ALB
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I wish members would check the source of some of the stuff they put up here. The author of the link above, Frances Leader, is a conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite. This is clear from the link itself.
Here’s the conspiracy stuff:
https://steemit.com/life/@francesleader/agenda-2030-no-escape
And here’s the anti-Semitism: a picture of Theodor Herzl with this printed over it:
“We will lead every revolution against us Zionist Theodor Herzl”
And this.
She also seems to believe that global warming is caused by geoengineering.
In short, she’s an utter nutter whose views on Extinction Rebellion (and everything else) are completely worthless.
Linking to stuff like this only undermines our own credibility.
By the way, there are also 3 independent candidates standing in the South East region.
On the national scale, we are the only party even claiming to be socialist that is presenting a list. The only other vaguely radical parties standing, both in London, are the Animal Welfare Party and the Woman’s Equality Party.
It certainly wasn’t Marx and doesn’t seem to have been Lenin either:
Did anyone actually say “the capitalists will sell us the rope we hang them with”?
by inAskHistoriansIt seems to be a favourite “quote” of US antie-cahmunists because it associates communism (and socialism) with wanting to hang capitalists. It even appears as a quote from Stalin as “when we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use” but that’s probably a fabrication too (it doesn’t even make grammatical or logical sense),
We have criticised Extincton Rebellion on this thread for being naive in appealing to governments to do something capitalist economics means they can’t do (and, in my view, for exaggerating by talking of the extinction of the human species as an immediate prospect) but this criticism of them as a “capitalist scam” is way over the top. Presumably it comes from rival groups who with disagree with XR’s non-violent tactics and favour violent direct action.
I noticed that letter in the Times but it never occurred to me that this meant that certain business interests were behind XR. Rather, that it was certain business interests who were taking advantage of their naivety.
Anyway, for the record and so people can judge, here is the text of the letter published in the Times on 22 April under the headline “Business and the climate rebellion”:
Sir, The multimillion-pound costs that the Extinction Rebellion protests have imposed on business are regrettable, as is the inconvenience to Londoners. But future costs imposed on our economies by the climate emergency will be many orders of magnitude greater.
Contrary to belief, there is business support for the Extinction Rebellion (XR) agenda. Hard pressure drives change, but even the most committed businesses will need time to respond. We welcome the news that Extinction Rebellion is evolving a new platform, XR Business, to engage business leaders, investors and advisers. To drive things forward, the idea is to convene a meeting of XR activists and experts with business leaders and influencers. Most businesses were not designed in the context of the developing climate emergency. Hence we must urgently redesign entire industries and businesses, using science-based targets. To kickstart the process, businesses should make a declaration that we face a climate emergency and organise a session at a full board meeting to consider the case for urgent action. We will encourage the senior management teams of which we are part to do likewise.
Bevis Watts, managing director, Triodos Bank UK; Christopher Davis, chief sustainability officer, The Body Shop International; Seb Beloe, partner, WHEB Asset Management; Paul Polman, former CEO, Unilever; Sir Tim Smit, founder, Eden Project; John Elkington, co-founder, Volans Ventures Plus a further 17 signatories at thetimes.co.uk/lettersI would see setting up “XR Business” as another sign of their naivety rather than them being a “capitalist scam”.
More on the UK EU Party here. Die-hard Remainers.
More here, including about their candidate in the South East region, Pacelli Ndikumana. He seems well-meaning enough.
James, the nearest part of the South East electoral region to you is Banbury, 40 miles down the M40. A further 28 miles brings you to Oxford. We have members and sympathisers in both places. The idea would be for West Midlands branch to cover these places (leafletting, street stalls). Details haven’t yet been finalised but will be this weekend.
We do know for certain that we will have a stall in Burford on Saturday 11 May for the Leveller’s event (details here). We can do some leafletting there too, even if this is Tory heartland or maybe in neighbouring Chipping Norton which has some Labour councillors despite being where Cameron lives (it used to have a textile mill and has a history of trade union militancy).
Here are the runners and riders. There are 9 lists. The 8 lists we are standing against are the usual suspects plus the Brexit (including the man himself) and Change (whose top candidate is the outgoing Tory MEP) parties and a mysterious UK European Union Party:
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:
