One of the world’s least-known and yet most obvious cases of the oppression of a minority group by a powerful state, China’s brutal hegemony over the Uyghur people of Xinjiang province, should be more widely known to western progressives.

It isn’t, partly because of the effectiveness of the Chinese state in blacking out mainstream media coverage of the region, but also because of residual left-wing quietism when it comes to criticising a stalinist state: one could safely assume that there would be far more banner headlines if the oppressor state involved was the USA.
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The papers today are carrying stories stating that a clear majority of the public want an early general election. This is of course completely unsurprising in light of the avalanche of scandal that there has been over recent weeks, and the pathetic reaction of MPs to it. People want to exercise the one democratic control that they have over their politicians – the right to throw them out at the ballot box.

What has been surprising though, is the reaction of the liberal political classes to the call. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s performance on Thursday’s Question Time was a case in point. Not only did she oppose calling an election, she did so on the grounds that such was people’s “anger”, they might “vote to spite”, and return BNP MPs to Westminster!

It is, of course, highly unlikely that the fascists could corral enough votes even in their strongest Westminster constituency to win an FPTP election. But even that isn’t really the point.

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It is widely held that Euro-elections are little more than an expensive white elephant, a charade conducted in order to put various failed and eccentric politicians on the gravy train to the continent. This year, however, they have taken on a new importance as there is a very real possibility that the fascist British National Party could gain representation for the first time at a European level. Voters are turning away from the established parties in droves, and I believe it is likely that the rise in support for the minor parties will prove to be understated on the day.

Tories have an easy if rather peculiar alternative in the UK Independence Party (UKIP), and that group’s support is rocketing predictably. For disaffected Labour voters however, the choice is not so easy. Those on the left who half-heartedly call upon people to vote for “the political expression of the working class” are wasting their time, and in any case are selling people a turkey. The idea of asking the working people of the UK to vote for a party that has overseen their houses being reposessed, their jobs being lost, their children being sent to war and their public services being privatised, has me reaching for the sick bucket. I cannot conceive of the thought process that allows people to continue reciting the same tired old doctrines about “historic ties to the labour movement” which lead them to call for a Labour vote. In any case, the electorate are not going to listen on June 4.
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Yesterday there was a rally in central London called by the Strangers Into Citizens campaign, a coalition with an apparently bedazzling array of backers from the unions, parliament and from (largely religious) community groups.

Its aim was to call for a one-off “earned amnesty” for migrants who live and work in the UK without legal status, and who have been here for over 4 years. But there is a sting in its tail.

The campaign argues that there is a strong case for such a legal change.
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What does a charity do? It used to be the case that charitable organisations, along a rather old but not dishonourable model, subsisted from donations and did “good works” independent of the state and public services. Increasingly, especially in services dealing with vulnerable people, that is no longer the case. Let us take a classic example – the funding of organisations which in one way or another house and support vulnerable homeless or ex-homeless people. 

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Statement taken from the JVP site which is here. Jewish Voice for Peace is an organisation seeking to build cross-border solidarity for peace in Israel and Palestine. Amongst other activities they have organised support for the Shministim, young Israelis who were prepared to refuse to fulfil their military service in the occupied territories (thus several were jailed), who are latter day heroes in my view.

Jewish Voice for Peace joins millions around the world, including the 1,000 Israelis who protested in the streets of Tel Aviv this weekend, in condemning ongoing Israeli attacks on Gaza. We call for an immediate end to attacks on all civilians, whether Palestinian or Israeli.

Israel’s slow strangulation of Gaza through blockade has caused widespread suffering to the 1.5 million people of Gaza due to lack of food, electricity, water treatment supplies and medical equipment. It is a violation of humanitarian law and has been widely condemned around the world. continue reading… »

It was with not a little sadness and familiarity that I read Catherine Bennett’s article in today’s Observer, in which she vocally opposes the idea of a government bail-out for Jaguar Land Rover. It is not so much her opposition to the terms being discussed (I would support an all-out nationalisation rather than the usual cash-injection bailout that has been mooted), but rather an aspect of her reasoning, which is at issue.

There is, as most readers here will know, a long-standing fault line between green and left-wing politics, which has never been fully resolved. On the left, the vast majority of us (myself included) acknowledge the reality of environmental issues such as climate change, species decline or pollution, and we would seek political action to support these problems. Similarly, most (though not all) greens would count themselves as part of the progressive wing of politics, having long ago and rightly dispatched most of the misanthropes and population bombers who infested their movement in the 1970s. However the two movements have never fully married, for all of this apparent convergence, and periodically we see why.

Just to give one anecdotal example, I can remember attending a No Sweat gathering a couple of years ago, where an academic whose name I forget was giving a lecture on the immediacy of the climate crisis. He made, and kept returning to, the point that many of the world’s industries are environmentally unsustainable and will have to change if the crisis is not to become a calamity. This point is plainly true. However I raised the “then what” question, to which he did not appear to have (or want, or indeed think it particularly important to have) an answer. What, I asked, would he suggest as an alternative mode of employment for a coal miner in West Virginia who had never known anything other than the coal industry since he was young. “Well, he’ll have transferrable skills”, came the answer. Like what? “Digging”, the definitive answer delivered with a shrug to suppressed giggles among the assembled audience.
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By far the most joyous and comical news in this past week has been the serial online publication of the BNP’s membership list. Fascists across the country have been crapping themselves at the prospect of being called to account for their views, especially if they work in “sensitive” jobs such as police, doctors or teachers. The list is now in the posession of all of the national media, as well as (one imagines) all of the major anti-fascist groups in the UK, as well as that of various people who’ve published it on the internet.

What has surprised me, has been some of the commentary about this from liberal and left-wing bloggers. I can obviously understand that there are legal concerns about publishing the list, and I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to face prosecution for having revealed the list in public. continue reading… »

The Democratic Party’s rules and bylaws committee yesterday effectively ended the race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to become the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.

For those of you who don’t know, the Obama campaign agreed to a compromise whereby the disputed delegations from Florida and Michigan would be seated, but with half a vote each. In the case of Michigan (where Obama did not appear on the ballot paper) the impressive 40% of ballots which were cast for “uncommitted” delegates will instead be allocated to delegates for Obama, presumably on the basis that these ballots were cast as “anyone but Hillary” votes.

Given that due to deliberate breaching of party rules aroung the timing of primaries these states were originally barred from voting at all, by consent of all the candidates including Clinton, it would seem that this is extraordinarily magnanimous on the part of the campaign that has legitimately won within the rules.
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If the polls are to be believed, today’s by-election in Crewe and Nantwich will deliver a widely expected drubbing to New Labour. Indeed, following a juvenile (at best) and deeply unpleasant (at worst) campaign run by Birmingham Hall Green MP Steve McCabe, it’s precisely what they deserve.

It does however raise the ongoing problem for “heartland” working class Labour voters of being stuck without a viable alternative to arrogant and ossified local Labour machines. If Tamsin “the hereditary MP” Dunwoody is beaten, it is likely to be by patrician Tory Edward Timpson.

Timpson may well be a nice man, jolly charming at parties and a regular giver to charity or whatever, but he is still a Tory and thus no more capable of representing working class voters in Crewe than the various Blair/Brownite pillocks who have spent the past few weeks either running around the city in top hats and tails, or else handing out shameful leaflets which come at the Tories from the right on immigration. The Labour campaign is utterly disgraceful, as commentators have rightly pointed out.
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There is an article by John McDonnell published in yesterday’s Morning Star, which I feel at once encapsulates the reasons why people on the left feel a lingering affection for the Labour Party and also why that Party is in reality a no-goer. And indeed I think McDonnell himself is emblematic of that same duality.

In the article, McDonnell begins with his ususal rallying cry “New Labour is dead” and seeks to take us forward via the construcation of a new set of economic policies (dare one say an Alternative Economic Strategy?) based on left-wing and socialist politics. He appears to be offering the notion that thus we will be able to take control of the Labour Party’s political direction via victory in a sub-Gramscian war of ideas.
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Until very recently I would broadly have fallen into the category of the ‘Labour Left’.

I was never totally comfortable with attempts by sections of the left to pull away from the Labour Party, which I had been brought up since childhood to see as “my” party, and which latterly I had come to see as a vehicle via which the Labour Movement could exercise its influence in the party political field: Lenin’s classic formulation of the “bourgeois workers’ party” could not describe it better.

In spite of a brief spell as a member of the Socialist Alliance, I quickly rejoined Labour and argued tooth and nail with comrades that things hadn’t changed so very much. It is now self-evident that I was wrong.
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… that I’d rather not support Ken Livingstone for Mayor? Somehow I just can’t muster any massive enthusiasm for Livingstone, nor do I feel the chilling terror of his major opponent (Tory buffoon Boris Johnson) that the Mayor’s re-election campaign appears to be trying to instil in the electorate. To hear the statements coming from some of Livingstone’s supporters you’d think that this was a race between Che Guevara and some kind of combination of Adolf Hitler and Satan, and I just can’t see what is effectively a council election on steroids in such apocalyptic terms. I also, try as I might, just can’t bring myself to like the oleaginous Livingstone, who is still trying to morph himself from his previous status as a grinning celebrity chat show guest, to having some kind of political gravitas. Ironically of course, Johnson is a product of the same media clowning circuit that Livingstone is. Bojo versus Bozo – what an appetising choice for the people of London. continue reading… »

Within the past four days, following a lengthy campaign of aerial bombings, a Turkish ground invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan has begun. 10,000 troops in total rolled across the border on Thursday night, according to the Turkish Daily News. This was on the pretext of hunting members of the PKK who live in camps around the mountainous north of the region. As the troops (whose numbers have been massing on the Iraqi border for months) went into Iraqi Kurdish territory at around 7 pm, the Turkish army’s general staff issued a statement which said:

“The Turkish Armed Forces, which attach great importance to Iraq’s territorial integrity and stability, will return home in the shortest time possible after its goals have been achieved”

Whether this is to be believed or not remains to be seen. Indeed, if the “achievement of its goals” is the elimination of the PKK “threat” then even taken at face value the statement is cold comfort for the Kurds – previous failed attempts by the Turkish army to eradicate Kurdish nationalism resulted in a bloody and drawn-out conflict between 1984 and 1999 which is reckoned to have claimed over 30,000 lives.

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Since writing my recent article supporting John Edwards in the Democratic primary race, a number of people have asked me why my arguments (which centre around the election of a Democratic president galvanising more radical change by opening up a space to that party’s left) would not simply hold true for any Democratic candidate. Those on the left who don’t think I’m wrong even to advocate a Democratic vote point out that whilst Edwards would be the preferable nominee, his name not being on the ballot paper doesn’t completely change the underlying process. Even Hillary Clinton’s election would surely be politically preferable to that of, say, Mike Huckabee. Further it would be supported by a majority of the US working class, and would mark a decisive break with the Bush era.

Yet I think there is a difference, and one which goes beyond the obvious fact that Edwards’ political stances are well to the left of Clinton’s. Unfashionable though it is on today’s left to mention such things, I think there is an issue of character that would prevent me from advocating a Clinton vote.

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A new poll taken in Iowa has John Edwards leading the field, Hillary Clinton’s vote falling, and a surprising late surge from Bill Richardson. Looks like there’s still everything to play for.

At both the last US Presidential election, I took a stance that is not popular on the UK left – one of support for a critical Democratic vote. For those of you who are unaware of my political heritage and who may be surprised that such an apparently uncontroversial stance would excite any kind of debate at all on the liberal-left, allow me to explain. The political background from which I come is one of the left in union and wider labour movement politics, where Trotskyist groups, all of which have a visceral loathing for the Democrats, have loomed large. Indeed, they were only ever really willing to call for a vote for the Labour Party in the UK based on a combination of recruitment raiding, and Byzantine theorising that attached an almost religious significance to the never-exercised trade union link with Labour.

Both of these factors having withered on the vine over the past ten years, most of the left (barring a few real no-hopers) have pulled back from automatic support for Labour, and indeed have ended up in many cases in something of a state of confused hopelessness as a consequence. Some indeed have ended up wandering down blind alleys such as the laughably misnamed “Respect” coalition, following quixotic figures such as George Galloway in the desperate hope of being led to a new dawn. Of course, that dawn will transpire to be a mirage, and most have already seen it. But such is the myopic faith even of ex-trotskyists in their will to follow a “line” that some will continue to do so – even as they spend every passing day tearing each other to pieces and opening themselves up for widespread mockery on this blog amongst others. It’s hardly an edifying spectacle.

So in light of such an extraordinary fiasco, what on earth could a refugee from such a risible political community possibly have to contribute to a debate being held on a far larger arena, in the USA? One of the reasons is because I like to think that people can and do learn lessons, and that therefore they are not doomed to carry on repeating the mistakes of the past. continue reading… »