In additional news, old dogs everywhere continue to trot out the same old tricks, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, and the Tories remain the same bunch of gloriously shameless bastards we always knew.

Of course, New Labour’s… “sensitivity” towards anything involving corporate funding at the moment probably means the government won’t be able to make the arguments this news is begging for. Thankfully, the arguments virtually make themselves.

Our modern, compassionate, liberal, progressive, green Conservative Party has a housing spokesman funded by developers, brokers and estate agents; a business spokesman funded by big oil; and a health spokesman funded by medical equipment suppliers. Our loyal opposition will be offering solutions to the crisis of affordable housing and rising fuel poverty and petrol prices any day now, no doubt.

Har de har har de frickin’ har.

As the spokesman for this scheming bunch of hypocrites makes clear, however, “It is utter nonsense to suggest that private companies can influence Tory party policy.” I agree completely. After all, Tory policy (where it exists at all) already represents the financial interests of these companies so completely that further submission would be impossible, however much they pay.

In fact, sod the arguments, I just want to sit here quietly for a while, revelling in the view one is offered from this superb moral highground.

I’ve been thinking, with all the good work of the Left on the subject of abortion, maybe we’re tackling the wrong issues. Let me just slip my tongue into my cheek and off we go…

Perhaps we should instead follow China’s “one child rule” - but our excuse shouldn’t be overpopulation. No. Instead, we should institute a “one child rule” for all the illiberal or religiously bigoted scumbags who are against abortion. We should institute compulsory sterilisation on all public representatives who propose shortening the length of time wherein a woman may have an abortion.

Absolutely anyone who calls himself or herself liberal or a socialist and still votes to shorten the abortion time limit, or votes to restrict access to abortion, should be taken out and given a blindfold and a nice cigarette to smoke, with a brick wall to lean against in the sunshine. No less than nine Labour MPs voted against the second reading of the HFE Bill, one of whom was a member of the Socialist Campaign Group. Six Liberal MPs voted against the Bill also. Why would the left even bother associating with such people?

One would think, after the defeat of the Thatcher years, when abortion was narrowed frim 28 to 24 weeks of a pregnancy, we’d be all geared up and ready to go. The following things should be on our agenda:

1. Repealing Thatcher’s amendment to the 1967 Abortion Act.

2. Extending the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland.

3. Getting rid of the “two doctors” clause in Abortion law.

4. Making refusal to terminate a pregnancy on the part of a doctor an offence warranting summary disciplinary action.

Instead, we’re mired down in trying to combat the fruitcake right wing. Apparently Abortion Rights have even been trying to prevent left wing MPs proposing pro-choice amendments.

An excellent post detailing all the proposed amendments to the HFE Bill, limiting abortion to certain lengths of time and amendments which demanded the imposition of certain insidious types of counselling upon women who are thinking about abortion can be found at Liberal Conspiracy. Meanwhile, the half-illiterate thoughts of one Newark upon Trent CLP member, who is one hundred percent against abortion, can be found here, where myself and top chick Stroppybird have registered our thoughts.

The arguments advanced by this chap, and they bear that name by courtesy rather than actuality, are unbelievable. Apparently since only 1 in 5 foetuses aborted between 20 and 24 weeks are likely to be born disabled, that somehow makes it alright to lower the abortion limit. Well, I hate to ask this, are disabled foetuses somehow worth less than normal ones? I don’t think so - but I think that any decision to abort should rest with the mother, whose body it is. I think that abortion should be legal up until the point where there are going to be zero back street abortions.

All the sentimental moralising about how mothers can feel their baby kick at 16-18 weeks is a preposterous attempt at emotional blackmail and the peddler of this stuff on that website can go to hell, taking his ‘Catholic faith’ with him for all I care.

No doubt most active bloggers will be aware of the nonsense surrounding Conservative MP Nadine Dorries and her recent fallacious presentation to the Science and Technology Select Committee, amply backed up by the mendacious comments upon her blog, which I refuse to link to. In justification of a lower abortion time limit she showed a picture of a foetus well below 24 weeks old gripping the finger of a surgeon who was operating upon it. The picture, it turns out, was a fraud and the baby was, at the time, under anaesthetic as the surgeon readily admitted.

When challenged upon this, Dorries, among other things, got rid of the comments section of the relevant blog articles, claimed that the surgeon had been ‘got to’ by pro-abortionists and basically claimed she was being persecuted. It reads like a bad joke at times, it really does. Yet remarkably Dorries has not stood alone on the abortion time limits issue: Labour MPs such as Claire Curtis-Thomas have been right there beside her. The madness has not been restricted to such Cornerstone Group (of Faith, Flag and Fascism) worthies as Edward Leigh and Ann Winterton.

A lot of this has gone largely unremarked upon in the mainstream media (i.e. outside of political programmes) beyond cursory comments on successive protests outside Westminster by scientists, by pro-lifers and so on. Radio 4 has picked up on some of the debates in Parliament, but as it isn’t a partisan issue and as there is a free vote on some of the elements to the HFE Bill, there’s not a lot of political mileage to be made out of it. As a result, abortion continues to be one of the least talked about issues facing our society.

When the alternative is the American model of pro-life / pro-choice, I’m not entirely sure that’s a bad thing of course.

The silence of the mainstream media opens a new danger however; the casual prejudice of the Tories with regard to ‘father figures‘ goes mostly unchallenged. MPs escape with peddling falsehoods. Religion continues to be treated as a valid way of exempting oneself from having to advance a rational argument without excessive emoting, such as Dorries’ picture, mentioned earlier.

And this is the 21st century approach to women’s rights?

I was worrying, for a while, that my internal anger was dying down a bit. Then I read this piece over on Comment is Facinorous. David Cox, occasional author for Prospect and the New Statesman, argues that actually being a bit of a toff isn’t that big a deal. In fact, he says, when they get elected they can bring some advantages to the tasks at hand. All this is of course set amongst the debacle of the attacks on Boris Johnson, the attacks on Cameron’s Etonite front bench and the attacks on the Tory candidate in Crewe.

How I wish, sometimes, that a long string of expletives or an iron bar to the head would serve as an effective retort to such utter piffle as this. As we know it won’t, I suppose I shall have to pick apart Cox’s point piece by piece. Starting with the following quote: “Toffs tend to be less desperate for the fruits of power, as they have other entertainments available. They consider gross public improbity a bit demeaning, preferring instead sexual misdemeanours which entertain rather than affront us.”

Everyone is familiar with the cash for peerages scandals, both belonging to Tony Blair and to other Prime Ministers. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that simply because the most famous transgressors were Liberal and Labour PMs, that Toffs haven’t played a role. Tony Blair, was a privately educated Oxonian, as was Harold Wilson. Narrowing the focus merely to cash for peerages however ignores the research which suggests how Conservative MPs, from the post-war period, made fortunes peddling influence.

Toffs respect public probity? Pull the other one, it has bells on.

Who are we classing as Toffs? Did they have to go to Eton, Winchester, St. Paul’s or Harrow? Let us not forget former Harrovian and Bullingdon clubber John Profumo, who, far from amusing the public with his sexual shennanigans, blatantly lied to the House of Commons. Let’s not ignore that Sir Tom Cowie stopped funding the Tory Party on the basis of cronyism on the front benches, something helped, no doubt, by Cameron’s imposition of an A-list for candidacy selections which included more of the same.

If we turn to expenses, the party gets all the more interesting. Michael Howard has an impressive list of padded expenses including mortgages, utility bills, council tax, phone bills, cleaning, food and provisions and household repairs. Conservative nepotist Derek Conway may have been educated at a bog-standard comprehensive, and of the hitherto disclosed MPs who employ their own family a majority may be Labour - but there are many more ways than these most obvious ones to skin a cat.

We need only look at the revolving door between public and private sector to see where all the former private and Oxbridge educated ministers of Margaret Thatcher’s government have sodded off to, in order to feather their nests.

Corruption doesn’t respect class barriers, that much is fairly obvious. It is ludicrous of people like Cox to maintain, as has been argued since wages were first introduced to the Commons, that the wealthy, well-bred should be parliamentarians because they can resist the occasional pressure to partake of cake having and cake eating. Those bred into power and wealth are just as susceptible as the rest.

More importantly, even were they not so susceptible, such people come with their own set of vices which, contra this chap Cox, are not so forgivable as the occasional sexual indiscretion. Enoch Powell, educated King Edwards’ School, was a racist. How many on the Tory ‘Etonian’ bench have shown themselves to be anti-feminist, prejudiced towards the ‘traditional’ family and more than willing to look out for the corporate sector over and above normal working people?

Don’t even start me on the religious bigotry of the Conservative Cornerstone Group, all the prominent members of which were educated privately; Julian Brazier, Edward Leigh, the Winterton pair and that malodorous scarecrow John Redmond. I think attacking Boris Johnson as a Toff was a mistake; whether the SDLP “Stop the DUP” campaign, or the Tory “Evil Blair Eyes” campaign, negative attacks usually are, unless they are based on substantial issues.

For god’s sake however, don’t swing the other way and think that all the privately educated nobs are fine and dandy. They aren’t. Many of them do have some remarkably objectionable qualities. If I was to pick out one of Boris’ qualities which he shares with so many privately educated tossers, it would be his seeming disengagement with the subject of any question being asked. Hiding behind the mask of the posh oaf. It’s dishonest and disrespectful to people who go to see and talk to him about real issues.

I dislike the concept of private schools, and of the people whom I have met who were privately educated, a greater percentage of them tend to irritate me than those who are just common oiks like myself. Yet we should not be handing the Etonians the victim hat to wear; no doubt honest, hard working people in Crewe find Labourites cavorting round mocking the Tory candidate to be petty. You know why? Because it sodding well is petty.

Toffish upbringing is not limited to the Tories and neither is corruption, idiocy and mediocrity limited to Toffs. Pretending that either of these things is the case, when most people feel our own leadership has its head just as much up its own arrogant arse, is a stupid tactic which we’ll pay for at the polls.

Blogger Mick Fealty has posted up an article over at Comment is Fatuous detailing how there is ‘No Road Back‘ for Northern Ireland, whatever certain extremist Republicans might wish. He makes some very good points about the situation as it existed in 1969.

“In 1969 there was no shortage of grievances. The diminution of heavy industry, with its threat to Protestant working class jobs for life, and the rise of an educated but thwarted Catholic aspirant middle class, was tinder for a civil conflagration. Add to that the generally poor economic conditions in the independent republic, and it became relatively easy to sustain the old Maoist concept of a people’s war.”

Back when I was a member of the Socialist Party, the General Secretary of the northern region, Peter Hadden, was often promoting a book called ‘Beyond the Troubles.’ The general thesis of the book was that the intensity of the national struggle could vary dramatically but that it would never go away so long as capitalist property relations were maintained.

Northern Ireland was once a perfect model of Marx’ law of uneven capitalist development. The Protestant east of the country received more investment, had more jobs and was generally more affluent than the Catholic periphery of the province. In the Protestant sectors, discrimination against Catholic workers finished the job. With jobs scarce, economic development uneven and wages depressed, competition would divide the labour movement into its Catholic and Protestant halves.

Hadden’s argument was that, with unemployment running so high and investment arriving only on the basis of depressed wages, the economic underpinning to the struggle had not gone away. Yet Hadden was writing in a period when unemployment was officially about 13% - it has now dropped to 4.2%. Despite ‘adult economic inactivity’ of 28%, the decommissioning of IRA weapons has not seen an accelerating growth of other Republican militant groups.

The book declares, “You can’t talk of peace and at the same time create the conditions for instability and violence. This is the economic reality which makes the national conflict irresolvable on a national basis.” Yet this economic reality has not materialised and the apocalyptic language of Hadden’s book fails, as many Marxists have, to take into account just how extensively capitalism can revolutionize itself.

In place of this, Northern Ireland has received in excess of £2 billion in private investment over the last few years, including the completion of the famous Victoria Centre in Belfast. Of course all this is underpinned by British subventions of approximately £5 billion per annum, accounting for twenty percent of NI economic output. Public sector employment stands at 63% of the economy, compared to 43% in the UK generally.

For as long as this situation continues, Northern Ireland can tick along with its devolved government. Only rising unemployment and economic pressure could drive Catholics back towards extreme Republican politics, unless a developed proletarian movement existed which could straddle the religious divide. Currently no such movement exists except in times of crisis, as when postal worker Daniel McColgan was shot by loyalists.

There is no sign of that economic pressure, and so no sign of the resurgence of the struggle. Until now. ‘Dissident Republicans’ are upping the pressure by carrying out hit jobs against Catholic officers in the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

As Fealty recognises in his article, it’s unlikely that these dissident attacks will disturb the political status-quo in respect of the main Parties. However forces appear to be moving beneath the surface, at grassroots level. The Sinn Fein councillors in the region were less unequivocal in their condemnation of the policeman’s murder. IRA army council members resigned as a result of the IRA/Sinn Fein engagement with the PSNI. An ill-wind is blowing for moderate Republicans perhaps.

On the other side, a party to the right of the DUP has emerged to challenge the Unionist consensus about going into government.

The national question is no closer to being resolved, but the latent pressures are still there. Several questions are still unanswered however; as I don’t have the relevant economic data to hand, we cannot look at how the recent worldwide economic downturn might be affecting things. Secondly, commenting on how dissident Republicans might be grounded in society, particularly among the youth, is idle speculation.

Are they young or dinosaurs, veterans of the earlier conflict who haven’t given up on ‘the struggle’? I’m inclined to believe they are the former.

So, Fealty and Hadden each go to two different, opposing, extremes and I think both of them are found wanting in some respects. Fealty recognises that Catholics still make up a higher proportion of the unemployed and less well-paid than Protestants: the rift between Protestants and Catholics still exists. Yet perhaps there is some hope that, if the capitalist investment and employment levels persist, the young will find hope not in a sectarian struggle, but in the class struggle, when things go bad.

So Caroline Flint, a woman whose contribution to our culture of bullying was in danger of becoming official policy before the government regained its sanity, has been caught out telling the truth in cabinet, and the Conservatives are lambasting her for it.

As someone who has yet to enjoy servitude to a mortgage which our cult of home ownership seems to bring, I am not one of those who is be panicking at the news that house prices may drop 5-10% this year. However, it is impossible to live in our green and pleasant land without understanding that we are engaged in a national game of snakes and property-ladders. So I sympathise with those living under the threat of negative equity or repossession, or whose dreams have been cut to the quick.

However, while this may sound insensitive, on behalf of everyone in this country who doesn’t own a house (or more accurately, whose bank doesn’t own their house) and who is keen on the notion of not living in a tent, I feel a responsibility to assert that, maybe, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for house prices to start falling to levels even remotely associated with our ability to meet them without selling our souls (and our futures) to the devil’s minions. I certainly don’t want a crash, but we can’t delude ourselves that the present situation is a good idea either.

It sounds insensitive. People have savings, even their hopes, tied up in the idea that just around the corner they can profit from unearned increases in the value of their homes. But it shouldn’t be this way. The concept of a “property-owning democracy” which has governed so much of our politics since the 1980s is profoundly unjust, not to mention, strictly speaking, impossible to realise. Not everyone can own their own house. Moreover, policies which emphasise private ownership to the detriment of alternative options, and which exacerbate the unaffordability of a basic human need, are flat out wrong.

This isn’t an attempt to fight old battles. Many council tenants wanted a “right to buy” and they won it. The Labour Party was identified with the other camp and suffered for it, so I understand why it is extremely cautious nowadays about being seen to prioritise the building of affordable, socially owned and rented accommodation over the simple task of keeping house prices sky high - even if the reliance of so many low-income people on the successful provision of that housing should be a natural priority for Labour.

But that is not the issue here. The decades-long policy discrimination in favour of homeowners and developers has not only made it politically impossible for Labour to restore the rights of local councils to build more and invest in their housing stocks, let alone allow the Government to embark on the massive building programme that is truly needed: it has now come to a point, fuelled by economic policies which have left us indebted and vulnerable to catchings the colds which capitalists are liable to sneeze, where the private housing market is destroying itself.

A situation where fewer and fewer people are able to afford housing, bought or rented, even with the “help” of the predatory mortgage lenders, is not sustainable. It’s not fair, either. It is a bankers’ paradise (that could easily be cockney rhyming slang). The only thing holding it together is the unwillingness of the Labour Party to contradict the supposedly god-like power of “market forces”, and the feeling many people have that to regulate homeownership or to build more, strictly ‘affordable’ housing, would threaten the delicately balanced house of cards which is our distorted housing “market”.

Much like the May elections convinced the Prime Minister to consider ditching some of the mild, if obviously unpopular, environmental policies our Party has introduced, I imagine that the threatened recession, rather than underlining the inherent flaws in our policy, will force the Labour leadership to try to prop up the status quo and thereby undermine the possibilities of reform and a democratic socialist defence of the right to housing. Nevertheless, like action on the environment, a change to the way we provide housing is necessary - the longer we deny that, the more people will suffer.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act has been given its second reading. I must confess to developing a real dislike for ‘Yesterday in Parliament,’ which is part of the Today programme on Radio 4. It doesn’t really seem to get to the meat of the debates being held in the House of Commons. Reading over Hansard on the debates, I was caught by the disagreement in the Conservative ranks.

Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con): … However, does he also accept that the scientific breakthroughs, to which he has alluded in his speech, have to date come only from existing adult stem cell research, not embryo research or stem cells extracted from embryos?

Mr. Ian Taylor: That is not true.

Mark Pritchard: It is entirely true. Why will the Government not accept that that is the fact? Notwithstanding that comment by my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton, the fact is that Professor Wilmut has moved his research and funding to stem cell research, not embryo research.

Hon. Members: Give way!

This is of interest because Ian Taylor was the Minister who authorised funding for the cloning of Dolly the Sheep, and an ally of Ken Clarke who is widely credited with the H.F.E. Act 1990. Bearing in mind that Clarke reduced the abortion timetable from 27 to 24 weeks, I’m not going to credit him with much, but his ilk are at least willing to give proper science a go. Mark Pritchard on the other hand is the idiot moving an amendment to reduce the Abortion limit from 24 to 16 weeks.

Anyway, rather than show this, the division in the Conservative Party between the moralists and the semi-normal people, what sort of thing did Yesterday in Parliament field? We had Labour MP Jim Devine asking weighty questions such as “Will he [Alan Johnson] place on record the fact that the Bill is not about creating Frankenstein-type monsters?”

Also unmentioned was the contradictory approach of the Conservatives towards gay rights. The Conservatives made wording of the bill an issue in respect to same-sex couples; I was pleased to see that Evan Harris was performing as his usual, reliable self in respect to matters of science and technology. The role of Iain Duncan-Smith and his henchman was less admirable.

Mr. Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con): I wish to clarify that, as it is the aspect that I am interested in. The new wording has been introduced in the Bill, yet I am aware of no gay couple who have been refused treatment. They are protected under the Human Rights Act and they cannot be refused treatment. The original provision was a guidance measure, as a signal, mainly to heterosexual couples, that the absence of fathers has an extremely detrimental effect on families. Why, oh why, are we driving the change through now?
12 May 2008 : Column 1071
Alan Johnson: The original legislation was put in place before the House agreed on civil partnerships, and before the House agreed to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. The right hon. Gentleman says that gay couples can go through the process. That is the case, and it is the case for lesbian couples. However, those people are treated completely differently. That is the point. We are seeking to make sure that the treatment is the same for gay and lesbian couples as for heterosexual couples.

Mr. Andrew Lansley (South Cambridgeshire) (Con): I am unclear about the basis for the Secretary of State’s assertion that same-sex couples or, for that matter, single mothers are being denied access to treatment by regulated clinics as a result of the application of the “need for a father” test. What is his evidence for that proposition?

Alan Johnson: If we are considering a Bill— [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman asked for evidence. We are considering a Bill 18 years on, after we have introduced civil partnerships and legislation against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Leaving in the Bill a provision that is challengeable, and could lead to couples feeling that the law has discriminated against them, would be a missed opportunity. The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) and others make the argument, but as there is currently no issue, and the need for a father has never adversely affected any gay or lesbian couple going through the process, why not make the law consistent with the other laws that Parliament has carried, while we have the opportunity of updating the legislation?

Dr. Evan Harris (Oxford, West and Abingdon) (LD): In answer to the question asked by the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) about the evidence of discrimination, he need look no further than the eligibility criteria for treatment in the NHS, which refer to a male and female couple, and the evidence given to the Select Committee that was chaired by the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) by Pink Parents, who clearly stated that clinics expect them to bring a man along just for show, so that they can tick the relevant box.

The Republicans in the US, the less insane ones, have this problem as well. They want to claim that they are in favour of gay rights, or not opposed to it, but every time equality legislation comes up, they make an issue out of it. As Evan Harris makes clear, there are prime reasons to insert clauses protecting the rights of same-sex couples but what is at issue is the motive behind the interventions of the Tory MPs on this occasion. It’s the civilised chauvinism of the nuclear family raising its ugly head.

Lansley makes utterly evident such chauvinism later in the debate as well, and though I could quote him at length, for this sort of garbage really is that readable, I will choose one last except on the matter. He declares,

“It is in the interests of every child to have a mother and a father, but if no father is present—as is, unhappily, the case for many children today—a male role model should be available. For that reason, I, personally, do not regard the substitution of “supportive parenting” for “father” as sufficient.”

Did Radio 4 demonstrate the witty retort of a Labour MP, such a rare event, to Lanley? No of course not. Emily Thornberry came back quite sharply.

Emily Thornberry: Does the hon. Gentleman envisage that the new family unit will somehow be assessed by a doctor when such people come and ask for artificial insemination? Will the doctor need to say, “Show me Uncle Jim; I want to sit down and talk to him to find out just how much of a commitment he is making to this family, and how long he is likely to be around.” Does he expect doctors to do that?

It’s also nice to see that the stifling centralism of the Conservatives has not disappeared; witness Mark Pritchard (yes, him again) implying that politicians should be more ready to exert their control over the avenues into which research money is poured, rather than leaving that to scientists:

Mark Pritchard: Given the scarce resources in the NHS, which both my hon. Friend and the Secretary of State have mentioned, would it not make more sense to put them into areas of research that we know have had results, rather than into alternative avenues of research that to date have produced no results whatever?

Mr. Lansley: My hon. Friend will know that it is the responsibility of the Medical Research Council to make judgments about the effectiveness of research proposals of that kind and to weigh them up together.

All of the issues which I have outlined are of social importance and in many respects, leaving out Ruth Kelly and her bunch of repressed malcontents, they demonstrate a clear difference between the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. They also go some way towards refreshing our image as not always to the right of the Liberals on social policy, which is important since people have the naive view that the Liberals will remain just the way they are on things like detention laws should they ever get into government.

Did Yesterday in Parliament show any of this? Did it hell.

Since the disastrous May elections, there have been a number of responses from the Left. Shiraz Socialist asked for reasons to be involved in the Labour Party, and to be honest I couldn’t think of many - those that did come to mind were invariably negative e.g. the alternative is worse, but nevertheless too accurate (it really is worse) for me to consider leaving. David Osler’s response to the slow desiccation of the Labour base which Blairism has led to highlights the chief obstacle facing socialists: where do we go from here? Dave commented on some of the responses already.

Various bourgeois commentators have built a career since the early Nineties mocking the socialist and anti-capitalist Left for having a lot more to say about the injustices of the neoliberal economic order than practical steps to rebuilding the class conscious labour movement we need to advocate freedom and equality. Combined with the old Tony Benn refrain about “too many socialist parties, not enough socialists” and we have a curious situation where a tiny minority of progressive opinion in Britain, the radical left, comes across as a tumultuous and shrill din of competing theories, none of which seem to result in any solid steps forward.

It’s easy to knock the sects, but very uncomradely. Against my worst instincts I tried to show solidarity with the various Trotskyist initiatives during the last elections, even if, as I imagine was the case in many homes, my attention was fully focused on the flawed ex-reformist figure of Ken Livingstone. But it is necessary to remember the disastrous organisational position the Left finds itself in. I’ll just focus on a couple of the bigger groupuscules.

The Socialist Workers Party seems to have completely ignored the failure of the Respect coalition and their own Left List faction in the aftermath of the split with Galloway, putting the blame for the Left’s performance onto Gordon Brown and the Government. Fair enough, I agree that New Labour has decimated the activism and enthusiasm of many voters, but that is not an excuse for the U-turns and sectarianism which the Respect debacle exhibited, noted on a daily basis in soap opera fashion on the Socialist Unity blog. If the Right are benefitting from the contradictions of the social democrats, then we must accept our part in the failure to win over working people to a socialist alternative to Brown, whether inside Labour or not.

The Socialist Party remains in the Purgatory of socialist strategy - unable to quit its Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, now that dropping the word ’socialism’ and reaching out to the Bob Crow and the RMT has proven not to be the sure-fire method of breaking into the mainstream they hoped after watching Galloway’s parliamentary success, and yet seemingly also unable to salvage anything from its current dead-in-the-water position.

The Labour Left, of which I count myself a part, despite having had our arguments about the ineffectiveness of a Blairism without Blair strategy proven time and again during our long decline in the opinion polls, is stuck in a quandary. The Tories are waltzing into office, unhurried and un-harassed by the tired ministers called on to defend the indefensible. More than the screw-ups over taxes or the “events dear boy, events” of lost data, the Government suffers from what it is not going. People feel the vulnerability of our “flexible”, “dynamic”, “open” economy every time they get a gas bill or buy their shopping, but Labour remains unable to give people an explanation of what needs to be done to counter these threats to our living standards. But what can the Left do? Opt for another, surely doomed John McDonnell leadership bid? It was useful the first time around - the LRC wing of Labour politics collected information on a significant network of activists, and gave people some hope in our Party’s future. A do-over would surely be less inspiring, less productive, less innovative.

As a result, I’ve been suffering the general malaise that I imagine most of the Left is feeling. Bankers, tax evaders and stockbrokers are “living it large” while even the Government’s modest targets on reducing child poverty have suffered from Labour’s unwillingness to be truly radical.

Amid all the wondering about whether the Labour Party actually wants to lose the next election, given the obvious lack of any instinct for self-preservation among the cabinet, let alone understanding of the desirability - the necessity - of rebuilding a solid Labour vote rather than spending the next two years failing to triangulate our way out of defeat, I read the discussion bulletin for the recent Alliance for Workers’ Liberty conference. I was surprised to find some interesting arguments among their proposed documents, including the following statement on the issue of workers’ representation:

6. The original Labour Representation Committee of 1900, the first form of the Labour Party, had union affiliations totalling only 353,070 members, less than 20% of the total trade union membership at the time of 1,908,000. Only bit by bit did the affiliated membership rise to 1.45 million in 1909. If the socialists, and the more politically-assertive unions, had waited until they had a majority, or near-majority, of the union movement, then the Labour Party would not have been founded at all in 1900. Likewise today: to wait for all the big unions to move would be to paralyse ourselves. We should fight for the socialists and the more politically-assertive unions to give a lead - and do so fully aware that, with recent industrial defeats, in the calculable future growth for a new working-class political venture is likely to be slower, not faster, than after 1900.

There is also a significant section (points 14 through 16) on the use that could be made of a revived Trades Council movement to the cause of socialism and working-class solidarity. It’s rather too long to quote here, but is particularly interesting given the vacillation and cowardice which marks the trade union bureaucracy’s relationship with the Labour Party leadership, and I recommend you take a look.

Like the socialist stereotype I mentioned earlier in this post, I’m really not arrogant enough to claim I have a solution to the crisis of socialist representation and organisation. I don’t. In some respects this is simply an attempt to excise the frustrations which have been brewing since the Government utterly failed to learn the lessons after 1st May which it needed to in order move on and rebuild the movement. But the AWL seems to be a lot more focused on forward-thinking than most - I am not a member, nor consider myself a supporter of their group, but a fraternal appreciation that socialists are trying to think through the problems we face is not dependent on outright political support.

Given our failure in Britain to build even the kind of Broad Left parties which exist in many other European countries, I was intrigued by the AWL’s comparisons with the old LRC. Obviously no one (in their right mind) is looking for a simple return to Labourism and all its faults, but as someone who has consistently dismissed left of Labour experiments for their failure to attract formal trade-union support, and been unwilling to consider a break with Labour until the “union link” has been cut, finalising the permanent transformation of the Party, it was provocative to say the least to consider that an unwillingness to move before “big unions” do is actually holding back what may be the inevitable step forward for the workers’ movement. Is it logical to lambast the unions as conservative and bureaucratic, and then expect them to lead the way to a socialist future? Should the Labour Representation Committee, as I believe the AWL proposed at its last conference, be actively considering a break with the Party?

The question is, where they remain members of the Labour Party, are socialists contributing more to the problem than the solution?

A guest-post over at Harry’s Place by ‘Ben’ advertises what it means to be a ‘Decent.’ Seemingly this is shorthand for someone who supports the war, is opposed to anyone further left than Jon Cruddas and genuinely thinks that the Parliamentary Labour Party should be staffed by people like Oona King.

With these blanket labels flying around, it is difficult to know the extent to which any given author is perpetrating a deliberate slander, or to which they’re simply caught up in their own misguided rhetoric. I’m not sure which is the case when guest-poster Ben makes the following declaration about why he turned from Stopper to idiot:

“Because so many of them opposed the democratic self-determination of the Iraqi and Afghan people, the former of whom I had seen with their purple fingers. The flowering of trades unions. The sheer belief that a better world existed outwith the Stalinist miasma. And it became sickening for me to think of the very fact that I had given my personhood to a vile and reactionary counter-revolutionary demonstration in central London, which I would forever be tarred with. The utter scum who would forever call my name in favour of the defence of the latest popular anti-western dictatorship.”

It would be easier to think that Ben is just a bit unsophisticated, that, like so many impressionable young people he was caught up in the populist tone of the anti-war movement and was later disillusioned by its failure. There’s no zealot quite like a convert, as they say. Nevertheless, I think that’s too light on him.

No one, particularly not the anti-Stop the War crew, can legitimately be under the impression that all the Stoppers were part of a giant Islamist movement to perpetuate the second-class treatment of women and minorities, also aimed at crushing freedom of dissent. This is what Ben contends. In his own words:

“And so it was very easy to attack those on the left for the idiocies they promoted. Because they were utterly wrong. Their disgusting communalism. Their horrific defence of the most reactionary elements of Islamist thought. Their pathetic peacnick [sic] hippy shit. Their attacks upon our demonstrably relevant nuclear deterrent. Their opposition – with no hyperbole – to our very way of life, and to the way of life we wanted others to be able to enjoy.”

I’m a Stopper, but I’m not caught up with the SWP and their dalliances with Hizb-ut-Tahrir and the other insane Islamists. When I marged in 2003 and again in 2007, I was not singing “From the River to the Sea” - the first time, I was leading chants for the Socialist Party about defeating imperialism. The second I was trying to get off the march into a quiet corner of Hyde Park because the Islamic ethno-religious sectarianism bothered me.

None of that reduces my opposition to an insane war which managed to do the unthinkable: establish an armed Al-Quaeda insurgency in Iraq. My abhorrence for Islamism has no effect on my abhorrence for the crass politics of invasion - which, for all that Ben might protest, originally cracked down on trade unions.

We should remember that the trade unionists who go missing in Iraq from day to day are kidnapped by the very same militias which we needed to put the country into some sort of order in the aftermath of the invasion. The Iraqi people are reaping what we sowed. I hated Saddam Hussein and the Iranians in equal measure, but this does not escape that the invasion has caused more problems than it solved - as was always going to be the case.

As many posts on this blog have addressed, there is a populist crowd which jumps from dictatorial opponent of the USA to dictatorial opponent. Characterising the many millions of people who marched against the war like that is not simple-mindedness, it’s intellectual dishonesty. That’s simply the inverse of each Trotskyist sect claiming the march was an explicit endorsement of itself alone.

How much of Iraq still doesn’t have regular access to water and electricity? With Turkey killing Kurds and Iran backing the Sadrists, with the Iraqi Army shown to be utterly ineffective, how long til we realise that the invasion was always going to snap the centripetal forces which held the country together, not in the interests of self-determination, but in the interests of local and not-so-local imperial interest?

Though I do not agree with the AWL on the matter, it might interest this person to know that the AWL do not support the slogan “Troops Out Now” because they believe that the troops are providing a window for the trade unions to grow up a little. As I said, I think that stems from a fundamental misinterpretation of the political machinations of the USA - but perhaps ‘Ben’ should consider that other Stoppers have different views from his narrow-minded caricatures.

They key to understanding the post at Harry’s Place is the unadulterated vitriol; phrases like ‘Stalinist miasma’ are not intended to be words of engagement, they are intended to shock and obfuscate the real issues at stake. Simply put, RESPECT doesn’t offer the socialist alternative that it would like to believe - but that does not at all impact the wider arguments against the war, for which no refutations have been offered.

I was and am proud to be a Stopper, and of the indecent sort who want the overthrow of capitalism coupled to the most democratic and representative system devised by human-kind. I am of the indecent sort who rejects the clichéd privilege which Ben represents and one of those against whom the supposed ‘decent’ intellectuals have always railed. I will remain so until someone convinces me otherwise - which Ben has categorically failed to do.

If we invade Iran, having not yet managed to finish up in either Iraq or Afghanistan, I wonder what such people will say then.

Readers will remember that some months ago I detailed some of the events happening within NUS. I celebrated the narrow defeat of some governance plans that would have effectively destroyed NUS democracy for the foreseeable future - i.e. without another May 1968 Movement. Anyone involved always knew there would be follow ups - but these have taken a surprising shape, it turns out.

At Sheffield University, one Gemma Short is to be dragged in front of a Union Council disciplinary body to determine if she will be allowed to stand for future Union offices. The charge laid against her is that she broke the mandate imposed upon her by Union Council, even though her campaign to be an NUS Delegate ran in explicit opposition to the governance reforms proposed by the NUS heirarchy.

Gemma herself wrote an impassioned letter to the student newspaper at Sheffield University which was unfortunately not published. Some excerpts are worth quoting:

“Over one hundred students voted to elect me as an NUS Conference delegate on the basis of a platform that included explicit opposition to the new constitution and a commitment to vote against it. I consider this a much more meaningful mandate than the one imposed on me by an unrepresentative Union Council, some of whose members were elected with less than five votes.

Various officers have accused those of us who broke the “mandate” of holding Council in contempt. If this is the case, the officers and indeed Council itself is guilty of the far greater crime of holding in contempt the entire Union membership – who thought they were being given the chance to vote for NUS Conference delegates who would keep the promises they made in the platforms on which they stood for election.”

Sheffield Union Council apparently have form in this regard, having ignored referendums when it suits them, such as when the Union voted on a boycott of Nestlé products. At Oxford University, Dominic Williams, from St. Catherine’s College, faced the wrath of the Students’ Union over breaking his mandate on Darfur and a few other issues, though OUSU apparently do not have policy on the NUS governance review.

I find all of this backlash interesting, as the petulance of student politics plays itself out in the labyrinthine alliances and friendships built between would-be politicians up and down the country. Still, when you’re campaigning against anti-democratic reform, when you’re campaigning so that students can still directly elect NUS delegates, it’s nice to know there are Union bureaucracies who will unwittingly make your argument for you.

It’s not easy to convey to people exactly what it’s like to grow up in Catholic education. Despite the advantage of having directly experienced it, others can no doubt be found to argue against my contention that Catholic education is basically thought control.

My problem with such people is that all too often, they have not experienced what I have not simply because the ethos of their school was different but because they didn’t go head to head with the school authorities in the way that I did while I was at school.

I feel satisfied when general and broad ranging examples of this thought control emerge into the public view. Readers may remember the furore last year about Amnesty International backing abortion in certain circumstances: Bishops resigned from it and so forth. Here is a story that emerged from that period, one I missed.

Basically the story outlines how Catholic schools in Northern Ireland, many of whom had Amnesty International clubs, are now acting to shut those clubs down. Lo and behold, the Amnesty International club of my own school has disappeared from the school website - shut down no doubt.

Catholic schools like my own can get away with this because a teacher must be found to sponsor any given club. Teachers, contracting into Catholic education, are obliged to uphold the Catholic ethos of the school - thus the best socialists at my school could muster was being part of the debate club.

Shutting down the Amnesty International club is a travesty of justice. Not because all those letter writing campaigns might actually have done anything - with Amnesty shut down in schools, we’ll save a few trees. It’s a travesty because this was one of the few ways of getting people interested in global political issues.

Amnesty International ran a Northern Ireland schools’ debating tournament, involving many Catholic schools, which myself and my team went on to win two years running. We even invited the Northern Ireland coordinator to a debate on whether or not Amnesty International was a positive influence in the world - thirty students and teachers showed up, and the team I led achieved a resounding vote that Amnesty was pretty ineffectual.

The loss of such debating to a school like mine is a major blow.

Naturally in that same school, the pro-life group survives and is permitted to take an unlimited number of students to see emotive and disturbing images of aborted foetuses in order to scare women into never having an abortion.

If that’s not a form of mind control, I don’t know what is.