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.

Jimmy Dore on Pensioner Attacking Hillary Clinton’s Opposition to Universal Healthcare

This is another video from Jimmy Dore, an American comedian and political commentators, whose been a regular guest on The Young Turks. In this video, he discusses an interview The Turks’ roving reporter, Jordan Cheriton, had with an elderly lady, who described her experience of being denied medical cover until she finally got Medicare. Medicare is the American system, in which the state pays for the healthcare of those too poor to have private medical insurance. This lady was denied private health insurance because she had a pre-existing condition: asthma. She only got medical cover through Medicare after thirty years or so without it.

Cheriton met her at a meeting of the supporters of Grayson, the progressive Democrat candidate for Florida, who’s one of those following in the footsteps of Bernie Sanders. Sanders was the self-described ‘Democratic Socialist’, who wanted to introduce universal healthcare in America, and whose bid for the presidency was blocked by Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democrat party machine. This lady and Dore attack the opponents of state healthcare, who accuse its supporters amongst the younger generation of ‘having it too easy’ and not knowing anything about the real world. One of those is Shrillary. Dore has a clip of her from earlier this year, voicing her opinion that state medicine is impractical, and ranting that ‘it will never happen’. One of Dore’s producers points out that back in the 1990s, she was in favour of universal state-paid healthcare, until the cheques from private enterprise came in. Dore is also suitably scathing about the charge that universal single-payer healthcare is ‘utopian’ in Hillary’s words, when the rest of the world has it. The lady at the meeting, and in the later interview with Cheriton, states that she’s glad the young people support state healthcare, and wants the old politicians who oppose it to move aside so they can come through.

Here’s the video:

I’m putting this up because this is the reality of the American healthcare system. Robin Cook in his pamphlet on the NHS for the Fabian Society nearly thirty years ago pointed out that private medicine discriminates against people with long-standing illness, because of the greater expense of treating them. They concentrate on covering relatively healthy people, who they can make a profit from, as they don’t need to pay out so often. And, of course, private insurance only works if you can afford, which 20 per cent of Americans can’t due to escalating medical bills.

This is the system which Thatcher, Blair, Brown, Cameron and now Theresa May want to introduce in Britain. This is why Jeremy Hunt has described the NHS as ‘an abomination’, and the Tories are manufacturing a funding crisis in the NHS. They’re doing so because they’ve also got connections to private healthcare firms, and the American healthcare companies are seeking to expand because of growing dissatisfaction over that side of the Pond with private healthcare. Over half of Americans now want a state healthcare system, like Canada and the rest of the world.

Don’t have any illusions on this score about New Labour wishing to support the NHS. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown laid much of the foundations for the continuing Tory privatisation of the health service, but were determined not to let anyone know, as, like Thatcher before them, they realised that it would lose them the election. This is the healthcare system that New Labour – Progress, Tomorrow’s Labour, Saving Labour and the other Blairite shills support. It’s why the Conservative media have put so much into attacking Corbyn, as he threatens to undermine it and their corporate masters by renationalising the NHS.

Don’t give your vote to them or the Tories. Defend the NHS, and support Corbyn, while there’s still time.

On a different issue, I notice one of the guys listening to her speak is a young Asian bloke wearing an ‘Islamic Relief’ T-shirt. He’s obviously a religious Muslim, who takes serious the obligation under Islam to provide alms to the poor. Many British Muslims also do. My parents met one young Muslim lady doing the same when giving to the local food bank. I guess she and he must be the horrendous Muslims coming to destroy British society in advance of ISIS. (Sarcasm). It’s been pointed out again and again that immigrants are actually net contributors to society, as they actually pay more in taxes than they take out. But this gets forgotten in the racist hysteria.

Vox Political on the Vacuity of Owen Smith and the Strategic Silence of the Blairites

Mike has put up a couple of very chilling articles about Paul Mason’s speculation of where the anti-Corbyn rebels in the Labour party will try to take the coup next. Mason points out that they are largely silent in defending or promoting Owen Smith. He notes that Smiffy was one of those Labour politicos, who sounded left-wing when their real political views were on the right – neoliberal economics intended to keep the Labour party under the control of big finance, the big pharmaceutical companies and the merchants of death. He goes on to state that at the Gateshead and Doncaster hustings, both broadcast by the Beeb, it became evident that Smiffy doesn’t believe in anything. There was no clear indication when he became converted to soft-left Corbynism, but without the unpleasant bits challenging capitalism and big business left out. He speculates that Smiff, and Angela Eagle before him, is only there as a kind of placeholder, to remove Jeremy Corbyn and the Corbynites from control of the Labour party, after which the resources of Progress, Saving Labour and Tomorrow’s Labour will be used to bring the party once more under corporate control.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/08/20/paul-mason-on-the-silence-of-the-blairites/

Mason goes further and suggests that the next phase of the coup will come after the special conference on the 24th of September. The Blairites are formulating new polls to show that the public prefers Theresa May to Jeremy Corbyn. They will then draw up a list of constituencies which they claim will be lost to Labour come a general election. This will be conveniently leaked to their friends in the right-wing press. Then the bullying and intimidation of Corbyn by Labour’s backbenchers will begin anew, with Smith smiling approvingly, but not taking part, and making disapproving noises occasionally castigating such intimidation. They will then start more legal actions to get their grubby mitts on the party’s name and assets. This is what the establishment of Saving Labour and Tomorrow’s Labour is for. By Christmas, Mason predicts, they will have engineered a split in the Labour party to remove Corbyn’s 300,000+ supporters. As for Smith, he will be discarded. They never took him seriously, and he was never anything more than a tool to prise Corbyn out of office.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/08/20/is-this-the-blairite-battle-plan/

This is just purely destructive, but it shows the power of corporate big business in New Labour. It also shows, as Mike points out, the sheer irrationality of the Blairites that they are prepared to purge the majority of the party’s members, and even sabotage its electoral chances, just to keep control. It doesn’t matter how many times the accusations of anti-Semitism and misogyny are refuted, they keep being repeated. Just like Goebbels demanded they should be in his strategy of using the one big lie.

This is disgusting, and shows why the Blairites themselves should be removed from power. They should never have been given it in the first place.

More Lies from the Blairites: The Truth about Conor McGinn’s Claim He Was Attack by Female Thugs

On Wednesday, Mike put up another piece from The Canary, a pro-Corbyn blog, which exploded another lie from the Blairites about how they were being attacked and victimised by Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters. McGinn, the Labour MP for St. Helen’s North, had reported several women to the police, claiming that they had ransacked his office and threatened him to the extent that he was forced to approach the police for protection. He also published a version of the incident on the Politics Home page.

The reality of the incident, from the women McGinn accused, is very different. They were accused of threatening the MP because they caught him in appalling deceit, and dared to challenge him about it. And far from them threatening him, it would appear from their account that it was they who felt threatened and intimidated.

As they ladies themselves and witnesses tell it, they had turned up on the 7th of July at Century House to attend a meeting of the Constituency party in St. Helens, which they had been told was going to be about a vote of confidence in the Labour leader. They came independently, and none of them knew each other. They were directed up to the appropriate room, which was locked. When they knocked, all the lights went out. They knocked again, but there was no response, and so they went down and asked security. They couldn’t give them an answer either, so the women left the building.

They went over to the Town Hall, and tried that too. It was also locked. After waiting an hour, they saw McGinn and a group of men leaving the building, laughing. Two of the women went over to challenge him about it. McGinn was with six other men, who were extremely patronising.

See Mike’s article at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/07/27/the-embarrassing-truth-about-mps-claim-he-was-attacked-by-corbyn-supporters/

From this, it would appear that McGinn is another Blairite, who started telling porkie pies to disguise the fact that he was caught lying about the location of the meeting, which was held behind closed doors, in order to get the result he wanted. The remnants of New Labour in Progress, Saving Labour and the rest have shown themselves to be consistently deceitful, using lies, PR stunts and smears against their left-wing opponents. McGinn has shown himself in this as more than willing to use the same tactics. Rather than showing Jeremy Corbyn as unelectable and unfit for government, McGinn, Angela Eagle, Owen Smith and the rest have shown themselves to be completely unsuited for government office. They lie to the British public to smear Corbyn, and they will lie to the British public if elected to government to protect the corporate interests they serve. They should reconsider their place in the Labour party, and resign if they cannot serve their leader or the vast majority of the party’s members.

Owen Smith Unveils His Policies, but None Are His Own

Mike yesterday put up a piece reporting that Owen Smith had finally unveiled 20 policies of his own, with which he hoped to challenged Jeremy Corbyn. They’re all good, as far as they go. The trouble is, none of them are his own. Mike reported that the Corbynistas have already pointed out that they were taken from the Institute of Employment Rights’ Manifesto for Labour Law, which Jeremy Corbyn had already adopted as the basis for future Labour policy last month. Mike quotes the response of the Jeremy Corbyn for Leader Campaign to Smith’s policies, who said that they welcomed Smiff’s support for policies announced in recent months by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. They pointed out that Smudger’s speech showed that Corbyn did possess true leadership, and that a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn would reverse the damage caused by the decline in manufacturing jobs due to the failed economic policies of the last thirty years. Northern communities, hard hit by industrial decline, would be a particular priority, and would be regenerated through economic devolution that would put people and jobs first.

Mike also points out that several of Smudger’s policies are vague. They just appear to be cosmetic, and don’t address the real, underlying problems. Such as his promise to concentrate on ‘equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity’. Mike makes the point that this is so confused as to be almost meaningless. He also makes the point that Smiff’s promise to increase spending on schools and libraries is fine, but he doesn’t promise to end private-sector involvement in schools, or reopen the libraries that have closed. His promise to reinstate the 50p top rate of tax is also cosmetic, and will be attacked as such by the Tories. His promises to reverse the cuts to the capital gains tax, corporation, inheritance tax and his plans to introduce a new wealth tax similarly look cosmetic. They’ll bring more money into the treasury, but he says nothing about how they’ll be spent. As for ‘ending fuel poverty by investing in efficient energy’ – this is notable because he does not promise to renationalise the electricity firms, thus meaning that we’re still going to be paying the foreign owners of our energy companies.

Mike concludes his article with the statement:

Smith makes a big deal of being able to deliver these policies – asking us to accept that Mr Corbyn can’t. How do we know either of those things? We don’t. In fact, it seems unlikely that this list is anything more than a catalogue of empty promises and he’ll go back to right-wing neoliberalism if he gets the chance.

It’s not enough. It’s painting a new face on New Labour. It’s reacting to Jeremy Corbyn.

And perhaps this is the biggest point to be made:

Why have Fake Corbyn when we can simply keep the real Corbyn?

See Mike’s article: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/07/27/20-policy-proposals-from-owen-smith-but-how-many-are-his-own/

This is a very good point. Smudger is reacting to Corbyn, and while it’s welcome that Corbyn’s leadership of the party is forcing Smiff to embrace some left-wing policies, they aren’t as good as the full range of policies articulated by Jeremy Corbyn’s camp. And we have absolutely no guarantee that once in charge of the Labour party, Smiffy will carry out any of his policies. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary. Smiff’s a New Labour, neoliberal privatiser. He left a job in the Labour party to work for Pfizer, and then returned to the Labour party. While at Pfizer, he pushed for the privatisation of the NHS. Back in the Labour party, he was part of the unit that maintained good relations with the company and the other private healthcare firms hoping to get a cut of NHS action. When questioned about his connection with Pfizer, Smudger lied about it, claiming that he worked for them before he joined the Labour party, thus hiding the fact that he was already working for the Labour party before he joined them. And while he has said that he doesn’t intend to privatise any more of the NHS, he hasn’t promised to renationalise what has already been sold off.

And his faction, New Labour in the form of Progress and Saving Labour, has a record of appalling mendacity. His rival, Angela Eagle, lied about having a brick thrown through her office window, just as she lied about being abused at a meeting for her sexuality. The anti-Corbyn camp have smeared and libelled decent people, many with a sincere and proud record of anti-racism and opposing anti-Semitism, as anti-Semites. This has included Jews and people of part-Jewish heritage. They have adopted the deceitful strategy of PR companies to try to present themselves as the victims in a concerted campaign to smear and discredit Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. There was the ‘Eradicate Blairite Scum’ T-shirt, which was devised by a Blairite and her pet PR person. Mike has put up a piece today reporting that the elderly gentleman wearing that claims he was tricked by the two, and feels that he has also been smeared because of it. Then there was the letter by over 40 female Blairite MPs complaining that they had been abused in his name, when there is no evidence that anything of the sort had occurred. Quite apart from the staged heckling of Corbyn himself at a gay rights rally, done by another PR person from Portland, a company owned by Will Straw, the son of Jack Straw.

I also notice that he makes absolutely no proposal to tackle the New Labour and Tory welfare cuts, despite the fact that these have thrust millions into precarity and grinding poverty. The Work Capability Assessment has resulted in at least over a thousand seriously ill people dying after being found ‘fit for work’ by Atos and their successor, Maximus. In some areas, 80 per cent of those told they were fit for work had their judgements overturned on appeal. But the damage inflicted on very many vulnerable people through the stress of these tests is severe. It has made the mental health of nearly 300,000 people worse, sometimes seriously so. He hasn’t promised to end the system of benefit sanctions, despite the hardships and injustice these have caused. The blog ‘Diary of a Food Bank Helper’ has put up numerous cases of those working at the sharp end of poverty in the UK. Kitty S. Jones, Johnny Void and so many others have also put up their accounts of people, who’ve been thrown off benefit for often the flimsiest reasons. Like they’re turned up a few minutes late, because they had to arrange alternative means of getting their children to or from school. Or they were in hospital, and so couldn’t attend the interview. Or some other bullsh*t excuse.

I’m still haunted by some of these stories. Stilloaks on his blog put up the cases of some of the 590 people, who have died of hunger or through their own hands, after having their benefit stopped. This included a young mother, who leaped through an upper storey window, killing herself and her baby. There was an elderly couple, who committed suicide together, because they were starving and had come to the end. One of the accounts, not of a fatality, was of how members of the public came to comfort a young man, who broke down in tears outside the Jobcentre, weeping because they wouldn’t give him any money.

This is the kind of establishment bullying that had people marching in the streets back in the 1930s. It’s the casual abuse by the entitled privileged classes, that inspired the comrades of the National Union of the Unemployed to occupy the Ritz, leaving their patrons aghast because the proles had dared to show up! How dare they!

Some of these account of poverty were read out in parliament. It says everything you need to know about Cameron and IDS that they had a good chuckle about them, live on air. Yep, to the Tories, poverty and desperation are a damned good, jolly joke, provided those affected are just grammar school oik or the hoi polloi from the comprehensives and secondary moderns.

And from Owen Smith and New Labour – silence. Smudger abstained on the Tory welfare cuts. As did Eagle. Mind you, they couldn’t do anything else, as New Labour was responsible for introducing a fair part of the legislation on which they were based. Like the Work Capability Tests.

Giving people a decent wage is an excellent start. But it also needs to be coupled with policies that won’t lead to the starvation of those of on benefits. Smudger isn’t going to tackle this. And so whatever he says or does, he’s still content to see a fair chunk of the 3.7 million trapped in food poverty remain in it.

And then there is the authoritarian mindset behind these antics. Jeremy Corbyn is massively popular with grassroots Labour. And I’m confident that, if his parliamentary party actually bothered to take the trouble to represent their members and constituents, he’d be massively popular too with the electorate. After all, before the Tories shot into a 16 point lead ahead of Labour this week, there were only a single point ahead last week. And this despite all the abuse and smears.

But that’s too much for the Blairites. They can’t stand the idea that the neoliberal policies Tony Blair placed so much faith in as the electoral salvation of the Labour party, actually aren’t. And they definitely don’t see themselves as the ‘servants of the people’, as Andrew Rawnsley ironically titled his book on Blair and his coterie. They see themselves as the leaders, whom the grassroots members should automatically obey. And if they still persist, then they’re a Trotskyite hippy rabble wearing donkey jackets and smelling of patchouli, who should leave the party.

Smudger and his cohorts have an absolute contempt for ordinary people, who are to be sneered at, tricked and deceived. He and they have lied about Jeremy Corbyn. He will lie, and lie flagrantly, once he is in government. He and they cannot and should not be trusted with power. He will not restore the NHS. He will not renationalise the utilities, and he will not renationalise our failing railways. He’s a fake, and the genuinely progressive policies he’s adopted are their to disguise the privatising neoliberal underneath. And once he gets in power, it’s a fair bet that they’ll be forgotten, and he’ll carry on copying Tory policies as before. After all, it’s what Bliar did.

Vox Political on the Labourist Owen Smith on Newsnight

Mike the other day also put up a piece on Owen Smith’s performance on BBC’s Newsnight. Mike and a number of other opponents of Blairite neoliberalism found it a cheering experience. It wasn’t quite a car crash, but, according to Mike, there were still some heavy swerves. He also observed that although Smudger mostly managed to control himself over Corbyn, he still felt constrained to sneer at him for his perceived lack of patriotism, and claimed that Corbyn had only had just over half the votes in the election, far underestimating the amount of support Corbyn had and has.

What I found particularly telling was the way Smiffy refused to use the word ‘Socialism’. He instead used the term ‘Labourism’ instead, to the manifest incredulity of the interviewer. In actual fact, historians of the Labour party and political scientists have for a long time made a distinction between ‘socialism’ and ‘labourism’. Socialism means the collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. It can take many different forms, from co-operatives through to state ownership, or collective ownership by trade unions, as in Syndicalism. It may also involve different degrees, from complete nationalism, as in the former Soviet Union, to a mixed economy, as in Britain and most other western European countries before Thatcher and the Neoliberal devastation of our public life.

Labourism, on the other hand, simply means anything that benefits organised labour. For a couple of decades after its foundation, there was a tension in the Labour party between the trade unions, or some of the elements in the trade unions, and the various Socialist bodies. Some of the trade union members wanted the Labour party to concentrate on protecting union rights, such as the right to strike and picket, and fighting to obtain better wages for working people. Furthermore, under Lloyd George’s introduction of the first, preliminary foundations of the welfare state, trade unions could serve as the official bodies for the administration of the social security and healthcare schemes, along with private insurance companies. This has been described as a ‘labourist’ policy, as it was designed to help working people, but was not a socialist measure in that it did not involve the state or collective ownership.

I was also told by a friend last week that the Labour party has removed the term ‘Socialism’ from its constitution. I’m not surprised. Blair was not a Socialist by any stretch of the imagination. He got rid of Clause 4, the clause in the Labour party’s constitution that pledged the party to nationalisation and collective ownership. I’m not surprised that New Labour, in order to endear itself to all those darling swing voters and the aspirant middle classes, as well as rich donors, dropped the ‘socialist’ label as well.

But Smudger isn’t a labourist, either. Blair and New Labour hated and distrusted the trade unions, and have done everything they can to deny them any effective power to oppose the increasingly punitive and exploitative employment legislation. Legislation introduced not just by the Tories, but by the Labour right. Blair and Brown talked rubbish about the need to support flexible labour market policies as well as social justice. In practice, the Warmonger and his grumpy sidekick jettisoned social justice, as again, swing voters, the aspirant middle class, and the media barons, like Murdoch, all had the vapours when faced with it.

So Smiff isn’t a Socialist, nor proper labour. He didn’t oppose the Tory welfare cuts, and I doubt very much that he wants to anything about the employment legislation that is driving people in this country into poverty – the zero hours and short employment contracts, the proliferation of unpaid internships, workfare and all the rest of the vile schemes designed to make working people as poor and as desperate as possible.

He and the rest of New Labour – Progress, Saving Labour and the rest, are bog-standard Tories, and nothing else. They should leave the party and cross the floor to their true political home.

Guy Debord’s Cat on the Posturing of the Blairites

Like just about everyone, who really wants the Labour party to mean something, and represent the interests and ideals of working people, rather than just be an imitation of the Tories, Guy Debord’s Cat is losing his patience with the antics of the Blairites. He put up this very short piece, in which a Labour right-winger goes from a simple statement that they merely want to be the responsible party of government to accusations of harassment and bullying when their position is simply questioned by a member of the public.

See https://buddyhell.wordpress.com/2016/07/23/a-typical-conversation-between-an-ordinary-citizen-and-a-labour-right-winger/

This is very much how many of us see them, and their attempts play the victim when their own bullying doesn’t get them their way. It’s too bad the Blairites in Progress and Saving Labour haven’t yet cottoned on to how poisonous and ridiculous they look. Though unfortunately, I don’t think that would stop them even if they did. True egomaniacs, it’s everyone else who’s wrong, and the glorious mechanism of the free market, private industry, cutting away welfare to make the poor, sick and disabled starve, according to the sacred teachings of Maggie Thatcher, must in no way be questioned. They work. Even when it’s obvious to everyone that they don’t.

New Labour Turns to Criminal Hacking to Stop Corbyn

Mike yesterday put up a piece reporting that an internet campaign organisation, #HackingLabour, had been formed by the Blairites at Progress, Saving Labour and Labour First. This organisation has the object of hacking into Labour’s computer records, in order to find details of ex-members, who left in protest against Corbyn’s election as leader of the Labour party. #HackingLabour and its backers wish to use the information to recruit these former members back to Labour, so that they can vote six more anti-Labour representatives onto the NEC to block Corbyn’s policies there.

Mike points out that such data mining is illegal under data protection laws. See his article at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/07/18/hackinglabour-the-new-wheeze-by-the-campaign-against-corbyn-is-a-criminal-offence/

In fact, it was so illegal that Mike later reported that the Information Commissioner had stepped in to stop it.

Information Commissioner acts to shut down illegal #HackingLabour data harvesting

This is more evidence showing just how desperate New Labour is to hold on to power, and keep people trapped in the Thatcherite consensus of austerity, welfare cuts and poverty, all to curry favour with the right-wing media and political and economic establishment. It’s just one in a long line of dirty tricks, from T-shirts to heckling and other PR stunts.

Of course, the real question is what Owen Smith and Angela Eagle think of all this. These stunts have been done for their benefit, and breaking into computers to steal membership information isn’t that far removed from breaking into a hotel room to steal information. That brought down Richard Nixon. The public has a right to know what Smith and Eagle think about it, because this reflects on their attitude to other, possible forms of corruption and illegality in government.