The letters page of the Morning Star is not somewhere I’d normally recommend for either political enlightenment or a good laugh.
But following the super-patrioticDaily Mail of the Left‘s decision to publish a token anti-Brexit letter last week, various rancid old Stalinists and Little-Britain nationalists have been spluttering with rage. One Mike Magee, for instance, fulminated in hilarious cod-Marxiese against the publication of any such “ignorant and ill-founded” letters from unbelievers (I personally just love the claim that such letters might “confuse” those who are “already unsure of which line is correct”).
As letters do not appear on the M Star‘s website, I feel it’s a public service to republish Mr Magee’s stern missive, followed by a straight-faced riposte from a splendid husband-and-wife team, who (not for the first time) bring some much-needed sanity and decency to the paper’s letter page.
Don’t add to the EU confusion MANY readers will want to reply to Alan Yearsley’s letter (M Star October 4) criticising the Star for not giving equal coverage to the Remainers protesting at the Tory conference that Brexit is a monstrosity. I would direct a contrary criticism to the Star.
The paper’s editorial line is based on sound factual evidence as exemplified by left-wing anti-EU campaign Lexit, including now the referendum result, whereas Mr Yearsley and his Remainers simply “believe” (imagine, presume or surmise without credible evidence) we can reform the EU from inside.
He cites a couple of “benefits” which do not require membership of the capitalist club, and there are many more such examples of collaboration across borders that do not require a corporate state to exist.
The EU is an oversized homunculus which no amount of reforming surgery can beautify – 45 years inside prove it. The Star’s editorial line is Marxist even though the rest of its content is directed at a wider left-leaning readership. Marxism is a scientific outlook formed from careful study and analysis of human society throughout history, and our modern day observation and experience of it.
Neither science nor Marxism relies on human hopes and fancies but on human experience.
My point is that publishing ignorant and ill-founded letters is not part of the Star’s remit. It only serves to confuse further those who are already unsure of which line is correct.
An aim of the capitalist media is to obfuscate reality and thereby confuse the mass of the people. It is not the function of our paper to add to that confusion. MIKE MAGEE Frome
The Star’s letters page is total waste of space Mike Magee is absolutely right (M Star October 8-9), and Alan Yearsley is quite wrong (M Star October 4) in his criticism of our paper
There is no place in it for ignorant and ill-founded letters, which only serve to confuse.
In fact, discussion of difficult and complicated political questions like Brexit is best avoided altogether.
Our paper’s editorial line is there to be followed. What else is it for?
Come to think of it, do we really need a letters page? It merely provides space for arrogant readers who think they have all the answers to lay down the law to the rest of us.
If we scrap the letters page, that would allow more space for news reports and the all-important Star comment, which tells us what to think and saves us the trouble of thinking for ourselves.
Of course a paper like the one were are suggesting would lose a lot of its present readers, so a very much larger Fighting Fund would be needed. We are sending a small cheque to help. BETTY AND CHRIS BIRCH London SW6
Len McCluskey (on BBC Newsnight): “I’ve never recognized [that Labour has a problem with anti-Semitism]. I believe it was mood music that was created by people trying to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. In 47 years of membership of the Labour Party, I’ve never been at a meeting where there was any anti-Semitic language or any attacks on the Jews. They would have had short shrift in any meeting I was at.”
“Unfortunately, at the time there were lots of people playing games. Everybody wanted to create this image that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour had become misogynistic and anti-Semitic because they wanted to bring Jeremy Corbyn down.”
Shami Chakrabarti: “With the greatest of respect to Len, I was the person charged with investigating this. It wasn’t Len,” she said. “I have seen things which Len hasn’t seen. I would ask Len to read my report.
“There are real reasons why someone like Len may not have experienced racism and anti-Semitism. There is an obvious reason why he may not have experienced it. I was charged with investigating by Jeremy and the National Executive and I set out my findings, warts and all.”
See also, Coatesy on Labour’s new rules to fight anti-Semitism, here
… Well, he didn’t actually say “fuck off”, but that’s what he meant:
From The Independent:
The Mayor of London has “more important things to do” than respond to Donald Trump’s “ill-informed” commentary on Saturday night’s London Bridge terror attack, a spokesperson for the Mayor has said.
The US president had hit out at Sadiq Khan in the aftermath of the attack, taking a comment the Mayor had made about the increased police presence on London’s streets out of context.
But a spokesperson for the Mayor said Mr Khan would not be responding to Mr Trump’s comments.
“The Mayor is busy working with the police, emergency services, and the government to coordinate the response to this horrific and cowardly terrorist attack and provide leadership and reassurance to Londoners and visitors to our city,” the spokesperson [for Khan] said.
“He has more important things to do than respond to Donald Trump’s ill-informed tweet that deliberately takes out of context his remarks urging Londoners not to be alarmed when they saw more police – including armed officers – on the streets.”
In a series of tweets posted in the aftermath of the attack Mr Trump appeared to take issue with the Mayor’s warning that that there was “no need to be alarmed” at the increased police presence on the street
“We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people. If we don’t get smart it will only get worse,” the President tweeted.
“At least seven dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed’!” another of his tweets read.
Mr Khan had said: “Londoners will see increased police presence today and over the course of the next few days. There’s no reason to be alarmed.”
The US President also commented on the fact that the attack did not feature firearms, in an apparent contribution to the US gun control debate.
Trump tweeted: “Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now? That’s because they used knives and a truck!”
Last night, as the news broke, Mr Trump used the atrocity to promote his travel ban against people from certain Muslim-majority countries.
This morning the Mayor of London issued a message of defiance in the face of terror, arguing that the general election should go ahead as planned on Thursday to show that Britain would never be “cowed” by terror.
“One of the great things about our way of life is our democracy,” he said.
“Elections are a wonderful thing and that’s one of the things that these terrorists hate and one of the things that we can do to show we’re not going to be cowed is by voting on Thursday and making sure that we understand the importance of our democracy, our civil liberties, and our human rights.”
Mr Trump’s intervention is the latest in a series of abrasive episodes between the US and UK following terror attacks on British soil. After the Westminster terror attack in March the US President’s son, who is named Donald Trump Jr, was called “disgraceful” after goading Mr Khan on social media and quoting him out of context.
The slow-motion car crash and hilarious pantomime that is the disintegration of Ukip seems to have been brought about in part at least, because Nigel Farage wants a knighthood, or perhaps a peerage. But preferably a knighthood, because a peerage would mean having to give up his cushy and well-paid seat in the European Parliament.
That’s right: Our Nige, Man of the People, the Outsider, the Scourge of the Establishment, wants a knighthood or a seat in the Lords!
When Douglas Carswell mocked the great Rebel’s ambitions, suggesting he should instead be given an OBE for “services to headline writers”, Farage was beside himself and publicly warned that the party will collapse unless its sole MP is thrown out.
Farage raged that Carswell had “sought to split and divide Ukip in every way imaginable” since defecting from the Conservatives in 2014. Farage said the leaked online exchange showed Mr Carswell was “consumed with jealousy and a desire to hurt me” and urged Paul Nuttall to expel him from the party.
“I think there is little future for Ukip with him staying inside this party. The time for him to go is now.”
According to Christopher Hope, Chief Political Correspondent of the Telegraph, leaked emails show that Lord Pearson of Rannoch, Ukip’s former leader, initially tried to organise a peerage for Farage, backed by Ukip peer Lord Willoughby de Broke, last July in the wake of the EU referendum.
The plan were dropped when the pair realised Farage would have to resign as an MEP first before being allowed to accept a peerage.
Pearson then approached the Cabinet Office’s Parliamentary and political service honours committee about a knighthood for Mr Farage. It turned down the application at the end of July.
The peer then asked Carswell to approach Gavin Williamson, the Government’s chief whip, about appealing the decision to reject Farage’s application.
On December 30th Pearson emailed Carswell saying: “Dear Douglas, Could you let me know how your talk with Gavin Williamson went before Christmas? By phone if you prefer? Good wishes. Malcolm.”
Carswell replied the next morning on December 31 – the day the New Year’s honours were announced – saying: “As promised, I did speak to the government Chief Whip.
“Perhaps we might try angling to get Nigel an OBE next time round? For services to headline writers? An MBE, maybe?”
Pearson replied an hour later: “Dear Douglas, Let’s speak at your convenience. Ring me? Not sure an ‘Other Buggers’ Efforts’ quite hits the spot for Nige……..?! Malcolm”.
Farage said: “It could not be clearer that Douglas Carswell was negative in his response to the chief whip. He is consumed with jealousy and a desire to hurt both Ukip and me. What a sad figure he cuts.”
Pearson said the comments showed that it was “pretty clear [that Carswell] did not support” Farage’s knighthood.
He added: “It is true that I and others tried to get a knighthood for Nigel Farage and one way or another we failed, and we still think he should have one.
“I am not going to give up. I am going to go on and try to see whether we can get him a K in the Birthday honours in the summer.”
So much for the “radicalism” of Dulwich College educated ex-stockbroker Farage. Radicalism has a real meaning and tradition in politics and it couldn’t be further from Farage’s repackaged conservatism. So while we can all have a good laugh at Nige’s frustrated ambitions to join the aristocracy, our real job is to use this to drive a final nail into Ukip’s preposterous claim to represent the working class.
“We get hung up on this child abuse stuff, to the point where we’re heavily policing even relationships between consenting adults,” he said on a podcast called The Drunken Peasants in January 2016. Later, in the same conversation, he said that relationships “between younger boys and older men… can be hugely positive experiences.”
On an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast in July of the same year, Yiannopoulos made similar comments and also hinted that he has personally seen minors being sexually abused at a party and not reported it.
Yiannopoulos, for his part, has vehemently denied the allegations, saying that his comments were taken out of context and that he was being humorous. Yiannopoulos apologized during a press conference today saying that he regrets the comments, but that “as a victim of child abuse” the concept of him being a supporter of pedophilia is “absurd.” He went on to say that this was a conspiracy by the media to bring him down.
“Let’s be clear about what’s happening here,” said Yiannopoulos. “This is a cynical media witch hunt from people who do not care about children; they care about destroying me and my career and, by extension, my allies. They know that although I made some outrageous statements, I’ve never actually done anything wrong.”
“They held this story back. They held this footage back—footage that has been out there in the wild for over a year because they don’t care about victims. They don’t care about children; they only care about bringing me down. They will fail.”
Oddly enough, some of the more well-known players in the alt-right have come out against Yiannopoulos. Richard Spencer and Tim Treadstone (Baked Alaska), the latter of whom claims to be Yiannopoulos’s former manager, both shit on their former British king.
“The guy is totally done,” said Spencer on Twitter. “No sane person will defend him.”
However, it seems, even if Richard Spencer (a self-avowed white supremacist) won’t defend Yiannopoulos, the pizzagaters will.
Mike Cernovich during his online call-in show. Photo via screenshot
Mike Cernovich, best known as that pizzagate guy, dedicated his online radio show to defending Yiannopoulos last night. His main argument is that Yiannopoulos was joking about the comments, but he also has some rather strong thoughts on how the video came to be. Toward the end of his show, Cernovich tail-spins into a theory that this is all a systematic takedown by the “deep state”—influential but unknown members of the military or government agencies (CIA, FBI)—because “citizen journalists” were onto their pedophilia rings. Look, it’s not that easy to summarize something that is crystallized stupidity brought to life so here it is in full:
One third of the deep state are pedophiles, to get at that high level that they get at they have all kind of initiation rituals that a lot of people that wouldn’t believe are possible but it’s how they control you,” Cernovich said.
“What they do, if you want to be at the highest level—the highest power level—they make the new members molest children and record it. That accomplishes two things, one it gives them blackmail material on everybody for the rest of their lives but, even bigger, they know that if you harm a child, then you will do anything for them.
“That’s why they became really nervous when citizen journalists began investigating pedophile rings in DC, they got shaken up. The fake news media freaked out and now they want to tar everybody that they possibly can to try and distract from their true crimes, that’s what’s really going on here, 100 percent what’s going on here.
The theory that this is a deep-state psy-op has taken hold in many of the circles of the alt-right. Jack Posobiec, another prominent alt-right social media figure, tweeted that a source told him $250,000 was spent on opposition research on Yiannopoulos, where “they” hired PIs and video editors—former independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin is somehow involved as well. Lauren Southern, a 21-year-old Canadian media personality for the northern equivalent of Breitbart, also tweeted out that it was a hit job but later deleted her tweets.
Many, many blog posts have been written supporting this idea that Yiannopoulos is the victim of a smear job conducted by the mainstream media. However, these videos were out publicly on YouTube for quite some time, which would mean that these “deep-state operatives” must have a hell of a budget to be able to go back in time and force Yiannopoulos to make those comments publicly on the podcasts.
That said, there is significant online chatter worrying about further takedowns of members of Yiannopoulos’s brethren. Cernovich later tweeted that “Deep State is going after everyone with a large social media following” to which Paul Joseph Watson, of conspiracy theory and Infowars fame, tweeted “can confirm.”
Alex Jones ranting on camera. Photo via screenshot
Which brings us to Infowars founder (and apparently semi-regular Trump advisor), Alex Jones, who posted a doozy of a video entitled “Milo Is A Victim of Sexual Abuse, Does Not Promote Pedophilia” last night. The video is mostly him yelling in the dark about Yiannopoulos; yet it is still, somehow, the most sane defense of the bunch.
In the rambly clip, Jones calls Yiannopoulos a “beta gay guy” and seems to suggest that he’s gay because of abuse and has Stockholm syndrome. He calls the stories about Yiannopoulos a “witch hunt” and goes on a tirade against people who support trans rights. In the video, he suggests that journalists should be going after the big pedophile rings in Hollywood and DC instead of Yiannopoulos.
“On a scale of one to ten—zero being a really good person with your kids and a good life where you’re standing up for what’s right. On the compendium, on this whole spectrum, most of us are a one or something,” said Jones. “Then you got a Sandusky or these type of people that are nines or tens.
“This is like a three or four, so if we’re going to fry Milo, we better go ahead and fry everybody else who is involved in this.”
Jones concludes that this is “absolutely the Republican Party trying to roll up the grassroots support of the nationalist and populist movement that is taking place” and then compared Yiannopoulos to PewDiePie.
The whole situation seems to have taken place in the Upside Down. For several years now, the alt-righters have never seen a pedophile conspiracy they couldn’t sink their teeth into. At one point, Cernovich repeatedly targeted Vic Berger as a pedophile and sicced his merry band of trolls on him.
So it’s interesting to watch these people, who see pedophiles around every corner, and, like Yiannopoulos, have weaponized pedophilia accusations, scrambling to explain away Yiannopoulos’s own comments.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell when the call is coming from inside the house.
In yet another blow to UKIP leader Paul Nuttall’s chances in the Stoke Central by-election later this week, the Chairs of UKIP Liverpool and Merseyside have both resigned. It’s extremely rare for this writer to be able to say ‘well done’ to anyone from UKIP, but both gentlemen have taken a stand on principle and that’s laudable.
As Politics Home revealed, Stuart Monkcom issued a statement on behalf of himself and Adam Hetherington, which reads:
Although the timing of our resignations is unfortunate in light of upcoming elections, both Adam and I wish to make it clear, where the painful subject of Hillsborough is concerned, with closure not yet in sight, this unprofessional approach and crass insensitivity from high profile people closely within and without Ukip is upsetting and intolerable.
We identify most strongly with all the good people of Liverpool and most importantly the families of the Hillsborough victims who have fought so hard and long for justice, in their condemnation of the way Ukip has handled these issues.
I felt supporting a libertarian party was the right thing to do in order to affect change in the political system in this country. Unfortunately that dream has been shattered and the potential of Ukip has been squandered by people who have demonstrated they are not fit to lead.
Nuttall’s campaign – and even his party – appear to have come apart at the seams. The SKWAWKBOX, which initiated this chain of events and added various links to it – especially the revelation that Nuttall and Nigel Farage had smeared the Hillsborough families in an attempt to get off the hook (a fact that is unlikely to be unconnected to today’s resignations, given the wording of the statement), is proud to have played its part in what should be a ‘dustbin of history’ moment for UKIP’s leader and hopefully even his party.
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THE STUNNING RISE OF NATIONALISM, populism, and fundamentalism has roiled the world. It is tempting to imagine that we are witnessing just another rotation of political modernity’s cycle of progress and backlash. But we can situate the undoing of the demos in democracy’s longue durée while rejecting the false comfort of the idea that what’s happening is not new, that we’ve seen it all before. How did we get here? How did we create the conditions for Trump, for Brexit, for Mosul, for a daily sequence of devastating events, whether shootings or strikes? Is shock, that quintessentially modernist avant-garde strategy of instigating mass perceptual—and therefore political—change, somehow more prevalent than ever, albeit in radically transformed ways? Does shock, in fact, go hand in hand with apathy and desensitization?
Indeed, masses of perpetual longue durées is a must for the quintessentially modernist avant-garde demos.
In this roiled (I have no idea of what this means but it suggests rolling all over the place) piece the Sage of Islington replies with his musings on this rotational cycle.
Choice extracts:
Speaking of Brexit and Trump the veteran pundit, awake from a much needed twenty year doze, admits,
…what strikes me as unexpected is the speed with which this right-wing recrudescence has taken place. Suddenly, in every major European country, you have right-wing groups developing along anti-immigration lines, saying, “We’ve got too many foreigners in our country,” trying to unite voters around populist xenophobia.
On the wars and deaths that have led people fleeing from the conflicts in Iraq and Syriya he is clear where the blame lies.
Not with Assad at any rate….
we confront the fact that the US and its EU allies uprooted these populations in the first place. When you bomb Arab cities and Arab countries, reduce them to penury, destroy their social infrastructures, and effectively create a vacuum in which religious fundamentalists come to the fore, it is not surprising that millions of people want to run away.
Honesty compels him to admit,
We waged a left-wing campaign called Lexit, Left Exit from Europe, which was very small and had limited impact, but our position certainly did chime with the views of a number of people we talked to on the streets, etc., who said that the country was wrecked and that staying in the EU would prevent us from doing anything to fix it.
Brexit was far from the only recent instance in which far Left and Right have found unlikely common ground.
Apparently the real problem is what Ali (and nobody else) calls the “extreme centre”.
I wish I could say that I think the extreme center has been put on notice by the past year’s turmoil and by Trump’s election, that new prospects for the Left and for direct democracy have opened up in the wake of Corbyn’s and Sanders’s campaigns. Unfortunately, I can’t. In the 1960s and ’70s, there was a great deal of optimism. There were few victories, but the defeats weren’t of such a nature that we thought they were going to be permanent or semipermanent. We live in bad times, I feel—the worst through which I’ve ever lived. There was a ray of hope during the height of the Bolívarian experiment in South America, where Chávez’s incredibly moving idea to unite the continent against the empires was very heartening. His death and the dramatic drop in the price of oil have of course brought Venezuela to a dire state. While Ecuador and Bolivia are doing somewhat better, people feel that we are going to be defeated there. And then, with the economic changes that the United States wants in Cuba, one is wondering how long it will be before Cuba becomes a US brothel again. I hope that doesn’t happen. But if it does, I won’t be surprised…
Nothing would surprise Ali…
But thankfully Good News and Merry Cheer is on the way,
Given the state of the world, I’ve been revived somewhat by working on a new book for the centenary of the Russian Revolution next year, The Dilemmas of Lenin. Lenin was a visionary inspired by utopian dreams, a man of practical action and ruthless realism. Rereading him and related works has been a real treat, so much so that my dedication is actually quite optimistic. “For those who will come after: The road to the future can only be unlocked by the past.”
Alan Partridge could not have expressed these thoughts with such a deft touch.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
Let Battle Commence!
The path to what’s coming starts from the beginning what went before
Above: rank idiocy, opportunism and self-delusion on the supposed “left”
By Liam Conway
The Brexit vote was “a bitter blow for the establishment, big business, the international financial institutions, the rich and the politicians” says Charlie Kimber, writing for International Socialism Journal.
This gives the impression, ″with minor exceptions″, that the ruling class was united in their support for remaining in the EU, which is clearly a fantasy. Cut through the pseudo sociology in Kimber’s analysis and you are left with two points. The leave vote was primarily a revolt against the establishment and was not dominated by racism or hostility to migrants. What evidence does Kimber give for either of these conclusions?
For the latter a little. For the former, none at all. Kimber quotes studies by professors and commentary by Labour politicians to justify the purely Kimber view that the leave vote was anti-establishment. Kimber writes that Professor Jennings of Southampton University found that “workers perceived politicians as arrogant, boorish, corrupt, creepy, devious, loathsome, lying, parasitical, pompous, shameful, sleazy, slippery, spineless, traitorous, weak and wet.” But how is this specifically related to the EU? Most of the sleeze that dominated the press was rooted in the British Parliament, not the European.
Kimber says that the Leave vote “was driven by such factors as the MPs’ expenses scandal, the decades-long sense that the political parties are now all the same, the widespread contempt for the ‘pillars of society’, the lies told to launch the Iraq war and the resentment that comes from sensing that a tiny group at the top of society are making millions while you’re suffering — and they are also laughing at you.”
But Kimber produces no evidence at all that the groups he cites as most likely to vote Leave — the poorest and least formally educated in society — did so because of class hostility to the elites in Britain. And even if the poorest of the poor were bitter and chaffing at the bit because of their mistreatment by the British establishment, why would they blame the EU? Dislocation Jennings’ study is nothing to do with the EU, it is about dislocation with British politics and politicians. Where is the sociological research that shows workers voted to leave because of ″lies told to launch the Iraq War″? This is just political wishful thinking to justify the line of the Socialist Workers′ Party (SWP).
Kimber re-states the three reasons for SWP support for leaving the EU. The EU is a ″capitalist club″. The EU is a racist fortress. The EU is part of the imperialist world order. What Kimber fails to do is explain how leaving the EU gets you out of the ″capitalist club″, undermines racism within Europe against EU nationals, or weakens the imperialist world order. Kimber accepts that racist incidents have risen since the referendum but there is no mention of EU nationals, such as Polish workers, seriously considering returning to their homelands because of increased racism after the referendum. Kimber tries to get around the clear rise in racism and anti-immigrant sentiment by banging on about the contradictory or uneven nature of working class consciousness, but he only succeeds in demonstrating the uneven nature of his own consciousness.
I suggest the SWP, and Kimber in particular, re-read the Communist Manifesto where they will find Karl waxing lyrical about the progressive, as well as the reactionary, nature of capitalism: “The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation.
“Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.”
What response did Marx recommend for this tendency in capitalism to break down ″independent or loosely connected provinces (nations)”? Was it a reversal of the process? Not at all.
“This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes.”
Kimber replaces solidarity with the interests of the working class with pandering to the current consciousness (of some) on the EU.
There are journalists and commentators whose views I don’t agree with (and in some cases, hate), who are nonetheless interesting, intelligent and worth reading. John Harris of the Guardian is not one of them.
I first came across Mr Harris in 2001 or early 2002, when he first started writing for The Guardian. He was, then (like many other Guardian coumnists), an uncritical supporter of the Stop the War Coalition (STWC), and keen to defend it against any suggestion that it was led, or politically dominated by the SWP.
This was shortly after the STWC’s first conference in October 2001, when the SWP and its allies like George Galloway and Andrew Murray had ensured the defeat of calls to reject ‘Muslim fundamentalism’ as well as US imperialism. The slogan “No to fundamentalism” indicated that opposition to war did not mean support for the 9/11 attacks or the Taliban reactionaries: but the SWP, Murray, Galloway & co were determined not to alienate Islamists and cared nothing for the anti-fundamentalist views of Iranian and Afghani socialists in Britain, or the only Iraqi socialist organisation (the WCPI) active in Britain, all of whom were horrified by STWC’s alliance with Islamists.
In fact the leading members of the STWC were, and remain, soft on political Islam. This is clear from a footnote in Andrew Murray’s history of the STWC which says: “Political Islam… has expressed, in however warped a fashion, some of the anti-imperialist demands which were once the preserve of Communist and nationalist movements of the region.”
Harris wrote a column in the Guardian at the time defending STWC and denying that the SWP, etc, ran the campaign. I sent a comment to CiF calling Harris a “useful idiot” which apparently upset him at the time. Unfortunately, Harris’s 2001 (or 2002 ?) column does not seem to be available anywhere on the web, but this 2008 article gives a taste: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/feb/15/iraq
Since then, I haven’t spent much time reading the banal outpourings of this rather stupid ex-New Musical Express journalist, but I have noted that he claims to have been in the Labour Party Young Socialists in the 1980’s, before being driven “to despair” by the Militant Tendency and subsequently leaving the Labour Party for fifteen years.
Now, it’s a matter of record and straight fact, that those of us around in the 1970s and ’80s, can vouch for, that the Militant Tendency were a bunch of thugs, bullies, homophobes and sexists. But they’ve been out of the Labour Party since 1991 when they abandoned entryism and decided to establish themselves as a separate party. Ted Grant, the group’s founder and leading theoretician, was expelled, and his breakaway minority, now known as Socialist Appeal, continued in the Labour Party. The majority changed its name to Militant Labour, and then in 1997 to the Socialist Party. Their leader, Peter Taafe, is now making ridiculous noises to the bourgeois media, suggesting that his group now expects to be readmitted to Labour – having spent more than twenty years denouncing the Party as irreformable and the past eleven months trying to stop his members leaving to join Labour.
The idea that the hundreds of thousands of new (and, in some cases, re-joining) members of the Labour Party who’ve signed up since Corbyn’s victory last year, are doing so under the influence of the Socialist Party, the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL), or any other ‘Trotskyist’ organisation, is a preposterous conspiracy theory put about by Tom Watson in a desperate attempt to undermine Corbyn and boost the hapless nonentity Owen Smith. But the wretched Harris asks Guardian readers to believe this nonsense in a truly ridiculous article entitled If Trotsky is back at the centre of things, there’s chaos ahead. This idiot’s ignorance and stupidity knows no bounds: and while there’s no requirement upon Guardian columnists to have any knowledge of (let alone sympathy with) Trotskyism, someone writing about it might be expected to have at least an elementary grasp: Harris clearly hasn’t.
To give one simple example, Harris describes Trotskyist transitional demands thus:
The practice of Trotskyist politics has long been built around the idea of the “transitional demand”, a rather cynical manoeuvre whereby you encourage people to agitate for this or that – a hugely increased minimum wage, perhaps, or the end of all immigration controls – knowing full well it is unattainable within the current order of things, but that when the impossibility becomes apparent, the workers will belatedly wake up. In other words, the herd gets whipped up into a frenzy about something you know it won’t get, while you smugly sit things out, hoping that if everything aligns correctly, another crack will appear in the great bourgeois edifice.
The reality (as explained by the AWL) is this:
These are not catchpenny demands designed to capture or mirror back an existing “mood”. In some cases, such as open borders, they are ideas that are positively marginal and currently rejected by most working-class people. Others, such as the demand for a democratic federal republic (rather than secession for Scotland and Wales), or opposition to withdrawal from the EU, are marginal even on the far-left.
But we cannot hope to popularise them or make them less marginal except by raising them consistently, within the context of a programme which starts from the logic of our current struggles. The boldness required is the difference between attempting to create a political “space”, through the hard work of agitation and education in our workplaces and communities, and cynical attempts to manoeuvre into some existing space where people are already imagined to be by mirroring back to them slightly more radical versions of the ideas we presume them to already hold.
These wouldn’t be demands that we’d orient towards the state, necessarily, as if we expect a Tory government to implement them. They are demands that make up part of our own political narrative, our own plan for remaking society, just as the Tory policies of cuts and privatisation make up theirs.
Capital make concessions to labour either when we are strong enough to simply overwhelm it and impose ourselves, or when it is too scared of the consequences of not making concessions. For either condition, a conscious programme – a working-class socialist alternative to austerity – is necessary.
Floppy-haired ex-pop music journalist Harris is, indeed, an idiot (whether “useful” or not): first on behalf of Galloway and the SWP; now on behalf of Tom Watson and Labour witch-hunters.
Shiraz Socialist 