Dave's Part

Dave's Part has moved to www.davidosler.com

2006-11-26T15:57:00.000-09:00

Fresh from another triumphant blog makeover - this time on behalf of Inveresk Street Ingrate - Geordie htmlmeister Will Rubbish has done the business for me over at www.davidosler.com. Ta muchly, comrade.

All future posts will be at the new place, although this blogspot site will be kept on to preserve the comments. If you link to me, please update accordingly. And if you don't link to me ... now's the time to do so.

Most of the benefits of the switch accrue to me as the blogger, of course. The new site will be much more reliable - 'nothing ever goes wrong', Will insists - and easier to use.

But small improvements from the reader's viewpoint include categories and a 'recent comments from ...' bit in the sidebar, which should make it easier to get debates rolling.

Dave's Part now gets about 350-400 unique visitors a day, a vast improvement on the traffic when it started out last March. That total is rising rapidly, too, so thank you all. But please ... more comments! More tip-offs!

Saturday Night Music Club: Davis and Coltrane

2006-11-25T10:12:00.000-09:00

Kind of Blue era Miles and Trane. Doesn't get any better than that, does it? Love the way Davis uses Coltrane's solo as an excuse for a fag break, too.

Saturday Night Music Club: Robert Cray

2006-11-25T09:35:00.000-09:00

Tonight's SNMC is supposed to be a guest post from young blogger Kit, provisionally titled 'A Guide to House Music for Old Farts'. But it still hasn't arrived.

So, for the benefit of blues-loving OFs everywhere, here's the very great Robert Cray doing his classic number Smokin' Gun. I'd give my right arm to play guitar like that. If that wouldn't be self-defeating, of course.

Cray is one of the few artistes of whom I actively seek to own every recording. But despite being a fan for 20 years, I had never caught him live until he played the Jazz Cafe in Camden earlier this year. He didn't disappoint.

George Galloway: near miss

2006-11-25T08:35:00.000-09:00

Friday night. Stroppy meets me after work. I buy the girl a Jack Dan and Coke in a trendy bar in Hoxton and we discuss the plan for the evening.

Ruby Murray, suggests she. Being Hank Marvin, I don't need my arm twisting. Not long afterwards, we are sitting at the window table of an unpretentious curry establishment on Hackney's Kingsland Road. I've got my back to the window, the Stroppy One is facing it.

The poppadoms, chutney and Kingfishers have arrived. The onion bhajees are fying. I am salivating in anticipation of the chicken jalfezi that is to come. Sometimes it takes a CJ to really hit the spot, no? Then Stroppy drops an entirely unexpected bombshell. And no, she's not with child.

'Ohmigod,' she says. 'There's George Galloway.'

'Whuuuu.... ??'

'Looking in the window.'

This takes a few seconds to sink in. I turn around. But by this point, GG isn't there anymore. I run to the door and poke my head out. In the darkness, I clock his Gorgeousness's unmistakeable silhouette - designer stubble, cee-gar, Crombie and all - heading south towards the cluster of Vietnamese restaurants that presumably took his fancy. The Respect MP - pictured above with some friends - was accompanied by another man, a woman and a child.

Damn. I'd have loved him to have chosen the same curry house as us, just to have been able to eavesdrop on the conversation. Maybe he would even have mistaken Stroppy and me for people who give a fuck about what he thinks.

RMT: John Leach elected president

2006-11-24T09:07:00.000-09:00

It’s a really good day for lefties being elected to things today. According to a press release from RMT, tubeworker John Leach has been voted in as the union’s new president, beating Ray Knight by 6,865 to 5,141 after the redistribution of votes from three eliminated candidates.

Bristol-based Alex Gordon, another leftwinger, was elected unopposed to represent South Wales and the West on the RMT executive. Congratulations to both.

National Union of Journalists: in dispute with Sheridan and Byrne

2006-11-24T08:05:00.000-09:00

When Tommy Sheridan and Rosemary Byrne quit the Scottish Socialist Party three months ago, they also pulled out of the collective agreement under which the SSP’s caseworkers, researchers and parliamentary assistants are employed.

The two Solidarity MSPs also withdrew £48,000 from the pooled account that paid the wages. As a result, the jobs are under threat.

OK, it’s natural that when launching a breakaway political party, the leaders will seek to secure the resources necessary for it to function. But that should be achieved by negotiating an equitable division of assets with the political party they are leaving.

It is unacceptable for socialist elected representatives to put these people’s jobs on the line in such a fashion.

Unsurprisingly, the employees are now in an dispute with Sheridan - pictured above - and Byrne. My own union, the National Union of Journalists, is giving them official backing. I wonder if Socialist Worker supporters in Solidarity will do the same?

You can read the SSP’s take here. And you can sign a petition in support of the SSP parliamentary team here.

[Hat tip: Harry’s Place]

Derek Wall gets Green Party top job

2006-11-24T07:10:00.000-09:00

Congratulations to Derek Wall – a regular in the comments box on this blog – on being elected one of the Green Party’s two principal speakers, effectively making him its joint leader.

This is great news for the left. Derek, an open ecosocialist, won the poll for the position by 767 votes to 705, ousting the more moderate Keith Taylor.

The development comes just months after the formation of Green Left, an organised ecosocialist tendency in the Green Party, of which I believe Derek is a member. Seems like that section of the Greens is advancing strongly.

Only a couple of weeks ago, I heard Derek speak at a public meeting, and admit that he did not expect to win. Presumably that will make victory all the sweeter.

As I have argued before, there is nothing inherently socialist about Green ideology. In Leeds, for example, they have formed a coalition with the Tories to run the city’s council.

But the Greens – in the UK, at any rate - are unmistakably an anti-establishment party. They are against the war on Iraq, they are anti-racist and anti-homophobic, the reject the current laws on immigration, trade unions and cannabis.

Where Green policies and socialist policies coincide – and they often do – then of course Greens and socialists should work together. Derek’s election will make that all the easier.

Incidentally, the Green Party has 92 Councillors on 38 Councils, two London Assembly members and two MEPs. The separately-organised Scottish Greens also have around half a dozen MSPs.

Alan Milburn and education vouchers

2006-11-23T19:33:00.000-09:00

Education vouchers. Some crackpoint idea devised by Milton Friedman, which the Tory right sniffed around years ago before giving up on as a bad job? No. The latest policy proposal for New Labour from Alan Milburn.

I have been racking my brains to think of other discredited or just plain dumb Thatcherite ideas the Blairite outrider could resurrect and present as fresh and courageous thinking.

But short of the poll tax, New Labour has already adopted most of them – from ID cards to the NHS internal market - and then some.

The reason education vouchers are a non-starter is simple. For every London Oratory School, there are many of the establishments Alastair Campbell famously derided as Bog Standard Comprehensives.

And even with a voucher, few parents would be able to afford £10,000-a-year private schools of the kind favoured by Diane Abbott.

The real alternative is not bogus parental choice, but to make every school a good school.

If you really want to think the unthinkable, Alan, what about bringing about that goal, paying for it with progressive taxation? Radical or what?

Iraq: what is to be done?

2006-11-23T09:35:00.000-09:00

The terrible news just in that at least 132 people have been killed in a series of car bombs in Shia districts of Baghdad. Greater or lesser atrocities such as this are now happening on a daily basis.

What is now happening in Iraq underlines the political inadequacy of the positions the main camps on the left adopted over the conflict three years ago.

It is increasingly obvious that both the pro-war left – remember their visions of a grateful Iraqi people strewing the path of US troops with flowers? – and the ‘Victory to the Resistance!’ brigade have gotten things completely wrong. Not that either can bring themselves to admit it, of course.

The project that movitated the invasion has clearly failed, albeit in ways I don’t think anybody anticipated at the time. It has created a crisis without any obvious solution.

The inability of the occupation troops to achieve order in Iraq underlines that the power to destroy is not the same as the power to create. The occupiers cannot build a state in Iraq, because they have no legitimacy.

Iraq’s weak government can claim to issue from a broadly democratic election, however warped the process was a result of being held against the backdrop of an occupation.

But inevitably it also lacks legitimacy, largely because the very concept of ‘Iraq’ itself lacks legitimacy, or even logic. It is an imperialist construct, which has existed for just 80 years of Mesopotamia’s 8,000-year history.

The Kurds want their own homeland, the oil-rich Shias look to Iran. The Sunnis have neither oil nor a majority, just guns and a willingness to use them.

One idea doing the rounds in foreign policy circles is some loose federal framework, with everything open to negotiation: the division of oil, water, and access to the sea.

Superficially, it seems an attractive proposition. But it runs up against many of the problems experienced in the partition of Ireland or of India and Pakistan.

The distribution of populations does not correspond to neat lines on a map. Even more bloodshed would inevitably ensue.

The move would also be unpopular in the Middle East. Many Arabs would regard it as Zionist plot to fragment Iraq for Israel’s benefit.

And there is no way the US would countenance the creation of a Sunni-dominated de facto Al Qa’eda statelet.

So the slaughter looks set to continue for years, whether the occupation forces remain or not.

I opposed the war in 2003. Nothing that has happened in the intervening period has given me reason to reconsider that opposition.

And given that it was a mistake to wage the war in the first place, rapid withdrawal of occupation troops seems the least worst option.

John McDonnell: manifesto for London

2006-11-23T08:49:00.000-09:00

With the London Labour Party Conference due to take place this weekend. Labour leadership contender John McDonnell – former deputy leader of the Greater London Council before Thatcher abolished it, of course – has launched a ten-point manifesto for London.

The centrepiece of the programme is a revival of the GLC’s famous 'Fares Fair' policy of making public transport affordable, launched in 1981, which the courts ultimately ruled illegal. And I thought McDonnell insisted he wasn’t an eighties revivalist.

But anyway, here’s the full list. Nothing that democratic socialists will have any difficulty with. The April Theses it ain’t. If anything, I reckon the call for a £7 an hour minimum wage is a little on the low side. Somebody remind me, what’s the figure for the Council of Europe Decency Threshold these days?

1. A new ‘Fares Fair’ policy for the 21st Century, slashing fares for Londoners

2. End privatisation of the London Underground, including the East London Line, restoring the tube to public ownership

3. Windfall tax on City bonuses to pay London’s contribution to the Olympics and ensure free access to Londoners

4. Restore control of business rates to local councils and abolish the Corporation of London, transferring its functions and resource base to the GLA

5. A real living wage of at least £7 per hour, plus a London weighting of 20%

6. Decentralised London energy system, based on alternative energy sources

7. No further expansion at Heathrow and no third runway

8. Halt hospital cuts and NHS privatisations

9. Emergency house-building programme, and allow 4th option, to tackle London’s housing crisis

10. Support free and comprehensive education and an end to Trusts, City Academies and tuition fees

McDonnell comments: 'This alternative programme for London will dramatically improve the quality of life for Londoners by striking at the roots of the Capital's environmental, social, and economic problems.

'London is one of the richest cities in the world but Londoners don't share in its wealth and opportunities. By using the wealth created in London to invest in its transport, environment, housing and industries we could transform the life of many of its citizens.

'Fares Fair was an extremely popular policy. It is time we restored to Londoners access to cheap, quality public transport with the consequent reduction in traffic congestion and pollution that we achieved under the GLC.'

Be nice to your boss today

2006-11-23T07:01:00.000-09:00

Britain’s business leaders are feeling unloved by the politicians right now. Of course, trade unionists among you will wonder how this can be, given the raft of business-friendly policies New Labour have introduced over the last nine years.

From subsidising low pay with tax credits to opening up the public sector through the Private Finance Initiative, the government’s motto might as well be ‘nothing’s too good for the employing class’.

Yet just like the an adolescent hoodie, UK plc feels itself in need of a hug, if this story on the front page of the Financial Times is anything to go by:

‘Business leaders are increasingly despairing of both the main parties' inability or unwillingness to champion British enterprise.

‘The heads of the Confederation of British Industry and the Institute of Directors are warning of growing irritation at the government's inability to deliver on promises, and the failure of the Conservatives under David Cameron to stand up for business.

‘Miles Templeman, director-general of the Institute of Directors, will tell members at its annual dinner tonight that business is waiting to see which party will champion British enterprise.

‘The government is too ready to kick difficult decisions on matters such as energy and transport into the long grass, he will say, while Mr Cameron has threatened to stand up to big business.

‘"There is a situation vacant in British politics for a party that stands up for business as a whole," he will say.’

I was almost feeling sorry for bosses. Almost. Until I got to this story on page five:

‘Chief executives of the top 100 companies in the UK take home an average of £3m after enjoying a 30 per cent increase in their pay packets over the past year, according to a new survey.’

Hey lads, there’s always some consolation, right?

Parenting tips for the proletariat

2006-11-22T07:17:00.000-09:00

The BBC website is offering expert parenting tips. Here’s one attributed to youth worker Shaun Bailey:

‘It's very sad that in the 21st Century, the class you come from determines your outlook on life. People from a higher class will have more to teach their children than those from a lower class.’

Excuse me?

John Monks on capitalism today

2006-11-21T07:41:00.000-09:00

Shortly after John Monks became general secretary of the TUC, I interviewed him for Tribune. Unlike some occupants of that role, he actually had a discernable personality. Unlike most politicians, he gave straight answers to straight questions.

As our meeting took place after working hours, he even cracked open the Congress House reserves of Scotch for the occasion. The blended stuff rather than the single malt, true. But much appreciated, nevertheless.

His political viewpoint, even then, seemed to be mainstream left social democratic. But as a TUC leader, he performed much as the job description presumably requires. During his tenure, which stretched from 1993 to 2003, he proved himself an outstanding fighter for the working class. Not.

So I am slightly surprised at an article in today’s Financial Times, written by that paper’s management correspondent Stefan Stern. It is based on a speech delivered by Monks – now working in Brussels as head of the European Trade Union Confederation – at a recent Nye Bevan memorial lecture in London.

Stern postulates that Monks has moved to the left since taking over his new job. I’m not so sure about that. But perhaps he feels better able to state his true opinions from a public platform.

Stern writes:

‘No one in the audience would have been expecting Bevanite rhetorical fireworks from Mr Monks. That has never been his style. Between 1993 and 2003, he led the British trade union movement with modesty and distinction.

‘He was the moderate's moderate: avoiding confrontation wherever possible and advocating partnership at work between management and employees. Business leaders were happy to do business with him.

‘They would not have found this lecture so easy to deal with. Confronted by today's turbo-charged capitalism, Mr Monks cast off his former moderation. He even seemed to be on the verge of recanting his commitment to the partnership model. "Partnership with who?" he asked. There has been, he said, a "disintegration of the social nexus between worker and employer - a culture containing broad social rights and obligations. The new capitalism wants none of it."

‘Mr Monks contrasted businesses' healthy profitability with the ruthless way some have treated their staff recently, whether through large-scale redundancies or the constant threat that jobs may be sent off-shore or outsourced. While median wages have stagnated, record executive salaries are legion.

‘He admitted that he had possibly been a bit naive in the past. "I did not fully appreciate what was happening on the other side of the table," Mr Monks said.

‘While he sympathised with business leaders for the relentless pressure they find themselves under - "It cannot be easy running a firm . . . when you are up for sale every day and every night of every year" - he was appalled by the increasingly "shameless", short-termist behaviour of overpaid corporate executives. "More and more they resemble the Bourbons - and they should be aware of what eventually happened to the Bourbons."’

Monks also reportedly hit out at the actions of management under what he called ‘casino capitalism’, a term that I haven’t heard used since the early eighties:

‘Their actions are "dangerous to economic stability, traditional industry and jobs", he said. "I would like to see the City pages of the press more challenging and less respectful on these matters . . . Our future - the world's future - is too important to place in the hands of the new capitalists."’

As critiques of capitalism go, this is more prawn korma than chicken vindaloo. FTSE-100 bosses are surely thick-skinned enough to be able to take such stick.

But it a token of just how far the Labour Party has moved to the right when such mild sentiments left of centre sentiment on the part of a union leader is deemed worthy of a full third of a broadsheet page in the FT.

Alvin Stardust and me

2006-11-20T21:40:00.000-09:00

The main broadcasting outlets are already getting their packages together for when - and it does now seem like when, rather than if - Scotland Yard decide to question Blair on cash for peerages.

As a result, I got to spend 2o minutes doing a piece to camera for ITN at Millbank this afternoon. I'll be lucky if they use 30 seconds of it. But it was a splendid book-whoring opportunity indeed.

Which reminds me. If you are looking for that ideal last minute stocking-filler for that Blairite relative you don't really like, look no further than my 2002 classic Labour Party plc, available on Amazon or from a bookstore near you.

But what really pleased me was being told that the package may also feature 1970s glam rock idol Alvin Stardust, pictured above, currently starring as The Childcatcher in the Liverpool Empire production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

The link here is that Stardust was famously a protege of Lord Levy when he was in the business of flogging 45s to teenyboppers instead of shaking down dodgy businessmen to fund New Labour.

As an avid viewer of Top of the Pops during Stardust's heyday, I can't wait for the broadcast. Altogether now ...

'Tom ... Cat! Y'know where it's at!
Come on, let's go to my flat
Lay down and groove on the mat
A-you can be my coo ca choo.'

US victory in Iraq impossible: Henry Kissinger

2006-11-20T07:58:00.000-09:00

A US military victory in Iraq is now impossible. Says who? No, not just those damn pinko Saddam apologists at the Stop the War Coalition. Henry Kissinger, that’s who.

‘If you mean by clear military victory an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control . . . I don’t believe that is possible.’

PS: I still rate Christopher Hitchins's 'The Trial of Henry Kissinger' - probably the last book he wrote while he was still on our side - as one of the best sustained volumes of investigate journalism combined with political polemic I have ever read. Truly stunning stuff.

Milton Friedman and 'the miracle of Chile'

2006-11-20T01:50:00.000-09:00

Margaret Thatcher summed up the feelings of many on the political right on hearing of the death of economist Milton Friedman - pictured left - last week:

'Milton Friedman revived the economics of liberty when it had been all but forgotten,' she argued. 'He was an intellectual freedom fighter.'

And perhaps the best case study of the kind of 'freedom' he fought for is Chile during the years of the savage Pinochet dictatorship, under which the state murdered at least 3,000 political opponents on the left.

Friedman visited the country in 1975, two years after the military coup in which the general took power, to give a series of lectures on economics. He even et the dictator personally.

Meanwhile, several professors from Chicago University, where Friedman taught and dominated the economics faculty, became advisers to the Chilean government. Many PhD graduates served in Chilean ministries, becoming known as 'the Chicago Boys'.

Chile provided laboratory conditions for Friedman's ideas to be put into practice, in one of the first and most dramatic experiments in what later became generalised worldwide as neoliberalism.

Pinochet abolished the minimum wage, took away trade union bargaining rights, privatised the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and profits, slashed the public sector and privatised 212 state companies and 66 banks.

Friedman was clearly impressed, coining the phrase 'the miracle of Chile' to describe what was happening.

The result? As detailed by the excellent Greg Palast here, after ten years of dicatorship, unemployment had risen from 4.3% to 22%. Real wages fell 40%.

'In 1970, 20% of Chile's population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year "president" Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle,' Palast notes.

Britain under Thatcher adopted a watered down version of the same programme, which brought about a watered down version of the same results. It's called the economics of liberty, stupid.

Blair, Galloway: sweet talking guys

2006-11-19T04:25:00.000-09:00

I own my readers another apology. In a post yesterday, I pointed out that Tony Blair - currently in Pakistan to meet president Pervez Musharraf - at least did not feel the need to salute the military dictator's 'courage, strength and indefatigability', as George Galloway famously did on meeting Saddam Hussein.

But I've just heard the World at One on Radio Four. There was Blair, praising Musharraf's 'courage and his leadership in taking Pakistan on this journey of change and modernisation' .

Oooh, you smooth talking bastard, Tony. Journey of change and modernisation? As I said yesterday, Amnesty International describes the direction this 'journey of change and modernisation' has taken. Salient features include 'arbitrary detention, torture, death in custody, and extra-judicial execution.'

I await the analyses offered by the Nick Cohens, Oliver Kamms, Drink Soaked Trots and Harry's Places of this world with interest. They can only be morally consistent. Can't they?

Once again, independent working class politics proves itself as the only theoretical basis on which serious socialists can operate.

Saturday Night Music Club: Jarvis Cocker and political pop

2006-11-18T14:55:00.000-09:00

Look, I'm not particularly a Jarvis Cocker fan. Don't dislike him, just usually have no strong opinions about his music, one way or the other. And I retain enough eighties feminist analysis still to feel uneasy about the use of the C-word as a general purpose insult.

But this anthemic masterpiece from the Sheffield wonderboy - the charmingly titled 'Cunts are still running the world' - qualifies as the best political pop song I've heard in years. Right up there with Lennon's finest post-Beatles output, if you ask me.

Talk about a catchy chorus. It will lodge in your brain on first hearing. Shame it's never gonna get much radio time, for some strange reason not unconnected with the lyrics. In recognition of that, here's a nice anti-commercial touch; you can download the mp3 free at Cocker's MySpace page.

The vid has already been highlighted by Darren and DSTs, but I'm happy to plug it as well. Be interested to hear what feminist readers make of it, though. After the Vagina Monologues, is the last really taboo Anglo-Saxon four-letter word now rehabilitated in polite leftie circles?

Saturday Night Music Club: gigs of a lifetime

2006-11-18T10:51:00.000-09:00

Our topic this week is gigs of a lifetime. Forget about the quality of the music. Tell us about the most enjoyable evening you ever spent watching a band.

I almost opted for one of the several Generation X shows I saw in 1977 here. Somehow, the memory of pogoing to Billy Idol and Co in the front row of the Marquee while wired on amphetamine sulphate encapsulates my misspent youth for me.

But in the end, I have to nominate the Sunday in 1979 a whole bunch of us went to watch Dr Feelgood in Leicester. I was just 19 at the time, and have to confess to a certain amount of yobbish behaviour during this outing.

Hardly surprising really. I drank around 22 pints in 12 hours. So let's just draw a veil over the runner from the curry house and my subsequent arrest for unlawful urination on railway property, contrary to a Leicester bye-law, shall we? I pleaded guilty and was fined a tenner. But that was half a week's wages then.

Courtesy of YouTube, I present the Wilko line up Feelgoods blitzing through a couple of numbers. Dedicated to Paul Anderson, who I know is a fellow fan.

Blair, Musharraf and the Euston Manifesto group

2006-11-18T09:44:00.000-09:00

The idea that Tony Blair's motivation in backing the invasion of Iraq was a desire to spread democracy in place of military dictatorship was one of the central arguments of the 'pro-war left'.

So they will presumably be perplexed by the news that Britain's prime minister is today in Pakistan to court president Pervez Musharraf, the former general who seized power in a coup in 1999. The two leaders are pictured left, during an earlier meeting.

It looks like the Pakistani strongman is in for a tidy little bung, too. Before Blair returns to London, he will pledge to double development aid to the regime over the next three years. What's worse? Verbal praise for a tyrant's 'courage, strength and indefatigability', or handing over a cheque for £480m?

The government that started out promising us an 'ethical foreign policy' ends up operationalising straightforward 'our son of a bitch' realpolitik of the crudest kind. Fair makes you nostalgic for the good old days of Douglas Hurd.

OK, OK. It's true that comparison with Saddam's Iraq, Musharraf's Pakistan is military dictatorship lite. But it's bad enough. In the words of Amnesty International: 'Arbitrary detention, torture, death in custody, and extra-judicial execution are rampant.'

So let me put a couple of questions to the Euston Manifesto supporters that read this blog. For the sake of consistency alone, shouldn't you take down that article by Tony Blair from your website?

Alternatively, if both the Euston Manifesto group and Respect are happy openly to endorse British politicians that openly support third world military dictators ... what is morally to choose between them?

Matthew Taylor: bloggers and the crisis of politics

2006-11-17T07:57:00.000-09:00

I guess I owe readers an apology. According to Matthew Taylor – Blair’s outgoing chief adviser on political strategy - this blog and others that dare question anything New Labour does are responsible for a ‘crisis’ in the relationship between politicians and voters.

Sadly, it seems the blogosphere has been whipping up a ‘shrill discourse of demands’. Notice how Taylor says that like it’s a bad thing.

Clearly bloggers are overmighty in comparison with the British state. I want immediate legislation to curb what may or may not be said online! Oops. There I go again. Shrill demands. You just can’t win.

Warming to his theme, Taylor told a conference on e-democracy in London today:

‘We have a citizenry which can be caricatured as being increasingly unwilling to be governed but not yet capable of self-government.’

How paternalistic can you get? Not yet capable of self-government? Ooh, go on … rule me, big boy. Rule me, please. I wonder what the good folks who publish the excellent anarchist fortnightly Freedom will make of that?

Taylor goes on to blame the media, including the internet, for what he sees as a crisis:

‘What is the big breakthrough, in terms of politics, on the web in the last few years? It's basically blogs which are, generally speaking, hostile and, generally speaking, basically see their job as every day exposing how venal, stupid, mendacious politicians are.’

How can I put this to you, Matthew? Let’s just say that politicians are not exactly making it difficult for bloggers to argue the case. It’s not us that are flogging peerages off the back of a lorry in return for six and seven donations, is it?

Even the most popular political blogs – Iain Dale, Guido Fawkes, Harry’s Place, Lenin’s Tomb – only secure a daily audience just into five figures. It’s hardly mass media-style power without responsibility, that famous prerogative of harlots throughout the ages, is it?

To cap it all, Taylor accuses some bloggers of having ‘anti-establishment’ and even ‘libertarian’ attitudes. Guilty on both counts, m’lud. But then, I was an anti-establishment libertarian Marxist even before they invented the internet.

It’s just that now I get to sneer at politicians on a small readership website instead of writing for small readership Trot papers. Somehow I think the government will survive.

UPDATE: I love this quote from Guido:

‘Since when has liberty been a problem? Guido intends to be a thorn in the side of corrupt politicians for a long time. There is nothing the vermin can do about it, no media proprietor for them to brandish baubles to, no job you can offer, no bribe we will accept.’

Guido can of course speak for himself. Lucrative job offers and bribes to the email address on the right, please. Cash please, New Labour. A knighthood's not a right lot of good to me at the moment.

John McDonnell on Marxism

2006-11-16T08:36:00.000-09:00

If you want to know what John McDonnell stands for, here’s the most detailed exposition of his political ideas I’ve yet read anywhere. It comes in the form of a long - and I do mean loooong - interview with a group of Alliance for Workers’ Liberty members, led it seems by David Broder.

Here’s some edited highlights. First up, McDonnell’s reasons for ‘work within’ the Labour Party - and that’s a revealing choice of words in itself - rather than join Respect, the SSP, and the smaller left groups that also undertake electoral campaigns.

In his own words, he is a Labour Party member out of ‘sheer pragmatism’, given the continuing use of FPTP for Westminster elections. So what would McDonnell do in the event of a switch to proportional representation and the subsequent emergence of a far left party picking up a handful of list seats? This obvious question sadly wasn’t asked.

‘I'm coming at it in terms of the sheer pragmatism of politics in this country, with a first-past-the-post electoral system. On a sheer pragmatic basis, I can't see how you can assess that outside the party you'd be more effective. The reason I'm in the Labour Party is, as I say, it's a terrain of struggle, within which we can win battles and eventually win power with the ideas that we convince people of.

‘Outside the Labour Party, the problem is that there's no form under the first-past-the-post system that you'd be able to win sufficient support to win positions where you could form a government or have any real pressure on government.’

But I loved the way McDonnell paraphrases Trotsky’s 1904 critique of the Leninist model of organisation, applying it Blairite New Labour. Cheeky!

‘The issue is, how has the PLP become cut off in the same way that any degenerate party does? It's the same as Trotsky's analysis of the bureaucracy. The leadership replaces the central committee, the central committee replaces the membership. And that's what's happened here.’

As the above quote underlines, this man knows his way around the Marxist classics. Quiz him about his political influences, and Keir Hardie doesn’t get a mention. But I would never have guessed that the sixties New Left played a role in McDonnell’s political formation:

‘If we go through it ... the fundamental Marxist writers of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, basically. In terms of the ability to mobilise spontaneously, Rosa Luxemburg. Interestingly enough, for a long time I was quite interested by the writers of the New Left who appeared in the 60s. Williams, Miliband, Griffiths, E.P. Thompson and others …’

Lastly, there’s a real whiff of the early eighties and ‘A Very British Coup’ about this argument:

‘If we do have a [socialist] prime minister … we will come under immediate attack from the City of London, international finance capital, and other countries in terms of political isolation. What we will then need to do as a movement is mobilise popular support behind that government.’

I can remember when Peter Hain and the Labour Co-ordinating Committee used to come out with much the same. Long time ago, though.

White Riot: Iain Duncan Smith and the white working class

2006-11-15T09:16:00.000-09:00

I am white working class. Top university-educated white working class. First generation middle class white working class. White working class, despite finally having worked out which fork to use while sitting through an expense account business lunch in an overpriced London restaurant.

But still, always and forever, white working class. I’ve lived in two-up two-downs and council flats, done the dead-end jobs, skipped the meals when the giro ran out. The white working class are ‘my people’.

My family were the railwaymen, the nurses, the dockers, the coppers, the carpenters, the steelworkers, the poor bloody infantry when the ruling classes wanted their killing done. Oh dear, this is starting to sound like a Billy Bragg song, isn't it?

Given where I’ve ended up, it almost seems precious to point this out. It’s as much as anything an emotional identification, something very difficult for someone who didn’t share a similar upbringing to understand. It's a working class thing, baby. You wouldn't understand.

I am well aware that far too many middle-class lefties romanticise ‘the workers’. Yes, many of them are politically rightwing and viscerally racist. I don’t have to go outside some – but only some - of own family to understand that.

I’m also aware of the other side of the picture. Again, I don’t have to go outside of my own family to find militant blue collar trade unionists and dedicated communists.

If I didn’t believe in the capacity of the multiracial working class - in Britain and across the world - to one day build a society without exploitation and oppression, without poverty, hunger, violence and racism, I wouldn’t remain a socialist.

North London Muesli Belt dinner party cliches about the working class dependence on state handouts paid for by upper tax band lawyers and journalists still have the capacity to reduce me to incandescent rage. ‘Scuse French, but who the fuck do these people think are doing the real work around here? ‘We’ are certainly not paying for ‘them’, Tarquin.

Don’t even get me started about how angry I felt when I saw the London School of Economics student union flyers advertising a ‘dress up as a chav’ mid-term party for its arrogant little merchant bankers in the making.

Now I’ve got that off my chest, can I point readers in the direction of this article in the Daily Telegraph today?

The Tories’ Social Justice Policy Group – headed by former leader Iain Duncan Smith, pictured above - has today published a preliminary report on the situation facing, yes, the white working class.

‘Boys from low-income white families are bottom of the heap in school performance, trailing behind every other major ethnic group,’ it details.

Much of the blame is down to cultural factors:

‘The report argues that family breakdown, parental breakdown and peer pressure that it is not "cool to study" are the key factors in the collapse in educational achievements. It also cites drug and alcohol abuse by parents.’

Almost all of these issues are, in turn, rooted in educational failure. It’s not an argument that I dismiss out of hand, and I await the publication of the full document next year.

But I’ll bet here and now that the final report won’t even begin to look at how that culture came about. There will be not a single word on the deliberate policy decision taken by the first Thatcher government to deindustrialise Britain and destroy the raison d’etre of white working class communities from Corby to Easington.

That’s just one more thing for which I’ll never forgive the Tories, or the class that Iain Duncan Smith represents.

But where the hell are we in British politics when it is down to the Conservatives to raise these very real questions? Hello New Labour, are you listening? Because the BNP certainly will be.

Respect: organising for fighting unions?

2006-11-14T07:00:00.000-09:00

Many critics of Respect – myself included – argue that the chief problem with the Galloway/SWP front organisation is that it bases its politics on a cross-class appeal to the Muslim community, including bourgeois elements.

That represents a stunning reversal of the traditional Marxist analysis that makes the working class - and especially the organised working class - central to the socialist project.

Last Saturday’s Respect-sponsored ‘Organising for Fighting Unions’ conference must, at least in part, have been motivated by a desire to silence such criticisms.

The official line is that everything went swimmingly. What else? The Respect website offers a triumphalist four paragraph ra-ra-ra summary:

‘Over 900 trade unionists packed into Shoreditch Town Hall last Saturday for the Organising for Fighting Unions conference. More than half were elected delegates from trade union organisations. A fantastic atmosphere built up throught the day as delegates listened to strikers from JJB in Wigan, NHS logistics and the Merseyside Firefighters dispute.

‘Union leaders Mark Serwotka, Matt Wrack, Paul Mackney and Steve Gillian all insisted that stronger unions could only be built if political and industrial issues were tackled together. Jane Loftus of the CWU insisted, and many others agreed that this meant tackling the government on war and islamophobia as well as on privatisation.

‘MPs John McDonnell and George Galloway, Valerie Wise, former leader of Preston council and John Rees, Respect national secretary, all argued that the left needs to strengthen itself through solidarity with fighting trade unions.

‘The conference passed a Workers Charter and elected an organising committee that will start a campaign to have the charter adopted by unions throughout the country.’

The left needs to strengthen itself through solidarity with fighting trade unions? Like, duh.

Other attendees offer more negative opinions. Here’s blogger Liam MacUaid, himself a Respect member:

‘It’s been quite a while since stage management and choreography of this standard has been seen at an audience of anti-bureaucratic, class struggle trade union militants.

‘At a guess there were about 800 people at the event. Roughly half were SWP members. Maybe another 20% were from other left organisations.

‘When I left at half four there had been nothing that vaguely resembled a debate on how you organise in the unions or why or how you can organise a political alternative to new Labour.

‘Instead we got an interminable series of platform speakers and when they had spoken for as long as they wanted a few people from the floor were given three whole minutes, though this could be extended if you were particularly rambling and off the point …

‘It was a dismal day. The majority of the audience was not in the first flush of youth. There were no significant new forces, bureaucrats or Labour Party members engaged with the project.

‘While there was lots of rhetoric about how we need to organise at a grassroots level there was no opportunity to do much other than sit on your arse listening to the great and the good with the occasional on message speaker reassuring us that things are pretty good in their patch. If you wanted a template of how not to organise fighting unions this was it.’

Roger Bannister – a Socialist Party member and prominent figure on the left of Unison – offered his thoughts on UK Left Network:

‘I thought the conference was terrible, just an old fashioned SWP stitched up rally. The usual stunt, fill in a form if you want to speak with name and what you want to say, and hey presto - 99% of the floor speakers were SWP/Respect!

‘Dave Nellist was invited to speak on behalf of the Campaign for a New Workers' Party, but was not allowed to make his speech in the section on "Who speaks for trade unionists: the struggle for political representation", so was excluded from that debate, (meaning that there was no debate!)

‘There was virtually no political analysis, the Conference just uncritically followed the rightward drift of the SWP.’

Childcare commitments meant I wasn’t there. But from the sound of it, taking Daddy’s Little Princesses to the local ice cream parlour was a more productive use of my time. It was certainly more fun.

UPDATE: Jim Denham – the Voice of Reason, as he is widely known – has this to say at Shiraz Socialist:

‘As these things go, it was quite big (about 600 people); politically it was terrible, rarely rising above the level of "people are angry and the fighback is beginning".

‘Perhaps the nadir was an incoherent stream of consciousness from one Jane Loftus, an SWP member on the CWU executive, who seemed to be arguing that the way to combine the political and economic struggles was to disaffiliate unions from the Labour Party...

‘I attended as a delegate from my union branch: I was in a small minority in being delegated: the vast majority of attendees were there as individuals, representing no-one but themselves (this can be confirmed by checking the "Respect" website, where supporters of the conference whose trade union bodies have actually voted to support are marked with an asterisk: they are very few). What was most noticeable about the event was that:

‘1/ It wasn't realy a conference, in the sense of "confering": there was virtually no debate. There were four lengthy platform speakers per session, leaving little time for contributions from the floor; virtually all the floor speakers were either SWP'ers, or people who the SWp knew weren't going to say anything contentious;

‘2/ It wasn't really a trade union event: few of the platform speakers had anything of significance to say about the state of the British union movement, or the way forward for the working class: they wanted to talk about the war in Iraq, Islamophobia, the veil, the US election results...in fact, more or less anything except trade unionism …

‘The session entitled "Who speaks for trade unionists: the struggle for political representation" was especially disappointing. For a start, there was very little debate on the subject that was supposed to be under discussion (most of the contributions were about Islamophobia and the veil); and what little debate on the subject of political representation there was, was thoroughly dishonest.

‘Let me explain: it is clear that the SWP are in fact in favour of unions disaffiliating from Labour; no-one who listened to the speaches from leading SWP trade unionists (like the afore-mentioned Jane Loftus) could doubt that; and yet they would not argue openly for that position. The reason for this appeared to be a desire to avoid alienating the Labour left.

‘So an opportunity to have an important discussion was lost because the SWP refused to argue for their own politics. They even went so far as to oppose the Socialist Party's pro- disaffiliation amendment to the "Charter" that the conference was asked to vote on in the final session: again, not because of any principled disagreement, but out of pure opportunism towards the Labour left.’

Globalisation: a new political dividing line

2006-11-13T22:10:00.000-09:00

In country after country of the developed world, attitudes to globalisation are rapidly emerging as the key dividing line between the major political forces. Both the US and France represent particularly clear examples of the trend.

On the other side of the Atlantic, most commentators put the Democrats' success in the mid-term elections last week down to economic populism.

Several of the most notable new Democratic senators - for instance, Jimmy Webb of Virginia and Sherrod Brown of Ohio - ousted Republicans through pushing a platform of opposition to free trade, blaming countries like China for the loss of US manufacturing jobs.

On the other side of the Channel, likely rightwing presidential contender Nicolas Sarkozy has used support for globalisation has a rallying call to the troops, while the left has made opposition a point of honour.

In Britain, the issue just doesn't enter mainstream political debate. All three major parties simply take globalisation as a given, presenting the public with broadly similar policies that - they argue - best position the UK in the new globalised world.

I don't like the way that neoliberal politicians - and I include the leadership of the British Labour Party in that category - use globalisation as an all-purpose excuse for not adopting such basic social democratic policies as limitations on working hours or enhanced trade union rights.

On the other hand, I don't believe that protectionism should be the automatic leftist or progressive stance. It can all to quickly degenerate into the kind of 'American jobs for American workers'/'French jobs for French workers'/'British jobs for British workers' rhetoric more suited to the nationalist right than the democratic left. Third world countries have the right to develop manufacturing industry.

There is still a considerable discussion to be had on the internationalist left.

Hain courts Labour left

2006-11-13T07:36:00.000-09:00

Peter Hain is obviously seeking Labour left support for his deputy leadership bid, if his remarks on executive pay and ‘grotesque’ City bonuses are anything to go by.

Here’s how the Financial Times summarises what he had to say in a couple of television interviews yesterday:

‘Mr Hain yesterday called for a debate between government and the City and business about high remuneration levels. Pay levels for top executives that are hundreds of times the average earnings within their companies "do not create a climate of social responsibility", he told ITV.

‘City bonus levels also came under fire. In a separate interview with the Sunday Times, Mr Hain warned that: "Most people find it pretty grotesque that a couple of dozen City executives can share a billion pounds of bonuses between them."

‘But he eschewed calls for statutory curbs on pay, saying: "We live in a globalised economy and the City is hugely successful … I don't think higher taxation or massive regulation or caps on salaries are sensible."’

It’s a message that could be boiled down into two sentences. Shocking, innit? Just don’t expect New Labour to do anything about it.

I used to know Peter reasonably well. When I quit the Labour Party in 1995, he even rang me up and tried to talk me out of it.

So I know that – at least then – he regarded himself as a man of the left. That just makes his pretence of a sudden rediscovery of basic democratic socialist principles just in time for a deputy leadership campaign all the more opportunistic.

Sadly for Hain, the bookies still rate him third favourite, behind Johnson and Benn.

George Galloway: F-word non-shocker

2006-11-12T13:04:00.000-09:00

After all the hype, here's the by now infamous Gorgeous George 'F-words in Oxford' tape. OK, OK, outbursts like this are not going to win him any awards for politesse. But those who toil in workplaces where profanity is regretably not uncommon - say, I dunno, the average newsroom, for instance - may find it distinctly not very shocking. Judge for yourself.

[Hat tip: Iain Dale]

Remembrance Sunday

2006-11-12T09:42:00.000-09:00

If Private George Osler had not been one of the 900,000 British soldiers killed in world war one, it is possible I would have met my great uncle. It would have been a meeting between a very old man and a very young boy, at some point in the 1960s. But I might have known him in person. I might still be carrying some sort of memory of him and who he was.

What did he think about the cause for which he fought and ultimately died? Was he a conscript or a volunteer? Family history doesn't record the details.

Meanwhile, my grandfather Willis Osler came out of the conflict with some decorations, and in 1920 married a German woman. I presume some of her relatives must have been on the other side. Maybe some of them were killed too.

My mother's family are German-speaking Swiss nationals, and at least one aunt and one cousin also married Germans. One of them - a man I did meet as a boy - had been a wehrmacht conscript in world war two. A reluctant conscript, he claimed. But it remains true that he fought for Hitlerism.

Another aunt married a Sudeten-German communist, who after a period in a concentration camp eventually found himself fighting with the Free Czech Forces in the UK. He stayed a diehard Stalinist until his recent death.

My father's half-brother did his national service in Korea. He is happy to boast of having killed 'communists', as he sees the matter. I suspect he regarded the fact that they were Asian rather white communists as, if anything, an added bonus. No reluctance there, then.

I'm sure all of the men mentioned above were - irrespective of the army in which they found themselves lined up - were 'brave' as individuals. And all three of the ones I have discussed it with had political ideas about why they found themselves called on to kill other men.

Few families will not have been touched by the massive conflicts of the twentieth century. But in these times when more and more people living in Britain can trace their recent ancestry to multiple countries, much of the patriotic narritive surrounding Remembrance Sunday inevitably erodes.

I do respect the memory of George Osler. How do I feel about the uncle fought for Hitler? I'm not sure, really. Much as I hate fascism, ultimately I do not disrespect him as a person. As a conscript, he didn't have a meaningful choice.

So even before I became a revolutionary socialist, my feelings on Remembrance Sunday were always ambiguous. Because members of my family fought on both sides in both world wars, subjectively I have never wanted to 'glorify' the dead on one side alone. That is why I have only worn pacifist white poppies.

I think the far left needs to handle these issues with a delicacy with which it is not customarily associated. We shouldn't belittle the emotions people inevitably feel on these occasions. What we need to stress is the nature of war, and how our brand of politics mean that there will not be repeat performances - again and again - across the rest of human history.

Saturday Night Music Club: Snooky Pryor RIP

2006-11-11T05:45:00.000-09:00

The bad news for blues fans this week is that harmonica genius Snooky Pryor will henceforth be jammin' in that great big roadhouse in the sky.

Personally I thought the Guardian obit was a bit sniffy:

'If not quite the equal of men like Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Walter "Shakey" Horton or Junior Wells, he was none the less a player with a distinctive sound, and his contributions to the early development of the Chicago blues-band idiom are held in high regard.'

Of course Pryor 'wasn't quite the equal' of Little Walter. No harp merchant ever was or ever will be. But to say that Snooky wasn't quite as good as the best blues harmonica player in the history of the genre is equivalent to saying a recently deceased rock guitarist wasn't quite as good as Jimi Hendrix, or that a jazz sax player who has just popped his clogs wasn't quite as good as Charlie Parker. Indisputably true, but neither here nor there.

For my money, Pryor easily ranks in the same bracket as Horton and Wells, although this 30 second clip from YouTube doesn't quite prove the contention. Sadly, that's all there was.

James Edward Pryor was born and raised in Mississippi. In the Depression, he hoboed through the South, playing the blues on street corners for small change. He served in the US Army in the Pacific in World War Two, before being posted to a base just outside Chicago.

The gave him the opportunity to jam on the southside club circuit on the weekends. After being discharged in 1945, he settled in the windy city, playing regularly with Homesick James and Floyd Jones.

Although he did cut some sides as a leader - notably on Vee-Jay - most of his paycheques came from session work. By the seventies, he was more or less out of the music scene, working regularly as a carpenter and raising a family.

But he was lured back into the recording studio in 1986, after signing to Blind Pig. His 1991 album 'Back to the Country' - made jointly with Johnny Shines, another criminally under-rated blues talent - picked up an award from Living Blues magazine.

I was lucky enough to catch Snooky Pryor live on a trip to Chicago a few years back. It was a great gig. Ladies and gentlement, we have just lost another one of the original hard drivin' greats.

OK, I realise blues is a minority interest music. Most readers won't have heard of Pryor, or have an opinion one way or the other. But the comments box is open for comments on any music-related topic.

Gerry Downing joins the blogosphere

2006-11-11T04:43:00.000-09:00

Another Trot blog has seen the light of day this week. International Trotskyism is brought to you by Gerry Downing, described in the current Weekly Worker as 'a comrade from the
Workers Revolutionary Party tradition who is currently unattached'.

After the WRP split into nine factions - count 'em, nine - in the mid-eighties, Gerry was originally part of the Workers International League.

Initially forthright defenders of the Healy legacy, the WIL subsequently evolved in an alarmingly sensible direction and became the small Labour Party entrist group it is today.

WIL publishes Workers Action. Perhaps its most illustrious former member is Livingstone staffer Bob Pitt, one of the brains behind Islamophobia Watch.

Lucikily, Gerry spotted the scratch that was in danger of becoming gangrene early on, leading a split which was comprised entirely of himself and two mates. The three of them formed a breakaway organisation, whose name I now forget. If you've got the details, please let me know in the comments box.

This particular revolutionary vanguard published one or two issues of a journal, and one of the members managed to get his girlfriend to join, swelling the ranks of the group to four. I suspect that was about as good as it got for them. I have heard nothing since.

Gerry's first blog post is minimal, so it remains unclear what we can expect. But my guess is that International Trotskyism will be super hardcore, the Trotskyist equivalent of the stuff they keep under the counter in porn shops to please favoured customers.

I confidently predict that the blog will show up both Southpaw Punch and Ian Donovan for the vacillating centrist wusses that both of them clearly are by comparison. Even Workers Power will find it difficult to denounce as reformist.

A sample of Gerry's writing style and political outlook can be found here. I wish him every success with his new website.

Just who are the International Trotskyist Labor Tendency?

2006-11-11T01:31:00.000-09:00

I like to think I am an expert on the geneology of obscure Trotskyist splinter groups. But I have recently come across the website of the International Trotskyist Labor Tendency, and I have to admit that this time, I am utterly, utterly stumped.

The slogan of this outfit is 'For world revolution and a 5th International!' Yeah, yeah. Ain't we all? Not exactly a unique selling point.

And I just love the way they include a link with the teasy-weasy title 'who are we?' Trouble is, you click on it and nothing happens.

The ITLT even claim to have a group in Britain, the Workers Front Organisation. But googling them draws a complete blank. Anybody know of any members? Do they have a publication?

If the WFO exists, it may even be working inside the Labour Party, if this extract from the ITLT's theoretical work is anything to go by:

'Many times our theory of Academicianism has become confused with the Ultra-left Anti-Proletarian theory we denounce this claim. What our theory is in truth is an observation of reality ...

'The long-standing history of labor and progressive ideas in Britain by far outweighs that of the U.S. In Britain initially we would apply Academicianism but the period would be brief and at some point we would begin "Light Enterism" into the Labour Party. We note that a new challenge exists with organizing inside of said party. This being the existence of Inter-Sectarianism.'

This perspectives document raises many important questions. Not least, have Workers Power and Southpaw Punch denounced them as reformists yet?

Comrades! Reveal yourselves to the DP audience! Either that, or I'll have to dob you in to Luke Akehurst. He really, really doesn't like Trots, you know.

Lord Sainsbury: minister for GM foods quits

2006-11-10T08:06:00.000-09:00

Science minister Lord Sainsbury has stepped down, officially to spend more time with his charities. But many commentators argue that the real reason for the one-time SDP supporter’s resignation is that he is fed up with being associated with New Labour sleaze.

By way of background, here is an extract from my 2002 book ‘Labour Party plc: New Labour as a Party of Business’, which looks at Lord Sainbury’s persistent support for genetically modified foods and wonders out loud if that backing is entirely unconnected with his business interests:

‘Officially, Tony Blair maintains that that while he is not a proponent of genetic modification, such crops should nevertheless be evaluated scientifically. In practice, he has consistently rejected calls for limitations on their use, hitting out against media ‘scaremongering’ and ‘nonsense about Frankenstein foods’.

‘Yet anything Labour has to say on the issue is automatically compromised by the Government’s links to the GM industry, symbolised by just one man. Ministerial responsibility for genetically modified crops has been given to the party’s largest financial backer, despite his business interests in GM crops.

‘David Sainsbury – an Old Etonian, although that fact is omitted from Who’s Who – has given Labour over £9m in recent years. He can afford it, of course. Sainsbury is Britain’s third-richest man, worth around £3bn.

‘This is someone clearly used to bankrolling politicians. He was a major financial supporter of the SDP in the early 1980s, remaining a trustee until 1990. He did not vote at all in 1992, and, as late as 1995, his support for Labour was decidedly lukewarm.

‘The family firm, J. Sainsbury plc, which owns the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain, issued a statement that its boss had ‘expressed his personal opinion that if he votes at the next general election, it is likely it would be for the Labour Party’.

‘Just three years later, the ‘don’t know’ floating voter was both a Labour peer and Science minister in a Labour government. With an unearned income estimated at £35m or more a year, he was, like Lord Simon, happy enough to do the job gratis.

‘Sainsbury sees no problem with enormous generosity to Labour on the one hand and his unelected office on the other. He simply argues that he is ‘proud to support the Labour Party financially alongside the many other people who contribute to it’, presumably as he was once proud to support the SDP.

‘Although Sainsbury stood down as Sainsbury’s chief executive on appointment, his role in government naturally turned the spotlight on the company’s activities. Each planning decision for out-of-town supermarkets that went Sainsbury’s way attracted notice, especially after Blair stressed his sympathies for such schemes.

‘But most controversial of all is Sainsbury’s continued ownership of two genetics companies, Diatech and Innotech Investments. While his shares were placed in the same trust as his supermarket stake when he became a minister, he still benefits from any profits they make.

"In addition, Lord Sainsbury funds GM research at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich by around £3m a year, channelling the money through his Gatsby Charitable Foundation.

‘It is also backed by the state. In the last year of the Major administration, it was given £300,000. Since Sainsbury became Science minister in July 1998, government support has risen to £1.2m a year, a 300 per cent increase.’

A quick butcher’s at Amazon reveals that ‘Labour Party plc’ has not only not been remaindered, but has even sold a few copies recently. Goodie. Can’t wait for the next three shillings and sixpence royalty cheque from the publishers.

More on Michael Meacher

2006-11-10T07:31:00.000-09:00

Despite the predictions that Michael Meacher would declare his candidacy for the Labour leadership yesterday, in the end he didn’t. Not quite, anyway.

But there seems little doubt he eventually will. Check out this from The Times:

‘The only declared leadership candidate, the leftwinger John McDonnell, also faces being squeezed by arithmetic after Michael Meacher’s launch of an environmental campaign that had the feel of a nascent manifesto.

‘Mr Meacher expanded his criticisms of the Government to take in the Iraq War, "subservience" to President Bush, unacceptable gaps between rich and poor, the privatising of public services and the eroding of civil liberties.’

And this from the Independent:

‘Meanwhile, Michael Meacher, the former environment minister, signalled that he would challenge Mr Brown for the leadership with a campaign based on radical action to combat climate change.

‘Mr Meacher launched a new Labour campaign group calling for "Big Change" in the direction of the government over global warming. He threatens to take votes away from the other challenger from the left, John McDonnell.

‘Mr Meacher, the environment minister for eight years, had a handful of leftwing MPs including Alan Simpson and Ian Gibson at the launch of the campaign. Although he said the time for announcing a challenge would come later, he said he was not denying he was running for the leadership.

‘"I do believe there should be a candidate on the centre left which I think is the majority of the party," he said.

‘"If Labour is going to win the next election, we need a fundamentally different direction of travel for the new Government after the election of a new leader and deputy," he said.

"We need more than corrections of where we have clearly gone badly wrong over Iraq, Lebanon and subservience to [United States president George] Bush."’

Ian Gibson, eh? Another bloody ex-Trot, being a former member of the International Socialists.

Is there really nobody on the Labour left with the moral authority to knock some heads together?

Friday open thread

2006-11-10T01:49:00.000-09:00

I will be posting later in the day, but until then, I'll open the floor to the readership once more with a Friday open thread.

Obvious topics I have not written about this week include the US elections. I'd be especially interested to get opinions from US readers on that.

Things seem quiet on the British far left. Best gossip I've heard all week comes via Paul Anderson, who has a good story about Anita Halpin, a leading member of the Communist Party of Britain.

Get this. One of Britain's best-known tankies has been judged the rightful inheritor of a painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, which the Nazis confiscated from her grandfather. Today it went up for auction, and promptly sold for $38m. Looks like the Morning Star's money worries are over for a long, long time to come.

Meanwhile, Will has been working hard on my new website, and I'll be test driving it over the weekend. Get ready to redirect your browsers.

Immigration controls: three parties, one policy

2006-11-09T09:21:00.000-09:00

On the day the Tories unveil their plans to reduce non-white immigration, try this simple quiz. Three MPs said the following about their respective parties’ stances on immigration controls:

Politician A: ‘The first principle will be to control immigration with regard to the economic effects. The second principle will be to control it with regard to the wider effects on society.’

Politician B: ‘We should publish an economic-social-demographic plan for population growth based on a points system and our own needs … no-one serious is advocating the scrapping of immigration controls.’

Politician C: ‘People recognise others from outside this country can bring great skills here ... but they also want to be assured that our services will be preserved and immigration will be managed.’

Have a guess which quote comes from a Tory, which from a Blairite - and which from Respect’s George Galloway. And, if you get all three right, please tell us how on earth you were able to spot the difference.

Lib Dems: going back to their constituencies

2006-11-09T07:25:00.000-09:00

Go back to your constituencies and prepare for a junior role in Go back to your constituencies and prepare for a junior role in government. Various outlets are running this Press Association story this morning:

‘The Liberal Democrats' leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, has summoned senior colleagues to a special meeting to prepare for a possible snap general election next year.

‘Party strategists believe that Gordon Brown may decide to capitalise on his expected election as Labour leader when Tony Blair steps down by going to the polls as early as next October.’

Not an unlikely scenario, I suppose. And nor is a hung parliament an unlikely outcome. You know what comes next …

If the Orange Book faction remains in the ascendent, a coalition government could suit both the purposes of the Brownites as much as those of the Lib Dems.

That way, Britain’s next prime minister prime minister will be able to tell centre-left party activists and union leaders that he really, really, truly, honestly would like to govern in mainstream social democratic mode. It’s just that those nasty free-marketeers won’t let him.

Meanwhile, the Lib Dems grab a couple of ministerial portfolios, and Campbell sells their radicals the line that New Labour acts as brake on his genuine desire to implement a progressive agenda.

Bothleaderships are happy. The City is happy. Sorted.

Meacher 'to declare leadership run'

2006-11-08T19:52:00.000-09:00

Newsflash: Reclaim Labour is tonight reporting that Michael Meacher will formally declare his candidacy for the Labour leadership tomorrow.

If confirmed, this would be a disastrous development for both McDonnell supporters and the left as a whole. Old Nine Homes is certain to pick up enough MPs to make it impossible for McDonnell even to get on the ballot paper. Kiss the campaign goodbye, comrades.

We all know Brown is going to get the job anyway. It's just that now we won't even have the tactical opportunities arising from a token hard left challenge.

I reckon the devious fingerprints of Socialist Action are all over this one. Bastards.

Union support for John McDonnell

2006-11-08T18:55:00.000-09:00

Press release just issued by the McDonnell Labour leadership campaign. (That's the candidate, pictured left):

‘Today the London Region of the FBU declared its full support for the McDonnell leadership bid and donated £1,000 towards the campaign.

‘Members will be urging both the FBU and RMT at their National Executive Committee meetings in December to endorse McDonnell.’

It’s almost certain that both unions will back the man at the national level. Great. But it won't do him much good. Neither are affiliated to the Labour Party.

The statement continues:

‘He has also been invited to address the political committees of the GMB and the Bakers Union over the next two weeks, and already has strong backing from the broad lefts within Amicus, CWU, the T & G, and Unison.

‘Within the Labour Party at grassroots level McDonnell now has the endorsement of the Campaign for Socialism in Scotland, Welsh Labour Grassroots, and the Labour Representation Committee …’

Golly, there’s a few hundred votes in the bag, then. But the three groups put together do not have the same weight in the Labour Party’s electoral college a couple of Blairite MPs.

Forward to socialism under a Brown prime ministership it is, then.

The debating tactics of George Galloway

2006-11-08T07:41:00.000-09:00

As a humble polytechnic graduate, I don’t often I get a pretext to link to the website of University College Cork Philosophical Society. But go there now for this interesting account of one of its debates last week. Sounds like things got pretty heated:

‘Controversial British MP, George Galloway - pictured left - stormed out of a debate in UCC last night. In the debate on US Foreign Policy, organised by the UCC Philosophical Society, Mr. Galloway was proposing the motion 'That This House Believe's [shocking grammar for a posh college, no? – DO] US Foreign Policy is the Biggest Crime Since World War II' against Dublin-based TV producer and journalist, Gerry Gregg.

‘In front of 500 people, Mr. Galloway spoke of the role of the United States in supporting Israeli actions in Palestine, while Mr. Gregg spoke of the history of the USSR in comparison to the United States.

‘Controversy arose when Mr. Gregg made several allegations against Mr. Galloway regarding his links with Saddam Hussein's regime, allegations to which Mr. Galloway took exception, demanding that Mr. Gregg withdraw the remarks.

‘The debate continued when Mr. Gregg refused, but controversy erupted again when Mr. Gregg repeated his allegations, prompting Mr. Galloway to walk out of the debate, criticising the chair of the debate for failing to intervene as well as threatening legal action against Mr. Gregg over his remarks.

‘Between 150-200 of the audience walked out of the debate with Mr. Galloway, who returned to the UK early this morning. Mr. Gregg stood over his remarks last night, stating that he was willing to defend all his comments in court should Mr. Galloway take further action.

‘The debate continued following the walk-out with up to 300 people remaining, while the motion was defeated when put to the floor.’

Obviously I don’t know what was said, and the website seems shy of repeating the claims, probably advisedly. But unless the provocation truly was extreme, such tactics are rarely the best way to win friends and influence people.

[Hat tip: Iain Dale]

Sheridan's new party: Solidarity conference reports

2006-11-08T01:51:00.000-09:00

Tommy Sheridan’s new party - logo on the left - held its first national conference last Saturday. Put together conflicting reports from rival supporters of the Committee for a Workers’ International and the Socialist Workers’ Party, and it is clear that the formation is already saddled with deep divisions.

The CWI’s Phil Stott headlines his account ‘SWP argue against socialism’. I reproduce this extract from the UK Left Network discussion list:

‘Saturday's conference was called to primarily agree a constitution and finalise the name of the new party. However, it was clear in the run-up to conference there was going to be a very important debate on the character and type of organisation that Solidarity should be.

‘The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) used the conference to strongly argue against Solidarity being a socialist party. Instead, they advocated that Solidarity should be a “movement of the movements”, a home for those fighting Islamophobia, for the anti-war movement and for those opposing climate change.

‘During the debate on the name of the party, one SWP member said, “socialism should not be in the name, if we remove it people will join us“. The SWP voted for the name to be "Solidarity", dropping the reference to "Scotland's Socialist Movement".

‘One SWP speaker, after another, emphasised that if Solidarity was socialist it would put off people joining. They argued that Islamophobia was the “main political issue” in society, today, and that Solidarity has to prioritise winning more Muslims into its ranks.’

You'd almost think the SWP are ashamed of openly identifying as socialists, wouldn't you? If Stott’s account is correct, then the John Rees crew were clearly calling for a Scottish version of Respect. But in the end, the CWI’s preferred title won the day.

However - in the grand tradition of distorted and dishonest reporting that continues to dominate the British left, Stott leaves out any mention of just how close the vote was.

For that, you need to turn to this week’s Socialist Worker. And surprise, surprise. SW does not present the debate in anything like the same light:

‘A lively debate (love the euphemism! - DO) took place in the discussion on the constitution. This was between those who favour a party model not dissimilar to the SSPand those (including members of the SWP) who feel that a coalition model, similar to Respect, would be a more effective way of engaging both with the Muslim community and with those involved in other campaigns …

‘The conference voted by 119 to 111 to call the new organisation Solidarity: Scotland's Socialist Movement.’

No mention at all of the fact that the SWP was against that step. Mind you, doesn't that almost 50/50 split look like a recipe for division right from the outset?

The thing is, I bet the SWP could have mobilised nine more members if they had tried hard enough. I guess that pained sound you hear emanating from North of the Border is the sound of its Scottish organisers getting their arses roundly kicked.

The Dhiren Barot case: the gas limos project and political Islam

2006-11-07T18:52:00.000-09:00

This is a heavily revised and expanded version of an earlier post. Even if you caught the previous offering, please re-read, as I think it moves the argument on some.

What sort of mind does it take to come up with the gas limos project? Nobody really knows what motivated Dhiren Barot, the Islamic radical sentenced to 40 years in prison for planning mass murder in the US and Britain. That won’t stop many commentators from trying.

Some of them may even point to the ideas of Paul Berman, who has been far more influential on the left then he should have been in spreading the contention that Islamic terrorism is some kind of irrational ‘death cult’.

Taken at the level of political Islamism as whole - and that’s the level Berman addresses - the basic premise is patently mistaken. Political Islamism is a political phenomenon. The clue is in the name. Like all political phenomema, it can be dissected with the standard tools of political theory. And surely the only real starting point for secular democrats seeking to undermine it is a correct analysis of what it actually constitutes.

For a start, it is essential to understand Islamic radicalism’s genesis in the continuing deep social crisis in what dependency theorists dub the ‘periphery’.

It is also essential to take on board that the rise of Islamic fundamentalist movements is - at least in part - an unintended consequence of the past US policy of sponsoring such currents as counterweights against communism and Arab nationalism.

And I agree with the argument from author Jason Burke that much of the Muslim anger that finds its ultimate expression in Al Qa’eda is fuelled by the injustice and bloodshed doled out to co-religionists in geographical locations from Chechnya to Palestine, and from Kashmir to Afghanistan to Iraq.

There’s nothing even remotely ‘irrational’ about these concrete grievances. Ultimately, the only way to win the ‘war on terrorism’ is to reach democratic solutions in these places. And democratic solutions are what the democratic left should want anyway, surely.

Over on the right, most conservatives - and many on the liberal left, it seems - would probably describe both Al Qa’eda and Barot - pictured above left - as somehow incarnating ‘evil’. I’m not sure how much this helps us, either.

The very concept - imported from religion - is frequently invoked as a quasi-magical force, with the implication that the most extreme breaches of human morality are somehow beyond rational explanation.

There are almost always quotidian explanations for most ‘evil’ acts. As Arthur Miller perceptively remarked: ‘The terrible thing about Auschwitz isn’t that it is beyond human understanding. It is that it is so easy to understand.’

There is a well-developed Marxist political sociology of Nazism, including what ranks among Leon Trotsky’s most perceptive work. Because we know exactly what fascism represents in terms of class forces, the simplistic notion of ‘Islamofascism’ can freely be rejected for the abject political illiteracy it reveals in those who use it.

So much for the general. Now for the particular. One aspect of the Barot affair that will instantly strike anyone on the left is his list of potential targets. This man wanted to blow up the International Monetary Fund, the Word Bank, Citigroup and the New York Stock Exchange. The anti-capitalist symbolism could hardly be more explicit.

On the other hand, he also wanted to blow up a London Underground tube train under the Thames and the Heathrow Express. The victims could have taken in anyone who lives in London. They would be more likely to include a Muslim illegal immigrant cleaner on her way to the late shift at Canary Wharf than top City executives, that’s for certain.

Socialists - more so than any others, perhaps - understand the impulse to solidarity with the oppressed. Revolutionary socialists make the case that acts of violence for political aims are sometimes justifiable.

But Barot‘s plot was not a case of some kind of misguided rage against the machine. His rage was against society as a whole. Once again that leaves us with the obvious one-word question … why?

The prosecution argued that Barot is a cadre terrorist, well-versed in anti-surveillance techniques, and in touch with high ranking Al Qa’eda leaders. Maybe. And maybe - just as likely - he is essentially a fantasist who gets off on setting out blueprints for carnage on his laptop.

But even on the relatively benign latter assumption, Barot - product of a middle-class upbringing in Britain, and not of the Arab street - was fantasising about the slaughter thousands of civilians as some sort of heroic act.

It is precisely the same mentality displayed by those fucked-up Goth kids that periodically perpetrate schoolroom massacres in the United States. He just took those impulses to the next stage. I only hope no section of left ends up excusing him as a well-meant anti-imperialist who went that little bit too far.

In the end, no political theory really helps. We must turn to the realm of psychology instead. As an individual, I suspect Barot is an irrational death cultist.

I hope the British prison system will treat this man, obviously a very disturbed individual, humanely. But knowing the British prison system, I somehow doubt it.

New Labour, new ID cards

2006-11-06T09:45:00.000-09:00

Tony Blair is pretty determined to bring in ID cards. All non-EU nationals will need them to work or access public services from 2008, and they will be introduced for Britons from 2009, he confirmed today. From 2010, they will be compulsory.

Until now, I haven’t really seen ID cards as too big an issue. Other European countries have long had them, I reasoned, and haven’t turned into police states as a result.

But I am starting to develop major reservations. For starters, the very term ‘ID card’ is truly a misnomer on a grand scale.

If the object of the exercise was simple identification, a photo, a thumb print and a PIN number would more than do the job. Have you seen the full list of data the cards will be able to contain? I mean, date of death? How the heck could the government know that?

They will be ineffective. If it isn’t compulsory to carry them at all times, what’s the point? If it is compulsory, what’s going to happen when people lose their wallets or purses?

What about errors in the data, which will inevitably occur? Will people risk arrest or be refused permission to leave the country because of a finger slip from a data entry clerk?

What if the data is abused? Most private investigators can already get personal information on just about anybody from police mates with access to the police national computer. Many more people will be able to log on to the national ID card database, so this problem will be greatly exacerbated.

And given the long and sorry history of massive cock-ups in major public sector IT projects, expect huge – and costly – over-runs on delivery. The government reckons the cards will cost £93 each, although independent experts reckon £300 is rather more likely.

Throw in such parallel developments as pervasive CCTV and DNA profiling, and the government will know rather more about each and every one of us then it really needs to do.

Jyoti who?

2006-11-06T08:03:00.000-09:00

‘I certainly don't fit in to mainstream corporate alternative. A morbidly obese 40-year-old Indian man who sings about Trotskyism and epigastric hernias isn't exactly the kind of thing that gets MTV2 tumescent, is it?’

You can read about indie rocker Jyoti Mishra – also known as the one-man band White Town – here. I've never heard a note of his music. But my curiosity is certainly piqued.

The Clash: Clampdown

2006-11-06T01:48:00.000-09:00

'Judge said five to ten/I said double that again ...'

Dedication for prisoner S. Hussein, Baghdad.

Ken MacLeod on western Marxism

2006-11-05T12:21:00.000-09:00

I'm not sure how soi-disant 'Trotskyist libertarian cyberpunk' Ken MacLeod - pictured left - ever achieved prominence as a sci-fi author.

As a proud citizen of what he calls Norlonto - North London Town - I loved every page of The Star Fraction, which features Trotskyist mercenary Moh Kohn fighting the US/UN bad guys in a future Britain that has descended into balkanised dystopia.

The satire is heavy, and a laugh a minute ... provided that the names Harry Wicks or Marcel Bleibtreu mean anything to you.

The International Committee for the Reconstruction of the Libertarian International? A few thousand of us will get the (extremely pointed) gag. Tens of millions won't.

Indeed, the in jokes must be inpenetrable to the 99.9% of the population that didn't do a twenty year stretch on the far left.

But he has obviously pondered - and resolved - the question of how to get socialist ideas across to a wider audience. Just to underline the point intellectually, there's a quality post on MacLeod's blog, pontificating on some recent books on the western Marxist tradition:

'When you add up the influence of Paul Sweezy, Paul A. Baran, Leo Huberman, Harry Magdoff, Maurice Dobb, Ernest Mandel; Isaac Deutscher's biographies; C.L.R. James, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, and, yes, E.P. Thompson; Gordon Childe; J.B.S. Haldane and J. Bernal - you've gone a long way to account for the intellectual influence of Marxism in at least the English-reading world.

'All of them wrote for readers who weren't Marxists. And non-Marxist, indeed anti-Marxist, readers have profited from their work ever since. Some who weren't Marxists when they opened a book by any of these guys were at least half-way to being Marxists when they closed it. Who ever became a Marxist as a result of reading Althusser?'

Yes, he's name-checking many of the guys - and they are all men, aren't they? - that influenced me as a young student. And ... I never quite got my head round Althusser, either.

Saddam Hussein: working for the clampdown

2006-11-05T09:57:00.000-09:00

Let's get one thing clear at the outset. Yes, as a democratic socialist and a paid-up member of Amnesty International, I am absolutely against the death penalty on principle.

I have no problem whatsoever in opposing the state-sanctioned execution of vanilla mass murderers, for example, even when they are unquestionably guilty.

Fred West? Harold Shipman? There is not a shred of doubt that either of them carried out the crimes of which they were accused. Life imprisonment was a just sentence in both instances.

Both chose to end their own lives. That was their prerogative. In line with my ideological convictions - inevitably shaped by my father's decision to kill himself rather than go to prison, which he made when I was 14 - I support the right of an individual to top themselves, for whatever reason, should they consciously so decide.

Let's get another thing clear. Yes, I am aware that the trial of Saddam Hussein will be seen in some - perhaps many - quarters of the international left as victor's justice. Then again, it is not only imperialism that pulls the trigger on political opponents. Revolutionaries from Lenin to Castro have also deemed that necessary.

And what Trot hasn't sat in a pub with their mates and cracked bad-taste jokes about who we are going to shoot, come the glorious day?

On balance, though, logic forces me to speak out against today's death sentence against former Iraqi dictator, pictured above. Just don't count me in on attending the protests that will inevitably ensue. For whatever reason, for once I'm not that upset. Some bastards actually deserve everything they get.

PS: Perhaps the late Joe Strummer said it best:

'In these days of evil presidentes
Working for the clampdown
But lately one or two has fully paid their due
For working for the clampdown

'But ha! Gitalong! Gitalong!
And I've given away no secrets
Who's barmy now?'

Saturday Night Music Club: TRB in action

2006-11-04T11:13:00.000-09:00

And for the benefit of younger readers wondering about the post below ... TRB video from 1978, courtesy of YouTube.

Saturday Night Music Club: angry political rock

2006-11-04T06:02:00.000-09:00

Your nominations in the comments box, please, for the finest angry political rock album ever made. I am expecting substantial write-in campaigns on behalf of ‘Sandinista!‘ by the Clash and the Redskin’s ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’, which are both indeed magnificent waxings.

But on balance the award has to go to ‘Power in the Darkness’, the 1978 debut from TRB. I dusted that particular slab of vinyl down the other night, and can testify that it still sounds terrific.

Even the cover is a slice of the Trotskyist iconography of the period. And the lyrical content is little short of an out-and-out incitement to revolution (even though Southpaw and Workers Power would denounce it as reformist, obviously).

Lines like ‘The Carib Club got petrol bombed … The National Front was getting awful strong’ still splendidly evoke late seventies Britain on the cusp of Thatcherism.

And just listening to that satirical voiceover from band leader Tom Robinson pretending to be a ‘rightwing Tory’ that terminates four beats before the Ray Manzarek-style organ break on the title track still sends shivers down my spine:

‘Today, institutions fundamental to the British system of Government are under attack: the public schools, the House of Lords, the Church of England, the holy institution of marriage, even our magnificent police force are no longer safe from those who would undermine our society, and it's about time we said “enough is enough” and saw a return to the traditional British values of discipline, obedience, morality and freedom.

‘What we want is:
Freedom from the reds and the blacks and the criminals
Prostitutes, pansies and punks
Football hooligans, juvenile delinquents
Lesbians and left wing scum
Freedom from the niggers and the Pakis and the unions
Freedom from the Gipsies and the Jews
Freedom from leftwing layabouts and liberals
Freedom from the likes of you…’

To top it all, Robinson must have been the first out gay rock star. Even if he did end up a married dad in the end.

After the McDonnell campaign

2006-11-03T19:51:00.000-09:00

One way or another, John McDonnell's bid to become leader of the Labour Party is going to be a defining moment for the future of the British far left.

Clearly, different tendencies in the movement are going to draw sharply different tactical conclusions from developments in the coming period.

DP helpfully offers this cut-out-and-keep guide to the five main likely scenarios, and what various Marxists will be saying 12 months from now:

(1) McDonnell becomes Britain's next prime minister
Workers Power denounces him for his abject failure to adopt a revolutionary programme. The Socialist Party insists this outcome underlines the need for a new workers' party. The SWP points to the potential future growth of Respect. Graham Bash maintains that the necessity for patient socialist work inside Labour has never been more clearly vindicated.

(2) McDonnell beaten after running credible campaign
Workers Power denounces him for his abject failure to adopt a revolutionary programme. The Socialist Party insists this outcome underlines the need for a new workers' party. The SWP points to the potential future growth of Respect. Graham Bash maintains that the necessity for patient socialist work inside Labour has never been more clearly vindicated.

(3) McDonnell polls humiliating low vote
Workers Power denounces him for his abject failure to adopt a revolutionary programme. The Socialist Party insists this outcome underlines the need for a new workers' party. The SWP points to the potential future growth of Respect. Graham Bash maintains that the necessity for patient socialist work inside Labour has never been more clearly vindicated.

(4) McDonnell doesn't make it onto ballot paper
Workers Power denounces him for his abject failure to adopt a revolutionary programme. The Socialist Party insists this outcome underlines the need for a new workers' party. The SWP points to the potential future growth of Respect. Graham Bash maintains that the necessity for patient socialist work inside Labour has never been more clearly vindicated.

(5) Climate change all but destroys human life
Workers Power denounces him for his abject failure to adopt a revolutionary programme. The Socialist Party insists this outcome underlines the need for a new workers' party. The SWP points to the potential future growth of Respect. Graham Bash maintains that the necessity for patient socialist work inside Labour has never been more clearly vindicated.

Health and Safety Executive: letting bosses off the hook

2006-11-03T08:53:00.000-09:00

As a workplace health and safety rep, I have always found the fine people I sometimes speak to at the Health and Safety Executive - logo pictured left - helpful and pretty much on the ball. But as most trade unionists are aware, when it comes to enforcement rather than advice, the HSE is often ineffective.

So I wasn’t surprised to read this fact in today’s Financial Times [subscription required]:

‘The number of prosecutions by the HSE has almost halved in the past five years, falling from 1,986 in 2001-02 to 1,012 in 2005-06. The number of successful convictions is down from 1,522 to 741.’

Hmmm. It doesn’t seem intuitively likely that workplaces today are only half as dangerous as they were earlier in the decade.

The HSE itself admits that prosecutions have not happened in around one in ten cases where they were probably justified. Why?

But on a more encouraging note, prosecutions are up more than 20% since March, after an internal audit found that inspectors have been ‘underprosecuting’ in recent years.

Greenhouse gases: Kyoto update

2006-11-03T06:43:00.000-09:00

Capitalism’s best efforts to save the planet seem not be doing very well so far. Here’s one for everybody going on the climate change demo in London on Saturday, courtesy of Environment News Service:

‘Emissions by industrialized countries of greenhouse gases linked to global warming showed a "worrying" upward trend in the 2000–2004 period despite efforts to control them under the Kyoto Protocol, finds a United Nations report released on Monday …

‘Although the overall emissions by industrialized countries dropped 3.3 per cent in the 1990–2004 period, this was mostly due to a 36.8 percent decrease by economies in transition of eastern and central Europe, EITs, the report shows.

‘The other industrialized Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, registered a 11 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions.’

Notice the glaring absence of the US, which has of course pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol five years ago.

Still, look on the bright side. Imagine how rapidly emissions would be going up if the industrialised economies weren’t trying to reduce them.

International trade unionism in a globalised world

2006-11-02T08:56:00.000-09:00

A new worldwide trade union conglomerate is currently holding its founding convention in Vienna. It takes in 306 national unions in 154 countries and represents 168m workers. Yet press coverage, at least in Britain, has been minimal.

How should we evaluate this development? On the plus side, the International Trade Union Confederation marks a partial overcoming of the cold war split in the world labour movement.

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions - logo above left - and the Christian-based World Confederation of Labour have formally dissolved themselves into ITUC.

France’s communist-aligned CGT is also affiliating. So is AFL-CIO from the US, not for nothing previously dubbed the ‘AFL-CIA’.

But the once Moscow-controlled World Federation of Trade Unions remains on the outside.

If unity really is strength, this is – up to a point – good news. I have long argued that cross-border trade unionism is the way forward in these days of globalisation, and am glad to see the first British union go down that road.

Numast, the British shipping officers’ union, is likely to merge with its Dutch counterpart in the next year or two.

But I have been to some of these conferences, and in my experience, there is a certain element of union leaders jockeying for committee positions while the other delegates enjoy a five-star hotel junket.

Indeed, some more leftwing union officials themselves share these concerns. A Brazilian in Vienna for the ITUC shindig told the Financial Times today: ‘The international union has drifted too far from its labour roots. It does not really stand up for workers, especially in developing countries, against capitalism.’

Spot on, comrade.

PS: The launch of ITUC has been welcomed by the president of the International Labour Organisation. His name? LeRoy Trotman. Brilliant.

Carbon trading: can market mechanisms save the planet?

2006-11-02T07:41:00.000-09:00

According to the Stern report on climate change, market mechanisms can save the planet. There is no need for nasty nasty regulatory controls on carbon emissions, we are told.

Instead, we should establish a price for the ‘right’ to generate a tonne of carbon, and then issue companies with a set number of permits and give them the right to buy or sell the permits like shares on a stock market.

Too little, too late, as this analysis of the existing EU emissions trading scheme in today’s Financial Times makes clear:

‘The scheme has not forced utilities to change their behaviour by switching from coal to cleaner fuels such as natural gas.

‘In fact, the EU is projected to burn 10m tonnes of coal more this year than it did last year, and the UK will import the largest amount of coal in its history.

‘Gerard McCloskey, chairman of McCloskey Group, a coal research and publishing company, said the UK was projected to import 42m-43m tonnes of coal this year, up from a record 35m last year …

‘It is still cheaper to buy coal, and additionally pay for the credit to be able to emit more greenhouse gases, than it is to buy natural gas.

‘One London coal and gas trader said that in Germany - the largest energy market in Europe - utilities were making near record profit margins of €26.5 ($34) per megawatt hour (MWH) on the coal they used in spite of the cost of purchasing the necessary credits.

‘"If utilities are making money like that, there is no incentive for them to switch from burning coal," he said.

‘In any case, the trading scheme suffered a severe blow to its credibility in April and May when it was revealed that European governments issued more permits than their companies needed to cover their emissions in the first phase of the scheme which started in January last year and ends on December 31 next year.

‘The price of EU carbon permits dropped from more than €30 per tonne to about €8.5 within three weeks from the end of April to mid-May, although it has since partially recovered to about €11. The drop led many hedge funds to leave the market …

‘"There are too many permits, so in reality they should be worthless," says Francisco Blanch, head of commodities research at Merrill Lynch.’

Is such a patently ineffective pseudo-market really the best idea the finest economic brains on the collective payroll of Europe’s government can come up with? If so, the case for direct regulatory intervention becomes even stronger.

Service announcements for regular readers

2006-11-01T20:32:00.001-09:00

(1) The poll for the second-best leftwing blog in Britain is now closed. The clear winners are the Stroppatistas, on 30%. Congratulations, sisters.

I was surprised at the strength of support for Lenin's Tomb, second on 26%. I suppose I'd better link to the little fucker, seeing as you all like him so much. Not that he needs that, of course. That SWP bastard has got shedloads more readers than I have. Not that I'm a sectarian or anything ...

(2) Talking of links, I have today added some and deleted some. Hello to Jim Jay and David Broder. Welcome to the Dave's Part family, comrades.

(3) Those of you with blogspot blogs know that it is a free service and - as a result - you get what you pay for. It regularly breaks down, and there are frequent glitches with loading pictures.

Enough already. I have therefore purchased - at enormous expense - an individualised domain name and engaged the Geordie Genius himself to shift this blog to that URL. Prepare to redirect your browsers.

(4) Finally ... a plug for certain neglected far left bloggers. I always used to like John Molyneux's now-defunct 'Teach Yourself Marxism' column in Socialist Worker. Indeed, TYM was second only to Paul Foot's weekly article as a reason for buying the publication in the eighties.

Molyneux may not be flavour of the month with the SWP central committee right now, after leading a half-hearted rebellion at the party's conference earlier this year.

But quite by chance I stumbled across his blog, and found he has some interesting things to say on contemporary art. I was particularly taken by this post on Tracey Emin, who is clearly the second-sexiest woman on the planet.

He is obviously a clever bloke, despite writing an article on the prospects for Respect in Socialist Review that will surely haunt him in years to come.

Then there is Respect ultra-loyalist Ian Donovan, who publishes online at Red Scare. Unsurprisingly, his blog has yet to attract a single comment in several months of existence. Go on, make his day. Be nice. Why not?

Ian has for several years been repetitively critical of an article on George Galloway I penned for the Weekly Worker in 2003. Even I in retrospect admit I should have been a little more circumspect. But Ian described it in this blog's comments boxes as 'Osler's wretched screed'. Harsh. I still stand stand by the substantive political points. I have offered Donovan right of reply. He hasn't taken it yet. Your call, comrade.

Oh, and lastly ... Southpaw Punch. Consistently high-quality orthotrot blogging. Writes to a standard Donovan would love to reach, but simply isn't capable of achieving. Southpaw has decided on a strategy of posting only once a week, namely Monday mornings. Not the best tactic in an increasingly competitive blogosphere. But go read, it's all good stuff.

What they really don't teach you at Harvard Business School

2006-11-01T07:11:00.000-09:00

One of the all-time best-selling titles in that loathsome and tedious genre of books on management theory is Mark ‘The Shark' McCormack’s ‘What they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School’. And according to the website Blood and Treasure, one of the things that should be on the curriculum there is revolutionary socialism.

Blogger Jamie K takes issue with my recent series of posts on old Trots. According him, many students who sign up to Trotskyist organisations on campus are motivated by careerism right from the start:

‘Membership of any far left group at University is good career training … the trots and tankies are learning what really matters if you want to get on in the world – how to manipulate committees, control agendas, identify and neutralise enemies.

‘The generally venomous internecine conflict between far left groupings also provides a good grounding for life in more conventional achievement oriented environments. Anyone with the remotest talent for bullshitting gets first rate training, especially since the professional merchandising of opinion is now a considerable business in itself …

‘All this is true of mainstream student political groupings. But they offer a path direct into politics itself, Young revolutionaries can take this path too, following the dictum that "freedom is the recognition of necessity."

‘Even the existential futility of holding far left positions in the actually existing political order teaches the kind of persistence that a true go-getter needs. I am right eventually becomes I am right, and Lev Davidovich Bronstein, becomes, by slow degrees, Tom Davidovich Peters.’

Unfair, I think. Neither I nor most of my far left contemporaries at the colleges I attended spent much time packing committees. We were far too busy genuinely trying to orient towards the local labour movement and the wider working class, particularly during miners’ strike and the Wapping dispute.

I’d like to think I could have had a career as a braindead Labour backbencher if that is what I truly had wanted. Trouble is, I was never much good either at keeping my trap shut or at kissing the right arses. I suppose that’s why I’ve ended up an underachiever and proud of it.

Funnily enough, including stints as Trot full-timer or ghostwriter for Arthur Scargill on my CV does not seem to have helped me secure a job with a telephone number salary. What am I doing wrong, Jamie?

Far lower numbers of students join left groups than was the case in the eighties. But a number of the young Trot whippersnappers I have come across recently strike me as both phenomenally bright and seriously politically committed. I just wish they would recruit more of their mates, so we middle-aged curmudgeons could put our feet up a bit more until we qualify for our pensions.

Old Trots: where are they now? 4

2006-10-31T07:07:00.000-09:00

It is well-known that my old IMG comrade John Ross – currently the evil genius behind the secretive but influential Socialist Action grouping - pulls down a six-figure salary as Ken Livingstone’s director of economic and business policy.

But according to a potted biog on the Greater London Authority’s official website, his expertise has also been widely available to selected private sector concerns:

‘Mr Ross is a specialist in international economic relations including the Chinese and Russian economies. He was formerly a business consultant advising international mining, financial and commercial companies.’

Really? Like who, for instance? I think we should be told.

[Hat tip: Prodicus]

Rich get richer: official

2006-10-31T06:16:00.000-09:00

‘Kevin Murphy, a professor at the University of Southern California's Marshall school of business, estimates that average CEO pay at S&P 500 companies stands at $10.5m, taking account of options and bonus payments. That figure is four times what it was in 1993.

‘In the UK, Incomes Data Services reports that the average pay of a FTSE100 company boss went up by 43 per cent last year while average earnings rose only 3.7 per cent.

‘The average overall pay of top UK chief executives now stands at £2.9m - 86 times what a typical employee receives. In the US, Prof Murphy suggests that average CEO pay is an amazing 369 times as large as an ordinary worker's salary.’

Tactical split in the Socialist Campaign Group

2006-10-30T08:45:00.000-09:00

Back in July, this blog reported the tactical split the Campaign Group over which candidate to advance for the Labour leadership. No great feat of investigative journalism, I’m afraid. I lifted the story from the Sunday Telegraph, which revealed:

‘The Campaign Group has split into two factions. One is led by Alan Simpson (pictured left), the MP for Nottingham South, and backs Michael Meacher, the former environment secretary, as its leftwing challenger.

'The other group of "ultra leftwingers" is backing John McDonnell, the MP for Hayes and Harlington and the campaign chairman. Mr McDonnell ... believes that Mr Meacher lacks leftwing credibility because he failed to resign his government post over Iraq.’

Now Reclaim Labour – a newcomer but already one of the best British leftwing blogs on the block, for my money – has done what I signally failed to do at the time, and actually researched the story properly.

Blog owner ‘Harry Perkins’ maintains that Simpson is pushing Meacher forward, basically because he is piqued at McDonnell’s standing as the de facto standard bearer of the Labour left. Simpson is accused of repeatedly telling one soft left MP that a vote for McDonnell is a wasted vote, and that only Meacher can get on the ballot paper.

But any remaining socialist street cred Meacher may once have enjoyed thanks to his former association with Tony Benn has long disappeared, given both his support for the invasion of Iraq and his property tycoon status.

Meanwhile, Harry believes that Meacher has been putting out feelers to what could still loosely be called the soft left. Odd, given that this section of the parliamentary Labour Party is now under the gravitional pull of Brownism:

‘Meacher has been desperately courting the head of the Compass parliamentary group Jon Trickett. But Trickett and his close mate Colin Burgon have told a couple of MPs that they're not going to vote for him under any circumstances,’ Perkins goes on.

Reclaim Labour then did the proper journalistic thing and contacted Simpson for comment, getting a full explanation in a letter from the Nottingham MP. Here is how Simpson explained himself:

‘The Left is in real trouble in our leadership election, because we are not likely to have a candidate with sufficient nominations even to get in the ring.’

‘The worst case scenario would be the emergence of a number of broad left candidates who are able to get a few nominations each, but with none of them able to reach the 44 MPs needed to get to the starting line.

‘I am trying to play this in a way that gets people to avoid falling out. We need an informal agreement that left MP’s can be free to offer the support to whoever they like on the basis that we look at their nominations a week before nominations close.

‘At this point the person with the lowest number of promises has to withdraw and accept they can’t get the numbers. MP’s should then be free to formally endorse what may be their second choice candidate. At least then there would be a contest.

‘I am sure you will know that my own obsessions are about our complete failure to engage with the climate change challenge. We only have about 10 years left in which to make profound changes to the way society works.

‘After that we will just be chasing after a series of catastrophes. The only person that really understands this on our side is Michael Meacher. I know he got it disastrously wrong over the war, but at least he has had the courage to say that was the biggest wrong decision he has ever made and is openly campaigning for troop withdrawal.’

I think at bottom there is a genuine tactical dispute here. Clearly some Campaign Group MPs think that McDonnell is too closely associated with the early eighties Trotskyist-influenced local government hard left, and thus has too narrow an appeal.

Accordingly they reckon it would be better to find someone capable of bringing in forces from the centre of the party. At least that’s a coherent set of propositions, although I happen to think the basic premise is wrong. Given that the left has no chance of winning, the key issue is to use the campaign to regalvanise some sort of activist base. Meacher is hardly the man to do that.

Sir Nicholas Stern, the environment and the left

2006-10-30T01:28:00.000-09:00

If Britain had a serious left that gave environmental questions the priority they clearly deserve - and sadly it doesn't - than today's review on climate change from Sir Nicholas Stern (pictured left) would present an open goal for the strident assertion of ecosocialist goals.

New Labour - and even Cameron's Conservatives, come to that - talk a good game on green issues. But none of the mainstream parties delivers the goods.

Blair can give a speech on Monday arguing that climate change is the most important issue facing the planet. On Tuesday, his government will back proposals for three new runways in the south of England, so that air travel to and from the UK can double over the next two decades. Joined up politics it ain't.

If the leaks are anything to go by, Sir Nicholas's proposals are based exclusively on market mechanisms. His report is designed to provide a green light to more 'green taxes'. That, in turn, will offer political cover for shifting yet more of the tax burden on to consumers, and a further reduction in taxation on business. That's not environmentalism. It's Thatcherism dressed up in pale green glad rags.

I'm not against higher taxes on Chelsea Tractors per se. But a self-confident green left could push for bolder demands. What about a moratorium on further road building, accompanied by year-by-year targets to reduce car usage by boosting surface public transportation across the EU, in a manner that would maximise job creation, for starters?

There is also a need for better dialogue between the red left and green left. True, there is nothing inherently socialist about Green Party ideology as such. But the Greens - in the UK, at any rate - are unmistakeably an anti-establishment formation.

They are against the war in Iraq, they are anti-racist and anti-homophobic, and they reject the current restrictions on immigration, trade unions and cannabis consumption, to name but a few of their positions.

Where Green and socialist policies coincide - and they often do - then of course both sides should work together. Socialists shouldn't tell Greens involved in the anti-war movement to get lost.

By the same token, there is little point in running our own, purely socialist, campaigns against nuclear dumping or open-cast mining. And there's no reason to reject involvement in existing campaigns that the Greens have taken the initiative to get off the ground.

A left worth having would respond by taking ecosocialism into the heart of the British labour movement. But I'm not holding my breath.

Old Trots: where are they now? 3

2006-10-29T01:22:00.000-09:00

Wolverhampton South West MP Rob Marris richly deserves his reputation as a relentlessly on-message braindead Blairite backbencher.

So hopefully he will be suitably embarrassed with the revelation - and I think that this is an exclusive - that he hides a shadowy past as a dangerous Marxist revolutionary.

He has succeeded in keeping this quiet until now because he propagated the doctrine of permanent revolution only in Canada, a country where he spent nine years as a student before working - oddly enough for a trained lawyer - in a string of blue-collar jobs.

Marris's biographical details in the Times Guide to the House of Commons state that he was a member of Canada's New Democratic Party from 1980 to 1982. What he doesn't mention - and I learned this while knocking back a few beers with some Trot dockers in Vancouver a couple of years ago - is that he was also a member of the Canadian section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International while working as a bus driver in that beautiful city.

The USec was at that time engaged in 'the turn to industry', which saw college kids routinely ordered to get into manual unions. It was this policy that led to 'Red Steph' and a handful of nice middle class IMGers being outed as 'moles' at the Cowley car plant, circa 1982.

Marris 'made the turn' in Canada instead of Britain. If you get to read this, Rob, your old comrades did get to hear of your subsequent political career. They wish you well. At least on a personal level.

RMT disaffiliates from SSP

2006-10-28T14:09:00.000-08:00

Press release from RMT, issued yesterday:

'Transport union RMT’s executive has agreed to disaffiliate the union from the Scottish Socialist Party after consulting its Scottish committee and branches.

'The union has also decided that it will not affiliateto the new Solidarity movement.

'"It gives no pleasure to have to take this decision, which has been made in close consultation with our Scottish committee and branches," RMT general secretary Bob Crow said today.

'"However, it is clear that there are elements within the SSP that have destablised the organisation, that the atmosphere within it is no longer conducive to comradeship, and that it is no longer in our members' interests to remain affiliated.

'"We will of course be monitoring political developments and the question of any possible future affiliation will be decided, as allowed under rule, in line with the union's aims and objects and the wishes of the membership," Bob Crow said.'

Hardly surprising given the developments in recent months, but a pity nevertheless. Interesting wording, though. Crow rather seems to be taking Sheridan's side in the dispute.

Old Trots: where are they now? 2

2006-10-28T10:25:00.001-08:00

Kirk Leech - pictured left - was an old mucker of mine when we were both politics students at City of London Polytechnic, class of 1981.

Contemporaries remember a charismatic and charming young man who clearly enjoyed female company. As to the exact circumstances in which he was found in the small hours of the night, wandering stark bollock naked and extremely drunk in the public corridors of a Blackpool hotel during a National Union of Students conference, alas my memory fails me.

Comrade Leech, who has also operated under a number of pseudonyms, was also a leading member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. You can read a potted biography of his activities here:

'For a number of years [Leech] ran [the RCP's] Irish 'front' organization the Irish Freedom Movement, at one time being based in Dublin Ireland.

'Whilst living in Bradford West Yorkshire, Leech set up a number of campaigns and groups who claimed to be taking on, with physical force, organised racists. This was carried out under the umbrella of Bradford, Workers Against Racism.

'He stood in the 1987 General Election in the Newcastle Central Constituency for the RCP. He was also for a number of years the RCP's key man in Scotland. Leech worked with the German Group Novo a sister organisation of the Revolutionary Communist Party.'

Kirk obviously remains close to the RCP old boys and girls network, being a regular and recent contributor to Spiked!. Now he has resurfaced on my radar screen as a 'freelance journalist, broadcaster, researcher', with a report rubbishing environmental objections to a gold mine in Romania. I'll not pass judgement on the rights and wrongs of that particular issue.

But I was interested to read that he now describes himself as an 'Adjunct Fellow' of the International Freedom Education Foundation, which he describes thus:

'IFEF’s mission is to advance education, and to further other charitable and educational purposes, in the field of the promotion of free markets, limited government under the rule of law and personal responsibility; and to publish, to conduct seminars, and to engage in research in furtherance of such purposes.'

Adjunct fellow at an obscure US rightwing think tank, eh, Kirk? I don't know whether that qualifies as a move right or left in your case. But let's hope there's a decent wedge in it for you. I could use a couple of those consultancy gigs myself, if there's any more going.

The crisis of modern socialism - sorted

2006-10-27T05:25:00.000-08:00

Several recent posts on this website have highlighted the seeming inability of all sections of the current UK left to modernise socialist politics. But what would a credible twenty-first century left reformism look like?

Most socialist thinking remains stuck in the ideological paradigms of the second half of the twentieth century. It's all 'renationalise this!' and 'rebuild that!'. There is far too much nostalgia for sundry icons ranging from Clement Atlee to Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili.

Little consideration is given to a dramatically changed political landscape, from the environmental crisis to the collapse of communism, from the emergence of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) economies to the rise of Islamic radicalism.

For those who define socialist utopia as something more than a renationalised gas industry, it is high time policies were developed that go beyond what is essentially a demand to return to the Britain of the early seventies. Those of us who remember it will testify that it certainly wasn't a workers' paradise, anyway.

It is also necessary to think beyond the 'wait for the revolution' project espoused by almost all the fractured forces of the far left, which have little to say on the subject of immediate political demands.

And - wakey, wakey, comrades - we need take at least a large swathe of the general public with us. That necessitates policies that would prove electorally popular.

So, purely in a back-of-a-fag-packet Friday afternoon kind of way, I'd like to offer a few bullet points for discussion. Not a Marxist programme. Not transitional demands. Just weedy updated social democracy for mass consumption. Here are some of the ideas I'd like to see in the platform of my fantasy Labour left:

Social ownership

Britain in the post-war period has tried both Morrisonian nationalisation and neoliberal privatisation. There are massive drawbacks to both models.

But inefficiency, fat cattery and the death toll from cutting health and safety corners has seen private enterprise in the transport and utilities sector discredit itself more thoroughly than any amount of agitprop ever could. There is certainly no public appetite for further private involvement in the NHS.

However, the left needs to come up with practical schemes for public administration - offering greater employee and user involvement - as part of our strategy for a return to public ownership.

We also need to rethink the seventies experiments with worker ownership and industrial democracy for smaller concerns.

Union rights

Trade unions are voluntary organisations, reliant on the efforts of full-time officials and lay activists. They cannot be 'decreed' into better health. The emancipation of British trade unionism will largely be an act of the trade unionists themselves.

There is currently a thoughtful article by Bill Mullin on the Socialist Party's website, making the case that regeneration is inseperably bound up with the fight for a new political vehicle. It's well worth a read.

But British unions are currently hampered by what Blair openly boasts is the toughest employment legislation in Europe. Reforms along the lines of the TUC's proposed Trade Union Freedom Bill are long overdue.

The ideas the TUC is canvassing include better protection from dismissal for those taking part in lawful industrial action; simplified ballot procedures; and a restored right to solidarity action.

Anti-racism

Racism in Britain right now is predominantly focused on the Muslim population. Politicians of all stripes exploit this to what they see as their electoral advantage. Straw and Reid happily play dog whistle politics, while the Respect slates even rational secularist criticism of the Islamic faith as 'Islamophobia'. Another section of the left - many with the political training to know better - have given currency to the shockingly politically illiterate term 'Islamofascism'.

The secular democratic left should combine a strong positive argument in favour of assimilation into secular democratic society with an equally strong defence of the right of religious observance. The socialist project is ultimately for the breakdown of all barriers between humanity, including not just barriers of class but of race and religion too. At the same time, we recognise that it is not the role of the state to force the process.

Ultimately, we would be working with the grain on this one, if the experience of the Jewish side of my family is anything to go by. Assimilation will happen. We should advocate it.

The working class

The working class remains the only realistic agency for socialist change. But New Labour's adoption of neoliberalism has weakened Labour support in working class communities to the point where political apathy has already made massive inroads. So has the fascist right, thankfully to a lesser extent.

A key task for a modern left is reconnection with our traditional base. Our politics have to promise tangible goodies for working people of all ethnicities, with social housing and job creation being the most obvious places to start.

A libertarian social agenda

In the sixties and seventies, the left was often the driving force behind initiatives on issues such as women's rights and sexual freedom. These days all three mainstream parties try to annexe such ground. Most of the right legislation - from the Equal Pay Act to the Civil Partnership Act and an equal age of consent - is in place, even if it not adequately enforced. It's seemingly only the SWP that wants to backpedal on this.

The environment

Trotsky once remarked: 'If you conceive that some cosmic catastrophe is going to destroy our planet in the fairly near future, then you must, of course, reject the communist perspective along with much else.' And unfortunately the shit could be about to hit the fan on that one.

But the best the EU is offering is the gradual extension of the carbon trading scheme. The left should develop policies for tough immediate action, perhaps starting with immediate Europe-wide legislation forcing all industries to adopt the best-available technology to reduce pollution in all their operations. At their expense. Now. As with social ownership for basic utilities, such a demand would prove massively popular.

Anti-terrorism

This is an area where the left should have something meaningful to say, but by and large doesn't. The problem with brandishing placards with the slogan 'Bush is the real terrorist' is the implication that Osama bin Laden isn't.

Of course citizens want to be protected from terrorism of all stripes. New Labour has taken this as the starting point for a sustained assault on civil liberties, with the de facto introduction of house arrest and internment without trial.

And of course the left needs to lead the fight against such reactionary measures. But that does not absolve us of the need to develop positive proposals of our own.

Foreign policy

For me, Rwanda marked a turning point in my political thinking. Humanitarian intervention is sometimes justified. That's something John McDonnell explicitly recognises in his stance on Darfur.

The problem here is that the words 'humanitarian intervention' are all too frequently advanced as a justification for blatant imperialism. The democratic left needs to think through it's criteria on the subject. Who intervenes? Under whose auspices?

Europe

You can still find sections of the left calling for 'immediate withdrawal from the bosses' common market'. But the project of a united Europe that transcends nation-states is clearly historically progressive. The struggle is to ensure that the united Europe has a social content.

An immediate priority should be co-ordination between the social democratic parties, giving them the leverage to co-ordinate social democratic policies in periods when they hold office in the main EU member states.

There you go. The crisis of contemporary leftwing politics sorted. Easy, eh? Still, I expect some of you will be churlish enough to disagree with me. The comments box is open.

Old Trots: where are they are now?

2006-10-27T03:21:00.000-08:00

Comrades who have knocked around the Trot left for far too long may remember Alan Johnson, previously (in his own coy words) 'a supporter of the newspaper Socialist Organiser', twice a member of the Socialist Workers' Party, and as late as 2003 an attendee at Alliance for Workers' Liberty events.

Professor Alan Johnson of Edge Hill University - as he nowadays styles himself - has more recently been involved in writing the Euston Manifesto and editing the online journal Democratiya.

Prof J is seen on the right of the picture above, nicked from Will's blog. At least he gets to hang out with bigger cheeses than Sean Matgamna these days.

Future leaders of corporate America

2006-10-25T08:07:00.000-08:00

A survey of Masters in Business Administration students in the US and Canada – the big bosses of tomorrow – reveals that almost 90% of them feel that companies should factor social and environmental effects into their business decisions.

Or, in other words, more than 10% of the little yuppie bastards don’t give even pretend to give a flying about what their future employers will do to the planet, the working class or the surrounding communities. Say hello to the future leaders of corporate America.

Balfour Beatty accused of major tube safety breach

2006-10-25T07:23:00.000-08:00

A truly frightening press release from transport union RMT:

‘Metronet Consortium member Balfour Beatty took a "massive and unacceptable gamble with people’s lives" by taking two 54-kilo containers of highly flammable and unstable acetylene gas into the Victoria Line, London Underground’s biggest union reveals today.

‘An LUL [London Underground Limited] investigation is under way into how and why the contractor – one of the firms contracted to build the East London Line extension – took what amounted to two massive potential bombs to track-replacement works on August 12.

‘"Balfour Beatty appear to have broken just about every safety rule in the book by taking these potentially explosive cylinders onto the Victoria Line for 48 hours," RMT general secretary Bob Crow said today.

‘"Acetylene is extremely flammable, unstable and explosive, and is only allowed onto the Underground in half-litre containers under strict rules, and it seems that Balfour Beatty flouted them.

‘"We understand they had no hot-works licence, no permission to take the cylinders underground and no method statement on transporting them – and that this was not the first time they had done it.

‘"If that was not bad enough we understand they even transported four oxygen cylinders alongside the acetylene – a potentially catastrophic mixture.

‘"This incident underlines the case we have been making that we cannot afford to lose the Section 12 sub-surface fire-safety regulations that lay down strict rules for what can and can’t be done down there.

‘"The idea of giving employers the initiative on fire-safety sends a shiver up my spine, because where there’s a profit to be made the privateers simply can’t be trusted, and the sooner all Tube infrastructure work is brought back in-house, the better," Bob Crow said.’

The revelation comes just one day after the announcements that National Grid has awarded Balfour Beatty a contract worth £550m over five years to upgrade and develop the electricity transmission network in the eastern half of England, and that – as RMT mentions - a consortium of Balfour Beatty and Carillion has won a contract worth £363m to extend the East London Line.

I live near Dalston. I only hope this cowboy outfit doesn't blow up the ‘hood.

George Galloway: gaff up for grabs

2006-10-24T08:26:00.000-08:00

Assuming you could possibly hack living in Streatham - apologies to anyone that has to - then George Galloway’s five-bedroom South London Victorian abode is on the market, pictured left. It's a real snip at just £825,000. Full details and internal pix can be seen on the Foxtons website:

‘A magnificent five bedroomed family house quietly secluded from the road via substantial front and rear gardens, two beautiful reception rooms, imposing double bedrooms and chic décor throughout. The property comprises two reception rooms incorporating feature fireplace and bay window, kitchen with dining area, extensive utility room, five bedrooms, three en suites, guest cloakroom, garage/covered side access with vast space for parking or storage, further off-street parking and mature garden with patio area and Mediterranean trees. Riggindale Road is conveniently located moments from Streatham High Road, which offers a wide range of shops and amenities while the open spaces of Tooting Common are also easily accessed. Streatham Station (British Rail) is nearby and the A23 offers the motorist easy access to central London and towards the South of England.’

The Times reports:

‘Galloway shared the five-bed house with Amineh Abu Zayyad, his Palestinian-born second wife. The pair seperated in 2005.

‘He now lives in Brick Lane, in the East End of London …

‘Foxtons tell us that Galloway has now accepted an offer on the property. He stands to make a bundle. In an interview last year he declared that the house was mortgaged for a mere £295,000.’

Oh, the London property market, eh? At dinner parties we talk of little else. I see he’s got the same bust of Lenin that I have, though.

[Hat tip: Guido]

The strange death of grassroots activism

2006-10-24T07:48:00.000-08:00

Continuing on the theme of the withering of local democracy, it’s worth adding that one factor in all of this is a sharp fall in participation in local political organisations.

I can say from personal experience that there were plenty of young people active in the Constituency Labour Parties I was a member of in the early eighties.

Being a twentysomething politico was not as sad as it may sound today. The meetings would usually wrap up in time to get to a gig by the time the main band was due to hit the stage.

Alternatively, you could always hit the Labour Club bar with other attendees – some of whom qualified as ‘talent’, to use an expression I haven’t heard in ages - and have a good chinwag on political topics.

We all know what has happened in the intervening decades. Labour has officially lost 200,000 members since Blair took office, and some Labour MPs put the real figure at 300,000. Grassroots Toryism may even be in a yet more parlous state. Activists in either no longer have any real say in policy.

The Unlock Democracy campaign – a new venture from Charter 88 and the New Politics Network – has recently conducted a survey of party membership in 286 constituencies.

This is how the FT summarised the findings:

‘Many local groups have derisory levels of membership and funding. The survey found 34 per cent of Conservative associations, 50 per cent of constituency Labour parties and 73 per cent of Liberal Democrat local parties had an income of under £5,000 - typically less than 7p an elector - last year.’

Interestingly – I initially typed astonishingly here, but it’s not astonishing at all – the Tories are in even worse shape than New Labour:

‘While only 3 per cent of constituencies have fewer than 100 Labour members, one in five has fewer than 100 Conservative members, the survey found. Northern Tory associations typically had fewer than 50 members. "These results suggest that in areas where the Conservatives are out of contention, the party has literally died off," Unlock Democracy said …

The party's local structure has been revamped in a number of the northern cities, with resources pooled to try to compensate for the dearth of activists. Manchester now has a single Conservative association, covering more than five constituencies, with a total of only about 350 members.’

It strikes me that the daft answers being adopted by Labour and the Conservatives alike – from open primaries to loose supporters’ networks - will do little to fire youthful idealism, either. What they have in common is a fear of handing activists any worthwhile degree of influence.

In the polarised Britain of the early eighties, there was a meaningful choice to be made between two sets of ideas with very different visions for the future of the country and the world.

But nobody can blame young people for not wanting to get involved in today’s mainstream politics, based on a bland right of centre managerialist consensus, when they could be out having a good time instead.

More on safety at BP

2006-10-23T08:23:00.000-08:00

Radio Four’s long-running documentary strand File on Four this week looks at safety standards at UK oil major BP, a subject this blog has previously covered.

And – if the taster on the BBC’s website is anything to go by, the programme will not much to the liking of £15,000-a-day Lord Browne of Madingly or the company’s public relations team:

‘The US Chemical Safety Board, the federal body which investigates major industrial accidents, has attacked safety standards at UK oil giant BP

‘Its findings follow an investigation into the March 2005 blast at BP's Texas City refinery near Houston that killed 15 people and injured 180.

‘The CSB alleges that … eight previous safety incidents at the facility were not property investigated, and that the right corrective actions were not taken.

‘It further claims that BP failed to adequately maintain instruments and equipment, and that the number of training staff at the plant had been cut by 73%. ‘The CSB concludes that such cost cutting was part of a 25% reduction in fixed costs at the plant from 1998 to 2001, which had a serious impact on maintenance and infrastructure.’

You can hear the programme at 8pm on Tuesday evening.

Amicus and T&G: you read it here first

2006-10-23T07:59:00.000-08:00

Today’s Guardian carries a report on the battle to divvy up the top jobs when Amicus and the TGWU merge at the start of next year.

It’s a story you could have read on this website more than one month ago. In much greater detail, too.

Thanks to the informant on that one. More of the same always gratefully received.

The decline of local democracy

2006-10-23T07:54:00.000-08:00

Local democracy has been under attack from successive governments – both Conservative and Labour – for more than two decades now. It’s reached the point now where the chief function of many councils is to vote on which private company gets the contract to empty the bins.

And with no disrespect to friends of mine who do serve as councillors, it’s probably fair to say that the standard of local elected representatives is now not as high as it was in the past.

Result? Fewer than 50% of people are happy with their local authority, according to a government-commissioned survey due for publication today. Two-thirds of respondents said they did not believe they could influence local decisions, while only 21% said they were satisfied with the opportunities open to them to participate. Nearly half felt that their council did not do enough for people like them.

OK, local government just ain’t sexy. Most lefties would far rather spend their free time discussing prospects for the Venezuelan revolution. But delivery of local services is one of the most important aspects of life for working class people. And middle class people, for that matter.
Revitalising local democracy should be a priority demand of the thinking left.

Saturday Night Music Club:where are they now?

2006-10-21T19:34:00.000-08:00

Coulda had class. Coulda been a contender. Well, maybe not. As a teenager, I was never a particularly good guitarist, to be honest. Indeed, I failed auditions for Adam and the Ants and Generation X. True.

Of course, mostof the stars of that era have moved on to other things. Take former Clash drummer Terry Chimes, pictured left, for instance.

This is the man who was billed on the band's first album as 'Tory Crimes'. Brilliant nomenclature, especially at a time when Britain hadn't even been through Thatcherism yet.

According to this article on the BBC website, he is now a respectable chiropractor in Essex. And what a boring bloke he seems to have turned into:

'I felt it was time to completely change - and over the time I'd been a musician, I'd already become a non-drinking, non-smoking, non-drug-taking vegetarian who does yoga.'

Not typical for a drummer, as anyone who has ever been in bands will tell you.

Meanwhile, a quick google reveals that sixties R&B legends The Pirates are still gigging. But back in the eighties, guitarist Mick Green was mini-cabbing in Leytonstone.

I found this out when I ordered a cab to take me back from a rehearsal. The driver asked me what was in my guitar case, and then after a bit of muso talk on Gibson versus Fender lines, revealed his ID.

Over to you now. Anybody know what the big names of yesteryear are up to these days?

Press freedom in Somalia

2006-10-20T19:22:00.000-08:00

Sections of the left were clearly delighted when the Union of Islamic Courts seized control of Mogadishu last July.

‘For the first time for many years there is a sense of relief and hope among many people in Somalia,' Socialist Worker told its readership, in a wholly positive article in which our ‘revolutionary socialists’ found themselves unable to utter one word of criticism about the freshly-minted theocracy.

As this blog remarked at the time, the UIC were depicted essentially as armed reformists, delivering welfare statist politics through the barrel of an AK-47. There was no suggestion that the Islamist rule would be anything other than progressive.

Media coverage of what goes on Somalia is, at least in Britain, extremely limited. Now getting an accurate handle on the situation is suddenly going to be a whole lot harder.

According to a report [in French] on the indispensable Jeune Afrique website today, the UIC has introduced tough new rules on press censorship:

‘By virtue of these rules, it is forbidden to journalists to publish information judged contrary to Islam and to participate in programmes or seminars sponsored by foreigners without the permission of the bureau of information of the UIC.

‘Equally, the code forbids the media to use the vocabulary that the infidels use to make reference to Muslims, such as ‘terrorists’ or ‘extremists’.’

French press freedom campaign Reporters Sans Frontieres has condemned the move. I wonder what the SWP’s position would be, if they even considered such matters? After all, they supported the Racial and Religious Hatred Act. What's the difference in principle?

No Respect for its own membership

2006-10-20T07:53:00.000-08:00

Whoever it is exactly that Respect purports to respect, it’s certainly not its own supporters. The group’s own internal figures – as recently reported on this blog – show that paid-up membership has fallen from 3,040 a year ago to 2,160 today.

But instead of facing reality squarely, the George Galloway/SWP bloc’s leadership has decided to ignore inconvenient reality and instead repeatedly lies to its own base.

According to a report on last weekend’s Respect conference published in the current edition of the Weekly Worker, Galloway reassured the assembled delegates Respect is not only the ‘fastest growing party’ in Britain but also ‘probably the only organisation that’s growing’.

However, the paper charges, the true figures were 'supressed in the version of the [national council annual] report given to delegates'.

The article adds:

‘The conference, held in London’s Friends Meeting House, was notable for the large numbers of empty seats throughout. The main hall holds around 500 people, but, apart from during the anti-islamophobia rally, it was never more than half full …

‘The total attending was clearly well down on 2005 - I counted just over 200 delegates on the Saturday, down to 150 or so on the Sunday. In addition there were around 50 observers on the Saturday morning (perhaps there were twice that number who attended for some part of the weekend).

‘Every delegate I asked told me their branch entitlement had fallen compared to last year - some quite considerably - and the last 12 months has certainly not seen the creation of any number of new branches.’

Considerable scepticism is also expressed about the claimed size of Respect’s student base:

‘In addition to suppressing the membership figures, Galloway played up the numbers who had joined Student Respect. In his opening remarks he gave a figure of 10,000 new recruits, who he said had joined the party. But, of course, filling in a form expressing interest in a Respect student society is hardly the same as signing up as a paid up member of the party.

‘However, this figure was ‘corrected’ the following day by SWP and national council member Nick Wrack, who put the number of Student Respect adherents at 2,000.’

In my experience, any political organisation that is forced to bullshit its rank and file on these kinds of issues is heading for deep trouble. If you can’t trust a leadership to tell the truth on something as basic as membership stats, what can you trust them to tell the truth about?

Journalists in 'principled stand' shocker

2006-10-19T07:51:00.000-08:00

As a journo by trade, I am well aware that my chosen profession is not universally popular in the labour movement. My job takes me to trade union conferences with reasonable regularity, so I know that sometimes the mere sight of a press pass can make delegates unnecessarily edgy, and at times even downright shirty.

But for all that, the National Union of Journalists – and I’ve been a member since 1988 – remains one of Britain’s more progressive unions. So I was particularly pleased to read this story on the Socialist Worker website, although it is not in the print edition:

‘The Daily Star was forced to withdraw a spoof "Daily Fatwa" page just before the presses started rolling [on Tuesday] night in the face of a revolt from the paper’s NUJ union chapel.

‘The page purported to show how the paper would look under Muslim law. It included material that would have given great offence to the Muslim community.

‘The Star's new deputy editor Ben Knowles – who joined the paper from the magazine Zoo in September - was in charge at the time.

‘Planned features on the page headed "How your favourite paper would look under Muslim law" included a "Page 3 burqa babes special" and a blank editorial stamped "censored".

‘It is understood that the page had been signed off by senior executives when around 12 members of the Daily Star chapel held an emergency NUJ meeting at 8.30pm.

‘They passed a motion stating: "This National Union of Journalists chapel expresses its deep concern at the content of page 6 in tomorrow's Daily Star which we consider to be deliberately offensive to Muslims.

'"The chapel fears that this editorial content poses a very serious risk of violent and dangerous reprisals from religious fanatics who may take offence at these articles. This may place the staff in great jeopardy. This chapel urges the management to remove the content immediately."’

The Daily Star is, of course, owned by Richard Desmond’s Express Newspapers. This week, sister title The Daily Express sacked six of its annual intake of trainees, just one month into their supposed 12-month contracts.

Human resources executive Hazel Messenger allegedly told some of the female trainees: 'It's a volatile industry, newspaper. You would be better off as midwifes.'

Express Newspapers is a past financial backer of a political party. New Labour, to be precise.

Tata bids for Corus: the rise of third world multinationals

2006-10-18T07:25:00.000-08:00

India’s Tata Steel has launched a 455p a share offer for Corus, the company that brings together what little is left of what was once the publicly-owned British Steel and what little is left of its Dutch counterpart Hoogovens. Two Russian outfits – Severstal and Novolipetsk – are mulling a counterbid.

Yes, the age of the third world (and second world, for that matter) multinational has well and truly arrived. What’s more, these MNCs are buying up large slices of the UK’s shriveled industrial base.

So RMC – Ready Mix Concrete, as was – is now owned by Cemex of Mexico. And, as a P&O Ports shop steward of my acquaintance likes to joke, P&O is now under state ownership. Except the state in question is Dubai.

My question is … where do developments such as these leave Lenin’s theory of imperialism? Is India now an imperialist power driven to export capital? Is Britain a neocolony? Answers on a postcard. Or in the comments box.

British Nuclear Group: living in a fuels paradise?

2006-10-17T09:26:00.000-08:00

Tony Blair has warned that Britain faces ‘a dramatic shortfall in our energy capacity and risks to our energy security over the next few decades’ unless existing power plants are replaced.

Er … Blair is right. Three words you won’t often read on this blog, I promise. But what the prime minister is really trying to say is that he wants Britain to build a new generation of nuclear power stations, however unpopular such a move would prove with the electorate.

To tell the truth, I’m slightly at odds with leftwing orthodoxy on this one. With global warming the number one threat facing humanity, I believe that nuclear energy – potentially, at least - could offer an important alternative to fossil fuels.

But to be able to do so, it would need to overcome three major, major snags. First, the safety risks are obvious. Second, there is the problem of what to do with the resultant waste. And third, could the economics ever stack up?

Nuke boffins of my acquaintance reckon that the technology exists to iron all these problems out. That said, this story from today’s FT doesn’t fill me with confidence that nuclear energy will ever get past the first two of these hurdles:

‘One of Britain's flagship nuclear facilities has been criticised by the Health and Safety Executive for significant safety lapses after a radioactive leak went undetected for months.

‘British Nuclear Group was fined £500,000 yesterday in a case brought by the HSE for breaches at the Thorp reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria, Britain's largest nuclear site.

‘No reprocessing has taken place at Thorp since April last year, when about 83,000 tonnes of acid containing 20 tonnes of uranium and 160kg of plutonium escaped from a broken pipe into a sealed concrete holding at the site.

‘The company was handed the fine at Carlisle crown court after pleading guilty at an earlier hearing to three counts of breaching conditions attached to the Sellafield site licence, granted under the 1965 Nuclear Installations Act.

‘The HSE said there was no evidence of harm to workers or the public but said it was "not prepared to tolerate" a "significant prolonged reduction in attention". It added: "Thorp was Sellafield's flagship plant and built to high standards. It must also be operated, maintained and managed to the high standards we insist on."’

A £500,000 fine? Given that BNG announced a £72m profit earlier this year, that is hardly going to hurt too much.

The Swedish model en deshabille

2006-10-17T07:52:00.000-08:00

I bet that, for most of my readers, the phrase ‘Swedish model’ instantly conjures up a mental picture of social democracy gone to heaven, rather than the young Anita Pallenberg en deshabille. Because we at Dave’s Part are serious about politics, right?

But sadly Sweden has had a centre-right government for, oooh, eleven days now. And so far, it has been – to coin a phrase – ‘an absolute fucking disaster’.

Two ministers have been forced to quit. Culture minister Cecilia Stegoe Chilo – crazy name, crazy gal, pictured left, and responsible for collecting the licence fees that fund public TV channels – has resigned following revelations that she hasn’t bought a TV licence for the last 16 years, and hired a domestic servant without paying the necessary taxes. Trade minister Maria Borelius resigned after similar accusations of tax dodging.

But enough schadenfreude. What about the class politics? Well, it is certainly difficult to mistake what side of the barricades the new Swedish administration is on.

Its current proposals include phasing out wealth tax over four years, starting by halving it to 0.75% of assets from 2007. But tax deductions for trade union dues and contributions to unemployment insurance are to be scrapped.

The future of Labour and the future of the far left

2006-10-16T09:30:00.000-08:00

How interesting that the argument that Gordon Brown would be ‘an absolute fucking disaster’ as prime minister emanates not from the left but from within the New Labour camp itself.

This blunt - but essentially correct - assessment points to the Labour leadership’s profound pessimism about the future of the Labour Party. He is simultaneously both New Labour's best shot and a guaranteed election loser.

Ideologically, there is no such thing as ‘Brownism’. When the chancellor does finally get to move from Eleven Downing Street to Ten Downing Street, the co-creator of New Labourism will simply take over the driving seat of a political vehicle left with no particular place to go.

That is not entirely Brown’s fault. No-one else in the Labour leadership has developed a coherent '–ism' either. Labour – from its left wing to its right wing - is effectively an idea-free zone.

Blair’s condign revenge for a decade and more of Brownite backstabbing will be to hand over a project in ruins. New Labour has converged with Conservatism to the point where there simply aren’t any good brave causes left.

What – in the twentyfirst century – is social democracy for? By repudiating social ownership, it has ceased to represent a clear-cut alternative even to liberalism.

Unlike previous Labour governments, it would be hard put to deliver meaningful social democratic reform, even if it suddenly discovered the political will to do so. In a neoliberal world, the margin of negotiation for class compromise has been squeezed hard.

The delabourisation of Labour began as long ago as the late seventies, when a Labour government abandoned the post-war consensus and introduced monetarism.

Since then social democracy across the developed countries has consistently moved to the right, because the ruling class has moved to the right. The transformation is rooted in changes in the nature of capitalism itself, and therefore irreversible.

Traditional British labourism was largely the product of the culture of organised blue collar workers – miners, dockers, printers, engineers - that is no longer extant, and will never come back. The Marxist left needs to take that on board to a far greater degree that it has managed yet.

The trouble is, it is this within this culture that my generation - and the generations older than me – were formed as activists. Our habits and training have made it that much harder for us to assess where we are, and how socialists should work around and within the Labour Party.

The old division of labour worked something like this: The Communist Party – and too a lesser extent the Trotskyist movement - provided the ‘brains’, coming up with theoretical justifications for left reformism couched in marxist terminology.

The Labour left then operationalised this set of politics, giving these ideas some purchase inside a mainstream political party. The local level municipal leftism of the early eighties is the clearest example of that.

Meanwhile, the more leftist unions provided industrial muscle where industrial muscle was required.

We thought it was the natural order of things. We thought it would go on forever. But the ruling class couldn’t live with the hard left having modest but real political clout, and consciously set about taking the machine to pieces.

One by one, the options were closed shut. To exacerbate our problems, globalisation has largely finished the job Thatcherism started.

Essentially, the far left conceptualised the defeats inflicted during the miners’ strike, the Wapping dispute, the sequestration of the National Union of Seamen and the abolition of the National Dock Labour Scheme as a temporary setbacks.

We called it 'the downturn', because we were sure it was just that. A downturn. The implication clearly was that 'the upturn' would follow. The blue collar proletariat would spontaneously regenerate itself in the wake of defeat, as it had done ever since its inception, we told ourselves. Strength would be rebuilt - as it was after 1926 - no matter how long that might take.

The trouble is, this time really was different. This time the pits will never reopen. This time the factory gates are shut for good. The deindustrialisation of the UK is permanent.

Of course the working class still exists. Conditions for many are far more miserable, the exploitation far worse, than in the days of unionised jobs with unionised pay cheques.

But it is a very different working class, with much of the combativity knocked out it, and broken up into much smaller workplaces that do not generate the same degree of class consciousness that factory work tends to imbue. That is why strike activity remains at the lowest since records begun in the 1890s.

This trend is the the pragmatic justification behind the Socialist Workers’ Party’s turn to the Muslim community, even if they haven’t theorised it as such.

The SWP's former tactic of ambulance chasing industrial disputes doesn’t work when there are no longer any industrial disputes to ambulance chase.

The new reality facing the British left also underlines why John McDonnell’s efforts to reinvent Bennism cannot succeed.

There are no ‘back to the future’ scenarios available. Comrades, the upturn isn’t round the corner.

What is urgently needed on the far left is a serious debate about the way forward from our new starting point, and the best way to articulate revolutionary socialism in changed world.

Respect: Galloway to knife Sheridan?

2006-10-15T07:26:00.000-08:00

Respect – the electoral front formed by the Socialist Workers' Party and former Labour MP George Galloway, pictured left in a pose unusual for the head of a serious political formation – held its annual conference in London this weekend.

Media coverage has been limited, although the coalition has issued a statement outlining its view of the proceedings. I was particularly intrigued by this extract:

‘George also hinted that a number of councillors in the North of England are in the process of severing their links with mainstream parties to join Respect, and reported that a staggering 10,000 students had joined Respect over the last few weeks.’

Mainstream parties? Parties plural? Now, a handful of defections from Labour wouldn’t surprise me. But the clear implication here is that some Lib Dems – perhaps even some Tories? – are about to jump ship.

As for the 10,000 students … anybody know how many kids the Socialist Worker Student Society signs up at the start of an average academic year? Is this a qualitative breakthrough or simply par for the course?

Meanwhile, this from the Sunday Times Scotland. Et tu, Brute?:

‘George Galloway’s party is preparing to challenge Tommy Sheridan in the Scottish parliament elections, following tabloid allegations about the former Scottish Socialist party leader’s private life.

‘The London MP and leader of the Respect party has long been a supporter of Sheridan and struck a deal not to challenge him in Scotland. But if Sheridan is charged with perjury after claims by the News of the World that he lied in court, Respect will stand against him.'

Given that the Socialist Workers’ Party is the core component of both Respect and Sheridan's new vehicle Solidarity, it will be interesting to see how they square this circle. For, as the Bible makes plain in Matthew 6:24, no man can serve two masters.

Finally … Respect is looking for a new logo and is inviting ‘all budding artists’ to submit designs. Details here. If any of you photoshop merchants out there submits a satirical entry, please copy me in.

Saturday Night Music Club: music on film

2006-10-14T19:20:00.000-08:00

I’ve always found it odd that some music fans don’t enjoy seeing music DVDs and videos. Personally I find it vastly preferable to watching the crap dished out on telly most nights of the week.

Films I have seen recently include two documentaries on stars of the 1970s New York punk scene, New York Doll and End of the Century. Both recommended if you can remember the period.

On top of that, I’m half way through watching for the second time the monumental Ken Burns series called simply Jazz, which runs to 19 hours over seven episodes. It’s not to everybody’s taste. Many people who know far about jazz than I ever will - especially on the left - have been highly critical.

But in my opinion, it constitutes superb documentary filmmaking. It’s not just about the music, it’s about the social history of the twentieth century USA, offering many insights into both race and class. It is as much education as entertainment.

By contrast, you wouldn’t argue that my favourite comedy of all time - John Landis’s 1980 flick The Blues Brothers - is anything but entertainment, pure and simple. John Belushi plays ‘Joliet Jake’ Blues, just out from prison, who puts together his old R&B band to raise the money to save the Catholic orphanage where he and brother Elwood Blues (Dan Aykroyd) were raised.

The gags keep on coming - ‘we have both kinds of music here - country and western!’ - and there are appearances from James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn of Booker T and the MGs fame, and … er … Twiggy.

And the Bros get to smash up a Nazi rally while generally laying waste to much of Chicago. Bliss.

Over to you now. Your nominations for the best music on film in the comments box, please.

More on New Labour and the prisons crisis

2006-10-13T09:56:00.000-08:00

Back in the early nineties, opposition home affairs spokesperson Jack Straw declared it ‘morally unacceptable for the private sector to undertake the incarceration of those whom the state has decided need to be imprisoned’.

Writing in the Prison Officers’ Association journal, he added that he had 'a fundamental objection to prisons run by the private sector’. Private sector prisons set up by the Tories would be taken back into the public sector as soon as contractually possible, he promised.

Within one month of becoming home secretary, Straw signed all the prison PFI contracts in the pipeline. So much for ‘fundamental objections’. Politicians break promises all the time, but rarely so brazenly and with such alacrity.

As I pointed out on this blog earlier this week, prisoner numbers have risen by a third under New Labour, and at over 80,000, inmates exceed the capacity of jails to hold them.

So what is the government doing about it? Well, to coin a phrase, it is allowing the private sector to undertake the incarceration of more of those whom the state has decided need to imprisoned:
‘The private sector appears set to benefit from the crisis facing the prison service with contracts worth a total of £1.5bn up for grabs as the Home Office prepares a significant increase in prison places …

‘Options being considered within the Home Office include expanding the size of private prisons, a majority of which have spare land ready for development, and construction and management of some, if not all, of a new generation of up to six new prisons under private finance initiative contracts.

‘Nor has the Home Office ruled out having to turn to the private sector in the shorter term to provide additional private security staff to supervise prisoners in police cells and in converted military barracks.

‘Among the 157 prison establishments across England, Wales and Scotland there are 12 privately contracted jails, holding about 10 per cent of the prison population. That makes the UK the most privatised prison system in Europe.’

Companies after a slice of the bang ‘em up market include Serco, GSL, UK Detention Services and Group 4 Securicor.

The end of the M1 Abrams road to liberation

2006-10-13T08:54:00.000-08:00

There is no M1 Abrams road to liberation. That much must be apparent even to the dimmer components of the ‘decent left’ after this week’s developments.

First there was the Lancet’s estimate that the war on Iraq has cost 665,000 lives. So much for the justification of the invasion on a utilitarian calculation of comparative death tolls. Yes, tens of thousands of Iraqis would have been killed by Saddam’s vicious government had the dictator remained in power. But mass slaughter on such an extraordinary scale outstrips even the crimes of that foul regime.

Then came Chief of General Staff Sir Richard Dannatt’s call for British troops to get out of the country 'sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems'. It seems that the head of the British Army has a better grasp of political reality than the so-called pro-war left.

Against this background, the Financial Times today reports that neoconservatism has been given the heave-ho by the White House, in favour of a strategy modelled on Cold War-style containment:

‘Interviews with US officials, who asked not to be identified, reveal that the "liberation theology" that dominated the post-September 11 2001 discourse, notably Mr Bush's second inaugural speech last year, has given way to a more pragmatic approach.

‘The shift is so pronounced that both neoconservatives and liberal hawks among Democrats are alarmed that the Bush administration's apparent embrace of realpolitik will mean abandoning promises made to oppressed peoples while entering into nuclear reduction deals with the Iranian and North Korean regimes.’

After the Iraq experience, who remains convinced the oppressed are somehow losing out because the US is now too overstretched to invade their countries? Not that that has ever been on the agenda for some of the worst regimes in the Middle East, such as US allies Saudi Arabia and Egypt, anyway.

For socialists still taking their political bearing from the idea that the emancipation of the working class can only be an act of the working class itself, word that Washington is at the very least taking a rain check on further wars is surely a positive point.

Return of the Friday open thread

2006-10-13T01:09:00.000-08:00

I am planning one of my wannabe Marxist intellectual posts on the future of European social democracy later today, if I get it finished. But in the meantime, please feel free to talk among yourselves this FOT.

Topic of the week has obviously been Jack Straw's remarks on the veil. I consciously said nothing about it, because I didn't feel I had anything original or insightful to say. In any case, there has been plenty of debate on this one on Stroppyblog, JBlog and Shiraz Socialist, to name but three.

Wasn't Jack Straw's form of words clever? In and of themselves, he said nothing to which any reasonable person could object. But in the current climate, the effect is to generate further anti-Muslim racism. This guy really is a master of dog whistle politics.

The more observant among you will notice some new links. In particular, I'd just like to single out Southpaw Punch for a special mention. This guy really is the only orthodox Trotskyist blogger I have yet seen anywhere on the internet worth reading regularly. The opinions are ultraleft, but the writing is spot on.

Lastly, the usual appeal for tip offs and information. Got any political or trade union gossip? Tell your Uncle Dave. Trust me, I'm a journalist.

Balls to Britain's bankers

2006-10-12T07:19:00.000-08:00

Even after New Labour’s decade-plus love-in with big business, remarks from treasury minister Ed Balls (pictured left) in a speech to the British Bankers’ Association – reported in the Financial Times today [subscription required], under the headline ‘Brown ally backs record bank profits’ – are noteworthy for the degree of absolute subservience they eloquently express:

‘"My starting point as a Treasury minister is this: what more can I do - can we do together - to support and enhance the critical role that the banking industry plays in our economy?"’

Just how out of touch with the public mood can you get? As the mid-market tabloids never cease to point out, banks are already making record profits, mostly by ripping off customers with outrageous charges. Imagine the uproar if a Labour minister expressed similar sentiments to a trade union audience. The FT wryly points out:

‘The Treasury's backing for the banks contrasts with the attacks on "big business" mounted by David Cameron, the Conservative leader, suggesting the attitude to large corporates could become a political dividing line.'

I long ago got my head around the idea of Labour as a party of business, just as the Conservatives have traditionally been. But these days it seems to be pitching its stall to the right of the Cameroonies.

Corporate manslaughter: getting away with murder

2006-10-11T07:55:00.000-08:00

Britain’s bosses are getting away with murder. Unions in the UK have been pushing for adequate corporate manslaughter legislation for around 40 years.

Such law is needed not just to prevent recurrences of the Zeebrugge disaster - pictured left - and the Piper Alpha tragedy. Most deaths occur in ones and twos.

Even without any spectacular accidents, there were 2,157 workplace deaths in Britain in the five years to 2004.

Labour has pledged to do something about the scandal ever since the early 1990s. Its 1997, 2001 and 2005 manifestoes promised legislation on the question. But subsequent delay and prevarication make the ban on foxhunting look the very model of alacrity.

Yesterday the Commons started debating the government’s latest proposals on the issue.

Labour leadership challenger John McDonnell - who has campaigned for the Bill for some time - said:

‘"After nine years, two detailed consultations and a strong campaign within the labour movement the government is finally presenting a Bill to Parliament.

‘"The overwhelming view of the TUC and the campaigning organisations is that the current proposals in the Government's Bill are utterly ineffective and so weak that the CBI approvingly describes it as "sensible".

‘"This is an absolute cop-out. The Bill must be significantly amended if it is to be of any use in bringing corporate killers to justice and if it is to help prevent further deaths at work."

"The government needs to takes note that the legislation in its present toothless form is unacceptable to the Labour movement and we shall be doing everything in our power to ensure that the government fulfils the promise made in three election manifestos and to the trade union movement in the Warwick Agreement that we would legislate against corporate killing."’

If company directors can be prosecuted for dodgy book-keeping, why not for negligence that leads to somebody's death? Or is the sanctity of accounting standards worth that much than human life?

New Labour and the prisons crisis

2006-10-10T07:55:00.000-08:00

New Labour in opposition famously promised to be tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. Indeed, that soundbite was coined by a promising young shadow home secretary by the name of Tony Blair.

As prime minister, Blair has certainly delivered the first part of the goods, presiding over a rapid expansion in the prison population, which has risen by a third during his time in office. The number of women and children behind bars has doubled, and Britain has more lifers than the rest of the EU put together.

As of the weekend, some 79,843 people were locked up in prison, just short of the 80,000 that the system can hold without serious risk to health and safety.

Home secretary John Reid has responded by announcing that some 500 places are to be made available in police stations, while foreign prisoners are to be offered payments of up to £2,500 to serve their sentences in their home countries.

But New Labour would do well to remember the second half of its early nineties slogan. Imprisonment is itself among the leading causes of crime.

This is how it works. A succession of populist home secretaries respond to the pressure of the tabloids for more custodial sentences for petty offences. The overcrowding that inevitably results puts paid to any prospect of rehabilitation for minor offenders.

Many prisoners are vulnerable people to begin with. Three-quarters have a reading age of ten or less. More than 40% are mentally ill. Prisoners are 13 times more likely than average to have been a child in care, 14 times more likely to be unemployed, and ten times more likely to have been regular truants.

Yet custodial sentences can lead to homelessness, unemployment, financial problems and broken families, all of which increase the chances of reoffending. Even the government’s Social Exclusion Unit recognises that. Result? Some 70% of those leaving jail are reconvicted two four years.

I recall interviewing the late Sir Stephen Tumim, HM Inspector of Prisons during the Major years. He made the argument that there are probably about 2,000 dangerous hardened criminals that really do need to be shut away for the good of society. Other than that, society should be asking itself what good imprisonment does in all other cases.

Sir Stephen – a very obviously upper class former judge – absolutely oozed Establishment liberalism, in a splendidly nice chap kind of way.

Off the record, he confided that he was rather hoping that the incoming Labour government everybody expected at the time would be rather more enlightened than the Tory administration of the day. If he were still alive, I suspect he would be feeling cheated.

British politics without a left

2006-10-09T01:38:00.000-08:00

British politics will - for the next three years at least - be dominated by David Cameron’s determination to fight Gordon Brown for something we have all learned to call ‘the centre ground’. That’s the conventional wisdom, at least.

The thing is, the entire argument hinges on exactly how you define that centre ground. And that, in turn, depends on where you place the boundaries of legitimate debate.

On a scale running from democratic socialism at one to Thatcherite Toryism at ten, today’s ‘centre ground’ probably lies somewhere between points six and eight. When it comes to questions such as immigration and law and order - the sort of issues where cheap populism rocks - a better estimate might even be from seven to nine.

If that’s the centre ground, it is only so because points one to three have magically been chopped off the end the political spectrum. Socialism disappears by conjuring trick. Hey presto! Now you see it. Now you don’t.

No wonder Brown and Cameron - pictured above left - are reduced to branding themselves by degrees of touchy-feeliness. Both are essentially politicians of the mainstream right. They cannot fight over differences of high principle. They do not have any.

If you find the propositions above contentious, let’s consider the policies that the SDP/Liberal Alliance - the soi disant ‘hard centre’ of yesteryear - stood for in the 1983 general election. I have a copy of the manifesto.

Roy Jenkins and David Steel were for public ownership of utilities and the railways. As good Keynesians, they wanted to pump billions of pounds of public money - yes, public money - into infrastructural investments.

They proposed measures to create a million jobs, called for worker-elected directors, and promised to increase child benefit, unemployment benefit, and sickness benefit. Oh, and up-rate pensions twice a year.

It is a symptom of the political slippage witnessed over the last two decades that even these kinds of ideas - far, far removed from democratic socialism - are considered way too radical even to merit debate.

To add to the tragedy, much of the marginalisation is self-inflicted. I cannot think of a single section of the left that has truly come to terms with the last two decades, and made sense of the ways in which the world has been dramatically remade.

The challenges are many, from the collapse of communism, globalisation and environmental crisis to the rise of political Islam, European integration and the emergence of China as a world power in the making, All that was solid did indeed melt into air. But somehow we just never saw history’s sucker punch landing on our collective jaw bone.

Where are the thought out responses? Where is the recognition of the need for cross-border unions and cross-border political parties? Where is the debate on - for instance - whether co-ordinated action by European social democratic parties could maintain manufacturing employment without lapsing into reactionary protectionism?

Where is the serious attempt to draw up policies capable of combating climate change, the most important political issue of all? You can’t deal with a problem of that magnitude simply by sticking an additional bullet point onto the Transitional Programme.

Inertia at the level of political theory condemns us in advance to irrelevance. The left remains content to do what it has always done. That means it’s going to get what it always gets.

Consider the John McDonnell decision to run for the leadership of the Labour Party. Leadership bids are a time-honoured Labour left tactic for enthusing its base, of course. But this time round, it amounts to little more than going through the motions.

There isn’t a Labour left to enthuse. As a result, there is little buzz, no sense of excitement, about the proceedings. The meetings have been small, and largely attended by people old enough to remember the Benn for deputy race that represents the campaign‘s prototype.

Elsewhere, Trotskyist organisations have learned to run electoral fronts with a little more pizzazz than they did in the seventies. But Respect is clearly going nowhere fast. As one of Respect’s national committee members revealed recently, membership has fallen from around 5,000 at the time of the euroelections in 2004 to 3,040 last year and 2,160 this year.

The Scottish Socialist Party has imploded spectacularly. One side or the other in Sheridan dispute has committed perjury and some comrades may well be looking at an extended stay in Barlinnie.

Unions are increasingly compelled to merge together for warmth, and content themselves with providing legal and financial services to members, with a sideline as unpaid health and safety inspectors.

With a few partial exceptions, they do not make even a pretence of trying to exert political influence. The main leaders are convinced that Brown enforcing a public sector pay freeze from inside Number Ten is as good as it gets.

The end result is that Bameronism gets away with representing itself as all there is. Welcome to British politics without a functioning left.

Cash for peerages:New Labour is innocent, OK

2006-10-08T11:11:00.000-08:00

Of the multiple scandals that have enveloped Britain's governing party since 1997 - the Ecclestone, Hinduja and Mittal affairs, Mandelson's mortgage, Blunkett's personal fast track visa scheme and company directorships, David Mills' backhanders from Berlusconi - the cash for peerages is easily the most serious.

So blatant is this racket that Lord Levy might just as well set up a stall at Walthamstow market to flog the honours that repeatedly fall off the back of the New Labour lorry. 'Ello luv, get yer seats in the 'Ouse of Lords 'ere! Lovely and fresh today, they are! I'm not askin' three million, I'm not askin' two, I'm giiii-vin' 'em away ... don't need a receipt, do yer, mate?

The usual New Labour delaying tactic is to dig some old fart out of retirement - geriatric QCs do nicely in these circumstances - to head an official inquiry with a preordained conclusion. Six months later, it is solemnly announced that all the evidence has been carefully considered and minister X has emerged without stain on his character, old boy. Meanwhile, politics has moved on and the public has forgotten all about it anyway.

But that wouldn't wash this time. A Scottish National Party MP raised the matter with the police, and Scotland Yard has been conducting a serious investigation. There have even been arrests. Blogs claiming inside sources reckons that charges could ensue.

I doubt it. At any rate, the spin doctors are already engaged in expectation management. Here's a carefully planted story from the FT yesterday [subscription required]. By the way, one of the hacks that gets a by-line is the respected old-stager Jimmy Burns, who despite a low profile, is probably the best investigative journo on the FT's payroll:

'Scotland Yard's "cash for honours" investigation is believed to be struggling to uncover an incriminating paper trail that proves peerages were sold illegally by Tony Blair's government.

'It is understood that detectives have failed to find a "smoking gun" despite months of intensive questioning of witnesses including Lord Levy, Mr Blair's chief fundraiser ...'

Believed to be. Understood. Who's been talking, boys?

'Optimism is growing in the government that the investigation, when completed, is unlikely to lead to anyone being charged with an offence.'

Knock me down with a feather. As they used to say in Walthamstow.

'"The police are walking through fields and picking up stones trying to unearth something," said one person close to the inquiry. "They've got the loan agreements, but haven't found anything that is a killer. Quite the opposite."'

Thank goodness for that. I was starting to worry that the Blair government is corrupt. But luckily, the fact that every single person who has given Labour £1m or more has been awarded a knighthood or peerage turns out simply to be the workings of Jungian synchronicity

.Meanwhile, politicians will go on accepting the outlook of the billionaires who fund their parties. So any measures that limit the whims of the super-rich in the interests of ordinary people will automatically prove politically unacceptable.

Saturday Night Music Club: guilty pleasures

2006-10-07T18:42:00.000-08:00

Probably everybody secretly likes at least one artiste that is terminally uncool and/or ideologically unsound. In my case, it is ... Motorhead, I am sorry to say. Me, a Guardian reader and all.

I'm well aware leader Lemmy collects Nazi insignia, and even brandishes an iron cross on his bass. His political views - if this interview is anything to go by - are utterly repugnant.

And then there’s this story, told in Lemmy's own inimitable style:

'When we played in Nuremburg in the stadium where Hitler used to make his speeches, the audience were a bit slow, so I said, "You made more fucking noise than this in 1937". That didn't go down well.'

It’s not even that I like HM. I haven’t really listened to it since my early teens, when it was the music of choice for those of us too crap at dancing to be Soul Boys. Luckily punk rock saved from a life of headbanging.

But a couple of years back, I was sitting in the Camden Head in Islington, catching up with a friend I hadn’t seen in years and years, when Ace of Spades came on the jukebox. Brilliant.

There is no getting away from the fact that the track is an inspired slab of high volume rock and roll. The words 'heavy metal' simply do not do this band justice. I downloaded the song as soon as I got home, and it topped my iPod playlist for weeks.

Right. I’m just off to stick the first album - in vinyl - on the deck. Any similar confessions?

The left and nuclear North Korea

2006-10-07T01:32:00.000-08:00

We all know what happens to countries the US suspects of possessing weapons of mass destruction, whether they actually have WMDs or not. So Washington’s reaction to the news that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – as endorsed by Southall Respect – is to conduct nuclear weapons tests is pretty predictable.

The New York Times reports a speech by Christopher R. Hill, George Bush’s assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs:

‘"We are not going to live with a nuclear North Korea, we are not going to accept it," he said.

‘Mr. Hill did not suggest what the American response would be and gave no hint of an economic or military response. But he said of North Korea: "It can have a future or it can have these weapons. It cannot have both."’

The phraseology of the statement is deliberately ambiguous, but is at least open to the reading that the North Korea will be destroyed if deemed necessary, perhaps by a nuclear first strike.

Of course, the CIA in 2003 made public its assessment that North Korea has already ‘produced one or two simple fission-type nuclear weapons and has validated the designs without conducting yield-producing nuclear tests’. So even if North Korea actually tests that its kit works, nothing fundamental will have changed.

It’s possible, too, that North Korea does not have nuclear weapons. The CIA has its own motives for talking such threats up, and Pyongyang has its own motives for bluffing. No-one outside North Korea knows for sure.

Socialists should start from a clear position of opposition to any state possessing nuclear weapons. That much of the left – and not just the Stalinist left – has not historically done so is much to its discredit.

And any sane person, irrespective of their place on the political spectrum, will be horrified at the thought of Team Kim Jong-Il getting its mitts on this kind of hardware.

It is true that the US deliberately demonises his regime by pejoratively labeling it as rogue state. But let’s just say that, in this case, the US is probably not far wrong.

Yet I don’t doubt that some particularly deranged Trot sect somewhere will justify the North Korean ‘workers’ bomb’ on the grounds that post-capitalist property relationships prevail in that country. Oh, and they are anti-imperialists, too. What’s not to like?

Let’s think this one through. Japan – which would be within range of North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, if only they worked properly – would certainly respond to North Korean nuclear weapons by building nuclear weapons of its own. That will exacerbate tensions with China, further destabilising the region.

The menu of choices on offer is made up entirely of dishes not to the taste of the democratic left. But the rapid reunification of Korea – yes, on the basis of capitalism – may well be about the least worst of them.

There is nothing remotely historically progressive about North Korea. It doesn't allow the working class the smallest democratic freedoms. It certainly doesn't demonstrate the superiority of the planned economy over the free market. In other words, it has no justification from any rational Marxist standpoint.

This is one deformed workers’ state the workers of the world - not to mention the workers of North Korea itself - would be better off without.

Conspiracy theories? I only believe them when they are true

2006-10-05T09:35:00.000-08:00

London mayor Ken Livingstone believes MI5 - logo pictured left - deliberately broke up the Workers' Revolutionary Party. Anything you say, Ken.

Tommy Sheridan argues that MI5 deliberately faked an incriminating tape recording of him confessing his swinger adventures to his best mate. M'kay.

So why has Dave's Part not been able to publish for more than 24 hours? Because Blogger's automated anti-spam robots locked me out of my own blog. I ask you comrades ... can that really be a coincidence? Hey? Hey?

George Galloway's Respect: huge fall in membership

2006-10-04T09:55:00.000-08:00

The purpose of Respect – according to a recent speech by its national secretary John Rees, also a leading member of the Socialist Workers’ Party – is "to replace Labour as the representative of working people in this country".

Wow. That’s one ambitious target. And Rees isn’t the only Respect supporter ostensibly convinced the project is heading for the big time.

Over at Respect Supporters Blog, for instance, Neil Williams – a nice guy and a good socialist – insists that ‘many’ Labour Party members are signing up with George Galloway’s outfit. I've tried arguing otherwise in his comment box, but to no avail.

Then I found this altogether more serious assessment of Respect's prospects, in the form of an online report from Alan Thornett. Thornett , who sits on the Respect national committee, does his best to talk up real but limited successes in Tower Hamlets, Newham and Birmingham.

Yet despite being fully committed to the formation, he makes many telling criticisms. Perhaps most damningly of all, he reveals the true extent of Respect’s paid up support:

‘After Respect was formed in January 2004 its membership rose to over 5,000 by the time it fought the European elections five months later. The National Council initiated a recruitment drive, at that time, with a target of 10,000. It was a realistic target.’

But things have not gone according to plan. Thornett talks of ‘… the moribund state of a number of Respect branches and declining membership figures, which now stand at 2160 according to the annual report – down from 3040 last year.’

In other words, membership has halved in two years and fallen 29% over the last year alone. Proportionally speaking, Respect is losing adherents more rapidly even than New Labour itself, and its ranks can contain no more than a few hundred people who are not members of the SWP already. Not much of a front organisation, is it? Neil, comrade. You really should stop deluding yourself.

Company profitability at a 40-year high

2006-10-04T07:29:00.000-08:00

Company profitability in Britain has reached its highest level for 40 years, according to a report in the Financial Times today [subscription required]. That’s right. After nine years of Blairism, corporate wallets are fatter than they were even under Thatcher or Major. Or, as the paper puts it:

‘The business environment for capitalism [is] much better now than in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.’

Remember that, next time Labour and the Tories argue over which of them has the best pro-business credentials. New Labour wins hands down:

‘Official figures yesterday showed the net rate of return on capital was 14.7 per cent, the highest quarterly figure since quarterly records began in 1989 and higher than any single year since 1965 …

‘Service-sector companies made a record 20.1 per cent rate of return on capital, while manufacturers made only 6.1 per cent, the lowest rate since the economy-wide recession of 1991-92.’

But companies operating in the North Sea topped the charts, with returns of 38.7 per cent.

There are lots of reasons, of course. But as one City commentator openly puts it, keeping trade unions hog-tied while slashing business taxation are probably reasons one and two.

‘With profitability at a 40-year high, the obvious risk is it might soon bump down to earth, but [David] Miles [chief UK economist at Morgan Stanley] thinks there are good reasons for believing current levels are more sustainable …

‘ "There has been a huge fall in the power of organised labour, the number of strikes in the private sector has crashed, the rate of corporation tax is lower and the volatility of the economy has reduced …"’

Miles goes on to argue that profitability will remain above the long-term average for some time. He may very well be right.

Cost of the Forest Gate raids: £2.2m

2006-10-03T09:32:00.000-08:00

The bungled Forest Gate police raid in search of chemical weapons last June – which lead to the shooting of Abul Kahar, an innocent man – has cost the taxpayer £2.2m.

That includes more than £90,000 in hotel bills for two familes whose homes were virtually dismantled in the process.

Then there was £864,300 in overtime pay for police officers (some of them seen top left), while more than £120,000 was spent on "operational feeding, barriers, technical support and restoration of property, while around £157,000 went on specialist equipment used in the search and £368,200 in "non-pay costs" — such as transport and catering, the erection of barriers and road signs.

Well done the Daily Telegraph, for obtaining the figures from Scotland Yard under Freedom of Information legislation.

Kasparov on the crisis in world chess

2006-10-03T08:22:00.000-08:00

The chess world championships are in crisis, after accusations that incumbent Vladimir Kramnik has been sneaking into his private bog to consult a computer, in what is basically a hi tech version of the technique some of us employed to get through our O-levels.

Yet Kramnik – a boring positional player loathed by much of the chess public, which likes to see grandmasters play 1.e4 and than attack the other player's king, rather than tacitly agree to draws so that they can split the prize money – has little to lose. If the match is called off, he retains his title on the grounds that he remains undefeated.

Toiletgate was sufficiently newsworthy to make the front page of the Guardian on Saturday. You can catch up on the story here.

Today Garry Kasparov,pictured top left and still the greatest player the world has ever seen, has waded into the chess establishment in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ website is subscription only, but you can read the full text over at Chessbase.

In particular, ‘president Kirsan Ilyumshinov’ (who?) of the ‘Republic of Kalmykia’ (where?) is rightly blasted for the way he runs world chess as if it was an extension of his petty little fiefdom. Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Gazza:

‘My battles with the power-hungry thugs who ran the Soviet and international chess world were politically driven. To me they represented a backwards and corrupt system. They saw me as a threat to their control.

‘The protests and conflicts seen in the current match are of a very different nature and reflect the complete loss of professionalism in the sport.

‘The event is taking place in the capital of the Russian republic of Kalmykia under the auspices of its president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who is also the president of [world chess federation] FIDE.

‘He has created a vertical column of power that would be familiar to any observer of Russia today. He runs the chess world in the same authoritarian way he runs his impoverished republic.

‘After a decade of such mistreatment, the only place that could be found to host this match was his own capital. Serious sponsors rarely want anything to do with Mr. Ilyumzhinov and his organization …

‘Recognizing the failure of his stated goals and low methods, Mr. Ilyumzhinov has lately taken steps to unify the chess world and make long overdue moves to professionalize the organization of events. This terrifies the fixers who would be the first to go under a professional administration …

‘Just like their brothers in spirit in the Kremlin, the chess nomenclatura hope to prolong the anarchy and corruption from which they have profited for so long. Mr. Ilyumzhinov needs this match to continue, but it is he who sowed the seeds of its downfall.

‘For a game associated with brainpower, chess's leaders and its leading players have displayed remarkably little in recent years. They are now paying the price by having their pettiness and incompetence splashed across front pages around the world.’

Kasparov has these days turned to politics, and is chairman of the United Civil Front, a political party in Russia. He’s on the centre-right, but crucially, he’s on the democratic centre-right, and uses his position to speak out against Putin’s drift towards authoritarianism.

Given that Putin’s opponents – think Khodorkovsky here – can find themselves in prison on trumped up charges, he should at least be commended for his courage.

Rafael Correa and the future of Ecuador

2006-10-03T06:39:00.000-08:00

Ecuador could be the next country to align with the Chavez-Castro-Morales axis. With a presidential election due on October 15, left populist Rafael Correa has an 11% lead in the polls. Here’s what the FT has to report about his political platform:

‘Mr Correa, a former finance minister, has promised to shut the US military base in Ecuador, restructure the country's external debt and renegotiate contracts with foreign investors in the oil industry such as Repsol of Spain, Brazil's Petrobras, Andes Petroleum of China and Perenco of France.’

And here’s a soundbite from a speech to a largely indigenous crowd in the town of Latacunga:

"The political and economic elites have stolen everything from us, but they cannot steal our hope," he begins, in Quichua, the indigenous language of the highlands. "We will take back our oil, our country, our future."’

In a country with one of the most uneven divisions of wealth in the world, and an explosive tradition of political street protest that has toppled three presidents in less than a decade, it is unwise to make that kind of appeal unless you really intend to follow through.

Incidentally, the Correa ticket is completed by a vice-presidential candidate rejoicing in the moniker of Lenin Moreno. The clue’s in the name, I guess.

This is the first time I have heard of these guys. The likelihood is that their politics will not be that dissimilar from their obvious role models, with all the attendant limitations .

But to the extent that the emerging radical nationalist bloc in South America generates a concrete real-word alternative to the disastrous brand of imposed neoliberalism that has so damaged the continent for more than two decades, I’m certainly interested in finding out more.

Gordon Brown and autism

2006-10-02T08:10:00.000-08:00

Tory shadow chancellor George Osbourne is in hot water for apparently suggesting that Gordon Brown - pictured left - could be autistic. As I pointed out in an earlier post, a number of News International columnists – including Robert Harris and Anatole Kaletsky – have already all but said as much in the Murdoch press.

I loved this quote on the BBC website, officially attributed to 'a source close to' the chancellor:

'This isn't offensive to Gordon Brown but it is grossly offensive to the thousands of people affected by autism and their families that their condition should be used by George Osborne as a term of political abuse and he should apologise.'

Now, as my family and close friends will know, I actually do have Asperger's Syndrome. There. I have said it publicly.

I met Brown on a couple of occasions in the early nineties, and based on that - and everything I've read about him since - I'd put money on him being an Aspie too.

If he had any sense, he'd openly declare it, before the whispering campaign becomes a shouting campaign.

Oh, and I do think Osbourne should apologise to the autistic community. How dare he compare us to that dreadful man?

Can Cameron's Conservatives win the next general election?

2006-10-02T07:43:00.000-08:00

The Tories have opened their conference in Bournemouth ahead in the opinion polls. But, as most psephologists point out, their lead is nowhere near big enough to guarantee them victory at the next general election.

A workable majority at Westminister usually needs about 40% support from the electorate. At present, Team Cameron stands at around 36%. Given the difficulties New Labour is going through, the real question is, why isn’t the main opposition party doing a hell of a lot better?

I think a lot of the reason is the perceived lack of difference between Labour and the Conservatives. Both of them base their political line firmly on what is widely being called the centre ground, but is probably more accurately described as the more rightwing side of the centre right spectrum.

So can the Tories win the next general election? The political experience of my adult lifetime has been confined to two extended periods of rule by the same party.

Both were preceded by a tangible swing in the public mood. The Thatcherite ascendancy was heralded by a backlash against trade unionism in the late seventies, while an extended period of Labour government was a certainty after Black Monday in 1992.

So far, any feeling that the tectonic plates have shifted in the same way is passing me by. There seems to be little active partisanship for either party, particularly among younger voters.

I suppose that increases the odds on a hung parliament. But that is not to say that Cameron cannot triumph.

By the way, I was interested to hear that Guardian green columnist George Monbiot will be addressing the Tories’ Tribal Gathering. This is the same guy who was still a member of Respect until February 2004, right?

[Picture credit: UK Daily Pundit]

Saturday Night Music Club

2006-09-30T20:05:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the first edition of Saturday Night Music Club, which will become a regular feature of Dave's Part if it finds with any popularity at all.

Given that a fair proportion of my known readership are fully paid-up music bores, the idea is to take a weekly break from the depressing state of British and world politics and just have a friendly chat about good grooves.

The inaugural topic is this: who is the greatest female vocalist of all time? After a long think, I have gone for Dinah Washington, who finishes just ahead of Aretha Franklin, with Irma Thomas coming third.

Washington - real name: Ruth Lee Jones - was born in Alabama in 1924, but joined the pre-war mass migration of blacks from the Deep South to Chicago as a child, and by her mid teens was working that city's club circuit as a vocalist.

She got her big break working with Lionel Hampton between 1943-46, before commencing to cut sides under her own name. Stylistically, she was a one-woman revolution, doing more than anybody except possible Ray Charles to bring gospel phrasing and tonal variations into popular music. Do whatever it takes to obtain a copy of the album pictured, Dinah Jams. It is sublime.

In the best tradition of such things, Dinah had a hard life. She married several times and struggled with alcoholism, dying before she hit 40.

Over to you now. Who would you rate as the best-ever female vocalist? Was I wrong to keep Aretha off the top spot? Anybody want to make a case for the second rank soul sisters? Or even Kylie Minogue, if you really, really must ...