imposs1904
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I’ll tag the details of this new biography of Paul Foot onto this thread, instead of starting another one:
The biographer, Margaret Renn, was from the same political tradition as Foot, and was also his contemporary.
Foot first originally joined the International Socialists in Glasgow in the early 60s when he was working as a local journalist. He also knew the SPGB in Glasgow. I remember a comrade contacted Foot a few years before he died, to ask him about this, and he replied with the following:
“I went to Glasgow for my first job (a reporter on the Daily Record) in September 1961. I joined the Young Socialists and the Woodside Labour party. A highly influential figure in the Woodside YS at the time was Vic Vanni, a big, very good-looking and persuausive bloke, a sheet metal worker, whose father had come to Glasgow from Italy, and ran a fish and chip shop. I became friendly with Vic and liked his sense of humour. He was greatly influenced by the SPGB, and many times I went with him and others to hear the SPGB lecturers in St Andrews Hall (I think). We also heard SPGB speakers like Dick Donnelly speak at open air meetings off Sauchiehall St.
“Before I left Glasgow in 1964, Vic joined the SPGB and I think he is still a member, probably a very senior one. . .“These SPGB speakers had a wonderful, proletarian, down-to-earth way of conveying Marxist ideas. They were all, without exception, sardonic and witty speakers, and they made a profound impression on me. In particular, they scornfully rejected the idea – prevalent at the time, that Russia etc were Socialist countries . . .”
The problem with the audio was at Keith’s end. His connection wasn’t the best . . . if he will insist on living out in the sticks.
That’s good to know about the Standard stats on the Party website.
I’ve still a while to catch up, though. I’m guessing of the 19,000 posts on the blog close to a thousand won’t be from the Standard. They’ll be from the old Western Socialists and other assorted WSM journals, there’ll be excerpts from pamphlets, adverts for meetings and other less conventional stuff tangentially connected to the SPGB.
I also have to mention that a chunk will be the MySpace Weekly Bulletins that Rob and yourself would put together, and which I would crosspost over here.
Good old MySpace. The origin story for the blog all those years ago.
19,000th post on the blog:
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2024/07/editorial-progress-1907.html
Surely tonight’s failed assassination attempt has delivered the Presidency to Trump? I can’t see Biden coming back from that.
Excuse the gallows humour but I thought this tweet was funny about the incident:
Off-topic:
If @stuartw2020 is still in contact with DF, pass on the message that I finally got around to listening to his Dostoyevsky talk last year and really enjoyed it. Cheers.
With the news that Alan Milburn is possibly being brought in by the incoming Labour Govt to help with the *cough* ‘reform’ of the National Health Service, a NHS Clinical Oncologist is already regretting voting for the Labour Party four days ago:
https://x.com/cpeedell/status/1809892724847382917
Just realised, Starmer – an ex-Trot – is bringing back Milburn, another ex-Trot. It’s a countdown to the right-wing conspiracy theories about the Trotskification of Britain.
‘Hey lads, grab your papers and your petitions, we’re getting the Fourth International back together again . . . ‘
Phil B-C gives a full breakdown of the results on his blog:
http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2024/07/left-of-labour-general-election-results.html
A few Trots were standing as independents in the election. I don’t think they were being deliberately deceitful. I put it down to the complications of registering with the Electoral Commission. But I do think it worked to their advantage.
For example, Maxine Bowler in Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough is a longstanding prominent member of the SWP. She stood as an independent, receiving 8 per cent of the vote. I’m skeptical that she would have received as high a vote if she stood with the SWP label next to her name on the ballot paper. Maybe we’ll know at the next election, or maybe the Left of Labour groups will now look towards the ‘Independent’ tag as a long term electoral strategy.
A major reason that Labour under Corbyn got hammered in 2019 is cos Farage and his ilk stood down. The Labour Right and the usual suspects in the media crowed at the time that it was Labour’s worst performance since the 1930s.
Farage and his ilk stood up this time, resulting in decimation for the Tories and this super-majority for Starmer in 2024.
All you have to have in 2028/29 is for the Tories and Farage to have some kind of electoral arrangement more along the lines of 2019 – though Farage has the whip hand now – and that majority will vanish. There won’t be an extended honeymoon period for this incoming Labour Government. It’s going to unravel sooner than people think.
Some New Statesman journalist was trying to be all clever and smug on Twixxer, by saying we shouldn’t compare 2024 to 1997, we should be comparing it to 1906.
. . . Yep, and what happened to that Liberal Party super-majority by 1910?
Someone posted these figures on Urban 75. Kind of shocking, if true:
Corbyn in 2017 – 12,877,918
Corbyn in 2019 – 10,269,051
Starmer in 2024 – 9,650,254Labour vote, according to wiki, 9,686,329 (33.7%).
I honestly think that if the Tories and Reform come to some agreement, Labour – with its majority of 174 seats – could be ousted at the next election. I think their “super-majority” is that brittle.
This is a wild official message from a sitting Prime Minister:
https://x.com/RishiSunak/status/1808890318713954593
I’m convinced he was bored with being PM and just decided to call an early election so he could spend more time with his money.
Funny you should mentioned Project 2025. There’s a longstanding American left communist sympathizer on Urban 75 who’s currently stanning for Biden in this election cycle – especially doubling-down in the aftermath of Biden’s disastrous debate performance – specifically because of Project 2025. He’s convinced it’s a game changer for accelerating America down a road to a right wing dictatorship. He’s adamant that Biden has to defeat Trump in November, and gets very defensive when people point out Biden’s personal and political shortcomings.
Maybe ‘funny’ is the wrong word in the circumstances.
