ALB
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Actually, taken in isolated, both those statements are not incorrect. No doubt, the wealthy are patriotic and it’s not 500 billionaires that are the cause of the problems people face. It’s the system. True, some might be “bad guys” but even if they were all saints it wouldn’t make any different to the way the capitalist system works and has to work. This of course is not what Biden meant.
Actually, while competing Remain parties may reduce the number of seats Remain get it will increase the number of votes. This because some people might not vote for a unity candidate, e.g a Green not vote for Change or Change for a Nationalist. If the Remainers want to use the elections as a proxy referendum, fielding separate lists would be the intelligent strategy. It’s probably because they are not used to PR elections that they haven’t realised this. Anyway, if the elections actually take place, expect arguments over who won. It will be “we won because we got more seats” versus “we won because we got more votes”.
As to us and PR elections, it depends on what sort of PR. The one for the European elections is based on voting for party lists. In one sense this suits us as people are voting for parties and not individuals so, as we put it, “for the case not the face”. The other PR system, the Single Transferable Vote, which is used in local elections in Northern Ireland and Scotland, is fairer from the point of view of pure democratic theory, is more problematic for us as we would have no control over our second, third, etc preference votes.
We say we only want people to vote for us if they agree with us (and on occasions have told me not to vote if they don’t fully agree with us) and so would want people to express only a first preference vote. But we know that in practice this won’t happen: those who voted for us first will express other preferences, using them to votes for the Greens or a leftwing Labour candidate or even a Trotskyist (could be embarrassing too if the second preference went to the Natural Law Party). Would we regard these as votes for socialism? Depends on how purist you want to be.
Actually Alan that’s not a bad idea. We’d just have to ensure that what was on the back could be chopped too without affecting the rest. Having said that, last time we negotiated with Royal Mail not have to do a separate leaflet for each constituency but to put all the ones we had chosen at the top of the same leaflet. As we chose 20 constituencies this took up 6 lines instead of just 2. Still, it could be done. Mind you, we had nearly a quarter of million leaflets printed and distributed last time. It would take us years to distribute that number by hand. But I don’t think that, if we go down this route, we’d have that many done this time.
Robbo, I’m afraid your specific proposal of putting on the free trial sub to the Standard wouldn’t work on the free postal distribution one. Royal Mail lays down that there must be no advertising and that the content must relate to the election, but last time they did allow us to say:
“For further details of our policy and a free information pack write to: The Socialist Party FREEPOST. Email: spgb @ worldsocialism.org. Phone: 020 7622 3811. Or visit our website: http://www.worldsocialism.org”
Which is good enough. In the past they have asked us to insert the words “in this election” after “our policy”, but they didn’t, so a precedent has been set.
If the UK withdraws from the EU and Scotland withdraws from the UK and joins the EU then there’d have to be border controls on trade between Scotland and England. Unless there’s a Scottish backstop … This could go on till we get socialism by which time the British capitalist class could well have put Cameron on trial for high treason for breaking up the UK (Wales won’t breakaway because there aren’t enough Welsh-speakers there) — mind you, the LibDems also supported that referendum because like him they thought they’d win.
Lesson for the capitalist class: don’t let the working class vote on your trade policy, just do it.
I’ve not seen any comment yet on the irony of the party projecting itself as the main one in favour of Remain calling themselves the Change Party when what they want is No Change.
This is quite a good side show. Better than some of the soaps on tv.
There’s a famous anti-Free State song “Take It Down From the Mast, Irish Traitors, It’s the Flag We Republicans Claim, It will never belong to Free Staters”, a product of the civil war amongst Irish Nationalists that followed the so-called War of Independence there. James Joyce opposed it on other grounds of course.
Logical follow-up to James Heatfield’s nationalistic defence of Brexit at that meetimng I went to in New Cross last month. Clare Fox, another ex-RCP Trotskyist, is standing for the Brexit Party:
Incidentally James Joyce refused to travel on an Irish Free State passport as he regarded that state as a joke. He had a British one. Not a lot of Irish Nationalists know that.
Marx never wrote that and Draper doesn’t say he did. He wrote that James Joyce said this in relation to the Irish.
Is there any way of deleting your post before this “quote” spreads all over the internet?
Saying that if we vote to Leave capitalism we can devote more resources to the health service (and everything else)?
A comrade has sent this from Oxford Circus today where the protestors have blocked it with a pink boat. I don’t know if the link will open here or if you have to copy it somewhere:
20190418_124900_357308745578469.mp4
Anyway, I can’t make out what they are singing if anybody else can.
The saga continues but is becoming more esoteric:
Society chose Barbarism and it has its own peculiar political economy
Apparently, since 6 April 1933 we have been living in a barbaric fascist society. Oh yes?
“But perhaps he does have a point that by ignoring the leave vote, it does open the door to questioning the legitimacy of so-called UK democracy and inviting extremism.“
But that begs the question by assuming that there is only one interpretation of the leave vote and would be buying into to the extreme Brexshiteers interpretation that Brexit means leaving not just the EU’s political institutions but the customs union and single market too.
There will have been many leave voters who didn’t interpret their vote that way; in fact one of the arguments of the Leave campaign was that when the UK joined the EU (or EEC, European Economic Community as it was then called) was just a “common market” but that since then it had developed towards a political union which wasn’t part of the original deal. So, any deal that involved withdrawing from the EU’s political institutions and project, as for instance May’s, would not be a betrayal of the 2016 referendum result. Anyway, it is the fault of the extreme Brexshiteers that the UK didn’t leave the EU on 29 March.
What would be undemocratic would be for Parliament to revoke off its own bat Article 50, i.e the application to withdraw. In accordance with our own rulebook that a Party Poll result can only be revoked by another Party Poll and not by a Conference Resolution, it would be undemocratic to overturn the 2016 result unless decided by a further referendum.
So, no, the Farage/Galloway argument does not hold water. It could even be argued that in refusing a second referendum it’s them who are being anti-democratic (though I’m not sure Farage among those as he thinks he’d win a second time, which could well be the case).
But of course the substantive issue at stake — the trading arrangement of the UK capitalist class — is an irrelevant issue from a socialist and working-class point of view so we are talking democratic theory here.
I watched President Macron yesterday addressing “the nation” on this event and that’s what he did, saying that Leur Dame was a symbol of the history, continuity and unity of the French “nation”. Real nationalist stuff that French rulers and politicians (and a lot of the people) are good at (after all, Chauvin was French). So, different people see this event and the place differently. Some like him as a nationalist symbol. Others see it as a major achievement of European civilization and culture or an architectural wonder. We see it as a major god-box of the Roman Catholic Church, the main christian sect. I don’t suppose it would be pulled down in socialism or used as a manure store, though it would make a good place for large (I was going to say mass) indoor meetings. It would just be a historical monument with no more symbolic significance than other ancient monuments like the Pyramids or the buildings of the Aztecs and Incas.
The Renew Party has folded:
A fitting end to this thread as another useless reformist party bites the dust. Next down Chukky Ubama and his band of Independent Renegades.
The place has an interesting history:
“1793-4 As the French Revolution begins the cathedral is rededicated to the Cult of Reason, then the Cult of the Supreme Being. Many of its treasures either destroyed or plundered. Twenty-eight statutes of biblical kings in the west façade, mistaken for statutes of French kings, were beheaded.”
It was nationalised in 1905 when the State and Roman Catholic Church were separated and like all French catholic churches is state property.
