Paul Foot on Why You Should Vote Socialist

Since the Marxists Internet Archive is currently in the news, Histomat readers might note there have been a number of recent additions to the archive of interest - Donny Gluckstein on Tony Benn's Diaries (a 1991 article), David Widgery's 1981 appreciation of the late great socialist cartoonist Phil Evans, and some new additions to the Julie Waterson archive. Two new things I want to particularly highlight though - firstly a fine little 2008 pamphlet on Capitalism's New Crisis: What do socialist say? by Chris Harman. Harman's pamphlet coming online is timely given some of the current discussions about the 'return of Marx' as a new generation of emerging intellectuals engaging with Marx's ideas in the aftermath of the economic crisis - and might encourage some of them to go and check out Harman's 2009 work Zombie Capitalism.

It is also worth highlighting Paul Foot's 2001 booklet Why You Should Vote Socialist, which is worth revisiting given we are now well and truly in an election period for the upcoming Euro-elections, and a pre-election period for the 2015 general election. There are also indeed some socialist candidates to vote for in many of the upcoming council elections - including from the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition and a few Left Unity candidates too. Yet Foot's booklet really stands as one of the clearest and most devastating indictments of the failings of the first New Labour government under Blair (1997-2001). Today, for example, when the racist party UKIP are on the rise as a result of mainstream parties own racism towards migrant workers, we hear the argument from the Labour Party front bench that they were too soft on migrants when in power. This is Foot on the reality of New Labour's record on refugees from 1997-2001:

Asylum seekers coming to Britain found themselves under sharp attack not just from racists and right wing fanatics but also from the New Labour government and its minister at the Home Office, Barbara Roche. She accused asylum seekers of ‘milking the system’ and then set about organising the system to ensure that there was nothing for asylum seekers to milk. Under her regime asylum seekers are deprived of social security benefits and provided instead with £36.54 a week in vouchers to buy food and clothes plus £10 a week in cash (there is no change from the vouchers). Asylum seekers are treated with the most disgusting contempt, housed in conditions unfit for human habitation and dispersed continually from refuge to refuge without discussion or consultation. Their vouchers and cash benefits are conditional on obeying orders to move. 

 When the Tory leader William Hague suggested locking up all asylum seekers, New Labour reacted with horror at such a gross breach of civil liberty, and promptly started building more detention centres for asylum seekers. The numbers of asylum seekers detained by New Labour have gone up from 800 to 1,200, and two new detention centres just built will take many more. More and more asylum seekers’ applications to stay in Britain are being turned down, including all such applications from Iraqi Kurds. A high point for New Labour policy was the refusal of an application to stay from a 24 year old Iraqi Kurd Ramin Khadeji. When he got his refusal he killed himself. Refusals have gone up from 35 percent of applications when New Labour took over to 60 percent.

As an aside, one of my fondest memories of Tony Benn was when he agreed to call and lead a demonstration in 2000 in London in defence of migrant workers and for the scrapping of the racist voucher system New Labour had introduced.

Currently Ed Miliband is considering whether to introduce the demand to renationalise the railways as part of Labour's manifesto for 2015 as many in the Labour Party and trade union movement are rightly demanding he do. Foot's booklet is damning of Labour's past record on this question (see here and here. In short, despite prior warnings about where privatisation would end, once in power in 1997:

The railways were not renationalised. The hideous mess constructed by the Tories, the different competing railway organisations and the speculative millionaires they created, continued with hardly any change. The reason was trumpeted proudly by Blair, Prescott and Co whenever they were asked about it, usually by the transport unions which had contributed so many millions to Labour. They explained that they could not possibly afford the £4 billion it would have cost to create what Blair had promised – a ‘publicly owned, publicly accountable railway’. They had so many other priorities, they bleated, that they could not possibly waste public money on paying railway shareholders for their assets. 

Then came the great triumphs of railway privatisation, the disasters at Southall, Paddington and Hatfield. At Hatfield, it was revealed, a train had come off the track because of a broken rail. Railtrack, the privatised company which owned and controlled the network, had known perfectly well of the dangers of broken rails. They had been spelled out to the company in great detail a year before the Hatfield crash by the new rail regulator, Tom Winsor, whose militant approach to the railway monopolies was held out by the government as proof of its continuing concern for and control over the railway. Winsor’s memorandum about the dangers of broken rails was scrupulously ignored in the interests of keeping trains moving and profits flowing. After Hatfield, Railtrack panicked and subjected millions of long-suffering passengers to months of chaos and delays as some of the track was renewed. The militant Winsor decided that what was most important was that he should have a private company to regulate, so he announced that another £4 billion of taxpayers’ money would be released to keep the privatised railways running. By coincidence, £4 billion was the exact sum that Blair, Prescott and Co had estimated as the likely cost of renationalising the railways. The money they had ‘saved’ the taxpayer by leaving the railways in private hands was now being passed into those same private hands without any public accountability for it. 

 The sheer extravagance of the decision not to renationalise the railways was set out in an article early in 2001 in the journal Public Finance. The author, Jean Shaoul, calculated the cost of public subsidies in the four years before privatisation and the four years after. Adjusted for inflation, the figures were: 1991–94 £2,556 million; 1997–2000 £6,848 million. The cost to the taxpayer of subsidising the privately-owned railway had grown to three times the cost of subsidising the publicly-owned railway.

The pamphlet stands as a timely reminder that Labour may promise one thing to get elected, but once in power will quite easily renege on them - something campaigners over the bedroom tax need to remember today. It is the strength of mass movements and class confidence on the ground and in the workplace that is decisive and leads to change - not the election of Labour governments. It also stands as an eloquent counterblast to many careerist Labour politicians such as Jack Straw (of whom Tony Benn once noted, ''No one takes Jack Straw seriously. He is just a little sort of weathercock, blowing with every wind.'').

 Finally as middle class Guardian journalists desperately try to whitewash the record of the last Labour Government and rehabilitate even Tony Blair (witness this appalling recent column by Zoe Williams) Foot's booklet - written before September 11th and the 'war on terror' - shows beyond any doubt that there was nothing redeemable about Blairism or Brownism in power on any level, even putting aside the war crimes and mass murder. Indeed, Foot was warning about the dangers of economic crisis on the horizon while Gordon Brown as Chancellor was courting the City of London and heralding the end of 'boom and bust'. The last words should go to Foot, as he takes on not only Brown but also those Guardian journalists like Polly Toynbee who defended Blair in the past and now continue to tell us now that the only hope for the future lies with Ed Miliband and a future New Labour government:

Four years of New Labour in extremely favourable economic circumstances have left the Tory balance between rich and poor almost exactly what it was when the Tories left it. Millions are still plunged in hopeless poverty. The gap between rich and poor has actually widened under New Labour...

Prudence Brown boasts that under his careful stewardship unemployment and inflation have come down. Modestly he ascribes this miracle to his own genius. Yet from the first moment he took office and handed the level of interest rates (previously set by elected government) to unelected bankers who benefit from high interest rates, he in effect admitted what he knows to be true – that elected governments of whatever colour cannot and do not determine what happens to the international capitalist economy unless they embark on the most determined and ruthless economic intervention.

Under capitalism, unemployment, inflation, the rise and fall of booms and slumps, are not brought about by governments, but by economic forces beyond government control. No one knows, for instance, why there was a recession in the so-called Tiger economies of Asia in 1998. Those economies were previously heralded as evidence that capitalism worked better when it was unfettered by trade unions or government regulation. The impact of that illusion is still being felt by the working people and the poor of those economies, notably in Indonesia where one corrupt and dictatorial government has been toppled, and its successor teeters on the brink of revolution on the one side and unspeakable racial violence on the other. 

 The most predictable feature of any capitalist economy is its unpredictability. Gordon Brown knows that perfectly well, which is probably why he prefers capitalist caution to socialist advance. He also knows that the more his government loosens its democratic grip on the engines of the economy, the less control he will have in the event of any future slump, and the more he consigns the future to a private enterprise chaos out of which he knows no road. Against the background of chaos and unpredictability, his refusal to spend his ‘war chest’ on the people and services who need it most is all the more reprehensible. 

 This, then, is the central charge against the New Labour government. All through the 20th century the Labour Party sought at least to some extent to use the power conferred on it by the votes of working people to shift the balance of wealth and power in their direction. Often the party failed miserably in that endeavour. Again and again elected governments bowed to what they regarded as superior forces in unelected private capital. They were, in Harold Wilson’s famous phrase, ‘blown off course’ by runs on sterling, investment strikes, judicial arrogance, media blitzes and other forces they did not understand, and did not dare to counter. But at least some effort was made in the right direction. At least some commitment was made to public ownership, to civil liberties, and to the building of strong trade unions. New Labour in the late 1990s and early 21st century has shifted so far to the right that almost all its policies and achievements have converged with those of its Tory predecessors... 

 One answer to Polly Toynbee is that she, as she recognises, was one of the prominent defectors from Labour to the SDP in 1981, and thus can be held at least partly responsible for all the Tory excesses that followed. But another has more resonance. It is that she and all her fellow ‘Vote Labour for real change’ enthusiasts are not listening to their leaders. Tony Blair’s speeches about his next term of office carry not a whisper of trade union reform, or of a new era of public ownership and democratic responsibility, or of a widening of the comprehensive element in schools, or of a new assault on the grotesque bonanzas of the rich. Everything Blair says about the future points in exactly the opposite direction, towards more privatisation, more inequality, more chaos on road and rail, less planning, less intervention, and a fiercer attack on what his press officer calls bog-standard comprehensives, bog-standard council housing, bog-standard anything which derives from the traditional cooperation and solidarity of working class people. The Toynbee-Walker thesis, that a new New Labour government would put the errors, omissions and mistakes of the last one behind it and engage on a new road to reform, is to ignore completely the triumphalism of Labour ministers and their single minded devotion to office whatever the price that has to be paid by the people who vote for them. They have abandoned their social democratic credentials without a word of regret, but with the singular jubilation of bog-standard politicians who have suddenly discovered the full fruits of high office and intend above all else to go on enjoying them. 

 There is another reaction to all these developments which is even more corrosive than Toynbee’s and Walker’s. This is Colin Hay’s assertion that there is ‘no alternative to neo-liberalism and globalisation’. He appears to argue that because Labour governments have now been corralled by capitalism, and forced to abandon their social democratic credentials, there is now no alternative to their policies. This is the policy of resignation and despair. There is no democratic alternative to Tory policies, argue the New Pessimists, so we had better accept them even when they are carried out by ministers calling themselves Labour. The inevitability of corporate power and corporate control commends itself most sweetly to the directors of corporations. 

But there is no reason why any of the rest of us should bow before them. There is plenty of evidence in the past and even now that these policies can be resisted and reversed. Corporations do not always get their own way. The establishment of the British National Health Service, the ending of apartheid in South Africa, the toppling of post-war dictatorships in Greece, Spain and Portugal – all these were accomplished against the corporate stream. Even today, while capitalism boasts its omnipotence, it is stopped in its tracks by mass protests in Seattle, Prague and Nice. Resistance can be as international, as globalised, as capitalism is, and, unlike capitalism, it offers hope and life to the exploited millions. There is nothing mystical or superhuman about capitalist power. It is managed and controlled by human beings and can also be changed by human beings. It can and must be resisted with all the power at our disposal... 

 Voting is only one infrequent and often emasculated form of protest. But voting is still a crucial opportunity to make use of our democratic rights. Our votes are important in proportion to their links to the real powers at our disposal. Every vote for [socialists] will put new heart and spirit into the growing ranks of people prepared to fight. Socialist candidates are standing not to further their own careers, still less to secure a parliamentary salary (they will only take an average wage if they get elected), but because they are horrified by what has happened to the labour movement and are determined to set it back on track. 

In a recent pamphlet, The Captive Party, the veteran socialist Michael Barratt Brown appealed to socialists to recall the alternative society that socialism promises: 

All forms of health and childcare and the care of the disabled would be free. Education would be free at every age right through to lifelong learning. Housing would be available at reasonable rents with access by foot to shops and parks and gardens, and to many workplaces. There would be a wide range of opportunities for work in production and services with appropriate training built in. There would be no discrimination at work on grounds of gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Pensions for the aged and invalid, and payments during sickness and unemployment would be provided on a universal scheme based on contributions related to income. Planning of land use, road and rail transport, industrial location, and the balance of urban and rural activities would be subject to the most open examination and discussion. In all walks of life, at work and at home, in all workplaces and public institutions, management would be subject to agreed forms of consumers’ and workers’ controls. We have the resources for all this. We just have to find how to change the system from one of private greed to that of public gain.

 As a start, just a start, you should vote socialist.'

Who is this guy?

There are not many current Labour MPs who have made great political interventions of late, but yesterday one Gordon Brown, an obscure backbencher, rarely seen in parliament - possibly because he knows that parliament is only the rubber stamp for political decisions taken by those with real power outside it - rose to make a 32 minute long impassioned speech attacking the 'criminal media nexus' of Rupert Murdoch's News International corporation which engaged in 'law breaking on an industrial scale' and 'let the rats out the sewers'. His speech made Ed Miliband's 'leadership' of the Labour Party to date look embarrassing, and by the looks of things this Gordon Brown fellow could perhaps be a future Labour leader in waiting... Indeed - and though his may be going a bit too far based on one speech - this guy Brown looks like he'd make one hell of a prime-minister...

Revolutionary new cure for insomnia found?

Do you suffer from insomnia?

Fear not, a revolutionary new cure for insomnia may just be around the corner!

For years Dr Gordon Brown has dilligently been working at finding a cure for insomnnia. Over the years many thousands of people who suffer from sleep deprivation have found some relief from Dr. Brown's tireless labours in this field - and many hundreds of people have already bought such tried and tested products such as Courage, Britain's Everyday Heroes as well as such classic products as Moving Britain Forward: Speeches 1997–2006 and The Change We Choose: Speeches 2007-9.*

But now Dr. Brown thinks he may have found the perfect formula for tackling insomnia - and next month will see the exciting new release of Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalisation which promises to be the most comprehensive one-dose treatment for sleep deprivation ever put onto the market!**

'He has an incredible legacy: he improved the lives of millions of people here and around the world.'
One happy amnesia sufferer, Mr. E. Miliband pays tribute to Dr. Gordon Brown

*32 copies sold to date!

**Important Health warning. May have unexpected side-effects. Previous medicinal treatments of Dr. Brown's have induced nausea and vomiting. Moving Britain Forward: Speeches 1997–2006 for example may have included traces of such toxic ingredients as "No Return to Tory Boom and Bust under New Labour" and his speeches to City bankers: "You are the wealth creators, the men and women who make our nation more prosperous'', and "What you, as the City of London, have achieved for financial services we, as a government, now aspire to achieve for the whole economy". His Speeches 2007-9 may have included traces of the old British Union of Fascists' favourite "British Jobs for British workers" and, in another speech to bankers, "The financial services sector in Britain and the City of London at the centre of it, is a great example of a highly skilled, high value added, talent driven industry that shows how we can excel in a world of global competition. Britain needs more of the vigour, ingenuity and aspiration that you already demonstrate that is the hallmark of your success."

Hung, Drawn and Quartered

I am not going to comment much here about the General Election 2010 - Socialist Worker and Lenins Tomb have extensive rolling election news, analysis and coverage - only to say, all in all, it was not anything like as bad as I feared it would be. In fact, the election proves the British people - against all the odds (9/10 major national newspapers in Britain backed the Tories or Lib Dems) - still remain fundamentally wedded to social democractic values and the welfare state - and delivered a hung, drawn and (if you count the triumphant entry of Caroline Lucas and the Green Party) quartered parliament which gave no main party a mandate for the cuts they all agreed was necessary - a desperately disappointing blow to all three main parties.

The Lib Dems and Tories are currently trying to cosy up to do some deal as I write - which kind of vindicates my slightly moody response when I bumped into some Lib Dem students canvassing yesterday (I described Clegg as a neo-liberal privatising warmonger about whom it seemed the only difference between him and other leaders was that he was probably better at sex than the other two. The Lib Dem students protested, 'But what about PR?'. 'Yeah, Clegg's a PR man, alright - he's very good at Public Relations' - I shot back). The whiff of a possible Tory-Liberal coalition is not edifying - on Leeds city council their attacks on refuse and bin workers pay provoked a gloriously victorious 12 week long all out strike - one possible future to come. The only thing anyone could realistically 'agree with Nick' Clegg on in the election campaign was his point that if the Tories implemented cuts Britain could soon have Greek style riots - well, if the Tories and Lib Dems implement cuts then Clegg's warning will be equally valid.

Though not all the local council results are in (Barking council in particular), the Nazi BNP were humiliated in their 'target seats', above all Barking and Stoke - though they still picked up worryingly high votes generally. It is always inspiring to see the Nazis lose - and speaking again of Leeds City Council, the city is now 'Nazi free' having just lost their one councillor there. But surely - and this is my last point - the real fight starts now - whatever the ultimate outcome of this election. In places like Barking for example - its great Labour so convincingly trounced the BNP fuhrer Nick Griffin and Margaret Hodge was able to tell him to effectively 'pack your bags and go home - you are not welcome here' - but the Nazis still got 6,000 votes or so in a working class area. Surely in such places - and indeed across working class areas across Britain - the work now has to begin in earnest to regroup and unite the Left around something like TUSC in order to be able to more effectively fight the coming cuts and offer working class people a genuine socialist alternative amidst the economic and political crisis and turmoil now beginning to engulf us all.

Edited to add: further congratulations to all the anti-fascist campaigners in Barking and Dagenham: local council results - Labour 51: BNP: 0

Charlie Brooker on 'Bigotgate'

The press held up Brown's Bigotgate outburst as evidence that he's two-faced and contemptuous of everyday people, especially those who mention immigration, a subject so taboo in modern Britain that even fearless defenders of free speech such as the Mail and the Express only dare mention it in hushed capitals tucked away on the front page of every edition.

Two-faced contempt is the basic mode of operation for many newspapers: mindwarping shitsheets filled with selective reporting and audacious bias. The popular press is a shrill, idiotic, bullying echo chamber; a hopelessly poisoned Petri dish in which our politicians seem resigned to grow.
Pretty much spot on
See also Alex Callinicos and John Molyneux

The Guilty Men

There is a classic scene in The Godfather, where Don Vito Corleone sits down for a meeting with the other heads of the Five Families, and agrees to make the peace if only it is guaranteed his son Michael is safe from reprisals for killing a police captain. As Don Corleone warns though,

'I'm a superstitious man -- and if some unlucky accident should befall him -- if he should get shot in the head by a police officer -- or if he -- should hang himself in his jail cell -- or if he's struck by a bolt of lightning -- then I'm going to blame some of the people in this room. And that, I do not forgive.'

In a similarish spirit of unforgiveness, it might be worth compiling a list of the top ten people who are worthy of blame should the worst case scenario happen and the British Nazi Party either take control of a council or even take a seat in this general election. Of course, as a Marxist, I understand that it is not the fault of individuals if a fascist party makes any kind of breakthrough - rather one should blame a crisis prone system of exploitation in which people are forced to compete with each other for jobs, the racism against migrant workers that results combined with the past failure of any British government to ever fully come to terms with the legacy of empire, the recent invasions and occupations of Muslim countries and concurrent rise in Islamophobia, the 13 years of attacks on the working class made by a so-called 'Labour Government' and so on and so forth. Nonetheless, individuals do play a role as well, and while theoretically every single member of Parliament who fiddled their expenses deserves to be on this list, this post aims to highlight the ten key individuals who I personally will not forgive should the fascists make any kind of breakthrough in two weeks time...

1. Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC - for giving the Nazis unprecedented favourable and largely uncritical media coverage in the run up to the election - essentially he (like most others on the list) might properly be regarded as 'an appeaser of fascism'.
2. Jeremy Paxman, BBC Newsnight presenter - for giving 'Nazi Nick' Griffin some of the most friendly and cosy interviews imagineable (eg on Newsnight on 24/4/10).
3. David Dimbleby, BBC Question Time Presenter
4. Tony Blair, former PM and war criminal.
5. Gordon Brown, current PM for his obsession with 'Britishness' and spinning the racist 'British Jobs for British Workers' line in 2007
6. Jack Straw MP - for both trying and failing to beat Griffin in public debate
7. Margaret Hodge MP (not strictly a 'guilty man' but an appallingly useless)
8. Peter Hill (editor Daily Express) - for relentlessly whipping up racism against migrant workers
9. Dominic Mohan (editor The Sun) - ditto
10. Paul Dacre (editor, Daily Mail) - ditto

Feel free to suggest others I have missed out etc... How for example did racist Immigration Minister Phil Woolas slip under the radar? Should Rod Liddle have made it on? What of Martin Amis? Or the likes of Nick Cohen and others on the pro-war 'Left' who gave intellectual legitimacy to racist terms such as 'Islamo-fascism'?

General Election 2010: It's time for class war

Following a recent post on Marxism and Anarchism and then one heralding the anniversary of the Poll Tax Riots, one might think that heading a post with the title 'It's time for class war' might lead some readers of Histomat to wonder exactly if this blogger is about to join one of the minuscule anarchist grouplets in the UK or something. Actually not, but anyway those currently shouting loudest about 'class war' are, as ever, those who for decades have been loudly cheerleading a war of the very richest in society against the poorest - the Daily Mail, whose headline today screams NOW THE CLASS WAR BEGINS.

What does this refer to? News of a much needed escalation in the current BA strike perhaps? No, that's too much to hope for - on every level. Actually, the Mail's headline in fact refers to Gordon Brown's banal declaration that he was from 'an ordinary middle class family in an ordinary town', which - the Daily Mail seizes on with horror - an implicit reference to the fact that Tory leader David Cameron is the son of a stockbroker and actually a related to the Queen, being a descendant of William IV while Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg is the son of a banker 'and his aristocratic grandmother fled St Petersburg after the tsar was ousted' by the Russian Revolution.

Actually there is a serious need for a real return to the question of class and yes, class struggle in British politics today - as Socialist Worker's excellent election coverage makes clear - given the grotesque poverty and inequality in modern British society - and given the devastating cuts that all three parties want to impose on public services by way of making 'ordinary' people (to use Gordon Brown's phrase) continue to pay for the capitalist crisis. The fact that Cameron, a rich white Old Etonian aristocrat trying to pass himself off as a British Barack Obama waving the banner of 'change', is a man who sits on a personal wealth of about £30 million and yet is leading this charge for public service cuts in the name of 'everyone tightening our belts' as 'we are all in this crisis together' is nauseating enough without the likes of Brown and Clegg following in his wake. Thank goodness that amid this election campaign - 'the worst election ever' according to one commentator, dominated by pro-big business parties offering either cuts or racism (or both), at least one party in this election is offering a socialist alternative and is prepared to not simply talk about the need for 'real change' but is actually seriously committed to it as well. The Daily Mail may well have to get used to screaming about 'Class War' in Britain for some time to come.

Edited to add: Right to Work is organising an emergency post-election conference on Saturday 22 May in central London:

An age of austerity is what all three established parties are promising after the forthcoming general election. All are pledged to cutting public services in order to pay for the public budget deficit. Ordinary people are being asked to pay for a deficit caused by this government nationalising the gambling losses run up by the bankers.

The European Union and the International Monetary Fund are demanding cuts. In Greece these same unelected officials are demanding savage cuts in pensions and wages plus cuts in services. There workers, students and pensioners are fighting back.

The vicious attacks on striking BA cabin crew reveal nervousness among politicians about how working people will react to being asked to making sacrifices to pay a crisis they did not cause.

We cannot sleep walk into an election knowing that vicious cuts are coming without organising for resistance. We certainly cannot simply hope that if Gordon Brown is re-elected he might go back on pledges to cut spending. Cuts are already taking place and BA cabin crew, PCS members, UCU lecturers and Network Rail workers are already taking action to defend jobs, services and living standards.

This conference aims to unite trade unionists, students, pensioners, local campaigns and all those who rely on state schools, hospitals and services. Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary, Jeremy Corbyn MP and Pete Murray, vice-president of the NUJ are among the confirmed speakers. We are also inviting speakers from Portugal , Greece & Italy so we can learn from the strikes and protests there.

Happy International Women's Day

Sorry this blog has been slow again of late people. I'd do a proper post today signifying International Women's Day (I was thinking of either an appraisal of This I Cannot Forget, the fascinating memoirs of Anna Larina, Nikolai Bukharin's wife, or possibly Cathy Porter's biography of Alexandra Kollantai that I picked up from Oxfam this week), but am suffering from a cold and so unable to muster the energy just now. Also in the pipeline for putting up on this blog are my thoughts on the relationship between 'Marxism and Anarchism', but I may wait until I have read Ian Birchall's reply to Paul Blackledge's article on that subject in the recent ISJ has appeared. If readers have any order of preference for these forthcoming posts then feel free to let me know.

Still, while I am here, I will link to the latest Charlie Brooker piece, if only because it notes astutely that the 'haunted elephant' Gordon Brown has 'slowly come to resemble a lumbering, doomy Mr Snuffaluffagus with all the carefree joie de vivre of the Kursk submarine disaster.' Which is true.

On David Cameron, Brooker is also astute. 'He's a replicant; an Auton; a humanoid; a piece of adaptive software that's learned to appeal to your likes and dislikes – "customers who bought Tony Blair also bought the following"...'

This is important information to bear in mind, not least because both Brown and Cameron have tried to make the forthcoming British general election all about their 'character' and 'personality' as much as matters of policy, and the two politicians 'characters' and 'personalities' are going to be even harder to avoid than usual because of the American style TV debates between the main party leaders we are all going to be subjected to.

Brooker has also penned an amusing article about passwords recently, while the two other random articles I came across recently was a polemic about the film Avatar by the comedian Slavoj Zizek, and a critical analysis of family history by the eminent Marxist philosopher Jeremy Hardy.

Three protests for Londoners

THREE PROTESTS ON FRIDAY 5 MARCH

1. ANTI-EDL EMERGENCY PROTEST
The EDL is marching to welcome the anti-Muslim Dutch political leader, Geert Wilders, who is visting Parliament. Wilders' exteme racism led to an earlier government ban on him entering Britain. The emergency protest, which has been called by Unite Against Fascism, and is supported by many organisations, assembles at 11am outside Parliament (DETAILS: http://bit.ly/cAsu6T ) .

2. GORDON BROWN PROTEST AT IRAQ INQUIRY
A short walk from Parliament is the QEII Conference Centre, where Stop the War will hold its protest from 8.30am to 10.30am, as Gordon Brown's gives evidence to the Chilcot Committee (DETAILS: http://bit.ly/14uRwZ ).

PICKET OF JOE GLENTON'S COURT MARTIAL HEARING The picket of the court when Joe Glenton will be sentenced for refusing to fight in Afghanistan, will take place at 9.30am. (DETAILS: http://bit.ly/41D2DP ).

Another Histomat Exclusive

After the recent announcement of the policy 'Local Homes for Local People', Histomat can exclusively reveal today that Gordon Brown unveiled a new policy for the retail sector...

'Local Shops for Local People'


A Local Shop, yesterday

Speaking of his new policy exclusively to Histomat, Brown said

'If you are local, then for convenience and practicality you need a local shop. And by local I mean local, and by local shop, I mean of course Tesco Extras, Sainsbury's Local, Tesco Metros, Sainsbury's Local, Tesco Express, and so on, so everyone can benefit from the whole diverse range of local options. In this time of economic insecurity we as New Labour, are going to champion Local Shops for Local People.'

When asked by one owner of a cornershop if this meant Brown would now provide additional support for post-offices, cornershops or small independent high street traders facing closure, Brown replied, 'Are you local? This is about Local Shops for Local People and we are New Labour. There is nothing for you here'.

In other news, Brown is reportedly also set to follow the path set by his predecessor Tony Blair who appeared in The Simpsons and set by Tory Mayor Boris Johnson's forthcoming appearance on EastEnders and plans to appear in a TV series himself. In the new series of the League of Gentleman, Brown will play a local councillor who stands for mayor of Royston Vasey on a programme of 'Local Homes and Local Shops for Local People'. The programme makers refuse to reveal in advance whether Brown's election attempt is successful or not.

Gordon Brown awaits first meeting of new Cabinet

From the memory hole

'I had never heard of the book before, so I took it away on the Easter holiday. It turned out to be the most relentless and comprehensive attack on the theory and practice of the New Labour government I have ever read. It mocks the government's supposed commitment to education, complaining bitterly that its "crucial requirement is not a broadly educated workforce of the many but the visionary entrepreneurship of the few: an individual combination of energy, initiative and drive for selling or trading that thrives in a kind of caricature economy more like the rag trade than the real thing". As for transport, "almost everyone except government ministers recognises there is a need for an integrated transport system, and such a system would be a more efficient use of national resources. Yet since the government abandoned the idea of co-ordinated transport planning, the transport system has become increasingly chaotic."

The book points out that the government's election manifesto "said little about privatisation", yet ministers promptly embarked on an orgy of privatisation. "The main beneficiaries of privatisation," it reminds us, "have been the City institutions which organised the sales and the top executives who now run the privatised companies." Then comes a familiar question: "And what about the workers? They have done less well. No dramatic pay rises for them and not much pride of ownership either."

Are there any real advantages in privatisation? "There is little evidence," the book proclaims, "to justify the automatic benefits of privatisation." On the contrary. "Privatisation has been a costly experiment whose benefits have been at best dubious." And yet "there is no declared limit to the government's privatisation plans. One government minister has suggested that the boundary between private and public sector should be refined so that only defence, law and order and some basic regulatory tasks should escape privatisation. Grey areas where the private sector would become increasingly involved included, in his view, health and education, and already such developments are taking place."

All this happened against a background of growing inequality. "The distribution of income in Britain has now become so unequal that it is beginning to resemble that of a third world country." Who has gained? "The real beneficiaries of tax reforms have been the few at the top of the scale. Not only income tax changes have favoured the very rich. Changes in capital and inheritance taxation have helped them too, making Britain's inequalities even greater."

The author was infuriated by the inherent contradiction in the government's attitude towards rich and poor. "How is it that incentives for the rich and poor are so very different? How can it be that for the rich the only stimulus to economic endeavour is that the rewards become increasingly lavish, while the poor are in continual need of the spur of their poverty?"

I hope I've given you enough of a taste of the book's socialist inspiration and its indignation at government policies. Sadly, though, you might find it hard to get hold of a copy. It is entitled Where There is Greed, a spoof quotation mocking Margaret Thatcher's stomach-churning reference to St Francis of Assisi when she went into Downing Street. The book was published by Mainstream in 1989. Its author was a dynamic Labour MP called Gordon Brown.'
Paul Foot, 'New Labour's Hypocrisy', The Guardian, 17 April, 2001

Would you buy a used war from this man?

Strike! Demonstrate! Get the Troops Out of Afghanistan Now

The Brown Plague and how to fight it

A couple of years before Gordon Brown, 'World Statesman of the Year' according to Comic Relief - sorry the 'Appeal of Conscience Foundation', began borrowing from the slogans of the 1930s British Union of Fascists for soundbites for speeches to Labour Party Conference, ('British Jobs for British Workers'), his unhealthy obsession with 'Britishness' was already on full display. In 2005, Brown famously glorified the British Empire on a trip to Africa, declaring the 'days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over...We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it'. Back in the 1930s, high days of white colonial power, when Britain ruled a vast swathe of the African continent as well as huge chunks of Asia and the Middle East, celebrating the greatest empire the world had ever seen was distinctly 'respectable' politically. This is what one famous German politician of the inter-war period, who in his autobiography had declared 'I, as a man of Germanic blood, would, in spite of everything, rather see India under English rule than any other', had to say in a speech in the Reichstag of 28 April 1939:

'During the whole of my political activity I have always expounded the idea of a close friendship and collaboration between Germany and England...This desire for Anglo-German friendship and co-operation conforms not merely to sentiments which result from the racial origins of our two peoples, but also to my realisation of the importance for the whole of mankind of the existence of the British Empire. I have never left room for any doubt of my belief that the existence of this empire is an inestimable factor of value for the whole of human cultural and economic life. By whatever means Great Britain has acquired her colonial territories - and I know that they were those of force and often brutality - nevertheless, I know full well that no other empire has ever come into being in any other way, and that in the final resort it is not so much the methods that are taken into account in history as success, and not the success of the methods as such, but rather the general good which the methods yield. Now there is no doubt that the Anglo-Saxon people have accomplished immeasurable colonizing work in the world. For this work I have a sincere admiration. The thought of destroying this labour appeared and still appears to me, seen from a higher human point of view, as nothing but the effluence of human wanton destructiveness.'

The politician in question was of course Adolf Hitler.* No wonder the British Nazi Party are looking such a threat in the coming Euro elections this June - almost a dozen years of New Labour trying to shove nationalist ideas imbued with connotations of race and empire down the throats of the rest of us - together with vigorous modern day acts of neo-colonialism and barbarism - are bound to have dangerous consequences. Oh yeah, and as Richard Seymour recently noted, 'I don't know if you saw it or not, but there's apparently this huge crisis in the capitalist system right now' going on as well. In my opinion, if humanity is going to do the whole '1930s thing' again, lets organise to try and make the rich and powerful - not the rest of us - end up paying for their crisis this time around. And that means building solidarity with the small number of factory occupations already underway, such as the workers in Dundee who yesterday decided to defiantly and gloriously occupy their plant rather than simply passively succumb to the idea that there is nothing we can do in midst of a jobs massacre of epic proportions. An international wave of 'sit-down strikes' such as those which swept America, France and even the Caribbean during the 1930s would rapidly transform the current political situation, and send out a beacon of hope to millions that 'another world is possible'. Such a strike wave would also do something else - it would begin to undermine the very social logic of the whole rotten system from within. Indeed - it is the only thing that can. As Rosa Luxemburg - who knew a thing or two about mass strikes - famously once put it, 'Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there they must be be broken'.

*From N Ferguson, Empire, (Penguin 2004), pp. 335-6.

Telling it like it is

'The importance that the city attaches to integrity and the highest standards in the provision of financial services is the enduring means by which London's reputation as one of the world's leading financial centres is secured, and indeed enhanced...What you, as the City of London, have achieved for financial services we, as a government, now aspire to achieve for the whole economy.'
Gordon Brown, Mansion House speech to City bankers, 2002.

'I understand and share people's anger towards the behaviour of some banks...Banks must act in the long-term interests of their shareholders and therefore of the economy as a whole, not in the short-term interests of bankers...We want to ensure that the new banking system...becomes the servant of our economy and society, never its master...We will put people first, not bankers'
Gordon Brown, 2009.

State Capitalism in Brownite Britain

Owen Hatherley, fresh from writing an book review for the New Statesman on Stalinist culture, has just penned a timely article about culture under New Labour, epitomised by its draconian new Community Payback scheme. While Stalinist Russia exploited prisoners via mass forced labour in GULAGS, New Labour try to equally enforce obedience and citizenship of the poor through building new prisons and publicly shaming those sentenced to community work. To try and placate the rising anger of 'Hard Working British Families' in the midst of the crisis, the Brownite bureaucrats have begun 'Show Trials' too, of a 'gang of four' criminal bankers, but these have been tokenistic pathetic affairs up to now... Yet Brown still resists the full shift to taking over the banks and building up state capitalism in Britain on a major scale, despite the scale of the crisis of neoliberal models of capitalism. We are still waiting, also, and for some inexplicable reason, for a 'cult of the personality' to really get going around Gordon Brown...and it looks like we may be in for a bit of a further wait as all his apparent brilliance and genius for economic macro-management is currently going down the pan. In the apt words of one of Brown's cabinet ministers last month, 'The banks are fucked, we're fucked, the country's fucked.' Quite. Welcome to Brown's Britain.

Right kind of snow, wrong kind of strikes

I am sure there is a point that socialists in Britain could make regarding the way in which when we are hit by a sudden fall of snow as we have been that the whole transport network should not come to an almost total halt. And I am sure a critique of privatisation would be part of this, as would the point that under socialism, I am sure that we would have plenty of snowploughs etc lying around. But as someone called Snowball, it is worth noting that if it is going to snow, this definitely is the kind of snow you want - it is solid and heavy enough for kids to make snowmen, snowwomen and yes, snowballs. We haven't had 'the right kind of snow' in Britain for ages, and I thought global warming might mean we would never again have this kind of snow again - which shows how little I know about global warming and its consequences.

Unfortunately, Britain has also been hit over the last week by 'the wrong kind of strikes' - ie. not strikes against the power of capital or even against a particular multinational or national capitalist enterprise - but a strike against er, other workers. Genius. In other European countries the economic crisis is seeing general strikes and very high levels of class struggle break out (for example in Greece and France), while in Iceland workers have helped to bring down a government.

Yet in Britain, a section of the organised working class movement has decided that they are not going to take direct action in the face of the jobs massacre targetted at those responsible for the jobs massacre - ie those bosses wielding the knife - but against er, other European workers simply on the basis of their foreign nationality. You get a sense they are the 'wrong kind of strikes' because a) they have got massive media coverage and b) the media coverage is on the whole fair to the strikers.

It is important for socialists to understand why this has happened - and what we can try to do about it. The reasons why it has happened it seems to me are, firstly - the fact that New Labour has played the 'race and nation' card consistently since being in power and even more since the economic crisis began. I commented on Brown's 2007 speech where he called for 'British jobs for British workers' at the time, and also his 2008 speech where he called for 'A New British Century'. It is also worth recalling in this instance Brown's Immigration Minister Phil Woolas's recent comments about 'It's been too easy to get into this country in the past and it's going to get harder'. When racist scapegoating of migrant and foreign workers comes from the very top of the body politic, it is only a matter of time before the poison is seen as legitimate and spreads.

The second reason why these latest strikes have happened is because of the craven and cowardly nature of the British trade union bureaucracy in the face of the jobs massacre. The top of the official trade union movement have not even so far come together to organise one national demonstration to fight for the right to work - let alone led any other form of action. In part, this is because they don't want to rock the boat for Brown. However, in part they are prepared to back the recent strikes because they accept the strategy of protectionism and think the idea of a fight for 'British' workers' jobs is a good one.

What should socialists response to these strikes be? There are obviously a lot of contradictions at work here (was it Lenin or Trotsky who said 'every strike, rebellion and protest may not destroy the state, but it bears the germ of revolution'?) - and many of those striking will not be racists but simply concerned about fighting for their jobs and showing solidarity with other workers fighting for their jobs. We should not therefore join in with the Tories and New Labour in denouncing workers taking strike action. Our role should be to try and put socialist solutions to the capitalist crisis to the workers' taking such action, and try to challenge the racism and nationalism implicit in the strike. In 1968, when Enoch Powell made his racist 'Rivers of Blood' speech, socialists in Britain were confronted with a similar (if not quite so extreme) situation. As Simon Basketter notes, 'after [Powell's] speech racists took comfort, gained in confidence and pulled the political climate to the right – opening up the door to more racism from the state and the establishment. That is a cycle which continues until it is challenged.

While some dockers did march in support of Powell, the racism that Powell fuelled in the docks did not go unconfronted. The late Terry Barrett was a London docker active in the International Socialists, the forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party.

Together with a small group of socialists and others opposed to racism, he tried to dissuade dockers from marching by distributing a leaflet that read:

'Who is Enoch Powell? He is a right wing Tory opportunist who will stop at nothing to help his party and his class. He is a director of the vast National Discount Company (assets £224 million) which pays him a salary bigger than the £3,500 a year he gets as an MP. He lives in fashionable Belgravia and writes Greek verse. What does he believe in? Higher unemployment. He has consistently advocated a national average of 3 percent unemployed. Cuts in social services. He wants higher health charges, less council houses, charges for state education and lower unemployment pay. Mass sackings in the docks. Again and again he has argued that the docks are ‘grossly overmanned’.'

The current situation is not as bad as that - but if such socialist arguments are not put forward and basic class politics are not injected urgently into the body politic by the trade union movement, then the current political vacuum in Britain will instead be filled with such racist 'solutions' to the crisis akin to Powellism - that blame the victims of the capitalist system - other workers - for the crisis rather than those - overlords of international capital like bankers and politicians like Brown (loyal servants of international capital) - who are responsible for the crisis in the first place.

New Film: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

A hilarious new comedy starring Simon Pegg:

Simon Pegg plays Gordon Brown, a hapless control freak well out of his depth in the murky world of British politics, who makes blunder after blunder as Prime Minister. His disastrous infatuation with Margaret Thatcher, his bankrolling of bloody criminal imperialist wars, his public sector pay freeze at a time of economic crisis, his promotion of Peter Mandleson and his overall attitude of being 'intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich' by profiting from the misery of millions in rampant chaotic financial speculation ends up destroying the thing he loved the most - the Labour Party.

'More a tragedy really than a comedy - it shows the bankrupt logical end point of parliamentary socialism and the depths to which New Labour have now sunk as a political party. It beggars belief how so many trade union leaders can continue to bankroll such a party with their members funds, and put their loyalty to the Labour Party before the interests of the working class in general. Why don't they lead a united fightback against this incredibly unpopular New Labour regime?' - Jonathan Ross

Brown's Project for a New British Century

Apologies to readers outside Britain for once more blogging about Brown and New Labour, but his speech to Labour Party conference yesterday demands comment. And I am not talking about the delusional and downright dishonest comments that it got from Labourites. "It was absolutely brilliant. He delivered it humbly but with a passion we don't often see in Labour politicians … That was an Obama moment a la Britain," said Ian Gibson, the Norwich North MP. Even the trade union bureaucracy lapped it up. 'This is exactly the sort of agenda that people wanted to hear from their Labour government,' said Dave Prentis, general secretary of the Unison union, which is the second biggest in Britain with 1.3 million members. `He set out clearly his vision for that fair society and an action plan.' Paul Kenny, general secretary of GMB, the third-biggest union, said Brown's language was `very different to that which we have heard before' and `welcome' to his members.

In reality it was neither inspirational nor brilliant nor really (aside from a brief moment when he discussed the NHS) that passionate. In reality it felt more like a farewell speech - because it almost certainly was the last time he will address Labour Party conference as leader, and Brown knew it. The knives are well and truly out for him, despite the warm words of praise he got yesterday. More importantly, if people actually read the speech they will see that despite the odd sop to criticism from the Left within the Labour Party and trade union movement, it has to stand as one of the most right wing speeches ever made to a Labour Party conference -essentially putting forward a pro-capitalist solution to the capitalist crisis - and it is this aspect of it that makes it comparable to something by Barack Obama. For both Obama and Brown are essentially loyal servants of imperial capital - and the speech reflected that.

With a tie and a backdrop of imperial purple, Brown felt compelled to once again confirm his utter loyalty to what he called the 'new global society' under American hegemony. 'We will work with America not just to deal with the immediate security challenges in Georgia and in Iran. And I tell you that what we do together for the poor and vulnerable is an act of compassion, but it is more than that. It is what will determine whether this new global society succeeds or fails. And David Miliband, Douglas Alexander and I will do everything in our power to bring justice and democracy, to Burma, to Zimbabwe and to Darfur.' Chilling stuff for the people of Burma, Zimbabwe and Sudan.

British troops would continue to be a kind of foreign legion to American imperial power, the loyal Gurkhas prepared to pay the 'blood price' and die as cannon fodder to maintain Britain's 'special relationship' with whoever is the next American emperor. 'We pay special tribute to the heroism of our armed forces,... to their service and sacrifice in Iraq and in Afghanistan and in peacekeeping missions around the globe. Quite simply the best armed forces in the world.'

There was never going to be any sign of repentance for the war crimes of New Labour over the last decade or so in power. 'The Conservatives say our country is broken - but this country has never been broken by anyone or anything. This country wasn't broken by fascism, by the cold war, by terrorists.' Indeed not - but no thanks to New Labour. New Labour has however participated in the breaking of other countries -most notably Iraq. The innocent people of Iraq and Afghanistan who have died or been made refugees by war are of course not even worth counting let alone mentioning in a conference speech - they are truly 'unpeople'.

In terms of the economy, Brown was committed to saving capitalism from its crisis by making tax payers and workers in general pay the price for the greed and financial speculation inherent in the system. 'We are and will always be a pro-enterprise, pro-business and pro-competition government. And we believe the dynamism of our five million businesses large and small is vital to the success of our country. But the continuing market turbulence shows why we now need a new settlement for these times - a settlement that we as a pro-market party must pursue. A settlement where the rewards are for what really matters - hard work, effort and enterprise.' The key word is 'enterprise' which was mentioned over and over again during the speech. Big bonuses for City bankers was fine - providing it flowed from 'hard work, effort and enterprise'. The pay freeze - effectively a pay cut - for public sector workers would continue. 'What counts is not the pursuit of any sectional interest but the advancement of the public interest' - and the 'public interest' under Brown remains whatever the dictates of imperial capital require.

As Ellen Meiksins Wood notes in her 2003 work Empire of Capital, there is: 'an inevitable contradiction between capital's constant need to drive down the costs of labour and its constant need to expand consumption, which requires that people have money to spend. This...is one of the insoluable contradictions of capitalism.'

'But, on balance, global capital benefits from uneven development, at least in the short term (and short-termism is an endemic disease of capitalism). The fragmentation of the world into separate economies, each with its own social regime and labour conditions, presided over by more or less sovereign territorial states, is no less essential to "globalisation" than is the free movement of capital. Not the least important function of the nation state in globalisation is to enforce the principle of nationality that makes it possible to manage the movements of labour by means of strict border controls and stringent immigration policies, in the interests of capital.'

Here we come to the great underlying theme of Brown's speech - Britishness - enforcing 'the principle of nationality' in the interests of capital. One only needs to glance through Brown's speech to hear of the apparent wonders of 'Great Britain', 'this great country', 'this incredible country'. He even called for a new 'British century' as though he was living in the late 19th century: 'With Britain's great assets - our stability, our openness, our scientific genius, our creative industries, and yes our English language - I know that this can be a British century and I'm determined it will be.'

And so to that apparently most quintessentially 'British' of things: Fair Play and Fairness. Other 'lesser nations' and people are incapable of grasping 'fairness' of course - only British people can understand it apparently. Brown's vision of 'fairness' is distinctly authoritarian and reminiscent of a police state. 'We will be the party of law and order... justice seen is justice done - so you will be seeing more neighbourhood policing on the street, hearing more about the verdicts of the court, able to see the people who offended doing community payback which will be what it says; hard work for the public benefit at the places and times the public can see it. That's only fair to the law abiding majority.'

Brown's 'Britishness' also inevitably involved paying the race card against migrant workers. 'Nobody in Britain should get to take more out of the system than they are willing to put in...we recognise the contribution that migrants make to our economy and our society, but the other side of welcoming newcomers who can help Britain is being tough about excluding those adults who won't and can't. That's why we have introduced the Australian-style points-based system, the citizenship test, the English language test and we will introduce a migrant charge for public services. That's only fair to the public who play by the rules and to the new citizens who uphold the rules. So across the board, we will create rules that reward those who play by them and punish those who don't. That's what fairness means to me.'

All in all, Brown's vision of 'fairness' and 'fair play' to build a 'British Century' is a mixture of 19th century imperial nostalgia and racism towards 'the Other', 20th century totalitarian state building, and 21st century craven complicity in the Bush Doctrine and the right of the American military-industrial complex to 'full spectrum dominance', all held together with a thin grimy ideological cement of warmed up Fabian bluster and bullshit. The fact that New Labour as a Party lapped it up while preparing to stab Brown in the back in 9 months time tells you everything you need to know about the moral, intellectual and political bankruptcy of Labourism today. People in Britain and internationally do deserve 'a new settlement for new times' and 'a fair Britain for the new age'. The Labour Party, whoever is in charge, can never and will never deliver that because it is so fundamentally tied to the capitalist system, with the bloody wars and devastating recessions inherent in that system. We need to build a socialist alternative now more than ever.

Thoughts on Labour Party Conference

I write this on the day after marching to lobby the Labour Party conference in Blackpool and I am reading the newspapers. Blackpool was chock full of journalists. They crammed into the Winter Gardens, scavenging for gossip. Is Tony Blair falling out with Gordon Brown? What is Robin Cook going to say about electoral reform? At least 500 of the best journalists of our generation spent their day searching for and producing, exactly nothing. Meanwhile the march of several thousand surged through the streets. These marchers had stories to tell: real stories, about hospitals starved of nursing care, about slashed firefighting capabilities, about impoverished old age pensioners and corrupt local authorities. Yet not a single of those conference journalists even considered spending a moment with the marchers. In the next morning’s papers, full of idiotic intrigue, the entire march had been obliterated.
Paul Foot, Preface to 'Shaking the World': Revolutionary Journalism by John Reed, edited by John Newsinger (1998)

Substitute 'Manchester' for 'Blackpool', 'David Miliband' for 'Tony Blair', and remove the reference to Robin Cook, and Paul Foot's description of Labour Party conference ten years ago could have been written yesterday. Only this year, there was not only a march of thousands outside but also an alternative 'Conference of the Left' (perhaps one sign of the growing realisation of the need for a left alternative to Labourism after a decade of Blairism and Brownism (where 'Brown' stands for Blairite Reactionary Only Without Novelty). And of course both the march and the convention of the Left have been obliterated by journalists as if they did not take place. As Foot went onto note,

No wonder the word ‘journalist’ has become almost a term of abuse in socialist circles. If this is the way journalists behave, surely they must be part of the capitalist conspiracy to exploit and humiliate working people? In truth, however, the word journalist describes only a person who writes about the contemporary world. Since the single most obvious fact about the contemporary world is that is ultimately divided into two classes, a journalist can write for one class or the other. Of course it is much easier and more profitable to write on behalf of the authorities. But the history of the century is lit up by journalists who wrote against the stream.

I am afraid I was not in Manchester at all this weekend. But I have recently got 'freeview' which enables one should one wish to watch the BBC Parliament channel which has live coverage of all the three main British neo-liberal political party conferences. I would not really advise watching the Liberal Democrat conference unless one has severe flu or something, as the utterly pointless and vacuous nature of proceedings makes it depressing viewing and really suitable only for the living braindead. The odd glimpses of the Labour Party conference I have seen so far have been marginally more interesting. Every time someone makes a vaguely 'left' point (such as criticising Margaret Thatcher or the obscene amount of money sloshing around the City of London bankers in bonuses and so on) they get cheers and applause. But the gap between socialist rhetoric and the neoliberal reality of New Labour is throughout the conference left me crying out for just one person to be brave to point out the hypocrisy of it all. I was left confused. At times it seemed as if I was watching some perverse bureaucratic Stalinist rally where speaker after speaker got up to denounce the greed of bankers, the devastating legacy of thirty years of neoliberalism and the idiotic freemarket ideology of the Tories and Lib Dems while ending with praise for the Dear Leader Gordon Brown as if he was a great socialist visionary. A delegate from the 'Socialist Health Association' got up and after praising the small number of genuine reforms that Labour had made attacked the fact that the gap between rich and poor had got wider under 11 years of Labour in power. The audience applauded. Yes! I thought - at last - someone is brave enough to speak truth to power. Only then, the aforementioned delegate ended his contribution by saying 'and that is why we all need to rally round Gordon Brown and ensure a fourth term of Labour Government' - again to applause from the deluded audience which made me utterly despair of it all.

At other times, I wondered if the delegates were playing a more clever and subtle game. By attacking Thatcher and the 'Tory lunatics who believe in the free market' so openly (while in a ritualistic manner also praising the Dear Leader Brown) were they not also implicitly attacking Brown (who after all met Thatcher, praised her, and is considering shelling out 3 million quid of tax payers money on a state funeral for her)? Was this the only way they could legitimately express dissent? If anyone openly and explicitly made a socialist critique of New Labour would they be arrested under the Terrorism Act for 'inciting violence' or something?

The whole thing anyway was decidedly Stalinist - though the only thing I couldn't quite work out was whether the delegates were consciously complicit in this or were playing the game while also trying to tell Gordon Brown his Tory policies were the reason why his Government was so unpopular in the only way they could...

So what 'stories' and 'news' have the journalists told us about Labour conference so far? Well, we get a sense of the sycophancy and careerism of younger delegates.

[Home Secretary] Jacqui Smith got the best reaction, which is saying very little. Emily Benn, 18-year-old granddaughter of Tony Benn, announced that it was a "fantastic honour to be anywhere near her!"...She was rewarded with a home secretarial hug. At the end of Ms Smith's speech a few people stood to applaud, then more, but very, very slowly. It was like a standing ovation from scores of arthritis sufferers.

And apparently Foreign Secretary David Miliband thinks that the Labour Government may have made a mistake in waging war on the people of Iraq, noting 'It's clear that despite Saddam's best efforts to persuade us he had weapons of mass destruction, he didn't.' Er, lets think - what were 'Saddam's best efforts to persuade us he had WMD' again? Ah, yes, I remember now. When asked by Tony Benn in February 2003 whether he possessed chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, he replied that he did not. 'These weapons do not come in small pills that you can hide in your pocket,' he said. And this is coming from Miliband, the man who is apparently going to save the Labour Party and deliver a fourth Labour term? No, the real stories and news from Labour conference would have come not from the 'idiotic intrigue' inside the conference but from the people who marched outside in their thousands against the warmongers like Miliband inside.