What a difference a day makes…

...or not in the case of Sir Tony Blair whose comments on the current turmoil within the Labour Party were splashed all over the bourgeois press last week. Whatever he achieved in office –  Scottish and Welsh devolution, ending the conflict in northern Ireland and pushing through some minor social  reforms – was far eclipsed by his despicable role in supporting the American onslaught on Iraq which ended in invasion and the execution of the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein. The dreams of Anglo-American imperialism ended in the streets of Baghdad as the Iraqi resistance fought back to eventually free the country from imperialist occupation. Blair fell from grace soon after – leaving Downing Street to console himself with lucrative sinecures, non-jobs like his “peace-keeping” role in the Middle East, that were given to him by the Americans as a reward for his life-time of service to imperialism. 
To be fair Blair never pretends to be anything more than he is – a mouthpiece for what he thinks is the dominant trend within the ruling class. He has plenty to say but he’s got nothing to offer workers. Or as Jeremy Corbyn  put it “Tony Blair thinks the answer to this country’s problems is AI, welfare cuts and endless spending on war. Who benefits? Arms companies and tech billionaires. Once again, Blair is wrong. The answer is a redistribution of wealth and power and the relentless search for peace”.
Tony Blair, like Ramsay MacDonald and Sir Keir Starmer, divided and ultimately betrayed the Labour Party. But to paraphrase Orwell and say “all Labour leaders are rubbish, but some are more rubbisher than others” may be going too far.  Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan did have their moments – though this was largely due to the immense pressure at the time from the labour movement as a whole for social justice.
Tony Blair is a rich man who has also acquired a number of gongs along the way. These include the usual honours reserved for past Prime Ministers as well as the American Presidential Medal of Freedom and the more dubious Dan David Prize given by Tel Aviv University for Blair’s "exceptional leadership and steadfast determination in helping to engineer agreements and forge lasting solutions to areas in conflict".
None of this has, however, restored his political standing in Britain. The fame that Blair so longs for continues to elude him. His paean of praise for the sort of  American-style neo-con policies that have been embraced by both Democratic and Republican administrations in Washington throughout the 21st century may have been music for the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg in the Conservative party but it didn’t go down well with Keir Starmer or the two contenders for his job, Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham, and can only serve to remind them of how glad they were to see the back of him in 2007.  

Goodbye Mandelson

Peter Mandelson has at last left the Labour Party. Brought down by the Epstein dossier, his reputation in tatters, his departure follows his earlier resignation as British ambassador in Washington and his more recent departure from the House of Lords.This week’s finale was an inevitable but grudging acceptance by Tony Blair’s chief henchman that his political career is over. No one cares.
No one is going to miss this venal schemer who wore his corruption as a badge of honour throughout the Blairite days when he was known as the “Prince of Darkness” by friend and foe alike.
His enemies, and they are legion, rejoice at his downfall. His “friends”, like Starmer who relied on Mandelson and the other ageing Blairites to keep him in office, now disown him. Mandelson was an icon for the right-wing social democrats that hounded Corbyn, Livingstone and thousands of others out of the Labour Party.
Now Starmer claims he didn’t know the extent of Mandelson’s dealings with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted brothel keeper who supplied young girls to prominent politicians and businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic and died in unusual circumstances in a New York jail in 2019. 
Starmer thinks he can weather the storm if he can hold on to Gorton & Denton in the by-election this month. But he’s got the Faragists and the Greens snapping at his heels while the Tories clamour for a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons to bring down his floundering government. Starmer, of course, must go. And the sooner the better. But who will replace him?
Starmer’s cohorts, who dominate the Parliamentary Labour Party, is in a dilemna. They argue that the only alternative to a Labour government is one led by Nigel Farage – who is certainly no friend of the labour movement. They liken the Corbynistas and the Greens to the “lunatic fringe” and still believe in Blair’s “New Labour” mantras of “new world order” capitalism and crawling to American imperialism – even though capitalism doesn’t work except for the immensely rich and the Americans neither need nor want their “special relationship” these days.
Their chosen successor, Wes Streeting, was a protege of the digraced Mandelson. And none of  the others in Starmer’s faction are capable of holding the highest office in the land.
Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham wait in the wings to pick up the pieces when Starmer inevitably goes. But though they can campaign on the street – unlike the totally useless Starmer – their outlook differs little from the general right-wing Labour milieu they came from in the first place. They pay lip-service to the trade union bureaucrats who run the TUC and most of the unions in the country. But that’s as far as it goes – and as far as it will ever go as long as the careerists and time-servers remain in charge. That’s where the struggle for socialism must begin anew – and it must start now...

Trump has a plan…

.

..but whether it will bring peace is another matter altogether. It’s very difficult to take anything that Trump says seriously these days – let alone a 20-point plan to end the fighting in the Gaza Strip that specifically rules out any role for the resistance movement that has governed the beleaguered Palestinian enclave since 2007. 
You would have thought that any proposal that envisages a new international administration for the Palestinian enclave called the “Board of Peace”  led by Trump himself with Tony Blair as The Donald’s chief gofer would be laughed out of court.
Far from it. The oil princes of Arabia and the other craven Arab politicians long in America’s pay love it. It gives them another excuse to do nothing, Likewise the Western politicians in Britain and the European Union who talk about Palestinian rights but, at the end of the day, will routinely do what they’re told to do in Washington.
To be fair the Trump plan does call for an end to the fighting, a prisoner exchange and a staged withdrawal of all Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip. It even makes a nod towards eventual Palestinian independence. But few, if any, Arabs seriously believe that the Israelis will honour what they signed up to in the White House. Trump, of course, could force the Israelis to obey him. The question is does he want to...

Meanwhile…

...Israel has hijacked the international peace convoy sailing to Gaza to deliver aid and detained the civilian activists on board. The commandeering of the Global Sumud Flotilla boats shows the contempt Israel has for the Palestinians and the international norms that the West pretends to uphold in their “rules-based order”.The civilians on board the flotilla were attempting to deliver aid to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, to break Israel's immoral and illegal siege. 
Israel's genocidal campaign against the Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip is a component of its genocide, which has killed many tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and caused the complete devastation of civilian infrastructure and an intentionally engineered famine.
Earlier this month, the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded what we already know –that Israel is inflicting a genocide on the Palestinian people. The report outlined that signatories of the Genocide Convention, including Britain, have an obligation to prevent further acts of genocide and punish those responsible, including by ending the arms trade with Israel.
Four of the boats in the fleet were British-flagged. The Starmer government has a legal duty to defend these vessels and the civilians on board, who have been subject to an attack clearly breaching international humanitarian law. The British government must intervene to demand the immediate release of those detained, and urgently address the issues to which the flotilla was responding to by ending all arms trade and military collaboration with Israel. 

Boris flails around

One could almost feel sorry for the Prime Minister as he flails around trying to fend off the charges from the jeering opposition benches because in the great scale of things Boris Johnson’s “partygate” lies pale into insignificance compared to Tony Blair’s duplicity over the invasion of Iraq. Blair was, in comparison, let off lightly by the Parliamentary Labour Party that let him quiet slink off to make a living on the American lecture trail and pose as a peace envoy for an imaginary UN Palestinian peace plan called the “road map” or some nonsense.
    BoJo repeatedly dismissed Labour calls to resign during heated exchanges in the House of Commons this week with one Labour MP calling him a “liar” to his face and Sir Keir Starmer saying Johnson had had “shown nothing but contempt for the decency, honesty and respect that define this country”. But it’s not Labour Johnson has to worry about – it’s the backstabbers in his own party that will bring him down sooner or later.
    There’s no shortage of wannabees waiting to take his place and the only reason that they haven’t so far moved for a motion of no confidence is that some would rather wait till after the local elections before showing their hand.
    Starmer & Co have been walking on stilts in recent days. Buoyed by the recent surge of support in the opinion polls they claim this is all down to Starmer’s embrace of Blairism and his purge of the Corbynistas. Though Labour has lost tens of thousands of members – some say up between 150,000 to 200,000 have left since Starmer took over this is seen as a “victory” for the Blairites who are rejoicing at the departure of a troublesome band of left social-democrats whose support for Jeremy Corbyn briefly derailed their “New Labour” project.
    They think that their current lead in the polls will translate into a real swing at election time that will sweep them back into government give them all the juicy perks that high office brings. But there’s no guarantee of that.
    What is certain is that a new Conservative leader will galvanise the Tories into mobilising their core vote at the next general election. Labour, on the other hand, will remain weak and divided as long as Starmer is at the helm.
    Starmer is a weak and uninspiring leader. He is clearly incapable of leading Labour to victory. He can’t even mobilise his own party let alone the working class it claims to represent. But the Labour’s problem isn’t to do with personalities. It’s policies that count. Who’s going to swayed by a Labour programme that differs little from those currently espoused by the Conservatives. Certainly not “middle England” or the mythical “hard-working families” that Starmer’s advisers from adland tell us are the keys to electoral success.
    Corbyn’s victory showed that the Labour Party is still a potentially strong weapon for our class and has vindicated our long held electoral position.The surge of support for Labour during the Corbyn era showed that workers could, albeit briefly, reclaim the party they founded and built from the agents and minions of the ruling class who have dominated its highest levels for decades.
What we need and what we must campaign for is a truly democratic Labour Party –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. It’s a tall order but it can be done. The alternative is more Johnsons and more Starmers.

End of an era

Few suppose Joe Biden will lose any sleep over the concerns of his European allies who are now bleating on about America’s hasty retreat from Afghanistan, let alone the wails of their expendable Afghan servants left stranded at Kabul airport when the last US troops pull out at the end of the month.
    The last few days have been a bitter lesson in real-politik for British politicians who still talk, at least in public, about a “special relationship” with the USA, whilst there’s a growing realisation amongst the movers and shakers of the European Union (EU) that their supposed ‘super-power’ status is just another Brussels pipe-dream.
    Britain, which still has the fifth greatest economy in the world, can of course stand on its own two feet. But Johnson prefers to spout nonsense about “Global Britain” rather than take any serious steps to break the slavish dependency on the USA, scrap the £billions spent on the useless US Trident nuclear weapons system and use the money saved to develop a truly independent economy for the benefit of the millions who live here.
    Tony Blair and his kind can drivel on for as long they like about “human rights” and “imbecilic” US decisions, but no-one takes them seriously – least of all anyone who counts in America’s ruling circles. The Americans are leaving Afghanistan because they’ve lost the war. Crocodile tears are the most that the Afghans left behind to the tender mercies of the Taliban can expect.

opportunity knocks

Sharon Graham has won the election to be the next general secretary of Unite. She succeeds the 70-year-old veteran Len McCluskey, who prolonged his stay at the top table but finally stepped down this year after 10 years in office. Unite’s first woman leader received almost 5,000 more votes than her nearest rival in a three-horse race that ended this week. She will now take over from Len McCluskey as leader of the second biggest union in the country.
    As usual these days the race to the top was, in practice, confined to three full-time officers and the factions they head. Whilst all three claimed to be following in the footsteps of Len McCluskey the only one who had their old chief’s blessing was Steve Turner – and that was only grudgingly given after Len’s chosen man, Howard Beckett, dropped out when he realised he couldn’t win. Turner – the official broad left ‘United Left’ candidate – came a credible second whilst Gerard Coyne – the right-wing ‘moderate’ – was well behind in third place.
    Sharon Graham coyly says she’s “not a member of any Unite or Labour faction – other than my own supporters group”, which though technically true masks the fact that her ‘Workers Unite’ group has built up a very powerful left-leaning platform supported by some Trotskyist movements within the union and focused on grass-roots issues to get the vote out.
    Turner relied on a run-down broad left machine that simply could not cope with the demands of social media or the lock-down restrictions imposed on public work during the campaign, while Coyne mistakenly hoped that the backing of the Murdoch press and dog-whistle support from Starmer & Co would be enough to turn the tables on his ‘left’ rivals.
    Sharon Graham says: “My slogan all along has been ‘Back to the workplace’ to build the union to fight for jobs, wages and conditions.” Let’s hope she does so.

The issue is policy!

SIR KEIR STARMER’S attempt to appeal to the supposed national sentiment of the working class by wrapping himself up with the Union Jack and talking nonsense about the “spirit of the Blitz” and a “new partnership” between Labour and businesses has clearly made little impact of the people he seeks to impress.
     After all we’ve been through under Johnson – his general incompetence and shameful handling of the COVID-19 crisis – the Tories are still a few points ahead of Labour in the opinion polls.
     The youth of today who chanted Corbyn’s name. The disillusioned workers in the northern ‘Red Belt’ who dumped Labour in favour of the Tories over Brexit. The Scots whose support Labour relied on for years. Few if any of them are likely to swayed by the “New Chapter for Britain” that Starmer unveiled in his address to the nation last week. What’s new in it you may well ask?
     The answer is, very little. Starmer conjures up the image of the post-war Attlee government that ushered in the Welfare State and built the public sector which, along with progressive taxation, helped to pay for it. But he doesn’t talk about the massive council house programme nor nationalisation of some key industries that Labour pioneered in the Attlee era. Instead, Sir Keir makes a call to arms around the 1940 Beveridge Report that laid the foundations for the ‘safety net’ reforms that underpinned state welfare and the health service during the time of the first post-war Labour government.
     But the Beveridge Report, named after the Liberal politician who drew it up at the request of Churchill’s war-time national government, was part of the bourgeois consensus which accepted that reforms would be needed to create social peace to prop up the capitalist system in preparation for the confrontation with the Soviet Union that they believed would inevitably follow the defeat of Nazi Germany.
     On the other hand, Starmer rarely, if ever, recalls the later Wilson and Callaghan governments that actually extended the public sector and the state welfare sector that the Attlee government had established.
     Although Starmer never talks about Tony Blair, whose lies over the Gulf Wars mean that he can barely show his face in public these days, his policies are essentially Blairite. Nothing for the unions, nothing for the unemployed and those on bread-line wages who queue at foodbanks, apart from the usual platitudes and clichés that right-wing social-democrats churn out in a mistaken belief that will win back the support Labour once had throughout the country. In fact, the only concrete pledges Starmer made were for start-up loans for 100,000 new businesses and a new “recovery bond” to encourage saving.
     Behind closed doors even some of the Blairites are saying that Starmer is “unelectable”. They say that Starmer lacks charisma and charm, and that he has little or no street campaigning skills. But the issue isn’t presentation – it’s policy.
     Labour is going nowhere unless it can present a clear alternative to the Tories to the electorate. The lifting of the shackles on the trade union movement and the restoration of free collective bargaining would be a start. The total restoration of the Welfare State and the public sector that helped pay for it are the minimum demands that Labour needs to make if it wants to win back the millions in the movement who once backed Labour. Putting socialism back on the working-class agenda is another matter – and that is something the communist movement must work for in the months to come.

 

Starmer’s virtual reality

Labour Party conferences can be boring even in the best of times. But we’re in the coronavirus era so a virtual conference is, perhaps, the best we could have hoped for.
Labour Conference has never been the sovereign body of the Party, and its decisions were regularly ignored or side-lined by Labour Governments and the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). But it does give a voice to the activists and the rank-and-file in the constituencies, and it provides a forum for the unions to make their demands on what was originally intended to be the political wing of the trade union movement.
    The dead hand of right-wing bureaucracy during the Blair era ended the open debate and factional back-stabbing that were the highlights for the delegates at a week at the seaside in a normal year. There was a bit of a comeback under Corbyn. But Corbyn’s gone and these are decidedly not normal times.
    Sir Keir Starmer’s followers like to compare him to Labour winners of the past such as Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair. But they, for good or bad, were skilled orators who had plenty to say. Starmer is neither.
    Talking to his ‘virtual’ audience this week, Starmer said it was time for members to be “brutally honest” about the changes required for a Labour victory. “Never again will Labour go into an election not being trusted on national security, with your job, with your community and with your money.”
    But the issue is not why Labour lost the last election but how it’s going to win the next. Some on the left are still stuck on the blame game over the last election because they refuse to accept the reality that is was Labour’s U-turn on Brexit that cost them swathes of seats in the north. Starmer, to his credit, realises this. The man who was once the front-runner for the Europhiles in the Labour Party has a new mantra now. “The debate between Leave and Remain is over. We’re not going to be a party that keeps banging on about Europe,” he says. But he’ll need more than that to win back traditional supporters who went over to the Tories at the last election over Brexit.
    Labour needs to have clear policies to mobilise millions of workers around their platform. We need to campaign to end austerity and defend the health service and public education. We must support industrial development to create new jobs to end the unemployment and destitution that has blighted the lives of so many working-class families in recent years. We must ensure that current demands for the renationalisation of the railways and the utilities are just the first step in restoring the entire public sector that existed in this country until 1979. Above all, we must fight for peace, the scrapping of Trident and the withdrawal of all British troops abroad, including those in the occupied north of Ireland.
    Droning on in front of a camera to tell us he’s not Jeremy Corbyn may have been music to the ears of the aging Blairites who have embraced Starmer as their new Messiah. But it’s not going to mobilise the millions of workers and students that rallied to Labour’s banner when Corbyn was at the helm.

Modern day Pharisees

We should not be too surprised at the Chief Rabbi’s anti-Corbyn rant that was splashed across the Tory rags earlier in the week. Last July Ephraim Mirvis said he was “delighted to congratulate Boris Johnson, a longstanding friend and champion of the Jewish community, on becoming the next leader of the Conservative Party and our next Prime Minister”.

The Chief Rabbi’s loathing of Corbyn is undoubtedly down to his staunch support for Israel, which he says is “central to our faith”, and his Zionist beliefs, which he says are “a noble and integral part of Judaism”.

Although the Chief Rabbi didn’t openly call on people to vote Tory, he did say that a victory for Labour in the General Election will put the "very soul of our nation" at stake. So we can safely assume that he is, at least, sympathetic to the Conservative cause. What we cannot accept is the Chief Rabbi’s claim to speak for his own community in Britain.

The same can equally be said of Justin Welby, the head of the Church of England, who has backed Mirvis and says that “such an unprecedented statement at this time ought to alert us to the deep sense of insecurity and fear felt by many British Jews”.

Tony Greenstein, an anti-Zionist Jew who was drummed out of the Labour Party last year, says: “The campaign to show that the Labour Party is anti-Semitic and that Corbyn is an anti-Semite has always been evidence-free. It has been based on the interests of Britain’s Establishment and its voice the BBC. It is in the interests of the rich and powerful to demonstrate that Corbyn’s Labour is anti-Semitic. If they were honest they would say that their real reasons were the threat that Corbyn represents to their pockets.

“The Zionists if they were honest would say that what riles them most is that Corbyn has consistently supported the Palestinians, but of course they aren’t honest. Britain’s Chief Rabbis have a habit of supporting the Conservative Party dating back to Immanuel Jakobovitz’s support for Margaret Thatcher and even further back, but none have been this blatant.”

Communists need not worry too much about these sanctimonious hypocrites. They barely represent the communities they pretend to lead. All they do is provide more ammunition for those determined to keep the Tories in power for another few years.

Weird indeed

Tony Blair showed his face again last weekend to tell us that a majority for Labour or the Conservatives would “pose a risk” to the country. The disgraced former Labour premier then went on grudgingly to concede that he would vote Labour on 12^th December in an election that he said was the “weirdest in my lifetime". It certainly is.

The ruling class is openly and bitterly divided over the European Union (EU). Although some European links are preserved in Johnson’s withdrawal plan, the only party that can bring about the second referendum that the Remainers have been working for over the last three years is Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.

The dominant section of the ruling class is determined to keep Britain inside the EU. They can live with Corbyn at the helm for a few years, providing he’s hamstrung by smaller Europhile parties such the Scottish nationalists to ensure that the ‘people’s vote’ that reverses the 2016 Leave vote takes place.

We can stop this but only by ensuring a massive vote for Labour that sweeps them back with a clear majority in parliament. Mass mobilisation can stop the Tories in their tracks and ensure that a new Labour government honours the historic decision to leave the EU.

We don’t want a Labour administration that’s been pawned to the Scottish nationalists and the Liberal Democrats. We don’t want a ‘people’s vote’ – we want a people’s government for social justice and an end to austerity!