The New Enlightenment

We’re living through a second brutal dark age
With renewed bigotry, superstition and terror.
And if you thought we’re on a preordained, exponential path of progress
Then I suspect you might be making a fundamental error.

Since the collapse of the twentieth century experiment in socialism
With equality and global brotherhood as its imagined creed
We have succumbed to the ideology of individualism
Which turns out to be nothing but a fig leaf for corporate greed.

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The Corbynista Revolution- Women On Top

Apologies for the headline but as the polemical war rages, even left-wing bloggers sometimes have to resort to cheap journalistic tactics in order to gain attention in a very crowded blogosphere. But behind this tacky tabloid heading is a very serious point. Corbyn was quickly lambasted for having a male dominated top table. All the so-called big hitters in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet were men. It was something the Tory press immediately jumped upon hoping to wrong foot JC at the earliest moment. But what the Tory press and Corbyn’s own detractors within the Labour Party did not pick up on was the highly competent female academics that have been invited onto John McDonnell’s economic advisory committee.

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British Labour Party – Who’s Abusing Who?

All of a sudden abuse is the new buzz word in the Labour Party. Nasty stuff to be sure but the question arises; who is abusing whom? Let’s try to unravel the mess. First and foremost, we have to deal with the vexed question of anti-Semitism. I would dare to suggest that ninety-nine point nine percent of alleged anti-semitism by Labour Party members and supporters is in fact wholly legitimate criticism of Israel’s colonial project in the Middle East. The Zionist project is a colonial project without doubt and every progressive person should have both the courage and the right to say so.

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Nuclear Contamination – Another Atrocity Hidden In the Small Print

Apparently today at the Labour Conference, Jeremy Corbyn was defeated in his effort to ban nuclear trident weapons. The reason so I read, is because unions say it will threaten jobs. Now I understand that these are difficult times – no one wants to lose there job, particularly in the midst of an on going global recession. But when your job is building nuclear weapons, common sense and the greater good must prevail.

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Mr Corbyn, Watch Your Back

Teflon Tony thinks he’s got it all wrong. Conservatives think he’s dangerous. The Labour establishment are mortally afraid of him. The Lib Dems conspire to belittle him. Those political elite types, straight from university having never held a real job, are campaigning against him. The mainstream press are digging the dirt on him. The BBC are trying to trip him up on every interview. Across the ocean, the bastion of political hypocrisy, are routinely denouncing him. And of course the landed and knighted gentry in this green and pleasant land are quaking in their designer boots.

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All Hail The Bearded One, Chris Mullin, The Guardian

Chris Mullin is at it again. Having imagined the fate of a radical left-wing Prime Minister way back in 1982 in his novel, ‘A Very British Coup’, Mullin now dares to imagine the first 100 days of a Jeremy Corbyn Government. It’s a clever and imaginative piece that has Corbyn surviving all the usual establishment traps and coming out a respected and even well-loved Prime Minister. Of course, Mullin is only imagining the first 100 days. Read More…

Corbyn and Contradictions

The old contradictions haven’t gone away. At the heart of everything is that most stubborn of all contradictions, that between the private ownership of the world’s wealth and the socially created nature of that wealth, creating a situation where a relatively tiny handful of multi-billionaires have gained control over the world’s resources and industries while an increasingly impoverished global population grimly toil just to survive. In various forms, this contradictory situation has been around for millennia, stretching back to the dawn of slave owning society, through the feudal epoch and then into the highly dynamic capitalist era.

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Migrants

The distinction between refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants
Is as repulsive as racism itself.
The very essence of humanity is migration
Nobody wants to be left on the shelf.

Our descendants all originally migrated from Africa
In search of food and a safer place to live
Those that would make criminals out of migrants
Commit a crime that is impossible to forgive.

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Mayoral Candidates, Where’s the Big Ideas

Ken Livingston had his Fares Fair, which of course soon got bogged down in the Tory courts. Boris Johnston had his cycling revolution which also got bogged down, though this time through lack of conviction. Painting a few blue lines on the road maketh a revolution not. But at least both Livingston and Johnston had something of a big idea. But the current crop of Mayoral hopefuls really are a sorry lot. A chance to lead one of the planet’s leading metropolises and not one of them can come up with an inspiring policy. Of course all the Labour candidates are mouthing the right sort of platitudes on housing, transport and the environment but you get the distinct feeling that none of them really mean what they say.

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Corbynomics – TRWNBT

There’s a man going round who’d rather jaw jaw
than carelessly set off a nuclear war war.
But they call him a threat to national security.

There’s a man who’s opposed to austerity
whose alternative shows a great deal of dexterity.
But they say he’s a threat to the nation.

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A Very British Coup by Chris Mullin

I have just revisited the magnificent TV version and then thought I ought to read the book just in case there were some nuances that the TV series had left out. As it turned out the TV adaption, for my money, does a far superior job in painting the dark picture of a British/US right wing coup than the original text. But both book and TV series are compulsory tools in exploring just how the ruling establishment, on both sides of the Atlantic, seamlessly come together to rid themselves of any threatening left wing upstarts. Written in the wake of both the CIA orchestrated Chilean and Australian coups, A Very British Coup simply imagines the same thing happening in Britain should the British electorate have the audacity to elect anything like a radical social democratic government.

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Kids Company – Scene of a Triple Crime

The Tory media would have us believe that this once loved charity had, in the last year or two, descended into a hotbed of financial misdeeds and sexual depravity. The evidence for such wrongdoings is patchy to say the least. Hard evidence, it seems, is non-existent. But there have indeed been crimes committed in and around Kids Company, and they are crimes so horrific that a public enquiry should be set up without delay and mass protests should be organised to name and to shame those responsible. These crimes do indeed involve financial wrong-doings and abuse of all types. And worse still, they include violent criminality of every conceivable description up to and including the premature deaths of young people. The crime I speak of is none other than the crime of poverty and neglect and it is endemic in our communities. And like all crimes, there are victims and there are perpetrators.

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Jeremy Corbyn, The Boy Is Doing Good

With the likes of the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, Channel 4’s Michael Crick, and the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee all pouring out bucket loads of venom against the democratically elected Mr Corbyn, not to mention the usual bile from the Tory tabloids, it’s a wonder that JC has remained so upbeat and energetic. With journalists like Kuenssberg and Crick, who needs enemies. Our clique of esteemed investigative journalists imagine themselves to be rigorously journalistic in their hounding of Corbyn but they are not. Good investigative journalism would be focusing on Corbyn’s radical policies.

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Postcapitalism by Paul Mason

When Mr Mason is not busy demonstrating to his readers just how clever he is, he provides us with a highly readable, highly thought-provoking discussion on post-capitalist scenarios. In actual fact Mr Mason is a very clever chap but he could do with adding a touch of humility whilst laying out his theories. Mason just can’t wait to tell us where Marx and Engels and Lenin got it right and where they got it wrong. As an accomplished journalist well-grounded in economics, he has every right to make such criticisms, but such criticisms might profitably be couched in more temperate language.

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Dear Jeremy Corbyn

Dear JC, I remember you well. During those dark, dark days when Irish Republicans stood defiant in the face of the vicious remnants of British colonialism, you offered them a sympathetic ear. In fact you did more than that, you gave them qualified support. When nearly all in the Labour Party had washed their hands of the Irish Republicans’ legitimate demands for self-determination, you took a principled stand. I suspect you understood those searing words from Marx: ‘The English working class can never be free while it colludes in the oppression of the Irish nation.’

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Orange is the New Black, Netflix, Series 1-3

It was billed as the new ‘Wire’ but I think it only lived up to that exalted rating in a most patchy and superficial sort of way. The Wire was dark and cutting edge throughout. It tore contemporary America to pieces. It touched on a deep alienation within American society that hitherto had seemed beyond the possibilities of any TV script. It held its audiences spellbound for five series and launched a few acting careers in the process. It became a marker for all future and past TV and had credibility in the claim that it was the greatest TV series of all time. ‘Orange Is The New Black’, despite a number of poignant moments, is most definitely not in that rarefied atmosphere. Too light-hearted, too glib and in places just too crass.

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Moses Ascending by Sam Selvon

Couldn’t be absolutely certain that I haven’t read this one a few decades back, but either way, it made for a thoroughly enjoyable read. Certainly not politically correct by today’s standards but since when has satirical humour worried about such niceties as political correctness. It was a bit like watching some old episodes of ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ or ‘Rising Damp’. Some highly dubious satire but funny and poignant in places nevertheless. There is no doubting Selvon’s astuteness when it comes not only to the racial tensions of the London of the 1970’s but of the human condition in general. So while we might conclude that his comic portrayal of those dark days is a little dated, we might equally conclude that there is a wonderful universality about this tale.

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The British Labour Party – What is it For?

Of the three great issues facing people everywhere, nowhere can the British Labour Party claim in any sense to be in the lead. Nowhere can it claim to be in the vanguard against environmental destruction, against growing inequality and against corrupt centralised governance. In fact it has been failing miserably on all three fronts. Which is not to say that both in government and in opposition it has not had its moments of enlightenment. New Labour did introduce the Sure Start programme to help combat the shocking disparity between the life chances of the better-off and of those of the dispossessed and disenfranchised.

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A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

There is one thing you can say with some degree of certainty about Mantel. She understands class, she understands sex and she understands human frailties. What better tools can novelist possibly need? The fact that she is a writer of stunning ability is the final ingredient for greatness. Nearly nine hundred pages of historical recreation and not for a single moment does the tension let up. Having been blown away, like so many people, by Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ and her subsequent ‘Bring Up The Bodies’, I was very reluctant to take on a novel that was written over twenty years earlier. Surely I would be disappointed. Surely it would just represent her apprenticeship for the masterpiece that was yet to come.

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The Lebedevs: Schizophrenic Oligarchs

The Lebedev’s, owners of the London Evening Standard, just can’t make up their minds. One minute they’re whipping up support for the Tory Party and generally behaving as one would expect a reasonable size cog in the corporate machine to behave. Next minute they are masquerading as tribunes of London’s working class, championing everything from literacy, safe cycling, affordable housing and clean air. The only problem with playing these two roles is, for the most part, they are diametric opposites. Read More…

Greek Negotiations – Podemos is the Elephant in the Room

Strictly speaking, the above title is incorrect. The real elephant in the room is not so much Podemos but neoliberalism itself. Give in to the wholly reasonable demands of Syriza and every anti-austerity party across Europe and beyond will take heart. The battle lines are crystal clear. It’s the exponents of monetarism and neoliberalism versus those at the receiving end. The ruling establishment’s narrative is that there is no alternative, yet one after another leading economists; including Nobel Prize winning economists, are telling us that neoliberalism and its attendant inhuman austerity policies are a busted flush.

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