vanity exercise that flatters the egos of compromised busybodies and failed MPs".

Of course there has always been an argument to democratise policing in this country, in a county like Northamptonshire it is possible to organise a directly elected police authority with each district having one or two elected members who by the way could be elected on the same day as  county council elections and that way the entire county could have representation without maintaining the farce of a police commissioner that at best was a lousy experiment. We now understand that the PCC is going to take over the fire service – such a proposal is the way of madness. I hope that the next Labour government will move to a directly elected police authority and this tragic wasteful experiment will be ended for ever.

A fable for our times

Once upon a time there was a garden with potting shed at the end of it, that was where the man who worked in the garden kept his tools. It was also where the other tools lived, and they were commonly known as the Cabinet.

Outside the potting shed there was a number of strange -looking orange pots, and in the middle of the strange -looking orange pots there was a little weed, she was commonly called a Mayflower, but the naughty boys and girls  who lived across from the potting shed and sat on rows of green leather toadstools will forever ragging the little Mayflower, who many regarded as a weed and every time she got up to speak to warn the naughty children across from her that she was strong and stable they just laughed.

Most of those naughty boys and girls were roses of one sort or another, and mix with them were a bunch of very jaggy Thistle's also jeered at the little weed and her strange orange pots that lurked in the shade of the potting shed where all her other little friends were hiding and plotting to chop the little weed down. They were almost no probably more naughty than the roses and thistles who sat on the green toadstools opposite. They her friends in the potting shed believed that she, poor little weed had betrayed them and had promised to be strong and stable and had turned out to be a heap of meaningless manure stop

The little weed could do nothing right, well that's not exactly true everything he wanted to do was right, indeed almost as right as her almost friend Nigel the poisoned fruit bat(sorry fruit tree) but Nigel was not in the garden, not even in the potting shed and in fact he had cleared off to be with his friend across the water Trump the termite(who thought by the way he was in fact the terminator but of course he couldn't spell that when he tweeted and so he settled for being a termite)

When the weed had decided that she was going to show all those naughty boys and girls who were bullying her and laughing at her shoes and making rude remarks about her expensive leather trousers and she decided that the best way to do that, the most austere way to do that was in fact to call all the naughty boys and girls bold the ones across from her on the green toadstools and the raggedy arsed mugwumps back in the darkness of the potting shed, to impose on all of them a day of reckoning, which she decided would be 8 June.

However things did not go quite to plan, and all those millions who lived outside the garden decided it was time to rain on her garden and instead of planting hundreds of new austerity plants and harvesting even more helpless, hopeless, homeless, unemployed, poor, useless mugwumps who would do their duty and lie down for the weed, the buggers listened to the bearded rose grower sitting opposite and they, the great unwashed mugwumps turned their back on little weed.

All the things she wanted to do like punish the young mugwumps and punish the old mugwumps and punish the sick mugwumps and of course build a big tower out of Lego to stand proud in the garden which you called a Brexit tree.

Four weeks she had been telling all the mugwumps that there was no such thing as a money tree, but there were hungry trees, poverty trees, austerity trees, coffin -shaped trees for the old mugwumps but certainly no money trees – zero, nada, absolutely zilch.

As her dreams fell apart like her friends in the Cabinet in the potting shed, she had even less friends than when she started, so she looked around the garden and saw standing grimly in their bowler hats and unusual orange sashes 10 likely looking new friends. And so while the garden fell into chaos and disorder she asked her strange pot -shaped new friends if they would like to play with her in the garden.

"Surely wee weed, we'll come and play in your garden,but ye ken we'll want to see your lovely money tree first. And we will need to shake that money tree a wee bit"



"Of course strange barrel-shaped orange coloured fellows and fellowess(by the way I view related to my orange friend across the sea?) What would you like from my lovely newly discovered money tree? A free ride in one of the Queen's aeroplanes? Would you like that my new orange friends?"

"Away to F**k, as our revered Master Dr Paisley would have said, we don't want much just a wee bit to get by on, so wee weed we'll settle for a nice round figure, give your money tree a good shake and we'll depart with a nice round billion poonds!".

And they did and nobody lived happily ever after in that garden until the weed was sprayed weed killer and the strange bowler hatted orange coloured men and women were returned to their box.

Even Peter Hitchens can be right sometimes.

The events in Manchester tragic though they are her produced a welter of handwringing and piety, everyone in the dog has had to get into the act and of course in the middle of an election campaign it has seemed as manna for the political opportunists that inhabit just about everywhere.

Reading the Mail on Sunday I got much of what I expected, the prattling of Amber Rudd and the usual bellicose pronouncements of those who believe you can somehow have a war on terror, which in reality means war against small groups often one or two men, not an army, not an identified force simply mavericks who have a distorted and perverted view of the world. You cannot legislate against such insanity, the best preparation can only be within the community.

Oddly enough the person in the Mail who seemed to understand the nature of what is happening appears to be Peter Hitchens, the right-wing libertarian irritant but on this occasion he appears to have it absolutely right. He argued in his column but the presence on the streets of Britain by armed squaddies carrying an array of weapons and dressed in jungle fatigues would somehow make things better, a show of military force would somehow subdue the individuals who threaten such atrocities and their presence in uniform would somehow replicate a war zone.

Of course that is a nonsensical idea and is Hitchens quite correctly pointed out it is but the first step towards a state that accepts willingly the sight of armed troops on the streets, in the stations, in the shopping malls, and even on the beaches. What the young soldiers are going to be able to do in a crowded town centre is anybody's guess, it might frighten the jihadists but it terrifies me.

Hitchens argues quite correctly that the best thing we can do is to ensure there are many more community policeman in our neighbourhoods who know what to look out for and who to look out for, for instance a local lad with a beard and a wild eyed look with siting verses from some religious tract loudly might well draw attention and a community beat officer would be aware that it was something unusual.

We can never eradicate the problem of the young man who for a variety of reasons be it a mental condition or a problem connected with for instance drugs or alcohol or even simply completely alienated from the community around them.

For years we had what used to be called community policing and it worked, local beat officers stayed in the areas they policed four years and got to know and were trusted by the people they were charged with policing. Knowing your local community is the only real and genuine prevent strategy, not people swaggering around with machine guns or driving fast cars with sirens blazing.

That is why Jeremy Corbyn is actually giving a strategy that can assist and prevent the problem that we see today. Let me make it clear that the notion of a war against terrorism is absolutely barmy and an unsustainable strategy for a government to pursue.

Which brings me on to the other sensible piece of writing I have read this weekend in the Observer Kenan Malik asked the question of why so many young people see radical Islam as being the root for changing society

.

"The institutions that shaped what are now called  'Muslim Communities' were not mosques,but secular and political organisations such as the Indian Workers Association and the Asian Youth Movements.The struggles of Asian communities were intimately bound up with wider working class struggles."
Malik makes the point very clearly that often in spite of reactionary right wing forces in many trade unions it was the unity of working people that brought together al workers in a common struggle.He cites  the Grunwick strike of 1976 when Asian working women took a year long action against a rapacious boss which then alerted the broader movement to the injustices those workers were faced with,and a solidarity movement grew from there.
It wasn't Imams or clerics or any religious impulse that created that solidarity, it was old fashioned working class unity in action.
it seems to me that despite what the yellow dog press bark about,and the dog whistle politics of the nasty party, the last few days have revealed more that just the resilience of the people of manchester but the dawning recognition that more and bigger guns on the street is not the solution, or indeed the fatuous suggestion from a UKIP member that we should re-introduce capital punishment for suicide bombers (!)
It is possible that come June 8th many more people will have seen through the no-solution solution of May and we will be once again a country of the Enlightenment-for all!

"

The phenomenon of the working class Tory

Theresa May is trying to pretend that she is trying to entice a new creature  called a 'patriotic working class tory' to break their historic links with the Labour Party and throw in their lot with the proletarian party of Sir Robert Peel, Benjamin Disraeli,Churchill,Thatcher and all the other monstrous creatures of wealth and privilege.
I'll let you in toa secret-there have always been such snivelling patriots crawling about,always willing to believe that their lords and masters care about them, and value their hard-working contribution to the nation,as long as they work hard,keep their mouth shut and are grateful for what little they are given.
Oscar Wilde knew well all about 'the deserving poor' who accepted their lot without question,did what their masters told them and never questioned anything.Wilde admired those who rebelled, who refused too acquiesce in their own subjugation and always seek to find someone worse off than themselves so they could give them a good kicking.
That is of course the root of all racism, if your at the bottom of the pile,don't ever question those at the top with their boot firmly on your neck, find someone that you can plant your depressing little trotter on-it'll make you feel that wee bit more superior and allow yourself to puff out your patriotic hest a wee bit more.

What do these working class tories really think when they wrap the Union Jack round their 'patriotic carcasses and sing 'God save the Queen' and talk about the superiority of the 'British way of life' in some sort of ritualistic religious fervour ?
Do they really think that the Royal house of Saxe-Coberg-Gotha  really gives a toss for those loyal working class toilers who wave their pathetic wee flags whenever a royal personage deins to nod in their direction?
Do they really think they have a special connection with a monarchy so remote from real life that a TV series that portrays them as cartoon characters in a make believe world is worth being connected to?
Do they really believe that when asked to go and risk their life in a foreign state thousands of miles away they are really doing it for their queen and their country ?

In case any working class tory gets round to reading this here blog let me make it clear.I am very patriotic- but my patriotism is not the superficial toadying to the rich and powerful who will lie and cheat working people out of their rights,the things they have fought for over generations, their aspirations and their hopes for a fairer and more equitable country in which to live.
When they burble on about the virtues of Brexir and taking back control of their country they are deluding themselves.Working people have never had control of this country although they, we are capable of doing so.
I am a patriot, but my patriotism starts and ends with my class, and my understanding starts and ends with working people all over the world.I have a common interest with teachers,woking or retired,in America or Sri Lanka or Croatia or anywhere than I have with Donald Trump,Theresa May or even Lord Mandelson.
To put it as simply as I can,so that even the dimmest working class patriotic tory can understand my definition of patriotism is solidarity-end of story.

Whatever else he is at least Trump is consistent

You sense what ever Trump is then at least he follows a clear and obvious trajectory, that is the one consistency of the Trump is the fact that he is inconsistent. His current act of irrationality in bombing and airbase in Syria and provoking not merely their regime there but also the Russians and probably the Chinese.

The explanation that he has given for the attack was that he watched on Fox television the chemical weapons attack and he was upset at the sight of Syrian children dying as a result of the attack. Strange therefore that this is the man who really didn't give a monkeys about Syrian children who were drowning on refugee boats in the Mediterranean and wants to close the borders of America to refugees from places like Syria the they men women beautiful children!

But then over the last 10 weeks we have seen nothing from this man other than hypocrisy, irrationality and absurd decisions.

This is the man who boasts that he has never read a book although he claims to have written 17 books, I wonder how difficult it is to write a colouring book? To put it bluntly the man is a dangerous illiterate and when experts say that the world over the last 48 hours has got closer to a dangerous war situation we need to think carefully about what happens next.

The fact that no one knows what is likely to happen and what this dreadful man is capable of I think we need to be very afraid, in my column in the Chronicle and Echo a couple of weeks ago I argued that the world needs the American people to impeach the bastard very quickly.

His inconsistency is revealed in his attitude to events in Syria. Just two years ago in his inimitable literary style he tweeted that Obama must not cross the red line and commit American troops to any further action in Syria. The whole premise of his America first policy is predicated on non-intervention anywhere in the world, he even wants to build a wall to keep either Mexicans out of America or Americans out of anywhere else that looks vaguely like Mexico.

He also argued that Obama shouldn't do anything without congressional approval and what he did do on Thursday why he launched 92 Tomahawk missiles without congressional approval. Once again Donald a hypocrite the man with the colouring book and blunt pencils has achieved the rare distinction of changing his mind and putting not just his bloody golf causes at risk but the whole world

The perception among commentators is that he is doing this to show that he really isn't a bosom buddy of Vladimir Putin, that way he can deflect the criticism that the Russians using cyber attacks help him win the presidency. As the evidence piles up then that is in fact a plausible explanation for his behaviour, distraction is the best way to draw the world's attention away from his insanity.

However I think he is not simply aware of the need to distract the people of the world from his criminal behaviour I think he needs to distract the people of America from the fact that his promises during election were nothing but flimflam

The most interesting thing I have read this week has been a well researched article in Time magazine, Much was made in his campaign about saving the American coal industry, how he was going to reverse the Obama policies on fossil fuel and climate change. He was going to make American coal great again

He won in states like West Virginia with promises of rebuilding the mining industry, it is possible he was aware that the Obama legislation would make the difference to the future of mining in West Virginia, it was already clear that mining was in serious decline and that the move towards natural gas obtained by the process of fracking was taking over.

West Virginia produces 60% of the coal it did a decade ago and employs about 12,000 people as coalminers down from more than 64,000 in the 1970s. Apart from the market forces that are changing the power industry in America there is the simple fact that after 150 years the coal supplies are running out, what coal remains is far deeper and far more expensive to extract.

When Trump was making his promises last year he must have known the truth of the situation after all he is supposed not only to be a famous writer but also extremely astute businessman. He must have known when he went on the stump trying to win votes in those desperate states that he was not only being economically with the truth but in fact was lying to the people

Everything he does appears to be carefully crafted lies and he is on a daily basis being found out even his passionate supporters in this country like Nigel Farage are realising publicly that the man will say anything and do anything to win power. He accuses people like Assad are being a demagogue and a dictator

I suppose it takes one to know one.

I suppose I should mention Brexit

I have to admit that I'm already extremely bored by the whole European debate.

Many years ago when I was young and innocent I supported the campaign to keep Britain out of the European Economic Community, or as we on the left called it the European Employers Confederation.

I should have realised right from the start that the anti-Common Market group in Northampton was a weird bunch right from the outset, as well as those of us from the left of the Labour party and the Communist Party (well both of them really) there was a smattering of small business people,a few strange patriotic nationalist/royalist types and some people who were really just lonely and wanted company-small group mentality I suppose.

Way back in 1975 it did appear to me that the EEC was really only another way to market monopoly capitalism, to dress up the greed and avarice of the ruling class in a more presentable manifestation-"Look you dumb workers' we're in te business of keeping peace in Europe-hooray for us"

Just as a passing thought, if you consider the events over Europe in the last 40-50 years, that great vision ain't been a resounding success,well I suppose Germany and France haven;t torn great chunks out of each other-but the fate of former Yugoslavia has been nothing to write home about.

And of course the thought that somehow the resurgence of fascism would never happen again

has on a daily basis proved to be a hollow aspiration.

However on balance I voted in last years referendum to remain. I voted on the grounds that it was the least bad option and as the leave campaign was based on nothing more than racism,bigotry,phoney patriotism and peopled by the sort of people I'd cross the road to avoid voting remain was a no-brainer.

But I have to admit I voted reluctantly with no great enthusiasm,and I still find it hard to have any sympathy for the 'European project' especially after the brutal treatment meted out the people of Greece-after the European banks had assisted the Greek banks to collapse their economy.

But we are where we are.We have over the last decades suffered from the retreat from socialism by the Labour Party leadership and the feebleness of the Trade Union movement.

The Labour Party effectively capitulated to the SDP.It may be argued that the SDP failed, it took few MP's with it, won very little electoral success and collapsed into the Liberal Party.But it's influence within the higher levels of the Labour Party remained and indeed strengthened under Blair.

Blairism was  all about managing capitalism,and of course  that is at the heart of Europe,even today the core of Blairite thinking is how far can we compromise with those who Mandelson was so relaxed about-'the filthy rich'

Look how close the Blair cabal were close to the founders of the SDP, and indeed how many former SDP apparatchiks crawled into positions within  New Labour !

But in a way all that was to be expected,the hollowing out of socialism within the Labour party was no surprise, what however has proved to be a far bigger crisis has been the acquiescence of the Trade Unions.When people talk about the good things the EU has brought us they tend to talk about improvements in workers rights,benefits,improved standards of equality and so on.

That may be all true, but I was brought up to believe that bosses never willingly give better conditions to workers,they have to be fought for and won.We know only too well that New Labour made no effort to repeal Thatchers' anti-trade union legislation  and we know too that timidity by the TU leaders has been a result of the hollowing out of trade union strength and the regular failure to demonstrate practical solidarity with workers in struggle because of the failure to repeal anti-trade union laws by New Labour and the reluctance by many union leaders to fight for change in case their members became too militant.!

Back in 1975 our romantic vision was for a United Socialist Europe-that would have been something,but perhaps better than that would have been a Trade Union movement that was Europe wide.Just as capital knows no national boundaries and capital can be switched from one place to another at the click of a switch-a factory goes here,a plant is closed there...

Just imagine how things could be,teachers in Italy are fired,and teachers all over Europe strike or lorry drivers in Malta are victimised and the roads across Europe are empty !

The slogan used to be Workers of the World Unite- right now I'd settle for Workers of Europe Unite !    

 

Trump couldn't deal a hand of pontoon

In my column in the Chronicle and Echo a week or two ago I argued that the best thing the American people could do would be to impeach the dreadful Trump.

I got a response in the letters column this week from, surprise surprise the local voice of UKIP(interestingly enough my gadget that enables me to dictate this blog thought that UKIP was actually Phucket-not far wrong there) In her defence of Trump Mrs Gibben, for it was she, bemoan the fact that I had an occasional column and she didn't.

Despite the fact that the little bunch of local kippers seem to get letters printed every week she still pursued the argument that the far right are badly treated by the media, instead of impeaching Trump she thought that Blair(I think this machine has a mind of its own for instead of Blair it substituted the word millionaire!) should be impeached. She obviously has never read any of my earlier columns or blogs where you would have found that I argued that our former Prime Minister should along with George Bush face a war crimes tribunal.

And strangely enough in her love letter to Trump Mrs Gibben forgot to mention that she had been the UKIP Parliamentary candidate for Northampton South. Obviously it had slipped her mind and obviously it could never be considered fake news or an attempt to hide who this innocent soul was from an unsuspecting public.

Yet the love of her life the unprepossessing president in the White House was not and is not the great dealmaker and political highflyer that he pretends and her party adore.

The fact that his big promise during the presidential election was that he would end within the first 100 days Obamacare fell at the first hurdle. With the largest Republican majority in Congress since the 1920s he was unable to secure a majority vote. His frequent boast of being a great dealmaker collapsed before it even got off the ground. He couldn't persuade over 30 of his own Republican congressmen to support him over his flagship policy.

The reason is quite simple his congressmen realised that to cut medical care from 24 million Americans might just damage them at the next mid-term elections. Turkeys rarely vote for Christmas.

However that is not strictly true, not so long ago a large number well over 50% of the British people or more precisely English and Welsh people voted like turkeys for Christmas. They believed the nonsense of cheap and shoddy populism that promised everything all the time to all people provided they left the European Union, the only surprise is that the populists didn't promise to rebuild Hadrian's Wall, thus emulating the knob head in the White House.

The only political thought in the empty heads ofUKIP and the Trumpists is to blame the foreigners, especially those with brown skins and a particular religion. It must have come as an enormous shock when Farage found out that the man who committed the killings in Westminster was like him born in Kent(incidentally my machine went off again and called Farage- Fawaz-I'm growing to love this machine)

At the risk of once again upsetting our local Trump lover I hope the sensible people of America get their act together and begin impeachment procedures against the brute, otherwise as well as punishing the minorities in his country, as well as intimidating people from other religions, building an ugly wall across the American Mexican border, as well as trampling over the historic rights of the Native American people I fear that the Bozo will probably declare war on North Korea, China and anywhere else he sticks a pin in his child's atlas.

Whatever Jeremy does is wrong

We live in an age of instant comment, when even the president of the United States tells us his thoughts before he's even had them. So it's hardly surprising that the leader of the Labour Party's is more often susceptible to having words and thoughts put into his utterances before they are even altered

Then of course they are deliberately misinterpreted by those in the Parliamentary Labour Party and elsewhere who wish to cause mischief and undermine Jeremy Corbyn's position. There has been no clearer example than today in the commentary about what Jeremy said about the possibility of another Scottish referendum.

There can be no doubt that if the Scottish people and the Scottish government request a rerun of the last referendum in the light of the Brexit vote then that is surely the right of the people of Scotland regardless of what Westminster, Prime Minister, the Daily Mail or even Nigel Farage(it's amusing by the way that my Bluetooth dictation software interpreted Nigel's name as barrage- quite appropriate really)

All Jeremy said was in fact echoing leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, if the people north of the border determine that there will be another referendum then no one in England or anywhere else has the right to interfere with that decision.

It is clear that there are many in the Parliamentary Labour Party and elsewhere who find it difficult to recognise that the loss of Scotland was not as a result of Jeremy Corbyn but rather the result of decades of neglect and arrogance by those who led the Labour Party previously. The crisis that the Labour Party currently faces is the loss of confidence by traditional supporters in working class areas that have been taken for granted by elitists and those who felt they could be parachuted into traditional Labour seats because they thought it was their right, their God-given right shop

The message that Corbyn has been giving out since his election as leader is similar to the one that Bernie Saunders is giving to the American left. The reason evil Trump won in traditional industrial states like Illinois, Wisconsin, and Ohio was because too many ordinary people have been taken for granted for too long stop

It is important that the Labour Party learns that lesson, with half 1 million members throughout the country it should be possible to rebuild a political base where it matters, right in the heart of those communities that have been betrayed and forgotten for so long stop

People elected Labour councillors and Labour MPs in the same way that they use to join trade unions and recognise all have is our solidarity and our capacity to work together, not to be in this together not to be just about managing but to take control of our lives and win our struggles at the lowest level as well as at higher and more meaningful levels. Labour lost Scotland because it was complacent, in order to build or rather rebuild its base in Scotland then it needs to listen not to the siren voices in Westminster but rather to the people of Scotland want something different.

There is of course a solution to what has happened, it's not simply about winning back parliamentary seats in Scotland it's about a whole new settlement. And of course it's not simply in Scotland alone any more, the elections last week in Northern Ireland has shown that the old ways are now history there is a nationalist and republican majority in the province, that cannot be ignored or wished away.

The solution of course and one that the Labour Party must embrace is a creation of the Federation of Independent countries within what we know as the British Isles. I would like that to be a Federation of republics owing no allegiance to a feudal monarchy and a system of government that is at least 300 years out of its time.

Each nation of the British Isles must have an independent and autonomous parliament and instead of the present system the second chamber, the nonelected House of Lords must be replaced with an elected Federal chamber that represents the independent nations but can cooperate on those issues like economic infrastructure, foreign policy and I even concede national defence or rather I'll concede that there should be some sort of civic defence force that can assist in times of emergency and that doesn't need bloody Trident!

.

There is of course the question of the Republic of Ireland, but it would be possible for a united Ireland to be part of a Federation of the British Isles, indeed that would make a great deal of sense. This piece has travelled a long way from the puerile attacks on Jeremy Corbyn over his recognition that Scotland has changed and can no longer just be a handful of northern seats in Westminster and simply voting fodder for the London elite.

Labour may not win many seats back in Scotland, but with local MPs representing their communities and working with the grain of the people of Scotland then it will be possible I believe to build a new social democratic alliance and who knows maybe even a socialist one.

What happens after Copeland?

The recriminations have been going on the last three days what happened in Copeland is everybody's fault but mostly Jeremy Corbyn. Or so say everybody who hates the Labour Party who hates leadership of the party who hates the possibility that there might be a socialist party in Britain trying to break out of the inertia of the last two decades.

What is most depressing is the endless criticism of Jeremy Corbyn and the endless blame game that so many in the Parliamentary Labour Party and elsewhere seek to put on Corbyn. What is odd is that all those who call for a new leader are reluctant to name that new leader he appears to be the leader whose name we dare not speak of. It is a safe there is a spectre haunting the Labour Party and that is the one that we dare not speak its name but we imply that he is some sort of Prince over the water or some businessman/property owner/world leader in exile whose name inspires fear and loathing throughout the country.

It is time to make it clear that what happened at Copeland was nothing to do with Jeremy Corbyn or the changes that are taking place in the Labour Party. What happened Copeland is as everyone seems to agree a result of the alienation of working people from what was once the People's party. How did that happen everyone is asking but come up with only one explanation "it must be that dangerous Islington radical with a beard and a history of standing up for such causes as international justice, defending the health service, fighting racism, opposing monopoly capitalism and representing ordinary working people.

Copeland was once a seat of one Jack Cunningham, he was the son of a huge power broker who was a leading figure in the GMB union and by way of remembering a friend of T Dan Smith once big cheese in Newcastle. The fact that Jack the Lad was parachuted into Copeland of course was merely a coincidence. If you want an explanation of what went wrong in Copeland there is only one word that can explain it and that is Scotland. Jeremy Corbyn was not responsible for the loss of over 50 seats in Scotland, what happened there was the people of Scotland were fed up with being treated simply as voting fodder for a Labour government and the Labour Party that took them for granted and gave nothing in return.

Until the Labour Party nationally and locally understand what Jeremy Corbyn means when he argues that the party needs to be built up once again from the bottom, from the local communities organising, agitating and educating then the Labour Party is doomed to be irrelevant to most people's lives. It is interesting how badly UKIP did in Stoke a place where they were expected to do well

There is no doubt that there were many people in Stoke who believed in the right-wing ideology of UKIP, after all not so long ago that Stoke had a bunch of BNP councillors and indeed it had the highest brexit vote in the country. But the reason that Stoke did not go far right is probably because UKIP chose as their candidate someone not from the town but rather parachuted in because he was the party leader. The people Stoke had already had that experience of someone being parachuted in, Tristan Hunt, who decamped to the Victoria and Albert Museum a job approved by the Tory government was like so many others of late in the Labour Party. He was the chosen candidate of Lord Mandelson and the Blairite clique. I suspect the folk of Stoke new what sort of candidate Nuttall would be, they are ready had that experience.

The lesson of Copeland that needs to be learnt is that the party will only succeed when it selects Parliamentary candidates and indeed local council candidates who actually represent the people they claim to. They need to come from the communities that they wish to serve, they need to know the real issues that confront real people daily and not what the press office and spin doctors of the party tell them.

Much of the criticism that has been levelled at the current leadership has been prefixed by the notion that the leadership is out of touch. But if you live and work in the community then you know what the issues are that concern people and if you live in a working-class district then those problems are there on your doorstep every day.

That is not an ideological position it is old-fashioned common sense, it is the sort of common sense that socialism was born out of, when Keir Hardie was elected in a Welsh mining constituency it was because he knew about the lives of miners, after all he had been a miner himself.

When you look at the grandees of the Labour Party or rather new Labour Party what you see is indeed a political elite. The fact that many working people have seen through the contempt with which the Mandelson's and the Blairs and all like them hold working people in, then the rise of populism of the right cannot be ignored. But you do not defeat such populism by appeasing it but rather challenge it and remind people that we still live in a class ridden society and the only people who can resolve the problems of working people are people themselves

The world has gone mad or so it seems

This is an experimental blog, I am not writing it I am in fact dictating it to a machine that is called Dragon, and so far so good.

Talking to a machine seems more sensible at the moment than watching the news or even reading a newspaper everything seems to be going to hell in a hand cart. It's hard to believe that the United States, the place where people fled to escape tyranny, intolerance, hatred and all that could be found in the old world. Who could believe that the country that called for the huddled masses to seek sanctuary could end up with a bizarre president like Donald Trump. Of course America has a dreadful history it massacred the indigenous people set about creating unfettered capitalism and it destroyed everything in its way.

America, has been a contradiction since the founding fathers laid the basis of a nation that was in many ways a product of the Enlightenment. Of course even founding fathers were not perfect, even Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and my favourite president John Adams was not above a bit of political chicanery but compared to what we have now he was indeed a shining light in mankind's history.

It's hard to believe that the country that has so many different peoples, but has a history of almost tolerance- you have of course to remember Phil  Ochs memorable song "Mississippi find some other country to be part of". America cannot forget or ignore the tragedy that was and in some ways still is slavery. But for a few years it seemed that the American people understood that dreadful history and was prepared to make changes to ensure that Afro-Americans, that Latinos, that Native Americans would eventually be treated with equality and justice.

As someone who hated the American hegemony who objected most strongly to American imperialism who objected to the exploitation of other people's by the US military it did all seem to be changing. There was a time when after the Vietnam War there was a dawning in popular consciousness that America was no longer the world's policeman, why it could even elect an Afro American as president, there was a moment in history quite recently that things seemed to be getting better.

But all that fell apart last November when the political establishment of the Democratic party elected as its candidate another waste of space. There was a time when it would have been possible to have welcomed Hillary Clinton as a real change but that time came and went and we were left with just another opportunistic mediocrity. Had the Democrats listened to the mood of the people and perhaps given Bernie Saunders, the Vermont Senator the chance to bring a new political vision to the jaded elite and enthuse the millions of young people who are believed that Obama was merely the start of a new process of political involvement then who knows what could have happened.

However we all know what happened we know that a cynical manipulation of public opinion a juxtaposition of the notion that a billionaire property developer somehow could speak for unemployed factory workers and the urban dispossessed is frankly absurd.
Horror of horrors, as I was reaching the end of this near perfect blog, no spell checks nothing going wrong the phone rang as i was reaching my conclusion, and the dictation process ended.So you may never know how far I think the world has gone mad!

How much bleaker can it get?

There have been many dark times during my sojourn on this planet.Like so many others I thought the time of the Cuban Missile crisis in 1961 was a highpoint of grimness.If you remember it was a time when a new and inexperienced US president, advised by such halfwits as J Edgar Hoover and John Foster Dulles and even his younger brother-the US Attorney-General and onetime  assistant counsel to Sen. Joe. McCarthy.
The Russian leader N>S> Khrushchev seemed at the time to be a bit of an adventurer but in hindsight played a canny hand, and by removing some missiles from Cuba got a guarantee from the Americans not to invade Cuba,and that agreement seems to have held-until now!
That was then and now is now.
Nobody needs a rehearsal of the tragedy that has occurred in the US.The cleverest and most sinister election campaign has resulted in a 'President' that makes Nixon and Reagan seem moderate and reasonable and even gives George W Bush a patina of intelligence.
Things must be bad when billionaire Koch,principal funder of the tea party numpties has called together a bunch of fellow billionaire right wing donors to find ways of shutting down Trump.
Even the most reactionary free market zealots have spotted that protectionism,a trade war,closing borders and picking fights even with the right wing media is not healthy for the good old American capitalist system.
The red necks may well have rallied behind the demagogue and they may well believe that he will open all the mines in West Virginia and the steel  plants in Ohio but the masters of the universe know better and as a more savvy class of capitalist know that their favoured system of exploitation requires the international movement of both capital and labour.
Probably something a frequently bankrupt property developer was unaware of, but even he might have noticed that one of the auto companies he wants to talk to is called 'Fiat-Chrysler'-bit of a clue in the name Donald.
But then of course he shuns elites,preferring to hunker down with his red-neck buddies and those of his supporters in the white sheets and the pointy hoods!
Why I'm so depressed is not simply Trumpy, I have confidence that the American people will take care of him,sooner I hope than later -impeachment is one of my favourite words, and Tom Jefferson and John Adams put enough hurdles in the constitution to screw up any passing illiterate narcissist.
My worries are not simply   lodged in the White House,the contagion is far wider, the arrogance of the Brexiteers and the growing strength of the far right in Europe.
there is indeed a spectre haunting Europe right now and it 'aint socialism, it's national socialism.
What we are seeing step by step is not a revolt against elites, not a resistance to the haves from the have-nots it is pure unadulterated racism! and for the moment Trump and Farage and those like them have given respectability to Le Pen and the rest of the fascist rabble throughout Europe.
And in turn the pressure is on to give way at the edges- Labour politicians burbling about 'immigration' and 'controlling numbers' and the Tories sneaking in little bits of legislation to satisfy the Daily Mail and the Daily Express.
Curb health tourism today is the big idea, although they have to admit that it costs 1/1000 of the NHS budget, and will almost certainly cost more to administer as the BMA (hardly the natural base of the SWP) point out 'implementation will cause chaos in the health service'
I understand tat the former Archbishop of Canterbury,Lord Carey,thinks we should,nt be beastly to the Donald.
The dead parrot sketch lives and breathes after all!



 

Return from the dark side to another dark side

My last blog was October last year.I was then stricken by the palsy and but for a couple of brilliant paramedics, a whole bunch of doctors and a series of seriously talented nurses ,especially young Vlad I might have been putting this together of a celestial plane(or do I mean plain!)
However it turned I had a minor stroke and after a night in NGH I have been becalmed in Western View-not quite observing the sunrise but reading a huge biography of Rasputin( who by the way comes across as a paragon of sanity compared to Trump.As a matter of fact the people of America might have done better electing a long dead Russian monk of dubious morals than sa still breathing billionaire of dubious morals.
The only still remaining vestige of my strokette is frequent typing errors,infernal slowness and handwriting that now resembles a seven year old child.
My events in November just reinforced my belief in the NHS,well in fact the brilliant people who work in it not the parasitical Tory politicians who are trying to dstroy it, the greedy drug companies who are fleecing it on a daily basis and the monstrous privateers who are working hand in glove or more  precisely hand in pocket to dismantle our health service.
It is no coincidence of course that one of Trumps' most passionate ambitions is to destroy 'ObamaCare' as quickly as he can.
Lets not beat about the bush (which the world should have done to George Dubbaya) this shallow creature is firmy in the pockets of the big pharma companies and  insurance conglomerates.
It's also of course no coincidence that his big mate is that booby Farage,whose party is keen to dismantle the NHS too,whatever they say.
Of course we are hearing on a daily basis May and Hunt claiming the NHS is safe in their hands-and anyone who believes that really needs to see a mental health practitioner (if of course there are any left)
There are many reasons for the current problems in our health service,the major one of course being chronic long term underfunding.The Tory solution revolves around us all living longer-that pesky health service did its job too well and has kept too many of us proles breathing too long.They want to ration health care,to insist that we don't trouble hospitals until we're really on our last legs.
I wonder if 95 year old Phil the Greek will ever spend a few hours on a trolley in a corridor ?
But it's not just underfunding, the cunning plan is to kill off as many GP's as possible by imposing seven day working on them and expecting them to add loads of other things to what they already do, and on top of that spend no more than five minutes a patient.
then they wonder why nobody wants to be a GP these days,and as wll as losing existing doctors the numpties and to make sure that fewer trained doctors come over from mainland Europe.
You couldn't make it up.
Funding is indeed the major problem.but thee are others.
What clowns thought PFI would be a good way of financing the building of new facilities ? Borrow money from the private sector and end up in hock for dcades! (don't answer that question-just think it)
And of course the brilliant wheeze some years ago called 'Care in the Community'-remember it ? The notion was to close all those 'expensive' post operative hospitals like the one at Pitsford,sell the land off, and assume that post operative care would be dealt with the private nursing homes,local authority care homes and by families supported by visiting care workers paid for by local social services.
It all seems a different time...
It seems to me that the only thing that can change  this dreadfully depressing litany of horror is a Labour government based on an understanding of socialist values.That always reminds me of Ken Loachs' film 'Spirit of 45' when Clement Attlee spoke the the party conference and believe it or not used the's' word- you know the one that Jeremy Corbyn uses quite a lot.
I was born within a year of the founding of the NHS.So if you want to blame anyone for its problems, blame me-not that nice Mr Hunt(of whom it was reported today will acquire £16 million from the sale of shares in a company he owned)
Yup- blame me, it was all that free orange juice and cod liver oil that they doled out atthe childrens clinic    

'I was so much older then,I'm younger than that now '

A short wallow in nostalgia, with all the appropriate cheesy cliches to record the latest Nobel Literature laureate.The fact that Bob Dylan,who  was awarded the prize last week has been the recipient of so much abuse and rancour is good reason to celebrate his award.

Indeed if Bob had been of a nervous disposition, or a shy retiring Labour MP he would have probably reported the critics to the National Executive and sold his story to 'The Sun'

Crowds of mournful critics have bleated out of every orifice that Bob is no poet ot writer and should never be allowed into the world portals of 'literature'

Most prominent amongst the arbiters of literary taste has been the Scots born novelist Irvine Walsh- whose claim to fame is the semi-literate novel 'Trainspotters' or some such tome.

Well,can you remember a single word the numpty has ever written ?

If he is the measurement of modern literature then indeed we've need for the zeitgeist !

I can measure my cultural awakening (classy huh!) to my early encounters with Dylan.The cliche 'soundtrack of my life' is something more than another banality.

I grew up in London in a Scots working class Communist household.The earliest 'soundtrack of my life ' was the curious eclectic discordance of Paul Robeson,the Red Army Choir, Jimmy Shand and his band and because my Mum liked his voice Jim Reeves.

It was ever so ,there is a curious bit of the psyche of all Scots  that they appear to have an unhealthy affection for country and western music.

Now it could of course be the simple affinity between Celtic fiddle music and the tunes and stories that the early settlers took across to the mining communities in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Kentucky,a style we romantically describe as 'blue grass'.

Or of course it could just be an attachment to slushy sentimental pap,after all.Consider the stirring airs of Irish popular music and what passes for the same in Scotland.How can you compare 'A Soldiers Song with Andy Stewart singing 'A Scottish Soldier' -FFS! 

But as I grew older whilst still enjoying Paul Robeson I was moving into political activity,and that meant going to YCL socials where everything was sedate and almost genteel-a scratched recording of the Red Army Choir was often on offer or a visit to a smoky back room in a North London pub where bawdy folk songs were wailed by bearded blokes with their fingers stuck in their lugs in the style of Ewan McColl or American union songs in the style of Pete Seeger.

Interesting how smoky back rooms are often depicted as the backdrop to revolutionary conspiracies-we know Uncle Joe liked his pipe-but did old LD Trotsky puff away on a cheroot ?

Of course in my more proletarian incarnations a tacky scout hut on the Holloway Road was a venue where we swirled around like demented hornets singing 'I'm 'enery the eighth I am,'enery the eighth ...' whilst a mediocre four piece played out of tune.

Around the age of fifteen or so I forsook much of my musical heritage when I found Dylan.My Saturday job was in Islington Central Library, a much coveted Saturday number where we were paid handsomely-35/6 a day,a rate for schoolkids that the union Nalgo negotiated for us (in those days unions even protected part time schoolkids and we weren't even members)

The average Saturday wage at the time in grim North London was £1.00 a day so my  £1.75 was a cut above.

I also learned how to carry an armload of books that went over my head and found out the hard way what it was to be bawled at by a head Librarian (to this day I can remember Bob Crumpton's unique command of the English language)

Across the road was a record shop, and with my first 35/6 in a wee brown envelope I went in and invested in my first wholly owned LP of my own choice , and for 15/6 I possessed Dylan's second album 'Freewheelin' Bob Dylan'.

The soundtrack of my generation.

I suspect there are few of my age who are unaware of so much of his repertoire and who cannot forget the inspiration that Bob gave us, through the civil rights fight,the Vietnam war,the fight against apartheid and all the domestic and international struggles we lived through and fought through.

Of course there were others that followed,Phil Ochs,Joan Baez,Tom Paxton  McColl and Seeger and then the generations that followed.

There were other styles and genres that followed and arguably have also changed people's lives.

But like Bob:

"I was so much older then,I'm younger than that now."

Perhaps 70 is the new 25!

And Irving, if you think your a writer......up yours!   

 

    

Agitate,educate and organise!

When we left beautiful Dubrovnik on Saturday morning we were fairly sure what the result would be from the conference in Liverpool.
we were not disappointed and I suppose we have to thank Owen Smith for confirming what many of us knew, that the Labour Party is no longer a snivelling collection of careerists and policy light clones but is emerging as a Socialist party, indeed now the largest one in all of Europe,and is becoming less and less the 'hollowed out shell' that Jason Cowley described last week in the New Statesman.
That's a bit ironic really given that the NS, along with it whinge-mate Progress  and all those other New Labour types has been the cheerleaders for 'moderate' politics, or to be more precise 'do as little as possible to rock the boat' politics of the last three decades.
However there is still a great deal to do if the Party is to be turned into one that can give leadership and hope to millions who are being crushed on a daily basis by austerity and the laughable pretensions of the so called 'political class'.
There is no such thing as a political class, it is a creation of wishful thinkers who believe if they say it often enough then we will get used to the perpetual rule of an elite.The one that the NS called the 'golden generation'-you will of course remember them, Douglas Alexander,James Purnell, the Miliband Brothers and of course the all dancing Ed Balls.
it is now up to all those thousands of new members to move on from hoping for change to creating change.
But some stable cleaning has to take place.The first and most important is that the witch hunt against members by the Party officials must end.It cannot be right that the thousands of new members subscriptions are being used by officials to trawl facebook and twitter and websites to find something someone once wrote eons ago and rehash it as being evidence of 'bullying' or 'deviation' or somesuch old tosh.
I guess when the thought police come to look at my scribblings over the years there is enough to cast me into the outer darkness several times over.(I forgot they already did that,at my last appeal they found stuff I had written ages ago on this blog-strangely enough it was a comment I made about Dennis Skinner becoming a parliamentary character-I'm glad by the way I got that wrong!)
However if these latter day heresy hunters had been around a few decades ago, well old Nye would have been slung out for calling tories 'vermin' .
So the first thing that happens must be the muzzling of the heresy hounds.
Then the Party needs to understand that endless bleating about unity means nothing other than offering a cover for plotting and scheming to go on with endless pious references to 'taking on the Tories'.
You don't take them on by wagging a petulant digit and then having a pop at JC.Neither does it mean stuffing inane leaflets in letterboxes,asking people what they want or offering to collect their litter or empty their dustbins.
In every area people have issues that confront them daily, some are small irritants, others are major problems,caused either by austerity or lousy Tory administrations.
What is required is for Labour Party branches to get involved in local struggles,to play a leading role, ina word to AGITATE.
There are many good examples, the best and most obvious one in Northampton at the moment is the plans by local Tories and big business to construct a highly dangerous and polluting incinerator in the St  James area.All the sophistry and preachy resolutions about creating business plans or understanding the problems of waste disposal and blah blah will not help the people living in the potential shadow of the monster.
I am delighted to see some Borough Councillors notably Gareth Eales taking a lead in the campaign, but it i9s just the sort of campaign that the Party should be organising townwide-that is real leadership within the community.
Which leads on to the second strand of what the Party needs to do-EDUCATE.
Every campaign that the Party participates in,if not leads should be about explaining in clear terms what is happening and why.Far too often, Councillors and indeed MP's get caught up in the management speak so beloved by bureaucrats at every level.If you want to know why people are turned off by politicians, can I suggest to those who are the public face of the Labour Party listen to themselves sometime, instead of preening in front of a camera,listen to what you are saying.
The reason why JC so resonates with so many people is that he speaks people-not jargon!

Lastly, if the Party is agitating and educating it needs to ORGANISE.That is the first lesson of the history of our movement.Even those farm labourers in Dorset understood that they needed to organise their workmates in the village-of course they got deported to Van Diemen's Land for their trouble, but at least they knew what had to be done.
Everyone talks about winning the next election, but to put it simply,stuffing semi literate leaflets in letterboxes is not organising, it's political drudgery at it's lowest level.The trade union movement learned what to do 150 odd years ago.
If Labour is to win council or parliamentary seats it won't be achieved by having a top heavy bureaucracy that spends its time sifting through members Facebooks and studying rule books like racing form books.As a simple suggestion with all the new money in the party,why not deploy Regional staff and indeed head office grand poohbahs into local constituencies, not simply to prepare for elections and design leaflets but get out into neighbourhoods and act as political organisers throughout the year.As a matter of fact as well as union officials on picket lines,LP organisers should be there too, offering to workers in struggle facilities to support their actions.
Labour Party organisers,activating and education within the communities,supporting members actions, supporting trade unionists,supporting tenants ,supporting claimants at the Job Centre.
"Where workers strike and organise,it's there you'll find......"  
Now wouldn't that be grand.