ALB
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ALB wrote:Oxford West seems to be the place. We've received a third invitation for our candidate there. This time to speak on a Sunday evening at a meeting in St Margarets Institute, Polstead Road, in North Oxford. The organisers are inviting all seven candidates declared so far (Tory, Liberal, Labour, UKIP, Green, National Health Action Party and us) to speak on their own and answer questions. The first, with the National Health Action Party candidate, is this evening:http://www.smi-oxford.org.uk/editor/content/upload/The%20Sunday%20Politics%20Helen%20Salisbury.pdfWatch this space for when our candidate, Mike Foster, will be the speaker.
It's earlier than expected — this Sunday, 8 February at 8pm.For more details see:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/event/meet-socialist-candidate-oxford-west-8pm
Just got another reply from them:
Quote:Hmm, apologies, I forwarded your email to the curator for the script who provided that source from his notes. The particular detail which you highlighted must have come from elsewhere – I'll have a dig around but I'm afraid we don't have anything to show you immediately since that article was the only reference attached to this note. I'll let you know if I find anything.The mystery continues.
Philip Collins in that article in Friday's Times (where he got Thomas More wrong) makes a couple of other points:
Quote:You would never have known it from Ms Bennett's account but the citizen's income is, in large part, a replacement for a means-tested welfare state, not a supplement to it. The Citizen's Income Trust has calculated that if we gave £56 a week to people aged under 24, £71 a week to those between 25 and 65 and £142 to the over-65s, the total cost would be £276 billion. Means-tested benefits would be abolished to the value of £272 billion. Add in your saving on fraud and the reduced costs of administration and you're in the black.In other words, the proposal is another case of what we said about the Beveridge Report: that it's about "reorganising poverty".And
Quote:To the extent that immigrants taking benefits is a problem (which is hardly at all), that would also be impossible under a scheme that, as the name suggests, grants an income only to UK citizens.So, maybe UKIP will soon be adopting it too.
John Oswald wrote:Areas of southern India have been vegan for millennia – without thinking about it.I find it hard to believe that whole areas have been vegan (as opposed to sects living in part of an area alongside meat-eaters). What is the evidence for your claim?Hinduism might ban eating cows (an ideological reflection of the fact that they were essential to agriculture) but I don't think it bans eating fish or birds. In fact I find it hard to accept that any people, even in South India, living in a coastal area would have abstained from eating fish. It just wouldn't make sense. And I find it only slightly less hard to accept that people living in inland areas wouldn't eat birds, eg chickens. That wouldn't make sense either.I suggest that vegetarianism has only ever been a minority practice everywhere pursued by religious or other sects amidst a majority meat-eating population. And always will be ….
John Oswald wrote:Interestingly, numerous members of the Japanese feudal nobility committed seppuku – both sexes – rather than allow meat to be eaten at home following the Meiji revolution. In all, two million samurai killed themselves, for many reasons, but slaughter of animals for food was one powerful motive too. (See one instance of this in the classic autobiography, Daughter of the Samurai.)I think your claim that some "two million" (your emphasis) Samurai committed ritual suicide (by self-disembowelment) a mere 150 years ago is also very dubious. Two million would in fact been all the Samurai then existing. It would have been an event of world-wide significance and knowledge. I suggest it is completely untrue. What is your evidence for it?
Oxford West seems to be the place. We've received a third invitation for our candidate there. This time to speak on a Sunday evening at a meeting in St Margarets Institute, Polstead Road, in North Oxford. The organisers are inviting all seven candidates declared so far (Tory, Liberal, Labour, UKIP, Green, National Health Action Party and us) to speak on their own and answer questions. The first, with the National Health Action Party candidate, is this evening:http://www.smi-oxford.org.uk/editor/content/upload/The%20Sunday%20Politics%20Helen%20Salisbury.pdfWatch this space for when our candidate, Mike Foster, will be the speaker.Meanwhile, elsewhere in Oxford, we have begun distributing a leaflet announcing that we are standing in both Oxford constituencies. Here's what it says:
Quote:The General Election: We will be standing hereIn both Oxford East and Oxford West & Abingdon.We are standing to raise the issue of the need to end capitalism and replace it with a system geared to meeting people’s needs rather than to making profits for the few. We want a world cooperative society where wealth is produced and owned in common and freely shared according to need. A classless democratic society where decisions are made for the common good rather than to benefit vested business interests.Tinkering around with the present system trying to fix it has been tried for years but the same problems remain and for the same reason: capitalism is a profit-driven system where making profits takes, and has to take, priority over meeting people’s needs and safeguarding the environment. No government can change this. What is required is a complete Revolution to get rid of capitalism altogether. We will be standing for that and nothing else.Our candidates will be Kevin Parkin in Oxford East and Mike Foster in Oxford West & Abingdon.The next occasion to distribute this will be on Thursday 5 February when the leader of the French Front National, Marine Le Pen, is due to speak at the Oxford Union Debating Society and the "No Platform for Fascists" lot have organised a demonstration to try to stop her speaking.
The other side of the coin: the decline of the established centre-left party in Greece PASOK:http://www.policy-network.net/news/4028/State-of-the-Left-%E2%80%93-The-threat-of-Pasokification
Quote:While long-anticipated, Syriza’s victory in Sunday’s Greek general election represents a mini-electoral earthquake which has further divided European social democracy.Parties are split on the implications: some factions see a great awakening, some a useful pressure point against Angela Merkel’s Europe, others either fear ‘Pasokification’ (the annihilation process that saw Greece’s centre-left Pasok party fall from 43.9 per cent in 2009 to 4.7 per cent last weekend) or a dangerous injection of wishful thinking at a time for hard truths.A bit early, but we've received our first invitation to a hustings. The vicar of Botley, a subsurb of Oxford just outside the city limits, has invited our candidate in Oxford West & Abingdon, Mike Foster, to one at a date yet to be fixed.
imposs1904 wrote:I have been known to do requests:Link: "France: from failure to fiasco"Thanks. So, we've seen before what the new Syriza government in Greece is doing: it's what the PS/PCF government in France did when it first came to power in June 1981. In the first few months it too increased benefits and took on more civil servants but it didn't last. It led within a couple of years to three devaluations and the re-imposition of austerity.The article is a reminder that, even if Greece quits the euro and re-adopts the drachma, devaluation won't help to get rid of austerity either. The workers in Greece are in for it whichever way they turn. No government can help them. Only socialism can. Literally.
John, the front page headline in today's Times gives you a chance to have a go at two birds with one stone: religion and cruelty to animals:
Quote:Big increase in religious slaughter of animals. Muslim campaigners reject use of stunningApparently, their religion requires that they can only eat meat from animals that have died from loss of blood. The orthodox Jews are just as bad. But to their credit the Sikhs and Hindus ban the eating of hallal meat (they only allow eating meat from an animal killed from a single blow). But hallal meat is served everywhere, and not just to muslims, in prisons, schools, hospitals. Does anyone know why? It can't be just to suck up to muslims. Is it cheaper or something?
That was Stuart's point: that the rise of Syriza to power backs up our case that ideas can change fairly quickly. Trouble from his point of view is that Left Unity is progressing even slower than us !
The other thing that comes out of the Weekly Worker report of the TUSC Conference is the lack of support from the RMT. It looks as if, with Bob Crow replaced as General Secretary by a Labour Party member (not just any old member but a former member of Labour's NEC) Mick Cash, RMT is drifting back into line with the other unions and backing Labour.There are two significant reports here of what is happening locally:
Quote:The situation in Brighton Kemptown is complicated for several reasons. We understand that the local RMT branch is supporting the Labour Candidate as she has made a commitment to highlight the call for the renationatisation of the railways in her literature. As Clive Heemskerk made clear at the recent TUSC meeting in Brighton, this wouldn't necessarily lead to a veto from the RMT nationally but would mean the local RMT branch couldn't support the campaign.and
Quote:Since this meeting the Socialist Party have had to pull out standing a candidate in Dover because the RMT union are now backing the Labour candidate.In other words, SPEW is not going to stand against Labour where the candidate is supported by RMT. The RMT's new attitude is logical from a "Labourist" point of view. The Labour Party may have adapted itself to merely running capitalism but at least it has a chance of bringing in a few pro-union reforms whereas a party like TUSC, which counts in votes in hundreds rather than Labour's tens of thousands, is completely useless from this point of view. If you want reforms you might as well support a party that is likely to be in a position to bring some in (even if they won't work).
I don't think TUSC and Syriza are comparable. Syriza has managed to get away from the activity of the Trotskyist sects of seeking to appeal to trade union militants to build another trade-union based "workers party". Their (conscious) equivalents in this country are Left Unity whose leaders are also tyrying to get away from this dead-end. Maybe when TUSC collapses (as I think it will) LU's turn with come. But any Syriza-type movement in Britain would have to involve the Greens, perhaps a Green/LU coalition, but then that supposes that LU gets off the ground which it is not showing any signs of doing.
You might be impressed, Alan, that he has replied but I'm not impressed by this part of his reply:
Quote:man is simply a slave to the global Zionist system.I must confess, though, that it is unusual to find anti-semitism amongst anarcho-capitalists. I thought that anti-racism, etc was one thing they were ok on.
I see the Oxford Greens have taken up the idea of their colleagues in Brighton of proposing a referendum to increase the council tax beyond the government's 2 percent maximum so as to avoid such savage cuts in services:http://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/11755960.Greens_wants_tax_hike_to_stop_disabled_facing_cuts/It would be interesting to see what the result of such a referendum somewhere would be. And which way the Trotskyists, with their loud protests against austerity, would jump. Against a referendum? a No vote? as their colleagues in Brighton have suggested, which shows that their real aim is not so much to fight the cuts as to exploit popular discontent over them.
