ALB
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Sympo wrote:If I say something like "I wish to establish a classless, stateless society. As long as there aren't any black people there!" am I really a Socialist?
No, but Engels never said that or anything like that.
From yesterday's Sunday Telegraph:
Quote:Remainers and "liberal Leavers" – to use a loose term – are suddenly on the same side. They both seek a safe settlement that protects Northern Ireland and Scotland, and the economy.Boris Johnson, Dan Hannan, and others in the sovereignty camp are signalling that they could live with a Brexit compromise that accepts EU migrant flows, but going back to pre-Maastricht rules that guaranteed only the right to work, before the concept of EU citizenship. This would be a modified variant of the Norwegian Model, or European Economic Area (EEA).A "soft-Brexit" would be accepted by the vast majority of Parliament, which has a duty in these unique circumstances to act on behalf of citizens who voted for Remain and as well as for Leave. This is not an event where the winner takes all.(….)An EEA-style compromise may be the only safe way to reconcile a divided country and ensure a safe withdrawal from the EU in managed stages.It looks as if those who voted for Brexit believing the talk about "using for the NHS the £350 million a week the UK pays to Brussels" and "ending immigration" have been well and truly conned by the cynical vote-catchers who led the Leave campaign. Now they are talking differently. Here's what the objectionable Tory MEP Daniel Hannan is now saying, according to Today's Times:
Quote:Another prominent member of Vote Leave, the MEP Daniel Hannan, came under fire for saying that a post-Brexit Britain could still join the single market with its free movement of labour rules …. Mr Hannan told the BBC that the Vote Leave campaign was about removing "legal entitlement to live in other countries, to vote in other countries and to claim welfare and to have some university tuition."Reference has already been made in this thread to his clash with Evan Davies where he said:
Quote:Mr Hannan infuriated BBC Newsnight host Evan Davis with his claims last night, hours after the result revealed a sensational win for Leave.Mr Hannan insisted shifting Britain to a Norway-style relationship with the EU that frees the UK from political integration but maintains access to the single market was 'feasible'.And the MEP said this would mean 'free movement of labour' but not the right for EU citizens to gain other benefits.They have yet to concede that they will only be able to get free access to the single market if they continue to pay something to the EU for this as Norway does. Wait for that come as no doubt it will (have to). I can see how they're going to spin this one: "we've got to compromise with the 48% who voted to Remain" ….
Here's Boris Johnson in today's Daily Torygraph which the Independent reports under the headline 'Boris Johnson says UK will 'still have access to single market’ despite Brexit'.http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-eu-referendum-single-market-brexit-a7104846.htmlA bit ambiguous as of course Britain will have access to the single market but the question is will it have free access?
Quote:In his column for The Telegraph, Mr Johnson said: “I cannot stress too much that Britain is part of Europe, and always will be.“EU citizens living in this country will have their rights fully protected, and the same goes for British citizens living in the EU.“British people will still be able to go and work in the EU; to live; to travel; to study; to buy homes and to settle down. As the German equivalent of the CBI – the BDI – has very sensibly reminded us, there will continue to be free trade, and access to the single market.The other side of British people being still"able to go and work in the EU" is that EU people would still be able to "go and work" in the UK. The two would have to go together but of course he doesn't emphasise that.Here's what the German CBI said (before the vote for Brexit):
Quote:A German industry boss has said it would be "very, very foolish" to impose tariffs on UK goods if Britain votes to leave the EU.Markus Kerber, the head of BDI, or federation of German industries, is urging Germany and the EU to create a free-trade regime that could be imposed in the event of Brexit."Imposing trade barriers, imposing protectionist measures between our two countries – or between the two political centres, the European Union on the one hand and the UK on the other – would be a very, very foolish thing in the 21st century," Mr Kerber told the BBC's World Service."The BDI would urge politicians on both sides to come up with a trade regime that enables us to uphold and maintain the levels of trade we have, although it will become more difficult."I don't that the politicians governing on behalf of the capitalist ruling class are ever again going to put an issue of vital importance to their masters to a vote of the working class. They won't make that mistake again.
I don't think Engels can be accused of "sexism" on the basis of not being "sympathetic to the women’s movement" of his day. In his day, this was a movement of bourgeois women demanding the same voting and property rights as men. If implemented this would have enfranchised bourgeois women leaving most other women and a third of male workers without the vote. Which is why we denounced the suffragettes as demanding "Votes for Rich Women".Also, Tristam Hunt (now a blairite Labour MP) was a hostile biographer. Even so, he records that in the 1876 elections to the London Scool Board (for which women could stand and propertied ones had the vote) Engels gave all his seven votes to a woman candidate. In view of her politics it can't have been for that that he voted for her, but just because she was a woman. As a comrade who did some research on this wrote:
Quote:Just did a bit of research and Engels definitely would have been in Marylebone Ward for the LSB elections (Regents Park Road was St Pancras but became part of Marylebone for the purposes). They had female representation from 1870 through 1891 (ie. when Engels was there). Interestingly the main rep, Alice Westlake (1876-88), opposed a ban on corporal punishment for girls as some "were of a very rough class and were insubordinate"), was married to the Board's solicitor (nepotism) and instigated a motion to remove married women teachers with children from their posts. She was a Liberal.In any event, his pamphlet of the Origin of Family, etc shows he was all in favour of equality of the sexes. Agreed he wasn't perfect. Nobody is.
That article from the Guardian about Ebbw Vale well illustrates my (and Meel's) point:https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/25/view-wales-town-showered-eu-cash-votes-leave-ebbw-valeAnd part of it is Nye Bevan's and Michael Foot's old constituency. Lower down the valleys there were coal mines, now all closed. The miners were members of the CP-dominated South Wales Area of the NUM. Labour has 33 of the 42 seats on the borough council.
They sent us a promotional email about this and we wanted to review it to go in next months special issue of the Socialist Standard .on socialism (with and without inverted commas) in the US but two potential reviewers tirned it down. I had a look at the cartoons. Some of them are ok, but there's some trendy trotskyism in there too, e.g. that the struggle for women's equality under capitalism is part of the class struggle and that oppressed people have the right to use violence.
There are not many immigrants in the ex-mining areas of South wales nor (I assume) in the depressed areas of the North East. Perhaps the comrades in county Durham can confirm.I can't see either what Corbyn could have done to get them to vote Remain. I would have thought in fact that he would have had a better chance of this than the metropolitan Labour politicians who are now stabbing him in the back as an obstacle to their rise up the greasy pole, precisely because he doesn't come across as one of them.
Speaking of Hannan here's his vision of Britain after Brexit in 2020:
Quote:London, too, is booming. Eurocrats never had much sympathy for financial services. As their regulations took effect – a financial transactions tax, a ban on short-selling, restrictions on clearing, a bonus cap, windfall levies, micro-regulation of funds – waves of young financiers brought their talents from Frankfurt, Paris and Milan to the City.It was precisely to avoid such regulation that the maverick financiers who put up the money for the Leave campaign did so. They weren't concerned about the NHS or immigration, only with avoiding regulation of their activities as listed by Hannan.It might not turn out that way, according to a report today:
Quote:Britain's banks could lose automatic access to the financial centres of the European Union after Brexit, the European Central Bank has warned.London's banks and financial services giants depend on a so-called 'EU passport' to operate unhindered in capital markets across the Continent.And that passport could be withdrawn according to a veiled threat from ECB Governing Council member Francois Villeroy de Galhau today, according to Reuters news agency.If Britain fails to secure continued access to the bloc's single market in its exit talks, this would make it difficult for UK banks to keep most of their staff and operations in London.'If tomorrow Britain is not part of the single market, the City cannot keep this European passport, and clearing houses cannot be located in London either,' Villeroy told France Inter radio.Villeroy, who is also governor of the Bank of France, added that Brexit talks must be quick to limit uncertainty.'There is a precedent, it is the Norwegian model of European Economic Area, that would allow Britain to keep access to the single market but by committing to implement all EU rules,' he said.'It would be a bit paradoxical to leave the EU and apply all EU rules but that is one solution if Britain wants to keep access to the single market.'Difficulties for Britain's financial giants with access to the EU would present an opportunity to rival finance centres like Paris and Frankfurt.This might not worry the Brexit financiers but it would worry the rest of the British capitalist class.
Yes, it does sound like a knee-jerk reaction (with the emphasis on the latter) of a mad marketeer to the very word "socialism" which he doesn't understand.
ItIt seems that those of us living in Remain areas like London (and Warwick) concentrated too much on attacking Brexit and failed to emphasise the title of the EC statement that "The problem is not the EU .. it's capitalism" and so neglected to address the thinking of workers in Leave areas that the EU was the cause of the problems they faced. But then we didn't distribute any leaflets or hold any meetings in those areas..
Young Master Smeet wrote:So, tomorrow is christmas for anoraks, I can hardly wait, either way, there'll be an interesting result, oodles and oodles of data to crunch, and big constitutional questiopns to examine and argue about till we're mauve in the face.Today's Times prints some revealing statistics:
Quote:83% of local authorities voted Leave where more than a quarter of the electorate do not have good GCSEs (at least five A*-C)86% of local authorities with a high proportion of manufacturing jobs vote Leave.79% of local authorities with house prices below the national average voted Leave.77% of local authorities with average earnings below £23,000 voted Leave.We shouldn't forget that 48% didn't vote for Brexit and that there were majorities against not just in London but Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Bristol, Cardiff, Newcastle. Birmingham was an exception. But the traditional "rivers of blood" xenophobia of this not particularly run-down part of England would not have been enough to give Brexit a majority without the addition of the resentment of discarded workers and communities in the ex-mining areas of South Wales and the North East, traditional Labour areas where the Tories have never stood a chance and which have the least immigrants (London, on the other hand, has the most).
No, you don't they are here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum,_2016Only 28,033 out of 33,578,016 votes cast, which is 0.08%. We do better than that in elections. Turnout was 72%, which is not particularly high despite what the pundits were saying. So non-voters were 28% of the 46,501,241 registered voters or about 13 million.
