ALB
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Starmer’s reaction to 8 members of his shadow government of capitalism resigning and a quarter of his MPs voting, against his advice, for a ceasefire (he wants the killings and destruction to continue) was;
“Leadership is about doing the right thing. That is the least the public deserves. And the least that leadership demands.”
But what on Earth does that mean? It has a certain rhetorical flourish but has sinister implications.
Everybody, not just leaders, should of course do the “right thing”. But who decides what is the right thing? Starmer, as a Leader, naturally thinks that a leader should and that this is what the public “deserves”. In other words, he considers that “the public” are incapable of deciding this but only leaders are; that they require leaders to tell them what is right. What arrogance!
It might be slightly less bad if he personally didn’t change his mind so often about what is the “right thing”. At one time he thought Corbyn was and that certain leftwing reform such as ending charity status for private schools were. Now he doesn’t. Even on Gaza he has changed his mind. Initially he thought it was the right thing that Israel should cut off water, fuel and electricity to Gaza. Then he said (but probably doesn’t believe) that it was the wrong thing.
The lesson of all this? We don’t need leaders to tell us what is right. In fact we don’t need leaders at all. Don’t follow them, just tell them to get lost. It’s the least leaders deserve and the least the public should demand.
Full list of all 125 here:
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/23926857.gaza-ceasefire-vote-mps-vote-full-list-rebels/
I see “my” MP was amongst them. The LibDems voted for as well as the Scots Nats. Also the non-DUP Northern Ireland MPs and the sole Green Party MP.
”this article concludes that Atlantic slavery’s stimulus was likely of limited importance for driving the later Industrial Revolution.”
There is an obituary in today’s Times of Professor Nick Crafts, billed as “economic historian known for his radical reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution”. The obituary quotes him as saying that “I was accused of taking ‘industrial’ and ‘revolution’ out of the Industrial Revolution”, and goes on:
“He argued that the British economy was already well advanced by the early 18th century, before industrialisation began, thanks partly to an early transition into what he called capitalist farming driving many smallholders to the cities to find work. He paid tribute to the role of railways and canals, but noted that steam did not become cost-effective until the 1840s.”
So in the end there were 125 humane beings in the House of Commons including 56 Labourites among them some ex-future ministers.
“Keir Starmer is braced for resignations from his frontbench after ordering Labour MPs not to vote for a ceasefire in Gaza.”
In other words, he wants his MPs to vote for the bombings, the killings and the wanton destruction to continue. Most probably will.
We will find out later today who are the Labour Party leaders who put their hope of becoming a minister before what any decent human being feels about what they can see on television is happening to ordinary people in Gaza and just want it to stop.
An interesting article from 2002 proposing a “a secular democratic state in historic Palestine” based on one person, one vote “without reference to ethnicity or creed”:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040805065028/http://www.one-state.org/articles/2002/karmi.htm
It is probably never going to happen (at least not until we get socialism when it would be a secular democratic administration) if only because the Zionists would fight it to the death — and they’ve got the atomic bomb — as it would mean a repudiation of their claim that part of historic Palestine should be a Jewish state for Jews.
But anyone raising it would put the Zionists on the back foot as, when you think about it, their claim is outrageous even from a bourgeois-democratic point of view.
Preliminary statistics show that over Saturday and Sunday there were 108 hits on our website via the QR code on the leaflet. As by then some 1600 had been handed out, that’s 1 in 15, ie for every 15 leaflets handed out 1 person was sufficiently interested to scan the code and visit our site.
That suggests it is worth putting a QR code on our leaflets and handing out leaflets.
Apparently in Stroud some want to ban The Light from being handed out in the streets, including initially the Tory MP.
https://www.stroudnewsandjournal.co.uk/news/23660745.stroud-mp-light-seems-sow-division-create-fear/
They are peddling nonsense but then so are a lot of others, including the Tory and Labour parties. The answer is not to prevent their views being expressed but to publicly expose them as nonsense.
Report on distribution in Yorkshire from Spintcom
Attended what was in fact public evening meetings in Sheffield , Doncaster and a afternoon meeting in Wakefield.
The Sheffield meeting attracted about 40 attendees with the advertised guest speaker a Lindsey German. Prior to the meeting starting the audience were informed that Lindsey would not be able to attend in person as she had been engaged in discussions with the Met’ Police in London regarding in the Stop the War rally scheduled for Saturday 11th.- she did however address the meeting via a link. The opportunity was taken to check out who Lindsey is and transpired she had previously been a member of the SWP for some 37 years sitting on their central committee before resigning and becoming a founder member of the Stop the War Coalition (STOC) eventually becoming the STOC convenor. This background gave a SWP flavour of how the meeting unfolded, primarily to get support for attending the rally in London with little mention of the real and primary cause of this conflict and others. When questioned on nationalism and capitalism the answer went along the lines of it was for the Palestinians’ to determine their homeland. 40 party leaflets or so were handed out.
Much the same thinking as had been outlined in Sheffield arose in Doncaster where about 25 people attended and the same in number of party leaflets handed out. The speaker in Doncaster was a Andrew Murray who had previously been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and then a member of the Communist Party of Britain and now a member of the Labour Party. On secondment from UNITE the union he had also been Special Political Adviser to Jeremy Corbyn for a couple of years and at one point Chair of STOC.
All in all the Doncaster and Sheffield meetings could well have been held by the SWP
The Wakefield meeting was a more constructive affair where the speaker a Adrian Cruden gave quite an extended history of the evolution of the origins in the creation of Israel and conflicts that had arisen for some 2000 years. The Q&A session after the address was also fruitful with a number of those present complimentary of the party leaflet of which again about 30 were handed out before the meeting reflecting the attendance.
And in Glasgow:
Had some positive reactions and interactions to the flyer, from fellow workers on the streets of Glasgow yesterday. One or two dodgy ones too! But overall very convivial and supportive of its content.
Well, the government has got rid of her. It was too much even for them to have a cabinet minister boasting of having family members serving in the Israeli armed forces and referring to Muslim demonstrations in London as “pollution”, precisely the language Hitler employed against the Jews. Maybe the police will get their revenge by charging her with using racially aggravated language. What a despicable character.
What we said in what we called a “Peace Manifesto” sent to an international conference of social democratic parties in June 1917 (and by published in the July 1917 Socialist Standard):
What interest have the Workers, then, in either starting or carrying on war for their masters? Absolutely none.
Every Socialist must, therefore, wish to see peace established at once to save further maiming and slaughter of our fellow Workers. All those who on any pretext, or for any supposed reason, wish the war to continue, at once stamp themselves as anti-Socialist, anti-working class, and pro-capitalist.The other leafletters also gave out their 300 leaflets in record time, one reporting:
“We could have got rid of twice the leaflets easily. I don’t think more than 5 people declined a leaflet. Many more came up and asked for them and several said they agreed with it, even one handing out a certain religious book (the front side anyway). Very few marchers had any other leaflets than ours.”
In all 1200 were distributed at the demonstration. A drop in the ocean of course seeing there were 300,000 demonstrators.
For the record, a further 100 were distributed outside head office and by a visitor on his way watch Millwall play Sheffield Wednesday. He said he would leave them on the train rather than hand them out at the match. Which seemed a wise decision.
A Western leader breaks ranks:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/frances-macron-urges-israel-stop-bombing-gaza-2023-11-10/
I can’t understand how anybody anywhere can support what the Israeli Attack Forces are doing in Gaza — deliberately targetting and cutting off supplies to hospitals and brazenly defending this on the grounds that weapons of mass destruction (or whatever) are hidden underneath them.
I don’t know what Macron’s motives are in publicly calling for a stop to the deliberate killing of babies and hospital patients but at least he is reflecting what most people are thinking.
The Jewish Nationalist government of Israel can’t call him an antisemite, though they might still deploy the self-hating Jew trope.
Nobody really supports what the IAF is doing to the population of Gaza. How can they without denying their humanity?
As socialists we don’t see Palestinians being bombed there but fellow workers and fellow human beings. The immediate interest of the working class is that the fighting stop unconditionally. It won’t, but at least we will have made our position clear.
More Remembrance Day hypocrisy.
What does the day mark? The anniversary of the armistice of 11 November 1918 that ended the First World War.
And what is an armistice?
“Armistice descends from Latin sistere, meaning “to come to a stand” or “to cause to stand or stop,” combined with arma, meaning “weapons.” An armistice, therefore, is literally a cessation of arms.”
So what is wrong with calling for an armistice on Armistice Day?
Remembrance Day hypocrisy. Will they be remembering the time when the Jewish Nationalists were terrorists killing British soldiers and hostages:
“The Sergeants affair was an incident that took place in Mandate Palestine in July 1947 during Jewish insurgency in Palestine, in which the Jewish underground group Irgun kidnapped two British Army Intelligence Corps NCOs, Sergeant Clifford Martin and Sergeant Mervyn Paice, and threatened to hang them if the death sentences passed on three Irgun militants—Avshalom Haviv, Meir Nakar, and Yaakov Weiss—were carried out. The three had been captured by the British during the Acre Prison break, tried, and convicted on charges of illegal possession of arms, and with ‘intent to kill or cause other harm to a large number of people’. When the three men were executed by hanging, the Irgun killed the two sergeants and hung their booby-trapped bodies in a eucalyptus grove near Netanya.
When the bodies were found, the booby trap injured a British officer as they were cut down. This act was widely condemned in both Palestine and the UK. After news of the deaths became widely known, some British troops and policemen went on rampages in Tel Aviv; five were killed and others wounded by the police, while anti-Jewish rioting broke out in some British cities.”https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sergeants_affair
More on the “Jewish Insurgency” here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_insurgency_in_Mandatory_Palestine
