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Lord Deben used to be known as John Gummer. He was environment minister at the time of the mad cow disease crisis and notoriously made his daughter publicly eat a hamburger to try to show that it was safe to eat beef. Luckily she survived.
From his Wikipedia entry:
“He had responsibility for food safety during the mad cow disease epidemic in 1989–90 which eventually claimed 178 British lives. At the height of the crisis in May 1990, he attempted to refute the growing evidence for BSE/Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease by feeding his four-year-old daughter Cordelia a burger in front of press cameras.”
No wonder he changed his name.
How about this for the dark future of the UK. As the Daily Mail says, maybe they should get the weather forecast right first.
Boris has had in for the Courts since the Suoreme Court ruled against a previous occasion when he tried to pull a fast one by suspending Parliament.
If Boris gets the boot his Brexiteer cronies like her will go with him and maybe the new PM will abandon the policy of undermining traditional Establishment institutions like the BBC and the Courts.
More reformist pie in the sky but that’s what think tanks seem to be be all about. Interesting though that there is a group in Britain proposing this too.
I see the situation in Germany is the same as everywhere else:
“The richest 10% own two-thirds of total private wealth (some €12 trillion in assets); the richest 1% own a third, while the richest 0.1% own up to a fifth.”
Why do these people not see that the solution is not a less unequal distribution of wealth but the common ownership of the means of wealth production so they can be used to turn out what people need and not for sale on a market with a view to profit?
Here’s Labour’s position on Ukraine. Why should we be surprised. They have always taken the side of US imperialism against Russian imperialism. And, despite the sham fight in the House of Commons, it’s, as the saying goes, Labour Tory, Same Old Story.
“In the first overseas trip by a shadow foreign secretary for two years, David Lammy chose to fly to Ukraine in a show of defiance against the Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Lammy flew with the shadow defence secretary John Healey to Kyiv today to meet ministers, officials, and civil society activists.
His choice contrasts markedly with the ambivalence about Putin shown by Labour during periods of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party. Corbyn was sharply criticised for his response to the Salisbury poisoning seeking more evidence that Moscow was behind the attack.
Allies of Lammy said it was vital that Ukraine understood there was cross-party support for its sovereignty across the UK.
The two Labour shadow cabinet members will not be visiting the areas of conflict in the east of the country.
Due to the Covid restrictions Lammy’s predecessor, Lisa Nandy, now transferred to the brief of levelling up, did not make any overseas visits, but as travel restrictions lift Lammy is determined to show his face abroad as much as possible. He already has strong personal contacts with White House Democrats built up since the Obama presidency.
To the extent there are any differences between Labour and the Conservatives on Ukraine, they centre on concerns the government’s integrated review on foreign policy placed too much emphasis on the Indo-Pacific, as opposed to defence of the Euro-Atlantic area. Labour is also pressing the Conservatives to do more to close down the loopholes that allow post Soviet oligarchs to store their cash in the UK.
Last week in the Commons Lammy defended Nato’s strategy on expansion saying:
‘The truth is that Nato and the European Union’s enlargement was not the west moving east, but the east looking west. These were free, sovereign states seeking a future of security, prosperity, co-operation and peace in a democratic Europe.’”Added to the Jack Fitzgerald Internet Archive.
Includes debates on “socialist industrial unionism” with the SLP and the IWW. Also one with TA Jackson, then in the ILP, in which Jackson puts arguments we still hear from Trotskyists and other reformists.
Emigration, June 1906
The Socialist Party of Great Britain and the Socialist Labour Party, August 1906
Debate on Industrial Unionism, October-November 1906
The Socialist Party and Trade Unionism, February 1907
The Rout of the Railway Men, December 1907
Bounteous Bournville, October 1908
Why This Resignation? The I.I.P. and its Leaders, May 1909
Mr. Garvey’s difficulties, June 1909
Labourism versus Socialism. A Debate, December 1909
Who supplies the brains?, February 1910A scientist warns of the danger of adolescent girls not eating enough meat.
Actually, personally I have always been against that “Stalinist monstrosity” and was going to say so. I think that some anti-Castro Cubans once had a go at blowing it up.
Ex-comrade Watkins recidives (I think that’s a word, anyway he’s done it again, this time with knobs on):
https://moneyweek.com/economy/604175/in-praise-of-capitalism-the-noble-path-that-leads-to-profits
That link Robbo put up to launch the anti-work thread has a link to a candidate in the Korean presidential election in March who appears to be advocating the real thing — a payment to everyone even if a rather modest one.
It will be interesting to see if he gets elected and, if so, whether he will honour his election pledge — and the outcome.
Very interesting article. If you got access to the discussion, Robbo, you could draw attention to the article on Tang Ping movement in China.
A bit surprising that the article didn’t mention this movement. I see it mentions Marx’s Wage Labour and Capital. I didn’t think it was except as exposing wage-labour as being exploited. But all to the good if people read it as well as the pamphlets by Paul Lafargue and Bob Black.
In any event, we definitely have a lot to say on the subject, including this editorial from November 1971.
Perhaps surprisingly Rees-Mogg has defended the jury system. Or perhaps not surprisingly as he likes old things and the jury system goes back a long way.
That the attorney general (who is supposed to be the government’s lawyer and give them independent advice) should be joining in the knee jerk Tory reaction just shows how Johnson’s has filled the post with an arse-licking crony rather than an independent-minded lawyer.
It remains to be seen if the case will be referred to the Court of Appeal but it won’t make any difference to the verdict or, I would have thought, to future jury decisions. Juries won’t like being told by governments what decision to make.
I have just read the Haskins book, or rather pamphlet as it’s only 90 pages. He does seem to have studied our case and portrays it accurately as us defining socialism as a classless, stateless, frontierless, moneyless world society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the whole people.
He says that this is what Marx too envisaged as the post-capitalist future and that the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ both refer to it. He accepts that socialism has to be democratic and has not been established anywhere and that the various authoritarian regimes that have called themselves or have been called socialism aren’t because they were not democratic.
His approach to criticising socialism is different from that of his fellow anti-socialists who attack it as undemocratic on the basis of what happened in Russia, China, Cambodia, etc. He criticises it precisely because it would be democratic, extending democracy to the production and distribution of wealth.
He doesn’t think that such a society is possible but his objections here are bog standard: that it’s against human nature and What About the Lazy Man, Who Will Do the Dirty Work, What If Everyone Wanted to Live in Malibu, etc, etc, which we have often met and refuted.
His main point is that socialism in our and Marx’s sense is not just impossible but is ‘evil’ on the grounds that it would oblige people to share responsibility for something that was against their moral principles.
This is the old ‘tyranny of the majority’ argument deployed by individualist anarchists against socialism (Haskins seems to be some sort of moderate anarcho-capitalist). His argument is that, because what is to be produced is democratically decided, if a majority decide to raise cattle or pigs to eat this would be ‘evil’ because it would force Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Vegans to accept this despite voting against it.
Although he accepts that what he calls ‘European-style Socialism’ isn’t really socialism, he makes the same charge against a Public Health Service like the NHS. This too is ‘evil’ because it forces, for instance, strict Roman Catholics to accept decisions to provide contraception and abortion if it is decided that these should be provided.
He would have a case if a majority were to decide that everybody had to eat meat but of course what people should eat or should not eat (or how they should dress, what they should read, etc) is not something that would be decided or would need to be decided by a vote but could and would be left to individual choice. There are limits to what can be decided by a majority decision.
In any event, it is an argument against majority decision-making as such rather than just against socialism. Maybe his next book will be called ‘Why Democracy is Evil’.
