ALB
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Part of the trade of a political correspondent is being a bit of a shit-stirrer by highlighting and to that extent contributing to differences within parties. As there’s no majority in parliament for another referendum (so, thankfully, we should avoid that inconvenience being inflicted on us), the government and Labour could agree that parliament should decide whether or not any agreement they may reach should be put to a confirmatory referendum. In fact the government has already hinted that it might itself propose an indicative vote on this. When it fails they will be happy and Corbyn will be able to say I tried but that the numbers weren’t there.
The other thing that happened in parliament yesterday was that an a bill got passed in only 4 hours. That deals with one objection that used to be raised to our policy of using elections and parliament as part of the process of abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism. It shows that, in this country at least, capitalist property rights could be abolished constitutionally as well as democratically and in less than four hours. As the bill was passed by just one vote that disposes of one silly objection to our policy about whether by majority we mean 50% + 1. We don’t but if this was the case it could still be done.
p.s. just heard while typing this a government minister, Mike Hancock, call Corbyn a Marxist (at 8.16 on BBC Radio 4). They’re all at it. Still, Corbyn would no doubt prefer to being referred to as that rather than as an anti-Semite, though neither are true.
And here’s resigning junior minister, Nigel Adams. More to come no doubt.
You don’t have to be a Marxist to recognise that there are two classes in society. Anyway, there seems to be a concerted campaign amongst the extremist Brexisteers to label (smear, in their eyes) Corbyn as a “Marxist”.
Here’s Andrew Rosindell, Tory MP for Romford. And here’s Ian Duncan Smith calling the whole Labour Party “Marxist”:
Speaking to the BBC in the Palace of Westminster’s Central Lobby, the former Tory leader raged: “This is no longer Conservative government policy. This is policy dictated by what I think is a Marxist and rather nasty Labour party.
In the past they’d have simply called him a “Communist” but that wouldn’t go down so well these days. Hence “Marxist” as their new term of abuse. Even so, I am not sure that, outside the Tory Party and the further-right, it will be taken as this.
According to Rees-Mogg, Jeremy Corbyn is a “known Marxist”. That’s probably news to Corbyn who didn’t know this and who has never even claimed to be one. And of course he isn’t. He is just a known leftwing reformist. In theory Labour and Tories should be able to reach a deal on the future trading arrangements of the British capitalist class; whether or not narrow party politics will allow this to happen in practice is another matter. A real Marxist would tell them both that the trading arrangements of the capitalist class are of no concern to the majority class of wage and salary workers — and not to inflict on the majority class the temporary inonveniences of a no-deal crash-out.
You are right, Alan. I was being a bit Britocentric. What I should have said was that it shows that “money can’t always buy votes” since, as Marcos has just pointed out, in some (most?) parts of the world money can literally buy votes and everywhere money does distort elections, primaries and, even in Britain, referendums. What I was meaning to point out was that in the British context you need more than money to get a new political party off the ground.
I think those behind the Renew party were trying to copy Macron in France (though I am not sure, given the result in France, that they are still saying this). There was also another would-be centrist party out on the streets of Newport yesterday, the Social Democratic Party, a left-over from an attempt in the 1980s to get a new centrist party off the ground (kept going after most of them joined the Liberals to form the LibDems, including its current leader, a former Labour councillor).
The Renew Party is contesting the Newport West by-election on 4 April. They were out in force in the centre of Newport this afternoon. One of them told us at our street stall that 50 of them had been bussed in and that at 4pm a plane would fly over advertising their candidate. It did but, unfortunately for them, the only word you could see clearly was “Vote” not who for. We were told that this and their piles of different glossy leaflets had been financed by a large donation to contest the election. Their political line, apart from being anti-Brexit and pro-business, seemed to be that people should be represented in Parliament by ordinary people rather than career politicians (no chance then of them merging with the so-called “Independent Group” of ex-Labour and ex-Tory MPs). They hoped to finish third behind Labour and Tory though they’ll probably only get a few hundred votes and be in the lower middle batting order of the eleven candidates. At least this will show that money can’t buy you votes.
The papers are saying that the Protestant Ulster Unionists of the DUP might settle for the UK staying in a customs union as that would mean no backstop threat of Norther Ireland’s trading regulations being different from the rest of the UK.
That’s always been their red line not a hard Brexit. What do they care about UK capitalism being able to make its own trade deals? And they certainly don’t want a no deal exit as that would lead to Northern Ireland being treated differently. They would settle for anything as long as Ulster is treated the same as the rest if the UK.
The choice May had between the devil and the DUP wasn’t really a choice at all. Either from her point of view was a pact with the devil as she has just found to her cost.
Talk about the legacy of dead generations weighing like an alp on the brains of the living.
Another organisation has claimed that the new party has usurped their name. I don’t think the victims of this will get anywhere with the Electoral Commission as they are not a registered party. But what a silly name the renegades have chosen. That won’t get them very far. Another seven-day-wonder party, as if there weren’t enough useless, reformist parties led by professional politicians (even though after the next general election most of this party’s MPs will be forced to change profession).
I was at a meeting last night at which one of the speakers, James Heartfield, billed as a writer for Spiked magazine, put the case for Lexit, i.e a leftwing Brexit. His arguments were based on the sovereignty and self-determination of “nations”; the EU could never be democratic as it was an artificial political entity not an organic nation and had no right to impose its will on nations such as Britain was. He defended the view that, despite capitalism being a global system, it was still possible to establish “socialism (although he no longer liked that term) in one country”, with subsidies, control on capital movement, etc. Basically, the sort of “reformism in one country” that Corbyn used to embrace. He also claimed that Theresa May didn’t really want Brexit but was working to betray it. This, coupled with the concept of an organic nation, suggests that Lexit might equally be called Rexit. I am sure he and Rees-Mogg would find they have much in common.
The irony is that she singled out Jeremy Corbyn as a “cultural Marxist”:
“I’m very aware of that ongoing creep of cultural Marxism which has come from Jeremy Corbyn.”
So, while some accuse Corbyn of being an anti-Semite, she accuses him of being part of a Jewish conspiracy. Neither is true of course.
The other thing is she comes from a group which played a similar role in East Africa as Jews did in eastern Europe, the “Kenya Asians” — traders who were unpopular with the local peasants whose prejudices were exploited by self-serving politicians and who as a consequence were persecuted and eventually expelled from both Kenya and later Uganda (by the notorious Idi Amin) and who were not welcomed here. In fact the then Labour government introduced race-based immigration controls to try to make it difficult for them to come (still in force incidentally, British overseas citizens still have no right to come to live in Britain unless their father or grandfather was born here):
You’d have thought she that instead of indulging in anti-Semitism she might have had some empathy with Jews. But there could be a simpler explanation: that she is simply a fool who picked up the term from US conservative stuff she had been reading without realising its connotation.
Yes, you live and learn. I hadn’t heard of this conspiracy theory either.
If she really persists, and she seems to be digging her heels in, I wonder whether she’ll be referred to some disciplinary committee such as the Tories would want Labour to do if she’d been one of their MPs. And to think that she was until recently a minister (in the Ministry or Brexit, of course).
Maybe Marcuse, Fromm etc were on the wrong track in adding Freud to Marx to try to explain why workers support capitalism, but they still made some good points (Fromm especially).
Yes, freedom to move over a wider area was an advantage for the working class of the UK belonging to the EU, probably the only one. But it works both ways. Those who voted Brexit to “keep the Poles out” probably didn’t realise that one consequence of this would be a restriction on their own freedom to work and settle in other parts of Europe.
