London Films

Working at the moment, I want to sit down and really blog. However, I think I will have to leave it until next week when I have the time. Gordon Brown is still playing hard to get on a General Election date, so until he says yay or nay definitely about an Autumn election I am in limbo a bit.

However, I will post a few pieces of others now, just to keep things ticking over.

I've started to consciously seek out films set in London and try and spot the famous and not-so-famous (ie the parts of London I wander around near-ish to where I live) areas where they were filmed. David Cronenberg has a film out called Eastern Promises very soon, which brings film noire to contemporary London. As the article below indicates, it is the latest of a long line of films which present London as the Big Nowhere.

Sin City: David Cronenberg's 'Eastern Promises' shows a gritty, violent London. If only more films did the same
By Geoffrey Macnab, The Independent, 17 September 2007

There are many ways of showing London on screen. Often, filmmakers depict the city from a tourist-eye view. Endless romantic comedies have name-checked notable landmarks while showing shiny double-decker buses and friendly policemen. The ghost of Stanley Holloway never seems far away. There is a self-conscious attempt to show off the city in the best possible light, regardless of the type of film being made. London now has its own agency – Film London – which prides itself on helping film-makers use such locations as the Houses of Parliament (V For Vendetta), Tate Modern (Children of Men) or Hyde Park (Stormbreaker).

The city has a chameleon-like ability to shift shapes. "You want 18th century, you want medieval or you want 21st century flash – it's all here within a couple of miles," Film London's boss Adrian Wootton recently boasted. But all too frequently, the London that appears on screen seems unreal or stuck in time.

You don't much associate London with film noir. From The Long Good Friday to Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, there have been plenty of gangster films made in the city, but only rarely have film-makers delved into what the critic Robert Warshow called "the dangerous and sad city of the imagination".

Audiences will shortly have the chance to see two brilliant films, both made by North American directors, which explore the seedy underbelly of London in a poetic and atmospheric way. The first, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, is about Russian gangsters on the prowl through the city. The London it depicts is unremittingly grey. Scripted by Steve Knight (who also wrote Stephen Frears' Dirty, Pretty Things), it is a film about outsiders. None of the main characters are Londoners. The lead characters are assassins, like the mysterious and ruthless Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), or girls sold into the sex trade, or Chechen thugs. Even the heroine, played by Naomi Watts, is from a Russian background.

After Alexander Litvinenko, Eastern Promises has a topical resonance. The idea of killings taking place in broad daylight (for instance, the young Chelsea fan in the film who has his throat slit outside Stamford Bridge) no longer seems fanciful. Even so, this is as much a mood piece as it is a thriller. For all its extreme violence it's as much about bereavement, loss of identity and family ties in a strange city as it is about infiltrating the Russian mob.

Eastern Promises offers a more "realistic" portrait of London than that found all those romantic comedies about Notting Hill booksellers or lovelorn singletons. Using what film-makers call "creative geography", Cronenber g has taken just as many liberties with his locations – the difference is that his sensibility is so much darker. Shooting at Three Mills Studios in the heart of the East End, choosing locations like Smithfield, using Turkish baths rather than well-known tourist sites, he depicts a London that has a brooding sense of menace. The Thames looks filthy, and its main use for the Russians is as a place to toss corpses.

London is shown in an equally forlorn light in Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950), which portrays a post-war London in the grip of hoodlums and racketeers. Thanks to the Blitz, there is rubble all over the place. Dassin throws in several sequences in which his lead character, the small-time US nightclub tout and would-be wrestling promoter Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) is seen scurrying like a beetle across grey, decaying cityscapes with heavies in pursuit. Again, the Thames is where the bodies are dumped.

Dassin – who knew he was on the verge of being blacklisted in Hollywood because of his Communist associations – made the movie at a ferocious pace. In interviews, he has talked about the outrage and disbelief that it provoked in Britain. The UK press refused to believe that his London had any basis in reality. Dassin, who had researched the film meticulously, was amused by their scepticism. A Scotland Yard officer had taken him to all the most squalid dives in Soho and introduced him to the chancers and low-lifes upon whom he based his characters. "The British press didn't treat this film kindly, saying that this London of mine – I had made it up!" Dassin recalled. "Well, everything that was in the film was shot there. I invented nothing."

Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the British liked to think that their gangsters were less ferocious than their US counterparts. British police didn't carry guns. When PC Dixon (Jack Warner) was gunned down by Dirk Bogarde's young spiv Tom Riley in The Blue Lamp (1950), it was portrayed as a one-off act of unspeakable violence. The criminals were so appalled that they helped flush Riley out. In fact, as Night and the City showed, there never really was a golden age in which cops and thieves shared some secret code of honour.

It is surprising how few films over the years have shown this other side of London life. Wootton, who is director of London's Crime Scene Film Festival as well as the boss of Film London, argues that it takes outsiders to expose this hidden side of the city.

Night and the City and Eastern Promises are not unique. Periodically, other film-makers have also tried to bring noir to London. There have been such B-movies as John Lemont's The Frightened City (1961), starring Herbert Lom and a youthful, pre-Bond Sean Connery, which deals with protection racketeers in the West End, and Street Of Shadows (1953), featuring Cesar Romero as a nightclub owner.

Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa (1986) likewise shows the squalor and pathos of a London underworld where – as in Eastern Promises – young, drug-addicted women are forced into prostitution. Further back in time, films like EA Dupont's Piccadilly (1929), didn't shirk from showing racism and sexual violence, while the original version of They Drive By Night (1938) evoked a world of tawdry glamour and brutality.

New York's murky alleyways and LA's seedy glamour, have always lent themselves to film noir more readily than London. In recent years, we have become accustomed to London-set rom-coms, period dramas or sci-fi films that use the city in a predictable way. That's why Eastern Promises and the re-release of Night and the City are so refreshing.

Public service announcement of sorts.

I've been busy. This week gone, during my week off work on nights, I went on a 4 day First Aid course for work. It was a very challenging course, I had a lot to learn, but I passed, so I'm now a qualified First Aider! It also meant early rises for me 4 days on the trot for me, which I am simply not used to! I've been trying to catch up on my rest this weekend, just in time for work starting tomorrow night.

My head is full of stuff about politics at the moment. However, I have held off major postings on it all as I don't want to be overtaken by events and look a complete idiot. That is, there is still speculation that there might be a UK General Election this Autumn. Last weekend there was fevered speculation in the media, but it has cooled off a bit over the last week. It is still unlikely. However, I will take a plunge next time I'm off. On Facebook I have joined one group (which I think is Lib Dem inspired) called "GORDON BROWN, CALL A GENERAL ELECTION NOW!" or something v.similar, and that's exactly what I think. I don't think I can stand a whole six months-plus of endless speculation about whether we will have an Election in the Spring/Summer of 2008. Then the Autumn of 2008, then the Spring/Summer of '09 etc etc.

I have a feeling this could be General Election (whenever it comes) that will break the log-jam of British politics for either good or ill (or a bit of both). Either there will be a decisive Lab or Con victory, which will lead to the disintegration of the Labour Party (not having enough ideas or energy left) or the Conservatives (having far too much ideas and energy left). Or we will have a hung parliament and a de facto "National Government" coalition. The way that Gordon Brown has recruited individual Tory and Lib Dem politicians to help his Government since becoming PM seems to me indicative of a possible future for British politics. Anyway, I want the future and I want it now!

I will say more about this in a week or so. I have also been thinking about how I am going to juggle my various thoughts in cyberspace between my 3 places on the Net ie this Blog, Facebook and Myspace. I think from now on the general of thumb will be stuff that is heavy and/or "political" will get posted up here. Personal and/or light stuff will tend to go on Facebook. As for Myspace, it will suffer from benign neglect. I won't get rid of it, and if people contact me via it, I will answer them back, but Facebook has simply superceded it for me as far as social networking goes. Plus I like the design minimalism of Facebook. With Myspace, every page seems to take an eternity to open, and I don't like to read stuff off backgrounds which seem to resemble psychedelic wallpaper!

Here endeth the lesson for now...

Four years ago today (more or less)...

Apols for the lack of blogging in recent days. I had intended to blog a fair bit this week, but I was down most of it with a cold, which I think had something to do with the rubbish summer we've been happening thus far (if England suffers a drought between now and Xmas, I won't say a word).

Anyhow, you'd might be interested in this. It's a bit historical (4 years ago), but it's by my near neighbour and mate Anna Chen. She has been treated like scum by the SWP types who dominate the British Left outside the Labour Party, and this is a response from her about their antics.

A Bad Case of the Trots: Anna Chen. An edited version of this article appeared in Tribune, 5 September 2003, under the title ‘They Put the Rot in Trotsky’.)

Who’s been putting the dick into diktat? Who put the rank in rank and file?

After 18 years of Tory rule, many leftists less than thrilled by a Labour Party galloping rightwards in its pursuit of discredited Conservative policies joined the far Left to support the socialist cause. In pressing for a left-of-Labour alternative, the Socialist Workers Party deservedly made itself a pole of attraction, and hitching up with the fledgling Socialist Alliance in the 2000 London mayoral elections provided a welcome boost for both organisations.

After a highly promising start, it’s clear the far Left is now such a basket case it’s amazing no-one issues public health warnings. Not so much Darkness At Noon as Carry On Comrade; I haven’t seen so much backstabbing, treachery and naked personal ambition since Dallas came off the air. This is a world which provides leaders rather than leadership and where, as they say, your opponents may be in front of you but your enemies are behind you.

SA chair Nick Wrack’s recent Tribune article claiming business as usual at the SA coalface was headlined, ‘We’re still alive and kicking’. Kicking who, Nick? New Labour? The far Right? Nope, looks like the membership to me, comrade.

But then Nick should know. As an independent member of the SA executive committee who made chair once fellow lawyer Liz Davies had been manoeuvred out under mysterious circumstances, he has presided over the destruction of the best chance of revival the Left has had in years, watching while the SWP’s old habits reasserted themselves and strangled the SA amid a welter of intrigue, malfeasance, and allegations of assault. And this year we saw electoral chicanery increase the SWP’s presence on the SA executive committee from three out of 22 to 13 out of 36, confirming fears that the SA is merely the SWP in a funny hat.

Now that the SWP’s fratricidal Tammany Hall tactics in Birmingham have split one of the healthiest anti-war groups in the UK and all but destroyed the SA, we need an honest appraisal of what is going wrong.

Regarding the labour and anti-war movements as its own private property, the SWP has come on like some sort of Bolshevik Re-enactment Society, purging activists according to whim, and hobbling our own side. This includes replacing a raft of proven socialists in Birmingham with SWP hacks hastily recruited to the SA (which probably accounts for Nick’s recent ‘doubling’ in membership numbers) in order to pack out meetings. The purgees include the highly respected Birmingham SA chair, general election candidate and victimised firefighter Steve Godward, and the very able press officer, Rumy Hasan, himself from a Muslim background.

Not only did the SA do nothing around the recent firefighters’ strike, rendering Godward dangerously vulnerable (he was eventually sacked), but we were then treated to the sight of John Rees, editor of the tiny SWP theoretical journal, sitting in judgement on a much-loved working-class militant and declaring that he ‘represented very little’. Professional revolutionaries – don’tcha just love ’em?

At the same time as the SWP was failing the striking firefighters – who should surely have been our cause célèbre – it also hamstrung us in the Stop the War Coalition, ordering SWP members not to do any work for the SA during the build-up to the big February demo. Then the SA executive cravenly accepted being denied a speaker on the 15 February anti-war platform despite the membership playing a key role in building the movement at every level. Even so, the SA’s nominal ‘chief press officer’, SWP Central Committee member and now suddenly spokesperson for the StWC, John Rees, swanned about on stage within inches of the microphone throughout. Lucky old Charles Kennedy, whose Lib Dems picked up much of the anti-war vote even though they supported the war once bombing had begun, must have thought it was Christmas.

Too many antiquated attitudes are being swept in under cover of the war, with power relations found under capitalism thriving unchallenged in far Left organisations. The SWP are fond of espousing anti-racist sentiments. And yet, for example, a District Organiser can insist that because ‘all’ Chinese supposedly work in catering and are therefore atomised, we must all be petit bourgeois: the deadliest insult in the far-Left lexicon apart from ‘fascist’. When I questioned this at a meeting, Rees barked that ‘The Party’ doesn’t do any work with the Chinese because ‘it’s British workers who count, not Chinese’. We apparently experience no racism because ‘the axis of racism is black and white’.

But the reason Nick’s article could be illustrated with a photograph of Chinese people rallying behind the Camden Socialist Alliance banner at the 2001 demonstration when a thousand Chinese protested at government attempts to scapegoat us for the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak, was that the SA had a press officer who was able to take up their cause. It’s just one example of setting down roots and doing something practical and effective alongside a community instead of ignoring them until election time, which is how the SWP-dominated SA plays it.

Unfortunately, the SA no longer has this facility. The effective press operation that helped us to punch beyond our weight in the media in both the general and London mayoral elections was gratuitously wrecked by the SWP without a word of protest from their acolytes in the executive. Even more scandalously, the SA remained quiescent during the last local elections when the far Right took off, leaving rank and file socialists to campaign without a national press operation to back them up. Our vote remained stuck at around five per cent while the BNP gained several times that. The SWP are sufficiently deluded to insist that, in the present political climate, the election of one solitary councillor constitutes some sort of victory. Instead of holding a post-mortem, they scamper for their next get-popular-quick scheme, a clandestine electoral lash-up with the Birmingham mosque, because, according to Rees, they no longer have any use for the ‘Left ghetto’. No wonder they act as if the only alternative to New Labour is not the SA, but the SWP.

And now we reach the SWP’s Clause 4 moment. Whilst wooing the religious leaders of the Muslim community, SWP CC member and StWC convenor Lindsey German announced that women’s and gay rights are no longer regarded as ‘shibboleths’. Having degenerated into a top-down organisation where ‘democratic centralism’ means all centralism and no democracy, perhaps it’s understandable that they would feel flock envy for those they regard as leaders of a monolithic community.

Their top-down instincts may chime with the religious leaders’ control over their congregation, but it means ignoring the struggles of working-class, secular, gay and women Muslims. It reinforces the image that all Muslims are under the control of the clergy and negates any possibility of liberation for the oppressed. Socialists have already mutely attended meetings where Muslim men and women sit separately and a Muslim woman speaker apologises to her elders from the platform for wearing insufficiently modest clothing.

Having run the SA into the ground, the SWP now threaten to do the same to the fragmenting anti-war movement. Many are pointing out that if the SWP/StWC wishes to take credit for getting up to two million protesters onto the streets, they need to explain where that two million have gone, and why everything all but ground to a halt once bombing began.

In my own case, having established press operations for the StWC after September 11, it was with a sense of bemusement that I found myself accused of the crime of making myself ‘indispensable’ by senior SWP members. I am now banned from doing press for the StWC even though they admit they need help. You’d think I was the Evil Daughter of Fu Manchu rather than a committed activist who plugged a gap previously ignored by the geniuses on the Left.

The fractures threaten to widen if the StWC – which, after all, now owns the anti-war ‘brand’ – remains obstructive to other anti-war efforts. Their refusal to back the Menwith Hill and Fairford airbase campaigns, hostility towards the Peace Not War CD organisers, and their pre-empting of a Socialist Party-initiated student action by two days, make some suspect they prefer competition to cooperation.

It would be nice to see all September events being built by the movement as a whole. We’d all rather work with the StWC but what do you do when you oppose the war but no longer trust the movement’s self-appointed leaders?

If the Left wants to grow it has to decide whether it genuinely wants fresh socialist talent in the movement as it claims it does, or whether it stagnates. The choice is clear – use it or lose it. Everything else is just ice-picks at dawn.

Anna Chen is a former press officer of the Socialist Alliance and Stop the War Coalition.

Neither Lenin Nor Labour Update

I'm reading a lot about the Labour Party, and New Labour in particular, at the moment. I've just finished reading Noel Thompson's Political Economy and the Labour Party, which was an interesting discussion of how Labour's political thought has evolved over the last century or so. What struck me is how Labour abandoned decentralist notions of socialism, such as Guild Socialism, some time in the 1920s at the latest, and they have never been really revived. It seems to me that if a real Left is to revive on any scale in this country, a decentralising democratic form of socialism will have to be embraced. However, there appears to be little chance of that in the forseeable future.

While thinking about such matters, and thinking what I'd like to write about for both cash and kudos (if I'm lucky) in the years to come, I came across the piece below by the Independent Working Class Association. Of course I don't agree with them 100%. However, their plea for a democratic, decentralising socialism to combat both the post-Thatcherite consensus which is currently stifling politics and the ROROs (Racially Or Religiously Obsessed) who dominate those parties pretending to be "the resistance" to aforesaid consensus (ie the BNP and Respect), is spot on.

The neo-liberal consensus is dying slowly:1 August 2007

Since Gordon Brown assumed leadership, Labour have surged back ahead in the opinion polls, scored a major victory over the Tories in the Ealing and Southall by-elections and have re-established themselves as the bookies' favourites to win the next general election.

Having followed a traditional tax/immigrants/Europe line of attack for almost a decade – which, as Oliver Letwin has said, was very effective for getting up to 32%, the Tories are now trying a centrist approach, which seems to be having no impact. Even after two and a half terms, ten years of infighting and Iraq, the Tories still cannot overhaul Labour: indeed, Cameron is struggling to win over his own party. Confidence in the Labour party is now so high, and contempt for Cameron so deep, that they are referring to Cameron as the Tory Kinnock. (Observer, 22 July 2007)

Tories – mission accomplished

The Tory party is, in the truest, historical sense of the term, finished. This does not mean that the Tory party has failed. Quite the opposite: the Tory party is finished because it has succeeded. The historic mission of the Tory party has been to destroy the working class movement, and they have done this. All the gains in equality made throughout the twentieth century have been reversed, and are still reversing. Wealth and power are once again being concentrated at their rightful place: the top. The UK has become a tax haven for the super-wealthy, meaning the tax burden has been redirected towards low and middle income groups. The gap in male life expectancy between social classes I and V has increased from 5.5 years in 1972-6 to 8.4 years in 1997-2001.

So comprehensive has been the Tory victory that it has pulled the entire political centre of gravity over to its side: where twenty years ago there was only one Tory party, now there are three. As Nick Cohen recently pointed out in the Observer, there is no great clamour within Tory Britain to get Labour out of office and the Tories back in, because Tory Britain is doing perfectly fine under Labour: "Margaret Thatcher had inflicted terrible wounds on leftish Britain. She had destroyed the trade unions, presided over the closure of traditional industries and reduced hundreds of thousands of proud families in Scotland, Wales and the north [and London] to dependency on state handouts... On the contrary, in the past decade the classic Tory voter has never had it so good; never been so wealthy or so secure. His assets are growing, his children can be protected whether they do well at school or not and he can look forward to a long and comfortable life." (‘Tory voters have never had it so good’. The Observer, 22 July 2007)

The root cause behind the Tory party’s seeming unelectability is that there is no longer any need for it: it has won its war, it has achieved its goals. Having defeated the working class and established the neo-liberal consensus, all that remains is the administration of this consensus. And why should anyone vote for the Tories – who cost the country billions of pounds on Black Wednesday, who are dying of old age, who are hopelessly split between their liberal and authoritarian wings - when the other Thatcherite parties are younger, shinier, less racist, more modern and less ‘nasty’?

The neo-liberal consensus has been famously described as ‘the end of history’, the end of ideology and class struggle. So was the Keynesian consensus, and English Victorian liberalism. The consequences of the neo-liberal consensus are obvious to anyone unless they decide not to see it. From a post-war historical norm of around 75% electoral turn-out up to 1992, this has fallen to 60%.

Labour takes on the Tory mantle

The catalyst for this was not Thatcher, but Blair: it was the creation of New Labour in 1994, and the ending of any worthwhile democratic choice, that led to the collapse in electoral turnout. The consequence is that, so far, 15% of the electorate has withdrawn their support from the neo-liberal consensus. If the Tory party’s difficulty is that it has no historic mission left, Labour is facing difficulties of a different variety: having to manage, maintain and uphold this profoundly anti-working class status quo.

The combination of an increasingly regressive tax regime, growing utility bills and inadequate money wage increases are producing something that barely even happened under Thatcher, namely real wage falls: “In both the final three months of 2006 and the first three months of 2007, there was a decline in real disposable personal income (RPDI). In English, that means that when you take account of rising prices, the money you are bringing in each month buys less than it previously did.” (‘The signals say no to a snap election’, The Guardian, 23 July 2007)

Again, the consequences of this are apparent and obvious. The constituencies with the lowest turnout are traditional Labour seats in northern cities.

From 400,000 in 1997, Labour membership had fallen to half that figure by 2004, and has now fallen to it’s lowest ever. In 2006, faced with chronic funding difficulties, Labour had to reschedule loans from its major donors, acquire a bridging loan from the bank, sell its London HQ and cut its HQ staff by half.

The neo-liberal consensus is dying slowly. A consensus built upon 60% approval –at best- is inherently unstable and in the long-term unsustainable. Barring a disaster of Black Wednesday proportions, Labour will win the next election and become established as the natural party of government, and all the trends in turn-out and political participation that have been apparent since the birth of New Labour will continue. The question is, what will happen next?

At present, the only organised opposition to the neo-liberal consensus is coming from the right: having averaged almost 15% across 750 candidates in May’s local elections, the BNP took 9% in the recent Sedgefield by-election (alongside significant votes for UKIP and the English Democrats). The Tory party has always been a coalition, held together by its ability to win elections. If it can no longer do this then the coalition has no reason to exist. Failure to win the next election, having exhausted every tactical path open to it, may well see the Tory party atrophy, with its liberal wing re-aligning itself with Labour and the Lib Dems, and its authoritarian wing forming a hard-right bloc with the BNP and UKIP.

The left, as it stands, is nowhere: it is stuck looking at the past, to 1917 or some supposed golden era of Old Labour. The undemocratic nature of Leninism is now well known. Less well known is that Attlee’s Labour party came out against workers control of the nationalised industries in 1944-5: Fabian socialism is as elitist and top-down as its capitalist counterpart. The rising working class showed its willingness to fight capital and the state during the Miners strike, Wapping and the Poll Tax revolt. The Labour party sat back and did nothing.

Neo-Liberalism as a political Strategy

This is no great loss: the working class is better off without the ‘leadership’ of the middle class left, whose only motive for being on the left was that the working class was seen as a potential ‘winning horse’, albeit one that required the guidance of a middle class jockey. Ultimately, the working class can only win its own battles, and the present period offers the opportunity – in fact, requires the necessity- of re-thinking and re-strategising. The victory of neo-liberalism was not historically inevitable, but neither was it an historic accident: it was the product of decades of effort.

Neo-liberalism as a political entity was formally born at the Mont Pelerin conference of 1947, although there had been some piecemeal efforts prior to the war. A group of intellectuals, led by Hayek and including Milton Friedman, identified what they saw as a collectivist consensus –encompassing Keynesianism, socialism, communism and fascism- and consciously set out to destroy it and replace it with free market liberalism (conveniently ignoring the fact that capitalism, like any form of industrial economy, is largely collectivist, and the ‘market economy’ largely a myth, purely through technological and organizational necessity. To give one example, the internet and the computer you are reading this on would not exist if it weren’t for decades of publicly funded R&D by the US military), using ‘freedom’ as their major conceptual, philosophical and ideological weapon: competitive market capitalism safeguards individual freedom, collectivism invariably restricts it.

Hayek set out to win the hearts and minds not of the masses, but of the elites: the decision makers and intellectuals who were enthralled by collectivism, and who Hayek saw as marching to their doom. However, nature abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of any original thinking from the left these ideas have gained a wider currency. It took until 11 September 1973, when Pinochet came to power in Chile, for the neo-liberals to see a tangible return on their efforts (this can be seen as the date the neo-liberal era of history began). The economic ideas put into practice in Pinochet’s Chile were born under Friedman’s stewardship at the University of Chicago. These ideas were then exported to Britain –as senior Thatcherites have openly admitted-, and are now increasingly dominant worldwide.

How we can revive working class politics

If the twentieth century has shown us anything, it is that authoritarian socialism does not work, does not deserve to work and does not deserve the loyalty of the working class. That the left resorted to undemocratic methods allowed the right to paint itself throughout the twentieth century –not without justification- as being the best guarantor of freedom and democracy, something the neo-liberals fully exploited. If a progressive and democratic alternative to neo-liberalism is to be constructed, then the work of developing a counter-philosophy has to begin now, as Hayek did in the 1940s. Where Hayek sought only to win the hearts and minds of the elites, our job is to win the hearts and minds of the masses. The difficulty in this is more logistical than intellectual. Like Hayek, we have historical and intellectual precedent. Lionel Robbins urged the implementation of neo-liberal measures in Britain in the 1930s. He lost out and Keynesian measures were implemented instead for one simple reason: a few short years after the General Strike, the working class was too strong to take on.

We have a long and honourable tradition of thought to draw on that advocates what James Connolly called ‘working class democracy’, or economic democracy: the placing of the economy under genuinely democratic control from the bottom-up and ending coercion of the individual from above. This is the final, and ultimate, goal for all progressives, for anyone committed to equality and democracy. It is the only ideological tradition that is in keeping with, and worthy of, the best and most natural democratic, anti-authoritarian instincts of our class.

This tradition was largely –although never completely- obscured by 1917 and everything that followed (almost perversely, Robert Dahl, professor emeritus of political science at the US’s most exclusive university, Yale, is a prominent contemporary advocate of this tradition). It is this tradition of thought that must be revived if neo-liberalism is to be overcome in a humane manner. Failure to do this will leave the field open to fascism and militant Islam as the only ideological alternatives to neo-liberalism, a dynamic that is already in effect. Economic democracy, and the working class, must return to the ring. The two are inextricably linked, and are now the exclusive property of each other.

How come the riot police never break up CAMRA meetings?

If everyone drunk ale instead of Stella Bleedin' Artois England would be a lot pleasanter place. As I've said before, ale is mellow cannabis in liquid form. Don't play into the alcophobe's hands!

Don't blame drinkers - it's the problem drinks
By Ed West, Daily Telegraph 23/07/2007

More bad news for Britain's drinking classes. Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson has stated that he would "strongly commend" an increase in alcohol tax to reduce the soaring rates of drink-related illness, violence and hospital admissions.

This follows Iain Duncan Smith's suggestion of a tax hike on beer, wine and whisky to combat that British disease, binge drinking.

Booze, a vice enjoyed by yobs and Daily Telegraph readers, tends to divide the country not on Left-Right lines but according to the older divisions of Roundhead and Cavalier.

And the Puritans do have a point, as anyone can see by walking sober through a city centre in the early hours.

But is the violence really a direct result of drinking too much? Until very recently, the French consumed more alcohol than the British, and, though they suffer high cirrhosis rates, they don't end up brawling on the streets.

No one has used the term "the French disease" since the introduction of syphilis. That is because liver disease and violence are two different issues, one a private and the other a social cost.

I think the problem is what we drink. A pint of real ale costs just £1.99 in a Samuel Smith's pub in central London, but there's about as much chance of seeing a fight there as at a Jehovah's Witnesses gathering.

Tesco house wine, at £3 a bottle, is perfectly sufficient to make the day seem 10 degrees warmer, and the lunch party shouldn't end in fisticuffs.

However, there are problem drinks that deserve close scrutiny. The super-strength lager known as "wife-beater", alcopops, sugary sweet to make them more palatable to the kids, and brain-rotting cheap vodka; they are all draughts favoured by the trouble-makers - the under-agers, the abusive alcoholics, the fist-flying yobs.

Stereotyping drinkers as homogenous is a form of prejudice tantamount to alcophobia: punitive taxes should target the problem drinkers through the problem drinks. Why should the peaceful majority of the drinking community suffer because of a few extremists?

Christopher Hitchens salutes Saddam Hussein!

Missed this while I was away in Couver, but made aware of it a day or two back (cheers Anna!). People are quite free to change their political opinions, but when you think of how armchair chickenhawk Christopher Hitchens has been such a cheerleader for the war in Iraq to be quoted as saying "Saddam Hussain...has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser" must be a tad embarrassing. Though I don't think "The Hitch" has much grasp of the concept of "embarrassing"...

Not much else to say, except it seems to me that many (most? all?) Trotskyites and ex-Trots need to (i) worship power (in Hitchens case, Iraq then, the Neo-Cons now) and (ii) have a need for a father figure to worship (Freud would have a field day).

Iraq Flexes Arab Muscle: New Statesman 05 July 2007
In 1976 Christopher Hitchens saw Saddam as an up-and-coming secular socialist who would transform Iraq into a progressive model for the rest of the Middle East

From The New Statesman 2 April 1976

Hitchens, now an American citizen, remains one of the fiercest and most unrepentant enthusiasts for the US-British overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But, back in 1976, when working for the New Statesman, he took a more admiring view of the Iraqi dictator, as this article shows. Young Hitchens saw Saddam as an up-and-coming secular socialist who would transform Iraq into a progressive model for the rest of the Middle East.

Selected by Robert Taylor

An Arab country with the second largest proven oil reserves, a fierce revolutionary ideology, a large and recently-blooded army, and a leadership composed almost entirely of men in their thirties is obviously a force to be reckoned with. Iraq, which has this dynamic combination and much else besides, has not until recently been very much regarded as a power. But with the new discussions in Opec, the ending of the Kurdistan war and the new round of fighting in Lebanon, its political voice is being heard more and more. The Baghdad regime is the first oil-producing government to opt for 100-per-cent nationalisation, a process completed with the acquisition of foreign assets in Basrah last December. It was the first to call for the use of oil as a political weapon against Israel and her backers. It gives strong economic and political support to the ‘Rejection Front’ Palestinians who oppose Arafat’s conciliation and are currently trying to outface the Syrians in Beirut. And it has a leader — Saddam Hussain — who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser.

Dining with an old man on a houseboat moored in the Tigris. I discovered that he inadvertently embodied the history of modern Iraq. He had been imprisoned in 1941 for opposing the British, again in 1959 for hostility to Kassem’s pro-Russian line and finally in 1969 by the present regime. The last of these had, he said, been easily the worst. He was personally interrogated by Nadim Kzar, then head of the secret police and since executed for his crimes. There had been torture and brutality of a far worse sort than his previous incarcerations. And yet he declared that he thought the present government the best Iraqi Administration he had seen. Why? ‘Because it has made us strong and respected.’ There seems no getting round this point. From the festeringly poor and politically dependent nation of a generation ago, Iraq has become a power in every sense — military, economic and ideological. Currently, it is pressing for a more aggressive Opec pricing strategy in order to raise more cash for its development projects, and envisages a doubling of oil production from 2m. barrels per day to over 4m. within the next ten years.

Strangely, its ally in this push against the Saudis is none other than neighbouring Iran, with which Iraq has only recently ceased a near state of war over Kurdistan. The Shah and his ‘White Revolution’ also need quick money to finance internal development, enormous military expansion and foreign aid programmes. The difference is that while the Shah ranges himself against communism and sends troops to the Gulf to fight Arab guerrillas, Iraq is dedicated to the idea of a single socialist Arab nation from Gibraltar to the Indian ocean; the original Ba’athist dream.

In their different crusades, both Iraq and Iran take a distinctly unsentimental line on internal opposition. Ba’ath party spokesmen, when questioned about the lack of public dissent, will point to efforts made by the party press to stimulate criticism of revolutionary shortcomings. True enough, there are such efforts, but they fall rather short of permitting any organised opposition. The argument then moves to the claim, which is often made in Iraq, that the country is surrounded by enemies and attacked by imperialist intrigue. Somewhere in the collision between Baghdad and Teheran on this point, the Kurdish nationalists met a very painful end. We now know, from the US committee of investigation, chaired by Congressman Otis Pike, that there was a Nixon- Kissinger strategy of arming and encouraging a Kurdish revolt, not for the purpose of creating a Kurdish state (which would have horrified the Shah) but for the purpose of de-stabilising Iraq. It was specifically argued, by those who planned the operation, that the Kurds should not be allowed to win.

They were allowed to take heavy casualties and suffer appalling refugee problems; and then were dumped unceremoniously when it became clear that the Iraqi government was not going to crumble. ‘Even in the context of covert action,’ says the report, ‘ours was a cynical enterprise.’ As one who had, on previous visits to Baghdad, scorned the argument that the Kurds were foreign puppets, I should say that ‘cynical’ is the mildest adjective that could be used about this latest triumph of the Secretary of State.

The Kurds now have a very attenuated version of autonomy, and former members of the Barzani armed forces are being moved to the South. At least, however, Iraq constitutionally recognises that she is a partly Kurdish state, which is more than Iran or Turkey do. Further tests for the regime lie ahead. The quarrel with Syria, which involves differences over Ba’athist ideology as well as a dispute over Syrian damming of the Euphrates river, has now extended to the Lebanon, where Syrian troops have attacked newspapers and buildings controlled by Iraqi-sympathising Palestinians. Relations with Iran are still far from cordial. In response to requests for criticism in the party press, some demands were raised for a constituent assembly, and other complaints voiced about the tightness of the regime. All these remain to be acted on, and as the situation grows more complicated Saddam Hussain will rise more clearly to the top. Make a note of the name. Iraq has been strengthened internally by the construction of a ‘strategic pipeline’ which connects the Gulf to the northern fields for the first time. She has been strengthened externally by her support for revolutionary causes and by the resources she can deploy. It may not be electrification plus Soviet power, but the combination of oil and ‘Arab socialism’ is hardly less powerful.

Back home!

Apols for the lack of blogging since coming back from Vancouver a week and a bit ago. Been busy and/or being sucked into facebook since getting back. Will post in the next few days to keep things ticking over. I haven't forgotten this blog!

Hope all is well out there!