ALB
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A message from the leader of the “party of NATO”:
“Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has said parliament should be recalled if Russia invades Ukraine, as he called for tougher sanctions against Moscow.
On a visit to Sunderland, he said: “I think it’s very important that parliament is recalled if there is an invasion … we must have a swift and strong response, a united response, from the United Kingdom and a united response with our allies.”
He added: “I would like to see tougher sanctions. I’d like that threat to be very real because let’s see this for what it is. It’s Russian aggression. So I would say to the government go further on sanctions.”
I know the Ukrainian ambassador has rowed back a bit on what he said, but I just heard on the 11 o’clock bbc4 radio news summary a junior minister at the war office called Heappy saying that if Ukraine wished to exercise its sovereign right not to join NATO the government would respect that; all they were concerned with was that Ukraine should have the right to decide its alliances.
Is there something going on here we are not being told about? And if there is, why didn’t they say this as the start?
At least this Heappy character seems more clued up than the Foreign Secretary who showed she an ignorance of the geography of Russia and his boss, Ben Wally, the Minister of War, whose contribution to de-escalating the situation was to compare Putin to Hitler.
Apparently Labour is now calling itself “the Party of NATO”. What are the unions doing financing the band of unprincipled place-hunters that the parliamentary Labour Party is? Cut them adrift and let them go bankrupt.
Another day. Another non-invasion.
Meanwhile the Ukraine may be prepared to consider dropping joining NATO:
“Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK has said the country could consider dropping its ambition to join Nato to avoid war with Russia. Vadym Prystaiko told BBC Radio 5 that the country would, due to threats and blackmail, consider “serious concessions” including removing the goal of joining the Nato alliance from the Ukrainian constitution.”
Nobody believes there’s going to be an invasion and a nuclear war, not even the ICC:
“Are we heading towards a direct conflict between Russia and the US over the Ukraine, even a third world war, as some of the more alarmist reports suggest?
Neither the US or Russia are part of a stable military bloc which has the discipline to mobilise for a global war. And neither has an interest in an immediate, direct military clash. Despite the Ukraine’s considerable agricultural and industrial assets invading and annexing the Ukraine has been compared to a python swallowing a cow: invading it might be one thing, holding onto it quite another. And as we have said, America has more pressing concerns on the imperialist front, hence Biden’s rather ineffectual warning that bad things will happen if Russia invades, and his commitment to high level diplomatic talks.”
Just woke up. Still no Russian invasion. The US and British “intelligence” services seem to be as reliable as the CWO — they have predicted 9 of the last 2 Russian invasions.
Of course they are not really that stupid. They know there’s not going to be one. They are just saying there will be, probably so as to be able to say that when one doesn’t happen that their firm stand deterred it.
Amusing how Putin treats with contempt the various ministers Britain has sent to Moscow to threaten Russia, indicating that he would rather speak to the organ grinder than the monkey. Which he did yesterday.
Meanwhile one of the monkeys has accused the French President of being an appeaser like Neville Chamberlain in Munich in 1938. Where did find these non-entities?
I thought you were worried, and rightly, about the effect on people’s mental health of alarmist talk of an impending nuclear war between Russia and America. As you pointed out earlier, Al Jazeera takes a more balanced approach. President Zeletsky of Ukraine seems to too.
The one in Canada seems to be a genuine working-class protest (even if hi-jacked by dubious elements) against unnecessary measures that would deprive them of earning a living, just like the ones elsewhere by health service workers — unnecessary as even if you’ve been vaccinated three times you can still get and spread the disease. Don’t know about the copy cat ones though, they seem more ideologically motivated.
The Labour Party has always been intellectually bankrupt. I am sure some capitalist donor will step in to stop them going financially bankrupt. An effective alternative government is useful for capitalism as it stops one set of politicians being in power too long and getting sticky fingers. And as a bonus maybe they will get a knighthood or lordship when the next Labour government of capitalism comes in.
I don’t think that means she “contributed” to the ideas expressed in the Communist Manifesto. It just means she was his secretary. Darwin too had his family help out with his writing but that didn’t mean they contributed to his ideas:
“Members of his family acted as his amanuenses, read to him, helped with experiments, and read drafts of his work; from time to time he employed someone to make fair copies of his manuscripts.”
Marx did the same with his wife and daughters.
Thanks,Alan, for the CWO link. I see they still stick to their view that there is a cycle of accumulation, over accumulation, war to destroy the “excess” capital, then reconstruction, accumulation, etc. Most of the article is explaining why a global war hasn’t broken out in the last 50 years when it should have happened, on their theory, not long after the post-war boom came to an end in 1973.
Anyway, it ends with this expectation:
“It cannot be predicted when this will lead to a more generalised conflict, although Admiral Davidson, the outgoing head of US command for the Indo-Pacific, openly declared that it would be within “the next six years” (as he, of course, called for an increase in the military budget).The system is inexorably taking us down that more than dangerous road. The actual flashpoint might not be either Ukraine or Taiwan, but in these uncertain times nothing can be ruled out. This is a struggle for mastery over the planet, and it will not go away. As our Italian comrades concluded in a recent article on Taiwan:
‘It is obvious that capitalism is preparing a new conflict of global significance and is not afraid of pushing the planet to the brink, not only on the environmental level, but now openly also on the economic and social level. Even if sometimes unconsciously, capitalism pursues the idea which every sensible human being instinctively hates and rejects: the idea of destruction, as its salvation, its resurrection. By devaluing capital and obtaining the much desired “creative destruction” according to the famous Schumpeter definition, capital would then have the paved the way to restart a new cycle of accumulation as after previous wars, regardless of the effects that this “regeneration” would have on the planet and on its population.’”
This recalls the joke about the person who predicted nine of the last two world economic crises. It doesn’t work in this instance because the CWO haven’t even been right on two occasions since there hasn’t been a world war. The fact is that there doesn’t necessarily need to be one as the economic theory on which it is based is wrong.
The question of whether or not another world war is inevitable came up at a meeting three years ago on “No War but the Class War” between the ACG and the CWO which we attended as observers.
Here is an account of the discussion:
“On war, the CWO has the position that another world war is inevitable in order to devalue capital by destroying it so that capital accumulation can continue, something they predicted in the 1970s and are still expecting. The ACG and us argued that, while capitalism was the cause of wars due to its built-in competition over markets, source of raw materials, investment outlets and trade routes, a world war was neither necessary nor inevitable (in fact not really likely); but rather that war would continue to take the form of scattered proxy wars, in which the “Great Powers” (and some lesser ones) use locals in disputed areas as cannon fodder to further their interests, and probably become more frequent. Despite this divergence, everyone agreed that workers should not take side in wars.”
Does anyone know if the CWO is saying that this is it?
