More on the (British) Labour leadership issue

John Rentoul in the Independent has written an interesting column considering how Labour should respond to a fairly novel and menacing threat - a progressive coalition of the Conservative and Liberal democrat parties that has, so far, confounded Labour's hopes by pursuing the sort of progressive good ideas that Labour neglected to investigate while it was in office. Of course, there is plenty of time for the both parties to revert to type and for the coalition to crack ... but that's a pretty uninspiring route for Labour to follow. Unfortunately, as Rentoul points out, it seems to be the one the party is opting for:

At the weekend I attended a Labour Party inquest. It was organised by the modernisers' faction, Progress. There were a lot of young people there, and some of them were most excited by the novelty of being in opposition. It wears off, you know. As someone who spent most of his formative political years attending leftish inquests into Labour defeats, I have to say that they are all the same and that they are mostly beside the point. A lot of people become animated about electoral reform or impatient to take the fight to the Tories (and in the present case, the addition of the Liberal Democrats to the government seems to have made no difference); while in between sessions all the talk is of nominations and shadow cabinet elections.

Furious denunciations were made of the coalition and all its works. The 55 per cent threshold for dissolving a fixed-term parliament was attacked as "gerrymandering". This overlooked the fact that, had Labour won the election, or if it had succeeded in stitching together a deal with the Liberal Democrats, it would have introduced fixed-term parliaments itself. In order to mean anything, a law setting a fixed term for parliament must have some mechanism to make it difficult for a party or parties with a bare majority to pre-empt the fixed date and seek a new election. Oh well. Similarly, the coalition is attacked for wanting to equalise the sizes of constituencies. Yes, that might help the Tories – much less than the Tories imagine, incidentally – but how can the opposition argue against the principle of reducing a bias in its favour?

Similar denunciations were made of colleagues seeking common ground with the enemy. Candidates for the leadership were condemned for blaming Labour's defeat on immigration and welfare dependency. Karen Buck MP, who defeated Joanne Cash to hold her seat and who is usually on the sensible wing of the party, said she did not want Labour to respond to defeat for the first time by "lurching to the right". But if the party is on the left of the centre, and most of the voters it needs to win are in the centre, lurching to the right might be a sensible response to defeat. (1)

Now, there is some sense in what Rentoul says, but I can't help feeling that he is politicking on the behalf of the Blairite candidates for the leadership. He's as guilty of the tribalism as the left-leaning members he castigates. Of course, he doesn't admit his tribalism is tribalism - it is presented as good, plain common sense.

I remember an anecdote comparing Bill Clinton to FDR. FDR, so the yarn went, would go out, meet people and convince them that his ideas were right. Clinton, on the other hand, would go out, meet people, and become convinced their ideas were right ... And how much more so Blair and New Labour. So - as you may have gathered, I disagree with his suggestion that Labour needs to continue moving right. For every vote it picks up there, it will lose one on the left. Far more sensible would be to come up with a vigorous set of centre-left ideas, go out and convince people they are good ideas that are worth voting for.

I also suspect that the electorate are more left than their voting suggests. In 1997, faced with a tired, corrupt administration tottering towards its quietus, they voted massively in favour of the bright, untried, centre-left alternative. In 2010, faced with a tired, corrupt administration tottering towards its quietus, they voted much less massively in favour of the bright, untried, centre-right alternative. Probably the deciding factor wasn't economic doctrine, but simply revulsion at the government's berserk authoritarianism - the seeming demented desire to inflict things upon people in the face of their opposition - that's the convincing people things are a good idea bit.

Finally, to make a troika of truculent tiffs, I also think Labour has to face up to Iraq. Yes, I know it was years ago and it is something Miliband the elder, Burnham and the Blairites would rather not talk about, but it is something that still rankles with a lot of party members and supporters, especially those of us who were proven right by events. A bit of mea culpa, humility and an explanation would be appreciated by those who were so blind to the evidence against war in 2003, rather than high-handed - that authoritarian streak showing through again - attempts to pretend it isn't worth talking about.

After all, if they can't account for such a colossal error of judgement over the most important foreign policy decision in decades, then how on Earth can they be trusted to lead the party?

1 - "A return to tribalism won't help Labour," by John Rentoul. Published in the Independent, 27th of May, 2010. (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/john-rentoul/john-rentoul-a-return-to-tribalism-wont-help-labour-1983718.html)

Something nice to listen to

The divine Peggy Seeger, singing "I'm going to be an engineer," live in 2008. I have this (somewhere) on vinyl, and that version is older than I am. While Peggy probably won't appreciate having that brought to her attention, she sounds just as good now as she did then:

Israel offerred to sell apartheid South Africa nuclear weapons

In 1978, Graham Greene published a book called The Human Factor, which - if my memory serves me correctly - included a sub-plot about the sale of nuclear arms to apartheid South Africa. I think the idea originated from unsubstantiated rumours about efforts by Israel to conduct such a transaction.

Well, now they are are substantiated:

The "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them "in three sizes". The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that "the very existence of this agreement" was to remain secret.

The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of "ambiguity" in neither confirming nor denying their existence.

The Israeli authorities tried to stop South Africa's post-apartheid government declassifying the documents at Polakow-Suransky's request and the revelations will be an embarrassment, particularly as this week's nuclear non-proliferation talks in New York focus on the Middle East.

They will also undermine Israel's attempts to suggest that, if it has nuclear weapons, it is a "responsible" power that would not misuse them, whereas countries such as Iran cannot be trusted. (1)

Now what is it they say about truth and fiction?

Beyond the hypocrisy of preaching about the dangers of Iran passing on nuclear arms and technology is the jaw dropping idea that Israel supplying the most blatantly racist and fascistic government since the fall of the Nazis with nuclear arms. I can't help but read this as showing that the Israeli government of the day - which means luminaries like Peres who are still in office - tacitly agreed with the sick ideas of the racist apartheid regime.

Any Israeli would surely agree that regime that offered support to the Nazis in World War Two and tried to supply them with secret weapons would have faced vilification and ostracism, especially if they continued to keep the people who brokered the deals in power. I can't see why a similar sanction shouldn't be applied to Israel, as long as it continues to honour the scum who masterminded this disgustingly cynical ploy.

A regime that defies the UN, attacks civilian populations within its borders, is suspected of possessing weapons of mass destruction, and is willing to sell them to evil bastards. Bit of deja vu?

1 - "Revealed: how Israel offered to sell South Africa nuclear weapons," by Chris Mcgreal. Published in The Guardian, 23rd of May, 2010. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/23/israel-south-africa-nuclear-weapons)

Don't mention the war

To borrow from the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto, there is a spectre haunting those who seek to lead the British Labour party. Or - I prefer the imagery of Helen MacFarlane's original English translation - what is bothering them is not an austere spectre, but a "frightful hobgoblin." Spectre or hobgoblin, it likes to sneak up behind the various contenders and whisper, in the style of World War One recruitment posters, "What did you do in the war, daddy?"

The uncouth hobgoblin refers, of course, to the invasion of Iraq, which has been raised among the candidates for the Labour party leadership. This has resulted in various degrees of discomfort, squirming and self-righteousness.

Ed Balls and Ed Miliband have made an issue of the war. Neither was an MP at the time, so both were in the pleasant position of not having been forced to account for their support of it. Ed Balls - with uncharacteristic frankness - admits that he would have voted for it:

“I was in the room when a decision was taken that we would say it was that dastardly Frenchman, Jacques Chirac, who had scuppered it. It wasn’t really true, you know. I said to Gordon: 'I know why you’re doing this, but you’ll regret it’. France is a very important relationship for us.”

Although Mr Balls concedes that, had he been an MP at the time, he would have voted for the war on the basis of the facts provided, he now concedes that not only was the information wrong but the war unjustified.

“It was a mistake. On the information we had, we shouldn’t have prosecuted the war. We shouldn’t have changed our argument from international law to regime change in a non-transparent way. It was an error for which we as a country paid a heavy price, and for which many people paid with their lives. Saddam Hussein was a horrible man, and I am pleased he is no longer running Iraq. But the war was wrong.” (1)

I think this is a pretty obvious attempt to pre-empt questions about Iraq. Balls is too closely associated with Gordon Brown to make any claim that he was always against it to hold up - the best he can manage is to admit that it was a mistake, But it's basically designed to make the whole nasty issue go away.

The Edward strain of Miliband has said pretty much the same, in a Guardian interview:

Ed Miliband was living in the US and was not yet an MP at the time. "I was pretty clear at the time that I thought there needs to be more due process here," he said.

"As we all know, the basis for going to war was on the basis of Saddam's threat in terms of weapons of mass destruction and therefore that is why I felt the weapons inspectors should have been given more time to find out whether he had those weapons, and Hans Blix – the head of the UN weapons inspectorate – was saying that he wanted to be given more time. The basis for going to war was the threat that he posed.

"The combination of not giving the weapons inspectors more time, and then the weapons not being found, I think for a lot of people it led to a catastrophic loss of trust for us, and we do need to draw a line under it." (2)

Perhaps I am being to subtle here, but I detect a difference in emphasis between Milband and Balls. Miliband wants to "Draw a line" under the issue, which means confronting it. My sense is that Balls wants to escape further probing on this unpleasant topic.

Like Balls, Ed Miliband also has the luxury of not having been an MP at the time. So perhaps Balls is eyeing up his rival and trying to anticipate what could still be a major dividing line between the 'mainstream' candidates - Ed Miliband, who didn't, David Miliband and Andy Burnham who did, and Ed balls who didn't, but is so closely associated with those that did that it makes little odds. Balls, obviously, wants to be on the same side of the dividing line as Ed Miliband, but his close association with Brown means can't get both feet over. He's left in this rather awkward position of saying it was a mistake and that he would have made it. I suppose he gets points for candour.

Everyone knows Iraq was a tremendous fuck up and a really bad idea. Acknowledging that is meant to draw a line under it for Balls and Ed Miliband and put some pressure on their rivals to do the same. It might not be very effective, as there are two leadership candidates who voted against the war - Dianne Abbott and John McDonell. Though I suppose as long as they appear to be outsiders, presenting yourself as they least tainted of the old crew might have serve purpose.

But that's assuming it remains a fight between the members of the old cabinet, and Abbott and McDonnell remain outsiders - which may not be the case. I remember a time when a certain David Cameron was a rank outsider, and Ken Clarke was expected to be conservative leader. Ditto a certain Barack Obama, and a horny chap called Clinton from Arkansas.

Meanwhile, David Miliband thinks that the whole Iraq invasion, false intelligence and violation of the UN's authority thing isn't really worth talking about:

But David Miliband, who, unlike his two rivals, was an MP in 2003 and voted for the invasion, said much of the controversy about the war had dissipated.

"While Iraq was a source of division in the past, it doesn't need to be a source of division in the future," he said as he arrived at the annual conference of the centre-left Progress group in London.

"Iraq was a big issue at the 2005 general election, but the vast majority of MPs and candidates I have spoken to this time say that while it was a big issue then it was much less of an issue in 2010.

"I said during the election campaign that I thought it was time to move on."

Asked whether his brother and Balls were using the war to "score points" within the Labour Party, he said: "I think that is something you would have to ask them about."

Miliband said he stood by his evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the war that if it have been known then that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, there would have been no invasion. (3)

So the greatest foreign policy blunder since Suez (at least) isn't that important and we should worry about why it happened or why Miliband was so shockingly wrong-headed as to support it. There is a fucking huge, Iraq shaped elephant in the room, covered in the blood of western soldiers and Iraqi civilians, but we really mustn't talk about it, because it is time to "move on."

Note the careful wording in the final paragraph - "if it had been known then that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction ..." As if that could ever have been definitively "known." Remember Donald Rumsfeld's assertion that lack of evidence was in its own way, evidence? (4) This is the same idea. The invasion was wrong, but the error was acceptable, because those making the error had not received to concrete proof of Iraqi innocence that would have fores-stalled military action. Wrong. The Iraqis had been co-operative and inspectors had found no evidence of active - or even dormant - WMD programmes. That should have been enough to stop any invasion, not any preposterous requirement that the Iraqis do the impossible by proving they are clean. There had been no proof to the contrary, so there should have been no invasion.

David Miliband is a mealy mouthed, self serving, slimy git. Like Tony "This might cost me my job" Blair (5), he seems to fail to grasp that there are more important things than his career. He must never, ever be leader of the Labour party. It would be a dismal re-run of Blairism, and - to borrow from Karl Marx again - the first time it was tragedy, the second time feeble farce (6).

1 - "Ed Balls interview: Iraq war was a mistake," by Mary Riddell and Andrew Porter. Published in the Telegraph, 21st of may, 2010. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/7750935/Ed-Balls-interview-Iraq-war-was-a-mistake.html)
2 - "Ed Miliband: Labour's catastrophic loss of trust over Iraq," by Patrick Wintour and Allegra Stratton. Published in the Guardian, 21st of May, 2010. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/21/ed-miliband-labour-iraq-war)
3 - "David Miliband: Time to move on from Iraq," by David Batty and agencies. Published in the Guardian, 22nd of May, 2010. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/22/david-miliband-iraq-war-labour-leadership)
4 - Rumsfeld's words are quoted in "No evidence is evidence: Rumsfeld's paradigm shift," by Carol Norris. Published in Counterpunch, 19th of January, 2003. (http://www.counterpunch.org/norris01182003.html)
5 - In fairness to Tony Blair, he didn't actually say that, but he did say something to that effect, quoted in "Blair talks of the strains of war, his family's unstinting support and his relief in victory," by Andrew Sparrow. Published by the Telegraph, 19th of April, 2003. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1427955/Blair-talks-of-the-strains-of-war-his-familys-unstinting-support-and-his-relief-in-victory.html)
6 - "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, " by Karl Marx, 1852. (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm)

Stock markets plunge as Tories take control

Stock markets around the world plummeted overnight as people realized that David Cameron was prime minister (1).

Stockbrokers were seen hysterically writhing on the floor of exchanges around the globe, gnawing at their limbs and smearing themselves in their own excrement, as the full scale of the disaster became clear.

One senior analyst described the formation of a conservative dominated government in Britain as "The worst thing that could possibly happen to Britain, even worse than everyone in the country being beating to death with rotting fruit and their corpses desecrated with cheese. By Hitler."

The FTSE 100 actually went fully negative - a stage below zero never reached by any stock and previously thought to be impossible. Complete catastrophe was only avoided what George Osborne cunningly removed the '-' sign from in front of the number, creating the illusion that the market still actually existed in a meaningful way.

"We would have closed down the exchange," explained one broker, who had been trading during the Great Crash of 1927. "But we couldn't, because under the Tories it is impossible to do anything useful. Everyone just ran about screaming. I wet myself, far more thoroughly than I did in '27, and I had to gouge my own eyes out because I couldn't bear to see what was happening. things were so good, only a few days ago. Then they put Cameron in charge.'

The Dow Jones coped with the disaster by eliminating all references to Britain from the American language. It is now punishable by summary execution to make any reference, however indirect, to the existence of England, Britain, the FTSE or David Cameron.

"It is a real chance for us to start over," said Bradley T. Shotgun, an American policy adviser to President Obama. "Up until now, our language has been colonise, but this has given us a chance to wage a new war of independence and drive out all traces of colonial heritage from our language. We've even renamed the language itself. Instead of the English language, we call it the Amerish language. Oh, fuck, I said 'English,' shoot me now."

European leaders have shown a range of responses to the global crisis triggered by Mr Cameron's election. The president of France, Nicholas Sarkozy immediately resigned and were last seen trying to board planes to South America, in a variety of unconvincing disguises. The president of Greece immediately offered to extend financial aid to the stricken country, allegedly muttering, "The but for the grace of God go I ..."

The British Government in Exile, based in New Zealand, issued a press release calling for the people of Britain to rise up against the appalling mismanagement of the economy, before the country runs out of zeros to put on its discredited bank notes.

1 - "FTSE 100 hits seven-month low on European debt fears," by Julie Kollewe. Published in The Guardian, 21st of May, 2010. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/21/london-market-jitters-european-crisis). Do I really need to point out that everything other than the first seven words is complete fantasy, the product of my somewhat childish and sleep-deprived imagination? Probably, I do ...

When I see a slave, I call it a slave ...

But in Texas, it seems that all this talk of slaves and slave rades and slavery and so on has been judged a bit too strong for school children.

Tempers are flaring in Texas over controversial proposed changes to the US state's public school curriculum.

The changes, put forward by the Board of Education's conservative members, include referring to the slave trade as the "Atlantic triangular trade".

Critics say the changes are ideological and distort history, but proponents argue they are correcting a long-standing liberal bias in education.

The conservatives are expected to prevail in Friday's final vote. (1)

"Atlantic triangular trade" - is this some weird new racial epithet? Can you refer to people of colour as 'triangles' at dinner parties without identifying yourself as an execrable racist? Or is it more street than that. Does it contrast with 'square' white people? Are Asians hexagonal?

Inverted political correctness is the new tool of the conservatives.

And yes, I'm quite away of the 'logic' behind the term 'triangular.' The ships went from Britain to Africa and then to America and then back to London. But that ships sailed these routes is not at all remarkable. Ships have always sailed in all sorts of directions and usually end up where they started. That the ships set out seeking slaves, transported slaves, and then carried the commodities produced by slaves back to Europe was.

Which is why we called it the slave trade.

1 - "Texas schoolbook fight heats up," unattributed article. Published by the BBC, 19th of May, 2010. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8693397.stm)

I was, of course, completely wrong - Cruddas rules himself out

It would appear Jon Cruddas has ruled himself out of the leadership race, if a piece he's written for the Guardian's Comment is free section is to be taken at face value:

I am determined to play a full role in the re-invigoration of a party that stands as the best hope for the people of this country. But to put it simply, that role of rebuilding and energising the party is a job that doesn't have a vacancy.

I would like to be involved in the debate about the future direction of the party and how we reconnect with our lost voters. But I cannot enter a leadership election just to contribute to a debate; to go into this must be on the basis of running to win and hand on heart I do not want to be leader of the Labour party or subsequently prime minister. These require certain qualities I do not possess. (1)

While that seems pretty definitive, I can't help but wonder if he's preparing a second piece, rather along these lines:

I had no intention of running, no desire to run, but I was told by so many people ... so many trusted people ... that I had to run, that I feel it would be wrong, even selfish of me, for me not to ignore the advice of all these good people. I said i don't want to be the leader of the Labour party, but if I am elected to this great office, I will do my very best to serve the needs of the party ...

I hope this is just a ploy, a tacit appeal for the hackneyed 'ground swell of support' of trite political parlance. After all, after the megalomania of Blair and brown, surely the last thing Labour needs is someone who actually wants to be leader? Or it could be a bid for the deputy leadership - or perhaps even a sign he's thinking of the London mayoralty.

But without Cruddas, there is no candidate I can see that won't just repeat the mistakes of the past. And none of the other candidates look at all electable.

1 - "Hand on heart, I do not want to be Labour leader," by Jon Cruddas. Published in the Guardian, 17th of May, 2010. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/17/labour-leadership-jon-cruddas)