Why does ZZ Top's "Sharp Dressed Man" Come To Mind?

Richard Barnbrook: The BNP's man in the GLA. Who says you can't look good in brown?

This is republished and slightly changed from Friday...got some bile from a BNPer as a consequence [see below]...


It is worth noting that the BNP got virtually the same share of the vote in this year's GLA Elections- 5.4%- as the NF did in the 1977 GLC elections (the NF got 5.3%. They took 119,000 votes, compared to the BNP getting just under 131,000 this time). The only real difference from 31 years ago is that there is an element of PR in this year's elections*. Under PR it is generally easier for fringe political groups to gain seats (although try telling the SWP that after their latest "cunning plan" ie Left Luggage went arse over tit last week. No wonder Lindsay G didn't turn up to the Mayoral election count...).If the benchmark of racist sentiment in London is the city-wide performance of "the Far Right", not much has changed over 30 years. There are still Racially Obsessed types out there, but overall they haven't really increased in number over three decades.

* I can see anti-PR people arguing that Sharp Dressed Man's election to the GLA proves that PR encourages "the Far Right". However, those who defend First-Past-The-Post will have to explain why when Italy had PR, overt Mussolini worshippers got nowhere near national political power, while now under FPTP they are Government Ministers. Plus I'm sure if Richard B was Italian, Berlusconi would give him a job, simply due to his natty threads...

2 comments:

Sid said...

It's ironic that an ugly, smug, bastard like you would mock Barnbrook's appearance. And you actually look quite a bit older than your age (pssst - the boys down on the common are just flattering you to get your money).

By the way, the BNP's vote was actually better than the NF's thirty years ago because of the huge demographic changes since then which make 5.3% much harder to get. Understand, you thick cunt?



2020: As Nick Griffin becomes PM, Sid and friends crack down on erstwhile anti-BNP bloggers...

Anglonoel said...

Hey Sidney! (or should I call you Mr. Vicious...or Mr. Little?)

Cheers for your first ever contribution to my blog. You really know how to win friends and influence people on behalf of the BNP (I take it you are a loyal BNP member/supporter- or do you think Nick Griffin has sold "British Nationalism" out to the Zionist Occupational Government?).

Unfortunately, that'll be your last to be published here as I've changed the settings. All comments from now on need my approval before they appear.

Before you start effing and blinding (which you seem incapable of NOT doing- or did the Stella/Special Brew make you do it?) on the grounds that I'm gagging your freedom of speech, I would point out:

(i)where's your blog with comment box, so people (ie 95% of the population) who disagree with you can take issue with, and take the piss out, your "thoughts"?; &

ii) by the way you attacked me, you foul mouthed nasty piece of work, I should guess that if you want a picture of future BNP Government, just imagine a boot stamping on a human face for ever. If the BNP took over I don't think anti-Government free speech would last very long. In particular, if your attitude is anything to go by, taking the piss out of BNP would be a thing of the past, and there would be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy.

So, sorry Sid, I'm pulling the plug on you. However, you'll be glad to know that your erudite contribution will be the focus of my next post. If you think I took the piss out of Richard Barnbrook (got a suit like his have you?), you ain't seen nothing yet.

So long, you sad race obsessed loser.

PS I might be ugly in looks, but at least my politics ain't. BTW where's your mugshot? I take it that YOU haven't put male Supermodel Fabio out a job yet...

Elections v. v.quick update- First Highgate, then the world...

Well, Boris won the Mayoral Election. The best thing you can say for him is that he is opposed to ID cards.

Furthermore, the BNP got a seat in the GLA.

On the plus side, the Greens took the 3rd seat in Highgate ward. Lab came second and the Cons third. The Greens took two seats on the GLA (same as in 04)and Sian Berry (who I found out on Wed night drinks bitter, after an evening getting soaked leafletting letter boxes in Archway) came fourth in the first round of the Mayoral contest. Furthermore, the Greens did pretty well in most of the constituency contests.

Respect (apart from 15% in City and East) and Left Luggage, sorry Left List, did extremely badly. It seems the last hope of the English Left is the Green Party. However, how more disasters it will take for the message to get home to all those wanting to re-stage Sergei Eisenstein's October?

Will blog more Sunday night/Monday morning here. I saw Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine going dirt cheap in a bookshop yesterday so I'm going to splash out and read it in the park this afternoon, either trying to get a suntan or rust...

Update: Early Hours of Monday 5th: Just finished Shock Doctrine. It is even better than No Logo. The book it complements is Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse (I need to look hard in the footnotes to see if NK cites him). I want to review it at length, or at least use it as a starting point for other posts. For instance, surely there is a viable political way between grovelling to Corporate Capitalism on one side and pandering to RORO (Racially Or Religiously Obsessed) types on the other? I'm tired and I digress...

There has been talk over the weekend that there may be a challenge to Gordon Brown's leadership of the Labour Party at some point in the coming months if things don't impove. There seems to be hopes on the Labour Left that NuLab can be defeated at last, but I'm pretty sure NuLab will find someone else to lead them all on the Forward Path to Reform and Modernisation if GB fails. The Tories seem to think the next General Election is all over bar the shooting, sorry shouting, but I still think we will have a hung Parliament in 2009-10 and a National Government of "Reformers" and "Modernisers" will form in the aftermath. We will see...

London Election latest and stuff

I spent yesterday morning leafleting a housing estate up in Highgate (next to the cemetery with Karl Marx in it)for the Greens. There is a Camden Council bye-election on May 1st, the same day as the London-wide elections, and as the Greens have two out of the three councillors in the ward, they are hoping to take the third off the Tories.

I think the Greens have a reasonable chance of taking the ward. On the estate (I managed 275 or so letter boxes in 90 mins) the only political posters in windows were Green ones. I think there was someone else delivering stuff (or it could have been just someone delivering leaflets for pizza). It could well have been the Lib Dems as I saw someone delivering Lib Dem Focus leaflets on my way back to Gospel Oak train station. It was a cold, grey, damp morning so there weren't many people about but those I did say morning to were friendly, so that it is a good sign. All other things being equal, I should be able to get up Highgate again the day before the election for one more leafletting blitz.

Two Tuesdays ago I did turn up at the Friends Meeting House over in Euston for a meeting organised by NO2ID. It was about the surveillance state in London. Ken Livingstone didn't turn up (he was represented by a full-size cardboard cut-out!), but Boris Johnson, Brian Paddick, Jenny Jones (for the Greens), Lindsey German for Left Luggage (sorry, Left List) and Gerard Batten for UKIP were there. The BNP candidate for Mayor Richard "one suit" Barnbrook turned up, but as the BNP aren't represented in Westminster, the European Parliament or the GLA (yet) he wasn't invited onto the platform and was given a ticking off by security. (You might ask, why was Lindsey G allowed on the platform when Left List have no electoral representation in London? Apparently she was asked to speak when she was still Respect's Mayoral candidate...).

There was quite a consensus amongst the platform speakers: opposition to ID cards and fears about where surveillance of London and Londoners is heading. The big arguments were between Jenny Jones and Brian Paddick (over whether crime in London was going up or down) and Lindsey German and Gerard Batten (over immigration). I must say Boris Johnson was quite impressive, but the format of the meeting (I left 8.30ish as I was nodding off and I had a night of work ahead of me)aided him. Each of the 5 speakers was given 3 mins to do their spiel, then the chairwoman (apols, I didn't catch her name) read out 4 issues NO2ID wanted the speakers to address. Each of the speakers were given 3 mins (or so) to give their view. Then it was questions from the audience (you had to fill a piece of paper in- I split before that started). I have been reading that Boris Johnson has been taught to stick to the point, otherwise his minders think he'll go off topic and alienate audiences. So three mins to reel his spiel off was ideal for him, and to his credit he is genuinely anti-ID cards, so he was reasonably impressive.

I still think I'll force myself to vote for Ken as my 2nd choice for Mayor, but I have no enthusiasm for him at all. Having said that, a few Conservative contacts of mine are not too keen on Boris either. I suppose it will all depend on where the Lib Dem votes go after Brian Paddick is eliminated. At the hustings he was very pro- civil liberties and vehemently anti-racist. However, I have been reading that he is quite pro-City of London and has accused Ken of wanting to make London "a socialist republic" (do me a favour!).

Anyway, before I started dropping off into the land of nod, I wrote down a few facts and figures mentioned in the meeting:

Later this year non-European Economic Area foreign nationals (that is, anyone who desn't come from the EU, Iceland, Norway or Lietchenstein)in the UK will be compelled to register for an ID card and be fingerprinted in the process. I can't see this going down well with people from outside the EEA living in London, including all those non-doms...

Those who have ID cards will have to give the authorities information about 50 categories (not just 50 items) of personal information. These can be added to via Government regulation (ie sod Parliamentary scrutiny).

In London there are around 10,000 CCTV cameras on the roads and 8,000 on the Tube. I feel safer already... There are 4.2m CCTV cameras in the UK as a whole.

There are 700,000 DNA samples on the Metropolitan Police database, with around 90,000 new samples being added to every year. I feel safer than ever...

A snapshot of Actual Existing Capitalism

I saw this a couple of weeks back. I've skimmed read Peter Oborne's The Triumph of the Political Class in a bookshop not so long back (waiting until it is out in paperback before buying it), which John Harris mentions at the end. Although he seems dimly aware that the current Political Class began to emerge big time during the Thatcher years, and glorifies a Golden Age that had more than a touch of Fool's Gold about it, I think that Oborne is spot on about the triangle of the Westminster Parties, Mainstream Media and Big Business strangling the life out of politics here. He is also the only Mail/Telegraph/Spectator political columnist I know to embrace the Noam Chomsky/Edward Herman "propaganda model" of the media as being a valid description of current events here now!

The slow death of the Real Job is pulling society apart: The government needs to look past middle England and address the harsh realities of an increasingly casualised workforce
John Harris, The Guardian, Friday October 19, 2007

This afternoon, 90 minutes of parliamentary time will probably be devoted to a doomed private member's bill. Around 100 Labour MPs would like to push it beyond a second reading, but the government is opposed, and other parties seem barely interested - so the temporary and agency workers (prevention of less favourable treatment) bill, proposed by Paul Farrelly, the Newcastle-under-Lyme MP, will die a quiet death. By way of cold comfort, the government has told the bill's supporters to focus attention on the possibility of regulation by the EU, knowing full well that the UK's coordinated blocking of past attempts has long made any European agreement a vain hope. On this evidence, Gordon Brown might be not so much a Stalinist as a fan of Kafka.

In proposing that temporary and agency workers should benefit from the same pay and basic conditions as their fully accredited counterparts, Farrelly's bill drills into an issue that barely intrudes on the political mainstream: the casualisation of thousands of workplaces, and the alleged slow death of the Real Job. Around 1.4 million people currently work in the temporary and agency sector, millions more feel its downward pull on their working lives - and at its current rate of growth, millions more soon will do. Unfortunately, the involvement of the trade unions serves to confirm that the issue lies as far from middle England as can be, and you thus arrive at yet another illustration of how contorted Westminster politics has become: the political class blithely yakking about "rising aspirations", while millions of people's hopes are plummeting at speed.

At the core of all this is a red-hot bundle of concerns around immigration, so those lobbying for change choose their words very carefully. No one is exactly sure how many migrant workers are employed in temporary and agency work - though foreign-born people increasingly form the sector's bedrock, and dominate its role in such areas as catering, private security and construction. This week's government report on immigration's economic impact might have told a rosy story, though one could just about discern these developments in some of its more unsettling passages - admissions that workers from the A8 and A2 countries (those eastern European states who joined the EU in 2004, as well as Romania and Bulgaria) "earn noticeably less than UK-born workers", and that migrant labour has effected a "modest" downward pull on wages at the economy's bottom end. Casualised work hovers behind both those points - though bizarrely, the report contains no mention of temporary and agency employment, nor any data about how migrants fare when it comes to holidays, pensions, sick pay and the like.

On the ground, however, alarming evidence is mounting up. A few months ago I spoke to a manufacturing employee from the West Midlands who works in a factory producing car parts. Three years ago, his bosses began the mass recruitment of a new kind of worker. A dwindling number of long-standing staff were on £11 an hour; the new arrivals - many of whom barely knew what they were doing - worked 12-hour days for £4 an hour less, had none of the usual entitlements to paid holidays or sick leave, and were seemingly arriving and leaving through a revolving door. Within 18 months, for every "core" worker, there were two supplied by agencies, many of whom were from Poland, Cameroon or Senegal. The walls were quickly smattered with racist graffiti and the level of scrap increased fast. Under union pressure, the company relented and proposed a scheme whereby long-standing agency workers could eventually join the accredited workforce, and, in its wake, the rancorous atmosphere began to improve.

Set against developments that are defining an ever-increasing share of the economy, these people were lucky. Trade unionists cite no end of altogether bleaker case studies: three-tier workplaces in which indigenous British employees sit precariously at the top, flimsily employed Poles come further down, and thoroughly casualised Hungarians and Slovakians are left right at the bottom; increasing numbers of people whose lack of sick pay forces them into working while ill. On the stories go: meat-processing workers in Monmouthshire threatened with redundancy unless they downgraded to agency terms, and then fired; agency street cleaners in Salford who must show up at dawn each day to see if they're required for work. The dereliction of formal employment applies to both private and public sectors, and the issue spreads way beyond the workplace: there is increasing evidence, for example, that casualisation is feeding into the burgeoning sub-prime mortgage market.

Seemingly frit when it comes to dealing with the economic nitty-gritty, the government's absence of answers is crystallised by that ugly and pretty much meaningless slogan "British jobs for British workers". Being on the centre-left should surely be less about appropriating the vernacular of the ultra-right than understanding the need for action at the sharp end: as Blair's old formulation would have it, being tough on social discord and tough on the causes of social discord. But no, give or take recent talk about increased enforcement of the minimum wage and timid plans for regulation that will swerve past the essential issues of unequal pay, the poisonous status quo remains.

When the election finally arrives, beware. Given its talent for issuing leaflets that read more like Socialist Worker than Mein Kampf, the British National Party is making hay with the issue of casual labour, as I was recently reminded while reading The Triumph of the Political Class, a new book by the Mail columnist Peter Oborne. An elegant tirade against a cross-party cabal either in thrall to vested interests or so lost in the woods of electoral arithmetic that the stuff of real lives scares them, one of its most sobering sections deals with the rise of the BNP "in Barking, Dagenham, Dewsbury, Leeds and Burnley" and its place in what he sees as an "insurgency against the political class".

"The estrangement between a tiny governing elite and mainstream British society is one of the overwhelming themes of our age, and will only get more desperate, and more dangerous," he says. At the top, an uneasy silence about one of our most urgent issues proves the point, but who's listening?

john.harris@guardian.co.uk

Oborne's identification of Westminster Parties, the Mainstream Media and Big Business locked in a triangle reminds me strongly of Michael Moore's identification in Sicko of a triple alliance between Congress, the Mainstream Media and the Medical Industry which prevents a universal healthcare system being established in the US. Different country, same type of vested interests in alliance against the people?

Piece on the IWCA

As Respect implodes into civil war between its pro-George Galloway and pro-SWP factions (one needs a heart of stone not to laugh), other more deserving of success currents on "the left" will, hopefully, get their chance. One I would like to see get somewhere is the Independent Working Class Association, who I've mentioned before in this blog. The article below I found on their website. I was encouraged that they are prepared to work with the Greens, as I see both parties having a role to play when (not if!) a new realignment of progressive political forces takes place here in the next years. I also noted the quote from a member of Oxford Trades Council on the IWCA:

‘They are not very visible. They don’t come to any trades council meetings. They have a crappy newsletter and haven’t stood up for normal socialist things.’

Perhaps that's the reason the IWCA might get somewhere!

However, with no further ado...


‘Take note of the IWCA’, 2 November 2007
An interesting analysis of the IWCA from independent radical left magazine Red Pepper.

A class act in Oxford: A small left party, pro-working class and anti-multiculturalism, has been winning council seats on Britain’s largest council estate. Zoe Jewell reports.

A giant cheque for £15,000 is proudly propped up against the wall of the Independent Working Class Association (IWCA) councillors’ office at the Oxford City Council town hall. It is a prized libel payment from the Oxford East Labour Party after Labour posted defamatory leaflets to residents in last year’s election campaign. Under the headline ‘Watch out for extremist group’, Bill Baker – Labour’s deputy city council leader – claimed that the IWCA had links to Irish Republicans and violent extremists.

In the otherwise bare office, Stuart Craft and Clare Kent, two of the four IWCA councillors on Oxford City Council, still talk about it now with disbelief. ‘We’ve been called vigilantes, racists, fascists, communist boot boys, everything you could think of,’ says Craft.

The IWCA is a political party that mixes community campaigning with traditional class politics – an interesting combination of far-left ideology and Liberal Focus Team pavement pounding. The white working class, ridiculed as ‘chavs’ by a self-satisfied, middle-class media and whose voice has been largely lost from mainstream politics, need representation – and on a council estate in Oxford, they are getting it.

The IWCA work on the issues that concern local people most –particularly drugs, anti-social behaviour, housing and youth provision. Their innovative answer to anti-social behaviour is community restorative justice, a programme that uses local volunteers to resolve conflict and prevent low-level crime, particularly in areas where the police have lost trust.

They believe youth provision is key to preventing anti-social behaviour. In Oxford, the IWCA councillors have campaigned especially hard against budget cuts to children’s play areas and had motions passed to ensure that money saved from cuts in youth provision is still channelled into the most socially deprived areas.

Breakthrough

Stuart Craft describes the IWCA as ‘a national party with just four local councillors’. But these four Oxford councillors have had considerable impact and illustrate the potential for a leftist version of community politics with an electoral expression. Craft, the leader of the IWCA councillors, was the first to be elected in 2002, [and] was joined two years later by Clare Kent and Lee Cole, and in 2006 by Jane Lacey.

They all represent wards in Blackbird Leys, one of the largest and most socially
depressed council estates in Europe, and the neighbouring estate, Churchill. It is an impressive breakthrough for a party that had no candidates in Oxford before the 2002 election.

According to Craft, what changed in 2002 was merely that ‘a genuine pro-working class party stood. People had the choice. There was nobody representing the working class anymore. If you’re in an area like Blackbird Leys and you see the whole place going to rack and ruin and it’s a result of the action of the political parties, then either you can sit back and be an armchair critic or you can try to do something about it.’ And that’s just what Craft did. He insists that he is merely the leader of a collective party, but his undiluted class politics clearly bolstered the IWCA when he won his seat in 2002.

Craft came to the IWCA from Anti-Fascist Action, but the other three councillors have no organised political background – left or right – whatsoever. The softly spoken Clare Kent explains what inspired her to get involved.

‘I was always a Labour voter up until my children started haranguing me in 2000 about them having nothing to do. So we did a petition. I was invited by the local MP, Andrew Smith, to join the tenants’ association and the area committees. I could not believe how our local Labour councillor would say one thing to the committee and then go and say another thing in the council. Anyway, I phoned up the MP, Andrew Smith, and said, “You’ve got to get rid of this councillor,” and he said, “Oh no, he’s a wonderful councillor.” That finished me with the Labour Party.

At the time, I didn’t know anything about the IWCA, but a friend of mine in Blackbird Leys said I should get in touch with Stuart Craft.’ After a short period of involvement, Kent stood as an IWCA council candidate and was elected. Highly localised and practical politics is what makes the IWCA so effective. ‘We do a lot more ward time on our estates than the other parties, because that’s our reason for existing. Attending council meetings is just the necessary evil really,’ explains Craft. Success in the wards is vital because, in the end, that is what will get them re-elected.

Yet the IWCA are highly principled. Their aim is securing a decent future for the people of their wards and it matters more than anything else to them. Clare Kent describes what she has achieved since 2004. ‘We’ve got play schemes running, the return of the youth club to the estate, and a sports centre is being built.’ But she is also well aware that there is still plenty to do.

Tackling drugs Stuart Craft talks earnestly about the continuing need to tackle drug
dealing on Blackbird Leys. ‘We’ve done everything from community patrols to picketing drug dealers’ doors alongside the residents. The local community centre bar was run by a couple who were harbouring drug dealers. Within months of us campaigning, we forced the closure of the bar and the crack house closed down.

Today, of course, there’s still drug dealing. We haven’t the power to affect national policies, and the drugs are going to be there until the government change their drugs strategy. All we can do is manage the problem.’

‘Recently, the police put out a press release stating that people in Blackbird Leys have said that the quality of life has gone up and they don’t perceive crime as a big problem anymore,’ Craft continues. ‘We attribute that to being directly linked to our efforts.’ The isolation of drug dealers by the community is one of the IWCA policy objectives on drugs.

The IWCA supports the decriminalisation of cannabis, but says that managing the problems of drug use is also of paramount importance. Its manifesto lists among its policy objectives ‘the proper provision of locally based detox centres, the establishment of a social contract with users for the proper disposal of needles, and GPs to be allowed to prescribe heroin in order to administer dosages safely’.

But the IWCA has no real national profile. They aren’t seen on London demos carrying banners and placards – something that most left parties regard as important. Instead they concentrate on their successes in Oxford, seeking to turn them into successes elsewhere.

There have been the signs of a breakthrough in other areas. In Bunhill, a socially deprived ward in Islington, the IWCA claimed 22 per cent of the vote. In May, they contested an election in Thurrock, where the BNP is also looking to win protest votes. Dave Amis, who stood in Thurrock, is upbeat about the vote they achieved, although they only contested one out of the 16 wards and gained 7 per cent. ‘It was the first time round, so quite hard work, but we got a very good base.’

Stuart Craft believes that ‘with a standing start, the IWCA could beat the BNP in working-class areas every time.’ If they could, this would be a significant reversal for the BNP, but as yet neither the IWCA nor the other larger parties to the left of Labour are seriously competing against the BNP at the ballot box.

Against multiculturalism

In defeating the BNP in council elections, Craft identifies the issue of multiculturalism as central. In diverse communities like Thurrock and Blackbird Leys, this would appear the obvious alternative and positive policy. But the IWCA controversially does not take the traditional left position. Instead it argues that any initiatives that privilege one religious or ethnic group over another are unfair and divide the working class.

In Oxford, Labour has branded the IWCA as racist. Craft vehemently denies this and instead claims, ‘I think we’re the only anti-racist organisation on this council.’ This notion is evident in the IWCA manifesto too, which argues that ‘the state funding of social projects purely on the grounds of race can only foster an ‘us and them’ scenario, with the result that instead of being united by anti-racism, the working class can just as easily be divided by it.’

When Craft first became a councillor, he proposed a motion against multicultural youth facility programmes, which he claimed benefited one group above another. ‘The limited resources we’ve got should be spent on facilities that are open to all and nobody should be barred for the colour of their skin. The council didn’t even debate the motion. It’s amazing. Everybody was against it, but nobody could actually explain why.’

Clare Kent adds, ‘On my estate all the young people are talking about this issue and people wonder why we’ve got a British National Party! Nobody’s willing to address this issue.’ Craft is equally incredulous. ‘It’s hardly rocket science, but in the council chamber when we raise this it’s like we’ve come from another planet.

The IWCA and the left

Craft is convinced that the ICWA’s approach will win it votes over the BNP. And he is scathing about other left parties. ‘We see the white working class as our constituency, though not just the white working class. The rest of the left see the white working class as the BNP’s constituency. I think the left drive working-class people into the arms of the fascists, whereas we’re there to coax people the other way.’

For a party that has recorded such a success in Oxford, with the same number of councillors as the far larger Socialist Party and not so many less than George Galloway’s Respect, the rest of the left does seem to wilfully ignore the IWCA.

Pete McClaren, of the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, admits he knows very little about the IWCA. ‘We have worked with them a bit, but they’re not forthcoming and don’t tend to advertise themselves. They are a bit of a mystery to me.’ Sue Tibbles, a member of the Oxford trades council, is similarly dismissive. ‘They are not very visible. They don’t come to any trades council meetings. They have a crappy newsletter and haven’t stood up for normal socialist things.’

The Oxford IWCA and the local Green Party have had a prickly relationship during their five years on the council together, with the Greens holding eight seats in wards very different demographically to the council estates of Blackbird Leys and Churchill. Matt Sellwood, Oxford Green councillor, admits their tensions were ‘mostly around class. The IWCA assumed that all Greens were middle class and therefore untrustworthy, but now they have come to understand that when we take a progressive stand, we tend to mean it.’

Stuart Craft agrees. ‘The Greens are the only party that are motivated for the right reasons. I’d say, whether we agree with them or not on a policy, they are genuine people and they’re in it because they want to change things.’ The two parties worked together recently on a council motion supporting striking postal workers, but they have nothing like a coalition.

It’s not so much that the IWCA are localists. What really marks them out is that they have given up on the rest of the left. The IWCA was originally founded in 1995 by Red Action, a splinter group from the SWP, but after ten years they have founded their own political positions and style of organisation largely divorced from this background. Craft describes the journey:

‘The Left might turn up on a demonstration, go home and then do nothing for six months. We don’t dance to that leftist tune anymore. We set our own agenda and if we decide that a demonstration we’re holding that day against a prolific drug dealer on the estate is more important than turning up on some march organised in London then that’s our business, isn’t it? I’ve never apologised for that.

‘We don’t really recognise the term left anymore, because looking around I don’t see any of the people that profess to be left or socialist as actually pro-working class. I think it wouldn’t be very clever to hitch up in the short term with a load of groups that don’t actually stand for the working class just to boost our numbers. We’d rather grow slowly, picking up decent members, genuine people.’

It’s a politics of the long haul, which will only work if they can turn small successes into bigger ones. There’s a fierce pride among IWCA members in what they’ve achieved so far on Blackbird Leys, with meagre
resources and absolute commitment.

The terrain of British politics isn’t about to be shaken by an IWCA earthquake, but the IWCA’s success in Oxford at least deserves serious comparison with the relative lack of success by much bigger left challenges to Labour from Respect and the Socialist Party. As the Westminster parties cluster ever closer together, there’s a rumble in the margins from left and right, which has all the signs of getting louder and more troublesome. Take note of the IWCA – it is as good a place as any to start thinking about possible outcomes.

Original article at: http://www.redpepper.org.uk/article635.html