Stop the War's Hypocrisy Revisited

The wave of anti-Trump protests was bound to attract the interest of far-left parasites and here they are in the form of the "Stop the War" Coalition run by by the former Trotskyists, now Stalinists of the Counterfire group led by Lyndsey German and John Rees. There's also the Socialist Workers Party but I'll return to them later...

Readers may recall that when the StWC was challenged over why they were not protesting about Putin's intervention in Russia they clearly stated:

....our focus is on what our government is doing, because we can make a difference to what Britain does and we can make a difference to what our allies do and we have done to a certain extent. If we have a protest outside the Russian embassy it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to Putin and it would also actually increase the hysteria and jingoism that is being whipped up at the moment against Russia.

Specifically:

Everyone who has a sense of duty for peace of the planet needs to mobilise everything can against that and that means opposing the West.

Lest anyone forget Russia has also been clamping down of gays, women's rights and opposition parties in favour of Putin and the new Russian nationalism. There's also the little question of Russia's brutal interventions in Chechnya where they fight Muslims which the Coalition would rather ignore and forget about.

The silence of the StWC and the left in general has been deafening about any atrocity committed by non-Western nations. Tibet? Not a lefty paper ever in sight when the Tibetans protest about the colonisation of their country. China is sort of "socialist" according their twisted world view.

Then as demonstrators assemble on Saturday some anarchists have tweeted about the need to NOT carry SWP placards. 

South London SolFed‏@slsolfe

Going to an anti Trump demo tonight? Don't accept any placards from the rape apologist SWP/Stand Up to Racism groups

The Socialist Workers Party handling of an alleged rape inside their organisation caused outrage both inside and outside the "left". The SWP cannot be treated seriously when it comes to women's rights. The StWC cannot be treated seriously when it comes to peace and human rights.

Hypocrites the pair of them.

Musical Tribute to John Wetton (King Crimson/Asia)

Photo: By Mike Inns

The passing of yet another great musician from my much mis-spent youth, John Wetton hit the news today. A former member of King Crimson, Family, Wishbone Ash, Uriah Heep and founder of the supergroup Asia (featured in the video below), John was a major contributor to once great British music scene before all these talentless wannabes started appearing on X-Factor and the like.

A sad loss for his family friends and fans alike.

RIP John. You will be missed. Thanks for all the great music.

BMA Bans "Expectant Mothers"

There are times when all this political correctness nonsense drives not only me, but a hell of a lot of people mad. The latest atrocity comes from the British medical Association who (wait for it) have told their staff not to use the term "expectant mothers" in case it upsets "intersex or trans people".  Instead they advise the use of "pregnant people".

I mean WTF?

Look I hate to point out to the BMA since they're the doctors, only women can get pregnant and we call them mothers.  Period.

That doesn't in any way shape or form discriminate against those that choose to alter their physical sexuality that's their choice. But all this pandering to this tiny minority of people is getting rather ridiculous. It wasn't so long ago some idiot university was suggesting He & She should be replaced by "Zee".

Oh please do stop this nonsense.

What worries me is that one of these days there's going to be a backlash against this utter bollocks and the situation that this minority says it's in will get worse.

Enough snowflakery.

Oh and as a footnote the BMA also says the "elderly" should be known as "older people". Bah humbug. I'm sixty later this year. "Old git" would be fine by me.

What would Victor Meldrew Say?

US President gives Islamists a "trump card"

The decision of Donald Trump to ban people from seven Muslim countries has rightly caused consternation and shock around the world. Additionally the refusal to accept refugees except possibly those from a "non-majority" religion (by which he means Muslims) all adds up to an own goal against the rise of Islamism.

One of the first people caught up in this nonsense was a Yazidi woman who was about to join her husband already resident in the USA. Tragic given the genocide that the Yazidis are escaping from and of course this also affects one large group of people, the Kurds who have been not just the best and most reliable allies against ISIS but also are themselves under threat from both Turkish and Arab forces in the Middle East who are determined to prevent an independent Kurdish state from being created.

The Kurds are the largest people in the Middle East without their own country, divided between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. They are also Muslims but tend to self-identify as Kurds first and one thing is blatantly obvious Kurdish women are free.

Such a policy will drive a wedge between the US led West and the Muslim world in which those who do try to stand up against the medieval Islamists of all types will find themselves further isolated as the extremists will use this policy to "prove" the West is against all Muslims.

Meanwhile the hypocrisy of both the legislation which excludes Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and Saudi Arabia id obvious. Trump has personal business interests in these countries. A direct abuse of power by the President who has only been in post for a few days.

This also allows the policies of other Muslim countries to be overlooked. Breitbart reports:

Five of the wealthiest Muslim countries have taken no Syrian refugees in at all, arguing that doing so would open them up to the risk of terrorism. Although the oil rich countries have handed over aid money, Britain has donated more than Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar combined.

Yet amidst cries for Europe to do more, it has transpired that of the five wealthiest countries on the Arabian Peninsula, that is, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain, not one has taken in a single refugee from Syria. Instead, they have argued that accepting large numbers of Syrians is a threat to their safety, as terrorists could be hiding within an influx of people. Sherif Elsayid-Ali, Amnesty International’s Head of Refugee and Migrants’ Rights, has slammed their inaction as “shameful”.

Quite. Saudi Arabia in particular has huge pre-prepared camps, fully equipped to take thousands of pilgrims for the "Haj" which could have been used for refugees rather than them fleeing and drowning across the Mediterranean. The Wahhabi version of Islam practiced in the Saudi state is barely a step away from the practices of ISIS. Saudi Arabia is a true Apartheid state with women being second class citizens not allowed to go out without a so-called "Guardian" and even bans them from driving.

The Saudi's are more concerned with controlling Islam than any humanitarian concerns, yet these hypocrites sit on the now totally discredit United Nations Human Rights Council. A travesty if there ever was one.

And then there is the question of Muslim countries banning Israeli citizens from their countries. Sixteen nations practice this anti-Semitic policy. Including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen and Libya who protest over their citizens treatement. One rule for them......

The battle against islamism and terrorism is going to be a long one. Military means can only solve a very small, albeit violent part of the problem. The solution will be to win over the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims to a more tolerant and inclusive world where religion is separated from the state. 

Trump's inane policy will set back the cause of a secular and democratic future.

The Maoist Cult Next Door

Our comrades have steeled themselves in acute and violent class struggles in the past two years. Fearing neither hardship nor death in upholding the proletarian revolutionary line of Chairman Mao and following closely our great, glorious and correct Party, the Party of World Revolution, we are preparing ourselves to greet the greatest event in the history of mankind – the victory of world people’s revolution and the establishment of the International Dictatorship of the Proletariat!

Party Committee
March 31, 1977

No one who watched the BBC Two documentary The Cult Next Door can have failed to be shocked and saddened by what happened to those poor women who followed Aravindan Balakrishnan behind locked doors. Brain washing, abuse and sexual assault. All in the name of Maoism.

Like many others I was familiar with the literature produced by the Institute of Workers' Institute of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought as it was handed out on the streets of Brixton. As Paul Flewers stated on the programme we all used to grab a copy and have a laugh down the pub about their latest nonsense until they suddenly disappeared.

Tin foil hats seemed to be the order of the day as we were warned of the activities of the British fascist state. Other than picking up leaflets everyone steered clear of these lunatics,there really was no other word to describe them.

Brixton High Street was a central focus for the far-left in the late seventies and early eighties. A walk down the road would introduce the average passer by to almost the full range of newspapers and journals available at that time. Socialist Worker, Morning Star, the News Line and others would be selling their wares every Saturday morning/early afternoon.

And then there was the bookshop run by the Workers Revoltionary Party just around the corner from the tube station. In those days no one knew the extent of the abuse that took place in the Workers Institute or for that matter the WRP until the mid-eighties.

The Workers Institute went into hiding. The rumour was they'd all gone to China but truth be know the Instute was forgotten by most people as other matters caught our attention in those heady days when the far left was highly visible and active.

The extent of the abuse by Balakrishnan only came to light in 2013 and that poor girl had spent all 30 years of her life in a prison in the middle of London. How was all this missed by not just social services or the police. We shall never know. Only the escape of the three women, all of whom were seriously damaged by their experience finally brought Balakrishnan to face justice.

One of Balakrishnan's followers was described as an academic and "deep thinker" who studied law before she became a communist. How did such a woman descend into total madness? One of the survivors was seen campaigning for Balakrishnan's release from the "British fascist state". Deluded even now.

Mao's China became a nightmare of mass starvation, torture and death. North Korea remains like that today having become the world's largest prison camp. Yet there are those on the "left" like the New Communist Party who see such barbarity as the true form of socialism. It seems many are just capable of self delusion.

But whilst we recoil in horror at the micro-antics of the Workers Institute it must be remembered that other left sects have behaved atrociously. A few years after Balakrishnan and his followers went into hiding a sex scandle erupted in the Workers Revolutionary Party as their leader and founder Gerry Healy was expelled. The reason? Healy had been abusing women inside the party for years and a fiancial crisis led to all this coming out in 1985.

Yet Healy retained around two the three hundred followers including Corin and Vanessa Redgrave. When Healy died his funeral was attended by a large crowd of mourners carrying placards with his picture. Ken Livingstone was "delighted" to write an introduction to a fawning biography of Healy.

And still the left didn't learn.

The Socialist Workers Party attempted to cover up an alleged rape by "comrade delta" and their organisation fell apart as a result. The SWP still has hard core followers in denial of events.

The far left pose as liberators of mankind yet have produced world-wide some of the worst mass-murders of the twentieth century. Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-Jung, Pol Pot and many others. That's what happens when the individual is subsumed by ideology and human rights are crushed by supposed "class interest" and the need to establish socialism at any cost.

Communism is an evil the world can do without.

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If you missed the programme it is available for the next 29 days here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08c3vrx

Labour Representation Committee expel Labour Party Marxists

Labour Party Marxists

Refound Labour as a real party of labour

More divisions have erupted on the Corbynista left as the Labour Representation Committee National Executive met and upheld the decision to "disaffiliate the Labour Party Marxists from the LRC. This conflict dates back to a change in the way the LRC is organised last year.

When Stan keable attempted to pay the affiliation fee for LPM, Michael Calderback, the  wrote on behalf of their EC that:

...at the SGM earlier in the year the rules for national affiliates changed - as a result organisations are required to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the NC that there is evidence of a membership base proper to a national organisation. When the current list of affiliates were reviewed, several were not deemed to have met this test, including Labour Party Marxists.

This resulted in the inevitable ranting from Keable and his mates who are really members of the tiny Communist Party of Great Britain (Weekly Worker). Labour Party Marxists are simply a front organisation. Everybody on the left recognises this though Keable and his cabal strenuously deny this.

The number of people involved in minute, but shows that the LRC is determined to keep the various organised far left groups at bay. The CPGB are not Trotskyists having originated inside the old CPGB (Morning Star) around a journal called The Leninist.

Their guru who goes by the name of Jack Conrad was originally in the pro North Korean New Communist Party registered under his real name John Chamberlain. Having recently journeyed through the now defunct Left Unity Party the CPGB are like most of the far-left tail-ending the Corbyn movement in an attempt to gain recruits for their declining sects.

Protesting in this week's Weekly Worker Keable complains:

Bureaucratic exclusion is the wrong way of resolving political differences between socialists, and is counterproductive for an organisation trying to democratise the Labour Party and win it for socialism. Hypocritically, the LRC is, at the very same time, complaining about the trashing of democratic structures in Momentum “without proper discussion and without even consulting”

The old adage if you put three Trots in a room you end up with two parties and a faction has never seemed more apt.

Socialist Party left out in the cold

 

Not so long ago the Socialist Party (Militant) started a campaign to demand the readmission of 75 of it's members back into the Labour with a petition that ended up being signed by mostly Socialist Party members. This campaign was quietly dropped as they realised absolutely no one was taking any notice of their nonsense whatsoever.

The SP has been in quandary about what to do with itself since the rise of Corbynism. Until Steptoe became leader the comrades were promoting their Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) as the alternative to the Labour Party. This consisted of an unholy alliance of the Socialist Party with their )highly discredited) arch-rivals the Socialist Workers Party and the RMT trade Union.

The TUSC has now seemingly stopped standing candidates as the SP turn their attentions to trying to elbow in on the rise of Corbynism. However their paper The Socialist announces that the TUSC will be meeting for it's annual conference on Saturday to discuss the future of their coalition. The key speakers will be Sean Hoyle (RMT President; Hannah Sell (Socialist Party) and Charlie Kimber (SWP).

They will be discussing the following resolution:

This conference re-affirms the support that the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition has given to Jeremy Corbyn against Labour’s Blairite right-wing, from his initial leadership election victory in September 2015 and during his re-election campaign in 2016. 

We recognise that his leadership of the Labour Party has opened up the political situation compared to the first five years of TUSC’s existence and that his defeat by the Labour right-wing would be a serious blow for the working class movement. 

TUSC was set-up in 2010, co-founded by the late Bob Crow, to enable trade unionists, community campaigners and socialists to stand candidates under a common anti-austerity and socialist banner, with an agreed minimum platform of core policies. Establishing an electoral coalition of this character, involving a mix of constituent organisations and individuals, was conceived as a step towards solving the vacuum of working class political representation that had existed since the triumph of ‘New Labour’. 

Clearly Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership victory, potentially a terminal defeat of New Labour, required TUSC to re-calibrate its electoral activity and conference supports the steps taken by the steering committee to do so. In the May 2016 local elections, for example, no TUSC candidates were even considered to be run without local TUSC groups seeking a dialogue with the sitting Labour councillor or prospective candidate on the critical issue of their preparedness to resist cuts to local council jobs and services. Conference calls on the steering committee to continue with this approach for the 2017 elections. 

We recognise that this will be more challenging in the 33 English county councils and unitary authorities with elections in May, only six of which have Labour-led administrations. That is not the case, however, in Wales – where right-wing Labour is the dominant force in local government – or Scotland, in a different political context and with councillors elected under a proportional representation system in multi-member wards. 

The preference vote system used in mayoral elections also makes it easier for TUSC candidacies to be supportive of Jeremy Corbyn’s antiausterity message while making sure that the Tories do not make electoral headway. 

Notwithstanding the differences between the various contests taking place in May, conference calls on the steering committee to ensure that, for whichever elections candidate applications are received, TUSC’s electoral interventions are part of a serious campaign against cuts to local public services and will strengthen the battle against the right wing in the Labour Party and the unions.

The TUSC attracts derisory votes wherever it stands and has lost many supporters on the ground to Momentum and the Labour hard left. The resolution shows that they really have no idea where to go with their outfit, though they remain hostile to the revisionist Jon Lansman. Militant guru Peter Taffe writes:

Recently, Momentum leader Jon Lansman shut down all of Momentum's structures and imposed a new constitution, with only a 'take it or resign' option to members and supporters. Overturning the original aim to bring people inside and outside the party together, membership of the Labour Party is now a requirement.

The change is dressed up as 'direct democracy'. The ground was laid by commentators like Owen Jones, presenting this as a battle between new fresh layers of people against "Trotskyist sectarian saboteurs".

'One member one vote' was a tool of the pro-capitalist right wing in the Labour Party to drown out the collective voice of trade unions and to set inactive, passive members against those who participate in meetings, debates and activity. The Momentum leadership are using it for the same purpose. It sounds very democratic, but in reality this 'direct democracy' means individuals clicking answers in response to questions set by the leadership, while the leadership do as they please with no democratic mechanism to hold them in check.

Momentum trailed this method when they decided their position on the EU referendum. An issue of such importance was decided by people individually sat at home under a deluge of capitalist media, with no alternative being put, no discussion or debate, clicking a yes/no answer.

The worst of the many problems with Momentum's new imposed constitution is the total sidelining of the role of the organised working class. Trade unions that affiliate to Momentum are collectively granted just six representatives on the new National Coordinating Group (NCG). Decisions of the NCG will be made by a simple majority. Thus the Fire Brigades Union, a militant, democratically-organised body representing tens of thousands of people, carries no more weight than individuals, and can easily be outvoted.

In complete contrast the TUSC (which does not allow for individual membership, just "supporter status" claims:

Contrast that with the consensus method of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), which means that representatives of the RMT rail union on the steering committee cannot be bounced into accepting any decision that they believe would not be supported by their members or that contravenes the democratic decisions of their annual general meeting.

Anyone who has had dealings with the Socialist Party will know how devious they are in their wheeling & dealing and are notorious for their bureaucratic approach to politics. by "consensus" they mean a deal made in a smoke filled back room between the factions then presented to a formal delegates meeting where the assembled have preordained orders to toe the line. 

That's how they operate. Democracy is not part of the Socialist Party tradition. They have never tolerated dissent in their ranks, even splitting with their won founder Ted Grant whose breakaway group, Socialist Appeal remains quietly operating in the background waiting for godot it's moment.

Militant has not changed its spots, simply grown more deluded with it's own self-importance. Why the RMT still bothers with these petty sectarians is beyond belief. A waste of members money.