Keir Starmer’s 10 Pledges for the Labour Party

I’ve just received a pamphlet from Keir Starmer’s campaign team, promoting him as the future of leader of the Labour Party. It begins with this quote

“I’ve spent my life fighting injustice. I’m standing to be leader of our Labour Party because I’m determined to unite our movement, take on the Tories and build a better future. If all parts of our movement come together, we can achieve anything.”

There’s a brief biography that runs

A Life Devoted to Fighting Injustice

Keir is the son of an NHS nurse and a toolmaker. As a former human rights lawyer, Keir is dedicated to Labour’s core principles of fairness and justice.

He has devoted his whole life to fighting injustice and defending the powerless against the powerful, as his ten-year unpaid battle over the McLibel case goes to show. he has fought against the death penalty abroad, defended mining communities against pit closures, and taken up hundreds of employment rights and trade union cases. After being the Director of Public Prosecutions, he was elected MP for Holborn & St Pancras in 2015, later becoming Shadow Brexit Secretary. Defeating Boris Johnson is a huge task but Keir knows that if we bring our movement together and stay true to our values, we can win, and change Britain for the better.

As leader of the Labour Party, Keir will contine to fight for justice in all its forms: social justice, climate justice, economic justice.

There’s then three columns of endorsement from people such as Dawn French, Rokhsana Fiaz, the elected mayor of Lewisham, Laura Parker, the former National Coordinator of Momentum, Emma Hardy, the MP for Hull West and Hessle, Aneira Thomas, the first baby born on the NHS, Sarah Sackman, a public and environmental lawyer, Alf Dubs, the refugee campaigner, Paul Sweeney, the former MP for Glasgow North East, Ricky Tomlinson, David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, Doreen Lawrence, Konnie Huq, the TV presenter and writer, Mick Antoniw, the member of the Welsh Assembly for Pontypridd, Ross Millard of the Sunderland band, the Futureheads, Lucio Buffone, a member of ASLEF and LGBT+ Labour national committee member, and the Unison General Secretary, Dave Prentis.

The back page contains his ‘My Pledges To You’. He says

My  promise is that I will maintain our radical values and work tirelessly to get Labour in to power – so that we can advance the interests of the people our party was created to serve. Based on the moral case for socialism, here is where I stand.

His pledges are as follows

1. Economic Justice.

Increase income tax for the top 5% of earners, reverse the Tories’ cuts in corporation tax and clamp down on tax avoidance, particularly of large corporations. No stepping back from our core principles.

2. Social Justice.

Abolish Universal Credit and end the Tories’ cruel sanctions regime. Set a national goal for wellbeing to make health as important as GDP; invest in services that help shift to a preventive approach. Stand up for universal services and defend our NHS. Support the abolition of tuition fees and invest in lifelong learning.

3. Climate Justice

Put the Green New Deal at the heart of everything we do. There is no issue more important to our future than the climate emergency. A Clean Air Act to tackle pollution locally. Demand international action on climate rights.

4. Promote Peace and Human Rights.

No more illegal wars. Introduce a Prevention of Military Intervention Act and put human rights at the heart of foreign policy. Review all UK arms sales and make us a force for international  peace and justice.

5. Common Ownership.

Public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders. Support common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water; end outsourcing in our NHS, local government and justice system.

6. Defend Migrant’s Rights.

Full voting rights for EU nationals. Defend free movement as we leave the EU. An immigration system based on compassion and dignity. End indefinite detention and call for the closure of centres such as Yarl’s Wood.

7. Strengthen Workers’ Rights and Trade Unions.

Work shoulder to should with trade unions to stand up for working people, tackle insecure work and low pay. Repeal the Trade Union Act. Oppose Tory attacks on the right to take industrial action and the weakening of workplace rights.

8. Radical Devolution of Power, Wealth and Opportunity.

Push power, wealth and opportunity away from Whitehall. A federal system to devolve powers – including through regional investment banks and control over regional industrial strategy. Abolish the House of Lords – replace it with an elected chamber of regions and nations.

9. Equality.

Pull down obstacles that limit opportunities and talent. we are the party of the Equal Pay Act, Sure Start, BAME representation and the abolition of Section 28 – we must build on that for a new decade.

10. Effective Opposition to the Tories.

Forensic, effective opposition to the Tories in Parliament – linked up to our mass membership and a professional election operation. Never lose sight of the votes ‘leant’ to the Tories in 2019. Unite our party, promote pluralism and improve our culture. Robust action to eradicate the scourge of antisemitism. Maintain our collective link with the unions.

This is all good, radical stuff, but there are problems. Firstly, his commitment to taking ‘robust action to eradicate the scourge of antisemitism’ and his decision, along with the rest of the Labour leadership contenders, to sign the Board of Deputies’ highly manipulative pledges, means that more people are going to be thrown out of the party without any opportunity to defend themselves, based only the allegations of anonymous accusers. We’ve seen innocents like Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth, Mike Sivier, Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni and so many others suspended and thrown out through the party’s kangaroo courts. One poor lady has died through the shock of being so expelled, even though she was a passionate anti-racist. This isn’t justice, it’s a pledge to renew the witch hunt.

As for promoting peace and human rights – how long will that last with the Board of Deputies demanding to supervise everything relating to Jews? Israel is a gross violator of human rights, but the Board has consistently defended it and its deplorable actions. Their demands that Labour adopt the IHRC definition of anti-Semitism was to stifle criticism of Israel by declaring them ‘anti-Semitic’. This pledge might be genuine, but the momentum anyone applies it to Israel the BoD will start howling ‘anti-Semitism!’ again and decent people will start getting expelled. Especially if they’re Jewish.

And his plan for giving Britain a federal constitution doesn’t seem to be a good one. From what I’ve read, it has been discussed before, and while it may solve some problems it creates others. It’s supposed to be no better than the current arrangement, which is why it hasn’t been implemented.

I also don’t back him on Europe. Oh, I’m a remainer at heart, but I think a large part of  the reason we lost the election was because, instead of accepting the results of referendum, Labour pledged itself to return to the EU. This was partly on Starmer’s insistence. He is right, however, that EU nationals in the UK should have voting rights.

But I have to say that I don’t trust Starmer. His campaign team were all supporters of Owen Smith, one of those who challenged Corbyn’s leadership. They include Luke Akehurst, one of the leading figures of the Israel lobby within the Labour Party. Tony Greenstein a few days ago put up a piece arguing that, whatever he claims to the contrary, as Director of Public Prosecutions he always sided with the authorities – the police, military and intelligence services – against everyone else.

My fear is that if he becomes leader of the Labour Party, he will quietly forget these pledges and continue the Blair project.

See: http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2020/02/keir-starmer-is-candidate-that-deep.html

http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2020/02/pauline-hammerton-expelled-for.html

Lisa Nandy Shows True Blairite Colours

I always suspected that Lisa Nandy was a Blairite, and particularly because of the way the media hyped her as one of the front runners in the Labour leadership contest. Now she’s confirmed it.

According to the Skwawkbox, she managed to destroy her left credentials and public credibility in the space of 50 seconds during an interview on Newsnight. She claimed that Labour’s manifesto showed that it didn’t know how much its promises would cost to carry out. This was flat-out false, because Labour’s manifesto was fully costed, far more so than those of the other parties.

She also said that the party should abandon its aim of nationalising key industries and services. This sets her at odds with the voting public, who support it. But it’s not too surprising considering that she was one of those, who very publicly resigned during the 2016 ‘chicken coup’, and then went on to chair Owen Smith’s challenged to Corbyn’s leadership.

Skwawkbox concludes

Nandy seemed to forget that she is asking for support from Labour members who overwhelmingly support renationalisation and are justly proud of the party’s thorough plans for bringing it about – and that if she won, she would be asking for support from voters who largely agree that it’s the right way forward, regardless of how they voted on the Brexit issue in December.

See: https://skwawkbox.org/2020/02/13/video-in-50-seconds-lisa-nandy-sets-fire-to-left-credentials-and-to-public-credibility/

Labour’s manifesto policies, with the exception of broadband, are exactly what the country needs and the majority of the public know it. And the Tories know they’re popular too, which is why Johnson promised more funding for the health service, had to nationalise Northern Rail and why he promised massive infrastructure spending and expansion. None of which will actually happen, by the way, with the exception of HS2.

And in rejecting these policies, I also believe that Nandy has shown that she is not prepared to fight the privatisation of the health service, nor the decimation of the welfare state.

She looks to me like she really is a Blairite, and wants to return the party to Blair’s Thatcherism and being another version of the Tories.

Private Eye: Corporate Donor Trevor Chinn Moving From Watson to Lib Dems

Here’s a little piece from this fortnight’s Private Eye, 8th-21st March 2019. According to this article, the Labour donor Trevor Chinn may be abandoning Tom Watson and switching his support instead to the Lib Dems. The article on page 11 runs

As Labour deputy leader Tom Watson tries to rally his party’s “moderates”, one of his loyal financial backers seem to be drifting towards the Lib Dems.

Since 2015, businessman Trevor Chinn has given Watson £50,000 towards his office costs, the last £5,000 coming in November. According to the latest register of MP’s interests, however, Chinn has now given £5,000 to former Lib Dem leader Tim Farron MP to help fund his office.

The apparent drift suggests a financial vote of no confidence in Watson’s prospects as he tries to “convene” a new group of Corbyn-sceptic backbench Labour MPs in the “social democratic” tradition to pressurise the party leadership.

Chinn, senior adviser to private equity firm CVC Capital Partners and a former chair of the RAC, is a long-term Labour funder, mostly for the moderate wing. He gave £27,000 to Owen Smith’s leadership campaign in 2016, and £20,000 to Ivan Lewis MP the same year. All told, he has given around £260,000 to various Labour MPs and groups since 2010.

Chin reportedly gave £500,000 to fund Tony Blair’s office in the 1990s, before figures were made public. Electoral Commission records show  no previous donations from Chinn to any Lib Dems.

I might be wrong, but I think Chinn is one of the corporate donors for the Israel lobby, the Zionist businessmen donating money to right-wing Labour MPs to encourage them to support Israel.

This seems to fit with a story Mike put up yesterday about 100 or so Labour MPs writing to the Jewish Labour Movement requesting them not to break their links with the Labour Party. As Mike points out, the Jewish Labour Movement is an explicitly Zionist organisation, former Paole Zion, or Workers of Zion. It is the sister party to Havoda, the Israeli Labour Party, which has heartily supported the Israeli state’s policy of apartheid and systematic oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. It’s former national director, Ella Rose, previously worked at the Israeli embassy. It was also mentioned by Israeli embassy official Shai Masot as one of his allies when he was caught by al-Jazeera plotting to remove Alan Duncan from the Tory cabinet.

It is one of the organisations within the Labour party responsible for the campaign of lies and smears against Mike and other decent, anti-racist folk, accusing them of anti-Semitism. One of the victims Mike highlights in his piece was the academic and anti-racist activist Jackie Walker, a Jewish lady of colour with a proud personal record and family tradition of standing up against racism and anti-Semitism. But she was smeared and has suffered the most foul abuse, some of it vitriolically racist. According to these campaigners for racial purity, Walker can’t be Jewish, because she’s black. Despite the fact that there have been Black Jews in Ethiopia for millennia.

In his article Mike deals with the accusations against him, such as that he claimed that Paole Zion did not represent Jews – false, as Mike said that they only represent Zionist Jews, and that by attacking Zionism he was attacking the Jewish people’s right to self-government, although that notion applies only to individuals, not nations. And by supporting Israel the Paole Zion and its protectors within the Labour party are denying the Palestinian’s right to self-government.

Mike concludes that the Labour party should be throwing them out, not begging them stay.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/03/06/labour-should-be-throwing-the-jewish-labour-movement-out-on-its-ear-not-begging-it-to-stay/#comment-114287

Looked at together, these stories suggest that the Israel lobby is seriously worried about its waning influence in the Labour party. It looks like it’s picking up its ball and its money and is debating going elsewhere. And the Blair project was also dependent on Israeli cash. According to Lobster, Blair was able to remain financially independent of the trade unions, and thus act against them, because he had funding from the Israel lobby, raised through Lord Levy, whom he met at a party at the Israeli embassy.

And no-one knows exactly who is funding the Jewish Labour Movement. As Paole Zion, it was more or less moribund until two years ago, when suddenly it was revamped and given a massive cash injection. Those 100 MPs – almost certainly Blairites – are probably partly motivated in their attempts to persuade the JLM to stay for fear of their own places in the party. If the JLM goes, and Chinn takes his money to the Lib Dems, then corporate support for them may also dry up. In which case they become even more vulnerable to the Corbynite grassroots, who aren’t impressed with their disloyalty.

Hopefully this means that the Israel lobby in the Labour party is weakening. If that’s true, then perhaps in time we can look forward to seeing a genuine, socialist Labour movement and government determined to work for the ordinary people of this country. Which includes Jews along with all the other ethnicities, religions and philosophies of this great and diverse land. And not a bunch of corporatists determined to back the interests of an interfering and oppressive foreign nation at the expense of their constituents.

Private Eye: Blair and Cronies Return to Fund Progress Thatcherites

According to this fortnight’s Private Eye, 15th-28th June 2018 Tony Blair and other wealthy donors have returned to fund Progress, the Thatcherite entryist group in the Labour party. The article states that ‘since its foundation, Progress has promoted Blairite candidates and motions inside the party’. The article goes on to state that it has, however, lost most of its internal battles since Jeremy Corbyn came to power, and that Lord Sainsbury’s announcement that he was no longer donating to it was a major blow. It’s now looking for new funders.

The article cites the Electoral Commission to reveal that the liar and unindicted war criminal gave it £10,000 on 26th March. The article states that this is the first time Blair has given it anything from the vast wealth he’s made from his various consultancies since leaving office.

Other donors include the City headhunter, Jeremy Breaks, who gave Progress £8,000 in April. He’s never given to the Labour party, but did give £2,000 to Owen Smith’s campaign for the Labour leadership.

Another financier, private equity investor Stephen Peel gave them £10,000 in January. He also hasn’t donated anything to the Labour party, but tellingly he did give the Tories £50,000 in 2008. He also funds and sits on the board of a business-orientated Remain group, Best For Britain.

Martin Clarke, the chief financial officer of the AA, also gave Progress £10,000 in February. He’s a long-standing Labour supporter, but his only recorded donation to the party was £2,960 to the Morley and Outwood Constituency Party in 2014. He also gave money to one of Corbyn’s rivals. In 2015 he gage £37,500 to Yvette Cooper’s campaign to gain the Labour leadership. (Page 12).

Blair and the other donors to Progress are thus the same City types, for whom Blair decided to sacrifice the manufacturing sector, and betray the party’s working class roots and supporters, privatising industry, including the NHS, cutting welfare and state aid, all to ingratiate himself with big business, Murdoch and the right-wing press, and swing voters, who would otherwise vote Tory. It also shows just a touch a desperation on the part of Progress and Blair himself. Progress were never more than a tiny faction in the Labour party, which succeeded because they held the levers of power. Now their power’s waning, they’re desperate to get more money. And if Blair’s donating to them for the first time ever, it shows that he’s worried that his political legacy is also in jeopardy.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Speech on Winning the Labour Leadership Election in Counterpunch

Counterpunch have put up the text of Jeremy Corbyn’s speech on winning the leadership elections in the Labour party last week. He thanks his aids and supporters, and pays due tribute to Owen Smith and his supporters as well. He states that the Labour party should now unite, as its members have more in common than the issues that divide them. He remarks that the party now has half a million members, and is the biggest party in Western Europe. He also states clearly that the Labour party has a duty of care to its members, and that the abuse should now stop. He also goes on to urge the party to take its message to all the community’s in Britain to attack the devastating Tory policies that have done so much damage to the nation. He says

Theresa May’s government isn’t a new government. It’s David Cameron’s government with a hard right edge, repacked with progressive slogans, but threatening to take the country backwards and dithering as we face the historic challenges of Brexit.

So, if you believe that education is better than segregation; that we need an NHS that isn’t threatened with breakdown and loaded with debt; that older people deserve dignity and care they need in their own home; that we have a duty as a country to refugees and promote peace, rather than conflict; if like me, you believe that it’s a scandal that here in Britain, the sixth largest economy in the world, four million children are in poverty, six million workers are paid less than the living wage; and if like me, you believe we can do things far better, then help us build support for a genuine alternative that would invest in our future.

A more prosperous future, in which the wealth we all create is shared more equally.

Together, arguing for the real change this country needs, I’ve no doubt that this party can win the next general election, whenever the Prime Minister calls it, and form the next government.

Exactly. Which is why I’m glad Mr Corbyn has won the election. And it’s why the establishment has tried and is still trying very hard to convince the public otherwise.

The speech can be read at: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/03/real-change-for-britain/

Vox Political: 3 Pro-Corbyn Labour Councillors Purged in Bristol

This is another story about the anti-Corbyn shenanigans in Bristol. A few weeks ago one of the city’s Labour MPs, Thangam Debonnaire, attacked Jeremy Corbyn. Now the local Labour party has purged three councillors, who support the Labour leader. They are Harriet Bradley, the councillor for Brislington West, Mike Langley, of Brislington East, and Hibaq Jama of Lawrence Hill. As a result of these purges, the local party has destroyed its slim majority on Bristol city council. They used to have 37 councillors. Now that they’ve purged these three, it’s gone down to three.

Mike asks the obvious question: what kind of politician destroys their own party’s majority in a major city council, simply out of spite against a leader they don’t like? He states that it’s exactly the type of behaviour he criticised the NEC for in a previous article, and state that the people responsible must be named, shamed and disciplined. They’ve harmed the Labour group on the council and made the party the subject of ridicule and disrepute. He states very clearly: Not in my name.

Labour loses its majority on Bristol City Council after Corbyn supporters are purged

The I newspaper adds a few more details to the story. It states that

Bristol was one of the success stories of Mr Corbyn’s mixed local election results earlier this year, with the party taking over the mayoralty and controlling it alongside the elected council for the first time since the post’s creation…

Labour’s national office said it does not comment on the reasons why people are suspended from the party. The Bristol City Council Labour group whip Christopher Jackson confirmed the councillors had had their whips removed “as per the usual”.

The three councillors could not be reached for comment at the time of publication.

The paper also quotes a Labour spokesman as saying

“The Labour party has a robust validation process for all votes to ensure every vote cast is eligible in keeping with the Labour Party rules.”

This affects me as a Bristolian. My local councillor was one of those, who signed a petition against Corbyn, so this purging of the three pro-Labour councillors basically tells me that the party does not want my support, or those of people like me, and regards they and me with fear and contempt. The party hasn’t given any reason why the three were purged. Simply trying to shrug it all off as ‘as per the usual’ is nowhere near sufficient. Quite honestly, I don’t think they have a good reason, just as they haven’t for all the 130,000 Labour party members Smudger and the NEC have purged.

I know I’m not going to be alone in being outraged by this. A few months ago there was a mass demo of Corbyn supporters on College Green outside the Library, Council House and Cathedral here in Bristol. The great man himself also appeared to address the crowd. But this has been too much for the Blairites on the local council. No doubt they will start cooking something up about the three having brought the party into disrepute through abusive emails, but the fact that Jackson just shrugged off demands for an explanation saying, ‘as per usual’ simply indicates that they’re so arrogant the Blairites can’t even be bothered to make up any kind of pretext for the purges. They just say, ‘the usual’, and hope the rest of us will swallow.

We’re not. I’m very tempted to write a letter to the local Labour party complaining about this and demanding an explanation. I do not want to see the Labour party in my city taken over by people, who are Tories in all but name, and who, as Blairites, are complicit in supporting his privatisation of the NHS, the welfare cuts, the work capability test and all the rest of the foul policies Blair introduced to grind the working people of this country down so he could get votes from ‘aspirational’ – read, ‘snobbish and embittered’ ex-Tory voters.

Paul Mason: Elite About to Go Tinfoil over Momentum

Paul Mason on Saturday posted a long, but excellent piece discussing the way the elite were changing their tactics from attacking Jeremy Corbyn, to attacking his support group, Momentum. This followed the appearance of an article in the Times about the group’s supposedly dodgy activities in Liverpool, based on an anonymous dossier put together from a Labour member, who had visited their chatrooms. He quotes right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes and the Time’s editorial about how Momentum are really cuckoos in Labour’s metaphorical nest, seeking to infiltrate and take over the party. Mason points out that two other films are also scheduled to attack Corbyn and Momentum this week, and notes the way the story being peddled by the Blairites and the elite has changed. Whereas before it was just Corbyn and a few members of Momentum who were infiltrators, with Smudger demanding the right to address their rallies alongside Corbyn, in a speech last week Smudger equated Momentum with Militant Tendency in the 1980s, and almost suggested that Momentum should similarly be thrown out of the party as Militant was.

Mason points out how ridiculous the comparison is, and compares the open and democratic structure of Momentum with both Militant and the Blairite successor group, Saving Labour. He writes

With 18,000 members Momentum is four times bigger than the Militant Tendency ever was, even at the height of its influence in the mid-1980s. Momentum is organising The World Transformed — an open, free, largely unstructured culture and ideas festival alongside Labour conference in Liverpool as a way of attracting non-party activists and local young people. The organisers have arranged open press access and gained sponsorship from two Labour-affiliated unions and a major NGO. Indeed until last week their main problem was convincing the press to cover it.

Militant, by contrast, was a rigid grouping, with two layers of secrecy, an internal command/control structure and an elected leadership along Bolshevik lines. It operated like this because that is how the Labour right operated. It was in some ways a mirror image of the bureaucratic hierarchy it tried to oppose.

Today, that is still how the Labour right organises: Saving Labour, for example, is a website co-ordinating attacks on Corbyn which has still not reveal who funds it or owns it. Labour Tomorrow is collecting funds from rich donors for purposes as yet unannounced. It has no publicly accountable structures at all. Momentum, by contrast, is an open and democratic group.

Mason states that the intention behind these stories is to begin a witch hunt against Momentum if Corbyn loses. If, on the other hand, he wins, it’s to form the basis of the Blairite’s legal campaign to gain the party’s name, bank account and premises on the basis that these had been illegally stolen by infiltrators. He notes also that these attacks on Momentum itself are based on the failure of the attempts to uncover dirt and smear Corbyn himself. Corbyn is popular with the party’s grassroots and his views poll well with the public.

Mason feels the solution would be to make Momentum and Progress, their Blairite opponents, affiliated sections of the Labour party so that their members become Labour members, and are subject to Labour party rules. But this would need a change in the party’s regulations. He is happy to see anyone become a member of Momentum, though, provided they don’t campaign for rival parties like the TUSC, the Greens and SNP. But Mason also believes that Labour members also need to join Greens, Left nationalists, anti-political people and even Lib Dems in grassroots campaigns on issues like Grammar schools. He also makes the point that the reason why Momentum grew so rapidly after Corbyn was in reaction to the dull, hierarchical and very bureaucratic structure of the existing party, and particularly hostility by the Blairites.

He goes on to make the following recommendations on what the party needs to do to attack the government and counter its policies:

•to de-select the (hopefully few) MPs who insist on actively sabotaging and abusing Corbyn;
•to bring forward a new “A-list” of candidates — more representative of the class, gender, ethnic and sexual-orientation of the UK population than the present PLP;
•passing coherent radical policies Labour Conference 2017 and the next National Policy Forum;
•deepening the left’s majority on the NEC and reversing the purge;
•focusing activist resources into geographical areas where the official party is weak;
•and turning Labour’s regional structures from anti-left “enforcement” operations into local networks of co-ordination to fight the Conservatives.

Mason states that Social Democrats in the Labour party should defend it as one of the remaining elements of the party’s Left wing, going back to the Clarion newspaper in the 1920s. And he also makes this point that it can be seen that it is not a far left movement can be seen from the fact that the true far left parties don’t like it:

And one of the clearest indicators that Momentum is a genuine, democratic formation is that the surviving far left — the SWP and Socialist Party–stand separate from it and their leaderships are wary of it. This suits me — because I have no sympathy for the bureacratic and hierarchical culture of Bolshevik re-enactment groups; it is precisely the open-ness, cultural diversity and networked outlook of Momentum, and the generation of youth drawn to it, that terrifies them.

He further argues that Social Democrats should support it, even if they disagree with its policies, as it has prevented the Labour party from undergoing a process similar to the collapse of PASOK in Greece, where the party has been ‘hollowed out’ and replaced by a party of the far left.

He concludes

The bottom line is: Momentum has a right to exist within the Labour Party and its members have a right to be heard.

If you’re a member of it, the best way to survive the upcoming red scare will be to smile your way through it. This is the tinfoil hat moment of the Labour right, as it realises half a million people cannot be bought by the money of a supermarket millionaire.

So get out the popcorn. You’re about to see what happens to the neo-liberal wing of Labour — and its propaganda arm — when the workers, the poor and the young get a say in politics.

In modern parlance: they are about to lose their shit.

See: https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/elite-goes-tinfoil-over-momentum-dd544c9d8f1c#.fwtj82i9m

I think Mr Mason’s exactly right about all this. He is certainly is about the highly centralised, and rigidly hierarchical nature of the real parties of the Far Left – the Communists and Trotskyites. Parties like these, such as the SWP and the Socialist Party, have a very un-democratic party structure based around Lenin’s doctrine of ‘Democratic Centralism’. In order to prevent the party splitting up into various competing factions, Lenin stipulated that the party must be organised around the leadership of committed revolutionaries, who would be responsible for laying down policy. These could be questioned up to a point, but the moment the leadership took a decision, further debate was outlawed and absolute obedience demanded from the members. There is also a very rigid attitude to party doctrine. Only the leaders’ view of Marxist ideology is considered authentic and conforming to objective reality. Any opposition to it is labelled a ‘deviation’ and its supporters purged, very much like heretics from a religious group. Stalin clawed his way to power by fighting a series of campaigns against his opponents in the party, who were labelled ‘deviationists’ of the Left and Right. When Tito in Yugoslavia decided he wanted to purge Milovan Djilas, one of the architects of workers’ control, he accused him of ‘anarcho-syndicalist deviationism’.

Momentum doesn’t have that mindset, but the Blairites – Progress, Tomorrow’s Labour and Saving Labour, certainly do.

As for the opaque nature of Saving Labour’s funding, my guess is that much of it comes from big business and the Israel lobby. This isn’t an anti-Semitic smear. Blair was funded by the Zionists through Lord Levy and David Sainsbury. It’s because the Zionist lobby is massively losing support through the BDS movement, which is also supported by many Jews fed up with Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians, that the Zionists in the Labour party have accused Corbyn and his supporters of anti-Semitism. My guess is that Saving Labour won’t reveal who funds them because it would show their opponents to be right about their connection to the rich and to the Israel lobby.

No, Owen Smith, You and Neil Coyle are Not the Spiritual Heirs of Clem Atlee and Nye Bevan

Mike last week ran a couple of stories, which included amongst their other details the facts that Smudger and another Blairite, Neil Coyle, now seem to be trying to convince the public that rather than being neoliberal privatisers, they are really the spiritual heirs of Clement Atlee, Nye Bevan and ’45 Labour government that set up the welfare state and the NHS.

Last Friday, 9th September 2016, Mike commented on an article from Left Foot Forward commenting on how Smudger had been booed by the Corbynistas after he yet again invoked the memory of Nye Bevan, the architect of the NHS. Left Foot Forward commented that both sides were invoking this iconic statesman, but that their attempts to hark back to him were problematic because of the contradictory nature of his ideas.

Mike commented

Is it true that both sides of the current Labour debate will invoke the memory of Aneurin Bevan? I’ve only heard Owen Smith doing it – and inaccurately.

It seems more likely that Mr Smith wants reflected glory – he says he’s a fan of Mr Bevan so he must be okay as well – than to actually call on any of the late Mr Bevan’s political thought, which would be so far removed from the policies of Mr Smith’s strain of Labour that it would seem alien.

And concluded

You don’t see Mr Corbyn invoking Bevan at the drop of a pin, do you?

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/09/09/smith-compares-himself-to-bevan-because-he-seeks-reflected-glory-it-isnt-working/

Then Neil Coyle, one of the Blairites, started to bluster about how he was also a true, traditional member of the Labour party after he appeared in a list of 14 MPs Jeremy Corbyn’s followers wished to complain about for their abusive behaviour. Coyle insisted that he had been ‘defamed’ because the complaint was specifically against him for accusing Corbyn of being a ‘fake’. The trouble for Coyle was, he had indeed called Corbyn a fake, and been forced to apologise for it. He also accused Corbyn and his supporters of creating a victim culture, which must surely be a case of projection. This is, after all, what New Labour has been trying to do with its constant accusations of misogyny and anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum.

In his own defence, Coyle sputtered

“I am a Labour MP, joined Labour as soon as I could and will always be tribal Labour. I voted for a Labour manifesto commitment today based on decades of policy begun by Attlee and was in my manifesto last May. Couldn’t be more ashamed by fake Labour voting against internationalism, collectivism, security and jobs today. Time for a new leader who shares Labour values. Join now.”

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/09/15/neil-coyle-should-not-use-words-like-defamation-when-he-doesnt-understand-them/

Now as Mike points out in his article on Smudger and Nye Bevan, the NHS is an iconic institution with immense symbolic value, so naturally Smudger wants to identify himself with its founder. The trouble is, he and Coyle are polar opposites to what Atlee and Bevan actually stood for.

Both of them were classic old Labour. The 1945 Labour government had put in its manifesto that it was going to create the NHS, and nationalise the electricity, coal and gas industries, as well as the railways and other parts of the transport infrastructure. This was part of the socialist ideology that the workers’ should take into their hands the means of production, distribution and exchange. Bevan himself was a champagne socialist – he got on very well with the circles of elite businessmen in which he moved. But he despised the Tories as ‘vermin’, and his book, In Place of Fear, made it very clear that he felt alienated in Westminster because it was a palace created by the ruling classes to celebrate their power against working people. He was resolutely determined that the NHS should be universal, state-owned, and free at the point of service. It’s true that like some other politicians, he considered charging hospital patients a ‘hotel’ charge for taking up beds, but he dropped this idea. And the reason he left office was in disgust at the introduction of prescription charges.

This is in exact opposition to Blair and his ideological descendants in Progress, Saving Labour and Tomorrow’s Labour. Blair vastly extended the Tories’ privatisation of the NHS, quite apart from demanding the repeal of Clause 4, which committed the party to nationalisation. He and his followers, Smudger, Coyle and the like, stand for privatisation and the dismantlement of the welfare state. While Bevan wanted to remove the fear of want and destitution from millions of the working class, Blair and co have striven with the Tories to bring it back, through measures designed to ingratiate themselves with the Tory press. Such as the introduction of the Work Capability Test, which was launched after a conference in the early 2000s with the Labour party in consultation with insurance fraudsters, Unum, and which specifically assumes most disabled people claiming benefit are malingerers. And then there was the case of Rachel Reeves declaring that New Labour would be even harder on benefit claimants than the Tories. Quite apart from approving comments from New Labour apparatchiks about the wonders of workfare.

As for Coyle’s claim that he supports ‘internationalism and collectivism’, you to have to wonder when. For many on the left, who consider themselves ‘internationalists’, the term does not include imperialism and the invasion of other, poorer nations for corporate profit. But this is what Blair’s foreign policy – the invasion and occupation of Iraq consisted of, just as his successors, Cameron and May, are also imperialists. Mike states in one of his pieces that he doesn’t know how many of the 552 MPs, who voted for air strikes in Syria, were Labour; but he does know that two, who voted against it, were Corbyn and John McDonnell.

As for ‘collectivism’, it should be noted that this is not the same as ‘socialism’. Blair claimed to be a collectivist in making private enterprise work for the community as part of his vaunted Third Way. Which incidentally was the claim of the Fascists. In practice, however, this meant nothing more or less than the continuation of Thatcherism. This was shown very clearly by the way Blair invited her round to No. 10 after he won the election, and the favouritism he showed to Tory defectors.

So no, Owen Smith and Neil Coyle are not the spiritual heirs of Atlee and Bevan. Whereas the latter stood for the welfare state, socialism and improving conditions for the working class, Smith and Coyle have done the precise opposite, as have their followers. Mike also reported this week that in 2014 the Labour party conference voted down a motion to renationalise the NHS. This shows how far New Labour and its supporters have moved from Atlee’s and Bevan’s vision. They are Conservative entryists, who deserve to be treated as such, and removed from power before they do any more harm.

Vox Political: Owen Smith Wants Momentum Banned because Has Same Initial Letter as ‘Militant’

I really couldn’t let this latest example of sheer lunacy from Smudger go. It just provides so much light on how he and the Blairites think, or at least, believe they can maker the rest of us think. It also makes you wonder how someone, who is so stupid or misinformed to believe that, can ever hope to present himself as political dynamo. As Kryten from Red Dwarf said of Arnold J. Rimmer, ‘Oh for a world class psychiatrist!’

Mike put up this evening a little piece reporting that Owen Smith, the Blairite challenger for the Labour leadership, told the world on Twitter that he thinks Momentum are a rebranding of the Militant Tendency, the Trotskyite group that infiltrated the Labour party in the 1980s. Why? Because Militant wasn’t subtle, and both Militant and Momentum begin with the same letter: ‘M’.

Mike sent up this piece of false logic by stating that his name also begins with ‘M’. How long before he too was rumbled? So he’s joked about changing it to Pharquar, with a ‘P’. That should appeal to Smudger as a Blairite. It begins with the same letter as the Blairite party-within-a-party, Progress. Oh yes, and Smudger’s old employers, Pfizer.

Owen Smith wants Momentum banned from Labour because the name starts with ‘M’ – like Militant

I’m left wondering if Smudger really is that thick, or whether it’s a lie to smear Corbyn in the minds of ordinary people, who are less well-informed politically. Militant Tendency aren’t Momentum. They’ve formed their own, separate party, called the Socialist Party. As for the similarity between the two names, because the share the same first letter, well, there are very many things that begin with ‘M’, as Mike himself points out. Like ‘M’, James Bond’s boss in the movies. Or child-murderer in Fritz Lang’s silent classic, M, from 1920s Germany, who was chillingly played by Peter Lorre. Perhaps Smudger also believes that Momentum is entirely made up of bug-eyed German serial killers, when not at their desks in their day job of ordering suave super-spies to combat villainous multi-millionaires trying to take over the world. Is this how the Blairites think of the Old Labour left? Do they think Corbyn, in private, takes off a mask to reveal himself as looking like Donald Pleasance or Charles Grey, wearing a Nehru-collared suit and stroking a white cat, as he giggles at his plan to incinerate the Earth from space-based lasers? Strange. Every time I’ve seen Corbyn on TV, he hasn’t been surrounded by goons in orange jump suits, and I’m fairly certain his constituency office isn’t located in a secret base inside an extinct Japanese volcano, or in an orbiting space station. Or in a secret laboratory under the Caribbean.

I do think I know where he got this bizarre idea, however. Looking through the Cheltenham branch of Waterstone’s the other week, I found on the shelves a book about Militant Tendency. And on the back was a series of approving comments, including one which said it would help anyone now trying to understand Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour party. This is part of the general line being pushed by the Labour right and its cheerleaders in the media, that Corbyn is a Trot and an infiltrator. He’s no such thing, of course, but that isn’t stopping them from repeating this calumny.

It also shows how, despite any protests they might make to the contrary, they’re also following Hitler’s advice on propaganda. It’s ironic, considering the way John MacDonald has been suspended from the party, because he dared to repost a picture of Dave Cameron as Adolf Hitler, along with a quote from the Fuhrer about taking away people’s freedoms tiny piece by tiny piece, so that they don’t realise what’s going on and can’t protest. There’s another quote from Adolf, or Goebbels, I can’t remember which, about making people believe in the One Big Lie. This runs that it doesn’t matter how stupid or false the lie is, you stick to your guns and repeat it as loudly and often as possible, until the majority of people believe you.

And this is exactly what Smudger and the rest of the Blairites are doing, trying to link Momentum with Militant Tendency and Trotsky.

It’s disgraceful, but what can you expect from someone, who was a PR man working for one of the big drugs companies when they were very keen to have the NHS privatised.

Book Attacking the Myth of Labour’s Defeat in the Winter of Discontent

Spokesman Books, the publishing arm of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, have also produced an edition of What Went Wrong, edited by Ken Coates. This book critically examines and refutes as grossly oversimplistic the myth that the Labour party lost the 1979 election because of trade union militancy during the notorious ‘Winter of Discontent’.

The book, with an accompanying blurb, is listed on their webpage at http://www.spokesmanbooks.com/acatalog/Michael_Barratt_Brown.html

I might have to get this one at some point, because, as the blurb itself says, it is very much ‘conventional wisdom’ that James Callaghan’s government fell because of the militant strike action by the trade unions. It’s brought up repeatedly by the Tories and the right-wing press whenever the unions are discussed or defended, along with comments and verbiage about not going back to the bad old days of the 1970s when Britain was held hostage by the union barons. And so forth.

Much of today’s problems can be traced back to the complete reverse. Thatcher broke the unions, and the result has been decades of poor wages at or below the rate of inflation, poor working conditions, and the creation of the ‘flexible labour market’, set up to make it easier for firms to sack people. Blair’s New Labour was as complicit in all this as the Tories. It was Tony Blair, who threatened to cut the party’s ties with the unions if they blocked his voting reforms. The result is 4.7 million people in Britain in ‘food poverty’, and hundreds of thousands only surviving through food banks.

Advocates of trade unions have pointed out that in companies where there are unions, not only do the workers enjoy higher wages and better conditions, the companies themselves are better run. Which is also an argument for worker’s control. It’s also an argument you are definitely not going to hear from the Conservatives or Smudger and his Blairite friends.

While I don’t want the country to suffer from frequent strikes, as they did in the 1960s and ’70s, we definitely do need more union power, not less.