How’s that London Olympic Legacy coming along? How goes the spirit of 2012 and all that euphoria? Not well. Not well at all if you’re poor. Residents in the flats opposite Grenfell Tower recently received a warning letter from those bleeding hearts at Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Association.
Under the terms of the “Anti-Social Behaviour” clause of their tenancy agreements, the residents must stop – get this – their children playing ball. Should the budding Wayne Rooney, Andy Murray or Rachael Heyhoe Flint continue to play balls games in the area around his own home, the family will face legal action.
Just as so much of public space has been zoned into areas of (in)tolerance by successive governments, the area about these people’s homes is a no-ball zone. It’s not a public space whose purpose is shaped by the people who enjoy it; it’s a restricted zone patrolled by the public authority. Socialising is messy, you see. Football, music, talking loudly, larking about, being a berk, smoking, drinking, skateboarding, hanging out and, well, anything, is messy. Your betters will control the area and in their doing control you.
This letter is dated 14 June 2017 – the day after the fire. ITV says the letter was hand-delivered to residents three days after the fire.
Safety regulations are not strong enough but the full weight of law will be brought down heavily on children living their lives and having fun. No sprinkler systems in the flats: no problem. Playing football whilst young: you are a criminal.
And don’t blame the Tories for this nastiness, this branding of people living in social housing as lesser beings deserving of less rights, less autonomy and less enjoyment has been going on for decades. Labour were very keen on this sort of thing. All politicians are.
After Grenfell Tower the media and politicians are demanding that we find someone to blame. The horror invites many questions about the 24-storey tower block’s cladding, sprinklers, fire-alarms, house building, the cost and availability of new homes, social-housing, gentrification that makes you look at London and wonder where the working class and poor live in the shiny, super-pricey city – where cladding Tower blocks rather than rebuilding them is a priority – and the ‘decanting’ of poorer people living in crowded accommodation on land that has soared in value following policies like the Urban Task Force with its mantra to build up not out.
As the acid stench of burning permeates the air and the painful, painstaking work of finding and identifying the victims continues, a cynical cloud has seeped in. The clamour to blame and make arrests quickly, to play party politics over the destruction of so many lives is nasty and limiting.
I touched on this race to blame yesterday, noting a section of former US poet laureate Josef Brodksy’s speech to students in 1988. This is more from that address to the graduating class. You can read it all here. It’s a terrific read. In six rules for successful living, Brodsky words on politicians and blame resonate.
3.) Try not to set too much store by politicians — not so much because they are dumb or dishonest, which is more often than not the case, but because of the size of their job, which is too big even for the best among them, by this or that political party, doctrine, system or a blueprint thereof. All they or those can do, at best, is to diminish a social evil, not eradicate it. No matter how substantial an improvement may be, ethically speaking it will always be negligible, because there will always be those — say, just one person — who won’t profit from this improvement. The world is not perfect; the Golden Age never was or will be. The only thing that’s going to happen to the world is that it will get bigger, i.e., more populated while not growing in size. No matter how fairly the man you’ve elected will promise to cut the pie, it won’t grow in size; as a matter of fact, the portions are bound to get smaller. In light of that, or, rather, in dark of that — you ought to rely on your own home cooking, that is, on managing the world yourselves — at least that part of it that lies within your reach, within your radius.
Yet in doing this, you must also prepare yourselves for the heart-rending realization that even that pie of yours won’t suffice; you must prepare yourselves that you’re likely to dine as much in disappointment as in gratitude. The most difficult lesson to learn here is to be steady in the kitchen, since by serving this pie just once you create quite a lot of expectations. Ask yourself whether you can afford a steady supply of those pies, or would you rather bargain on a politician? Whatever the outcome of this soul-searching may be — however much you think the world can bet on your baking — you might start right away by insisting that those corporations, banks, schools, labs and whatnot where you’ll be working, and whose premises are heated and policed round the clock anyway, permit the homeless in for the night, now that it’s winter.
But more than that, this. It’s one of the most motivating pieces of advice I’ve read.
5. ) At all costs try to avoid granting yourself the status of the victim. Of all the parts of your body, be most vigilant over your index finger, for it is blame-thirsty. A pointed finger is a victim’s logo — the opposite of the V-sign and a synonym for surrender. No matter how abominable your condition may be, try not to blame anything or anybody: history, the state, superiors, race, parents, the phase of the moon, childhood, toilet training, etc. The menu is vast and tedious, and this vastness and tedium alone should be offensive enough to set one’s intelligence against choosing from it. The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything; it could be argued even that that blame-thirsty finger oscillates as wildly as it does because the resolve was never great enough in the first place.
After all, a victim status is not without its sweetness. It commands compassion, confers distinction, and whole nations and continents bask in the murk of mental discounts advertised as the victim’s conscience. There is an entire victim-culture, ranging from private counselors to international loans. The professed goal of this network notwithstanding, its net result is that of lowering one’s expectations from the threshold, so that a measly advantage could be perceived or billed as a major breakthrough. Of course, this is therapeutic and, given the scarcity of the world’s resources, perhaps even hygienic, so for want of a better identity, one may embrace it — but try to resist it. However abundant and irrefutable is the evidence that you are on the losing side, negate it as long as you have your wits about you, as long as your lips can utter “No.” On the whole, try to respect life not only for its amenities but for its hardships, too. They are a part of the game, and what’s good about a hardship is that it is not a deception. Whenever you are in trouble, in some scrape, on the verge of despair or in despair, remember: that’s life speaking to you in the only language it knows well. In other words, try to be a little masochistic: without a touch of masochism, the meaning of life is not complete. If this is of any help, try to remember that human dignity is an absolute, not a piecemeal notion, that it is inconsistent with special pleading, that it derives its poise from denying the obvious. Should you find this argument a bit on the heady side, think at least that by considering yourself a victim you but enlarge the vacuum of irresponsibility that demons or demagogues love so much to fill, since a paralyzed will is no dainty for angels.
Regulation is lifeless without the will to make things better.
Posted: 16th, June 2017 | In: News, Politicians, Reviews | Comment
The horror at Grenfell Tower fire dominates the news. The fire shouldn’t happened. After fires at King’s Cross station and Bradford football ground took many lives, prevention became the watchword. A fire and building inspector told media “if there is a fire in any of these buildings, you’d expect it to be contained to an individual apartment. You wouldn’t expect it to spread in anything like the way, and certainly not in the time, that we’ve actually seen here.” But the level of prevention was inadequate.
The appalling scene at the 1974-built tower block in West London scars the mind. Volunteers are flocking to the site of the disaster. The stricken and bereaved are not echoes. We see them.
The faces of the dead pepper the front page like bullets holes. Most of us didn’t know them but, boy, can we feel the pain.
And it spreads. Already the newspapers are out of time. The present is fleeting. Twelve dead, says the Mirror’s cover. The figure is now 17. The newspapers try to report and make sense of the terrifying blaze. The Daily Mail produces a special edition with 21 pages, all led by the question “How the hell could it happen?” “Tragic. Horrific. Avoidable,” says the ‘i’ newspaper. The Sun has 18 pages of coverage, leading with “They were told it was safe”. “Warnings were ignored,” says the Guardian’s front page.
The papers’ questions can be distilled: who is to blame? Surely we should wait until we know the facts before naming and shaming any guilty parties, if there are any. If we trust the brave and heroic firefighters who race in as others run out, we must trust them to investigate fully. But in the void, many like to use the horror to score points. This should be avoided.
Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky put it well in his 1998 address to students in Michigan:
“Of all the parts of your body, be most vigilant over your index finger, for it is blame-thirsty. A pointed finger is a victim’s logo – the opposite of the V-sign and a synonym for surrender. No matter how abominable your condition may be, try not to blame anything or anybody: history, the state, superiors, race, parents, the phase of the moon, childhood, toilet training, etc. The menu is vast and tedious, and this vastness and tedium alone should be offensive enough to set one’s intelligence against choosing from it. The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything; it could be argued even that that blame-thirsty finger oscillates as wildly as it does because the resolve was never great enough in the first place.”
But the rush to blame is contagious. The Tories did it. It’s part of their war on the poor. Labour did it. It’s their nannying, cod environmentalism, lack of home building and lowering of expectations. The media did it, with its assault on health and safety regulations and monstering the poor. Resist the urge to blame. Don’t rush to position yourself as the victims’ conscience. A disaster like Grenfell did not happen by chance and did not happen as the result of one mistake. It’s far more complex than that.
Brendan O’Neill notes:
If this mass burning of homes feels Dickensian, then so too does the hunt for the fat, evil, Tory-like landlord to hold responsible: that’s a Dickensian-style moralism that prefers the thrill of hating immoral individuals to the far harder task of looking at the economy and politics over the past 30 years and asking what might be done to improve both.
We don’t know all the names of the victims. But in this coming together of a community in the face of horror – a genuine community of people who live together, not individuals bunched together by ethnicity or age to further a divisive agenda – let’s take time to focus on those who have lost so much. They’re not looking to blame. They’re looking at how they can carry on. We should be circumspect. We should be kind, stoic and humane.
Madeleine McCann: a look at the missing child in the news. With the media full of huge and often terrible stories, Madeleine McCann has been largely absent from the tabloids’ pages. But she pops up in the Daily Star.
On page 11, readers are told: “BRIT MUM: I STOPPED ‘MADDIE’ KIDNAPPER.” To Mallorca, where mum Blaise Deacon says a “mystery blonde” woman “put her arms around” 23-month-old daughter Darcie and “said he was taking her”. Blaise “grabbed her child” and “refused to let go”.
At which point you wonder where Madeleine McCann comes into this? She went missing in Portugal. Are we to think that anyone who took her in what some theorise to have been been a well-executed crime, is now simply grabbing kids in broad daylight on a Spanish island?
The paper says this “Madeleine McCann-style kidnapper ran to a waiting car and fled”. Only, this person was not a Madeleine McCann-style anything. Moreover, Spanish police have CCTV footage of the incident, which cops investigating what happened to Madeleine McCann do not.
Blaise says the police were “excellent “. She says: “From what we understand they have a match of the suspect and are now looking for her.”
Meanwhile, Madeleine McCann is missing. The police have nothing. But the tabloids have another sensation.
Posted: 15th, June 2017 | In: Madeleine McCann, News | Comment
We should like it that John McDonnell speaks his mind. The shadow chancellor wants people to “get out on the streets” in support of Labour, to force Theresa May from office and to further the cause for another General Election and with it what he hopes will be victory for his Labour Party.
“We need people doing everything they can to ensure the election comes as early as possible,” says McDonnell. “What we need now is the TUC mobilised, every union mobilised, get out on the streets,” the Shadow Chancellor said in comments reported by the Morning Star. “Just think if the TUC put out that call – that we want a million on the streets of London in two weeks’ time.”
Via Private Eye
McDonnell, who went on to talk about his “comrades” in Labour, has much form when it comes to saying what’s in his head. He refused to apologise for calling Esther McVey a “stain on humanity”. “Sometimes it is better to be honest with people about how you feel,” he said. “At times, in parliament in particular, it means using strong language that reflects your honest views.”
I’m no fan of McDonnell, his calls for revolution mask a man steeped in conformity, who wants a society funded on taxation and welfare.
I enjoy his call for protest, a cornerstone of any democracy. But does a raucous protest – Occupy, anyone? – do anything other than gain media attention? The suspicion is that McDonnell, an MP and with that job title a member of the Establishment, would rather the marchers and Left presented themselves as victims of oppression than as active agents in a fight for meaningful change. If you can’t win through political argument – and twitter is wrong; Labour lost – you call for those already on your side and with time on their hands to get together and hope that being there is enough.
Posted: 15th, June 2017 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Are we edging towards Remain by another name? Last June, 17.4million people voted in a legal and free election for the country to leave the EU. On twitter, Jo Maugham QC (@JolyonMaugham) tweeted: “This is the *only way* for the Tories to remain in Government: outflank Hard Brexit Labour on the Remain side.”
But Labour and the Tories both vowed to support Brexit. Over 80% of the electorate backed the two parties at the election. The LibDems wanted a second referendum, echoing the EU’s habit of keeping citizens voting until they produce the ‘right’ result. But the LibDems were thrashed, existing now more as focus group than a political party that could win power.
The referendum result must stand. Mick Hume wonders:
The anti-democratic EU expresses the fear and loathing which our ruling elites feel towards the mass of people. If they manage to overturn, ignore or emasculate the Brexit vote, the largest political mandate for anything in British political history, it would represent an historic setback for popular democracy.
Agreed. The troubling thought is that if the Tories adopt the policy of ditching Brexit to remain in Government – and both Theresa May and Philip Hammond were Remainers – we get the worst of all worlds: a hapless Prime Minster and a rejection of Brexit. The chance to try something new will have taken from us.
Democracy is in peril. Who will shape the best argument to save it?
Posted: 14th, June 2017 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Transfer Balls – with Alexis Sanchez Watch: The Arsenal player wants to leave the Gunners. Will he join Manchester City or Bayern Munich? Arsenal should get shot of him, of course. Any player who wants to leave isn’t committed to the cause. You cut them out. Let’s see what the paper’s are saying:
The Daily Mirror leads with news that Sanchez ” fears” Arsenal will block his move to Man City. The paper says City will “trump Bayern’s £40m offer and give Sanchez £280,000-a-week”. Arsenal, we read, have offered Sanchez “in excess of £275,000-a-week to stay at Arsenal”.
But hold on. On June 8, the Mirror told us that Bayern were offering Sanchez £350,000 a week. Are we to believe Sanchez will take less money to play for Man City? Is he in a Dutch auction?
The Evening Standard relays what Sanchez has been telling the local Chilean Press: “I’m looking at what my agent is doing. For now, I’m focused on the Confederations Cup in Russia and trying to do well. The truth is that my agent will see to it. He knows and he will sit down with the club to look for the best option for me. I’d like a lot of things but I’m only thinking about the national team.”
Is all the drip-feeding of information the agent’s work, a ploy aimed at gaiting the best terms for his client? As it stands, no deal has been done. Sanchez remains an Arenal player.
The Metro says “Manchester City are reportedly getting increasingly confident that Arsenal will buckle and end up selling Alexis Sanchez this summer instead of losing him on a free transfer in a year’s time.” The Metro presents it as Sanchez holding all the cards. But does he? He’s 28. He’s on £130,000-a-week at Arsenal. Unless he plays to his optimum level next season that huge pay rise will vanish. As for a loss of transfer fees, well, if he fires Arsenal into the Champions’ League or to the Premier League title, £40m will be worth the gamble, and that’s not taking into account the £7.5 in extra cash Arsenal will pay Sanchez under a new deal nor the cost of recruiting his replacement. Add in the fact what selling your best player to a rival says about your club’s ambitions and negotiations look less biased towards the player.
Jeremy Wilson notes:
Arsenal should this time call the player’s bluff. They should make a statement about their ambitions in relation to a Chelsea or City, just as Liverpool did at their expense in the summer of 2013 over Luis Suarez.
Liverpool were in an admittedly stronger position but Arsenal’s offer of £40 million, even allowing for the extra £1, was hardly derisory. Arsenal thought that Suarez’s very public desire to join them would force Liverpool’s hand, in the same way as they had felt obliged in previous summers to let star players leave. Liverpool said no and how did it work out? Suarez eventually settled down and signed a new contract four months later on the understanding that he would leave the following summer. Liverpool almost won the Premier League and then still received a far bigger fee – £65 million – from Barcelona for their player.
Over to you, Alexis.
The Manchester Evening News says, “Manchester City have been left hoping Alexis Sanchez can hold his nerve long enough to force a move to the Etihad.” the paper cite’s anonymous sources who “claim Sanchez has set his heart on a reunion with Guardiola, who signed him for Barcelona in 2011.”
Finally, the Daily Mail says Arsenal will accept no bids from English clubs. It says Manchester City and Chelsea “are ready to pay £45m” for Sanchez. “But due to Arsenal’s stance, he will have to look at offers from the likes of Bayern Munich, Juventus or Paris Saint-Germain instead.”
Or he could stay at Arsenal. The Telegraph says: “Arsenal manager, Arsene Wenger, does, however, retain some hope of convincing Sanchez to stay. Watch this space…”
Posted: 14th, June 2017 | In: Arsenal, Back pages, Liverpool, Manchester City, News, Sports | Comment
Anita Pallenberg (6 April 1942 – 13 June 2017) – was rock music’s greatest muse, writes Rob Baker:
Pallenberg first entered the Rolling Stones’ universe in the mid-Sixties when she sneaked into a concert in Munich and began a relationship with then-guitarist Brian Jones, but eventually left a devastated Jones for Richards.
Marianne Faithfull wrote about Anita in her 1994 autobiography, Faithfull:
How Anita came to be with Brian is really the story of how the Stones became the Stones. She almost single-handedly engineered a cultural revolution in London by bringing together the Stones and the jeunesse dorée…The Stones came away with a patina of aristocratic decadence that served as a perfect counterfoil to the raw roots blues of their music. This…transformed the Stones from pop stars into cultural icons.
Anita again:
Me and Marianne Faithfull were always left alone, as Keith and Mick were recording and we were friends. We hung out together, taking drugs together, and we went to John Paul Getty’s house, the Rossetti House, because he was the last resort and he always had some drugs.
I always lived in Chelsea since we had a house, before that we were living in hotels. I was shocked in Chelsea by hippy girls who were walking barefoot in the Kings Road. I am Italian and in Italy shoes are a sign of wealth. Only very poor people walk without shoes.
Keith Richards wrote in Life, his 2010 autobiography:
I like a high-spirited woman. And with Anita, you knew you were taking on a Valkyrie—she who decides who dies in battle.
Even after their relationship ended, Pallenberg and Richards remained close. In a 2010 interview with Rolling Stone, Richards recalled,
It was tough. At the same time, there is an underlying love that goes beyond all of that other stuff. I can say, ‘I love you, I just won’t live with you.’ And we’re now proud grandparents, which we never thought we’d ever see.
Pallenberg got herself of drugs and drink and while sober during the mid-Nineties she earned a degree in fashion design from Central Saint Martins in London. During the late 2000s she returned to acting as well, appearing in films like Mister Lonely and Cheri, while in interviews she described a happy relaxed life of gardening and art and even taking up botanical drawing.
Courtney Love once asked her whether she would consider getting plastic surgery, Anita reportedly answered, “Darling, I was the most beautiful woman in seventeen countries. I like being ugly!”
Spotter: Flashbak, which has more.
Posted: 14th, June 2017 | In: Celebrities, News | Comment
Today’s Radio 4 chatter about social media connecting with yoof was mind blowing. Replace social media for ‘newspapers’, ‘magazines’, ‘John Lennon’, ‘football’ or ‘TV’ and we were once more being told the cool kids have outgrown the old ways and are rebelling.
Our parents don’t understand us, man, they cry. Only they do because they’ve tracked your iphone and follow you on Instagram under an assumed name. And the hubristic people you voted for are older than your dad.
You’re not a rebel marching on the citadel, writing searing protest music and creating a rosy-fingered dawn. You’re not Spartacus. You’re a nerd with a Vodafone contract.
Posted: 13th, June 2017 | In: News, Politicians, Reviews | Comment
‘Ich bin ein role model’
Katy Perry has issued a public apology for having “culturally appropriated” a black hairstyle.
Whites are not allowed to use black hair styles and blacks should not use white hair styles, reasons Katy. Back in your boxes, people. Your bouffant, suedehead, skinhead, mop-top, shaggy perm, bowel cut and mohican is now limited by genes.
To avoid causing offence, and to further individuality, self-expression and freedom, all musicians should cover their heads with wimples, shrouds and Brian Eno wigs (the former Roxy Music band member recognised the link between identity and hair, choosing to cover his luxurious chestnut curls beneath a ‘balding’ helmet, thus securing his ‘brand’ and enduring ‘iconic’ status).
People should not wear metal helmets because the robot community is offended. “The likes of Gary Newman, Kraftwerk, and Daft Punk all pretend to be robots,” says Mr Autotune, partner at Messers Speak ‘n’ Spell PR and a spokesmachine for the robot community. “Their behaviour suppresses robot-kind and perpetuates arcane media narratives of robots as lacking in emotion and incapable of playing anything other than synthesizers.”
Meanwhile, Perry has yet to explain why she’s adopted the hairstyles of a gay man.
Posted: 13th, June 2017 | In: Celebrities, News | Comment
Is Jeremy Corbyn surging towards Downing Street? Can urban young Remainers get Corbyn, a Eurosceptic for most of his life, to change his ways, scupper Brexit and become Prime Minister? The stakes seem very high after Theresa May’s humbling. The General Election result invites so many questions.
Is democracy in peril? Wasn’t Brexit the biggest revolt in British politics, a rejection of the establishment? Is Corbyn’s dynamic campaign and his leadership a strike against a hard Brexit? Is the increased Labour vote share a turn away from Leave and back to the EU? Brexit was not central to the General Election debate. Well, so they told us. And then when the votes were counted, it became all about Brexit. Have your heard anything other than Brexit leading the news cycle and TV bulletins?
Tabloid round-up:
In the Daily Mirror, we read (fornt page): “Corbyn: I Can Be Prime Minister In Months”
Corbyn says that if the Tories call another snap election, he’s ready to win it and become Prime Minister. So close is Corbyn to power that the paper finally introduces Mrs Corbyn III. She’s Laura Alvarez, an ex-banker and 48 years young. She married Corbyn in her native Mexico in 2012. What does she do with her time? “She now imports fair trade coffee.” She is very much the kind of supporter Labour now represents.
The Daily Mail leads with “Theresa Tears Up Manifesto”. Well quite. “Theresa”. We’re still on first name terms with Mrs May in the Daily Mail. Even on Saturday, when the vote was raw and she was, as the Mirror’s source tells it, “welling up with tears”, the Mail backed “Theresa”.
The Mail on Sunday is less pally, preferring a night in with Boris:
As Mail editors compete, today’s paper has Boris Johnson, for it she, declaring: “Me after the top job? That’s tripe, says Boris.” Tripe you can read in the, er, Mail on Sunday.
So into Theresa is the Mail that Peter Oborne analyses the election and declares: “Let’s calm down and remember that Mrs May won.” She won a bigger slice of the vote and more voters, but she lost the most important result on seats won. Rather like Nicola Sturgeon, May took voters for granted and failed to engage with them.
But the real winner seems to be Boris Johnson. The Mail on Sunday loves him. The Star (“IT’S BOJO THE FAVE”) supports him. The Sun leads with him. “BOJO: BINNING MAY IS A NO-NO – Boris tells Tories to stop plotting.” BOJO. Boris. May.
So keen is Boris Johnson to leave Theresa May in the limelight that he writes a column for the Sun. He make one salient point about democracy and the fluidity of modern politics, noting that Corbyn “picked up Kensington – but then he also lost Mansfield”. Labour is the party of the south. Who represents the working class now? Boris Johnson?
And finally the Express also leads with “BORIS”. He says”TORY MPs MUST BACK MAY”. Over pages 4 and 5 we’re told: “We need to calm down and pull together says Boris.” We see the text message he sent to Tory MPs to encourage them to back the Prime Minister. Rally round the leader, says Boris. Boris should be leader, says the media. Rally round me, says Boris.
Posted: 12th, June 2017 | In: News, Politicians, Tabloids | Comment
Much weeping and wailing over the Tory Party calling on the DUP to form a coalition government. One commentator described the DUP as the locals from The Dukes of Hazard. But ridicule is not enough. The censorious call is for a ban.
The shrill petition against the Tory-DUP deal has hit half a million signatures within 24 hour. What an intolerant, sneering, entitled mob we are. How great it is to be so into freedom, liberty and ‘being myself’ that you can ban other ideas and ‘bad’ people with abandon. The argument is settled! The science is settled! Thou shalt not dissent! No wonder Islamists feel so at home here. But you don’t need knives and bombs to destroy democracy. You just need a free online petition.
But this isn’t really about the red-neck DUP. This is about stopping Brexit. Back in 2015, the New Statesman told us the DUP were Labour’s allies in the General Election battle:
DUP could do a deal with Labour, says party’s Westminster leader – Nigel Dodds says he “can do business” with Ed Miliband and praises his responsible capitalism agenda.
George Eaton had encouraging news on how the DUP and Labour could unite to stop the Tories:
The Northern Irish party is traditionally viewed as a potential partner for the Conservatives, who considered a deal with them before the 2010 election. But when I interviewed the DUP’s Westminster leader, Nigel Dodds, he rejected this characterisation and signalled that he was open to an agreement with Labour.
“We can do business with either of the two leaders, either Ed Miliband or David Cameron, and we will obviously judge what’s in the best interests of the United Kingdom as a whole,” the North Belfast MP told me. “And obviously we’ll also be looking at it from the point of view of the constituencies that we represent in Northern Ireland as a whole. Unionism has worked in the past with Labour governments and we’ve worked in the past with Conservative governments back in the 70s. Indeed, the Ulster Unionist Party propped up the Callaghan administration. But it remains to be seen. We are certainly not in the pocket of either party and we’re certainly in a position where we’re able to negotiate with both of them.”
How ambitious were the DUP? Said Dodds: “We are not interested in a full-blown coalition government with ministerial positions and all of that.” The NS was delighted, calling the DUP’s openness “a boost for Labour”.
The Guardian said “senior Labour and Tory figures believe they will be able to work constructively with the DUP”. Labour saw the DUP as a “reliable partner”. The DUP had a “more natural affinity to Labour”. As for the DUP’s views on homosexuality – Ian Paisley, the party’s founder, once campaigned to “save Ulster from sodomy” – well, that wasn’t an issue:
Labour and the Tories are both troubled by the views of many DUP members on LGBT rights, highlighted by the resignation of the party’s health minister. But that would have no technical impact on negotiations over the formation of a UK government – LGBT matters are devolved to the Northern Ireland assembly.
Wind the clock forward and the DUP are no longer the party of Labour hope, who get on with Labour leaders “extremely well”. They are regressive and anti-human. They are the “ultra-conservative DUP”, says the Guardian. “The DUP has vetoed the legalisation of same-sex marriage five times in Northern Ireland assembly votes. A majority of DUP members also oppose the legalisation of abortion, which is prohibited in Northern Ireland unless the mother’s life is at risk.”
The “DUP is undoubtedly bad news for the pro-choice movement in Northern Ireland”, says one New Statesman writer. The DUP’s rise to prominence will “embolden other anti-choice MPs”. Another writer tells New Statesmen readers: “Any government that includes the DUP is profoundly bad news for women.” All of them, including Arlene Foster, the DUP’s leader, because “women have the equal opportunity to be depressing misogynists too”. Or to put it another way: not all women agree with one another; they can hold their own views and exercise free will in decision making.
All abortion should be decriminalised. Birth control should be a private matter. But to call the DUP women haters is unhelpful, hyperbolic and deliberately polarising. It’s meant to be, of course. If the DUP are bad for women’s right then any Brexit contracts signed by a Tory-DUP alliance will be bad for women. Ditch the DUP and save womankind. But with no DUP there can be no easy Brexit. Better yet, there’ll be no Brexit at all.
So add your name to the online poll, and defeat the free and legal vote for Brexit, one backed by over 17m low-information, tabloid-duped people between 7am and 10pm on a June day last year. Do it for the many, not the few.
PS: This dicing up of the electorate into gender, race and age is hideous. We don’t vote with our skin, genitals or student ID. We vote with our heads, hearts and wallets. The narrative that says Labour is the party of youth overlooks the number of younger voters who voted Tory and the older voters who were unnerved by the so-called dementia tax and turned away from Theresa May. It also ignores how fluid voting has become. UKIP’s collapse was down to its voters turning to Labour and the Conservatives. Fudge Brexit and UKIP may yet rise again. A return to ‘safe and secure’ two-party politics is far from guaranteed.
Posted: 10th, June 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
Is it different for women? Husband and wife Tony and Julie Wadsworth have been found guilty of encouraging six boys to take part in sexual activity between 1992 and 1996. The Wadsworths, both ex-BBC radio presenters, had denied all charges, putting their victim through the ordeal of a three-week trial. Julie Wadsworth, 60, was convicted of nine indecent assaults against boys and five counts of outraging public decency. Tony Wadsowrth, 69, was found guilty of the same charges.
Nasty stuff. Sordid and ugly. So how does the Sun report on these sex criminals, villains the Mail brands “paedophiles”? Well, from the off the story is of “romps” and the “kinky” wife. Since when did indecent assault become a romp?
In case you’re not yet titillated, the paper has lots more photos of Julie:
ROMP – Collins Dictionary:
verb – When children or animals romp, they play noisily and happily. Dogs and little children romped happily in the garden. Synonyms: frolic, sport, skip, have fun.
countable noun – If two people have a romp, they have sex in a light-hearted and very casual way.
The grainy black and white image below featured in the Leicester Trader in December 1979 “when the paper ran a glamour competition featuring local girls”.
There is the Julie Wadsworth mug shot – and we even see Tony – a paedo less worthy of the front page – posing for the police’s camera:
But the photos of Julie Wadsworth surely invite readers to appraise her appearance. Are we really to think that paedophilia is ok if the abuser is shaggable? Is it different for women?
Huzzah for Jeremy Corbyn. He lost the General Election for Labour to a Tory leader he thinks so useless she should resign. Theresa May can’t hang on for five years – not with her track record of defeating Corbyn by just 58 seats.
She has to go, says Corbyn.
Tony Blair defeated three Tory leaders at General Elections. There’s hope in the Corbyn camp that he’ll see the back of many more. Labour lost in 2017 by the same margin they lost to useless David Cameron in 2010.
As the Daily Mash puts it:
He said: “I am very confident that I can now be beaten by a classic British idiot like Boris Johnson, or even someone as utterly moronic and dreadful as Andrea Leadsom.
“If the Tories are stupid enough to choose a dimwit like Liam Fox or David Davies then I can promise them both a reasonable level of victory.”
High Five!
Posted: 9th, June 2017 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
It’s “TEZZA v JEZZA” (Daily Star) and the tabloids are going big on the leaders of the country’s two biggest parties.
Which leader’s picture appears most?
The Daily Star leads with photos of Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. Corbyn looks like he’s flicking through some old holiday snaps of his time with Diane Abbott. Theresa May is in full Joyce Grenfell mode. Inside the paper, over pages 2 and 3, both leaders are smiling.
It’s just May on the Express‘ cover. No sign of Corbyn until page 12. “We must not let Jeremy Corbyn into Number 10,” says Ross Clark at first sighting of the Labour leader.
The Mirror finds a horrible picture of May and makes it big and then bigger. Get a load of those nostrils! Gerra load of those bogies up those nostrils!! And then look at the bags below the staring eyes, the teeth, the lips, the lot. Aaaaaah! There is no sign of Corbyn. Where is he?
On pages 2-3, we get 7 more pictures of May – and not one of Corbyn. We see and hear from Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary. We see May with a long Pinocchio hooter.
Finally we get to see Jeremy Corbyn on page 4. He’s inviting us to examine the thumb on his right hand. In a smaller photo, we see his right hand held up and open. You wonder what the left hand is doing and if the right hand knows what the left hand is doing.
There are two more pictures of Theresa May. On page 7, there’s a cartoon showing May being kicked – physically kicked – by a battalion of voters.
On page 8, we again see May. She’s everywhere in the Mirror.
The Daily Mail leads with May. She is smiling. Her hands are spread wide. The picture is flattering.
Page 4 and May’s back. She’s “fired up”.
Page 9 and we see picture of Diane Abbott. But sill no sign of Jeremy Corbyn. He’s nowhere. There is not one photo of the Labour Party leader in the Mail.
This man is rubbish – actual rubbish
The Sun shows Corbyn on the cover. He’s in the “COR-BIN (geddit?). He is rubbish, actual rubbish. (If anyone fancies a flutter, I’d go each-way on Puppet of Unions in the 3:15).
Over pages 2 and 3, we see two photos of smiling Theresa May.
On pages 4 and 5 we see Jeremy Corbyn stood below a sign that says “CRAP”. It did say “SCRAP” – another sort of rubbish, if you will – but if you crop the ‘S’ it’s changed to “CRAP”.
Pages 8-9 and the Sun dresses up Corbyn. We see the now Prime Minister sat on a bench in “derelict Britain”. We get one more photo of a smiling May.
Meanwhile… the kind of people who don’t like tabloids and the Untermensch who read them are burning the things. It really is like the 1930s. And it’s not Nazis shutting down free speech and monstering anyone you don’t agree with – it’s you, the right on fascist spotters! Oh, the irony!
Psst: Any Corbyn fans got a copy of the Jewish Chronicle? It’s full of burning issues.
Vote now and vote often. RAUS!
Posted: 8th, June 2017 | In: News, Politicians, Tabloids | Comment
Politicians all want to censor the web. CapX writes:
It took us many centuries, a lot of effort and much expended blood and gore to get to this place where we are free – at liberty and ruled by the law, not the whims of people nor the rage of the mob. That we have those who would snatch them from us worries me far less than what our rulers will do to us and our liberty in the name of protecting us from those bearded nutters.
Just wait until the next generation of politicians arrive in Westminster from our elite universities. Spiked’s Free Speech University Rankings tells us: “The more prestigious universities, those ranked highest in popular league tables, are nearly always the most censorious; the few green-ranking institutions are generally less highly esteemed.”
Joanna Williams adds:
The link between academic success and a fondness for censorship is more than just a mindset. It is precisely because they are the academic achievers that students at elite universities demand freedom from speech…They’ve learned that language constructs reality, and that ‘words that wound’ can inflict ‘spirit murder’ on those who, according to their gender, ethnicity or sexual identity, are assumed to be forever powerless. The students who excel in elite universities today have come to embody the vulnerability they see in others.
They don’t trust us. They moralise about our choices, thoughts and movements. They pick technical arguments about what should be banned and permitted over debating the root cause of the problem that leads people to become Islamist killers. In the minds of these superior prudes and knowing gatekeepers, the mere act of looking becomes a gateway to crime.
Posted: 7th, June 2017 | In: News, Politicians, Reviews, Technology | Comment
Worse than video nasties, scourge of the 1980s, sex and trolls are YouTube videos possessed of a power to radicalise the viewer, transforming a normal bloke surfing the web for Wiggles songs and old episodes of Play For Today into a mass murderer. No circumspection, reflection or deliberation. To see is to do.
Jonathan Sacerdoti notes:
I’ve watched plenty of extremist videos and heard some dodgy speeches over the years. I even watched a couple of videos online this last week of extremist Rabbis preaching against rational and modern thought as well as homosexuality. But I didn’t become a backwards thinking fanatic.
Why do some people want to say “was radicalised” (a passive thing), rather than “chose to become an extremist and murderer”?
Passivity reduces the killer’s free will to dust. He’s one step closer to becoming a ‘vulnerable’ victim. And – boy – do Islamists love being victims. The actual victims – the people murdered – are reduced, their innocence linked to the killer’s vulnerability, the good boy or good girl from a good family who was ‘groomed’ online by powers too strong to resist. We are corralled into looking not only at the victim and saying “There but for the grace of god…”, but empathising with the killer, too. And you can’t blame a victim, so the narrative goes. You can’t get angry at a victim.
Radicalisation doesn’t come out of the blue or from a YouTube snuff movie or tweet. It’s rooted in the Islamists’ antagonism towards the prevailing culture and a search for a form of aggrandised, pristine identity they can embrace and be defined by. You might call them fascists.
Posted: 6th, June 2017 | In: News, Reviews | Comment (1)
The London Bridge and Borough Market terror attacks – how do the tabloids cover the massacre? All share the same news of heroic deeds, horrific injuries and barbarity. But their different treatment of Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn is notable. Which of the political leaders do you trust to keep us safe?
Daily Star (front page): “HEROES”
The paper focuses first not on the Islamist extremists who murdered people, rather on the people who helped defeat them and help the injured. We meet Gerard Vowles and Geoff Ho.
Page 2 – 3: “HUNTING FOR VICTIMS”. Now we get to the killers, who wielded foot-long hunting knives and used a truck to slaughter people. And then to the heroes once more.
GEEZER: Gerard Vowles, a proper Londoner who makes us proud. He went to help a woman being set upon by the murderers. He “pelted the killers with pint glasses, bottles and chairs”.
GEEZER: A woman “wedged herself in a restaurant door to stop the gang bursting in and attacking diners”. We do not know her name. But she held things up long enough for 20 people to escape.
GEEZER: A cabbie tried to run down the killers with his taxi. (More on him later.)
GEEZER: A copper took on all three killers. He was armed with a baton. He was stabbed many times. He survived.
GEEZER: Geoff Ho is a journalist for the Sunday Express. He was stabbed in the neck trying to help a doorman under attack. He tweeted: “Don’t know whether it was stupid or noble to jump in and break up the fight outside the Southwark Tavern, but two a*******s trying to do over a lone bouncer on the door isn’t happening on my watch.”
(It’s great that the Star is unable to repeat the word “arseholes” but finds no issue carrying adverts for “Proper Filthy Girls” and an invitation to phone in and “Listen to Mother & Daughter” aural sex. Apparently, incest is ok but arseholes are taboo.)
The paper produces grainy photos of the killers waking through Borough Market. We also see one of them dead on the floor, killed by a policeman. The copper’s a geezer, too, as are all the police who raced to help.
Pages 4-5: “Dozens held in Armed Swoops”
Police raided a block of flats in Barking, where one of the killers reportedly lived. He was, says a neighbour, a “nice guy” who “rewarded favours with curry”. Says Mohammed, a neighbour who had jump-started the soon-to-be killer’s car: “I told him to forget about giving me money. The next day he turned up with a lovely chicken biryani that we all enjoyed.” The killer was also seen wearing an Arsenal shirt – the one he was wearing when he murdered so many. “I couldn’t believe it. I had seen him in that shirt at 5pm that evening,” says another neighbour.
Another adds: “He approached me yesterday and asked me where I hired a van recently. He said he was going to move house… He was being nicer than normal… He was always nice, but yesterday he was an entirely different level of niceness.”
Evil is banal.
Page 6- 7: “MAY: THIS IS WAR – PM vows to crush Islam extremist.” May is “defiant”. But Jeremy Corbyn did a”U-turn”, changing his “long-held opinion that he was not ‘happy’ with the police’s shoot-to-kill policy.”
Page 21: The horror occupies readers’ minds. They text in their views (click the image to enlarge):
Daily Express (front page): ENOUGH IS ENOUGH”:
The paper echoes the words Theresa May used to condemn the slaughter.
Page 2-3: “Jihadis walked around like outlaws at the OK Corral.” Sticking with the idea of this being the wild West, the paper issues a phone poll. The question runs: “Is now the time to round up suspects?”
The paper reminds us that the killers wore dummy suicide vests. They yelled, “This is for Allah.” The paper’s editor tells readers of the woman on London Bridge pleading with her stabbed partner: “Stay with me please, I love you. Come on, please. Don’t let those fuckers get away with it.” He says Donald Trump is right to ridicule our politicians for being “politically correct in our reaction to these outrages”. And “Theresa May is right when she says Enough is Enough.”
Page 3: “Marksmen threaten to shoot a fleeing suspect in pyjamas.” To West Ham, where an eyewitness tells us about a police raid: “Then a young black man, barefoot and in pyjamas came out of the window. They were shouting ‘We will shoot you if you don’t go back in… the police officer was ready to shoot.”
Page 4: “We fought toff jihadis with bottles and hid in cellars and cupboards.”
We hear from Mark Stembridge, owner of Cafe Brood: “Three Asian guys came down the steps after crashing the van. I saw them with the knives. They each had a knife in their hands. They were about 10-12 inches long. The staff reacted very quickly. We had about 130 customers and 15 staff working. We all got inside but we don’t have doors only shutters. The staff protected all the customers and the three guys just hesitated and then they went off.”
Page 4: Elizabeth O’Neill’s son, Daniel O’Neill, was stabbed. The killers told him: “This is for my family, this is for Islam.” Mrs O’Neill calls her son’s attackers “cowards”. She is remarkably restrained. They wanted to kill him.
Page 6: More from the cabbie who tried to run down one of the killers. He had a fare in the back when he saw their rented van crash on London Bridge. “I said I am going to try and hit him, knock him over, so I spun the cab round and was about to ram one of them, but he side-stepped and three police officers came running towards them with batons drawn.” The cabbie told everyone to run. Student nurse Rhiannon Owen is grateful. “I’ve been trying to find the driver all day on social media. I owe him my life.”
Black Cab drivers, eh, salt of the earth. One part of Chris’s – that’s all we know of him – testimony makes me smile: “I saw the van went between one of the traffic light systems. There is an area called Nancy Steps, famous for the film Oliver!.” You don’t get that in an Uber. Chris is a top geezer.
And now we get to Jeremy Corbyn. We read that one of his “leading supporters” has “described Islamic terrorists as ‘freedom fighters'”. It’s Barbara Ntumy – pronounced numpty? – who reportedly tweeted in July 2014: “One mans jihadist / terrorist is another mans freedom fighter #JustSaying.” She is quoted: “I absolutely 100 per cent condemn terrorism.” Is it fair to drag up an old tweet now? Isn’t Corbyn enough?
On Page 9, we hear of “Nauseating” Jeremy Corbyn, a man who “in the recent past has called Islamic terrorist groups and the IRA ‘friends’ and opposed every piece of anti-terror legislation”. Security Minister Ben Wallace says: “Voters will judge him [Corbyn] on his views and actions in the last 30 years, not his desperate promises and evasive soundbites three days from polling day.” Is Corbyn tough on crime and terror? Express readers get to read Theresa May’s statement in full. They do not hear Corbyn’s.
Daily Mirror (front page): “MONSTERS”
The word dehumanises them. The killers were men.
Page 2 -3: “FACING DOWN EVIL”. We meet the “revellers fighting back against the attackers”. The paper mention religion once in its lead story. It does so when quoting Theresa May, who stated that she would fight the “evil ideology of Islamist extremism”.
Page 4-5: We hear more of the woman begging her partner to hang on. It’s heartbreaking. We do not know if Peter survived. To consider one story up close brings the pain to the fore. The numbers of dead and injured we read and consider as facts. Peter and his lover are intensely human. It’s unbearable.
Page 6-7: “TOWER OF TERROR.”
Police raided the Elizabeth Fry tower in Barking, East London. In all, they made 12 arrests. Chris Hughes, the paper’s defence editor, praises police and MI5. They have “smashed… more than a dozen major plots” cooked up by “Islamist terrorism since 9/11”. MI5 operates with a “professionalism” other intelligence agencies “can only dream of”.
Page 8-9: “People hurled tables, chairs and glasses at then..they weren’t going to stand back.”
Page 10-11: “I looked into his eyes and thought he was going to pull the pin & blow us up.”
Page 14-15: Only now does the paper turn to politics. We see Theresa May declaring “Enough’s enough.” We get it. The words chime. The paper picks out another of her lines: “Terrorism breeds terrorism…they are copying one another.” And then we get to Jeremy Corbyn. He looks smaller than May. His line runs: “Our police, nurses, firefighters deserve a pay rise. They can’t get by on her warm words.” Get that? In talking of terror and the fight against it, the Mirror backs Corbyn to get better rates for public sector workers. If the voters decide terrorism is the key issue, Corbyn’ scuppered. The Mirror is realistic. Corbyn being tough on terror does not resonate.
Page 16-17: “PM: Net giants give hate ‘safe space to breed.” May is no champion of free speech. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the killers most likely used phones, roads and drank tea as they plotted. Why not clamp down on those things, too? The Mirror does not condemn Mays illiberalism. It finds an echo in the shape of the no less authoritarian Yvette Cooper. The paper affords the Labour MP and ex-shadow home secretary a platform to say the big web companies must do mote to stamp out “extremist recruitment online”. If Cooper is worth a listen, then why not the current shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott? Is she hard on terror? Is she in hiding until after the election? Is Cooper the future of Labour? If she is, then blimey, they really are shafted.
Pages 18-19: “Richard Angell says the terrorists will not win. More on him here.
Page 20-21: “GIVE MORE COPS GUNS”
Is that a good idea?
Daily Mail (Front page): “Bloody day all of Britain said: Enough is enough.” The message is clear: Theresa May speaks for us all.
Page 2-3: The Mail says at least one of the killers was known to the security services. We’re told he’s the Watford-born man wearing the Arsenal shirt. We’re told of claims he “became radicalised by watching extremist videos on YouTube”. Funny how it goes that way around: you watch the video then become a killer. Might it be that he liked Islamic extremism and any videos just entertained him? If we present the killers as empty vessels to be easily moulded by a video, we remove some of their own free will from the crime. We move closer to making them victims. And – boy – do Islamists like to be victims.
Page 4-5: More photos of the carnage. Pictures of the dead and injured. Who needs YouTube? If looking can turn you into a killer, should we look at the papers?
Page 6-15: More and more photos of the injured; more stories of heroism, defiance and bravery – “The fucker stabbed me in the neck,” says Candice Hedge (the Mail says “f*****s” ; dead bodies are ok in the Mail but swearing might influence impressionable minds).
Page 16-17: “MAY: CURB THE HATE ON WEB.”
Page 18: “Hours after latest horror, IS terror guides sill online.”
Page 19: Richard Littlejohn – “I’m sick of politicians pussy footing around. As they won’t says it, I will – we ARE at war.” He asks if the nation can take Jeremy Corbyn seriously on matters of national security. Hold your tongue. The question is rhetorical. The answer is coming thick and thicker.
Page 20: “There country is not reeling – but nor are we appeasers of terror like Corbyn,” says Dominic Lawson.
Page 21: “Corbyn’s 30 Years of Talking to Terrorists.”
The Sun (front page): “JIHADI KILLER IS AN ARSENAL SHIRT.”
Football. The Sun has done it and made football a key part of the story. (Add it to the list of unwelcome endorsements.) We learn that the killer in the old Arsenal top was called ‘Abz’.
Page 2-3: “8 Cops. 50 Shots. 3 Losers burning in Hell.” Is Donald Trump writing the Sun’s headlines?
Pages 4-5: “A girl burst in, her neck spurting blood, and grabbed me.”
Page 6-7: “4 Women Among 12 Arrested.” To which the response is: so? Or: How many Spurs fans?
Page 8-9: “We Stopped Them – Bouncer lobs seats at 3 killers. Leads fiends to be shot by police.” Ozzy the doorman is a geezer. “I realised I had to do something,” he says. “… Me and another guy started launching bar stools, bottles and glasses at them… They ran through the barrage and we deflected them and they literally ran straight into the cops who shot them.” Says Ozzy’s mate: “Ozzy’s an absolute hero.”
Page 10-15: More tales of courage, heartache and horror.
Page 16-17: “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.”
May’s soundbite might just produce the predicted Tory landslide. Corbyn is once more attacked over his ‘U-turn’.
Page 18: “Corbyn is a real threat to security”, says Trevor Kavanagh. The Sun says a vote for May is a vote to “make Britain safer”.
Such are the facts.
Posted: 5th, June 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians, Tabloids | Comment
When France was attacked by Islamist extremists, journalist Bertrand Dicale wrote for the Bataclan website. His words resonate in light of the attacks in Manchester and London. Last night at One Love Manchester, the benefit concert held in the wake of the Manchester attack to remember the victims of the suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert on 22 May, joy and love shone through. It was fabulous.
On November 13 2015, Islamists attacked Paris, murdering 89 people on a night out at the Bataclan.
Here’s Dicale:
Several times in its very long history, the Bataclan had to be reborn and, in November of 2016, it is still reborn.
By reopening one year after the November 13 attacks, the Bataclan confirms what it has always been: a reflection of the culture and the art of living of Paris, whatever the events, the crises, the upheavals this city. This theater has experienced revolutions, chills, aesthetic quarrels and storms. It was glorious, it went bankrupt, it was forgotten, it came back…
And, as Paris was able to overcome its pain, its anger and its fear, the Bataclan would not die. It is born again, with more fervor and more humility than ever: it is to host concerts and shows, to give pleasure, to share the party. It is not much, although we all know that it is one of the freedoms guaranteed to us by living in a democracy.
He concludes:
The Bataclan could only resume the course of its history – generous, audacious, passionate. Free.
It’s a recipe for living.
“We were throwing bottles, chairs, stools, anything we could get. A stool hit one of them on the head,” says Gerard Vowls, an eye-witness to the attack on London Bridge and Borough Market.
“They were running up going ‘this is for Allah’, they ran up and stabbed this girl, I don’t know how many times, ten times, maybe 15. She was going ‘help me, help me’ and I could not do anything. I tried to help her, I threw something at them. There was a bike on the floor, I tried to pick up the chair but it was locked to it, to throw it at them, to get them away from her…
“They kept coming to try to stab me … they were stabbing everyone. Evil, evil people.”
A chef from Fish restaurant tells us: “I saw two men with big knives downstairs outside Roast. They were stabbing people. The guy with the knife was killing two people. We were shouting ‘stop, stop’ and people threw chairs at them.”
Gerard and the other people fighting back make me proud to be a Londoner. The Islamists murdering people enjoying a night out in London are scum. Police shot three attackers dead.
Owen Evans was there. He says: “Then they told us to leave the pub and to run, and a policeman standing outside with a gun was shouting, ‘Go, get the fuck out.’ We ran down the street, turned left at the Market Porter, than ran down the road and away. We got to the South Bank and then waited ages for a tube, and eventually got home.”
The police make me proud to be a Londoner.
Politicians do not make me proud. To suspend the election campaign so close to the vote looks like capitulation.
The front pages:
Posted: 4th, June 2017 | In: News, Reviews, Tabloids | Comment
Manchester native Morrissey has shared his view on the slaughter in his home city. Twenty-two people went to a pop concert and didn’t come home. Many more are very badly injured. All around us we are told not to hate, to watch our words and police our thoughts. But if we can’t rage when our children are murdered, when can we get angry? If we can’t howl and surge with anger’s raw energy, we might as well give up. Are you outraged that innocent children excitedly leaving a fun concert were slaughtered? You are. I can tell. You’re breathing.
Morrissey speaks for many when he writes on Facebook:
Celebrating my birthday in Manchester as news of the Manchester Arena bomb broke. The anger is monumental.
For what reason will this ever stop?
Theresa May says such attacks “will not break us”, but her own life is lived in a bullet-proof bubble, and she evidently does not need to identify any young people today in Manchester morgues. Also, “will not break us” means that the tragedy will not break her, or her policies on immigration. The young people of Manchester are already broken – thanks all the same, Theresa. Sadiq Khan says “London is united with Manchester”, but he does not condemn Islamic State – who have claimed responsibility for the bomb. The Queen receives absurd praise for her ‘strong words’ against the attack, yet she does not cancel today’s garden party at Buckingham Palace – for which no criticism is allowed in the Britain of free press. Manchester mayor Andy Burnham says the attack is the work of an “extremist”. An extreme what? An extreme rabbit?
In modern Britain everyone seems petrified to officially say what we all say in private. Politicians tell us they are unafraid, but they are never the victims. How easy to be unafraid when one is protected from the line of fire. The people have no such protections.
Morrissey
23 May 2017.
Agree. Agree?
The Guardian does not agree. It calls Morrissey “controversial”. The best poetry and music from Manchester often is. The Guardian has previously praised Morrissey for his “barbed repartee” that made watching his shows one of the paper’s top things to do over Christmas. Bring the family. Morrissey is right-on.
But today Morrissey is on the wrong side. Calling him controversial is not meant as a compliment. His words have offended. The paper unpacks his open letter to prove it false. The Guardian says MPs are not safe. Morrissey is wrong. We read: “The MP Jo Cox was murdered by a rightwing extremist last June.” The murder of Jo Cox, a respected and committed MP engaging with the people she represented, was abhorrent. But is it right to use her death to stymie debate and free speech?
Jo Cox was murdered by a depraved killer, whose motives were swiftly co-opted to further the Remain side of the Brexit debate (Jo Cox was for staying in the EU; her killer was against everything she stood for). The message was clear: a vote for Brexit was to align yourself with a maniac. A vote for Brexit was to show a cruel disrespect to the memory of Jo Cox.
Writing in the Remain-campaigning Guardian, Polly Tonybee laid it on thick. Beneath the headline “The mood is ugly”, she wrote:
This attack on a public official cannot be viewed in isolation…
It’s been part of a noxious brew, with a dangerous anti-politics and anti-MP stereotypes fomented by leave and their media backers mixed in…
Rude, crude, Nazi-style extremism is mercifully rare. But the leavers have lifted several stones.
So much for debate. Leave voters were insects.
Moving on from Jo Cox – and letting her rest in peace until they need her to endorse another cause – the Guardian continues to study Morrissey:
Morrissey cited government immigration policy among his complaints saying the prime minister would never change her immigration policy in the light of the attacks. It is believed that the bomber named by police, Salman Abedi, was British-born and from Manchester.
The coward’s parents – it is to be believed – are from Libya. Is that relevant? Surely it’s worth mentioning. Or is the conversation now – and I’ll borrow from Tonybee’s lexicon of enlightenment – so “noxious” that to talk of immigration, to even mention the word, cloaks the speaker’s argument in a black shirt? That question is to everyone – not just sub-human pests who creep and crawl.
The paper also says:
He also appeared to suggest that a desire to adhere to “political correctness” was behind politicians’ unwillingness to specify that the attack was the work of an Islamist extremist, rather than simply an extremist. The same claim is often made by people on the far-right.
Talk of immigration and you’re a neo-Nazi. You’re a race riot in waiting. So shut up. Go on Twitter and state how the perverted actions of people who destroy children at a pop concert will not bow us and change our liberal, diverse and raucous way of life. But hold your tongue. Free speech is only worth championing if you agree on what is right and proper conversation. Get an official T-shirt. Light a torch. Be in agreement. Keep in step. Stick to the party line. Don’t be a Nazi. The irony is sharp.
One music site manages to go a step further and link everything “stupid” Morrissey said to – yep – Brexit:
Morrissey has had a long history of saying more-than-questionable things about immigration in Britain, and last year called the Brexit decision “magnificent.”
It was. Brexit was a triumph of democracy. It wasn’t a victory for Nigel Farage’s narrow views, monoculture and racism. The collapsing UKIP vote tells us that. Brexit was when the ignored, abused, patronised, without, forgotten and belittled took their chance to vote for change. And if you don’t like it, you can vote for the LibDems in June’s General Election and ensure that the party now operating as a focus group gets into power and holds another referendum. In a free country, you get a free vote. (If you vote LibDem you can keep voting until you give them the ‘right’ answer.)
You can question. You can debate. And just as you can challenge the orthodoxy on the EU, pick the clothes you wear, who you fancy, what music you listen to and sing along to Ariana Grande as she makes your heart throb – and there she is live on stage before your very eyes, the singer you’ve duetted with in the car on the way to school – you are also free to look at the dead children’s faces on the telly and in the newspapers, feel your eyes moisten and your throat tighten as you consider their stories, the horror of their deaths and the hollowed out lives of their loved ones robbed of the most precious of all things; you can consider the people raped of so much joy, light and life; and wonder why it happened and what can be done to end it. And if you value freedom, and consider humanity robust and truth-seeking, you can wonder aloud. To do anything less is to live in fear.
Posted: 24th, May 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Reviews | Comment
Many are dead in the attack on a pop concert in Manchester. What say the reputable news sources?
The Daily Express has news:
The Express’s sister publication, the Daily Star, echoed the chilling news that a second armed man was at large in Manchester. He was outside Oldham hospital waiting to strike.
And then, having spread a fake news story, the Express realised it was utter balls. Having garnered clicks from tragedy, the paper updated its earlier fake news report.
Wily stuff to make it look as though those reports were based on anything factual. The “Town Council deny”, rather than the paper “admits”.
The Express’s scoop appears to have been based on a single Facebook comment.
The paper notes:
Laura Bailey-Wood wrote on Facebook: “DO NOT COME to Oldham Hospital I’m currently inside… Man outside with GUN.”
Oldham Council wrote on Twitter: “We have no information to this effect at all. Please only trust or share official sources of information.”
Over in the Star, the fake news is no less opportunistic. The paper’s story has now been changed to read:
But the paper’s earlier URL still suggests an armed man was at Oldham hospital. Humans get the update but those news bots keep the scoop high on the search engines. The URL contains no word on fakery.
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/616507/manchester-men-arena-explosion-Oldham-hospital-closed-gun-armed-man-ariana-grande
The rewrite in an exercise is bad journalism. The headline is changed but the paper’s teaser still trills:
OLDHAM hospital was placed on lockdown after a terror attack in Manchester – sparking fears a gunman was on the loose.
Jamie Micklethwaite writes:
Oldham Hospital stopped admitting new patients after it was overwhelmed by casualities [sic] from the blast. The lockdown sent Twitter into panic – with many people reporting gunshots had been heard there.
Twitter into panic – and also Daily Star readers, no doubt. In the panic to get the story rehashed, the paper spots lots of “casualities”, whatever they are. Still, nice shot of Ariana Grande’s cleavage. Twenty-two people never made it home from a pop concert, but it’s all about clicks, right. So go for it. Phwaor!
Micklethwaite continues:
Rumours a gunman was on the loose quickly spread.
See Daily Express and Daily Star.
An Oldham Royal Hospital source confirmed they had been placed on lockdown – but due to the explosions at the MEN.
No gunman was at large.
The gunman was an imaginary figure – but he remains very real to anyone who gets their news from the Daily Express and Daily Star.
Posted: 23rd, May 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Tabloids | Comment
News that Andrew Murray, a “longstanding communist party member who joined Labour in December”, is running the Labour Party’s General Election campaign raises eyebrows. The Hard Left have taken over Labour.
Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey, authors of Moscow Gold: The Soviet Union And The British Left, look at UK’s Leninists since 9/11, and ask “if life in the mainstream will make or break revolutionary socialism”:
1. What is to be done?
By the end of the 1990s, to most observers of the British left, the Leninist era seemed to have come to an end. The Socialist Workers Party, quasi-Trotskyist and owner of a competent offset press in east London, still had some life about it, but not a lot. The Scottish Socialist Party – essentially the renegade Glasgow office of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency, which had been expelled by Labour in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with SWP and independent barnacles hanging on – had some support in urban western Scotland. And the hardline Communist Party of Britain, the main Stalinist splinter from the ‘official’ Communist Party of Great Britain (which had given up the ghost in 1991, 70 years after its launch with a giant subvention from Moscow), was still influential in a few trade unions. The CPB still had a daily paper, the Morning Star, though hardly anyone read it any more.
This is what Leninism had dwindled to, unless you also count the aloof cadre at New Left Review or the machinations of mayor of London Ken Livingstone’s office, in both of which veterans of another Trotskyist outfit, the International Marxist Group, latterly Socialist Action, had key roles. New Left Review a dry bi-monthly theoretical journal, had gone through several changes of tack since its 1960s and 1970s IMG-dominated heyday (if that’s the word), but the onetime followers of the Trotskyist guru Ernest Mandel – most notably Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn, were still very much on board. Livingstone had a later generation of IMGers in key staff positions, among them John Ross as chief economic adviser and Simon Fletcher as chief of staff. Mood music for this embattled rump was provided by the occasional jeremiad in the comment pages of the Guardian and in the London Review of Books.
On the best estimate, the membership of all the Leninist groups at the turn of the millennium totalled no more than 6,000 – of whom perhaps one-third were active.
Most were in the SWP, the CPB or Militant’s successor groups, with a few hundred scattered among more esoteric fractions, some of them crazy but most of them deadly dull: Socialist Action, so deeply embedded in the Labour hard left that even members found it difficult to distinguish themselves from centrist trade-union bureaucrats; the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, previously Socialist Organiser, notable for picking ideological fights on foreign policy with everyone else and then claiming to be victimised; the group that had once been the Revolutionary Communist Party, a slightly unorthodox Trotskyist group, but after a series of baffling changes of political direction under a variety of names was in the process of launching Sp!ked, a website devoted to provocative libertarianism; the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), a weird sect that had emerged from a Stalinist fraction in the Turkish Communist Party and had spent most of the 1990s engaged in litigation over former assets of the real CPGB – fighting for flats above chip shops in Dagenham – but had also set up Weekly Worker, an entertaining newspaper, largely online, devoted to left sectarian quibbling.
Few would have predicted any kind of revival for the Leninist fragments. Yet that is what happened in the early years of the new century. The starting point was the creation of an electoral coalition to fight the 2001 general election against Tony Blair’s Labour government, the Socialist Alliance, by the SWP and the English successor-group to Militant, the Socialist Party of England and Wales (the unfortunately acronymed SPEW). Blair, said the comrades, had traded the promise of socialism for a destructive neoliberalism: it was time for a new left initiative. The SA attracted a few independents and started brightly, but got nowhere. All the same, the experience gave the SWP, with John Rees and Lindsey German at the helm, a taste for working with other organisations it not had for more than 20 years – even though they’d decided that SPEW wasn’t exactly an ideal partner.
Then came 9/11 – and everything changed.
2. War and peace
The destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center by Islamist terrorists on 11 September 2001 had a disorienting effect on the British left. A brief, shocked silence was rapidly followed by attempts to make sense of the outrage. On the Leninist left and among its sympathisers the narrative that it was payback for American imperialism in the Middle East was quick to emerge. The “root cause” of the attack was not Islamist fanaticism, they argued, but crusader power – US support for Israel, the punitive sanctions imposed on Iraq after the 1991 war against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, arms sales to Saudi Arabia, exploitation of the region’s oil. The British government was on the side of the imperialists – and it was crucial that the imperialists were defeated. (This is Lenin’s doctrine of “revolutionary defeatism”, developed in World War I, according to which the left in any country engaged in an imperialist war should support the defeat of its “own” ruling class in order to bring on the revolution.)
The analysis was simplistic and met deserved scorn from many left and liberal critics, but after Blair’s decision to support US military intervention in Afghanistan, the knee-jerk anti-imperialism of the Leninists gained a wider hearing. The SWP went all-out for the most opportunist popular front ever. The minuscule party – with an unstable membership of less than 2,000 – ditched SPEW and the Socialist Alliance to set up the Stop the War Coalition, with the aim of attracting the mosques to the anti-imperialist cause. It soon became an alliance of Trotskyist and Stalinist Leninists and the Islamists of the Muslim Association of Britain, with a sprinkling of Labour leftists (among them Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell), Greens, anarchists, CND (by now controlled by the hard left), Scottish and Welsh nationalists and Liberal Democrats.
Opposing the Blair government’s political and military support for the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001-02 was not popular: overturning the Taliban and catching Osama bin Laden were objectives shared by an overwhelming majority of Britons. But opposing Blair’s subsequent backing for the US invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein was different. The 9/11 link to Saddam was, to say the least, not persuasive – and the official rationale for the invasion shifted suspiciously from Saddam’s support for terror to weapons of mass destruction. Taking out Saddam by force seemed a massive risk. US President George Bush appeared to be preparing for an intervention that was at best opportunist, half-thought-through and dangerous – and Blair seemed to be tagging along uncritically. It was more complex than that, but Stop the War, with the SWP firmly in command and the CPB playing a key supporting role, found itself in the position of being the only organisation in place with the means to mobilise popular opposition to war. Its high point was the 15 February 2003 demonstration in London against intervention in Iraq, which attracted perhaps 1 million people.
It would be ludicrous to claim that many of the 15 February demonstrators were signed-up Leninists. But the Stop the War organisers and spokespeople for the movement for the most part were: Rees and German from the SWP; the organisation’s chair, Andrew Murray, a leading figure in the Stalinist Straight Left fraction of the 1970s and 1980s (a bizarre secretive group that operated both in the CPGB and the Labour Party), who had become a member of the CPB central committee and an official for the train drivers’ union Aslef; the Labour MP George Galloway (expelled from the party in autumn 2003 for bringing Labour into disrepute after calling on British troops to refuse to obey orders); Kate Hudson, chair of CND and a member of the CPB. And they had media support too – most importantly from the comment editor of the Guardian, Seumas Milne, another veteran of Straight Left.
The Leninist-Islamist alliance (minus most of the Labour hard left and the CPB, at least formally, but backed by many conservative Muslims) was subsequently the basis for a new electoral party, Respect (Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environmentalism, Community, and Trade Unionism). German failed miserably as its candidate against Ken Livingstone in the 2004 London mayoral election; but Galloway won Bethnal Green and Bow on a Respect ticket in the 2005 general election. The Scottish Socialist Party, without Islamist support, also did well in the 2003 Scottish Parliament election, winning six seats.
The Leninist revival was, however, patchy and short-lived. It bore the seeds of its own destruction in the blurring of aspirations required by the anti-war popular front: deference both to Muslim moral conservatism and to Scottish nationalism north of the border.
Despite their organisational zeal and campaigning efforts, the micro-parties recruited fewer new members from Stop the War than they had expected, and the new recruits, though often as ardent and narrow-minded as any “class-against-class” communist of the early 1930s, chafed at the bit of party discipline.
While the high-ups in the SWP and CPB engaged in the Stop the War love-in with Islamists, pacifists, Greens, the Scottish National Party and the traditional Labour hard left, undermining their own arguments for a distinctive revolutionary party, the narcissism of small differences disorganised the movement on the ground – where it was amplified by articulate (if hardly independent-minded) novices radicalised by campus identity politics.
The Leninists’ embrace of Islamism was particularly problematic: if everyone could agree that Islamophobia was bad and it was easy enough for Galloway and leftist intellectuals to declare anti-imperialist solidarity with Islamists, the culture clash between Leninist and Islamist anti-imperialisms could not be avoided in campaigning activity, particularly where the rights of women and gay people were at stake. Meanwhile, in Scotland, the Leninist left could not find a narrative to rival that of the SNP.
In Scotland, the SSP’s Tommy Sheridan never got into bed with Galloway and Respect – in part because there was little in the way of Muslim radicalism in Scotland with which to ally – but the News of the World reported in 2006 that he had taken part in orgies at a dodgy sex club in Manchester. He sued the paper for libel and won damages, but his account of his actions was at odds with what he had told his SSP comrades, and he was soon charged with perjury for lying in court. Sheridan’s economy with the truth led to the SSP imploding: it lost all representation in Holyrood in 2007 as its followers transferred their support to the SNP, which became for the first time the largest party in the Scottish parliament. Sheridan was convicted of perjury and jailed in 2010.
In England and Wales, growing tensions between Galloway and the SWP – largely over the role of Islamists – led to a spectacular split in RESPECT. Rees and German were off-loaded by the SWP in 2009-10 and set up a website in lieu of a party, Counterfire, which adopted political positions barely distinguishable from those of the traditional Labour hard left except for its empathy for radical Islam, Iran and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Galloway, who made a fool of himself in the reality-TV Celebrity Big Brother in early 2006, abandoned Bethnal Green and Bow and then failed to become the MP for Poplar and Limehouse in 2010. SPEW, the CPB and the RMT railworkers’ union set up No2EU as a left-Eurosceptic electoral alliance for the 2009 European Parliament elections: it secured less than 1 per cent of the vote. SPEW’s next initiative, the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (supported by the SWP and RMT but not the CPB), stood in the 2010 general election but lost all its deposits with a similar, stubbornly insignificant, share of the vote.
Meanwhile, the Trotskyists in Ken Livingstone’s office received big pay-offs after he lost the London mayoral election in 2008. By then, only train-spotters could tell they remained Trotskyists, so deeply had they subsumed their identity in that of Labour’s hard left and Livingstone’s enthusiasm for attracting inward investment by giant global corporations.
Things got little better for the groupuscules after Labour’s general election defeat in 2010. Galloway made a spectacular comeback to win a by-election victory as a Respect candidate in Bradford West in 2012. But he did this without much Leninist support: his electoral base in Bradford was almost entirely Muslim, communal and largely conservative. The SWP went into meltdown when the leadership mishandled allegations of rape against one of their number, a nasty affair that lost the party nearly all of the members it had recruited during the Stop the War campaign.
The film-maker Ken Loach and others – many of them, like him, formerly of the Workers Revolutionary Party, once the biggest Trotskyist group in Britain but utterly discredited in the mid-1980s when its leader, Gerry Healy, was accused of serial sexual assaults – set up Left Unity, a supposedly new party which was not explicitly Leninist, though most of the members it attracted were old-left Leninist has-beens. Unsurprisingly, it failed to get off the ground.
TUSC staggered on, failing to win local council seats, and No2EU did even worse in the 2014 European elections than it had in 2009. Slightly more in tune with the times, Counterfire, the CPB and others opened a second popular front – the People’s Assembly Against Austerity – bringing together Labour, Green and trade union leftists, among them Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. Despite its large meetings and occasional demonstrations, it had little public impact.
These false starts and falterings are not the whole story. The Leninist micro-parties may have got nowhere in 2010-15, but after the collapse of the SSP and RESPECT many individual Leninists, drawing on the hard-left networks in which they had embedded themselves, did much better in the trade union bureaucracies.
Assisted by the apathy of members and the complacency of their opponents – while building on the alliances forged in Stop the War and local campaigns – the hard left won several key positions, elected and appointed, on top of the handful it already held. The most important victory came in 2010. Unite, the giant general union born of a series of mergers with the TGWU, elected Len McCluskey as general secretary on a 15 per cent turnout. McCluskey, a self-declared former-supporter of Militant in Liverpool (although he was never a member and is much more a product of the 1970s CPGB union machine than of Trotskyism), won against a candidate supported by the SWP and other Leninists. He appointed Andrew Murray of the CPB and Stop the War as his chief of staff.
Over the next five years the hard left in the unions huffed and puffed, complaining that Ed Miliband, who they’d backed in 2010 for the Labour leadership, was a great disappointment. In 2013 there was a major falling-out between Miliband and McCluskey after complaints that Unite was trying to fix the Labour parliamentary selection in Falkirk. Miliband’s response to the unions throwing their weight around in internal Labour politics was a change to the party’s leadership election rules. In 2014, he eliminated the formal role of trade unions in the electoral college that had chosen Labour leaders since 1983: members of Labour-affiliated unions and registered supporters were given a vote in party leadership elections with the same weight as that of a standard full member.
Hardly anyone objected. The commentariat saw the move as Miliband taking on the union bosses in a new drive for “modernisation”. But Unite and others saw the change as an opportunity – and in 2015, after Labour lost the general election, the chickens came home to roost.
Unite and Leninist-influenced hard left networks in the unions played a significant role in the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Their intervention was mostly indirect. Unions in which the hard left was dominant splashed cash for propaganda and funded phone banks. Unite in particular invested heavily in the Corbyn campaign.
This support was contested and appears to have been grudging – McCluskey wanted to back Andy Burnham but was overturned by his executive. Corbyn’s leadership campaign director was Simon Fletcher, a longtime Socialist Action stalwart who had served as Ken Livingstone’s chief of staff before taking up a similar role with Corbyn. Activists from the People’s Assembly Against Austerity played an important part in organising public meetings for the Corbyn campaign, as did the Labour Representation Committee, a parallel initiative set up in 2004 that brought together the remnants of the Leninist left in the Labour Party and the unions that had survived two decades of expulsions of entryists.
Both the People’s Assembly Against Austerity and the LRC consider that Leninist parties should be allowed to operate freely inside Labour, and members of both – along with activists from TUSC and other far-left operations – have enthusiastically signed up to Momentum, the continuity Corbyn leadership campaign set up by his campaign manager Jon Lansman, a veteran of the early-1980s Bennite left who is a key player in the LRC.
As far as anyone knows, Corbyn himself never joined one of the Leninist groups, but throughout his political life he has drawn on their support and ideas. He basked in the political milieu they dominated, and was heavily involved in campaigns in which Stalinists and Trotskyists played major if not defining roles – the Chile Solidarity Campaign, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, Liberation, Labour CND, Stop the War, the Labour Representation Committee and many more.
More importantly, Leninist anti-imperialism continues to play a central role in shaping his thinking on foreign affairs: if there’s any guiding principle to Corbynism, it’s that the west – in other words, the US and the other “imperialist powers” – is always wrong. The west is by definition imperialist, whatever the aims or impact of its policies, from humanitarian intervention to regime change, from economic development to trade agreement, from the extension of democracy and human rights to formal alliances between states.
In this world, any opposition to the west that arises on the ground is understandable whatever form it takes, and is mostly viewed sympathetically. From the IRA to Hamas, from Cuba to Hezbollah, from North Korea to Venezuela, “anti-imperialists” are “friends” usually deserving solidarity – and a blind eye has to be turned to most of their flaws and their crimes.
As leader, Corbyn has appointed people from the Leninist periphery of hard-left Labour politics who share this worldview – let’s call them Leninoids, as they retain no formal relationship to organised groups – to key positions in the Labour Party, most importantly John McDonnell as shadow chancellor and Seumas Milne as chief spin-doctor. Back in the 1980s, McDonnell, along with Ken Livingstone, was part of the Labour Herald crew that was kept afloat by the Workers Revolutionary Party. Milne’s political sympathies have always been much more towards J V Stalin.
One of the strangest and most shocking characteristics of this boilerplate ‘anti-imperialism’ is a deeply ingrained deference to the Leninists’ old flame, Moscow. The hard left defended Vladimir Putin’s military intervention in Georgia in 2008 and excused Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its subsequent bloody interference in Ukraine. This left raised only a finger in protest at Putin’s cynical support of Bashar al-Assad in Syria – and its leading protagonists have long been favoured talking heads on Moscow’s international propaganda TV channel, RT. That Russia might itself harbour imperialist ambitions remains unthinkable for the last Leninists standing. Their crude anti-imperialist reflex gives Moscow a pass, just as it did for Saddam, and just as it continues to do for Iran and China.
It would be wrong to describe the elevation of a few backward-looking fossils as a Leninist revival. It is certainly not a Leninist takeover of Labour. Corbyn’s mindset is indebted to Leninism, but the Labour Party members and supporters who voted for him were and are people who wanted a change of tack on austerity and foreign military intervention. What they’ve got isn’t what they wanted. Putting it crudely, a handful of Leninists past and present have been given key bureaucratic positions by a hard-left Leninist-fellow-travelling leadership. Or to frame it differently: in choosing his team, Corbyn took a leaf out of Livingstone’s book and co-opted Leninist organisational talent for reforming and social-democratic ends.
It’s not the wisest move an aspiring prime minister could make, nor has it united the party, so the future of Corbyn’s fragile and fractious project is unpredictable. One thing is clear, however. Corbyn’s leadership of Labour is unlikely to regenerate the CPB, the SWP or any of the other micro-parties. It is much more probable that the sharp left turn for Labour that his leadership represents will deny Leninists their most potent recruiting argument, that Labour is selling out socialism and the working class. The more successful he is, the more difficult it will be to differentiate their brand – and if he sinks, their close association with him makes it likely that they go down with him.
Sadly, another Leninist mini-revival cannot be ruled out. The organisations are still there, ageing, battered and bruised, and there are plausible scenarios that they could exploit to their advantage. But nearly a century of experience suggests that Britain’s Leninists are on their last legs and going nowhere.
The best hope for the left in electoral politics remains Labour – even if there is a mountain to climb by 2020 and Corbyn fails to enthuse the voters. The party is easy to join and it is a movement for change. Most of its members are sane democratic socialists with no illusions about the scale of the challenge facing them. If you want thrills and spills in the here-and-now and Labour doesn’t appeal, you’re better-off doing your politics yourself than joining one of the self-appointed vanguard parties. You might get nowhere, you might win meaningful victories, but you won’t find yourself dragged into cadre servitude by a central committee that treats new recruits as expendable extras in a misconceived historical movie.
Because that is what British Leninism is today: a tawdry political re-enactment society. They can grow Lenin beards and pretend to be hipsters, or dye their hair red like Rosa Luxemburg’s. But it’s not a politics for today. It isn’t going to find the way forward. The raison d’etre of Leninism is to mislead, to misrepresent and to divide the left. It’s time to let 1917 go.
Reproduced with permission of the very good Little Atoms.
Read the book: Moscow Gold: The Soviet Union and the British Left.
Posted: 15th, May 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
Compare and contrast former deputy prime minister John Prescott’s views on TV debates.
September 2 2009:
“Sky’s TV debate campaign is cheap publicity for Murdoch. Gordon can beat Cameron any day of the week. Doesn’t need to go on Sky to prove it.”
April 17 2017:
Empty seat her.
Is Mr Prescott’s view altered by the fact that in 2009 uninspiring anointed Prime Minister Gordon Brown was a poor performer on live TV and Labour could only lose – but in 2017 uninspiring anointed Prime Minister Theresa May is a poor performer on live TV and Labour can only gain?
Posted: 5th, May 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
We first encountered pictures of Kate Middleton’s naked breasts when the French edition of celebrity magazine Closer published the grainy images captured on a long lens in 2012. Today the Mirror leads with news that Kate is seeking £1.3m in damages. So traumatic was it to see Kate’s baps in the tabs that in a French court lawyers for Kate and Prince William say the episode evokes haunting memories of Princess Diana’s “Paparazzi nightmare”.
Among other things, the images show Kate removing her bathing suit and slapping sunscreen to her husband’s back.
Six people are accused of beaching privacy: Closer magazine editor Laurence Pieau, La Provence Publishing Director Marc Auburtin, whose paper also published the snaps, Chief Executive Ernesto Mauri, and photographers Cyril Moreau, Dominique Jacovides and Valerie Suau, according to BBC News.
The Sun, which published pictures of a naked Prince Harry, sets a sympathetic scene:
Kate and William had escaped on holiday in France in September 2012, a little more than a year into their marriage, when the images were taken.
So much, then, for “Workshy Wills“, the Sun’s nickname for the Prince, who last month was telling us all to loosen up. He was “escaping” not skiving. Wills and the other two parts of the Golden Triangle of Palace PR – Prince Harry and Kate – are not the epitome of an unaccountable elite, but in it with us.
The British Press are all on the Windsors side in this one, partly because some organs enjoy watching Britishers making the French squirm and partly because the story can illustrate their own sense of decency, righteousness and strict moral code. It’s not often the gutter press get to look down on something lower, so the likes of the Sun, Star, Mail and Mirror are not going to pass up the opportunity to posture, salute and preen.
But what;s wrong with the photos?
Kate and Wills – the couple who showoff family photos of their children, let us look around their palaces in TV documentaries designed to show their ordinariness, jet about the world adopting worthy interventionist causes, talk to showbiz magazines and cut through the pomp and ermine to get closer to the people – crave all the trappings of celebrities. With no Empire and no political role, it is through celebrity that Kate and Wills, and so too the Royals at large, can achieve a sense of authority. The topless photos are just part of the celebrification. The French see that. We don’t.
When push comes to shove, Kate and Wills have pulled up the red rope. They aren’t the UK’s Kim and Kanye or even Posh and Becks. They are not special by anything other than birth. If we see that then the fall out from their reaction to topless photos might cause more Royal pain in the long run.
Posted: 3rd, May 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Royal Family | Comment
