Last week it was revealed that Keir Starmer intends to abolish the House of Lords. Before I go any further, I should say that I have no idea what he wants to replace it with. I caught a few seconds of a video put up by GB News or one of the other god-awful right-wing YouTube channels of a Starmer being laid into on this issue by Peter Hitchens. From the few seconds I saw, Hitchens was accusing him of wishing to make all the members of the upper house appointed by the Prime Minister. Hitchens stated that this would be undemocratic, which is absolutely right, if true. But the debate is also more than a little familiar. Back in 1986 or 87 the papers carried reports that the Labour party then wanted to abolish the House of Lords. I think they also plans to reform the House of Commons to make it more democratic, which would have involved giving more power to the speaker. Then there were Tony Blair’s reforms in the late ’90s and early part of this century.
Blair took on the objection to the House of Lords that it was an unelected, undemocratic anachronism. It is. It is, or was, a remnant of feudalism, the old medieval grand council in which the king or the prince was advised by the kingdom’s great lords. It goes all the way back to the witangemot, the council of wise men, in Anglo-Saxon England and similar feudal assemblies in the Carolingian Empire and other states on the continent. Such an assembly is outdated and against the basic principles of democratic representation. On the other hand, it had the advantage of being cheap. Or so I heard it said at the time these reforms were being mooted. The other argument, put forward by really reactionary Tories, was that the hereditary peers deserved the place because they were better fitted to it through centuries of breeding and education. Which is the old Tory argument that all the great civilisations had an aristocracy that cost them an election in the early part of the past century. I don’t think it’s a vote winner, but I’ve no doubt that Jacob Rees-Mogg probably believed in it. He started his career as an aspiring MP campaigning for the seat of a Scots fishing town. He proudly announced that he was standing on a platform of trying to convince the local people that an unelected, hereditary upper house was actually a great institution. Obviously he didn’t succeed, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the SNP vote didn’t increase in that constituency as a result.. Blair reformed the House partly by appointing some of its members, and subsequent Prime Ministers have done the same, so that the number of peers is now 800-odd, far more than the House of Commons and even the governing political assembly of the Chinese Communist party. The peers get an allowance for turning up, and so there have been scandals and accusations that many of them just stick their head through the door long enough to claim their cheque before zooming off to business elsewhere. And the opposition objected at the time that Blair’s reform was hardly democratic. He was denounced as a new Cromwell, who was packing parliament with his supporters, just as England’s Lord \Protector and the butcher of Ireland had done during the Interregnum.
The suggested alternative was to transform the upper house into a senate like America’s. It would still have the duty of checking and amending legislation, but would be elected. According to Private Eye, there was no real enthusiasm behind this idea. People didn’t want to have to go through another round of elections, and the lack of popular support for such a chamber would mean that only mediocrities would serve in it. This must have been the view of the powers that be, or something similar, because the plan seems to have vanished soon after.
.I believe that the current House of Lords needs to be cut down, and no, I don’t want membership of the House to be by prime ministerial appointment. But I also don’t see any point in reforming it radically. The precise nature of the House of Lords doesn’t actually bother me to anywhere near the extent that this country needs a return to the social democratic consensus pre-Maggie. Privatisation has failed, and the Tory welfare reforms are leaving people cold and starving. We need to renationalise the utilities and the railways, as well as the NHS, which should be properly funded. We needed to reverse the destruction of the welfare state so people aren’t left dependent on food banks and private charity to feed themselves if they’re unemployed or disabled. And we need to make sure working people are paid a proper wage for exactly the same reason, not to mention nationalising the energy companies so that people pay less for the fuel and electricity bills and aren’t faced with the decision whether to heat their homes, pay the rent or eat. All this is far more pressing and important than tinkering with the constitution.
But I think the mooted reform of the House of Lords is another example of Starmer wishing to emulate Blair. And Blair wanted to make Britain more like America. But our political system is different. It’s parliamentary, not presidential, and that does apparently affect the results of Blair’s reforms, including his changes to the judiciary. There’s a very interesting video of David Starkey explaining this, put up by the New Culture Forum. Starkey is, of course, a terrible old reactionary while the New Culture Forum are the cultural wing of the Institute for Economic Affairs, a right-wing Buxton Street think tank that wants to privatise everything Thatcher, Major and Blair haven’t already sold off, including the NHS. But Starkey makes a very good case for the incompatibility of British and American constitutional systems.
But most of all I’m afraid that this constitutional tinkering is in lieu of practical policies, that will make a real difference to Britain’s poor and working people. Such as the return to proper, socialist, or at least social democratic politics. Blair changed the constitution, but didn’t change Tory government policies. He just carried on with them once he was in power. In fact, he ramped them up and went much further in the privatisation of the NHS than the Tories had dared.
I hope everyone’s enjoying the summer sunshine, or at least not suffering too much from the heat. I went to a Zoom meeting of the local Labour party here in south Bristol. One of the issues that came up was the Pride march and the attendance of the anti-trans group, Labour Women’s Declaration, at the annual conference where they will have a stall. Bristol had held its Pride celebrations the previous Saturday, and the local Labour party had taken part in the march. Unfortunately, Bristol Anarchists had appeared as well to make a nuisance of themselves and insult the other marchers. They chanted slogans attacking Pride for being too corporate – ‘No Pride But Corporate Pride’, and called one of the Labour men a scab and a Tory, before being shown the door by the cops. They also turned up the following day, Sunday, at the Trans Pride march, where they made a nuisance of themselves again. They’re really not doing their best to make a non-coercive system based on communal ownership and absolute personal autonomy very popular.
Our local Labour MP, Karin Smyth, appeared to give her monthly report. She is horrified by all of the candidates for the Tory leadership and dreads any one of them getting in. She also reported that they are not turning up to the committees set up to scrutinise government activity. This is an important function of parliament, which they’re just breaking. They don’t give any excuse or tell anyone they’re not coming. They just don’t turn up. Priti Patel was particularly mentioned as one of these offenders. I’m not surprised. She’s one of the laziest MPs in the House and has always had a deep contempt for anything except her own political ambitions, as she demonstrated when she was caught conducting her own foreign policy with Israel under Tweezer. This attitude may well show how the Tory candidates intend to behave once their leaders – complete contempt for the dignity and functions of parliament, just like Bozo. Or Charles I or Oliver Cromwell, for that matter.
When it came to questions, the party’s LGBTQ officer raised the issue of Labour Women’s Declaration’s attendance at conference and asked Smyth why she support them. Smyth said that it was because they were concerned with protecting women’s sex-based rights. So the officer said he was on their website, and couldn’t find anything about women’s rights, just stuff about trans. He also said that they thought trans people were communists. Smyth repeated that they were defending women’s sex-based rights. She also said that she wasn’t a member of the group, but felt it was important that they should be heard.
I feel very strongly that in the case Smyth’s right. Trans people, of course, should have the same respect and dignity as everyone else, but the automatic treatment of transwomen as women, especially when they’re still biologically male, does negatively affect women’s sex-based rights, especially their right to safety, dignity and autonomy in sports. As for trans people being communists, that’s obviously not true, but there are trans activists who are strongly influenced by Queer Theory. This is a postmodern revision of Marxism, and it does see campaigns to promote respect for gay and trans people as a method of creating a queer Marxist revolutionary communist. This needs to be weeded out of the gay and trans movement. They should not be used by extremists for political indoctrination.
I therefore sent the following emails to Smyth, supporting her on her support for Labour Women’s Declaration, and to the LGBTQ officer seeking to provide him with further information on the issues involved for women presented by the trans movement.
Here’s the email I sent to Smyth:
‘Dear Karin,
Thank you for your report to the local Labour party at the meeting last night,, and particularly for standing up for the right of Labour Women’s Declaration to have a stall at conference. I’ve been following the issue of the way trans rights also impacts on women’s rights, and believe very strongly that women’s sex-based rights – the right to privacy and security in rape and domestic abuse shelters, prisons, sport and toilets, for example, must also be safeguarded. And there is a Marxist ideological dimension to the current push for transgenderism. Some transgender activism is based on Queer Theory, a postmodernist Marxist view of gender based on the theories of Marcel Foucault. This was founded by Gayle Rubinl in the 1980s in her essay, ‘Thinking Sex’. This is also affecting the Drag Queen story hour events now staged by many school and public libraries here and in the US. Two years ago an essay was published in an American educational journal presenting Drag Queen story hour as a queer Marxist strategy for indoctrinating children to live ‘queerly’ with the revolutionary consciousness required to rise up against bourgeois society. The American academic James Lindsay has made an excellent series of videos going through these papers and critiquing them. See the video ‘Groomer Schools 4: Drag Queen Story Hours’ at his New Discourses channel on YouTube at Groomer Schools 4: Drag Queen Story Hour – YouTube. and this on Gayle Rubini’s ‘Thinking Sex’: The Origin of Queer Theory: Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” – YouTube..
Thank you for standing up for these women to also have their voices heard in this controversial and emotive issue.
Yours faithfully,
David Sivier’
And here’s the email I sent to the Labour party to go to its LGBTQ officer
”Dear Sir,
At this month’s all members meeting last night the new LGBTQ officer queried Karin about her support for Labour Women’s Declaration having a stall at conference this year. He seemed to believe that their opposition to the trans movement is based on hate and prejudice.
I’ve been following the controversy about trans rights, and do not believe this to be the case in the many feminist groups expressing criticism or opposition to the trans movement. The movement to include transwomen in many areas reserved for natal, biological women does present real dangers to women’s sex based race. There are already cases in America where biological men and boys have raped women and girls in prisons and schools after gaining admission to their private spaces through claiming that they identify as women. There are problems with fairness in sport, as transwomen retain the biological advantages they had when they were men. There are also issues with the medical process of transition, in that the cross-sex hormones can and do have detrimental effects on patients’ health. Many trans people are coming forward to complain that these complications were not sufficiently explained to them when they were seeking treatment. And I could go on.
What concerns me particularly here, though, is that the LGBTQ officer did not know that there really is a Marxist ideological element behind the current wave of transgender activism. This is based on Queer Theory, a postmodernist revision of Marx based on the theories of the French philosopher and paedophile Marcel Foucault. It was founded in the 1980s by activists like Julie Bindel and Gayle Rubin, whose essay ‘Thinking Sex’, remains one of its cornerstones. More recently there has been a paper published in an American educational journal by a transperson and a drag queen, Little Miss Hot Mess, about using Drag Queen Story Hour to indoctrinate young children into living ‘queerly’ and developing a queer revolutionary Marxist consciousness.
I am very much aware that this sounds absolutely barking mad, and sounds very much like some stupid conspiracy theory cooked up by the Sun and the rest of the Tory rags. Unfortunately, this papers exists. See the critique of it by James Lindsay on his New Discourses YouTube channel in the video ‘Groomer Schools 4: Drag Queen Story Hour’.
I’m very much aware that trans people also need to be protected from prejudice, and hopefully there is a way to reconcile their demands with women’s sex-based rights. I also feel very strongly that we need to be aware and very vigilant that there are activists whose desires for the trans movement go far beyond simply combating prejudice against them. The issue of grooming, both sexually and ideologically, is becoming prominent and has been seized on by the far right. Laurence Fox has already put out a video on this, with his party’s programme for combatting it.
We need to be aware of these issues and prepared to combat the challenges over this issue from both the extreme left and the extreme right. And that means we cannot ignore the fringe elements in the trans movement nor the way their presence is being used by the right. I do not want the Labour party and decent trans and gay activists to be smeared as Marxist paedophile groomers through failure to tackle this issue.
Yours with best wishes,
David Sivier’
I don’t know if I’ll get any replies to these messages. Somehow I doubt it. But I am convinced of the necessity of defending women’s sex-based rights and making sure that the Labour party is not one-sided on this issue. The Tory media has had great fun with the inability of senior Labour politicos to answer the question ‘What is a woman?’ after they declared their uncompromising support for trans rights. And this latter is alienating many women from the Labour party. And the concerns over trans and gay issues, and their teaching in schools, is very much being used by far right politicians like Laurence Fox. Only proper, clear debate, hearing from both sides, can stop this and offer the opportunity of protecting both trans people and women.
More radical songs for you to enjoy. This is another piece by left-wing pop musician Attila the Stockbroker, from dprkspacemarine’s channel on YouTube in a homage to two of the radical sects of the British Civil War. The Levellers were a radical group that demanded an extension of the franchise to the male heads of households, as well as state-supported schools, hospitals and almshouses. Naturally, they were far too radical for Oliver Cromwell and were duly suppressed after attempting an uprising in May 1649. However, their influence still remains in the Labour party as part of the continuing British radical tradition, though I can imagine Starmer, Reeves and the rest of them trying to play this part of British radical history down. Mustn’t frighten all those Thatcherites they want to appeal to. I gather from reading the comments that the Leveller’s March was originally composed and performed by Leon Rosselson, another radical folkie.
The Diggers were communists, who occupied the wasteland at St. George’s Hill in Surrey, declaring that it was now under their communal ownership and would now be cultivated by them, on 1st April 1649. They were harassed by Cromwell and the local landlords, but managed to last two years before finally fizzling out in 1651. They were supported by Gerard Winstanley, who wrote a number of pieces defending them. One is the song performed by Attila, while another was his pamphlet A New Yeere’s Gift. Attila goes from the Diggers’ Song itself to a modern song about the Digger movement, which explains who they were. This may give the impression that they were atheists, but I don’t think this was the case. Winstanley was a heretical Christian and the impression is that their socially radical views came from their religious beliefs, in which they felt that private property contravened the true spirit of Christ.
Nearly a year ago now I posted this video of myself trying to play the Digger’s Song. Unfortunately I hadn’t heard it performed at the time, and the music and the text of the song were printed separately. I thus just played the music without singing the lyrics, and then recited the lyrics afterwards. It’s not the best performance, but I hope you enjoy it.
I found a couple of very interesting articles on Bristol’s Jewish community in Max Barnes’ Bristol A-Z: Fascinating Stories of Bristol through the ages, published by the Bristol Evening Post c. 1970. Bristol has had a Jewish community for centuries. There was a Jewish quarter in the city in the Middle Ages. Way back in the 90s a miqveh, a Jewish ritual bath, with the Hebrew inscription, ‘Zacklim’, ‘flowing’, was found on Jacob’s Wells’ Road. They were expelled by Edward I along with the rest of England’s Jews, but returned after Oliver Cromwell once again opened the doors to Jewish immigrants. They were certainly present in the 18th century, when one Bristolian, looking for a doctor, said that he had no objection to a Jewish doctor, provided he claimed to believe in Christianity. In the 1820s one outraged commenter complained that the city’s corporation included not just Anglicans, but also Protestant non-Conformists and even Jews! There was also a very imposing synagogue in Park Row. This had giant Hebrew characters over its entrance and seemed to be cut into the very rock of St. Michael’s Hill. I haven’t seen it recently, so I wonder whether it’s still around, or if it’s simply the case that more recent building work has covered up the Hebrew inscription.
The article ‘Jews’ in the book runs
The first Jews settled in a confined area between St John’s Gate and St. Gile’s Gate. As Jews they were banned from living inside the walled town itself.
Their sole business was money lending. Like Jews down through the ages they suffered a lot of persecution. Once their houses were pillaged and burned by a mob led by William Giffard, a man who had had many financial dealings with the Jews and in 1275 took this brutal course to destroy the records and clear his debts.
Another Jew who refused to pay heavy ransom money to King John was hauled off to Bristol castle.
The king’s torturers pulled out one of his molar teeth each day. He had lost seven teeth before he paid up.
I think it was the poor man’s daughter who persuaded him to pay the money before he lost all his teeth. I think money lending was the only trade Jews in this country could legally pursue. Giffard’s pogrom against them was, I think, part of a number of anti-Semitic attacks and riots led by members of the aristocracy. The real reason behind them was that aristocracy at the time was in debt to Jewish moneylenders, and this was their way of getting out of it.
There’s another article on the Jewish author, Israel Zangwill, who also apparently was educated in Bristol. I doubt many people have heard of him today except experts in modern Jewish literature, but from reading the article he seems to have been a powerful force in the development of modern Jewish literature. The article says
Novelist and playwright (1864-1926) went toschool in Bristol.
He was the son of a Russian Jewish refugee who escaped from Russia in 1848 from a death sentence for a military offence. Zangwill was known as a richly gifted but outspoken humanist. He was a champion ofunpopular causes. His novel “Children of the Ghetto” was dramatised in 1899 and played in Yiddishand Englishin New York.
Imperial Russia had a policy of conscripting Jews into the army. It was used as a method of forced conversion, with Jewish troopers singled out for bullying and beating. I suspect that Zangwill’s father may have not taken the abuse, hence the death sentence for some kind of military offence. More recent victims of such maltreatment in the Russian army included Seventh Day Adventists and Pentecostalist Christians under Communism. I can’t remember which one, but one of these sects was persecuted because they’re pacifists who reject military service. And the Pentecostalists were subjected to the persecution under the guise of all kinds of stupid conspiracy theories. They’re abstainers, refusing to touch tobacco and alcohol, and as a result tended to be wealthier than ordinary Russians. As a result, there was a story propagated that accused them of receiving money from the CIA through a ship that landed annually at a secret location. It’s the same kind of stupid, murderous rumour about treachery as the source of secret wealth that has been used against our Jewish brothers and sisters.
Bristol’s Jewish community seems to have had a fascinating history, and its monuments are part of the city’s rich architectural heritage.
And real persecution and conspiracy theories are wrong and dangerous, whether levelled against Jews, Christians, Muslims or anyone. They are not things to be cynically used to expel left-wing peeps and non-Zionist Jews from Labour.
Two of the many great commenters on this blog, Brian Burden and Gillflowerblog, are concerned about my watching too many videos from the far right. As they have pointed out, the danger with it is that it can turn you a Tory after a night of bad, troubled dreams. Just like the hero of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis turns into a beetle after a similar disturbed night. I’ve no time for Fascism or the far right. The horrors of the Nazi and Fascist tyrannies are so enormous and vile that no sane, decent person can ever support them. The most infamous of those is the murder of 6 million Jews, and 5 1/2 million assorted gentiles in the Nazi death and concentration camps, but it also includes the atrocities by the Ustashe regime in the former Yugoslavia and by the Italian Fascists against the Arabs and Ethiopians. But it seems that amid the racism and xenophobia the Irish far right are uncovering some very disturbing facts about the actions of multinational corporate capitalism in sub-Saharan Africa that could very easily form part of a liberal critique and politics of international protest.
For some reason YouTube’s put up for my viewing a series of videos from the Irish Nationalist Party, despite the fact that I’m not Irish and definitely not a member of the far right. But they are interesting because of what they show about the issues now driving the rise of the nationalist right in Eire. From what I’ve seen in these videos, the Nationalists are against the EU, mass immigration, gay and trans rights and multinational finance capitalism. Their attacks on finance capitalism are superficially entirely reasonable. They hate the way Ireland and its enterprises have been parcelled up and sold off to foreign owners through offshore holding companies and tax havens. They’re right. This is also what has been done over here in Britain, and is still being done by the Tories. They rightly criticise the government for bailing out the banks responsible for the 2008 financial crash and the austerity that was consequently imposed on the Irish people. Just as over this side of the Irish Sea, our government bailed out the banks and rewarded the people responsible for the crash, while at the same time using it as an excuse to impose cuts on the welfare state, state expenditure on education and the NHS and low wages for everyone not a multimillionaire. And part of their hatred of the EU seems to come from the European Union’s role in imposing this austerity as well as other, socially liberal policies which go against traditional, conservative Irish morality.
In one of their videos, they compare the offshore financial houses and the EU to the absentee landlords that oppressed the Irish peasantry during the 19th century, and whose predations and exploitation was a major cause of the grievances that finally produced the Irish Revolution. But underneath the liberal, reasonable critique of multinational finance capitalism, there’s something far more intolerant. In one of the videos I watched, the speaker talked about how there needed to be research into the role of international finance capitalism in the Cromwellian invasion. This sounds to me to be the old anti-Semitic nonsense about the Jewish banking conspiracy. The nonsense spouted by the Tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and which inspired Adolf Hitler and the other architects of the Holocaust.
They also hate the Irish government and the country’s mainstream parties, as well as the EU, for mass immigration, which they claim is taking Irish jobs from Irish workers and making Irish people homeless as accommodation which should go to them is given instead to immigrants. It’s standard far right stuff in many ways.
But one of their speakers at a local rally said something very interesting about what the multinational agricultural firms and the EU are doing in Africa. He claimed that they were destabilising the continent through purchasing vast areas of land and then clearing them of the indigenous, local people in order to turn them into vast farms. One of these estates being set up in Niger is, according to him, 5,000 square miles in extent. These firms are building huge walls around these estates, which have created tension and conflict. It’s the reason why so many military age men from the continent are seeking asylum on this side of the Mediterranean. They’re fleeing the wars and conflicts this is fuelling.
Now I don’t know how true this is. But it sounds horrifically plausible. Way back in the ’90s some of the creators of 2000AD put out a very political comic strip, World War Three, about a future war in Latin America driven by the big agricultural firms. I got the impression that this was based on fact and reasonable predictions. It was SF as the ‘literature of warning’. Now it sounds like something very similar is really happening, but this time in Africa.
I’m sure this is being discussed elsewhere, but I’m unaware that it has been covered in the mainstream media or by the mainstream parties. I wonder if this is a consequence of the embrace of neoliberalism by the European left. I very much doubt that Tony Blair and his successors in the Labour party want anyone noticing that free market, international capitalism in its genuine sense rather than as a code for ‘Jews’ brings nothing but wage slavery, poverty, misery and death. The Fascists and the far right, however, are left free to mention it. They are, after all, at the moment numerically small in Ireland and Britain and so few people will take any notice. And decent people will ignore it, because it comes from such a contaminated source.
Odiously, we have now got into a situation where reasonable criticisms of multinational capitalism are being shut down by the rightists under the pretext of combatting anti-Semitism in the Labour party. And instead they’re being embraced by people, whose solution is the ‘socialism of fools’ described by August Bebel.
We need real socialism, and a politics of tolerance and internationalism to protect working people across the world, whether Africa, Ireland or Britain.
I’m not going to show the video or link to it, but if you want to see it on YouTube, it’s title is: Ciarán McCormack – “The UN, the EU and the World Bank are destabilising Africa.”
This weekend, our murderous, clown Prime Minister Boris Johnson added more weight to the argument for the House of Lords. At the moment the membership of the upper house is something like 800+. It has more members than the supreme soviet, the governing assembly of assembly of China, which rules a country of well over a billion people. Contemporary discussions are about reducing the size of this bloated monster, many of whose members do zilch except turn up in the morning in order to collect their attendance before zipping off to what they really want to do. Since Blair, it’s become a byword for corruption and cronyism, as successive prime ministers have used it to reward their collaborators, allies and corporate donors. The Tories were outraged when Blair did this during his administration, but this didn’t stop David Cameron following suit, and now Boris Alexander DeFeffel Johnson. Johnson has appointed no less than 36 of his friends and collaborators. These include his brother, who appears to be there simply because he is Johnson’s sibling, Alexander Lebedev, a Russian oligarch and son of a KGB spy, who owns the Metro and the Independent, which is a particular insult following the concerns about Russian political meddling and the Tories’ connections to Putin; the Blairite smear-merchants and intriguers, who conspired against Jeremy Corbyn to give the Tories an election victory, and Claire Fox.
Fox has managed to provoke outrage all on her own, simply because of her disgusting views on Northern Irish terrorism. Now a member of the Brexit Party, she was a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party which fully endorsed the IRA’s terrorism campaign and the Warrington bombing that killed two children. She has never apologised or retracted her views, although she says she no longer believes in the necessity of such tactics. But rewarding a woman, who has absolutely no problem with the political killing of children has left a nasty taste in very many people’s mouths. It shows very clearly the double standards Johnson and the Tories do have about real terrorist supporters. They tried smearing Corbyn as one, despite the fact that he was even-handed in his dealings with the various parties in northern Ireland and was a determined supporter of peace. Ulster Unionists have come forward to state that he also good relations with them and was most definitely not a supporter of terrorism. The Tories, however, have shown that they have absolutely no qualms about rewarding a real terrorist sympathiser. But even this isn’t enough for Johnson. He’s outraged and demanding an inquiry, because he was prevented from putting his corporate donors from the financial sector in the House of Lords.
Demands for reform or the abolition of the second chamber have been around for a very long time. I remember back c. 1987 that the Labour party was proposing ideas for its reform. And then under Blair there were suggestions that it be transformed into an elected senate like America’s. And way back in the first decades of the twentieth century there were demands for its abolition altogether. I’ve been reading Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s A Constitution of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, which was first published in the 1920s. It’s a fascinating book. The Webbs were staunch advocates of democracy but were fiercely critical of parliament and its ability to deal with the amount of legislation created by the expansion of the British state into industry and welfare provision, just as they were bitterly critical of its secrecy and capitalism. They proposed dividing parliament into two: a political and a social parliament. The political parliament would deal with the traditional 19th-century conceptions of the scope of parliament. This would be foreign relations, including with the Empire, the self-governing colonies and India, and law and order. The social parliament would deal with the economy, the nationalised industries and in general the whole of British culture and society, including the arts, literature and science. They make some very interesting, trenchant criticisms of existing political institutions, some of which will be very familiar to viewers of that great British TV comedy, Yes, Minister. And one of these is the House of Lords, which they state very clearly should be abolished because of its elitist, undemocratic character. They write
The House of Lords, with its five hundred or so peers by inheritance, forty-four representatives of the peerages of Scotland and Ireland, a hundred and fifty newly created peers, twenty-six bishops, and half a dozen Law Lords, stands in a more critical position. No party in the State defends this institution; and every leading statesman proposes to either to end or to amend it. It is indeed an extreme case of misfit. Historically, the House of Lords is not a Second Chamber, charged with suspensory and revising functions, but an Estate of the Realm – or rather, by its inclusion of the bishops – two Estates of the Realm, just as much entitled as the Commons to express their own judgement on all matters of legislation, and to give or withhold their own assent to all measures of taxation. The trouble is that no one in the kingdom is prepared to allow them these rights, and for ninety years at least the House of Lords has survived only on the assumption that, misfit as it palpably is, it nevertheless fulfils fairly well the quite different functions of a Second Chamber. Unfortunately, its members cannot wholly rid themselves of the feeling that they are not a Second Chamber, having only the duties of technical revision of what the House of Commons enacts, and of temporary suspension of any legislation that it too hastily adopts, but an Estate of the Realm, a coordinate legislative organ entitled to have an opinion of its own on the substance and the merits of any enactment of the House of Commons. The not inconsiderable section of peers and bishops which from time to time breaks out in this way, to the scandal of democrats, can of course claim to be historically and technically justified in thus acting as independent legislators, but constitutionally they are out of date; and each of their periodical outbursts, which occasionally cause serious public inconvenience, brings the nation nearer to their summary abolition. Perhaps of greater import than the periodical petulance of the House of Lords is its steady failure to act efficiently as revising and suspensory Second Chamber. Its decisions are vitiated by its composition it is the worst representative assembly ever created in that it contains absolutely no members of the manual working class; none of the great classes of shopkeepers, clerks and teachers; none of the half of all the citizens who are of the female sex; and practically none of religious nonconformity, or art, science or literature. Accordingly it cannot be relied on to revise or suspend, and scarcely even to criticise, anything brought forward by a Conservative Cabinet, whilst obstructing and often defeating everything proposed by Radical Cabinet.
Yet discontent with the House of Commons and its executive – the Cabinet – is to-day a more active ferment than resentment at the House of Lords. The Upper Chamber may from time to time delay and obstruct; but it cannot make or unmake governments; and it cannot, in the long run, defy the House of Commons whenever that assembly is determined. To clear away this archaic structure will only make more manifest and indisputable the failure of the House of Commons to meet the present requirements. (Pp. 62-4).
When they come to their proposals for a thorough reform of the constitution, they write of the House of Lords
There is, of course, n the Socialist Commonwealth, no place for a House of Lords, which will simply cease to exist as a part of the legislature. Whether the little group of “Law Lords”, who are now made peers in order that they may form the Supreme Court of Appeal , should or should not continue, for this purely judicial purpose, to sit under the title, and with the archaic dignity of the House of Lords, does not seem material. (p.110)
I used to have some respect for the House of Lords because of the way they did try to keep Thatcher in check during her occupation of 10 Downing Street. They genuinely acted as a constitutional check and wasn’t impressed by the proposals for their reform. I simply didn’t see that it was necessary. When Blair was debating reforming the Upper House, the Tories bitterly attacked him as a new Cromwell, following the Lord Protector’s abolition of the House of Lords during the British Civil War. Of course, Blair did nothing of the sort, and partly reformed it, replacing some of the peers with his own nominees. Pretty much as Cromwell also packed parliament.
The arguments so far used against reforming the House of Lord are that it’s cheaper than an elected second chamber, and that there really isn’t much popular enthusiasm for the latter. Private Eye said that it would just be full of second-rate politicos traipsing about vainly trying to attract votes. That was over twenty years ago.
But now that the House of Lords is showing itself increasingly inefficient and expensive because of the sheer number of political has-beens, PM’s cronies and peers, who owe their seat only because of ancestral privilege, it seems to me that the arguments for its reform are now unanswerable.
Especially when the gift of appointing them is in the hands of such a corrupt premier as Boris Johnson.
Hitler was very definitely not a socialist, although he did advocate kind of nationalization for joint-stock companies and the power industries. However, the Nazis favoured big business and private industry. They despised traditional organized labour, smashing the unions and sending their members to concentration camps. Hitler himself was firmly against profit-sharing and worker’s control. Under Nazism, industry was rigidly hierarchal and governed by the Fuhrerprinzip, the ‘Leader Principle’. The company director or factory owner was the leader, and the workers were his retinue, whose duty was to obey. He had nothing but contempt for the genuine socialist parties, which he reviled as Marxist and believed were part of a mythical international Jewish conspiracy to destroy Germany and the Aryan race. And his table talk also revealed his absolute contempt for the British Labour party and especially one of its leading figures at the time, Stafford Cripps. He conceded that Cripps was a statesman who was ‘not negligible’, but said
To establish himself against the Conservatives, it would take a Cromwell at the head of the Labour party, for the Conservatives will not yield without a fight. Now, although Cripps (who has Stalin’s confidence) has succeeded in sowing Socialist ideas in England, I don’t think he carries enough guns for this role. From our point of view, a Red (and therefore fallen) England would be much less favourable than an England of Conservatives. In fact a Socialist Engalnd, and therefore an England tainted with Sovietism, would be a permanent danger in the European space, for she would founder in such poverty that the territory of the British Isles would prove too small for thirty million inhabitants to be able to keep alive there. I hope, therefore, that Cripps will be sunk by the fiasco of his mission to India-the most difficult mission with which an Englishman can now be charged. If he isn’t, it would become more and more difficult to avoid civil war on British soil. But the mobilization of the masses, on which the Labour party’s propaganda is working, and which would be the result of the execution of the trade unions’ new programme, should be regarded as a very serious threat. (Hitler’s Table Talk, (Oxford: OUP)pp. 369).
Hitler then goes on to rant about how he far prefers Churchill, sneers at Cripps as ‘a drawing-room Bolshevik … a man without roots, a demogogue and a liar’ and declared that ‘With his hypocritical social programmes, he’d be sure to dig a pit between the mother-country and the Dominions, especially the Catholic Canadians, Australia and South Africa’. (p.369).
This is very much the view of many Tories. Thatcher despised Socialism because it was a relation of Communism, and for many Tories Socialism and Communism are identical. Hence the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, who represent a return to proper socialism in the Labour party, as Communists, Trotskyites and Stalinists by the media and Blairite right. And like the Tories he believed that the Labour party and its programmes create mass poverty, with a particular contempt for its concern for popular welfare. Robert A. Brady in his book, The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism, stated that similar views to those of the Nazis can be found in American businessmen. They’re also shared by British big business and the Conservatives. The right-wing press continually declares that the Labour party’s programme will wreck the country economically, and despises welfare spending. Thatcher wanted to destroy the welfare state altogether. She wasn’t able to, but the Tories and the Blairites in Labour are still pursuing her goal, justifying it with false claims that those on welfare support are scroungers and malingerers.
Karl Kautsky, the Austrian Marxist intellectual stated that at the heart of socialism was a concern for equality. The working class was championed as the best way of creating a classless, more equal society. If this could be achieved best without socialism, then the latter would have to be abandoned. Since then there have been programmes to create more equality for certain groups that have crossed the boundaries of political ideology. These are anti-racism, feminism and gay rights, although these are most strongly supported by the Left. Marx in the Communist Manifesto also makes a point of distinguishing Communism from other ideologies that may have some similarity, such as the pre-Columbian Amerindian states of South America. Marx also stated that at the heart of Communism was a concern for the working class.
Hitler was bitterly anti-egalitarian, especially in the anti-feminism and genocidal racism. He stated that the included ‘socialist’ in the Nazi party’s name and made red one of the colours in the Nazi flag in order to take members from the real socialist parties. While his ideas on the nationalization of the power industry and joint-stock companies sound socialist, he was fiercely on the side of the capitalists. And his views on the destructiveness of socialism and contempt for welfare programmes are those of the Conservatives.
Mike over at Vox Political also put up a piece today about the suspensions of Wallasey constituency Labour party by the Labour Party’s general secretary, Ian McNicol. Apparently, there had been complaints about bullying and intimidation, though the real reason may have been that the party had voted to deselect Angela Eagle, and was planning another meeting at which the deselection would be approved. It was also planning to pass other decisions, which would be sent to the national party.
Mike wonders whether it Mr McNicol has bothered to investigate the complaint, or whether it is a case, where the authorities have used unsupported excuse of there having been a complaint to stop an event they didn’t like. In Mike’s case, this was where the local council would ban any event they didn’t want using that excuse. The accuracy of the complaint was never investigated, so there was never any proof.
He also makes the point that it does not seem that Mr McNicol issued the party with a written warning before he suspended it, as he is required to do under Chapter 6 of the party’s rule book.
If there is no proof that there was bullying and intimidation in the party, and if no written warning was issued, then Mr McNicol is liable to be investigated and suspended for his infraction of the rules.
This seems to show just how desperate the parliamentary Labour party is to cull Corbyn supporters from the membership, and the complete contempt the Blairites have for the grassroots. They’ve already suspended Brighton, the biggest constituency Labour party. There were allegations of intimidation of anti-Corbynistas in the local Labour party for Bristol East, though Mike has reported that despite the local Labour MP Thangam Debonnaire giving her support to the supposed victims, other people at the meeting claimed it was no rowdier or threatening than usual.
Of course, Blair had similar intolerant attitudes to possible sources of dissent in the Labour party. He had the public schoolboy’s hatred of the trade unions, and one of the first things he did when he took over the Labour party was threaten to cut the party’s ties with them. As the Labour party was partly founded by the unions to represent working people in parliament, this was an attack on a core, founding element of the party.
This also reminds me very strongly of the actions of the Parliamentarians during the Civil War. This was ‘Pride’s Purge’, when Colonel Pride entered parliament on 6th December 1648 to arrest 45 MPs and prevent 78 more from taking their seats. Twenty more MPs refused to take their seats. As a result, the ‘Rump’ parliament was the acquiescent tool of the army. It’s presumably this piece of history which has inspired the name of Tom Pride’s blog, ‘Pride’s Purge’. The rump parliament differs from the current Labour administration in that it was actually very radical. It abolished the House of Lords, the monarchy and declared Britain a commonwealth. Blair reformed, but did not abolish the House of Lords, packing it with more of his supporters. And economically, his followers were very determined to maintain and expand the status quo in the form of capitalism and the power of private industry.
There is one other similarity between the Cromwellian interregnum and Tony Blair, however. Both began terrible invasions of other countries, which has resulted in massive bloodshed and a legacy of terrible national and social division. Cromwell invaded Ireland, an event which is notorious in Irish and British history for the terrible atrocities inflicted on the Roman Catholic population. And Blair joined Bush in the illegal invasion of Iraq, which has also destroyed the country and resulted in massive bloodshed and atrocities.
Mike over at Vox Political put up this report from the Guardian about the Tories wishing to go ahead with their plan to cut the number of MPs down from 650 to 600. The Commons Political and Constitutional Committee, however, has rejected the proposals as unjustified. The real reason the Tories are going ahead with it is because they hope that by adjusting the boundaries they’ll get 20 more Tory MPs.
Mike has called this what it is: gerrymandering. He states it’s part of the same tactics, which has caused the Tories to cut Short money, the parliamentary funding of opposition MPs. His recommendation is that Labour should make good on their threat and stop all co-operation with the Tories.
This isn’t the first time the Tories have tried something like this. I remember that back in the 1980s, under Thatcher, they carried out a similar piece of gerrymandering. They altered constituency boundaries in order to give them an electoral advantage. The result was that Tony Benn, the highly respected Labour MP for part of Bristol, was kicked out and we were given Jonathan Saeed instead. Not that Mr Saeed’s career in anyway blossomed under Maggie. Bristol was one of the areas where Thatcher decided she was going to cut funding. Saeed stood up to her, and so suffered the fate of all Tories when they make the mistake of confront the Generalissimo.
And, of course, there’s a fine piece of Tory hypocrisy about this. Remember the howls of rage when Tony Blair packed the House of Lords with ‘people’s peers’. Not democratic! they thundered. They compared him to Cromwell’s attack on parliament and his abolition of the House of Lords. One volume, written by an outraged High Tory, had a caricature of Blair on the cover as a punk, dressed in black leather and combats, for his assault on traditional British institutions.
Well, as Roy Hattersley I think once said, there wasn’t a British institution that Maggie didn’t handbag. To them, it’s only an affront to democracy and tradition when Labour do it. The Tories’ machinations are another step towards setting up the oligarchical state they so desperately desire. A state run by the privileged rich, for the privileged rich, and with the proles firmly kept in their place, excluded from power by any means possible. And they’ve had good practice at it. They’ve been doing it for over thirty years. The time’s well overdue this was stopped, before it leads the whole parliamentary system into disrepute.
Since the Lord’s threw out Cameron and co.’s plans to end tax credit for the low paid, he and Tories have muttering about how ‘undemocratic’ they are and how the Upper House needs to be reformed. Among those to join in the fulminations against the Lord’s was Bojo. According to the Tories, the Lord’s are only there to advise on amendments to legislation.
Not quite. They’re part of the system of checks and balances that were built in the British constitution. Part of this is the separation of powers – the legislative should be separate from the executive, and all that. They have always had the power to block legislation, but if I recall correctly they can only do so three times. Nor is their objections to legislation passed by a Tory dominated parliament anything even remotely unique. I can remember when the Lord’s under Thatcher regularly blocked her bills, causing her to rant even more about ‘Wets’.
Cameron’s ignorance of the British constitution isn’t surprising. This is, after all, the man, who said he didn’t know what the Magna Carta was on American TV. He probably thinks ‘constitutional checks’ should be spelt with ‘que’ in the second word, and are what he and his lackeys get paid by corporations for passing laws in their interests. Like all the Tory MPs, who blocked attempts to curb tobacco and alcohol advertising, because they sat on the board, or received donations, from the breweries and companies like British American Tobacco.
As for reforming the House of Lords, this is another piece of Tory hypocrisy. Remember when Tony Blair introduced his reforms for the House of Lords, so that the second chamber received ‘people’s peers’ nominated by Blair himself? The Tory press ranted at the time about this foul attack on the British constitution. The Lords, according to some on the right, like Roger Scruton, if memory serves, were held to be supremely fitted for their role, as they had been brought up to it through breeding and education. It was almost a eugenics argument, that somehow the peerage were all members of some master race. I’m sure that’s how they view themselves, but it certainly not obvious from some of the prize items on display in Cameron’s cabinet. Like that scion of the Baronet of Ballymoney, George Osborne.
There were even dark comparisons with Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell also attacked the English constitution by getting rid of the House of Lords, and altering the conduct of elections so as to exclude his enemies in the lower house. Quite apart from killing half the population of Ireland. He virtually ruled as a military dictator until his death and the restoration of the monarchy.
Now Cameron, from the party that has always defended aristocratic privilege, has decided that the House that enshrines the privilege is ‘undemocratic’ and needs to be reformed. How things change! There are further comparisons with Cromwell. The Lord Protector also hated and abolished the Anglican Church. Cameron has also had a battle with the churches. In the case of Cromwell, it was because the Church of England was, in his opinion, too close to that of Rome. Cameron is much less sectarian – he’s been under fire from just about all of them, because of the terrible effects of his reforms on the poor.
As for being a democratically elected lower house, even that claim is dubious. Much of the country stayed away from the polls, meaning that the result would be invalid under the government’s trade union legislation. Further reforms from the Tories could lead to as many as 10 million people losing their right to vote. The anti-racist organisation, Hope Not Hate, has started a campaign to get people to register. See their report at http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/voter-registration-report/.
So this is just more hypocrisy and attacks on democracy and the constitution from a party, which has always hated the proles voting, and really can’t stand it when their own side, the Toffs, side with them.
For many British, and particularly Irish historians, Cromwell was a figure of hatred and revulsion, a proto-Fascist military dictator, complete with short hair cut and the goose-step. Cameron is becoming increasingly like him. How long before he starts calling himself ‘Lord Protector’, after the great revolutionary?
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 