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More than 4000 election addresses for the elections in Lambeth were delivered to Head Office yesterday. Door-to-door distribution in Clapham East ward will begin tomorrow.
The leaflets carry a QR code which will take those using it directly to a page on our website. As this page can only be reached directly via the code this means that we can see how many used it from the leaflet.
Up to now we have only be able to judge the effectiveness of our election leafletting in terms of votes (not all that helpful) and replies by post, phone or email to Head Office (very few in recent years). We will now have a additional measure. In this sense, this election campaign is an experiment.
Imposs1904 has just put up in his blog this appropriate article from April 1963:
http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-inhumanity-of-war-1963.html?m=1
According to this report in an Indian news outlet, in one such incident the soldiers killing captured Russians call them “Bolsheviks”. Somebody seems to think they are still fighting the Russian Civil War of 1918-21.
This is going to be a test of the sincerity or hypocrisy of Western politicians. Are they going to equally condemn atrocities by those fighting on their side?
It looks as if the Green Party election agent didn’t understand that in a two or three member ward electors can sign the nomination papers of up to two or three candidates, as the Labourites and Tories did. That would have been much easier than collecting another ten.
In one sense it is lucky they didn’t as their proposer is one of those who assented to our nomination. If he had also proposed the second Green candidate that would have meant that he had proposed three candidates. Which he couldn’t validly do. As it happened, we handed in our papers first and so it would have been the third nomination that would have been invalid.
Here’s the Daily Mail quoting the New York Times on that:
It’s war itself that is the atrocity.
And perhaps the LibDems as well, as they have only one candidate. Another possibility is that there is a deal between the two parties as in some other places.
In the rest of the Borough apart from 3 other Tuscites, the only other minor capitalist parties contesting are the Womens Equality Party and the Reform party (ex-Brexit party) with one each somewhere.
Here are the candidates in Clapham East ward, which is a new 2-member ward. As you can see, our opponents are: 2 Labourites, 2 Tories, 2 Greens, 1 LibDem and 1 TUSC:
We now know who our opponents are in Tunbridge Wells. It’s the usual gang of four capitalist parties — Tory, Labour, LibDem and Geem, including the outgoing Liberal Democrat counillor.
According to the terms of the Geneva Convention and its interpretation, it is a “war crime” to deliberately kill non-combatant civilians but it is ok to kill armed people in civilian clothes fighting against you; and it is just too bad if civilians get killed in shelling from either side, their killing does not count as a war crime. Captured armed civilians are supposed to be treated as POWs and so to shoot them is a breach of the Convention.
There are calls to charge and convict Putin as a “war criminal” but to blame the head of the government for war crimes committed by their troops would create a precedent which Western politicians might not like. It would mean that they could be held responsible for any war crimes committed by their armed forces — and to Bush, Clinton, Obama, Blair, Cameron, and various successive Australian prime ministers being hauled before the international court at The Hague for the war crimes committed by their troops in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Putin is clearly a warmonger but so are they.
From a socialist point of view, the killings permitted by the Geneva Convention — workers killing other workers for the benefit of their respective rulers — are also to be condemned as is civilians being killed in the crossfire. War itself is the crime, of which workers are the victims.
The first three paragraphs are ok:
“This is not a war between Ukraine and Russia. It is a war between the USA and Russia, in which both sides are cynically using Ukraine as a battering ram.
The people of Ukraine will gain nothing and lose much from being treated in this way. They fight and die or lose their homes and flee. We pour in more weapons and shout encouragement from a safe distance. Russia wrecks the joint.
What Ukraine actually needs is action to cure its festering, universal corruption. It would also benefit from the pushing to the margins of the ultra-nationalist fanatics who have far too much influence in its government and armed forces. The war will make these problems worse, not better.”As to the rest, it won’t be official US policy to want to reduce Russia to the Stone Age. That may well be the opinion of some government adviser, but no more official policy than the mad plan for “denazifying” Ukraine that YMS has drawn our attention to will be official Russian policy.
What both the US and Russia want is to expand their sphere of influence to include Ukraine, an issue that is being settled on the battlefield at the expense of the people living there.
The pictures from Bucha are horrific enough. The trouble is the Ukrainian propaganda machine doesn’t know when to stop:
“Mylovanov said early eyewitness accounts and anecdotal evidence suggest children may have been burned alive, young women raped en-masse and then executed afterwards, and people forced to eat their pets after being deliberately starved by Russian troops.”
I don’t think that the Russian state really wants to exterminate Ukrainians by “denazifying” them. That seems to have been written by some extremist.
But the old Soviet Union had a chance to try this in Western Ukraine after WW2. This part of what is now Ukraine, with Lvov as the main city, had never been part of the Russian Empire. It had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire up to WW1 and then of Poland up to 1939.
After WW2 the Russian state had trouble digesting it. The attempt to do so it did lead to six years of guerrilla warfare and, you are right, would again. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the UPA):
“After the end of World War II, the Polish communist army—the People’s Army of Poland—fought extensively against the UPA. The UPA remained active and fought against the People’s Republic of Poland until 1947, and against the Soviet Union until 1949. It was particularly strong in the Carpathian Mountains, the entirety of Galicia and in Volhynia—in modern Western Ukraine. By the late 1940s, the mortality rate for Soviet troops fighting Ukrainian insurgents in Western Ukraine was higher than the mortality rate for Soviet troops during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.”
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Insurgent_Army)
When the USSR collapsed in 1991 these nationalists came out into the open again and could even be said to be at the origin of present-day anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalism.
The irony is that this would not have been a problem for the Russian state (in its various forms) had it not seized the parts of previously non-Russian Ukrainian area and incorporated into its province of Ukraine.
But I can’t imagine that those in charge of the Russian state want to repeat the exercise with the whole of the Ukraine. Their aim now appears to be to move their frontier westwards, leaving the rest of Ukraine as an independent neutral state (as the USSR did with Finland after WW2).
The nomination papers for our candidate in the Patiles & St. Mark’s ward were handed into today and accepted.
We won’t know who are our opponents are here and in Lambeth till Wednesday.
Here is the election address of our candidate in Tunbidge Wells:
Fit for Purpose? Or fit for Change?
Democracy can seem abstract when your ability to make changes to your community feels limited to choosing between a small number of political parties every few years. And how can any winning party really represent the needs of all 119,000 residents in Tunbridge Wells borough?
Party politics will always get in the way of local residents being able to make changes that help build a better community for all. The main parties are limited by decisions and views made centrally, and conflict between them distracts from the need to work for improvements that benefit the greatest number of people. Two councillors this year alone have resigned from their parties for failures in both local administration and at the very top of government. Whether Liberal Democrat or Tory, it is not the party but the political system they wish to maintain which causes these issues. We must strive to create a political system that ensures all members of society are listened to and can contribute. And this must start at the very grass roots of politics, not the top.
In Tunbridge Wells, there has been a disturbing number of cases of women’s drinks being spiked in bars and clubs. This problem won’t be resolved until every woman is safe and secure while out at night. We should ask what leads some people to violent and antisocial behaviour, and aim for a culture which treats everyone with respect.
Community projects which work to safeguard and support our community never have enough funding, part of a wider problem of neglected public services which has led to problems such as the lack of NHS dental care. Capitalist society is shaped by money, with most wealth ending up with the elite and the majority left to cope with dwindling resources and high prices.
The Green Party would have you believe capitalism can be managed to mitigate the effects of industry on the environment. Locally, efforts to maintain and protect our green spaces, stop developments outside of brownfield sites, reduce traffic, and efficiently renovate properties are constrained by the economic system. The main parties merely attempt treatment of the symptoms; we propose treating the cause by advocating for a socialist society built to satisfy everyone’s needs, and those of the planet.
Shannon Kennedy, the Socialist Party candidate, Pantiles & St. Mark’s Ward.
Why is that these days the liberal centre, who are supposed to be “the lesser evil”, are the warmongers and the authoritarian right is less bellicose? Hungary is an example where Orban has just been re-elected against the opposition which wanted to prolong the war in Ukraine:
“Their candidate Peter Marki-Zay argued that Hungary should join Poland, the UK and others in supplying arms to Ukraine. And if called upon, and only within a Nato framework, should even consider sending troops.”
I don’t know if this was a big issue in this election but it seems a majority there have not been carried away by Ukrainomania.
It’s the same in Serbia where the outgoing president was re-elected too, but that’s more easily understandable as 23 years ago Serbia was the victim of a NATO bombing campaign.
The well-known Ukrainian Trotskyy would have approved, writing in 1934:
“the lack of a stable gold ruble is one of the main causes of our many economic troubles and catastrophes.”
https://www.leftvoice.org/leon-trotsky-if-america-should-go-communist/
For the moment, the Bank of Russia is buying gold at the fixed price only from Russian banks, maybe as a first step towards what the RT interview suggests of eventually linking the value of the ruble directly to gold.
More here:
The fact that the “West” is prepared not only to risk a global economic downturn but also disruption to the international payments system shows how determined they seem to be to do down Russia. In any event, they don’t seem to be likely to achieve their original stated aim of incorporating Ukraine into NATO.
But at what point will Western oligarchs react against this and bring pressure to bear to stop this danger to their commercial interests?
