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For those who want to read Bomber Benn's supposedly brilliant speech, the full text is here.His peroration at the end begins:

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And we are here faced by fascists. Not just their calculated brutality, but their belief that they are superior to every single one of us in this chamber tonight, and all of the people that we represent. They hold us in contempt. They hold our values in contempt. They hold our belief in tolerance and decency in contempt. They hold our democracy, the means by which we will make our decision tonight, in contempt. And what we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated.

He was talking about IS but what he says applies equally to the Saudi regime. From where, afar all, IS's ideology comes from. But nobody's suggesting bombing their oil wells. They prefer to sell them bombers.

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Young Master Smeet wrote:

Another interesting map:Note how "State of Aleppo" covers most of what IS now holds; how 'Alwaite State' is more or less what the Syrian Government holds securely (with the addition of Damascus itself).  Now, even these lines are likely to be arbitrary, but it does suggest that tehre is a 'constituency' which IS have managed to appeal. to.

Most of what the IS now holds does fit into the area of 1922 "State of Aleppo"(which seems to be exactly the same as the existing Syrian provinces of Idlib, Aleppo, Hama, Hasakah, Raqqa and Deir er-Zor), But they don't control either the North East part (Hasakah,  which is controlled by the Kurdish nationalists and the government), nor Idlib (at the western end, which is controlled by other rebels), nor much of Aleppo or Hama (which is divided between other rebels and the government.Essentially, they control two big cities (over 200,000) on the Euphrates (Raqqa and Deir er-Zor, and not all of the latter).  Out of Syria's population of 20 million they oppress only about 2 million or so; most of those they rule over, some 10 million, are in Iraq not Syria). Except for the two on the Euphrates, all of the other 10 largest cities in Syria are controlled by the government (including most of the city of Aleppo itself), i.e the government controls far more than the 1922 "Alawite State" and rules over some 80% of the population.The Sanjak of Alexandretta became part of Turkey in 1939..

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Correction: 2 LibDems also voted against and, contrary to what I hinted at in a previous post, the Labour candidate in today's by-election in Oldham is not amongst the warmongers. At the last moment he came out against bombing Syria.

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Banks borrow short-term, on the wholesale markets, and lend long-term (Northern Rock got about 70 per cent of its funding from the wholesale market and repackaged it in the form of high-risk mortgage loans). The difference between the rates a bank pays and the rates a bank charges is its profit. (Oiliver Kamm in today's Times).

Actually, more accurarely, it's the source of a bank's income, of which profit is only one part (wages and other expenses have to come out of it too). Still, there's no nonsense here about banks creating the money they lend out of thin air. As Kamm says, they have to get it in the first place.

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I see 66 Labour MPs voted for war and that some of them are complaining about receiving tweets and emails calling them "warmongers" and saying they'll have "blood on their hands" .But, unlike Cameron's statement that opponents of the war  are "terrorist sympathisers" (echoing George Orwell's outrageous characterisation of opponents of the Second World Slaughter as "fascifists") this is true: they are and they will have.Having said this Hilary Benn, one of them, did express the Labour Party's traditional attitude accurately when he described Labour as always having been an "internationalist" party if you understand this as that it has always supported British capitalism's overseas imperialist ventures. Even so 153 Labour MPs voted against, along with 7 Tories and all the Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalist and the Green.The upshot is that the life and limbs of workers in Britain are now in greater danger. When ISIS strikes back the warmonger MPs will indeed have blood on their hands, our blood, just as Blair and the others who voted for the Iraq War did after the 7 July 2005 London attack on innocent commuters.

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This article by David Wearing is very good. I don't know if it's appeared elsewhere. He writes occasionally for the Guardian and seems to be connected to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade:http://www.syriahr.com/en/2015/12/syria-airstrikes-has-the-west-learned-nothing-after-its-911-response/He makes the point that bombing Syria will increase "the probability of ISIS killing civilians on the streets of Britain", i.e us and other members of the working class here. We'll know this evening the names of those MPs prepared to put our lives as well as those of innocent civilians in Syria at risk.Also, that

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Cameron’s government has been looking for a way into the Syrian conflict for some time, likely motivated above all by the need to restore Britain’s military credibility after the failures of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

As he also points out, Cameron's 70,000 Syrian fighters on the ground prepared to take on ISIS is a fabrication equal to Blair's one about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

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Gresham College is presumably named after Sir Thomas Gresham of Gresham's Law that "Bad money drives out good". They seem to be testing this by putting bad publicity (using a picture of working men from the 1900s to illustrate a talk on middle class "Communists" in the 1930s) into circulation to see if it really will drive out good publicity.I would have thought that a formal protest is in order on at least two grounds (1) that it's a photo of working men not "middle class" and (2) that we've always had no association, except for opposition and contempt, with the Communist Party

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Here's a couple of their clues:

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Santa heard the Labour Party scrapped a crucial part of one of theirs ! (6)

And no doubt, seeing who they are, the one they must think the cleverest:

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Revolutionary wants traditional Christmas back; with the runs and what sounds like a holy kidney! (4,7)

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Young Master Smeet wrote:

 (also Assad is Shia,

People keep pointing this out but I don't think it means much. He and his regime are basically Baathists, i.e secular pan-Arab nationalists. And as I think you once posted, many people of Sunni origin support the government and occupy top posts in it.Anyway, I'm not sure that the Alawites (the sect Assad is formally a member of) are really Muslims. According to this (which also provides other useful information) they weren't recognised as such even by orthodox Shiites till 1974.

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Sunnis believe that succession to prophet Mohammed (d. 632) rightly followed through the line of his most able and pious companions. Alawites follow the Shiite interpretation, claiming that succession should have been based on bloodlines. According to Shiite Islam, Mohammed’s only true heir, imam, was his son-in-law Ali bin Abu Talib.But Alawites take a step further in the veneration of Imam Ali, allegedly investing him with divine attributes. Other specific elements such as the belief in divine incarnation, permissibility of alcohol, celebration of Christmas and Zoroastrian new year makes Alawite Islam highly suspect in the eyes of many orthodox Sunnis and Shiites.

Alcohol, no praying five times a day, no going to Mecca. They don't sound so bad compared with the others ! Still religious mumbo-jumbo of course.

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There's a Shiite mosque just round the corner from Head Office. I too have seen swastikas on houses, when leafletting in Tooting where many Tamils live.

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Six of us turned out to leaflet this, both at the beginning and at the end, but we ran out of leaflets. Apart from the SWP and the CWO (who had a leaflet which said the same as ours except with an even more pessimistic headline "Either social collapse or socialism" than our "Too Little Too Late"), we seemed to be the only leafletters there using the word "socialism".In fact this was a Green rather than a leftwing march with corresponding leafletters, eg vegans and a group called "Deep Green Resistance" which declared "DGR's goal is to dismantle industrial civilization". No thanks. And "Deep Green Resistance is a radical feminist organization. Men as a class are waging a war against women". No thanks to that either. I'm not sure why I was handed one of their leaflets … by a man (a class traitor?).As to slogans, the main one seemed to be "What Do We Want? — Climate Justice" but there was also "Go Vegan. Save the Planet". I must admit, though, that the best was the SWP one "Society Change Not Climate Change" (them saying they are for something for once).

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Here's UKIP's position on bombing Syria:

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Farage joins Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in voicing his opposition to air strikes in Syria – after David Cameron told the commons that British air strikes were instrumental in defeating ISIS.

Just in case anyone interprets a UKIP victory over Labour in Thursday's by-election in Oldham as endorsement for bombing. In fact it would more represent the opposite as the Labour candidate is reported to be a warmonger.

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Interesting development, if true: Russia helping the Kurdish Nationalists to fight here not just against ISIS but also against the so-called non-ISIS "moderates" the West wants to benefit from "regime change" in Syria:http://ekurd.net/kurdish-forces-advance-in-syria-2015-11-28

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Vin wrote:

ALB wrote:

I agree and that's a good quote. Have you the details of where and when he said it (so it can be requoted)?

He may not have said it. I can't find the quote but he says similar.

That's a pity as it would have been a good quote (more celebrity endorsement for what we say !). The others from him are not so good as he believes that wars can be avoided under capitalism through the UN, etc even though he might know what causes them.

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Good article here from an Irish paper under the headline "Bombing Syria may hit some targets, but many innocents will perish" putting in effect a case against bombing which, apparently, and surprisingly, appeared in the Daily Telegraph but with the not so surprising headline "There is a case for bombing Syria. But it's not as simple as Cameron sayshttp://www.independent.ie/world-news/middle-east/bombing-syria-may-hit-some-targets-but-many-innocents-will-perish-34241829.htmlThe main case against bombing is that it will result in the loss of working class lives, both in Syriand here in Britain. But the war-mongers, including, it seems, a majority of Labour MPS. I knew they were a load of careerist shits but not that they would be prepared to sacrifice working class lives just to play internal party politics and/or sway with the media wind.It looks as if the main lesson of the Corbyn experiment is going to be that the Labour Party can't be transformed even into the party it used to be years ago, let alone into a socialist party or a party that can serve working class interests. But we knew that. Perhaps the time has come to say "We told you so".

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