Sunday Supplement at Howie's Corner

Trans-Censorship Campaign Continues

A dictionary definition of what a woman is has been branded by a Doctor Harrop as "transphobic". Sky news covered this in a piece I missed. Posie Parker took him on and won.


Further reading:

I recommend the following, albeit lengthy piece by Jane Clare Jones:

Twitter, Trans Rights Totalitarianism and the Erasure of Sex

Militant Rehabilitated by Labour



Dawn Butler's speech that Liverpool Council was right to "break the law and not the poor" was quite obviously historically revisionist and raised more than a few hackles during Labour Party Conference. The larger of the two groups that were the Militant Tendency, the Socialist Party certainly thought so:

An attack on the Militant-led Liverpool City Council has so often been the go-to line for many careerist Blairites - a way to burnish their credentials as opponents of any alternative to the politics of big business.

Ed Miliband used his first speech as Labour leader to denounce the council struggle. And, ever since the election of Jeremy Corbyn, scare stories and lies are shuffled out every few days in an attempt to dent and discredit the growing support for socialist ideas.

If socialism means sending redundancies by taxi to the workers they employ then count me out. I'm sure the "poor" were impressed as more lost their livelihoods.

Trouble is that Hatton bloke responsible for the whole sad affair and was rightfully  expelled from the party for his membership of Militant. Apparently the NEC doesn't think there will be a problem "unless one the local party raises an an objection".

True he's no longer a member of Militant, but their Socialist Party is banging on the door demanding to be allowed in.

Modern British Maoism



When I was a student I went to the only Polytechnic/University where the Students Union was under the control of Maoists. The Communist Party of Britain (Marxist Leninist). It took the side of Enver Hoxher when there was a split between Beijing (we still called it Peking in the seventies) and Tirana (the capital of Albania).

To cut a long story short I am surprised to see that they are still continuing though their numbers must be limited as the CPB(M-L) only publishes a bi-monthly journal The Worker, which was weekly when I last saw a copy. However the production standards are now very professional as is their website. Unusually for a group that comes out of the Maoist tradition their articles are free of the absurd jargon that other organisations in this milieu are prone to.

Their current perspectives document shows a very nationalistic bent:

We have now entered an epoch of fragmentation and chaos, with all the consequences and dangers that implies for our British working class. Over three centuries our class created British society and the nation by a thousand threads and by combining to struggle in the face of exploitation by capitalism. Separatists, Scottish or others, forget this industrial revolution when they hark back to feudal enclaves and regions of a “golden age” that is only myth......

By far the most important aspect of this is to re-establish – and where it didn't exist before, create – a solid sense of working class unity. In the face of bolstered Welsh assembly and Scottish parliament, the resurfacing of regionalism, the imposition of city economic zones, the overthrow of referenda which had rejected city mayors, and the spread of “federalism” across the whole political spectrum, we have to act swiftly and decisively. The Scottish National Party and the Tories collaborate on breaking up Britain in a process of slow independence resulting from their Scotland Bill. Being rushed through Parliament, it destabilises the cohesion of the nation.

The CPB(M-L) joins those on the left who are not only anti-EU but activley seeking Britain's departure. Their perspectives continue:

Our goals to rebuild Britain, re-industrialise, stop war – let alone starting to create a fresh socialist society – cannot be achieved with these dead hands upon us. We can decide to rebuild Britain and reconstruct a fresh industrial economy – and prosper, as we and many writers have proven, outside the EU. A new world is waiting.

The British people's consistent opposition to joining the euro did not emerge just because that disastrous currency would have had destructive economic consequences for us. No – our independent-mindedness as a class created a deep reluctance to abandon all control over our national economy.

However besides being Communists be warned they hold still Stalin in great esteem as these weighty tomes for sale on their website shows:

  

The CPB(M-L) was formed in the heady days of 1968, The most well known member was founder Reg Birch. The group were 50 years old this year. They state:

Another key impulse to the making of our Party was the negative example of the outfit pretending to be a revolutionary party, the Communist Party of Great Britain. Despite having the word communism stowed in its name, it never acted as a revolutionary organisation. It wanted to be merely a variant or even a member of the bigger social democracy, the Labour Party. It was always a revolutionary fake.

So 50 years ago, at the call mainly of industrial workers in the engineering union led by Reg Birch, our founding chairman, the Communist Party of Britain Marxist-Leninist was founded to rectify weaknesses that had long been undermining the potential of our class to take control of society.

There's that word again "control". That's why socialism/communism has always failed. As that Pink Floyd song puts it "We want no thought control". Quite right. Sorry comrades.