This is a very brief piece by George Galloway, the former Labour MP and founder of the Respect party. Galloway talks about how the Tory party has been on the verge of splitting, and that the Labour leadership election is being held two weeks after the Chilcot report. Nevertheless, instead of heading for this open goal to overturn the Tories, hundreds of Labour MPs have nevertheless decided to turn against their own leader. In the following weeks Galloway predicts that we will have hundreds of people we don’t know, and have know idea what they do, parading in front of us attacking Jeremy Corbyn. Nevertheless, he is confident that Corbyn will win, as ‘he is a man of steel’. He urges his viewers to join the Labour party, and vote for him.
Despite this, Galloway also predicts that by the end of the of the week, the Labour party will have split into two parties. One will have a 100,000 members and millions of affiliated trade unionists, the other will consist of just 200. But the real loser will be the British people, who deserve a real Labour party.
I’m not a member of the Labour party, just a supporter. But I do want Corbyn to win the leadership of the Labour party, because I believe he is the only hope we have of overturning the four decades or so of harm done to our economy, society and political culture by Thatcherism. I hope Galloway is wrong about the party splitting, but I fear he isn’t. It’s what the Blairites want, and they’ve been preparing for it for a very long time. However, Galloway’s exactly right in that Corbyn has the popular mandate, which the Blairites don’t have, regardless of the sputterings of their MPs and the right-wing press. Mike’s put up a piece today pointing out that a poll company founded by one of the Tories predicts that Corbyn is the favourite to win.
And he’s also right about the British people being the loser because of the coup. Again, this is quite deliberate by the Blairites in the Labour party. Mike earlier put up a piece reporting on the comments on the Radio 4 programme Broadcasting House on Sunday by the economics journalist and Labour activist, Paul Mason. Mason stated that the Labour rebels were motivated, not by their professed view that Corbyn was unelectable, but by the opposite: they feared he was only too electable. And so, to preserve Thatcher’s legacy of privatisation, including that of the NHS, they staged their mass walk-out, hoping to discredit him as leader and stop him winning an election.
Disgraceful. If they cannot reconcile themselves to being members of a party, founded to advance socialism and the working class, then they should leave to go to the Tories or the Lib Dems. They should not try to split the party, or wreck its chances at an election. If they stay on, I hope that not only that Corbyn will win, but that the Labour membership will begin the process of deselecting these traitors.
This is another very interesting piece from YouTube, again featuring George Galloway. It’s not really a video, as it’s just recorded dialogue, presumably from his radio show. In it, he talks to the right-wing columnist and broadcast, Peter Hitchens. The two are from completely the opposite ends of the political spectrum, but on the matter of the Chilcot Inquiry and the Iraq War they are largely in agreement. Galloway acknowledges that he has profound disagreements with Hitchens, but also some overlap. Most of the talking in conversation is done by Hitchens, who makes some very interesting points.
Hitchens points out that, although the Chilcot Inquiry made Blair the sole culprit responsible for the Iraq War, there were many others involved, who have been exonerated, such as Alistair Campbell. Hitchens is not greatly impressed with Blair’s intellectual abilities. He states several times that he was only a figurehead, and the real leadership of New Labour was elsewhere. Blair, he contends, didn’t really understand what was going on around him. At one point Hitchens states that Blair didn’t really want to be a politician. He wanted to be Mick Jagger. He probably had the intellectual ability to be Jagger, but certainly lacked the necessary brainpower to be prime minister. He also argues that Blair was really only a figurehead for New Labour. He was found and groomed by the real leaders of the faction, who wanted someone who would be ‘the anti-Michael Foot’. They settled on Blair, and prepared him for the role without him really understanding what was going on.
Hitchens and Galloway also discuss the allegation that everyone was in favour of the War, and it was only the Left that was against it. Hitchens states that he was initially in favour of the War, but if he had the sense to turn against it in 2003, it shows that you didn’t have to have any great prophetic ability to be against it. Hitchens states that he feels that people were led to support the War, because of the myth of the ‘Good War’. This is based on the belief that the Second World War was a straightforward, uncomplicated struggle against evil. Ever since the War, our leaders have been fancying themselves as Churchill or Roosevelt, and casting every opponent as Hitler. They did it with the Iraq War, and they’re doing it now with the Russians and Vladimir Putin. They’re presenting Russia as an expansion power, and preparing for another war with Russia by sending troops to Estonia and Poland, when the reality is that Russia is not an expansionist threat and has actually ceded hundreds of miles of territory. Hitchens also informs Galloway and his listeners that Britain has actually sent troops into the Ukraine.
Hitchens goes on to state that much of the West’s destabilisation and attempts to destroy opposing regimes is done covertly, through the funding of opposition movements, the manipulation of aid, and – here Galloway supplies the words – ‘moderates’. This happened in Syria, where considerable damage was done before we started bombing them. But people don’t realise it, as this will never show up in a newsreel. As for how warmongers like Blair can be stopped, it can only come from parliament. Hitchens remarks approvingly on the way parliament stopped Cameron when he wanted to bomb Syria. Unfortunately, Hitchens concludes that turning Blair into an object of ridicule is the only justice we can expect. He is pessimistic about there being any tribunal that can bring war criminals like Blair and Bush before it, and so here there’s a difference between those, who have and those who don’t hold a religious belief. For religious believers, you hope that there will be an ultimate judgement coming. Galloway concludes by saying that he believes that there is such a punishment coming to Blair.
It’s an interesting dialogue, as the two clearly have pretty much the same perspective on the Gulf War. They’re both religious believers, as they themselves make clear. Hitchens converted from Marxism and atheism to Christianity, while I think Galloway has said that he’s converted to Islam. As believers in two of the Abrahamic religions, they share the faith that God does judge the guilty in the hereafter. Galloway is very supportive of Hitchens in this video as well. Hitchens states at one point that he’s going to publish a book on the myth of the ‘Good War’. Galloway asks him when it’s going to come out. Hitchens then replies that he hasn’t written it yet, to which Galloway then tells him to come on, as he wants to read it.
Hitchens is right about the manipulation of protest movements, humanitarian aid and opposition groups by the West to destabilise their opponents around the world. This is what happened in Chile and Iran with the overthrow of Salvador Allende and Mossadeq respectively. It happened in the Ukraine during the Orange Revolution, and I’ve no doubt Hitchens is exactly right about it occurring in Syria. The parapolitical magazine, Lobster, has been saying this more or lest since it was founded in the 1980s. It laments that very few, in any, academic scholars are willing to accept the fact that so much diplomacy and politics is done through covert groups.
I think Hitchens is also correct about Britain and the West always casting themselves as the heroic ‘good guys’ in their wars, though I strongly disagree with Hitchens’ reasoning behind it. Hitchens has made clear in his books, column and website that he believes Britain should have stayed away from the Second World War. He correctly points out that it was not about saving the Jews from the Holocaust, but honouring our treaty with the French to defend Poland. he also thinks that if Britain had not declared War, we would still have the Empire.
I’ve blogged before that I believe this to be profoundly wrong. We did the right thing in opposing Hitler, regardless of the motives of the time. The Poles, and the other nations threatened by Nazi Germany needed and deserved protection. Churchill’s motives for urging Britain into the War was that Nazi Germany would be a threat to British naval power in the North Sea, if they were allowed to conquer Europe. This is a correct evaluation. A Europe under Nazi domination would see Britain pushed very much to the periphery. The Nazis believed that it was control of the Eurasian landmass which would determine future economic and political power and influence. If Britain was deprived of this, she would eventually stagnate and decline as an international power.
Nor do I believe we would have kept the Empire. The first stirrings of African nationalism had emerged before the Second World War. Ghana had taken a momentous first step in being the first African colony to have indigenous members of its governing council. The Indian independence movement had been growing since the 19th century, and was gathering increasing support and power under the leadership of Gandhi. Orwell, remarking on a parade of Black troopers in French Morocco in the 1930s, stated that in the mind of every White man present was the thought ‘How long can we keep fooling these people?’ The War accelerated the process of independence, as, along with the First World War, it taught the indigenous peoples of the Empire that the British alongside whom they fought were not gods, but flesh and blood, like them, who suffered sickness and injury. The War also forced the pace of independence, as Britain was left bankrupt and exhausted by the War. As part of their reward for aiding us, the Americans – and also the Russians – demanded that we open up the Empire to outside commerce and start to give our subject people’s their independence. This was particularly welcome to the leaders of the Jamaican independence movement. This had also started in the 1930s, if not before. It was partly based on the dissatisfaction of the Jamaican middle class at having their economy managed for British interests, rather than their own. They hoped that independence from Britain would allow them to develop their economy through closer links with the US.
I also think that the belief of most British people in the rightness of the Wars we fought also comes from British imperial history. Part of the Victorian’s legacy was the Empire and the belief that this was essentially a benign institution, which gave the less developed peoples of the world the benefits of modern British rule, medicine, technology and so on, while downplaying the atrocities and aggression we also visited on them. It’s a rosy view of the Empire, which is by no means accepted by everyone. Nevertheless, it’s the view that the Tories would like to instil into our schoolchildren. This was shown a few years ago by their ludicrous attack on Blackadder and demands for a more positive teaching of British history. Unlike the Germans, who were defeated and called to account for the horrors of the Nazis and Second World War, Britain has never suffered a similar defeat, and so hasn’t experienced the shock of having to re-evaluate its history and legacy to that level. And because Hussein was a brutal dictator, Blair was indeed able to pose as Churchill, as Thatcher did before him, and start another War.
Mike yesterday also put up a very interesting piece reporting the claim by Paul Mason, a journalist and now Labour activist, that the Blairites had timed the coup against Jeremy Corbyn because they were very much afraid that it was capable of winning the next election. Mr Mason was speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House, alongside Rhea Wolfson. Ms Wolfson is the lady, who was elected to the NEC with the backing of Momentum. But not before Jim Murphy, the head of the Scottish Labour party, had tried to stick the knife in her back by telling her constituency party not to support her, because through Momentum she was connected with anti-Semitism, if I remember correctly. She also agreed that Labour could win an election if they are able to mobilise the vast numbers of people who have joined the party.
Mason is the former economics editor for Newsnight. He said
“I think Jeremy Corbyn will win. Or, let’s put it this way, he will be in a position to form a government.
“That, of course, is what the Labour rebels were worried about on the day after Brexit. Remember the sequence of this. It looked like there was going to be an early general election with the Tories in disarray.
“They texted each other saying ‘this is our last chance, otherwise the guy has the chance of leading the party into an election and that election is winnable”.”
Mike states that if this is true, then it shows that everyone, who claimed to be opposing Corbyn because he was ‘unelectable’ was consciously lying. He challenges them to explain themselves, and urges everyone else to start doing some deselecting of their own.
I’ve described the Blairites as ‘Thatcherite entryists’. It’s how several of the commenters on this blog have described them, and it’s exactly right. Blair and the rest of New Labour were Thatcherite to the core, and brought into the party a whole range of individuals and think tanks, who are really part of the free market right.
And if this is correct, then they are literally behaving as entryists. One of the goals of various Communist factions that have historically tried to infiltrate democratic, reformist socialist parties, like Labour, is not just to make them increasingly radical and therefore platforms for their own clandestine seizure of power, but also to disrupt and destroy them as rivals to their own parties. During the 1919 Council Revolution, the Communists of the Spartacus League attempted to infiltrate the Independent German Social Democrat Party, or USPD. The USPD was much further to the Left of the main German socialist party, the SPD, but they weren’t Communists. By infiltrating them, the Spartacists hoped that they could destroy the USPD from within, and radicalise its most ‘advanced’ members into becoming Communists and joining them.
The Thatcherites of New Labour haven’t quite gone so far as trying to get a section of the party’s membership to join the Tories, but they have appealed to the Tories and Lib Dems to join to stop Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters from gaining power in the party.
Despite the rants against them by the Blairite leadership, Corbyn’s followers are not ‘Trotskyites’. Neither are they ‘scum’ or any of the other unpleasant epithets they’ve had hurled at them. I put up a piece by George Galloway last week, in which he stated very clearly why the new members of the party, who’ve joined because of Corbyn, aren’t followers of Leon Trotsky.
But Tony Blair and his coterie, and their successors in Progress, Labour First and Tomorrow’s Labour, are Thatcherite entryists. They have absolutely no business being in the Labour party, and blocking the genuinely socialist, traditional Labour policies of a popularly elected leader with a mandate from the majority of members. They should leave, and find their true home in the Tories.
Mike also put up another article, which shows that Jeremy Corbyn has taken notice of the attempts to suspend people without giving them a specific reason, and has warned the leadership of the harmful consequences this may have on the party’s reputation, and for those, who are personally responsible for the suspensions. The Guardian published an article stating that Corbyn had written to Iain McNicol, the Labour party general secretary, warning that the suspensions are damaging the party’s reputation. He has called on the party secretary and his staff to uphold the principles of natural justice advocated by Shami Chakrabarti in her report on anti-Semitism and racism in the party. She recommended that suspended members should be given a timeline in which their case would be dealt with, and should be told who their accuser is and the reasons for their suspension. The Labour leader has called for a meeting of the party’s equalities committee to discuss in early September before the conclusion of the leadership contest.
Mike concludes that Corbyn’s message appears to be a not very coded warning that if they continue to damage the party’s reputation in this way, they themselves may find themselves suspended.
Of course, Corbyn and Chakrabarti are entirely correct. It is simple, natural justice that anyone accused of an offence should be told what it is, given an opportunity to defend themselves, and know who their accuser is. It is precisely the fact that so many of the people, who have been suspended by the Blairites haven’t been told the reasons for their suspension, or the identity of those making the complaint, nor given the opportunity to refute the allegation. I’ve stated before that this turns the whole process into a Stalinist, Kafkaesque travesty. Those who are guilty of running this kangaroo court should themselves be challenged, and face the consequences themselves of their actions in destroying the party’s own culture of democracy, its reputation, and that of their colleagues.
In addition to the purge of Corbyn supporters, the Blairite group Labour First is also trying to bias the national conference against the Labour leader. Mike on Saturday put up a piece commenting and urging his readers to look at an article post by J Simpkins on his A Blade of Grass blog. Luke Akehurst, the general secretary of Labour First, who was massively defeated in his campaign to get elected to the NEC, has taken the step of writing to the constituency Labour parties that voted for Smudger, urging them to send motions to the national conference next year. These motions will be the policies and arguments Smudger wants to get across. The whole point of this exercise, it seems, will be to get them passed by the Conference in defiance of Corbyn’s own leadership.
The Blairites really don’t stop. It seems there’s nothing too low, no dirty trick they won’t pull, to thwart Corbyn’s leadership and the hundreds of thousands of his supporters in the party.
Over the past few days Mike’s put up a few more posts about the Blairites and their attempted purge of the Corbynites in time for the leadership elections.
Among their various antics, they sent a tweet to one victim of the coup, who had been told they did not have the right to vote, in the middle of the night asking them to support Owen Smith. Which is, as Isabel Waby, a friend of Vox Political, observed, simply adding insult to injury. Another person, Catherine Starr, was banned because of an ‘inappropriate’ tweet. She had made the cardinal sin of posting that she ‘f**king loved the Foo Fighters’. Richard Burgon, the Shadow Justice Secretary, responded to this woman’s ban with the jocular comment that he preferred Motorhead, but liking the Foo Fighters was certainly no reason to ban someone. Quite. Nor is foul language on a completely unrelated topic. I realise the ‘F bomb’ is still very shocking to quite a few people, but it’s now so widely used that it is using much of its ability to shock. If you want an example of this, think of the number of times Paul Merton and some of the other panellists on Have I Got News For You have cussed. When I was at school, the use of the word got Jools Holland thrown off the Friday early evening pop show, The Tube. Admittedly, this show was on much earlier, at about 6 O’clock, while HIGNFY is on after the 9 O’clock watershed. But even so, Merton and co are still going, and the shows as strong as ever. Starr was planning to vote for Jeremy Corbyn, so it looks very much like the Blairite National Executive was simply trying to find an excuse to ban her.
Corbyn was moved to tweet his own disapproval about the one-sidedness of the purge: “I’m very concerned that some people seem to have been unfairly removed from the ability to vote in this election. I’ve written to Labour’s General Secretary to raise concerns about members being suspended from voting in the leadership contest often without knowing why, being given an option to challenge or appeal.”
For this, the Labour leader got told by a Scottish Labour councillor, Stephen McCabe, that he should have some faith as leader in the NEC, knowing perfectly well Corbyn can contribute, but can’t control what they do.
Among the other victims of the purge is Ronnie Draper, the General Secretary of the Baker’s, Food, and Allied Worker’s Union. He was told that he was being denied the vote on the basis of an unidentified tweet. He has also been given no opportunity to refute the charge, and no hearing has been set for him to challenge it.
According to Mike, 200,000 people have been denied the vote by the NEC. The process of deciding who gets to vote, and who doesn’t, is overseen by Joanna Baxter. She tweeted that the decisions were made by 2 panels, comprising three people from the NEC, and supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith. She did not, however, give any details on the criteria by which the suitability of the voters was assessed. Furthermore, Baxter is no longer a member of the NEC, and so has absolutely no right or obligation to oversee the purge.
Mike concludes:
So far, it seems you get the boot for comments made at any time since you joined social media – no matter how long ago and never mind whether you have changed your mind since. Use of profanities at any time means you’re out – if you’re a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. Tweeting support for a point of view put forward by another political party – out. Publicly disagreeing with Owen Smith – out.
It is hard to tell the criteria by which supporters of Mr Smith are likely to be removed from the voting register. Does anybody know?
Mike also has put up the advice, given by one of his commenters, that anyone intending to appeal against the decision to ban them should throw in a Data Access Request for Data held on them under the Data Protection Act. As data holders, the Labour party will be obliged to provide them with all the data they have on them.
Mike also warns that as Baxter complained that she was receiving abuse even before these shenanigans began, she’s now got a running commentary on her twitter feed about the abusive messages she’s receiving. Or claims to have received. As Mike says, it’s unknown whether these are ‘false flag attacks’ or not. But he strongly advises his readers to be polite in any case.
I remarked before, when the purge began a few days ago, that this is New Labour and the Blairites behaving exactly like Stalin. He took over the Russian Communist party by purging the membership of his rivals’ supporters. Once installed as the president of the USSR, he continued his purges, not by merely throwing his opponents out of the party, but by sending them, and millions of others, to the Gulags and the firing squads as enemies of the Revolution and so forth. Baxter and Smudger aren’t sending people to forced labour camps, but in other respects they’re following Uncle Joe’s tactics. As he said, ‘it’s not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes.’
It’s also all very Kafkaesque. In his novels The Castle and The Trial, the Czech novelist described farcical bureaucratic tyrannies, in which the regime’s victims were arrested, tried and condemned without knowing what their crime was, or who their accusers were. Which is pretty much what’s happening here, with people being told their banned simply on account of ‘inappropriate comments’.
But only Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters, apparently. Lord Sainsbury, who is now supporting the Lib Dems, has, it seems, not lost his right to vote. Never mind. As Mike has put up in a later article today, after the election there will be a reckoning of this bureaucratic tyrants.
This is just to let you all know that I’ve had one of my pamphlets against the privatisation of the NHS printed by Lulu, the print on demand company. Here’s what it looks like:
My thanks to Mike over at Vox Political for his help in formatting and proof reading it.
I’ve a few more things to sort out at present, but hopefully it won’t be too long before everything’s properly up and ready.
I found this passage in Max Beer’s two volume book, A History of British Socialism, in volume 2, page 347. It’s part of a long discussion on how the early Labour party was assisted in its rise because of the way the working class and the lower middle class found themselves under similar attack and allied themselves against attempts by big business to reduce their independence and grind them into subservience. Beer’s book was published in Britain in 1920, but this passage could describe the situation of millions of office workers, sales assistants and small shopkeepers today. And especially the latter. I’ve already blogged about the way the predatory supermarkets are driving the small businesspeople into bankruptcy, and in so doing pushing up unemployment. In this passage, Beer talks about how the shopkeepers of his time were under attack from the department stores. He writes
In commerce and finance a similar process has come into operation. The wholesale traders are reducing the retail traders to the role of distributive agents working on commission. And the great manufacturers are gaining control both over the wholesale and retail trade. The great departmental store, the large importers, and the co-operative societies have been displacing great numbers of small shopkeepers. The tendency of modern times appears to be the displacement of the independent lower middle class by a salaried class of clerks, salesmen, official and civil servants. This process of concentration in commerce and finance could not escape the observation of a sociological writers like H.G. Wells. “Shopkeeping, like manufactures,” he declares, “began to concentrate in large establishments, and by wholesale distribution to replace individual buying and selling… The once flourishing shopkeeper lives to-day on the mere remnants of the trade that great distributing stores or the branches of great companies have left him. Tea companies, provision-dealing companies, tobacconist companies, make the position of the old-established private shop unstable and the chances of the new beginner hopeless. Railway and tramway takes the custom more and more effectually past the door of the small draper and outfitter to the well-stocked establishments at the centre of things; telephone and telegraph assist that shopping at the centre more and more… And this is equally true of the securities of that other section of the middle class, the section which lives upon invested money. There, too, the big eats the little. through the seas and shallows of investment flow great tides and depressions, on which the big fortunes ride to harbour while the little accumulations, capsized and swamped, quiver down to the bottom”.
I think Wells was the son of a shopkeeper, and so had personal experience and interest in what was happening to this class. And the description of how trade was moving away from the local area into the centre of towns, assisted by the trams and railways, along with orders by telephone and telegraph, could almost be a description of the ruin of modern British high streets by the construction of vast, out of town shopping centres and the mass ordering of goods by shoppers through internet dealers, like Amazon. We’ve been here before, folks, and Old Labour had the capacity and will to solve those problems. And it still has, if it can get past the Blairites and their intransigent advocacy of big business against the worker, the employee and the small businesspeople.
I realise that this may not be the wisest post to put up, considering the Blairite smears against Corbyn supporters as abusive, violent extreme left-wing militants, ignoring their own vitriolic, highly abusive rants against the Corbynites and their own rhetoric of violence. In this video, Galloway challenges the right-wing columnist to a boxing match over his comments about the beating of a disabled protester, Jody MacIntyre. You may remember the incident. MacIntyre has cerebral palsy, and is confined to a wheelchair. At one of the anti-austerity demonstrations, one of the rozzers hauled him out of his chair, and beat him as he lay in the ground. Like very many people, including Mike at Vox Political, and I believe Johnny Void and the Angry Yorkshireman, the Glasgae politico was outraged. He was also highly unimpressed by Littlejohn’s comments about the incident, in which he compared MacIntyre to the character in the wheelchair from Little Britain. Galloway has considerable respect for MacIntyre, and states that he accompanied him on a trip to Syria, which is impressive for anyone, and much more so for someone with MacIntyre’s disabilities. He derides Littlejohn as ‘rancid’ and challenges him to go five rounds in a boxing ring.
This is pretty much what very many people would like to happen to Littlejohn. Littlejohn seemed to be trying to position himself as a right-wing ‘shock jock’ a few years ago. He had his own talk show on Sky, the titles of which showed him walking past a Black beggar and other unfortunates or examples of the British Left, to show how hard, heartless and right-wing he was. If I remember correctly, one of his guests on the show, who was royally outraged by his bigoted sneering, was Michael Winner.
That’s surprising, as Winner was hardly a man of the Left. But Winner always supported gay rights, going as far back as the 1960s. Winner and a couple of gay women had been invited on Littlejohn’s show to discuss homosexuality or perhaps more specifically, lesbianism. Whichever it was, Winner was outraged by Littlejohn’s treatment of the two women and his sneering towards them. There’s a clip of this, which has been shown a number of times on TV. It shows Winner standing up, bristling and almost shaking with rage, telling Littlejohn to his face that the two ladies not only agreed to appear on his show, but have also been courteous and polite, while Littlejohn has treated them with nothing but sneers and innuendo.
The comparison of MacIntyre to the Little Britain character is also invidious. A friend of mine, whose partner is severely disabled and bound to a wheelchair, told me years ago that he felt the character had done immense harm. If you haven’t watched the show, that character pretends to be bound to his wheelchair, and in an almost vegetative state. When his brother, who is also his carer, is away, the character leaps up and runs around, showing that he is perfectly fit and well. I don’t think the two writers and stars of the show were trying to smear the disabled. Unfortunately, it seems many of the public, encouraged by inflammatory articles in the press about benefit cheats and scroungers on disability benefits, have believed that the character somehow reflects reality. And so disabled people, including my friend and his partner, have been insulted and abused because of the character. Abuse and prejudice that was no doubt reinforced by Littlejohn’s article.
And so it’s great to see a bully like Littlejohn being very publicly challenged for his comments. And the challenge to a proper, refereed fight is appropriate, considering that Littlejohn clearly enjoyed the spectacle of someone else being violently assaulted. I am not encouraging anyone to assault anybody because of their comments, no matter how bigoted and obnoxious. I’m merely enjoying the spectacle of a challenge being issued to Littlejohn designed to cut him down to size for supporting violence and bullying.
Mike put up another report on yet another disgusting assault on party democracy by the Blairites on Thursday. It’s another purge, directed at anyone who used insulting or pejorative language against other Labour members. This includes the word ‘Blairite’, whether or not the term was used correctly to mean a follower of Tony Blair, or not. This is despite the fact that there has been no notification to Labour members against the use of the term. Hundreds of Labour members have already been expelled, suspended or told they may not vote in the forthcoming leadership elections.
The bans and the censorship on which it is based are highly selective. They seem to be another attempt by the New Labour, pro-corporate, pro-austerity leadership to purge the party of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters. The ban does include people like Tom Watson, and other right-wing Labour MPs and apparatchiks, who went off on a rant calling Corbynistas ‘Trotskyite dogs’, ‘rabble’, and so forth. John McTiernan has also not been expelled, despite the fact that he has threatened his detractors with violence. These expulsions are extremely one-sided.
Among the victims so far is John Dunn, the miner and member of the party for 45 years, who was thrown out because he dared to upbraid Smudger on beginning his election campaign at Orgreave, when he had done nothing to aid the miners. It also includes Jonny Will Chambers, who’s a friend and supporter of Prezza and supports Smudger, which seems to show, according to Mike, that the purge has a scattershot approach. The letters sent out to individuals telling them they’ve been purged, or the hopefuls wanting to join the party that their application has been refused, are remarkably vague. Chris Devismes, one of those, whose membership application was turned down, was refused admission because he shared ‘inappropriate content’ on Twitter. There are no further details, so it’s difficult to challenge the accusation.
Mike reports that there is already a backlash on Twitter. Prescott was annoyed about his old oppo being banned, and Rhea Wolfson is similarly unimpressed. She’s a member of the NEC, despite the attempts of the Blairite Jim Murphy, head of Labour in Scotland, to stop her, on the grounds that she had connections to that terrible anti-Semitic organisation, Momentum. Despite the fact that Momentum’s members aren’t anti-Semites, and Ms Wolfson definitely isn’t. She’s Jewish. Wolfson put this message on Twitter observing that people were being punished for social media messages they put out before joining the Labour party. Their crime was therefore not joining the Labour party before they joined the Labour party. She concluded that the party needed to show more respect to its supporters. Another member of the Twitterati, ‘Susan’, summed this up by stating that if you tweeted nice things about the Tories, you were safe. But if you tweeted anything about the parties Labour might have to work with, such as the Greens and SNP, you were out.
Mike notes that the leaflets inform their recipients on how they may appeal about their expulsion or suspension. He also advises them to contact the barrister Liz Davies, who will also try to help them. Ms Davies is at:
There is a clear stink of corruption about this purge. The aim is to prevent anybody who wants to change the current Labour status quo from ever being able to do anything about it. That is wrong.
One hopes those who still have a say in the ballot will take note of what is being done and use their votes accordingly – to restore a leader who will end the corruption, remove the people responsible and restore fairness to the Labour Party.
This latest assault on the Corbynites by the Thatcherite entryists is ironic, given that their favourite term of abuse for Corbyn supporters has been ‘Trotskyites’. When not abusing them as ‘homophobes’, ‘misogynists’ and Nazi Stormtroopers, of course. Stalin also used purges to destroy the opposition against him and to consolidate his leadership in the Russian Communist party. He began his rise to power as the party’s secretary, which was then quite a junior post. His job was to throw out undesirables like seducers, drunks and the corrupt. What nobody realised until it was too late, was that he was throwing out the supporters of the other Bolshevik factions, and replacing them with his own loyal supporters. And once in power, the purges became lethal, as millions were hauled before firing squads and sent to the gulags on the flimsiest charges. One of those was Trotsky himself, who became an ‘unperson’. He was written out of Soviet official histories, and he and his supporters were attacked and vilified in the strongest possible terms as imperialist agents, Nazi collaborators, anti-Communist saboteurs intent on destroying the Soviet Union. Trotsky himself was forced to leave the USSR, and died in Mexico, murdered by one of Stalin’s agents.
The old brute said of his tactics ‘It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes’.
And it’s exactly the same with the New Labour leadership, which seems intent on securing their hold on the party by expelling anyone, who once looked cross-eyed at Smudger, or who doesn’t believe that a party founded to support the working class should be trying to win elections by appealing to a middle class electorate on the basis of Thatcherite policies against that class. Like cutting welfare benefits, privatisation and the selling-off of the NHS.
The Blairites’ tactics are massively counterproductive. Not only has Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal massively expanded the Labour party and shown, though various local election victories that Labour is quite capable of winning a national election. It also shows the absolute contempt for democracy for which New Labour was notorious under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Their appearances before the media were carefully stage-managed, along with very carefully crafted ‘popular consultations’, where the public was very carefully selected beforehand to agree with everything the leadership wanted. The purges are part of that shameful tradition.
By carrying them out, the Blairites, or whatever they want to call themselves, are showing the public that they haven’t changed. They’re still a faction of sham democracy and a calculated indifference to the working class and the real feelings and wishes of the general public, in order to appeal to their corporate paymasters. The more they carry on with the purges and other anti-democratic charades, the more the electorate will distrust them. They have nothing to offer Britain, but Tory policies. And like the Tories, they want what Corbyn has described as a ‘zombie democracy’: a political system that preserves democratic forms, but which is in effect a corrupt corporate oligarchy, like America.
The only real alternative is to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 