After the leak of the suppressed report showing that Blairite members of Labour’s bureaucracy were responsible for plotting against Corbyn, including deliberately sabotaging Labour’s attempts to win the 2017 and 2019 general elections, the right-wing members of the NEC are doing everything they can to protect the guilty and target the innocent. Mike yesterday put up a piece reporting that certain unnamed right-wing extremists on the committee called for the suspension of those they suspected of leaking it. They had no evidence whatsoever. Furthermore, as Tony Greenstein has pointed out in the first part of his piece about the right-wingers plotting, bullying and corruption, there are laws protecting whistleblowers. And the first thing an organisation does, which has been accused of wrongdoing by one of its employees or staff, is trying to identify the whistleblower, because these organisations are really guilty of wrongdoing. In the end, the move was not agreed by the committee. Mike states that
(I)f it had been, then Labour’s more than half a million members would have had grounds for an immediate vote of no confidence in the committee. I urge all party members to watch these representatives closely.
In the meantime, as he also points out, Labour’s NEC has done absolutely nothing to suspend those accused of the plotting and sabotage. This is despite the fact that they were attempting to stop Corbyn himself taking action against alleged anti-Semitism in the party. Mike has pointed out that the plotters aren’t anti-Semites themselves, nevertheless they were aiding and abetting it. There continued membership of the party is in stark contrast to the members actually accused of anti-Semitism, who were suspended with little or no opportunity to defend themselves. So once again, it seems that the right-wingers are determined to hang on to power through abusing their positions and double standards.
Meanwhile, the Skwawkbox has reported today that a right-wing BAME NEC member, Unison activist Carol Sewell, tried to get racism excluded from the references of the committee’s investigation of the leaked report. The Skwawkbox was told by another committee member, who was outraged at her conduct, that Sewell wanted to have it omitted because it would predetermine the report’s outcome. The anonymous speaker said that in the end they managed to get racism, sexism and discrimination included in the terms of the report’s investigation, but the attempt to get it dropped shows the right’s contempt for the membership and equalities. Sewell changed her vote when she saw that her proposal wasn’t going to be accepted, but did nothing to strengthen the references of the investigation. And the contributions from all three of the new, right-wing NEC members who were elected to their positions the same day Starmer was declared the Labour leader were all ‘pretty bad’.
I appreciate that Black people really don’t like being called Uncle Toms by Whites, and completely understand why. But considering how the report describes the horrendous racist abuse inflicted by the Blairites, I really don’t think she can be fairly described any other way. Sewell as supported in her election to the NEC by the Blairite groups Labour First and Progress, and her conduct reflects extremely badly on them. It provides more evidence that they aren’t remotely interested in genuinely battling racism, only in using the anti-Semitism smears to protect Israel and oust their opponents.
Many Labour members are extremely unhappy about both Starmer’s election and the way the NEC wishes to conduct its investigation into the leak. People are talking about suing Labour and demanding their subscription money back because of the Blairite’s plotting and sabotage. If Starmer refuses to listen to them, and protects the Blairites instead, he may well be the leader who destroys the party. Which is no doubt how the Blairites would like it, because they’re determined to wreck the party rather than have a left-wing – or, more properly, a genuinely centrist – Labour leader carry the party to victory.
This fortnight’s Private Eye for 8th -21st March 2019 has an article on the connections between Chuka Umunna’s Independent Group, the Blairite think tank Progress Centre and Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson. It suggests that Paul Myners, who sits on the think tank’s advisory board, could be funding it. The article on page 7 runs
MYNERS STRIKE
AS WELL as launching “The Independent Group” (TIG) of MPs, Chuka Umunna also chairs a think-tank called Progressive Centre UK. Last August this “next generation ideas lab” gave him a £65,000-a-year (for 12 hours a month) chairing its advisory board.
As TIG launched, the Progressive Centre paid for polling that “shows real appetite for new party” – which was handy for TIG, as its PR people admitted it did not yet have the cash to fund its own polling. The Progressive Centre also published work by academic Steven Fielding arguing that “despite what many believe, the future of the Independent Group might be very bright indeed”.
The most heavyweight member of the Progressive Centre’s advisory board is Lord (Paul) Myners, Gordon Brown’s City minister from 2008 to 2010, and deeply involved in the bank bailouts during the financial crisis. Indeed, the Commons treasury committee criticised Myners over his “City background and naivety” for allowing the disgraced Fred Goodwin to escape from the bailed-out RBS with an £8m pension top-up.
Myners, who also chairs PR firm Edelman and is vice-chair of Peter Mandelson’s lobbying firm Global Counsel, gave Umunna £9,000 for office costs in 2016-17. This was when Umunna was believed to be raising funds for a leadership bid, which was called off when Jeremy Corbyn failed to crash adn burn in the 2017 election.
Could Myers be funding the Progressive Centre itself? The think-tank doesn’t say who funds it – but if he is backing it, it could at least get his name right. On its “People” page its website lists him as “Peter Myners”.
The Progress Centre sounds like a standard Blairite political faction. Myners is a banker and the head of a PR firm, and New Labour was notorious for its insistence on a light regulatory touch for the financial sector, as well as its connections to industry and banking. It was also notorious for PR and spin, instead of real policies. And like the Blairite faction in the Labour party, it’s trying to sound progressive and forward-thinking while in fact it’s just more of the same, shop-worn Thatcherism.
And the Progress Centre and the Independent Group also have another feature in common: they’re heading their financial backers.
As for the Independent Group’s prospects for the future, I think Fielding and his pollsters are being wildly optimistic. The mood of the public is moving left. Labour’s policies are massively popular with the public, unlike those of the Tories and Blairites, who aren’t offering anything except more privatisation and austerity.
As they are now, both the Progress Centre and the Independent Group are also a positive threat to democracy. They won’t reveal who their backers are, but following standard Blairite practice, it’s more than likely that they represent those backers’ interests, rather than that of the British public. They represent more Blairite and Conservative corporatism. And as six out of the eight Labour founders were members of Labour Friends of Israel, including Joan Ryan and her connections with Masot and the Israeli embassy, it’s likely that they’re also receiving money from them. And so they’ll also represent Israeli interests, rather than those of the constituents, who elected them.
This is the cover of a very old Private Eye for Friday, 2nd October 1998. The caption reads ‘Blair Calls For Unity’, and has Blair saying in the speech bubble ‘There’s a leftie – chuck him out!’
This was the time when Blair was trying to modernize the Labour party by removing Clause 4, the part of its constitution formulated by the Fabians and other socialists, which committed the party to the nationalization of the means of production and distribution. In short, socialism. Blair instead was determined to turn it into another Thatcherite party committed to privatization, including that of the NHS, welfare cuts, and job insecurity. Its traditional working class base were to be ignored and the party instead was to concentrate on winning swing voters, who might otherwise vote Tory. He attempted to win over the Tory press, including the Murdoch papers. Despite owing the start of his career to union sponsorship, he was determined to limit their power even further, and threatened to cut the party’s ties with them unless they submitted to his dictates. His ‘Government Of All the Talents’ – GOATs – included former Tory ministers like Chris Patten. Tories, who crossed the floor and defected to New Labour were parachuted into safe seats as the expense of sitting MPs and the wishes of the local constituency party. Blair adopted failed or discarded Tory policies, including the Peter Lilley’s Private Finance Initiative and the advice of Anderson Consulting. This was satirized by a computer programme that made anagrams from politicians’ names. Anthony Blair came out as ‘I am Tory Plan B’.
The direction in which Blair wanted the party to move was clearly shown by him inviting Margaret Thatcher to 10 Downing Street to visit the day after he was elected. And she thoroughly approved of him, declaring that New Labour was her greatest legacy.
Blair and New Labour were also staunch supporters of Israel. It was money from Zionist Jewish businessmen, raised by Lord Levy, whom Blair had met at a gathering at the Israeli embassy, that allowed him to be financially independent from the trade unions.
Now all that is being threatened by Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Which is why Blairite apparatchiks and MPs have done their level best to purge the party of them by smearing them as Trotskyite and Stalinist infiltrators and anti-Semites. The charges are ludicrous, hypocritical and offensive. Corbyn and his supporters aren’t far left: they’re traditional Labour, supporting a mixed economy. And far from being anti-Semites, the vast majority of those accused are decent, anti-racist people, including self-respecting Jews and dedicated campaigners against anti-Semitism. People like Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Mike over at Vox Political, Martin Odoni and many, many others. Many of the Jews smeared as anti-Semites are Holocaust survivors or the children of Holocaust survivors, but this is never reported in the media. Except when the person supposedly attacked is a good Blairite or member of the Israel lobby.
The cover was made in jest when it came out, though it had an element of truth even then. Now it’s even more true. Blair has left the party leadership, but his supporters in Progress and similar groups are determined to cling on to power by carrying out a purge of Corbyn and his traditional Labour supporters.
Just as Blair himself emerged to urge Blairite MPs and Labour members to leave and join his proposed ‘Centrist’ party.
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.
This is the third part and final part of my article on the interview with Abby Martin on the Jimmy Dore Show. She’s a tireless critic of American imperialism, and the presenter of the Empire Files on TeleSur English, and before that, on RT.
Dore and Martin discuss how the Empire and the Deep State loathes Trump because he ain’t good for the Empire’s image. After Bush had nearly pushed Americans towards revolution, Obama managed to placate people, and win them back to the Empire. But Trump is worse for the Empire because he’s such an a**hole and psychopath. There are people, who are just as psychotic. Paul Ryan, another Republican, hates the poor. But Trump is ramping up the Empire to colossal levels. There are now troop surges in Afghanistan, and the formation of Africom to deal with Somalia. Everybody’s heard of a horrific massacre committed by one of the warlords, and blamed on al-Shabaab. But what you aren’t being told is that week before his village was subject to a bombing raid which killed a load of kids. Martin talks about Trump’s hypocrisy and cynicism. He attacked Killary for the way she sold arms to the Saudis, but has been more than willing to sell them arms himself so they can kill civilians in Yemen. Under Trump, there has been a 400 per cent increase in drone strikes, and a 75 per cent increase in civilian deaths. Under Bush and Obama, the US military just killed every military-age male in a given locality. Now they’re carpet-bombing whole villages. Just like the Israelis kill Palestinians. Well, Trump said he would kill not only the terrorists, but also their families, in direct violation of the Geneva Convention. Unfortunately, he has not honoured the promises Martin hoped he would, like normalising relations with Russia.
And then they get on to MOAB – the Mother Of All Bombs. This ‘mini-nuke’ – actually a conventional bomb that approached some of the destructive power of a nuclear device – was dropped on a cave system in Afghanistan. They said it only killed terrorists, but there were people in that area, and we won’t know if it only killed terrorists, because nobody’s allowed in there. Martin describes ISIS as a barbaric death cult – which is true – but states that this doesn’t give us the right to kill the people, who live in these countries. She makes the point that the applause which greeted the MOAB attack was a dehumanisation of the Afghan people and the victims of this weapon.
They then discuss whether some of the people on the Right, who supported Trump, may now be disillusioned with the orange buffoon. Many people probably voted for him because they thought he was anti-interventionist. But he hasn’t been. This might be because the military-industrial complex and the warfare state are beyond his control. Martin hoped that this part of the Republican based would speak out, but she was disappointed. The base is just interested in having a more efficient War On Terror. They aren’t speaking out about Venezuela, nor about the push for war with North Korea, they just don’t want us to fund al-Qaeda. As for Trump himself, he was never anti-interventionist. He just appeared so as it was a useful stance against Killary. He doesn’t have to surround himself with generals, who just want war because with every new invasion they launch, they get another star on their jacket. They two then discuss how nobody knows why America was in Niger.
I realise that this is an American programme, discussing American issues. But it also directly and acutely affects us. A number of our politicos have attended Republican conventions, and one of Trump’s British buddies was Nigel Farage. The Tories have been copying and utilising Republican policies since Maggie Thatcher took over as premier in the 1970s. And New Labour did the same with the Clintonite wing of the Democrats, adopting their stance against the welfare state, and introducing neoliberalism, deregulation and privatisation, including the privatisation of the NHS, into the Labour Party.
The situation is rather different over here in Blighty, as we are now lucky enough to have a real Socialist as leader in the shape of Jeremy Corbyn. But New Labour is desperately trying to hang on in the shape of Progress, Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement. And they have been using the smearing of decent anti-racists, the majority of whom are Jewish, as anti-Semites and their expulsion from the party as a weapon to purge their left-wing opponents.
As for imperialism, we are still riding on the back of America’s coat-tails, trying to be a world power by exploiting the ‘Special Relationship’. And so we support their wars in the Middle East, and the looting of these countries’ state industries and the brutalisation and impoverishment of their peoples.
Our media isn’t quite as bad as the Americans’ just yet. The news over here does accept that climate change is real at least, and there are still news reports about the poverty caused by austerity and Tory cuts to the welfare state and health service.
But it is heavily biased towards the Tories. The Beeb is full of public school, very middle class White guys, and its news and editorial staff have contained a number of high profile Tories, several of whom have left their posts to work for the party under Cameron and May. ‘Goebbels’ Robinson and ‘Arnalda Mussolini’ Kuenssberg are members of the Tory party. Robinson led a whole series of Tory groups, while Kuenssberg spoke at a fringe meeting in the Tory party this year.
The Kushners noted in their book, Who Needs the Cuts, that the Beeb does not allow anyone to question austerity, and it is just assumed, entirely falsely, as true and necessary by the rest of the media. And academics from Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities have noted that the Beeb is far more likely to talk to Tory politicians and managing directors about the economy, than Labour politicos and trade unionists.
And the war on alternative media is happening in this country as well. The Tories would love to close down RT. We’ve already seen them join in the baying mob accusing it of being Putin’s propaganda arm interfering with British democracy over here. All the while being very silent about how the Israelis were caught trying to get the people they don’t like removed from May’s cabinet. We’ve seen them criticise Labour MPs for appearing on the network, while ignoring their own people, who also have. And May got on her high horse to write a letter to Alex Salmond telling him not to take up a job as presenter with the Network.
And the bots and algorithms cooked up by Google and Facebook to protect us all from ‘fake news’ are having an effect on ‘controversial’ read: left-wing bloggers and vloggers. They direct potential readers away from the sites the corporations have decided are a threat to democracy. Mike’s suffered an inexplicable fall in the readership of some of his articles, and some of his posts have had to be reposted after mysteriously vanishing from Facebook. Even before then, there was an attempt to censor Tom Pride over at Pride’s Purge by claiming that his site was unsuitable for children. The pretext for that was some of the coarse humour he employs in his satire. This is nothing compared to some of the language you will hear on YouTube. It looked very much like his real crime was sending up Dave Cameron and the other walking obscenities taking up space on the Tory benches.
What Abby Martin says about the media and the crimes of Empire describe the situation in America. But it also describes what the neoliberal elites are doing over here.
We have to stop this. We have to take back parliament, and end the warmongering. Now.
I’ve put up a couple of pieces a few days commenting on Hillary Clinton’s appearance at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, and how in her book, What Happened?, which she’s been touting at this and other events across the world, she blames everyone except herself for her failure to gain the presidency.
In this short piece, RT asks people coming out of another book signing, this time at the South Bank Centre, ‘what went wrong?’ A few people recognise that she stood on the wrong platforms and campaigned on the wrong issues. One individual remarks that you can’t win elections simply by promising more of what your predecessor did. One man also comments that it was ‘the Rust Belt, populism, you know, Donald Trump’.
Most of the women, and one or two men, reply that Hillary’s gender was against her. They state that America wasn’t ready yet for a female president, and possibly not ready for one after a Black man. A lady in a hijab states that American politics is dominated by White men, and so Hillary suffered what has always happened to women everywhere, and was ‘Trumped’ by a poorly qualified man. And a couple blamed it on the Russians.
One of the women questioned is the head of Democrats Abroad, or at least the British chapter of it. She blames Killary’s defeat partly on the voter suppression and gerrymandering that went on. And a couple of people simply blame Russians. Nevertheless, she still has her supporters, with one Black young lady still saying that ‘we have faith’ in her.
Now it is true that Hillary’s gender was against her. America is a very masculine society, and politics over there, as they are in most White majority countries, is dominated by White men. And Killary was the victim of some very bitter, anti-feminist rhetoric when she and her husband became the first family back in the 1990s. One Republican Pastor angrily declared that she was the ‘type of woman, who turns to lesbianism, practices witchcraft, leaves her husband, and kills her children.’ And to a certain extent, some of those slurs have continued. There have been rumours throughout her political career that Shrillary’s a lesbian, and during Obama’s presidency these rumours became very specific. She was supposed to be having a lesbian affair with one of her advisors, Huma Abeddin. A male official, who had been sacked, also claimed that she and Nancy Pelosi were both man-hating lesbians, who delighted in humiliating men.
As for witchcraft, Alex Jones on his Infowars channel was coming out with all manner of complete and utter nonsense. He claimed that she, and Obama, were both demonically possessed. Or it could be that she was an evil alien, or under alien control. An invitation by a New York performance artist provided Jones with further ammunition to claim that she was involved in black magic. The performance artist specialised in ‘spirit cooking’ as part of her performances, which involved human blood. Jones pointed out that it was also what the black magician Aleister Crowley called his own vile magical cuisine, which used menstrual blood and semen. Hillary was therefore accused of performing various black magic rituals with this woman. In fact, she and Bill had been friends with her since the ’60s or ’70s, and as far as I could see, the ‘spirit cooking’ she talked about really was just weird performance art. It might have been inspired by Crowley, but as far as I could see it had very little to do with genuine occultism.
However, there are people in America more than willing to vote for a female candidate. I was told by one of the American postgraduate students on an archaeology course I did several years ago at Bristol Uni, that she was so sick and tired of every candidate being another White male that she would vote for anybody, who wasn’t. And the political landscape had shifted so much that she wasn’t the only female candidate for the presidency. The Greens put forward Jill Stein. As the candidate of a third party, Stein very much was an outsider, but she’s still blamed by Killary as part of the reasons for her defeat. In fact, as a feminist candidate, Stein was the stronger party. She was a doctor, who supported single-payer healthcare as well as protecting the environment, because her experience taught her that women particularly needed it.
Killary, by contrast, was very much a political insider. She was a professional businesswoman, who sat on the boards of multiple corporations. She was also very, very much in Wall Street’s pockets, having been paid hundreds of thousands for speeches she delivered at their various dinners. One of the companies she headed was Walmart, which does not recognise trade unions, and treats its staff extremely badly. Despite making a speech to trade unionists that she would defend their rights and those of their members, she had actually made no attempt to reverse Walmart’s union-bashing policy. And at a time more and more Americans were coming round to support single-payer healthcare, like the Germans have had for nearly a hundred and forty years, she blocked this and called it ‘utopian’.
People also remembered how racist Killary was. In her youth back in the ’60s she’d been a Goldwater Girl, supporting the pro-segregationist Republican Barry Goldwater. She and Bill were responsible for the 1990s legislation that led to a far greater proportion of young Black men being convicted of and serving longer prison sentences for drug offences that Whites. There was also a racist edge to her previous electoral campaign against Barack Obama. She promoted the whole Republican ‘birther’ nonsense, in which it was claimed that Obama, because of his Kenyan ancestry, was not born in the USA and was therefore not eligible to become president.
She also treated the traditional blue-collar Democrat supporters with a very obvious contempt. She stated that she wanted to appeal more to Republican voters, and was true to her word. She ignored, or only did the most cursory campaigning in traditionally Democrat strongholds, expecting the folks there to vote for her. Just as Blair and ‘Progress’ treated the British working class over here.
As for foreign policy, she boasted that she was proud to have Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s old adviser, as her friend and that she regularly spent her hols with him. This is the man, whose policy of backing Fascist dictators across the world, and support for carpet-bombing in Vietnam, has caused him to be denounced as the world’s biggest unindicted war criminal. He is really has shed enough blood, as Shakespeare put in MacBeth, to make ‘all the seas incarnadine, turning the green red’.
This was at a time when the American public was becoming increasingly war weary. People were becoming sick of waving their sons and daughters off proudly, only to see them coming back in coffins, or with shattered bodies and minds from a series of wars that seem to only profit multinationals.
In short, Killary was the consummate corporate and political insider. But she still claimed that she was an outsider, because of her gender. Well, her biological gender was immaterial. She was as hawkish as any of the men in Bush’s and Obama’s cabinets, and was responsible for much legislation that actively harmed women. Her claims of feminism rang very hollow to ordinary American women concerned about bread and butter issues. Like, you know, actually finding paying jobs, being able to afford to eat and have somewhere to live, pay the utility bills and being able to afford to see the doctor. Oh yes, and being able to see their daughters and sons go through college without being burdened by staggering amounts of debt.
As for the Russians being to blame, this is quite frankly a massive lie. Yes, Putin wants to influence what’s going on in the West. No, he wasn’t responsible for Killary’s defeat. Killary was damaged by the WikiLeaks revelations, which showed how she and the head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, fiddled the internal election process to steal the nomination from Bernie, as well as the incriminating documents which showed just how far she was in Wall Street’s and corporate America’s pockets. This had nothing to do with Russian hacking. They were handed over by disgruntled insiders within the Democrat Party. But Killary couldn’t admit this, and so has started a bogus campaign to blame Russian.
And there’s more than a little bit of hypocrisy about this too. Killary’s got no problem with fiddling Russian politics. America poured millions into Boris Yeltsyn’s campaign to become president of the USSR during the 1990s, and so complete the dismantlement of the Soviet Union and the privatisation of its state concerns. All of which were sold at knock-down prices. The results were massive profits for the oligarchs, who bought them, the complete melt-down of the Russian economy, a massive surge in mafia violence as organised crime tried to take over industry. Millions of Russians were thrown out of work in a nation that had never developed unemployment benefit, ’cause the state’s policy was to have everyone in work. Left without benefits and with medicine increasingly privatised, there was a massive increase in sickness and suicide.
And she’s continued meddling in Russian/east European affairs. The Orange Revolution in Kiev against the pro-Russian Ukrainian president was carefully stage managed by Shrillary and the state department, down to the orange clothing being given out to protesters. It was an astro-turf coup, which carefully resembled a popular uprising but which was scripted by the American state and western capital. As for the composition of the new Ukrainian government installed with Killary’s help, these include Nazi thugs from the Pravy Sektor, real Fascists, who wear SS uniforms and scream Nazi slogans, and who have a bitter hatred of Jews, trade unionists and real democrats.
She was also caught on tape moaning about how she regretted not fiddling the elections for the Palestinian authority to get the right party in power.
Hillary’s a very intelligent woman. I think some of the misogynist abuse directed against her is because she’s probably the brighter than her husband, Bill. But intelligence does not equate with morality. Trump’s a grotesque monster, but he made some of the right noises. At one point he said he was in charge of single-payer healthcare, and that he didn’t want to start more wars. He’s since gone back on these promises. But despite the fact that Trump’s stupid with a disgusting attitude to women, these are issues that did appeal to many ordinary people. 45,000 people a year die in America because they can’t afford medical treatment. Bush’s wars abroad have pushed taxes up for the state to be able to pay for it, and the burden has fallen again on the ordinary man and woman in the street, just as it has over here. And if you’re a parent wondering if your child will come back for his or her tour of duty in one piece and compus mentus, Trump’s promise not to put boots on the ground in Syria is welcome indeed.
For some people, these are life and death issues, and the grotesque personality of the person proposing them won’t matter. And especially not after Clinton’s own dubious affair with Monica Lewinsky, and the rumours of indiscretions, if not something far worse, with other female staffers.
And let’s put some of the blame for Killary’s defeat on a factor, that I haven’t heard she herself has cited: the American Constitution. As one of the speakers in the above video shows, Killary actually got more votes than Trump. But she lost because of the electoral college, an antiquated and byzantine electoral organ that was set up to give the slave-holding states a disproportionate amount of power in the 19th century. Slaves couldn’t vote, but were defined as being partial humans for the purposes of voting, and the electoral college set up so that the southern states could still successfully field presidential candidates against those from the northern states, which had a far greater proportion of free and White men, and so a greater voting population.
This isn’t the only problem with the American Constitution. It was drafted at the end of the 18th century by patrician White men, who were terrified that the Revolution would see power slip from the hands of the monied, landed elite to ordinary working Americans – the ‘leather apron men’, as they referred to the industrial craftsmen, who flocked to town hall meetings and provided the basis for American popular democracy. And so checks have been placed within the Constitution that make the kind of radical change now desperately needed impossible. The result is that millions of ordinary Americans feel disenfranchised, and so stayed away from the election.
Hillary has no-one to blame but herself. She was a horrible Conservative, serving a stifling Conservative political and social order, who was beaten by another horrible Conservative, but one who actually understood how to appeal to the public.
But it ain’t just in Britain that Killary’s touring, telling little lies. She also appeared on Australia’s ABC television station to tell porkies Down Under. Michelle, one of the great commenters to this blog, sent me this link to an article in Medium by Caitlin Johnstone exposing five of the lies she told in her interview with Sarah Ferguson.
I didn’t put up an article about this, when Corbyn made the claim last week at the Labour conference. So I’m doing it now. In his speech to the Labour conference last week, Corbyn proclaimed that Labour is the real party of the centre. This should upset and frighten the Blairites, Lib Dems and Tories, who have been busily screaming that Corbyn and Momentum are Trotskyite entryists, and that Labour has moved to the far left.
Blair did this a little while ago, when he turned up from whichever stone he’s been hiding under since he handed power over to Broon, and flew off, having done his best to finish Maggie’s and the Tories’ goal of privatizing the Health Service in Britain, and aiding George Bush and the Likudniks in their demented project to turn the Middle East into a gigantic charnel house for the sake of big business and the American-Saudi oil companies. He’s trying to set up his own Blairite party, which he claims will represent the true centre ground of British politics.
No. It won’t. Blair and the Tories were never the centre ground. They were right-wing. Indeed, following the victory of Maggie Thatcher and her abandonment of the post-War consensus that advocated a mixed economy and state investment in industry, and comprehensive welfare provision, the Tories and their entryists in the Labour party in the form of Blair, New Labour and Progress, the Tories were far right. They stood for absolute privatization and the dismantlement of the welfare state, aims which Blair, as Thatcher’s political golden boy shared.
The press, Tories and Blairites have been whining ever since Corbyn won the leadership election, however, that Labour is now a party of the far left. And indeed there was a letter repeating that lie in the I newspaper today. But it’s untrue. Under Corbyn, Labour party has become once again a party of the centre-left. It advocates a mixed economy, a properly funded and state-run NHS, and proper welfare provision, so that 100,000 of us don’t have to rely on food banks to stop ourselves from starving, and 7 million of us don’t have to worry about whether we can afford to feed ourselves or pay the utilities bills. And where the trains actually run on time. As they did, or did more regularly, before John Major privatized them.
These are not extreme left-wing policies. They way entirely mainstream policies in the thirty-odd years from Labour’s election victory after the end of the Second World War to Thatcher’s election in 1979. This was a period of economic growth and prosperity and where the difference in wealth between rich and poor was at its narrowest.
This has all been wrecked, thanks to Thatcher and her followers in the Tory party and New Labour. And it is excellent that under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour is set to reverse nearly forty years of Thatcherite misgovernment and exploitation, and return politics to its true centre ground.
Yesterday I came across a review from 2012 of Tony Greenstein’s The Fight Against Fascism in Brighton and the South Coast in the Brighton Argus. Greenstein’s a veteran socialist activist, and an opponent of all forms of racism. This includes the Zionists’ massacre and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, for which he has, like so very many others, both Jewish and gentile, been smeared as an ‘anti-Semite’.
Greenstein refers to the book to support his own, very evident commitment to fighting all forms of racism and racial injustice, including the bitter anti-Semitism of the British far right, in an open letter he published in his blog on Sunday to the leader of Brighton council, Councillor Warren Morgan. Morgan had smeared Greenstein as a Holocaust denier in a statement linking Greenstein to Miko Peled. Peled is the son of an Israeli general and fierce critic of Israeli barbarity to his country’s indigenous people. Peled spoke at a Labour party fringe meeting, organized by a Jewish Labour party organization committed to ending the Israeli state’s oppression of the Palestinians. Peled had stated in his speech that everything – ‘even the Holocaust’ should be up for debate. So Morgan insinuated that Greenstein was a Holocaust denier, and demanded his expulsion from the Labour party.
Greenstein replied in his letter with the following statements, noting that Peled was just defending complete academic freedom, and certainly did not deny the Holocaust, whose victims included members of his father’s family. He goes on to cite other incidents, when he was previously smeared with the same accusation, citing his book as evidence that he most certainly isn’t anti-Semitic, and explaining his opposition to Zionism.
All that Miko Peled was doing was to say discussion about the Holocaust is legitimate free speech. To twist this into support for Holocaust denial is a prime example of how anti-Semitism has been weaponised by supporters of Zionism and the Israeli state. It demonstrates your contempt for those who died at the hands of Hitler’s regime – Jewish and non-Jewish.
Unlike you I am Jewish. Unlike you half my father’s family was murdered in the gas chambers of Treblinka. For you to use the Holocaust, of both Jews and non-Jews, up to 5 million of whom also died in the Nazi concentration camps, as a cheap political device in order to gain a political advantage over your opponents in the Labour Party is despicable. If anyone in Brighton Labour Party is anti-Semitic it is you and your followers.
It is noticeable that you and your political soul mates have nothing to say about racism against the Roma, yet proportionately just as many Roma died in the camps as Jews. Racism against the Roma today is far higher than that against Jews today but it isn’t so politically advantageous.
As you well know I have often been the recipient of this vile Holocaust denial propaganda, as evidenced by the Argus article of 16th October 1993 as well as physical attacks by fascist groups such as the National Front. A cursory search of the Argus archive would turn up numerous articles e.g. Adam Trimmingham’s review of my book ‘Fighting Fascism in Brighton’ I confess that in 40 years of opposing fascism and racism in Brighton and Hove your name has never once come up.
My reasons for opposing Zionism and the Israeli state are the same as my opposition to fascism and racism in Britain and Apartheid in South Africa. Your use of the Jewish Holocaust for transparently cheap political purposes is contemptible.
In the rest of the article he explains the background to the smear. Basically, it’s more of the same intriguing by Progress and the Zionists to cling on to power anyway they can. Morgan is a member of Progress, the Thatcherite entryist group in Labour. The fringe meeting addressed by Peled, at which Greenstein was present, not only condemned the maltreatment of the Palestinians, it also demanded the expulsion of the seriously misnamed Jewish Labour Movement. This was formerly Paole Zion, and is the sister party to the Israeli Labour Party, which has and remains one of the chief instigators of the Palestinian’s oppression. The meeting was organized by Jewish Voices for Peace, and nearly everyone, according to Greenstein, with the exception of Ken Loach, was Jewish. And Loach himself is not, by any stretch of the imagination, anti-Semitic. In the 1990s he directed a film, Perdition, about the Zionists’ collaboration with the Nazis in the deportation of the Jews to the death camps in Hungary.
Not that this stopped the Right making the habitual smears of anti-Semitism. Guido Fawkes repeated them on his blog. In fact, Fawkes has no business calling anyone a Fascist, or words to that effect. Way back in the ’80s or ’90s he was a member of a Libertarian organization on the fringes of the Tory party, which invited one of the leaders of the Fascist death squads then massacring the people of El Salvador, to come as their guest of honour.
Adam Trimingham’s review of Greenstein’s book is interesting for the perspective it gives on the very strong opposition to Mosley and his thugs in Brighton. Mosley and Lord Haw-Haw, the Anglo-Irish traitor William Joyce, both tried speaking there on several occasions, to be seen off by local Labour party supporters, Jews and other anti-Fascists. In one incident in 1934 when Mosley tried speaking at the Dome there, the electricians setting up the sound system wired it up to the office of the Labour councilor, Nick Cohen. When Mosley tried to launch into his rant, Councilor Cohen pressed a button, and the would-be British Mussolini was drowned out by the sound of the Marseillaise.
That didn’t stop Mosley and his stormtroopers from trying again. And each time they faced opposition, including violence, to the point where the town was a no-go area for them. The last time Mosley tried to speak there was just after the War, when he was trying to launch his Union Movement. This resulted in the Battle of the Level, when local people, included Jewish ex-servicemen, weighed in against them. This included many retired Jewish gents, who beat them up with their umbrellas and walking sticks. They were successful, and Mosley never returned. His own Fascist movement had been in decline before the War, and the battle against the Axis effectively finished it off. He emerged from the war disgraced and with whatever remained of his former popularity in ruins.
The formation of the National Front in the 1970s led to more battles, as they tried to demonstrate in Brighton. A committee was formed to combat them. This suffered from some division, with some members arguing for a more moderate line, with Israel another bone of contention. But they nevertheless succeeded in ensuring that any Fascist meeting or rally was met with determined opposition. And that includes the Fascist March for England the year the review was published in 2012.
It seems the Torygraph will publish any old rubbish, not matter how hackneyed and obviously wrong, to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. Yesterday Mike put up a piece about an article in it, which claims that about 100 Labour MPs are in talks with potential donors about setting up a new ‘Progressives’ group in parliament if Corbyn stays on after a Tory landslide.
As Mike says, this is just the same old rumours that right-wing Labour MPs were planning to split the party that were circulating just before Corbyn won his second leadership election with a landslide.
He concludes
This is just a stupid smoke-and-mirrors bid to sap support for Jeremy Corbyn after Labour’s storming campaign launch and yet more blunders from ‘Team Terrible’ – I mean, Team Theresa.
I notice the name of the Torygraph reporter is ironically appropriate – C Hope? There’s no hope for Tories to see here.
A little while ago Florence, one of the great commenters on this blog, posted this remark about similar rumours of a Labour split:
It seems you may not have long to wait, as rumour has it that Blair is indeed trying to found a new party (or should that be a New Party?), with Sainsbury’s money being redirected from Progress to the New Blair Party. I have no doubt at all that this will claim to hold the middle ground as long as the ideals of neoliberalism seem centrist and “moderate”. I also have no doubt that this is yet another attack on the working people of the UK.
Let’s just stick with the current Labour party, that has promised to represent the 99%, and not the 1%?
My guess is that the Torygraph writer has heard some of these same rumours, and decided to repeat them as fact. It might be true that Blair wants to set up a new ‘Progressives’ party – the title of this new ‘moderate’ – read: neoliberal – group touted by the Torygraph seems to be based on ‘Progress’, the Blairite faction in Labour. Blair himself wants to return to British politics and was in the papers a week ago spouting on about how he wishes to spread ‘moderate’ politics.
I doubt he would have any chance of forming a new party. As Richard Seymour has pointed out in his book on Jeremy Corbyn, Progress is tiny numerically. It’s only causing trouble because its members have seized key position in the party. Furthermore, Blair himself is politically toxic, though like Thatcher he has no idea that he is long past his political sell-by date. Mike and Seymour in his book have pointed out that from 2002 to the end of their administration, Labour lost five million votes. He alienated voters with his right-wing policies.
And even some Tories despise him for reasons that are entirely right and correct. The Mail on Sunday columnist, Peter Hitchens, refers to him as ‘the Blair creature’ and voices his intense disgust at him for starting the needless wars in the Middle East which have cost so many brave men and women their lives and limbs.
My guess is that if the 100 Labour MPs did split off from Labour, it would result in them immediately losing their seats. The party would then be able to put up proper left-wing candidates, who would support Corbyn – or a suitably left-wing successor. These proper Labour MPs would then win the seats previously held by their Blairite predecessors.
But as Mike said, rumours of these splits have run before, and been wrong. The Blairite MPs themselves have been desperate to hold on to their nominations as Labour MPs by any means, fair or foul. We’ve seen whole local Labour parties suspended on trumped up charges because they’ve scared the Tom Watson and his minions by threatening to deselect their Blairite MP.
And Barry Davies, one of the long-term commenters over on Mike’s blog, raises the spectre of what happened to the SDP:
Well let’s honest if they “moderate’s” broke away what are they going to do, renew the social democrats?, start another party? join the lib dems, whatever they would be assured of losing their cushy jobs.
Yes, what did happen to the SDP? They were supposed to be about to break the mould of British politics. I can remember David Owen telling his troops to go back home and prepare for government.
It didn’t happen.
But he did get an invitation from Screaming Lord Sutch to join the Monster Raving Loony Party. Sutch said in his autobiography, Life As Sutch, that if Dr Owen had joined them, he’d be in government by now.
This looks like wishful thinking at best from the Torygraph. They’ve been one of the most venomous and persistent of Corbyn’s critics in the media. Possibly this is due to the paper’s very blatant right-wing bias, made worse by its ownership by the weirdo Barclay Twins, and desperation to ingratiate itself to potential advertisers by spiking stories that reflect badly on them. According to Private Eye, this prostration before the advertisers has resulted in readers leaving it in droves. I got the impression that this has resulted in mass sackings by doddery CEO Murdo McClellan and the Gruesome Twosome in order to keep the paper’s share price up.
Either way, it’s the Torygraph that’s in dire straits, not Labour. And hopefully one result of a Labour victory will be to utterly discredit the Telegraph and the other right-wing denizens of Fleet Street as influential opinion-formers.
The General Strike: Jackdaw No.l05, compiled by Richard Tames (London, New York and Toronto: Jackdaw Publications Ltd, Grossman Publishers Inc., and Clarke, Irwin and Company 1972)
I picked this up about 20 years ago in one of the bargain bookshops in Bristol’s Park Street. Jackdaw published a series of folders containing reproduction historical texts and explanatory posters and leaflets on variety of historical topics and events, including the Battle of Trafalgar, the slave trade, the voyages of Captain Cook, Joan of Arc, the Anglo-Boer War, the rise of Napoleon, Ned Kelley and Wordsworth. They also published another series of document folders on specifically Canadian themes, such as the Indians of Canada, the Fenians, Louis Riel, Cartier of Saint Malo, the 1867 confederation of Canada, the vote in Canada from 1791 to 1891, the Great Depression, Laurier, and Canada and the Civil War.
This particular folder is on the 1926 general strike, called by the TUC when the Samuel Commission, set up to report into the state of the mining industry, published its report. This recommended that the mines should be reorganised, but not nationalised, and although the miners were to get better working conditions and fringe benefits, they would have to take a pay cut. The folder included a poster giving a timeline of the strike and the events leading up to it, and photos of scenes from it, including volunteer constables practising self-defence, office girls travelling to work by lorry, the Conservative prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, and buses and train signal boxes staffed by volunteers. There’s also a Punch cartoon commenting on the end of the Strike. It also contains a leaflet explaining the various documents in the folder, along suggested projects about the issue and a short bibliography.
Poster and timeline of the Strike
Leaflet explaining the documents
The facsimile documents include
1. A leaflet arguing the Miner’s case.
2. Telegram from the Transport and General Workers’ Union to a local shop steward, calling for preparations for the strike.
3. Pages from the Daily Worker, the official paper of the T.U.C. during the Strike.
4. Notice from the Met calling for special constables.
5. Communist Party leaflet supporting the Strike.
6. Handbill giving the proposals of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the leaders of the Free Churches for an end to the Strike.
7. Handbill denouncing the strike as ‘The Great ‘Hold-Up’.
The accompanying pamphlet states that this was very far from the truth, and that it was a government lie that the T.U.C. were aiming at a revolution.
8. Emergency edition of the Daily Express.
9. Conservative PM Stanley Baldwin’s guarantee of employment to strike-breakers.
10. Contemporary Analysis of the causes of the Strike’s failure, from the Public Opinion.
11. The British Gazette, the government’s official paper, edited by Winston Churchill.
12. Anonymous letter from a striker recommending that the T.U.C. shut off the electricity.
13. Appeal for aid to Miner’s wives and dependents.
14. Protest leaflet against Baldwin’s ‘Blacklegs’ Charter’.
The General Strike was one of the great events of 20th century labour history, and its collapse was a terrible defeat that effectively ended revolutionary syndicalism and guild socialism as a major force in the labour movement. It left a legacy of bitterness that still persists in certain areas today.
The jackdaw seems to do a good job of presenting all sides of the issue, and the final section of the explanatory leaflet urges children to think for themselves about it. And one of the folder’s features that led me to buy it was the fact that it contained facsimile reproductions of some of the papers, flyers, letters and telegrams produced by the strikers arguing their case.
Looking through the folder’s contents it struck me that the strike and the issues it raised are still very much relevant in the 21 century, now almost a century after it broke it. It shows how much the Tories and the rich industrialists were determined to break the power of the unions, as well as the sheer hostility of the press. The Daily Express has always been a terrible right-wing rag, and was solidly Thatcherite and anti-union, anti-Labour in the 1980s. Since it was bought by Richard Desmond, apparently it’s become even more virulently right-wing and anti-immigrant – or just plain racist – than the Daily Heil.
The same determination to break their unions, and the miners in particular, was shown by Thatcher during the Miner’s Strike in the 1980s, again with the solid complicity of the media, including extremely biased and even falsified reporting from the BBC. It was her hostility to the miners and their power which partly led Thatcher to privatise and decimate the mining industry, along with the rest of Britain’s manufacturing sector. And these attitudes have persisted into the governments of Cameron and May, and have influenced Tony Blair and ‘Progress’ in the Labour party, who also bitterly hate the unions and anything that smacks of real working class socialism.
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