A wild, erratic genius:

“Nicol Williamson, whose death of oesophageal cancer at the age of 73 has been announced, was arguably the most electrifying actor of his generation, but one whose career flickered and faded like a faulty light fitting. Tall and wiry, with a rasping scowl of a voice, a battered baby face and a mop of unruly curls, he was the best modern Hamlet since John Gielgud, and certainly the angriest, though he scuppered his own performance at the Round House, north London, in 1969, by apologising to the audience and walking off the stage…” The rest of today’s Graun obit here.

Rather eerily, here he is on the David Frost Show (BBC circa 1969 at a guess) talking about death…

That was when chat shows didn’t insult your intelligence.

Here’s one of his finest filmed peformances, The Bofers Gun (1968, dir: Jack Gold):

Note the young John Thaw and David Hemmings

Finally, as Jack Gold notes in the Graun, “if ever there was a piano handy, he was immediately seated there, singing ballads, blues, rock, jazz. He loved the great musicians and improvisation. I think that, latterly, that is where his heart truly lay.” Listen to him singing I’ve Got The World On A String:

Britain’s biggest union, Unite, “should only fund Labour when it supports [their] policies”, says Jerry Hicks, left challenger in the union’s general secretary election in 2010.

Hicks’s article, which has been doing the rounds in the left “blogosphere”, is full of contempt for Unite leader Len McCluskey, accusing him of hypocrisy in attacking a Labour leader whose election he (along with Unison and the GMB) effectively engineered. Hicks exhorts McCluskey to “Stop wringing your hands, stop moaning and stop funding them!”

A perfectly reasonable line of argument, surely? Why should unions, particularly one with as much potential clout as Unite, give money to a party who — in government or opposition — has helped reinforce the cuts consensus in British politics?

But the problem with Hicks’s approach, and indeed with the entire way in which the relationship between trade unions and the Labour Party is understood by almost everyone in the British labour movement (including both the union bureaucracies and the far-left) is that it conceives of the relationship in essentially financial, machine-politics terms.

It is a conception of political engagement consisting essentially in trade unions “buying” political favours from an external political force. If a particular politician or political party doesn’t deliver on the paid-for favours, stop the payments and give the money to someone you expect to do a better job.

This is how unions do politics in America, where there is no labour party (small ‘l’ and ‘p’ deliberate). The funding invariably goes to the Democrats; the unions give them money, and turn out activists to campaign for them, in return for political scraps-from-the-table (or, more frequently, the promise of scraps). There are no channels through which workers, through their unions, can exert direct control or accountability over the Democrats. The relationship is mediated through union bureaucrats (themselves unaccountable) playing machine politics with Democratic senators, congressmen and women, and other officials.

This is undoubtedly how the hardcore New Labourites would like the relationship between their party and the unions to function in this country too. Severing the structural link between the Labour Party and the unions has been a long-held dream of the Blairites, and one that they have only held back from trying decisively to make a reality through a lack of confidence.

Certainly, McCluskey’s hypocrisy should be called out, along with the hypocrisy of Unison’s Dave Prentis and the GMB’s Paul Kenny, who have conducted similar media exercises in macho-posturing (both have talked of “reviewing” their unions’ relationship to Labour).

Their real hypocrisy lies not in their role in getting Miliband elected, but in their roles as part of trade union leaderships that have, at practically every turn, acquiesced to the New Labour machine when they could have stopped it in its tracks. In 2007, when the Labour leaders proposed a raft of anti-democratic reforms to party structure at its Bournemouth conference, union leaders talked a good fight but ended up voting the reforms through.

McCluskey, Prentis and Kenny have absolutely no intention of disaffiliating their unions from Labour. Besides, a summary disaffiliation by unions on these terms, necessarily motivated by a business-unionist complaint that affiliation to the Labour Party was no longer value for money, would be a financial blow for New Labour but a political victory. It would represent the completion of the Blairite project to turn the Labour Party into the US Democrats.

The confusion on this question is widespread; Bob Crow and Mark Serwotka (two of the most left-wing bureaucrats) have toyed with the idea of union funding for Plaid Cymru, SNP and even Lib Dem candidates. Most on the far left would baulk at unions supporting what are clearly straightforwardly pro-capitalist parties, but if your only conception of political engagement is based on buying political favours from the least-bad electoral party, then why not throw some money at Plaid?

After the abject experience of Labour in power, the little-better experience of them in recent opposition and the generation of anti-democratic reform in the party, it’s understandable that even people on the trade union left have internalised and accepted the basis on which union bureaucrats and New Labourites want the Labour-union link to function. But if socialists are to be useful in the fight for genuine working-class political representation, our perspective has to be based on more than knee-jerk cynicism.

Channels for union self-assertion inside the Labour Party are radically different now than they were even 15 years ago, but they still exist. The unions could still exert massive political pressure. They could get radical policy onto the floor of Labour Party conference. They could demand that Labour councils refuse to pass on Tory cuts. Some of what they could do might have a targeted financial element; within a framework of continued affiliation, they might refuse to fund individual MPs and councillors who voted for cuts. The reason the unions have not done these things is not that they are impossible, but that the union leaders lack the political will to do them and rank-and-file union members lack the democratic structures within unions themselves to force them to act.

That list is far from exhaustive, and there are plenty of ways the unions could assert themselves outside the Labour Party too (including backing independent candidates if and when it makes sense, as the RMT, CWU and FBU all did while still affiliated). But the aim is to shift the political terrain, not simply to buy into a “value-for-money” approach to political representation.

The Labour Party is not “reclaimable” in the crude sense suggested by those on the left for whom loyalty to the Labour Party is a religion. In all likelihood, any consistent political self-assertion by unions on anything approaching a radical political basis would precipitate a splintering of the existing Labour Party, with most MPs and the entire New Labour machine decamping (perhaps to merge with the Lib Dems), or pushing through a formal severing of the union link. That potential should not be shied away from; in fact, if it happened as the result of a consistent fight, it would be positively to be welcomed.

Of course, we’re nowhere near that happening now. It would require seismic shifts within the unions themselves and a reinvigoration of independent rank-and-file organisation (something else the left has consistently failed to meaningfully organise for). A perspective of the unions using the existing link to disrupt, subvert and, if necessary, cause a split (rather than hive off one by one) is “blue sky thinking”. But it’s “blue sky thinking” that starts from where we are now and proceeds forwards. The “blue sky thinking” of Hicks — that the unions will disaffiliate, one by one, and give their money to someone else instead — is both less plausible and less desirable.

It would be a step back for working-class political independence, a political gift to New Labour and a reinforcement of the machine politics that both New Labour leaders and union bureaucrats are desperate not to see disrupted.

One of the few figures in British public life who is entirely admirable.

Above: attacked by Mugabe’s thugs

I can’t better Nick Cohen’s tribute from Sunday’s Observer:

“He lives in some poverty and suffers for his beliefs. As for gay rights, when even the leader of the Conservative party finds it politic to legislate for gay marriage, homosexual liberation appears the most mainstream of causes. Yet Tatchell wants nothing to do with the British political class and the feeling is reciprocated. Rather than showing how yesterday’s rebels become today’s conformists, Tatchell’s life illustrates a rarer and nobler theme: how a commitment to freedom for some can meld seamlessly into a commitment to freedom for all.

“If he were not an atheist, who receives death threats from Islamists, I would say that there is something of the saint about him.”

Read the rest here.

Help fund Peter’s work here.

To quote Nick Cohen again:

“Happy birthday, comrade. If the British are slightly more tolerant than we once were, it is in part because we had the good fortune to have you live amongst us.”

David Harvey’s Companion to Marx’s Capital may become the most widely-used handbook for studying the great “critique of political economy” which Karl Marx published in 1867.

Harvey’s book has a clear, brisk, and unpretentious style, in contrast to some other guides to Capital thick with lectures on how the author has detected some otherwise-unnoticed complexity in Marx’s argument. It includes frequent, and often useful, comments on contemporary relevance.

It is a write-up from nearly 40 years of almost continuous conduct of study classes and reading groups on Capital; and, in effect, the written version of a popular series of video lectures, based on those 40 years, available online at davidharvey.org.

The book will also attract readers because of Harvey’s fame as the best-known academic Marxist writer of our days (including on current issues, as in his Brief history of neoliberalism). He is, apparently, the world’s most-cited academic geographer and one of the 20 most-cited authors across the whole field of the humanities.

In London, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is using Harvey’s video lectures as a basis for our current study class on Capital.

Harvey’s exposition of most points in Capital is lucid and unpretentious, and he flags up where his interpretation is controversial without plunging readers into fevers of intra-Marxist debate and long supplementary reading lists. And he is emphatic about the main idea:

“Marx holds up a mirror to our reality in Volume 1 in such a way as to create an imperative to act, and he makes it clear that class politics, class struggle, has to centre what we do…

“Over the past quarter century, many of us have lived in a world where we have been told again and again that class is irrelevant… Any serious reading of Capital shows irrefutably that we will get nowhere unless we write ‘Class Struggle’ on our political banners and march to its drumbeat”.

And again: Marx’s “introduction of class struggle marks a radical departure from the tenets of both classical and contemporary economic theory. It radically changes the language in which the economy is depicted and shifts the focus of concern…

“Marx’s value theory… leads directly into this central question [of class struggle]. This is so because value is socially necessary labour-time, which means that time is of the essence within capitalism… Control over time has to be collectively fought over…”

Harvey notes that, paradoxically, in Capital Marx discusses “class struggle” only relatively late on, for the first time in the tenth of the book’s 33 chapters. (In the Communist Manifesto, by contrast, Marx declares straight off, on its first page, that history is the history of class struggles.)

With class struggle as with all other important concepts, in Capital Marx wants to get us to think about things critically and to take nothing for granted. Rather than cataloguing the salient facts of capitalist society straight off, he wants to dig down to its cell-forms, and trace all the connections forwards and backwards. In fact, it is not until chapter 25 that he has fully developed the argument which shows that capitalism must constantly create and recreate a division of society into classes.

As Karl Korsch put it in his introduction to Capital (1932), Marx’s “is a method which leaves nothing out of account, but which refuses to accept things uncritically on the strength of a superficial common-or-garden empiricism soaked in prejudice… The reader of Capital is not given a single moment for the restful contemplation of immediately given realities and connections; everywhere the Marxian mode of presentation points to the immanent unrest in all existing things…”

Capital study groups, as Harvey wryly notes in his introduction, have a chronic tendency to get mired in intricate line-by-line study of chapter 1. Sometimes they become exhausted through that effort before they get on to later chapters. Chapter 3, a lot of it dealing with Marx’s dissection of other economists’ views on money, is also often a hurdle.

But the reader cannot really understand the concepts in chapter 1, or understand what Marx is “getting at”, without pressing on and seeing how those concepts are reworked and reconnected in the course of the analysis. To get stuck on trying to elucidate chapter 1 by sheer force of exegesis is a trap.

Marx himself, in a letter, suggested that students might read chapter 10 first, to “get into” the book, before attempting chapter 1. Korsch suggested starting with chapter 7 and then going back.

Harvey rejects such zig-zagging, and tackles the problem more straightforwardly by pushing through chapter 1 briskly and without fuss, then advising the reader: “Once you get to the end of [the book], it is a good idea to go back to the beginning and read the first chapter again… You should, by now, find it a lot easier to follow. When I went back the first time, I also found it much more interesting and even downright fun to read”.

A steady understanding of class struggle, and of the fight for control of time and of life, as “the focus of concern” should allow the reader to understand that the Stalinist states which called themselves “Marxist” were in fact other systems of exploitation of the working class, and not embodiments, even aberrant ones, of Marx’s ideas.

Harvey, however, is unclear on that point.

In chapter 14 of Capital Marx makes a sarcastic jibe: “It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organisation of the labour of society, than that it would turn all society into one immense factory.”

The context makes clear that Marx was not positively advocating the conversion of “all society into one immense factory”; in Capital he denounces the mutilating effects of the way capitalism shapes labour more than he denounces the chaotic and inefficient nature of market regulation, and he emphasises the battle for free time.

Yet the passage sets Harvey pondering as if he takes Marx to suggest that planning is sufficient for socialism, so long as it is unlinked from capitalist greed, and commenting censoriously on Lenin’s advocacy, in the early years of the Russian revolution, of adapting the then-most-modern capitalist techniques and management methods for the workers’ state.

The “acute failure”, he says, “in the history of actually existing communisms” (or at least “one of the acute failures”) has been to “take the technologies of a capitalist mode of production” uncritically.

If only. Stalinist Russia, and Mao’s China, were characterised by more primitive technologies and modes of management than the advanced capitalist countries, put into operation on the basis of the autocratic state’s ability to mobilise vast masses of labour under tight political control. Stalin had the White Sea Canal dug by hand; Mao forced millions of people to try to run “backyard steel furnaces”, and shut down higher education entirely for a while.

In the 1980s, one of the factors in the collapse of Stalinism in Europe was its failure to develop computers and microelectronics beyond limited use of clunky equipment produced in East Germany.

Lenin’s argument in the early years of Bolshevik Russia was a different thing again. It was not based on uncritical acceptance of capitalist technology. Lenin knew well that socialism would develop its own technology, inevitably starting from what capitalism had already achieved, but moving in different directions and on different criteria.

Lenin also knew that a “proletarian” technology could not be created at will or by sketchy deduction from general socialist ideals, any more than a “proletarian” art or a “proletarian” military doctrine. Socialist technology requires a socialist society, and socialism cannot be built in a single country, let alone a country as poor and war-ruined as Russia was.

He advocated adapting the then-most-modern capitalist techniques and management methods at the same time as, putting the point as bluntly and angularly as he could, he declared that an efficient “state capitalism” would be a great step forward for the economic life of the poverty-stunted workers’ state. His arguments did not mean equating capitalist technology with socialist, any more than they meant equating capitalism with socialism generally.

Possibly linked to this argument is an odd excursus in Harvey’s Companion where, instead of following Marx’s text unpretentiously as elsewhere, he writes an entire chapter of extrapolation from a tendentious reading of a single short footnote about technology in chapter 15. He develops the argument, expounded more lengthily in his book The Enigma of Capital, about social life being shaped by six or seven “spheres” of activity, and socialist transformation being a slow and diffuse process of pursuing various processes of change in the various “spheres”.

Linked to that, again, is his over-emphasis on the importance for the working class of allies from other classes, which leads him at one point to cite Mao Zedong as an authority on how to form the necessary class alliances.

Other criticism of the Companion could be made, for example on its (not-too-heavy) schematising about “dialectics”. But the conversational style makes it easy to learn from the Companion both by accepting its clear summaries of some of Marx’s points, and by critically rejecting Harvey’s extrapolations on others.

And now, by popular demand, we present that old favourite, yet again: The Communist Manifesto in cartoon form:

From the Unite website:

Unilever – hands off our pensions!

Many of the world’s biggest companies are using the recession to attack workers’ pay and pensions. Yet they are still making healthy profits and returning dividends to shareholders. At Unilever, workers are standing up for what is theirs – and they need your help.

Congressman Ron Paul poses with neo-Nazi leader and campaign contributor Don Black. (Photo: Ace of Spades)

The grotesque freak-show that is the US Republican Party’s search for a Presidential candidate has already provided us with some almost unbelievable spectacles: a candidate who couldn’t remember his own policies, another who didn’t know where Obama stood on Libya,  Mitt Romney cast as a “moderate,” Rick Santorum taken seriously and Newt Gingrich now tipped as the likely winner. Roll up, roll up: the GOP circus is in town!

But of all the weird and wonderful phantasms to have emerged from the foetid miasma of the Republican Party’s flatulence, none can match congressman Ron Paul. He won’t win the nomination, but in his way he’s making at least as big an impact as the front-runners. That’s in part because he’s outspoken, consistent and colourful. It’s also because, alone amongst the candidates, he’s attracting support from sections of the liberal-left in America and further afield.

The British New Statesman magazine, for instance, recently carried an article by Alec MacGillis (senior editor at New Republic) that suggested “Liberals must grapple with their mixed feelings about Paul.” The magazine’s cover billed Paul as “the left’s favourite libertarian.”

Meanwhile at the supposedly left-of-centre Salon.com, one Glenn Greenwald can scarcely contain his enthusiasm for Paul ; after an ass-covering disclaimer (“I am not ‘endorsing’ or expressing support for anyone’s candidacy”), Greenwold goes on to pen a breathless paean to “the only political figure with any sort of a national platform – certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party – who advocates policy views that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial…alone among the national figures in both parties (Paul) is able and willing to advocate views that Americans urgently need to hear.”

What are these views “that Americans urgently need to hear”? Well, Paul is in favour of immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, opposes “destructive blind support” of Israel, is critical of the “War on Drugs” and…he’s on record opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, denouncing Martin Luther King Day as “our annual Hate Whitey Day,” and considers  that “we can safely assume that 95 per cent of the black males in [Los Angeles] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”

He considers gay rights campaigners to be the “organised forces of perversion,” and that “Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.”  He has speculated about 9/11 [NB: correction; he was actually referring to the 1993 attack on the WTC -see comments below] being “a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects…” He believes that there are “tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to wok (sic) for Mossad in their area of expertise.”

He has also given practical advice to militias on how best to organise: “You can’t kill a hydra by cutting off it’s head…Keep group size down…Keep quiet and you’re harder to find…Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. If you have more than one rifle, store it in a hideaway spot…Hide your best eggs from prying eyes. Destroy any documents or discs that become unnecessary…Bojangles Robinson ain’t the only one who can tap. Avoid the phone as much as possible…Remember you’re not alone.”

In fairness, it should be stated that these opinions (and many, many more along similar lines) appeared in  a series of newsletters published under his name (“The Ron Paul Report”, “The Ron Paul Newsletter”, “The Ron Paul Survival Guide”) that he published in the 1980′s and 90′s. He doesn’t deny that he authorised the newsletters, or that they generated as much as $1 million dollars per year for him. His defence is (wait for it)…they were written by someone else in his name, and he didn’t bother reading them at the time!

Paul, of course stands in a long-standing US political tradition – one that reached its zenith in the late thirties and early forties: that of Lindbergh. If you think that’s an exaggeration, then listen to what former Paul staffer Eric Dondero says (in an article largely devoted to defending Paul):

“It’s his foreign policy that’s the problem; not so much some stupid and whacky things on race and gays he may have said or written in the past.

“Ron Paul is most assuredly an isolationist. He denies this charge vociferously. But I can tell you straight out, I had countless arguments/discussions with him over his personal views. For example, he strenously does not believe the United States had any business getting involved in fighting Hitler in WWII. He expressed to me countless times, that ‘saving the Jews’ was absolutely none of our business. When pressed, he often brings up conspiracy theories like FDR knew about the attacks on Pearl Harbor weeks before hand, or that WWII was just ‘blowback’ for Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy errors, and such.

“I would challenge him, like for example, what about the instances of German U-boats attacking U.S. ships, or even landing on the coast of North Carolina or Long Island, NY. He’d finally concede that that and only that was reason enough to counter-attack against the Nazis, not any humanitarian causes like preventing the holocaust.”

To get a full handle on how bad Paul’s record and positions are, here is a quick rundown. Ron Paul:

• Would abolish the income tax
• Would place the U.S. on the gold standard
• Would allow citizens to engage in trade using gold and silver instead of currency
• Would arbitrarily cut government regulations and believes that regulations only hurt businesses
• Would eliminate the taxation of foreign income
• Is a global warming denier
• Says that Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are unconstitutional
• Would eliminate antitrust laws
• Would eliminate the federal minimum wage
• Would eliminate the Davis-Bacon Act and the Copeland Act
• Would eliminate the estate and gift taxes
• Would tax all earners at a 10 percent rate
• Would eliminate tax credits to individuals who are not corporations
• Would eliminate the elderly tax credit, child care credit and earned income credit
• Voted to make it easier to decertify unions
• Opposes Federal Deposit Insurance
• Would revert government spending to 2004 levels and freeze it there
• Opposes raising the debt ceiling for any reason
• Would allow people to opt out of Social Security
• Says that widespread bankruptcy is the stimulus the country needs
• Opposed the auto industry bailouts
• Favors tort reform
• Opposes the regulation of tobacco
• Would protect the ‘privacy’ of online sexual predators and child pornographers on public wi-fi networks
• Would prevent federal courts from protecting citizens who have their rights denied
• Opposed the Motor Voter law
• Would allow states to ban gay marriage
• Sponsored the Marriage Protection Act
• Would repeal affirmative action
• Would limit the scope of Brown v. Board of Education
• Says that emergency rooms should be able to turn away undocumented immigrants
• Opposes the Americans With Disabilities Act
• Voted anti-choice more than 90 times as a member of Congress
• Voted to eliminate all international family planning funds
• Voted for the Stupak amendment banning abortion coverage by private health insurance companies
• Voted in favor of fetal personhood laws
• Would eliminate all funding for Planned Parenthood
• Would ban flag burning
• Would weaken regulation of dietary supplements
• Supports a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research
• Opposes subsidies for prescription drugs for seniors
• Opposes mandatory vaccinations
• Would expand offshore oil drilling
• Would increase mining on federal lands
• Would weaken the Clean Air Act
• Would repeal the Soil and Water Conservation Act
• Would weaken the Federal Water Pollution Control Act
• Would eliminate departments of Energy, Education, Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Labor
• Would eliminate the Environmental Protection agency
• Would eliminate FEMA
• Would eliminate the Federal Reserve
• Would eliminate the Occupational Health and Safety Administration
• Would eliminate AmeriCorps
• Would eliminate spending to combat AIDS overseas
• Would eliminate gas taxes
• Opposes the census gathering demographic data on Americans
• Opposed the dismantling of U.S. nuclear missile silos
• Wanted to withdraw the U.S. from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
• Wants to claim the Panama Canal as sovereign U.S. territory
• Opposes the International Criminal Court
• Would withdraw the U.S. from the U.N.
• Supports the electoral college and believes that the U.S. is not a democracy
• Believes that we have no right to health care
• Would eliminate birthright citizenship
• Believes that law enforcement can’t help people, only armed citizens can prevent violence
• Would allow the legal sale of unpasteurized milk
• Believes that groups of people don’t have rights, only individuals do
• Believes that government cannot redistribute wealth in any way
• Believes in the concept of ‘jury nullification’, the idea that a jury can judge not only the facts in a case but the justness of the law itself
• Believes that social welfare should be in the hands of individuals only, not government

Anyone that still thinks that a “progressive” vote for Paul is a legitimate vote under any circumstances doesn’t know what the word “progressive” means.  And a “left” that has even the tiniest tincture of sympathy for this thoroughgoing reactionary, racist, homophobe, conspiracy-nut and isolationist, is a “left” that has completely lost its moral and political bearings.

Ofcom has revoked Press TV’s licence, claiming that Press TV had not paid the £100,000 fine that had been demanded after it had broken regulations by broadcasting a “forced” confession from a journalist, and also for being controlled from Teheran rather than London. [more here]

Press TV’s scoop:-

Ofcom is said to have close ties to Britain’s royal family. And the cables released by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks show that Press TV’s programs on the royal wedding, which many in the country described as extravagant, angered the royal family.

The CEO of Press TV, Mohammad Sarafaz, is not daunted:-

Sarafraz stressed that Ofcom’s bid to revoke Press TV’s license will not prevent the channel from broadcasting the truth about the British Royal regime.

“It is futile to attempt to conceal the truth from the people of Britain, and those that want to hear our alternative voice will find a way despite your efforts,” he said.

In these internet streaming days, Mr Sarafaz is no doubt right.   Those who are looking for the alternative voice on eg the “Holocaust”, will not be thwarted.

The fair-minded analysis of the brilliant literary stylist, George Galloway, will still be available.  Lauren Booth will still speak her truths to power about Zionist control of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign. and their persecution of the popular intellectual, Gilad Atzmon.

Hireling lackey of the British government and Welsh corgi poodle John Humphrys “covered” the story of Press TV on the BBC’s Today programme this morning (second item from the end).   He interviewed Yvonne Ridley, an employee of the channel.  So afraid was he of any more revelations about the British royal family’s stranglehold on broadcasting in Britain he did not once ask her to enlarge on this exclusive story dug up by Press TV.

Ms Ridley announced that Press TV could not pay the fine as there are sanctions on Iran’s banks.  As for her salary, barrels of unrefined oil are collected by her, Mr Galloway and Ms Booth at London’s docklands where they hawk them in the street.

We at Shiraz demand further investigation into the Royal family’s death grip on the media of this country.

We know that Prince Charles is in the habit of interfering in political affairs – normally on matters of architecture, ecology and quack medicine.   However, if he has been leaning on media outlets who question paying for Royal extravaganzas, that is the end of The Guardian, the New Statesman and letter writers to The Times.  Here’s something that  Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate should address:-

Listen matey,
To keep your job,
Act  like mater
And shut your gob

Note from Ofcom:- Guards, take her away. (Clang of dropping portcullis).

Though her life had its share of troubles to the end — her husband and sons were locked in a long-running battle over control of her estate, which was resolved in her husband’s favor only weeks before her death — Ms. James said she wanted her music to transcend unhappiness rather than reflect it.       

“A lot of people think the blues is depressing,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, “but that’s not the blues I’m singing. When I’m singing blues, I’m singing life. People that can’t stand to listen to the blues, they’ve got to be phonies” – from the New York Times  obituary

By Dale Street

“There are two different forms of nationalism in the referendum. The British nationalism of a ‘No’ vote. The Scottish nationalism of a ‘Yes’ vote. And Scottish nationalism is better for the workers.”

So John McAllion (former Labour MP and MSP, and now a member of the Scottish Socialist Party) concluded his pro-independence speech at a conference in Glasgow on 14 January, organised by the United Left (Scotland) of the Unite trade union.

The Tories and the SNP have clashed over the timing of a referendum, how many questions should be on the voting paper, who should be entitled to vote, what would be the status of the referendum result, and what body should have overall responsibility for the conduct of the referendum.

Both have been motivated more by self-serving calculation than by principle.

The SNP can genuinely argue that it has a mandate for staging a referendum in late 2014. But the real reason why the SNP wants to hold it then is that it calculates (correctly) that it would have a better chance of winning then: around the 700th anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn, after the second “Scottish Homecoming” celebrations and a succession of international sporting events in Scotland, and shortly before a UK General Election which could see the Tories returned to power.

According to McAllion, there has been a “genius” element in the British state which allowed it to “mould and change threats, to see off threats to the establishment.”

The Labour Party has been “moulded and changed” by the British state. There is no time to spend another hundred years trying to build a new workers’ Labour Party. But an independent Scotland will open up space for the progressive political change previously stifled by the British state.

Independence for Scotland will also be “a golden opportunity” for the British trade union movement to show how trade unions can operate across national boundaries. In truth it is not the “genius” of the British state which holds back progressive social change, but the idiocy of the Labour and trade union leaders who fail to fight for it.

The weakness of the British labour movement comes from its own political limitations, not from the quirks of British governance (monarchy, House of Lords, etc.), which the movement would have changed long ago if its leaders were combative enough.

Independence would not be “a golden opportunity” for the trade union movement. Right now, despite the changes and political differences resulting from devolution, there is a single British trade union movement. The EIS teachers’ union is the only union of any size which is purely Scottish.

What is the point in that unified trade union movement campaigning for the creation of an obstacle to that unity — another national border — so that it can then show how well equipped it is to overcome it?

Other speakers at the conference claimed virtues for nationalism.

Jackson Cullinane, the Political Officer of Unite in Scotland, argued: “Nationalism can be reactionary or progressive. Examples of the latter are Cuba, Venezuela, and James Connolly and Ireland … There is no conflict between the ideology of nationalism and the ideology of socialism.”

Specific Scottish examples of this supposed lack of conflict between socialism and nationalism were Keir Hardie (who called for Home Rule when he stood as the first independent labour candidate in 1888) and John Maclean (who advocated a Scottish Communist Republic).

But when Keir Hardie advocated Home Rule in the mid-Lanark by-election in 1888 it was an expression of his continuing Liberal political baggage. Until shortly before the by-election Hardie had been a member of the Liberals, and his election slogan was: “A vote for Hardie is a vote for Gladstone.”

There clearly is a conflict between nationalism and socialism. Nationalism is about organising and mobilising people on the basis of their national identity. Socialism is about organising and mobilising people on the basis of their class identity.

Nationalism is a particularising ideology: it divides people up according to their national identity. Socialism is a “universalising” ideology: it unites the working class, the class which aspires to liberate all humanity, across the boundaries of national identity.

Sometimes socialist movements may pursue goals also sought by nationalist movements, like freedom for the colonies of the imperialist powers in the twentieth century.

Even then nationalism as an ideology conflicts with the ideology of socialism. And Scotland’s case is not analogous to the national liberation movements in India or Algeria: hardly anyone argues that Scotland is subject to national oppression.

The third speaker at the 14 January conference was John Foster, for many years the Communist Party’s main theoretician in Scotland.

In the early 1970s, he recalled, the trade union movement in Scotland had begun to take up the question of a Scottish Parliament in response to the initiatives of Communist Party members such as the miners’ leader Mick McGahey. It was the start of the road which eventually led to the creation of a Scottish Parliament some three decades later.

But, said Foster, the hopes of the early 1970s that the Scottish Parliament would be a “workers parliament” had been dashed by the political domination of neo-liberalism. What was needed now was a specifically labour movement form of “devo-max”, involving “redistribution-max” (i.e. redistribution of wealth) and “democracy-max”. If the labour movement fails to shape the Scottish nation, he warned, then reactionary forces will do so.

Foster’s argument cannot be understood outside of the evolution of the Communist Party’s politics.

From the 1930s onwards the Communist Party in Scotland (and elsewhere) pursued “popular-frontist” politics, allying with and accommodating to non-working-class political forces.

In 1972 this “popular frontism”, which by then had come to be known as ‘building a broad democratic alliance’, led the Communist Party in Scotland to push the Scottish TUC to convene the first-ever Scottish Assembly in Edinburgh in 1972 – bringing together trade unions with… local authorities, the Scottish CBI, Chambers of Commerce, and Tory MPs.

“Devo-max” is the demand around which the Communist Party hopes to reconstruct the “broad democratic alliance” which produced the Scottish Assembly of 1972. Logically, after pro-independence and “devo-max” speakers, the final speaker at the conference should have been someone arguing for some version of retaining a larger political unit.

Instead, Lorraine Davidson (introduced as “a journalist” but better known as a former Labour Party spin-doctor) described herself as “a mere observer in this debate, not here to make any political point.”

The Scottish left, or much of it, is confused about the basic difference between nationalism and socialism, and so demoralised that the SNP is effectively to be entrusted to achieve what the labour movement has failed to achieve.

Despite the repeated invocations about the need for the labour movement to have its own distinctive agenda, the best on offer was really a latter-day “broad democratic alliance” of the Scottish people against neo-liberalism.

The 14 January conference was billed as the start of a debate. The debate must be  continued – and shifted onto the grounds of class-struggle socialism.

By James Bloodworth at Obliged to Offend:

Instead of celebrating when Thatcher dies, the left should reflect on what a pig’s ear it’s made of the past 30 years