HP sauce

No by-election can be held these days without a flurry of independent candidates to liven up an often predictable race to the House of Commons. There’s the usual posse of self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” who believe that their forlorn efforts will somehow advance the cause of socialism. There’s the remnants of the racist and fascist movements that tried to kick their way to power back in the 1970s and a whole host of cranks seeking a platform for all sorts of bizarre opinions.  And finally there are those who capture the moment to rally dissident opinion that sometimes goes far beyond the usual protest vote. 
The legendary Screaming Lord Sutch first hit the headlines in the early 1960s. He continued until his sad death in 1999. Martin Bell – the “man in the white suit” actually took a seat from the Tories in 1997 on an anti-corruption ticket and sat in the House of Commons until 2001. And George Galloway, the maverick Labour MP, repeatedly bucked the system over the years to win seats against the mainstream parties. Now we have Count Binface.
Count Binface is the street persona of Jon Harvey, a stand-up comedian who has been a familiar face at by-elections since 2017. Binface upholds the rights of every citizen to stand in elections and gets a protest vote that many left groups would envy these days. This week he excelled himself winning 26.8 per cent of the vote in the Clacton by-election (9,455 votes) that was held by Nigel Farage who bagged 22,239 votes (63.34 per cent). Labour said this was “no victory for Nigel Farage” and “shows he likely has so much to hide”.
Though there was never any doubt about the outcome the result was a clear humiliation for the Faragists. The campaign revolved around the unanswered questions about the five million pounds donation given to the Reform UK leader and the antics of a man wearing tights with a bucket over his face who claims to be an “intergalactic space warrior” from the Planet Sigma IX.
Farage’s attempt to avoid Parliamentary scrutiny of his dodgy undeclared gifts and donations by triggering a by-election have turned into a farce and he knows it. The fact that over a quarter of those who voted chose the Count says it all.
The mainstream parties had boycotted the poll in protest. Binface, however, was joined by 33 other novelty candidates in the race. Many of them turned up for the count – unlike Farage who says he’d been advised not to by the police due to “a credible threat against him” – a claim the Essex police categorically deny.
The enquiry begins again now Farage is back in Parliament. If Farage is found to have breached MPs' rules, the Standards Commissioner could impose penalties that could lead to yet another by-election in Clacton. The Tories will now have to think deeply about their next move. Farage is a skilful manipulator. He will be difficult to beat, Though Clacton is part of the Conservative heartlands in Essex they may have to look for a high-profile maverick of their own to take on Nigel Farage.

Double whammy in Makerfield

Makerfield’s voters killed two birds with one stone this week giving the Faragists a drubbing and sending Andy Burnham back to the House of Commons. If Starmer goes before Parliament’s summer recess that will be an added bonus. 
Burnham’s by-election victory was not all that surprising. He was the odds-on favourite with the bookies on the eve of the poll that ended weeks of ferocious Labour campaigning on the streets of the constituency in what was essentially a two-horse race between the “King of the North” and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. But the stakes weren’t quite the same. For Farage victory would just be another feather in his cap. For Burnham victory opens the door to Number Ten.
Farage likes to pose as a country gent with the common touch. But he’s just a venal City businessman who’s been the political voice of those sections of the ruling class long-opposed to the European Union.  For many years he languished on the political fringe of British politics. He made common cause with the Tories with his heady mix of racism and anti-Euro federalism during the Brexit campaign. But being propelled to centre stage and leading a small, but high-profile far-right front is no substitute for Burnham’s years of political experience as a Blairite minister and then Mayor of Greater Manchester. 
Farage is a good communicator. But so is Burnham. Burnham is a hand-shaker and a back-slapper. He’s everyone’s friend and like Labour’s old leader, Harold Wilson, or the late Charles Kennedy of Liberal-Democrat fame he can get the vote out on the street. 
But that wasn’t always the case. Reform had high hopes for their man, a local plumber who was just three points behind Burnham when the campaign began a few weeks ago in the constituency in Greater Manchester. The Faragists played the race card clearly hoping that the Southampton riots and the sectarian violence in northern Ireland would trigger nation-wide unrest that could be exploited in their favour throughout the rest of the country. But the firm response of the anti-racist movements, together with that of the local communities as a whole,  made sure that was no repetition of the mob violence in Southampton despite the best efforts of the racists, the fascist gangs and the followers of Tommy Robinson to stir up anti-immigrant  hysteria. 
Burnham is back in Parliament and he says he’s ready to challenge Starmer for the leadership. Starmer’s followers are drifting towards the Burnham camp. Those of his rival, Wes Streeting, want to do a deal to keep their place in the new Burnham administration. Some Corbynistas even hope for reconciliation – though Burnham has ruled out any return for Jeremy Corbyn himself.
Burnham may not be “New Labour”.  But he’s definitely “Old Labour”. He says he’ll keep the triple-lock and return the water industry to some sort of public ownership. But that’s as far as it goes from a man who comes from the right social-democratic camp that has traditionally dominated the Labour Party from Ramsay MacDonald’s days...

It’s still the same old story…

...from the likes of Nigel Farage who’ve been stoking up the flames of racist violence in Southampton following the trial and conviction of the young Sikh responsible for the death of a teenager in a fight last December.
That's not to say there aren't serious questions to be answered about the way the Southampton police handled the incident, or indeed about their training and their general policy in dealing with violence of this nature. 
But there’s no doubt that the enraged mob on Southampton’s streets, headed by Tommy Robinson and urged on from afar by Nigel Farage and the American hi-tech tycoon Elon Musk, exploited genuine anger at the conduct of the local police at the incident that led to the death of  the student. These people, to be sure, are not fascists or Nazis in the conventional sense (though some fascists and neo-nazis were amongst the mob that attacked the police). But they are certainly racists, trying to incite a pogrom in Southampton. The ring-leaders deliberately ignore the fact that the fatal incident was not racially motivated (the killer's claim that he had been racially abused was rejected at his trial) not to mention the calls from the victim's family and those of the killer for calm.
None of them care about the victim. Nothing is said about root cause of the spike in violence on the street – the alienation of the youth and the decadence of capitalism in its final days.  No, as far as these people are concerned it’s all down to immigrants and asylum seekers. Kick them out and it’ll all be better – like the never-never land of the 1950s they talk about when there was full employment and everyone knew their place. Or so they say...
The NCP doesn’t support "open borders". We accept that all states, including the UK, have the right to control immigration and emigration in accordance with their resources and    economic needs.
But we are opposed to any controls based on ethnic or religious grounds. Asylum-seekers are different. The UK is bound by international agreements to receive those claiming asylum regardless of their countries of origin. Asylum seekers must be treated humanely and their claims dealt with swiftly. They should be allowed to work to help to pay their own way while their status is being reviewed (a right that was revoked by the Blair government) which is also a demand of the TUC. 
 The ruling class tries to confine the political arena to endless debates on law and order, immigration and the European Union. We have to break the bourgeois consensus that uses immigration to divert working people from the real issues that affect their lives. We must put socialism back on the working class agenda!

After the ball is over

 “Many the hopes that have vanished, after the ball” goes the old song – much like Keir Starmer’s pipe dreams about the Trump state visit this week. Two days have gone in a flash. Donald Trump’s been and gone. The Donald was treated to an unaccustomed right royal pageant at Windsor Castle which no doubt went down well with his MAGA constituency back home. Starmer however got nothing out of the visit – which was entirely predictable to everyone apart from the sycophants and flatterers that the Labour leader surrounds himself with these days.
They say Starmer and his clapped-out old Blairite advisers genuinely believed that the American president could be wooed by a red-carpet meeting with the King into cutting tariffs and making other trade concessions to the UK at any given time. Openly talking about Trump as if he was a gullible, vain old fool wasn’t such a good idea. Revealing your hand (and it was a very weak one) in advance to the mainstream media for all to see only compounded the folly. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. This, after all, the government that appointed Peter Mandelson ambassador to Washington in the first place... 

There may be trouble ahead

The public spat between Zarah Sultana and the other five MPs in the Independent Alliance doesn’t augur well for the new Corbynista party that still lacks a name. Though the rift is simply over who should manage the membership system and bank accounts of the new party it clearly reflects underlying differences between those who want a conventional left-social democratic party and Corbyn’s kitchen cabinet that seems to hanker after the sort of rally party like the old Gaullist movement in France or the mass movements of Ghana’s Nkrumah and Nasser in Egypt that were models for much of the Global South in the 1950s and 60s.
With support for Labour and the Conservatives crumbling Reform UK is waiting to pick up the pieces. The Faragists have deliberately stoked up the flames over asylum-seekers. They will have no qualms in using the racist rabble that we saw march through the streets of London last week to pave their way to power.
There’s clearly deep divisions within the corridors of power. Though the Tories have traditionally always been the chosen political instrument of the ruling class Brexit has gone badly wrong for them. Boris Johnson and Madame Truss burned their bridges with Franco-German imperialism and their pivot to American imperialism failed. Sunak and Starmer fared no better – unable to negotiate some sort of associate relationship with the European Union or deal successfully with the truculent Trump administration in the United States.
Though it has served them well in the past Labour will never replace the Tories as the governing party of the bourgeoisie as long as it retains its organic links with the trade union movement. But neither will Reform. Though many Tory activists have gone over to Farage members of the old guard are few and far between in the Reform camp. And as far as the ruling class is concerned Farage remains an outsider – even in the City of London where he made his money in the first place.
They’ve got to put one of their own back at the helm of the Conservative & Unionist party while at the same time maintaining the credibility of Labour to contain the Corbynistas in parliament and on the street. That cuts Starmer out as well. It’s a difficult equation. But
for us we simply have to defend the principled line of socialist advance throughout the labour and anti-war movement. So let’s face the music... 

Bad news on the doorstep…

Reform’s sweeping gains in this week’s regional elections were bad news for the Conservatives. Nigel Farage’s going round saying this is the beginning of the end for the Tories telling people “you’re witnessing the end of a party that’s been around since 1832, they are disappearing”. And while that may be a trifle optimistic there’s no doubt that the Faragist advance has plunged the Conservatives, and their lacklustre leader, into another crisis of confidence. But it wasn’t good for Labour either. Though the Tories were hammered in the local elections Reform also took one of Labour’s  safest seats in the country at the by-election in Runcorn & Helsby. Can any of us be surprised at this?
The Starmer government, led by the clapped-out old Blairites that run the Labour Party these days, differs little from the Conservatives they beat at the general election last year. The Starmer government’s decision to continue Tory austerity offers no real change to the millions of working people that once traditionally looked to Labour as the legitimate alternative to Tory rule. It’s no wonder that some of them are now turning to the Faragists who blame the asylum-seekers and immigrants for all our woes and whose only answer to the economic crisis that has plunged the country into the doldrums is to become an American protectorate and merge the British economy into that of the United States. 
Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, will doubtless come under fire from those who already covet her job. But the clamour for her departure is of no interest to working people who have no say in the matter one way or another.
For over a hundred years the Tory party has been the chosen political instrument of the ruling class. The capitalists, industrialists and land-owners who pull the strings, will not lightly change horses – least of all for Reform whose anti-European Union platform is anathema to the City of London.
Labour, on the other hand, was founded by the unions to give workers their own voice in Parliament. But the Parliamentary Party leadership has been dominated by the middle class intelligentsia since the days of Ramsay McDonald. Nevertheless the working class element within the party remained strong until the 1980s with figures like Nye Bevan and even Harold Wilson giving it credibility among the working class.
Though the Labour Party is dominated by the class‑collaborating right wing in the parliamentary party the possibility of their defeat exists as long as Labour retains its organisational links with the trade unions that fund it. The defeat of the right‑wing factions in most of the major unions in recent years demonstrates this possibility – though it has to be said that the bogus “broad left” factions that run the bureaucrats’ gravy train do very little for the rank and file these days.
In the unions we must struggle to elect genuine working-class leaderships who are prepared to represent and fight for the membership against the employers and against the right-wing within the movement. At the same time we must build the revolutionary party and campaign for revolutionary change. Social democracy remains social democracy whatever trend is dominant within it and, as we know, it has never led to socialism.
But for a start we must campaign for a democratic Labour Party controlled by its affiliates. A Labour Party whose policies reflected those of a democratic union movement would become a powerful instrument for progressive reforms that would strengthen organised labour and benefit the working class.

Freedom for Palestine – no to ethnic cleansing!

No one, apart from the Israelis, can take Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza seriously.The Zionists always denied that the true aim of the genocidal assault on Gaza has been the destruction of the Palestinian population, and denial of all of their rights including the right to self-determination. They lied. 
So did those lackeys of US imperialism in Britain and Europe that not only provided diplomatic cover for Israeli aggression but armed and funded the Zionist state in its drive to crush the Palestinian resistance.
Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party who now heads the Independent Alliance bloc in Parliament has, however, taken the principled stand  holding Israel and those who are still sending arms to the regime rrsponsible for genocide in Palestine.
"The death toll in Gaza has already been updated to 61,709," Corbyn said. "The true scale of Israel's atrocities is only just emerging - and officials must face justice for every single life lost. So should those who continued to send weapons, knowing full well they were enabling genocide”.
Trump’s proposal is. of course, nothing new. It echoes plans that have been discussed by Israeli officials for many decades. Kicking out the Palestinians to turn the Gaza Strip into a millionaires playground may seem a good idea to the likes of Trump and Netanyahu but it is only a recipe for yet another war – and this time round, going on what Trump is saying, it will be American troops confronting the Arabs.
The Americans came unstuck in Iraq and the Israelis lost the Gaza war. Trump’s threats will not succeed in what the Zionist guns failed to achieve. Trump will not achieve what Biden could not do. 
Despite their vast resources, US imperialism and its Zionist lackeys have not broken the will of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people, who faced Zionist terror armed with American weapons for 15 months, will not bow to the empty threats of Donald Trump.

New Labour woes

This week a Scottish Labour MP  warned that the next government may be a “hard-line far-right effort” if Labour does not deliver “improved living standards”. Brian Leishman, who represents Alloa & Grangemouth, criticised his own party's government for not providing financial compensation to the ‘Waspi’ women who campaign against the way in which the state pension ages for men and women were equalised at the expense of many women.
Leishman was one of 10 Labour MPs who supported a Bill introduced by the SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn that would require ministers to publish measures to address the findings of the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) report which recommended paying compensation to women born in the 1950s whose state pension age was raised so it would be equal with men.
Labour’s embrace of Tory austerity has led to further unpopularity on the street. And this week a new public opinion poll puts Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party ahead of Labour and the Conservatives. A YouGov survey puts Reform, at 25 per cent, narrowly ahead of Labour at 24 and the Tories on 21 per cent. The Liberal Democrats stand on 14 per cent, while the Greens are now at nine.
The Starmer government pleads poverty to justify means-testing the pensioners’ winter fuel benefit. It won’t pay compensation to the three million or so women born in the 1950s who were not properly informed about the state pension age increase. But it can find plenty to fuel the proxy war against Russia and pay for Trident and the rest of our so-called nuclear deterrent.  

The Russians are coming…

Or maybe not. It all depends on whether you believe the ‘Russia report’ by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (ISC), which was published this week. The ISC says that the 42-page “summary” is “supplemented with a substantial annex” that gives greater detail, which has been read by the chosen few but cannot be published at this time “in view of the current Russian threat”.

In the meantime, we have to make do with a flimsy dossier that covers purported Russian interference in the European Union referendum and other “malicious” cyber-activities by the Kremlin to influence opinion in the UK.

The parliamentary report predictably confirmed "hostile foreign interference" by Russia. It concluded that Downing Street “took its eye off the ball” and failed to respond to a range of threats from Moscow. It said it was “astonishing” that no-one in government had sought to protect the electoral processes from potential subversion – and concluded that the influence of Russian money in the UK is so pervasive that it amounts to a “new normal”.

The Remainers, now led in Parliament by the crowd surrounding Sir Keir Starmer on the Labour benches, have long tried to discredit the 2016 EU referendum result by claiming it was covertly influenced by Russian propaganda. But any hopes of a “smoking gun” were dashed by this report, which was strong on the sort of anti-Russian smears and innuendo that many believed had died with the end of the Cold War in 1990 but produced few facts to back its claims.

Although the report said the Government had “avoided” looking into potential Brexit vote meddling, it admitted that it was unable to determine whether Russia had attempted to influence the EU referendum in 2016. When asked for evidence, MI5 had provided the ISC with just “six lines of text”, the report stated. “We were told they hadn’t seen any evidence, but that is meaningless if they hadn’t looked for it,” said Stewart Hosie, a Scottish nationalist MP on the ISC who told the media that no-one in government wanted to touch the issue with a “10-foot pole”.

But all the parliamentary report could come up with was “open source” studies that pointed to “pro-Brexit or anti-EU stories on RT and Sputnik”. It also claimed “there has been credible open source commentary suggesting that Russia undertook influence campaigns in relation to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014”, but it provided little or no evidence of co-ordinated Russian propaganda media campaigns or that detected cyber intrusions were from proven Russian intelligence centres.

What all this boils down to is simply that Russia Today (RT), a commercial TV news channel, and Sputnik, the old “Voice of Russia”, report the news as they see it. The rest is half-baked conspiracy theory about activities that the intelligence services of the major powers all indulge in together with freelance hackers all over the world.

Members of the Left Leave campaign (Lexit) and Leave – Fight – Transform (LeFT) say that the idea that Russian interference swayed the electorate over the EU vote is nonsense and Nigel Farage, a prominent leader in the Brexit campaign, has demanded an apology.

Farage, the former UKIP leader, said: “Years of lies and smears from Remain politicians and much of our media. There is no evidence of Russian involvement with Leave.EU or me in the referendum. It was all a hoax – apologies are now required.”

The Government has wisely said it sees no need to look again at the Brexit referendum because it has no evidence that Russia affected its outcome in any way. A statement released by the Johnson government said: “A retrospective assessment of the EU referendum is not necessary.”

It actually has no need to look at anything else in this rubbishy report based on pointless speculation that has only served to further sour relations with the Russian Federation.

Farage marches on

Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party is clearly dominating the debate, such as it is, over the farcical European elections that take place later in the month. Despite a fig-leaf of support from veteran campaigner George Galloway and a handful of former Trotskyites who have made their name in the bourgeois media, Farage’s platform is essentially like the UKIP of old.

The Brexit Party will hoover up most of the anti-immigrant vote that once went to openly racist parties; and disaffected Tories will vote for the Farage slate in protest at Mrs May’s inability to deliver Brexit.

None of this will make the slightest bit of difference to what is going on in Parliament. Mrs May’s Government cannot deliver Brexit and this fractious Parliament cannot deliver anything these days.

The European Parliament has become a byword for undemocratic practices, corruption, nepotism, waste and fraud on a massive scale. The elections themselves are nothing more than a bogus public relations exercise for a body that possesses no meaningful executive powers at all. They don’t deserve the credibility of a vote at all.

The only way out of the impasse is another general election and this has to be the central demand of the labour movement in the weeks to come. In the meantime don’t bother to vote in the European elections. It’s a pointless exercise for a worthless institution.