Corbyn is too much of a risk to our security

It's been a week since I last blogged and not entirely by design as this is the worst era of British politics like.. ever. As someone who until Corbyn had happily voted Labour or Liberal depending where I lived or what election was taking place the current options do not impress.

In fact what prompted me to return to the blog (I have been highly active on Facebook if you wish to join me over there, see sidebar for link) was the tragedy yesterday. Two innocent people stabbed to death by a religious Islamist terrorist in the name of his non-existent  deity. Those members of the public who tackled him deserve a medal.

Besides the shock of the attack it was the reaction of the left-wing tweeting community who appalled me. Hundreds of messages doing the rounds that this was  a "false flag" probably establishment or Mossad inspired attack to help the Tories. Even worse where the morons who complained about the police shooting the bastard despite the fact he had what appeared to be a suicide vest.

I was reminded of Corbyn's interview back in 2015. The  reported:

In an interview with the BBC, Corbyn was asked whether as prime minister he would be happy to order police or military to follow such a “shoot to kill” policy.

He said: 

“I’m not happy with the shoot-to-kill policy in general – I think that is quite dangerous and I think can often be counterproductive. I think you have to have security that prevents people firing off weapons, where they can. There are various degrees of doing things as we know … but the idea you end up with a war on the streets is not a good thing. Surely you have to work to try and prevent these things happening, that’s got to be the priority.”

This caused a furore at the time and combined with his general desire to reduce the armed forces and his dithering over all security related issues on which he would seek a "collective decision" thereby wasting valuable response time and lacking leadership abilities he shows himself and his party unfit to be in power in this country under any circumstances.

Bugger Brexit or a second referendum this idiot and his supporters would leave us defenceless in the face of the enemy. 

That on top of the endemic anti-Semitism and now revealed in the tweets of the leftists combined with a political programme that would decimate the economy and seek state ownership of the Internet combined with new laws to control newspapers makes the prospect of a Labour Government a frightening prospect.

Whilst there remain some good people in the Labour Party it is far too risky to allow Corbyn and his unhinged followers to be elected. 

In these circumstances despite the many criticisms I may have of Boris it is clear that voters should follow the basic principle of ABC, that is Anyone but Corbyn on December 12th.

For only the second time in my life (the last being in 2017) I recommend that you vote for the candidates most likely to keep Labour out which will mean Conservative in most seats but also some Liberal-Democrats and hopefully the three Independent Group for Change MP's plus Frank Field who is running as an Independent.

Fringe 2019: Socialist Labour Party

Most people who have any interest in left-wing or trade union politics will remember Arthur Scargill former President of the National Union of Mineworkers. During the great miners strike back in the eighties Scargill led his members into industrial action without a ballot thereby casing a division in the NUM and helping laying the foundations for a massive defeat not just for the union but the trade union movement in general.

The failure of the NUM was a watershed in British politics that cemented Thacher's government and began the wearing down of trade union power and influence to the almost negligible level it has today, though there are some exceptions to the rule.

This was also the period in which the left attempted to and failed to take control of the Labour Party. Militant, a parasitical Trotskyist organisation was purged and Labour entered years of opposition until the rise of Tony Blair.

In 1996 Arthur Scargiil split from the Labour Party and set up a new organisation known as the Socialist labour Party and at the beginning there were high hopes as various smaller groups and individuals joined up. However from the start the SLP was ruled by an Scargill with an iron fist and his Stalinist politics led him to purge not just the various Trot groups inside his party but anyone who dared oppose him.





Scargill was aided in this by one Harpal Brar who himself split with the SLP in 2004 to form the ultra-Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) as Scargill refused to back North Korea.

The party failed in it's attempts to gain any traction electorally and there has always been some mystery about it's financing but this year the SLP is standing but one candidate in Hartlepool where it has a small group of ex-Labour councillors.

The SLP website can be found here: www.socialist-labour-party.org.uk

The CPGB (M-L) can be found here: thecommunists.org

Doctor Who: The Key to Time (Tom Baker)

In trying to avoid the tedious pre-election prattle about Brexit I decided to go in for what turned out to be a major piece of escapism and ordered the boxed set of Tom Bakers Key To Time. This consists of no less than six stories over 26 stories which means it would have bee broadcast over six months. Being retired I got though it in just over a week including a few of the bonus features of which there are plenty.

This is Doctor Who as most people of my age remember it. Great acting and the need to suspend disbelief due to the low tech special effects, but it was a kids TV programme at the end of the day. I recall describing it to a media studies student ans classic British Pantomime with monsters thrown in!

I grew up having been lucky enough to see the very first episode of Doctor Who aged seven in 1963. My favourite Doctor was always Patrick Troughton with his companions Zoe (Wendy Padbury) and Jamie (Fraser Hines) but frankly they are all good and so were most of his companions over the years though Ace always irked me by referring to the Doctor as "professor". Still part of her particular charm I suppose.

This box set is actually quite inexpensive having set me back a little over £22 from Amazon and with the exception of the first story (after the introduction to the whole sequence) they are all solid Doctor Who yarns. The Ribos Operation could have been shorter in my opinion especially since it had just about the worst "monster" set I can think of.




However once you get past that the stories improve. Of course this adventure also introduces us to Romana (Mary Tamm) and Lalla Ward appears as a Princess in the final part, The Armageddon Factor as does another (not to be seen again) Time Lord. There's some classic if laughable moments in The Stones of Blood as huge stones chase the Doctor across the countryside and into space as for the giant squid Kroll, Like I said, pantomime with "monsters".

  


The new adventure of the Doctor from Christopher Ecclestone onwards are on a technical level so superior to these old ones but I think they will always have an appealing charm to those of us like Peter Pan refuse to grow up and hopefully generations to come.

Gratuitous Sax and Senseless Violins -Sparks 25th Anniversary Re-release

In the seventies one oddball duo of American brothers Ron (keys) and Russell Mael (vocals) renamed  their band and came to fame as Sparks. The infamous Hitler moustache of Ron being a trade-mark of their early form of electronic pop in the age of Glam Rock.

One of Sparks more memorable hits was This town Ain't Big Enough For the Two of Us which reached no 2 in the British charts in 1974.


Photo: By AVRO  

Sparks went on to have a couple of other hits that year with Amateur Hour and Never Turn Your Back On  Mother Earth which reached numbers 7 and 13 respectively that yer. Despite releasing other singles they did not impact again in the charts until 1979 with a couple of sings which reached 14 and 10. They failed to chart again until the nineties when a trio of singles entered the top 40.

These were tracks from their 1994 album Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins which has it's 25th anniversary this year and has subsequently been re-released on CD and coloured vinyl. Not having heard this album before I chose the CD version and was pleasantly surprised at the music which is a mix of their original sound and humour with more than a little influence from the Petshop Boys.

The song titles Frankly Scarlett, I Don't Give A Damn and I Thought I told You To Wait In The Car give a flavour of the material. Here's a track from the album which as they used to say is well worth a spin!





Official website: allsparks.com

Video Channel: SparksOfficialVideo

Fringe 2019: The Animal Welfare Party

Unlike other most of the other fringe parties the Animal Rights Party has no illusions of grandeur. It simply exists to promote a cause and I noticed they were standing in my local constituency (Chelsea & Fulham). If it wasn't for the need to keep Corbyn out I would have lent them my vote to at least help save their deposit and help highlight their cause.

In their own words:

The Animal Welfare Party’s vision is of a fairer, more equitable and sustainable society for all.

AWP’s Key Policies for the 2019 General Election

• Avert climate catastrophe, improve human health and save NHS funds by promoting healthy and sustainable plant-based diets
• Re-direct farming subsidies from animal agriculture and fisheries into plant-based agriculture
• Increase penalties for those convicted of animal abuse up to a maximum custodial sentence of 10 years
• End the badger cull and strengthen the fox hunting ban
• Strengthen companion animal welfare with an end to breed specific legislation, the sale of animals online and in retail stores and the exotic pet trade
• Phase out farming practices and systems with poor welfare consequences for animals
• Phase out animal experimentation with binding targets for reduction combined with proper funding & real support for alternatives
• Introduce independently monitored CCTV for all slaughterhouses
• End live animal export and all slaughter without prior stunning
• Oppose hard Brexit. Support a second or ‘people’s’ referendum on the final exit deal

AWP’s 2019 General Election Manifesto will be released shortly.

The Animal Welfare Party are standing six candidates:

• Professor Andrew Knight MANZCVS, DipECAWBM (AWSEL), DACAW, PhD, MRCVS, SFHEA is the AWP candidate for New Forest East in Hampshire
• Vanessa Hudson, AWP Party Leader is the candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow in London
• Jane Smith, AWP Deputy Leader is our candidate for Congleton in Cheshire
• Sam Morland is the AWP candidate for Chelsea and Fulham in London
• Angelika Cowell is the AWP candidate for Kingswood in Gloucestershire
• Fahima (Femy) Amin is the AWP candidate for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner in London

Further info from their website: www.animalwelfareparty.org

Fringe 2019: Socialist Equality Party

The Socialist Equality Party is one of the fragments of the old Workers Revolutionary Party whose origins and breakup was covered yesterday. (See post below)

The SEP (originally called the International Communist Party) consists of a group of individuals who sided with David North leader of the American section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) then called the Workers league who started questioning Healy's demands for money from their co-thinkers around the world.

The WRP had a large operation consisting of their own print shop which employed party members at lower rates than the printing unions would have tolerated. They published a daily newspaper had a fleet of lorries for delivery ran several bookshops plus a "College of Marxist Education" and supplied Healy with vehicles for his personal use.

The WRP was in trouble despite continually telling it's allies how well they were doing when in fact sales of The News Line were in sharp decline. Additionally North had the temerity to challenge Healy's dialectical materialist theories or gobbledygook as most all outside observers saw it. This along with the sex scandal prompted the Young Socialists around the Hyland family to break away.

North managed to get all but the Greek and Spanish sections of the ICFI (all of one member in the latters case) on side and eventually all the groups changed their names to the Socialist Equality Party issuing similar manifestos in their respective countries.

Highly sectarian and aggressive the SEP is also standing candidates in the General Election. Their set of demands include that urgent matter for all of us:

★ No to austerity, militarism and war!
★ Free Julian Assange!
★ For class struggle and socialist internationalism!

Corbyn will not mobilise the working class against this threat or the war danger, but instead seeks to convince the ruling class he can be trusted. Asked by the Guardian if he was prepared for the “3 am call” warning that Britain is under imminent threat, he replied, “Of course: absolutely. You have to take decisions at times like that.”

Build the Socialist Equality Party!

Britain’s pseudo-left groups have once again loyally rallied to the Labour Party, insisting like the Socialist Workers Party that a vote for Corbyn “could change everything.” But four years of Corbyn’s leadership have proved that the Labour Party cannot be reformed, let alone British capitalism, by the installation of a nominal “left” leader whose real loyalty is to the Labour and trade union bureaucracy and British imperialism.

Election campaigns will be run in Bradford, Sheffield, Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester and London. 

Socialist Equality Party: socialequality.org.uk

International Committee of the Fourth International: www.wsws.org

Fringe 2019: Workers Revolutionary Party

Not everyone on the far-left is happy to give the revisionist Jeremy Corbyn a free run in the General Election. Enter the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) a grand sounding name for what is just a tiny fragment of the old WRP that split asunder in 1985 after their founder/guru/leader was found to have have been sexually abusing or rather raping his female members. Young Socialists in particular were to his tastes.

Back in the seventies and early eighties the WRP was one of the four main far-left political parties outside the Labour and Communist Parties. It had originated out of the Revolutionary Communist Party (1944 version) which contained not just WRP founder Gerry Healy but also Ted Grant who went on to found Militant and Tony Cliff who formed the Socialist Workers Party. It was the only tie that most British Trotskyists were in one organisation.

Healy split and entered the Labour Party forming The Club and publishing Socialist Appeal which eventually transformed into The Newsletter in time for Hungary 1956 where it managed to attract many dissident members of the Communist Party not that it hung on to most for long due to it's hard line internal regime in which Healy could not be challenged.



Cutting a long story short Healy went on to found the Socialist Labour League and published the first Trotskyist daily newspaper Workers Press as it transformed itself into the Workers Revolutionary Party. Healy attracted Vanessa and Corin Redgrave giving the WRP influence amongst a certain layer of luvvies and helped the group manage to organise some quite large rallies.

The Workers Press was closed down and a new colour daily newspaper (before the mainstream press it has to be noted) The News Line was published with as we now know money from various dodgy supposedly "anti-Imperialist" Middle Eastern regimes like Libya and Iraq but with help from the luvvies toured around the Gulf States fund raising.

Heavily supportive of the "anti-Zionist" movement and worked towards promoting not just the PLO but eventually ended up a friend of the Ayatollah. When the Iran Iraq war broke out The News Line published a statement calling on them to stand down and face the Zionist common enemy.



The News Line's photographers were used to to take pictures of Iraqi and other Middle Eastern dissidents which ended up being traded to the various despots. At least one walked out of the WRP at the time.

When the rape scandal broke out the WRP split with the Redgrave's backing Healy and for a while there were two WRPs and two editions of the News Line every day which we all joked was just to "double their circulation". However Healy eventually formed The Marxist Party which pandered to Gorbachev and the other WRP founded a weekly paper Workers Press but the group disintegrated as they all fell out.

Amongst the organisations that came out of the WRP were Socialist Fight led by Gerry Downing him of the car crash interview when interviewed by Andrew Neil on the BBC after he was kicked out the Labour Party and the Socialist Equality Party who followed David North of the American Workers League who managed to capture the majority of the WRP's tiny version of the Fourth International.

Then there was the small group around Sheila Torrance who continued with the WRP name and News Line franchise. It's not known how many members they have or how they manage to continue a daily paper! Yet they do and the WRP are running candidates in the General Election.

So far they have declared candidates in Bradford, Southall, Peckham and Kensington. A long way down from their 1979 heyday of 60 candidates which gave the country it's first Trotskyist party political broadcast.

Their votes will be derisory but I might pick up a copy of The News Line if I manage to bump into a paper seller. For old times sake. It was once an "essential read" for Trot spotters and inveterate sectarians.

You can find the WRP here: wrp.org.uk