To Win in the Countryside, Labour Can Start by Defending the Small Farmers

Mike put up a piece yesterday reporting the prediction that if Boris and the Tories get the no deal Brexit their paymasters, the hedge funds, want, 1/3 of Britain’s farmers will go bust in the next five years. These are going to be the small farmers, who were suckered into believing that leaving the EU would make things better for them. They were wrong, and Mike asks how much sympathy we should have for them, considering they voted for Brexit. Actually, it’s not difficult to understand how. We were taught about the EEC as it was then in geography at my old school, including the Common Agricultural Policy. I can’t remember the details, but this was geared to granting subsidies and rewarding the much-less efficient farming systems of France and Germany, and penalised our agricultural sector, which is much more mechanised and employs far fewer people. The system of subsidies, if I remember correctly, also tranferred money and funding from the advanced agriculture of northern Europe to the less developed farms of the grain belt around the Mediterranean. Given that the Common Agriculture Policy actually put our farmers at a relative disadvantage, it isn’t hard to see why our farmers, like the fishermen, wanted to leave.

However, the big farmers were advised not to vote for Brexit, didn’t, and probably won’t suffer quite as much as their smaller cousins. However, I do think this crisis offers Labour an opportunity to show Britain’s rural communities that it hasn’t forgotten them. There have already been discussions about how Labour could win in the countryside, including a Fabian pamphlet about the issue. Well, I think Labour can start by following the example of the Swedish Social Democrats in the 1920s and 1930s. I can’t remember where I read it, but I read somewhere that the Social Democrats’ 50 year stay in power began in the 1920s when it backed the small, peasant farmers against the threat of bankruptcies and land seizures. I think the party and its members not only opposed these in parliament and local councils, but actually physically turned out to stop the bailiffs seizing individual farms and evicting the peasant farmer.

There’s a crisis going on in the countryside. If you watch the Beeb’s Countryfile, you’ll have seen reports about British farmers rural communities being under threat. Apart from the continuing problems of British agriculture, many rural communities are also suffering from cuts to local services and a lack of housing that local people can afford, rather than rich outsiders. Also, if you read George Monbiot’s Captive State, you’ll also know how the corporativism of New Labour and now the Tories actually harms farmers and local small businesses. Corporativism gives government subsidies and positions to big business in return for their donations. New Labour especially favoured the big supermarket chains, like Sainsbury’s, and gave it’s chief, David Sainsbury, a position on one of regulatory bodies, because Sainsbury at the time backed the party and donated to it. However, the supermarkets offer their cheap food at the expense of the producers, who are bound into manipulative and highly exploitative contracts. One of the supermarkets boasted a few years ago about the money it was giving to charity. In fact, none of that money came from the supermarket itself – it was all taken from its producers. At the same time, supermarkets undercut small businesses, like the local butcher, greengrocer and so on. But this also creates unemployment, because small businesses like theirs employ more people. If Labour wants to improve conditions in the countryside for small businesses like Arkwright’s in the classic Beeb comedy series, Open All Hours, it has to attack corporativism and the big supermarket chains. But I can’t see that happening under a Blairite like Starmer.

I expect that most of Britain’s farmers are probably Conservatives. But this doesn’t alter the fact that, whatever they believe, the Tories have abandoned them and their policies are actively harming small farmers and businesses and rural communities. The Labour party can start winning back the countryside by actively and obviously defending those hit by Tory policies.

And that means protesting against the closures of small farms when the Tories’ no deal Brexit hits them.

From 25 Years Ago: Private Eye on the Failings of the Privatised Water Companies

A few days ago I put up a piece about a report in the I that stated MPs had criticized the regulatory authorities for their failure to ensure that the water supply is adequately maintained. According to the I, the supply is in such a terrible state that within 20 years England may run out of water.

This isn’t exactly surprising, as environmental scientists, ecological activists and archaeologists have been warning about the terrible possibility of a global drought as the world runs out of supplies of drinking for over two decades. And in the 1980s the SF author Alfred Bester set his last book, Golem 100, in the ‘Guf’, a sprawling metropolis covering America’s eastern seaboard somewhat like Judge Dredd’s Megacity 1. Society in the Guf was decaying, with different areas controlled by various gangs and terrorist groups. Crime was rampant, and in addition to the social and political decline and fragmentation the huge megacity also suffered from a shortage of drinking water.

The regulatory authorities aren’t solely to blame for the deleterious state of England’s water. The industry is also responsible, and particularly its privatization in the 1980s and ’90s by the Tories. This was supposed to bring new investment. This hasn’t materialized in the privatized utilities, either here or in the US. In this country, these industries owners are foreign companies, which put the minimum into maintaining them while taking the profits out of the country.

Private Eye was a sharp critic of the Tories privatizations when they were being pushed through by Maggie Thatcher and then John Major. And one of their criticisms at the time was that the Tories appointed as heads of the new regulators, such as Ofwat and the Environment Agency in the case of water, people from the private sector, who shared the Tories view that government should leave industry to regulate itself. This was the beginning of the corporatist system, in which private industry is entwined with government to the point where it dictates official policy. This became notorious under Tony Blair, with leading industrialists like David Sainsbury of the supermarket company given posts on government bodies, that Guardian hack George Monbiot wrote an entire book attacking it, Captive State.

I found three reports of some of the antics of the privatized water companies in the ‘Privatisation Round-Up’ column in an old copy Private Eye from 25 years ago, Friday, 16th June 1995. They were as follows:

It’s tough at the top of a water company – especially if you are William Courtney, chairman of Southern Water, and all you hear are grips about your salary, your £250,000 share options (cashed) and the increasing cost of water in your area.

The public probably doesn’t realise how hard Mr Courtney works. In his capacity as director of Waterline Insurance, for example, a major subsidiary of Southern Water, he recently had to attend a long conference. As did his long-suffering wife Margaret; his diligent finance director at Southern Water, Ray King; and Ray’s long-suffering wife Sandra.

The relevance of the conference – on “international risk management” – may not be immediately obvious to Southern Water consumers, who will ultimately foot the bill; but the surroundings were relevant. Hard-working Mr Courtney and Mr King and their spouses attended the five-day conference at the luxury Marriott’s Castle Harbour Hotel in Bermuda – and as everyone knows Bermuda is surrounded by, er, water.

OFWAT, the water regulator, likes ot boast of its own successes, but the residents of Clyst St George in Devon are not convinced. Their case has been sitting in OFWAT’s tray for three years.

Their argument began when the National Rivers Authority ordered a clean-up of local ditches which acted as open sewers for septic tanks. The bill for householders could have run into the thousands. When the case finally ended up in court it was ruled that the responsibility fell on South West Water to bring the ditches up to modern hygiene standards.

South West Water had better things to spend the money on – like share options worth £144,95 for its managing director. The consumers turned to the apparently powerful watchdog OFWAT to force South West Water to take action. Finally, after no encouragement from OFWAT, the company is now thinking of installing the new sewerage system. But it still refuses to foot the bill and has approached the residents for a financial contribution towards the clean-up.

The European Union, meanwhile, is investigating why Yorkshire Water, which is now trying to buy up its own shares, was once given £23 million of regional aid to fatten it up for privatisation when the sold-off company now makes profits of more than £140 million a year.

The money, from a fund earmarked regenerating regional economies in the EU, was spent on improvements to three sewage works – improvements that had to be carried out in any event. When the EU bureaucrats sent the cheque, perhaps they forgot to point out that regenerating local economies does not mean boosting shareholders’ dividends and executive salaries.

I have a feeling that Yorkshire Water was hit by so many scandals that it ended up re-branding itself as Kelda.

These stories are an example of why English water is in the terrible state it is: greedy senior management doing as little as possible to maintain or improve the supply, awarding themselves grossly inflated pay and benefits and flitting off to foreign junkets and complacent and apathetic regulators doing as little as possible to protect the interests of these companies’ customers.

Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party were quite correct to demand these companies’ renationalization, along with other utilities. And it can’t come soon enough.

‘I’ Newspaper and Sunday Times Claim David Miliband May Lead Blairite ‘Centrist’ Party

Today’s I newspaper for the 12th November 2018 also ran an article following a piece in yesterday’s Sunday Times, which suggested that the launch of the new, Blairite ‘centrist’ party is coming nearer, and that David Miliband, the brother of the former Labour leader Ed, may return to Britain to head it. The article by Richard Vaughan stated

David Miliband is mulling a return to frontline politics as head of a new centrist party, it has emerged.

Plans are under way to launch a fresh political party, with speculation mounting it could be just months away.

Labour MPs, unhappy with the direction of the party under Jeremy Corbyn, are believed to be in talks about forging a breakaway party from the centre ground and looking at Mr. Miliband to lead it.

According to the Sunday Times, the former foreign secretary is eyeing a return to London, having spent the last four years running the aid charity, the International Rescue Committee in New York.

The newspaper also reported that Mr. Miliband met prominent Labour donors Sir Trevor Chinn and Jonathan Goldstein.

His decision to leave UK politics followed his unexpected defeat to his brother Ed for the Labour leadership in 2010. Mr. Miliband sparked rumours of a return in the summer wyhen he said in an interview that he brought PG Tips and Marmite back to his home in the US, adding: “Of course I’ll come back. It’s my home. I’m British.”

Centrist Labour backbenchers still view Mr. Miliband as the “king over the water”, harbouring hopes that he will step back into the political limelight under a new party.

It comes amid persistent reports that Tony Blair is in discussions to create a new party, with suggestions that his one-time political apprentice could take on the job of leading it. Another favourite to lead such a party is the former business secretary Chuka Umunna, who has been one of the most vocal critics of the Labour leadership.

Should there be any chance of a new centrist party being established in time for a general election before Britain leaves the EU, then it would have to be launched before the end of January.

Under parliamentary procedure, 28 January is the latest possible date that an election can be called before Brexit day on 29 March. (p. 15).

Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s get started. Firstly, the source of this bit of speculation – and speculation is all it is, rather than news – is the Sunday Times. This is the entirely trustworthy establishment paper, owned by the honest, deeply moral newspaper magnate, Rupert Murdoch, that libeled Mike as an anti-Semite last year. And it is this paper, which is repeating the nonsensical smear that the former Labour leader, Michael Foot, was a KGB spy. Despite the fact that when they ran this story 20 or so years ago, Foot defended his name in the courts, sued ’em for libel, and won. One of the reasons the rag is repeating the smear is because Foot’s dead, and the dead can’t sue for libel. But there is no further corroborating evidence, the charge is still malicious nonsense, and the editor publishing this is still a complete slimeball. In my opinion, of course.

Now let’s attack the claims about the proposed ‘centrist’ party, which might have members from ‘centrist’ Labour MPs. Firstly, there is nothing centrist about the Labour right. They are Thatcherite infiltrators, who follow their former leader Tony Blair, in rejecting socialism and embracing Thatcherite neoliberalism. Thatcher hailed Blair as her greatest achievement. The Blairites thus stand for more privatization, including that of the NHS, and a similar attack on the welfare state and workers’ rights. Blair and his cronies continued Thatcher’s policy of ‘less eligibility’, taken over from the workhouses, to make applying for benefits as difficult and humiliating as possible in order to deter people from claiming them. And I personally know people who didn’t sign on when they unemployed, because of the degrading way they were treated. It was the Blairites too, who introduced the work capability tests for those applying for disability benefit. This was on the advice of the American insurance fraudsters, Unum, based on spurious medical research, which has been criticized as scientific nonsense. Again, this was following the Tories. Unum had been advising Peter Lilley, when he was their health secretary in the 1990s. Lilley introduced the Private Finance Initiative as a deliberate policy to open up the health service to private enterprise. And this was following Thatcher, who would have liked to privatise the NHS wholesale, but was only prevented by a cabinet revolt. As for the unemployed, the Blairites’ contempt for the jobless was clearly shown more recently when one of them – can’t remember whether it was Rachel Phillips or Reed, said a few years ago that if Labour got into power, they would be even harder on the unemployed than the Tories. Which is a very good argument for making reselection of MPs in the party mandatory.

The Labour centrists are nothing of the kind. They are actually extreme right. The real moderates are Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left, who are a return to the Social Democratic politics of the traditional Labour party. They are definitely not ‘Communists’, ‘Trotskyites’, ‘Stalinists’ or whatever other insults Joan Ryan and the press hurl at them.

Now let’s analyze this ‘centrist’ party that the press have been speculating about for nearly a year. At the moment, it has zero policies and precious few members. One of those, who was part of the project, fell out with the others and left. The early newspaper reports stated that it was being launched with the aid of donors. This should ring warning bells with everyone concerned with the corruption of today’s corporate state. Blair’s Labour party was a part of the corporate takeover of politics. They took funds from corporate donors, like David Sainsbury, and put them into government posts, where they influenced government policy to their benefit. George Monbiot describes the way this corrupted the Labour government and its policies in his book, Captive State. It looks like the centrist party, if it is ever launched, will be intended to maintain the dominance of corporate power over the political parties, against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party, which has actually expanded its membership to become the largest socialist party in Europe and which actually represents the wishes of grassroots members. Its other policy seems to be that Britain should remain in the EU. I believe this, but the party otherwise represents too much of a threat to ordinary people’s lives, health and livelihoods to ever be worth voting for.

The party’s Blairite foundations also mean it is going to be Atlanticist in geopolitical orientation. That is, it will support America and American policies. Blair and the other architects of New Labour were members of BAP, or the British-American Project for the Successor Generation. This was a Reaganite project to recruit future political and media leaders, give them sponsored study trips to America, so that they would return staunch supporters of the Atlantic alliance. Blair’s pro-American stance could clearly be seen by the way many of the companies lining up to run Britain’s privatized industries or manage what was left of the state sector, including the NHS, were American. Miliband is part of this. I really don’t think it’s any accident that he scarpered off to America after he lost the leadership contest to his brother. And Blair’s own extreme right-wing views is shown by the fact that he accepted an invitation to attend an American Conservative convention at the request of former president George Bush.

The other policy is likely to be staunch support for Israel and its continuing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. I don’t know who Jonathan Goldstein is, but one of the possible funders of the new party, Trevor Chinn, was revealed a few months ago as one of the big donors to the Israeli lobby in the Labour party, giving money to Labour Friends of Israel. He’s one of the people behind the Israel lobbyists and their smears of anyone standing up for the Palestinians as anti-Semites. These smears are vile, libelous and deeply offensive. Those smeared as anti-Semites include not just non-Jewish anti-racists, like Mike, but also self-respecting secular and Torah-observant Jews, like Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni, Tony Greenstein and so on. Some of those they’ve smeared are the children of Holocaust survivors, and people, who’ve suffered real racist and anti-Semitic attacks.

If launched, this supposedly centrist party will represent nothing but corporate greed, especially of transatlantic multinationals. Oh yes, and support for the Likudniks and other members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly Fascistic government coalition, and their persecution of Israel’s indigenous Arabs. It will not support the welfare state, the NHS or the rights of British working people to decent jobs, working conditions, dignity and pay.

That’s if this wretch party ever gets launched at all. It’s been debated for about year now, and the Labour right have been threatening to desert the party and found a new one for even longer. So far, fortunately, they haven’t done so. And it’s possible they never will. Mike over at Vox Political published a piece a little while ago pointing out that new parties find it very difficult to establish themselves as major forces in politics. UKIP was founded in the 1990s, and despite decades of hard campaigning, it’s still -fortunately – pretty much a fringe party. And some of us can remember the Labour party split in the 1980s, when the right-wing rebels left to form the SDP. There was much noise then about them ‘breaking the mould’ of British politics. The result was that they had no more than a handful of MPs, and after forming an alliance with the Liberals then merged with them to become the Lib Dems. Which remains smaller than either Labour or the Tories.

As for right-wing Labour MPs splitting off on their own, Mike showed very clearly why they wouldn’t really want to do that, either. Independents also struggle to get themselves elected. If they ever left the party to run as independents, they’d almost certainly lose their seats at the next election.

The centrist party will thus very likely be a complete non-starter, funded by businessmen to maintain their power over British politics at the expense of the NHS, the welfare state and working people, and preserve British alliance with right-wing parties and business elites in America and Israel. But it is being touted by the newspapers like the Sunday Times and the I, because they fear and hate Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, and see it as a way of destroying it and the chance of real change for working people in this country.

Observer Unveils Launch of New ‘Centrist’, Corporatist Party

On Sunday, the Absurder covered the launch of a new ‘centrist’ party, which it was claimed would break the mould of British politics. And talking about it with Mike, I certainly got the impression that the party sounded very mouldy indeed. It has been launched with £50 million worth of funding, backed by businessmen and donors.

Yes, businessmen and donors. This looks to me like more continuity Blairism: claiming to represent the centre, while instead promoting the policies and business interests of the corporate elite. Just like Blair did in New Labour, when he gave government posts to a whole slew of businessmen in return for their cash and support. The party’s launch was also covered by the Mirror, which quoted two of the leading officials in the Labour party about it. One described it as ‘a party for the rich, by the rich, and with the rich’, which sounds very true, although it also describes the Tories, Lib Dems and the Blairites in Labour. Another leading member mocked the new party for having no members, no rule book and no ideology.

Well of course it doesn’t. It looks very much like Tony Blair trying to claw his way back into British politics. I don’t know if he’s behind this, but he certainly made murmurings about starting a new party. This party has been set up a party to appeal to the ‘centre ground’ he thinks are being alienated from Labour by the ‘far’ left Jeremy Corbyn. In fact, Corbyn is centre left, and is actually becoming increasingly popular as the corporatist, Thatcherite policies pursued by Blair and the Tories before and after him are increasingly shown to be failing.

He also doesn’t seem to have learned that far from being attracted by corporatism, voters are actually repelled by it. Blair’s time in office was marked by numerous exposes of his rewarding greedy donors, as well as George Monbiot’s book, Captive State, which described how, under Blair and his predecessors, the British state had been made into the vehicle for the interests of big business. Like the supermarkets, led by New Labour donor David Sainsbury, amongst others. Far from this attracting voters, the Labour party actually lost them as Blair continued to ignore the party’s traditional base in the working and lower middle classes in order to appeal to ‘aspirational’ middle class voters.

And its lack of ideology is part of its Blairite nature. Blair too described New Labour as having left ideology behind, by which he meant socialism, and would use instead what worked. By which he meant private industry, which spectacularly hasn’t. It also appears that Blair believes that this new party will also borrow, or work with members of other parties where necessary or appropriate. Which is back to Blair’s ‘Government Of All the Talents’, which included leading Tories like Chris Patten.

So far from breaking the mould, this new party is simply more of the same from Blairism. It’s also highly debatable how different it is from the other, existing parties. The Tories are dominated by corporate interests, which they have been representing since the 19th century. So too are the Lib Dems under Vince Cable. Statistics gathered way back in 2012 or so showed that 77 per cent of MPs had one or more directorships. This is a major problem for those trying to get our elected representatives to work for ordinary people, rather than the corporate elite. The same problem is particularly acute in America, which is why Harvard University issued a report stating that America was no longer a functioning democracy, but an oligarchy. Once elected to office, American politicos follow the wishes of their corporate donors, not their constituents.

This new party isn’t going to reinvigorate democracy. It’s unnecessary, unwanted, and if anything a real danger to it by standing to give even more political power to business people as its members and donors. It looks less like a serious contender, and more like a vanity project by Blair, trying to show that the public still want him and his increasingly worn out policies.

Does Anybody Really Believe that Alan Sugar Ever Really Supported Labour?

Alan Sugar, the multi-millionaire host of the British version of the Apprentice got himself into the news this week. He’s another one, who has joined the chorus of rich industrialists and Conservatives denouncing Corbyn as an anti-Semite. On Wednesday he put up on the Net a photoshopped picture of Corbyn riding in a limo with Adolf Hitler. Faced with a storm of criticism for this outrageous smear, Sugar took it down. But crucially, he didn’t apologise. Then yesterday he put up a nasty poem attacking Corbyn.

This little ditty was denounced by at least one female Corbynite as misogynist. And rightly so. In one of its stanzas, it describes Corbyn having sex with Diane Abbott, who ‘lies back and thinks of Russia’. Corbyn is supposed to have had an affair with Abbott. But as the female critic pointed out, it also shows the misogynist fixation with female sexuality, and discomfort at the fact that women are free to have sex with whomever they choose. In this instance, Sugar’s like the White supremacists of the Alt Right, who have a similar fixation with controlling women’s sexuality, as well as denying them the right to vote. There’s also a nasty undercurrent of racism in this as well. Most of the racist and sexist abuse sent to MPs is actually centred on Diane Abbott. She was one of the first Black MPs elected to parliament in the 1980s, and is notoriously concerned with combating racism. So much so, that the Scum quoted her in their infamous anti-Labour campaign during the 1987 election as saying that ‘All White people are racist’. I don’t know if she said it or not. If she didn’t, it wouldn’t be the first the Scum libelled someone. Not by a very long chalk.

As for thinking about Russia, this is just more of the Tory ‘Red Scare’ drivel that the party’s been running ever since the Zinoviev Letter in the 1920s. Labour is supposed to be full of Communists, ready to do Moscow’s bidding. Or, now that Communism’s fallen, Putin’s bidding. Sugar then goes on in the poem to rant about how Corbyn supports our enemies, listing them as the IRA, Hamas and Russia. All of which we’ve heard before, and despatched. He never supported the IRA, but recommended that the British government should talk to them. Which Margaret Thatcher was doing, all the time she was loudly denouncing the Labour party for daring to suggest that she should. Well, as someone once said, the Tory party is an organised hypocrisy. As for Hamas, I’ve seen allegations that they were either created, or helped into power, by the Israeli state, who thought that this would make it easier to control and disinherit the Palestinians. Corbyn isn’t an enemy of Israel, but he does want a just settlement for the Palestinians. Hence the outrage of the Israel lobby, who can’t bear anyone taking their side, even if they’re actually not opponents of Israel or anti-Semites.

He also claimed that Corbyn was the worse Labour leader ever. Well, I can remember the Tories making the same accusations, minus those of anti-Semitism, against Neil Kinnock in the 1987 election, and before that against Michael Foot and Harold Wilson in the 1970s. The CIA, MI5 and the Tories, including Maggie Thatcher, were convinced that Wilson was a KGB spy. He wasn’t, but they still smeared him.

As for Corbyn being extreme left, he stands for the renationalisation of the health service, a partial renationalisation of the electricity grid, and the renationalisation of the railways, as well as an end to the murderous benefit cuts. This is a return to something like the post-war social democratic consensus, and very far from the total nationalisation demanded by the genuine far left, like the Socialist Workers’ Party. Not that this bothers the Tories, who never let the truth get in the way of a good lie.

And I have always been uneasy about Sugar as a supporter of Labour. It never seemed quite genuine. There are, and always have been, businesspeople who supported the Labour party. But I don’t think Sugar was really one of them. I might be wrong, but I seem to remember Sugar appearing on Terry Wogan’s weekday talk show way back in the 1980s. He poured scorn on the idea that you needed an extensive education to become successful in business, and talked about how he’d begun his career aged fifteen selling things from the back of cars. Or something like that. I can remember my father looking at me, and remarking that he was the type who’d have children climbing up chimneys again.

Sugar left Labour three years ago, about the time Corbyn was elected leader, so he’s definitely no supporter of the current Labour leadership. It seems very much to me that he was one of the big businessmen Blair ingratiated himself with, and who were given seats in government in return for their support. Like David Sainsbury, who was another donor to New Labour, now departed. He’s basically another Tory, who was drawn to New Labour because Blair was continuing the Thatcherite programme of privatisation and benefit cuts, but was electorally more attractive than the Tory party itself under John Major.

His poem was basically another Tory screed of lies and hate, from someone, who only seems to have joined Labour out of political and commercial opportunism. There’s absolute no reason to take him, or his opinions seriously.

End Workfare Now! Part 2

Arguments for Workfare

The arguments trotted out to support the workfare policies are these.

1. Everyone has a duty to work. Those who take money from the state have a reciprocal obligation to work for the support they have received.

2. Following Moynihan in America, it’s argued that part of the problem of poverty in society is communities, where there are families, which have not worked for generations. In order to break the cycle of poverty, these people must be forced into work.

3. It’s also argued that many individuals have also been unemployed for so long that they, too, have lost the habit of working. These people must also be forced to work.

4. The unemployed are also socially marginalised and excluded. Workfare helps them, its supporters argue, become integrated into society and so become productive members of the community once again.

5. It is also claimed that workfare allows people to acquire new skills. In 2012 a report was published on the exploitation of the people forced to work for free as security guards for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. A spokesman for the ConDem coalition responded to the claim by stating: ‘The work programme is about giving people who have often been out of the workplace for quite some time the chance to develop skills that they need to get a job that is sustainable.’ As Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols sang back in 1977 ‘God save the Queen and the Fascist regime.’

6. Workfare somehow reduces government spending on welfare programmes. Liam Byrne, New Labour’s advocate for workfare, who was quoted in the first part of this article, said ‘The best way to save money is to get people back into work.’

In fact there are serious arguments against just about all of these points, and some of them simply aren’t factually true. Let’s deal with each of these arguments in turn.

The Duty to Work

If people have a duty to perform free work for the goods and services that are provided freely by the state, then the middle classes and the elite should particularly be targeted for workfare, because they use the state infrastructure and its services more than the proles and those at the bottom of society. But the middle and upper classes most definitely are not required to perform these services. One of the worst policies of Mao’s China during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ of the 1960s and ’70s was the policy of taking skilled workers, intellectuals and artists away from their work to perform manual work elsewhere in that vast nation. It was bitterly resented, although at the time it was in line with the idea of creating a classless ‘workers’ state’. The respected TV critic and broadcaster, Clive James, in his column for the Observer, reviewed a programme that exposed this aspect of Chinese Communism. James was horrified at the effect this had had on breaking the health and skills of those sent to labour in the fields, such as a dancer for the state ballet. But if such forced labour is unacceptable for the middle and upper classes, it should also be so for those, whose only crime is to be without a job.

Furthermore there are also strong objections to performing workfare for a profit-making company. Those who do so, like those poor souls working free of charge for the big supermarkets like Sainsbury’s, are helping to make these companies even more profitable. It isn’t society that profits from their work, but extremely wealthy individuals like David Sainsbury and his shareholders, and the people running his competitors, for example. This parallels the exploitative nature of Stalin’s gulags and the Nazis’ use of skilled Jewish workers by the SS. The gulags were the immense archipelago of forced labour camps used to punish political prisoners and other victims of Stalin’s regime. Over 30 million Soviet citizens are estimated to have been imprisoned in them at the height of the terror. The vast majority were totally innocent. The system was used to industrialise the country, whose economy had formerly been dominated by agriculture. Under Stalin, the heads of state enterprises would supply lists of the types of workers they needed to the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, the state secret police. The NKVD would then arrest workers with those skills, and supply them to the businesses as requested. In Nazi Germany, the SS also formed an enterprise to exploited the skilled Jewish workers, such as jewelers, they had imprisoned. They were put to work producing luxury goods, which were then sold by the SS. They even produced a catalogue of the products made by these slave artisans.

This claim also implies that low income people have a duty to work in an inferior position for the benefit of their social or economic superiors in a master-servant relationship. This is a distortion of the concept of duty. The same idea also leads to the view that if you are unsuccessful in the labour market, you therefore have a duty to work for nothing, a view of society that is both regressive – harking back to some of the worst aspects of the Victorian era – and alienating. On the other hand, if you are performing work that is unprofitable, then there should be no duty to perform it. If it is genuine, valuable work, then the people performing it should be paid the current market rate, not simply provided with unemployment relief.

Standing also makes the point that the concept of duty has led to the belief that people should be forced to find work. But the use of coercion is divisive and actually undermines the commitment to work. He also argues that it actually amoral, because it takes away from workers their ability to choose for themselves whether to be moral. Plus the fact that workfare is not levied on the idle rich, or the friends and relatives of the politicians forcing it on others

Multigenerational Families of the Unemployed

The number of families that actually fit this description is so small as to be negligible, both in America and over here in Blighty. The academics T. Shildrick, R. MacDonald, C. Webster, and K. Garthwaite examined this issue in their Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low Pay, No Pay Britain (Bristol: Policy Press 2012). Their research revealed that only 1 per cent fitted the description of a family in which two generations were unemployed. Official attempts to find these pockets of intergenerational unemployment have similarly turned up next to zilch. The whole idea is rubbish, but that hasn’t stopped papers like the Daily Fail claiming it’s true.

Getting People out of the Habit of Not Having a Job

Researchers have also looked at this one, too, and guess what? Yup, it’s similarly rubbish. There are very few people like this. But rather than acting as an incentive to find work, actually being forced to work unpaid in poor conditions may actually act as a deterrent. The Anarchist activist and writer, Alexander Berkman, made this point about work generally in his 1929, What Is Anarchist Communism? He made the point that much poor work was caused by forcing unwilling workers to perform jobs that they did not want and weren’t interested in. He pointed to the experience of prison labour, as an illustration. In prison, those workers, who were forced to perform such jobs did so badly. However, if they were given a job they enjoyed, then their work rapidly improved. He also made the point that Standing also makes about poorly paid but necessary work, that instead of forcing people to do it, wages should be increased to encourage workers to do them, and increase the social respect for those, who did those jobs. In a very stretched comparison, he described how both road sweepers and surgeons both helped keep people health. Surgeons, however, were given respect, while road sweepers are looked down upon. He felt this was simply a question of money, and that the social stigma attached to cleaning the streets would be removed, and the two professions given equal respect, if road sweepers were paid the same amount. This is too simplistic, as the surgeon is far more skilled than the road sweeper. But sweeping the streets and related dirty jobs would undoubtedly be more attractive if they were better paid.

Integrating the Jobless Back into Society

Far from being calculated to help the long-term unemployed back into society, the type of work that they are forced to do under workfare is humiliating. In many cases, this is quite deliberate as part of the government’s ideology of ‘less eligibility’ and dissuading people from going on benefits. And studies by the researchers and the DWP itself have also found that workfare makes absolutely no difference to whether a claimant gets a job afterwards.

Enabling the Unemployed to Acquire New Skills

This is also rubbish, as the type of menial work people are giving under workfare, in which they sweep the streets or stack shelves, are by their nature unskilled. And if a skilled worker is forced to perform them for months on end, this type of work is actually like to make them lose their skills.
Workfare Cuts Government Spending

This is also rubbish. In fact, workfare increases government expenditure on the unemployed, as the government has to pay subsidies to the firms employing them, and pay the costs of administration, which are actually quite heavy. And the work those on the programme actually perform doesn’t produce much in the way of taxable income, so money doesn’t come back to the government. Furthermore, most of the people on benefits are actually working, which makes Liam Byrne’s statement that the best way to save money is to get people back into work’ a barefaced lie.

In addition to demolishing the government’s arguments in favour of workfare, Standing also provides a series of further arguments against it. These are that the jobs created through workfare aren’t real jobs; workfare is unjust in its treatment of the unemployed; it stops the unemployed actually looking for jobs for themselves; it lowers their income over their lifetime; it also acts to keep wages down; it keeps the people, who should be working at those jobs out of work; it’s a dangerous extension of the power of the state; and finally, it’s a gigantic scam which only benefits the welfare-to-work firms.

Workfare and Real Jobs

According to the ideas of the market economy developed by the pioneer of free trade, the 18th century philosopher Adam Smith, workfare jobs don’t actually constitute real jobs. Smith believed that the market would actually produce higher wages to entice people into performing unpleasant jobs. On this reasoning, if workfare jobs were real jobs, then they would have a definite economic value. They would be created through the operation of the market, and the workers in them would also be paid proper wages for performing them.

There are also moral problems in the definition of what constitutes a ‘real job’ that someone on workfare should have to perform. If it is defined as one paying the minimum wage, then workfare is immoral as it puts downward pressure on the wages and conditions of the people already performing those jobs, forcing them into poverty. If those ‘real jobs’ are defined as those which are dirty, dangerous, undignified or stigmatizing, and so unpopular, they would have the opposite effect of what the advocates of workfare claim – that they are encouraging people to find work.

The solution for progressives is to make the labour market act like it is supposed to act, rather than it actually does in practice. Adam Smith was quite wrong about wages adjusting upwards for unpopular jobs in a market economy. The wages provided for work should match both supply and demand, and people should not be made into commodities as workers. They should have enough economic support to be able to refuse jobs they don’t want. Instead of assuming that people need to be forced to work, there should be the presumption instead that most people actually do. It is arbitrary and ultimately demeaning for all concerned to try to identify people who are somehow ‘undeserving’. Genuine supporters of equality should want the wages in unpleasant jobs to rise, until there is a genuine supply of willing labour.

Vox Political: Torygraph Spreading More Lies about Break-Away Labour Group

It seems the Torygraph will publish any old rubbish, not matter how hackneyed and obviously wrong, to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. Yesterday Mike put up a piece about an article in it, which claims that about 100 Labour MPs are in talks with potential donors about setting up a new ‘Progressives’ group in parliament if Corbyn stays on after a Tory landslide.

As Mike says, this is just the same old rumours that right-wing Labour MPs were planning to split the party that were circulating just before Corbyn won his second leadership election with a landslide.

He concludes

This is just a stupid smoke-and-mirrors bid to sap support for Jeremy Corbyn after Labour’s storming campaign launch and yet more blunders from ‘Team Terrible’ – I mean, Team Theresa.

I notice the name of the Torygraph reporter is ironically appropriate – C Hope? There’s no hope for Tories to see here.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/10/how-many-times-must-we-read-this-twaddle-about-mps-breaking-away-from-corbyns-labour/

A little while ago Florence, one of the great commenters on this blog, posted this remark about similar rumours of a Labour split:

It seems you may not have long to wait, as rumour has it that Blair is indeed trying to found a new party (or should that be a New Party?), with Sainsbury’s money being redirected from Progress to the New Blair Party. I have no doubt at all that this will claim to hold the middle ground as long as the ideals of neoliberalism seem centrist and “moderate”. I also have no doubt that this is yet another attack on the working people of the UK.

Let’s just stick with the current Labour party, that has promised to represent the 99%, and not the 1%?

My guess is that the Torygraph writer has heard some of these same rumours, and decided to repeat them as fact. It might be true that Blair wants to set up a new ‘Progressives’ party – the title of this new ‘moderate’ – read: neoliberal – group touted by the Torygraph seems to be based on ‘Progress’, the Blairite faction in Labour. Blair himself wants to return to British politics and was in the papers a week ago spouting on about how he wishes to spread ‘moderate’ politics.

I doubt he would have any chance of forming a new party. As Richard Seymour has pointed out in his book on Jeremy Corbyn, Progress is tiny numerically. It’s only causing trouble because its members have seized key position in the party. Furthermore, Blair himself is politically toxic, though like Thatcher he has no idea that he is long past his political sell-by date. Mike and Seymour in his book have pointed out that from 2002 to the end of their administration, Labour lost five million votes. He alienated voters with his right-wing policies.

And even some Tories despise him for reasons that are entirely right and correct. The Mail on Sunday columnist, Peter Hitchens, refers to him as ‘the Blair creature’ and voices his intense disgust at him for starting the needless wars in the Middle East which have cost so many brave men and women their lives and limbs.

My guess is that if the 100 Labour MPs did split off from Labour, it would result in them immediately losing their seats. The party would then be able to put up proper left-wing candidates, who would support Corbyn – or a suitably left-wing successor. These proper Labour MPs would then win the seats previously held by their Blairite predecessors.

But as Mike said, rumours of these splits have run before, and been wrong. The Blairite MPs themselves have been desperate to hold on to their nominations as Labour MPs by any means, fair or foul. We’ve seen whole local Labour parties suspended on trumped up charges because they’ve scared the Tom Watson and his minions by threatening to deselect their Blairite MP.

And Barry Davies, one of the long-term commenters over on Mike’s blog, raises the spectre of what happened to the SDP:

Well let’s honest if they “moderate’s” broke away what are they going to do, renew the social democrats?, start another party? join the lib dems, whatever they would be assured of losing their cushy jobs.

Yes, what did happen to the SDP? They were supposed to be about to break the mould of British politics. I can remember David Owen telling his troops to go back home and prepare for government.

It didn’t happen.

But he did get an invitation from Screaming Lord Sutch to join the Monster Raving Loony Party. Sutch said in his autobiography, Life As Sutch, that if Dr Owen had joined them, he’d be in government by now.

This looks like wishful thinking at best from the Torygraph. They’ve been one of the most venomous and persistent of Corbyn’s critics in the media. Possibly this is due to the paper’s very blatant right-wing bias, made worse by its ownership by the weirdo Barclay Twins, and desperation to ingratiate itself to potential advertisers by spiking stories that reflect badly on them. According to Private Eye, this prostration before the advertisers has resulted in readers leaving it in droves. I got the impression that this has resulted in mass sackings by doddery CEO Murdo McClellan and the Gruesome Twosome in order to keep the paper’s share price up.

Either way, it’s the Torygraph that’s in dire straits, not Labour. And hopefully one result of a Labour victory will be to utterly discredit the Telegraph and the other right-wing denizens of Fleet Street as influential opinion-formers.

How Labour Can Become a Party of the Countryside

Last Thursday Mike put up a piece asking ‘How can Labour become the party of the countryside again?’, following the announcement by the Fabian Society that it was launching a project to investigate ways in which the Labour party could start winning over rural communities in England and Wales. The Society stated that the government had promised to match the subsidies granted to farmers and rural communities under the Common Agricultural Policy until 2020. However, farmers are faced with the devastating prospect of losing access to European markets, while being undercut by cheap foreign imports. Environmental regulations are also threatened, which also affect the continuing beauty of the English and Welsh countryside.

The Society recognises that agriculture isn’t the only issue affecting rural communities. They also suffer from a range of problems from housing, education, transport and the closure of local services. Rural communities pay more for their transport, and are served worst. At the same time, incomes in the countryside are an average of £4,000 lower than in the towns, but prices are also higher. Many market towns, pit villages and other rural communities have been abandoned as their inhabitants have sought better opportunities in the towns.

The Society is asking Labour members in rural communities to fill out a survey, to which Mike’s article is linked, and give their views on how the party can succeed in the countryside.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/03/28/how-can-labour-become-the-party-of-the-countryside-again/

This is a fascinating project, and if successful would see Labour challenge the Tories and Lib Dems in their heartlands. The Tories in particular seem to see themselves as the party of the countryside since the 18th and 19th centuries, when they represented the Anglican aristocracy, who tried to emphasise the rural traditions of a mythical prosperous ‘merrie England’ against the threat of the towns of the growth of the Liberal middle class.

Mike states that one of the problems he’s faced as a Labour party campaigner in his part of rural Wales is the myth that ‘Labour wants to nationalise farms’. Clearly, this is the part of the same complaint I remembering hearing from middle class children at school that ‘Labour wanted to nationalise everything’. It was to allay these suspicions that Blair went off and got rid of Clause 4 as part of his assault on Labour as the party of the working class. But even before then it was nonsense.

Following Labour’s defeat in the 1950 elections, the party halted its programme of nationalisation. Labour was in any case committed to nationalise only when it was necessary and popular. Thus, Atlee’s government set up the NHS and nationalised the utilities, with very little opposition from the Tories, but did not proceed further. And the Social Democratic section of the party, led by Tony Crosland, argued very strongly against nationalisation on the grounds that it was not only unpopular, but the benefits of nationalisation could be achieved in other ways, such as a strong trade union movement, a welfare state and progressive taxation.

This held sway until the 1970s, when the Keynsian consensus began to break down. Labour’s response in 1973 was to recommend a more comprehensive programme of nationalisation. They put forward a list of 25 companies, including the sugar giant, Tate & Lyle, which they wanted taken into public ownership. How large this number seems to be, it is far short complete nationalisation.

The party was strongly aware of the massive problems the Soviet Union had in feeding its population, thanks to the collectivisation of agriculture. Most of the food produced in the USSR came from the private plots the peasants were allowed on their kholkozy – collective farms. Tito’s government in Yugoslavia had attempted to avoid that by letting the farms remain in private hands. At the same time, only companies that employed more than 20 people were to be nationalised.

Even in the 1930s and 40s I don’t think the nationalisation of farmland was quite an option. Looking through the contents of one of the secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham, I found an old copy of Production for the People, published by the Left Book Club in the 1940s. This explored ways in which Socialists could raise production in industry and agriculture, to the benefit of working people. The section on agriculture was almost wholly devoted to the question of subsidies and suitable government infrastructure to support farmers. I can’t remember there being any mention of nationalisation. The closest the book came was to argue for an expansion of rural cooperatives.

This project may well embarrass the Fabian Society. I’ve got the distinct impression that the Society is now staffed very strongly with Blairites, and it is Blairism as a barely left extension of Thatcherism that is at the heart of so many of the problems of rural communities. Blair, for example, like Major and now the administrations of Cameron and May, strongly supported the big supermarket chains. But the supermarket chains have done immense damage to Britain’s small businessmen and farmers. They force small shopkeepers out of business, and impose very exploitative contracts on their suppliers. See the chapter on them in George Monbiot’s Captive State. Yet national and local governments have fallen over to grant their every wish up and down the country. David Sainsbury even had some place in one of Blair’s quangos. I think he even was science minister, at one point.

If Labour would like to benefit farmers and traders, they could try and overturn the power of the supermarket chains, so that farmers get a proper price for their products and are not faced with the shouldering the costs while Sainsbury’s, Tescos and so on reap all the profits. At the same time, your local shops together employ more people than the local supermarket. So if you cut down on the number of supermarkets in an area, you’d actually boost employment. But this is unlikely to go down well with the Blairites, looking for corporate donations and a seat on the board with these pernicious companies when they retire or lose their seat.

At the same time, rural communities and livelihoods are also under attack from the privatisation of the forestry service. Fracking is also a threat to the environment, as is the Tories campaign against green energy. A number of villages around Britain, including in Somerset, have set up local energy companies generating power from the sun and wind. But the current government is sponsored heavily by the oil and nuclear companies, and so is desperate to close these projects down, just like the Republicans are doing in America.

The same goes for the problems of transport. After Maggie Thatcher decided to deregulate bus services, the new bus companies immediately started cutting unprofitable services, which included those to rural areas. If Labour really wants to combat this problem, it means putting back in place some of the regulations that Thatcher removed.

Also, maintaining rural communities as living towns and villages also means building more houses at prices that people in the countryside can afford. It may also mean limiting the purchase of housing stock as convenient second homes for wealthy urbanites. The Welsh Nats in the ’70s and ’80s became notorious for burning down holiday homes in Wales owned by the English. In actual fact, I think it’s now come out that only a tiny number – perhaps as low as 1 – were actually destroyed by Welsh nationalists. The rest were insurance jobs. But I can remember my Welsh geographer teacher at school explaining why the genuine arsonists were so angry. As holiday homes, they’re vacant for most of the year. The people, who own them don’t live locally, and so don’t use local services, except for the couple of weeks they’re there. Furthermore, by buying these homes, they raise the prices beyond the ability of local people to buy them, thus forcing them out.

This is a problem facing rural communities in England, not just Wales, and there are some vile people, who see nothing wrong with it. I’ve a friend, who was quite involved in local politics down in Somerset. He told me how he’d had an argument on one of the Somerset or rural British websites with a very right-wing, obnoxious specimen, who not only saw nothing wrong with forcing local country people out of their homes, but actually celebrated it. This particular nutter ranted on about how it was a ‘new highland clearances’. I bet he really wouldn’t like to say that in Scotland!

Labour may also be able to pick up votes by attacking the myth of the fox hunting lobby as really representing rural Britain. Well, Oscar Wilde once described them as ‘the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible’. Which about accurately describes them. They were resented in the early 19th century, when some farmers and squires started ‘subscription hunts’. Their members where wealthy urban businessmen, off for a day’s ‘sport’ in the country. At the same time, harsh laws were passed against poaching, which saw starving farm workers transported.

Mike’s put up statistics several times on his blog, which show very much that very many, perhaps even the majority, of rural people do not support fox hunting. And I know people from rural Britain, who actively loathed and detested it. I had a friend at College, who came from Devon. He bitterly hated the Tories and the fox hunters, not least because the latter had ridden down a deer into school playing field and killed it in front of the children.

Another friend of mine comes from East Anglia. He told me how many of the tenant farmers over there also hated the fox hunting crowd, not least because of the cavalier way they assumed they had the right to ride over the land of the small farmers in pursuit of the ‘game’.

The fox hunting crowd do not represent rural Britain as a whole, and their claim to do so should be attacked and shown to be massively wrong at every opportunity. As for the Tories’ claim to be the party of the countryside, they have represented the interests only of the rich landed gentry, and the deregulation and privatisation introduced by Maggie Thatcher and carried on by successive right-wing administrations, including May and Cameron, have done nothing but harm real working people in rural Britain. The bitter persecution of the farmworker’s unions set up in the 19th century clearly demonstrate how far back this hatred and contempt goes.

More on Progress, the Groaniad, and the Israel Lobby

Lobster 70 also had some very interesting little snippets about the Israel lobby, and its connections to sections of the Labour party and the press, specifically ‘Progress’, and the Guardian.

‘Progress’ is the Blairite faction within the Labour party. In ‘Tittle-Tattle’ for that issue, Tom Easton praises Solomon Hughes in the Morning Star for his work investigating and exposing Progress and its dodgy donors. Hughes had written about the close connection between Tristram Hunt and David Sainsbury. As I’ve blogged previously, Sainsbury was a big corporate donor to the Labour party under Blair and Brown. He stopped funding the party as a whole when Ed Miliband became leader, but, according to Hughes, he continued funding Progress. Just as he continued funding the SDP rump under Dr David Owen after the rest of it had merged with the Liberals. One of the SDP’s members was Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee.

In November 2014 Hughes described Hunt’s speech at the previous Labour Conference, in which he made a joke about the secretive and numerically small nature of the faction, which did not go down well with the Progress hordes. He wrote

‘When I went to the Progress rally at the last Labour conference, Tristram Hunt was one of the speakers, where he declared he was “delighted to be with Progress” because “you might be an unaccountable faction dominated by a secretive billionaire, but you are OUR unaccountable faction dominated by a secretive billionaire”.

Here were two dozen true words spoken in jest. Hunt’s joke was so close to the bone that the shiny happy people of Progress — this is one of the biggest events on Labour’s fringe — seemed embarrassed into silence.

Hunt’s insistence that Progress was “the Praetorian Guard, the Parachute Regiment, the Desert Rats of Labour” also raised few laughs, even though the meeting took place in a Comedy Club at the edge of the Labour conference site. Even joking that Progress is new Labour’s shock troops was a bit too much.’

One of Progress’ board members is Patrick Diamond, who is a long-time associated of Peter Mandelson. He is the Vice-Chair of Mandy’s Policy Network, as well as frequently contributing columns to the Guardian. Progress’ president is Stephen Twigg, a former chair of Labour Friends of Israel. Progress’ chair, John Woodcock, the MP for Barrow and Furness, contributed the foreword to the Labour Friends of Israel’s The Progressive Case for Israel. And when it seemed Liz Kendall was about to don the mantle of leadership for New Labour, she got a positive press from the Jewish Chronicle. The week after Labour lost the election, the newspaper ran the headline, ‘Labour Must Now Pass the Israel Test’. Which shows just how close New Labour is to the Israel lobby. And in another item in the same column, Easton states that another former chairman of the LFI is Jim Murphy, the head of Scottish Labour. Which sheds yet more light on his determination to block Rhea Wolfson’s attempts to get on to the NEC. Murphy persuaded her local Labour party not to back her because of her links to that terrible anti-Semitic organisation, Momentum, despite the fact that they’re not, and Wolfson herself is Jewish.

A further item, ‘Grauniada’, also comments that that the Graun’s connections to Zionism goes back ‘to the early days of both’, noting that the newspaper itself had told the story of its relationship with Israel in 2008 when it published Daphna Baram’s Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel. The same item also notes that Jonathan Freedland, one of the leading critics of Jeremy Corbyn, is also a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle.

All this shows the very strong connections between New Labour, the Labour Friends of Israel, and the Jewish Chronicle, and how they are absolutely united in their hatred of Jeremy Corbyn.

The same item in Lobster also speculates on how long the connection between the Graun and Zionism will survive, now that the new editor-in-chief is Katherine Viner. Viner and Alan Rickman produced a theatre production based on the diary entries and writings of Rachel Corrie. Corrie was the American peace activist, who was killed by bulldozer driven by the Israeli Defence Force in Gaza in 2003.

There’s also another section in that part of the magazine specifically about the Israel lobby. Most of the politicians reported in that item, ‘Israel Lobby News’, are Conservatives and Lib Dems, such as Eric Pickles, Nick Clegg’s head of communications, James Sorene, who went off to head BICOM, while local councillors elected in May that year were invited to join the Local Government Friends of Israel by Rachel Kaye, the Executive Director of We Believe in Israel. Kaye stated that the director of We Believe in Israel was Luke Akehurst, a former Labour councillor for Hackney, and had worked with Peter Mandelson’s former press secretary in the PR and lobbying firm Weber Shandwick.

Ruth Smeeth, the Anti-Semitism Smears and the Israel Lobby

Ruth Smeeth is one of the other Blairites, who made allegations of anti-Semitic abuse earlier this year. According to Wikipedia, she demanded that Corbyn resign, after Marc Wadworth, of Momentum Black Connexions, accused her of working ‘hand-in-hand with the right-wing media’. She claimed that this was a slur against her as someone of Jewish heritage, because it was linking her, as Jew, to a conspiracy theory. See the entry at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Smeeth

Easton, in his ‘Tittle-Tattle’ column in Lobster 68 for 2014 also reveals that she’s a member of Progress, the Blairite party-within-a-party, funded by David Sainsbury. She was also a former director of public affairs for another Israel lobby group, BICOM. A number of organisation have documented how BICOM are involved with the occupation of the West Bank and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

As was remarked at the time, if I recall correctly, her accusation is all about protecting the neoliberalist entryists in Labour and protecting the Israel lobby and its influence.