Is the drift tothe right inevitable?

For those of us on the left times are looking bleak at the moment.The election in India of the avowedly right wing BJP seems one more desperate victory for the forces of reaction.It is a party that grew out of a far right militant bunch that admired Hitler and has a history of violent racist attacks on minority communities.
They are simply not nice people.
Yet part of the problem is that the Congress Party played into their hands, the once leftist party of the struggle for Indian independence has become mired in nepotism and corruption.
And you don't have to look fae elsewhere to see the same traits emerging in political parties of the centre/centre left all over the world.

France, Germany,Italy,Spain,Ireland,Greece most of former Eastern Europe and you see the dame pattern emerging.
Left Parties often with proud radical traditions and history have become corrupt empty vessels that bear little resemblance to the movement that they grew from.
Even the once might ANC in South Africa is now led by people most socialists would cross the street to avoid.
How has it come to this?
Well I suppose the template in many ways is the Labour Party here.A party founded with the name 'labour' in its title.That should be the clue-a party for the people who labour by hand and by brain, a party created by working people's organisations to give them a voice in the democratic process.
A party that was different from all else that went before.
On the spectrum of socialist/social democratic parties in Europe the Labour party was always on the social democratic,gradualist wing,and liked the notion that it represented the respectable working class.From its foundations it preferred the section of the class that wore suits on a Sunday and were ideally Methodists with a trade.
However those pesky unskilled noisy workers kept joining  and brought with them uncouth agitational habits like striking and demonstrating and causing class based mayhem.
As well as the rowdy street agitators the Labour Party also attracted a section of the intelligentsia who brought ideas,frequently more in keeping with the traditions of Marx than those of John Wesley.
However from whatever tradition they came they brought an idealism and a vision of the radical possibility of change.Not simply a little bit of liberal tinkering here and there but wholesale social engineering that changed the whole alance of the relationship between capital and labour.

Not for our forefathers the crumbs from the bosses table-they wanted the whole bloody bakery!
What was true in this country was true everywhere, the ideology of socialism was one that required the necessity of change with as little compromise as possible.

Gradually those principles were eroded away,but even as late at the mid 90's there seemed some possibility that change on a massive scale was just possible.Then came Thatcherism,the Chicago School.Monetarism and the collapse of the deformed workers. states throughout Europe.
None of this was really a surprise, as they were all pursuing the goal of the free market.
And to put it simply,once to accept the economics of the free market, then the ideas and the ideology follow s swiftly.
That means the values that sustained the socialist vision fly out of the winbdow, ideology is simply another commodity that you buy and sell, that you pick and choose according to taste.
Perhaps the defining moment in this country was when the cynical popinjay Peter Mandelson declared that he was 'relaxed about the filthy rich' 
And so the habit of cutting corners,buying power and influence,and endemic corruption became the leitmotif of much that passes for social democracy today.
And that then lets the far right in, it allows them to posture about 'the political class' and how different they are to 'the mainstream'.Make no mistake the appeal of the sanctimonious pigs bladders like Farage and his ilk are difficult to fight because so many passes have been sold by the 'modernisers'.

Of course all the evidence show that they are just as corrupt and venal, just think of Berlusconi and he stands for all that is evil and unwholesome in the body politic.But then remember that he got his first start in Milan by cosying up to Craxi,the leader of the Socialist Party of Italy.

"You don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"  
Well right now the left internatonally needs to see which way the wind is blowing and start thinking about how we reform, and no, we won't take advice from the SWP and neither will we borrow Gordon Brown's fucking moral compass!      
            

Desperate men do desperate things

It will be interesting to see who blames who if the whole referendum story in Scotland doesn't turn out quite how the masters of the universe predicted it would go.
Already they are blaming dreary Darling for making a complete arse of the 'No' campaign, and the Tories are getting ready to blame Labour for their failure to keep the Union intact and labour are blaming the Tories for only being half hearted in support of the status quo.
It could have all have been so different, and why didn't they see the possibilities coming down the road?

I believe passionately that an independent Scotland is the best solution, both in terms of the people of Scotland but also in the best interests of the working people of England too.
An independent Scotland might give the ;lacklustre labour movement in England some cojones.It might convince them that the only way is not Essex and that a progressive settlement is possible.

If Scotland can do without the obscenity that is Trident, why England could do without it too, and the £25 billion a throw on a useless submarine,commanded by the USA anyway,might be shown up as the waste it is so obviously.
One consequence of Scotland getting shot (sorry for the phrase) of Trident would be the thorny issue of where to relocate the bloody thing.
Fine when its in a berth up near Glasgow, a little more uncomfortable however if it had to be parked somewhere near the home counties-in Hampshire for instance!
If the nimbys don't like a few council houses or a downmarket supermarket on their doorstep-imagine their reaction to a fully armed nuclear sub skulking at the end of their waterfront?
That would certainly bugger up the property prices!

The Unionist parties have thrown everything at Scotland, including the cabinet,the shadow cabinet, the Bank of England,a herd of Generals,Admirals and Air Marshals, as well as bankers,oil companies and even Favid Bowie.
But those stubborn Celts appear to be ignoring the plaintive howls from the South and even being love bombed by Cameron and Miliband.  You'll know when things are getting desperate when they send Clegg up on a sleeper to Aberdeen.
What I find strange is why the Tories are bothering.They instinctively hate Scotland and Scots, and of course the feeling in mutual.With only one MP in Scotland, as the joke goes, there are more pandas in Scotland than Tory MP's.
It is easy to see why Miliband needs the Scottish seats, the 41 Labour MP's are his only hope in 2015.That's why that old hasbeen Gordon Brown was sent on the stump last week.His presence no doubt added many thousands of 'Yes' votes.
I bet Alex Salmond is praying that they enlist Tony Blair's silver tongue in the 'No' cause!

Yet it could have been different.If from the outset Scotland had beeen offered a Federal option, with the right to control more of the economy, foreign and defence policy as they affect Scotland and a greater degree of fiscal control, I suspect that would have met with approval all over Scotland, and in many parts of England not in thrall to the London hegemony.
It would have given Scotland an alternative to demonstrate that a social democrat, if not a socialist state could prosper away from the bleak negativity of austerity Faragism.

I am impressed however by the astute leadership of Alex Salmond and especially Nicola Sturgeon.They have both played a blinder and have gaugedthe mood of the coutry.
It is of course possible that the 'No' vote will prevail, the combination of all the big guns focussed on Scotland plus the scare tactics that are the stock in trade of the Unionists might still win.But the anger will still be there, and it will only be a matter of time....

Mind you id the SNP had promised to create a Scottish Republic,left Nato and nationalised the oil industry,rhen I think there would have been no contst!
    

And you thought only the Stuarts had a divine right to rule!

Three hundred odd years ago the people of this country fought a civil war to end the divine right of Kings.

They almost got there,but sadly when the crunch came old Noll was disinterred and his head stuck on a pike.

The old order reverted, and whilst they lost the 'divine right' they retained the right of succession through a bunch of useless German princelings and princesses right up to the present day.

From the preposterous Hanoverians to the mediocre Saxe-Coberg-Gothas.

But at least we had an elected parliament that allowed some degree of democracy,albeit it took most of that 300 odd years to get anywhere near a free equal and working democracy.

For much of the time parliament was ruled by rich boys from top public schools,often from the landed gentry.many came from the military,the higher reaches of the legal profession and were frequently large landowners or obscenely rich factory owners.

Thinking about it not really much has changed!

But of course many of them, when the couldn't buy the odd totten pocket borough or the land where the borough itself stood  made sure that the parliamentary power kept strictly in the family.

Most of the great landowners made sure that political power was dynastic-that seats passed from father to son in the usual ordered way.

Then about 100 years ago a great change appeared to happen, a small number of working stiffs got themselves elected,many started out as Liberals, but in 1900 the emergent trade unions decided that Liberal toffs with a scattering of working class Liberals did not really represent their interests.

The labour party was born.

A party that represented working people, their needs and their aspirations.

It was never a revolutionary party in the sense that the Levellers and even the Diggers were in Cromwell's' time.Indeed it was nothing like the great revolutionary parties and movements that were churning up Europe and had been since 1848.

What was important was that the Labour Party was not a party of privilege and was not one with a hereditary principle at its core.

But asa social democratic party it found itself a house divided.For decades it was never quite sure if it was a social democratic centralist party with a tinge of socialism or a socialist party with a tinge of social democracy.

Generations of good men and women gave their life to the party because they believed that whatever the foibles of the 'leadership' at any given time its collective heart was in the right place.

This has of course allowed it to degenerate , as the Thatcher era destroyed much of the strength and solidarity of the trade union movement the Labour Party, with no strong ideological core simply drifted into becoming another 'political' party.

So it attracted in growing numbers men and women who if push came to shove would join whatever party deemed to give them the best chance of a political career.It didn't really matter what the party stood for, as ling as they could chat up a selection meeting ot buy off a few local party officials or trade union hacks.

I well remember years back when an aspiring parliamentary candidate came to solicit support for the Northampton South constituency.

What a speaker the guy was and how he paraded his working class credentials before us.His father had been a miner, his granddad had been a miner, even as far as I can remember his fucking dog had been a miner.

He of course was a barrister! Now by the way in the House of Lords!

And where have we come to now?

Why the dynastic Labour Party.Neil Kinnock's son,married to the Prime Minister od Denmark no less has been selected for the safe labour seat of Aberavon (be interesting to see where his second home will be located-or maybe his third one)

Then we hear that Jack Straw's boy is going for a safe Labour seat(wasn't he once done for possession of drugs?)  and it would appear that the offspring of the noble Lord Prescott is on the hunt for a safe Labour berth.

But if that all stinks of nepotism then the worst of all is that Euan Blair,son of you know who is hoping to be parachuted into the safe Labour seat of Bootle on Merseyside(majority 21,000) His claim is that as his mum came from Liverpool then thats alright!

Is it possible that in the whole of Merseyside the Labour Party there could not find a working class candidate?

Are they so bereft of talent that they need a London lad educated at Brompton Oratory to speak for those inarticulate scousers?

Is this what the workers party is now reduced to/

I know people can point to the Benn dynasty and say that it has happened on the left, but I suspect Hilary Benn was carefully vetted to make sure that his was not infected by the old mans radical politics and I suspect there were many in the party hierarchy who were nervous of another Benn.

Luckily they got one of their own.

The sad truth is that the party is now picking candidates few of whom have any trade union experience or local government experience either.

Clones by any other name,

A party whose idea of inspiration and values has nothing to do with Keir Hardie or Nye Bevan but rather Dolly the Sheep! 

postscript
According to the local press in Liverpool Blair will only get a chance at the shortlist if the 81 year old sitting Mp decides to stand down voluntarily,then the party nationally can designate the seat a 'women only' shortlist.If however he decides to stand again-they can't.
The irony here is that it would appear that he too believes in a sort of hereditary principle(he wants his agent and the current leader of Sefton to replace him!) 
So the outcome might be that young Blair,who part owns a £3 million property in London with his mother might end up representing one of the most impoverished constituencies in Britain!     

Exquisitely Dumb-and she's the Culture Secretary!

Maria Miller is seriously dumb.The events over the past few days have revealed once again that national politicians think and behave like Plantaganet Monarchs.or worse Stuarts! They really seem to believe that they have some sort of divine right to rule,that are somehow part of a 'political class'.

Trouble is that the hysteria surrounding the narrative of 'Another fiddling MP' serves only the press and Nigel Farage.
I refuse to be stampeded into the lobby of the Daily Telegraph bleating about press freedom and the glories of a free press.
Lets get one thing straight from the outset this country does NOT have a free press.It has a bunch of censorious oligarchs as bad as any who hold sway in Russia.They own vast swathes of the media,they control much that passes for television,radio and the new technologies and all of the press.
The dailt Telegraph has for long been the authentic mouthpiece of the Tory Party, and will long remain so.What we are seeing is not an assertion of their freedom  merely a shot across the bows of the Tory Party to remind them who the real masters of the universe are.
Next week the barclay brothers will get back to the usual business of beating up on trade unions, working people and all the myriad of demons they like to conjure up to frighten the masses.
Frankly I think it was despicable of any so called 'journalist' to doorstep and elderly couple and badger them about their living arrangements.
It was mean and shabby and not even central to the story.
The story was that Miller over claimed on her mortgage and when found out tried to bluster her way out, and when all else failed got her parliamentary mates to reduce her repayment from over £40k to about£5k.

That is the real scandal and that is what she should be punished for,not her parents and not about being rude to the House of Commons.
I'm also getting a bit fed up with Labour members standing on the dignity of the parliamentary process and aall the old guff about the sovereignty of the 'Mother of Parliaments'

What we have is a huge majority of time serving  numpties.Without ideology and a reason for being in parliament its just another job and so many of them are interchangable.Remember only 13 Labour MP's had enough of the ideology of socialism to remember whose side they were on when it came to support people on benefits.
Apart from members of the SNP,PC and the Green Party the majority of 'honourable members' trooped into the coalition lobby to support further cuts.
And that's where Farage will win support.He is a sleazeball of monumental proportions.He is so like the poujadists of inter war France.But like his great mate Le Pen he is using populism to win popular support, and its interesting just to see how much exposure he and his sordid racists are getting in the popular press.

It is of course no coincidence.The one thing the political class, the media and the populist politicians most fear is a literate and organised working class.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about the referendum in Scotland is that after many hundreds of years there is an awakening of political thought north of the border.
People are starting once again to think not just about what the press tells them to think but they are thinking and discussing ideas.
It's as if the Enlightenment  has caught the public imagination once again.      

How careless to make the same mistake!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But when your dead.....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone is an expert now!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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