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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101310502015-06-29T08:35:28.339+01:00BobFromBrockleybobhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-63623259034775535632015-06-25T19:21:00.002+01:002015-06-25T19:51:59.257+01:00Far right violence from Charleston to Mold Tesco

Last week saw the horrific attack by Dylann Roof on a black church in Charleston. There has been lots of debate about whether his actions should be named "hate crimes" or "terrorism" or not, which I won't comment on, except to say that the far right, in its various guises, has killed quite a lot of people in America in the past decade. Depending how you count it, there have been well over a hundred incidents of multiple homicide or attempted multiple homicide - see, from different political perspectives, reports by the ADL, SPLC and PRA.

One of the reasons these incidents tend to get classed as "hate crime" rather than "terrorism" is that they are typically carried out by "lone wolves", often "self-radicalised" rather than networked. But typically they have made connections - sometimes online, but often face-to-face - with far right groups. It is far right ideology, not (just) visceral racist hate, that inspires them to mass murder.*

Worth noting is that conspiracy theory, and almost always antisemitic conspiracy theory, rather than racial prejudice, that is usually at the heart of their ideology (as John-Paul Pagano shows here, exposing the antisemitic conspiracism central to Dylann Roof's worldview, in which blacks are the manipulated pawns of Jews, the real enemy).**

Although Fox News and its ilk like to portray the left as full of hate, there have only been a small number of comparable left-wing attacks in the last decade or so: Joseph Andrew Stack and Lee Malvo, and earlier Ted Kaczynski, the eco-primitivist Unabomber.*** It's striking, though, that their worldviews were conspiracist too, and that they shared more memes with survivalists and fringe right groups such as the militia movement and sovereign citizens than with the socialist far left.

British liberals like to chuckle and sneer at American political wackiness, but this is a British problem too. This week we have seen the trial of Zack Davies, Britain's would-be Dylann Roof, who carried out a machete attack in a Tesco's supermarket in Mold, on a Sikh man he thought was Muslim, attempting to behead him as Lee Rigby was beheaded. Thankfully, a former soldier bravely intervened and saved Dr Bhambra's life.

Davies is not the first. Since David Copeland's nail-bombings at the end of the last century, we've had Robert Cottage, Martyn Gilleard, Nathan Worrell, Neil Lewington, Pavlo Lapshyn, Ryan McGee. In 2013, the Home Secretary

disclosed that one in ten cases referred to a Home Office scheme to stop youngsters being caught up in terrorism related to the Far Right. Seventeen right-wing extremists are serving prison sentences linked to terrorism, including a man who built up the biggest arms cache uncovered recently in Britain, two men convicted of preparing to use home-made poison in an attack and another jailed for circulating terrorist literature.
For some reason, these attacks are not newsworthy in Britain in the way Islamist terrorist attacks are, which is why many of the names I've listed might not ring a bell.

Again, most of these British attackers are "lone wolves" - but most have connected to far right organisations. McGee, for example, had a mum who was active in the EDL.

Zack Davies was connected with a particularly unsavoury far right group, National Action.**** Matthew Collins writes about him and his NA connection here. While Davies thought his victim was Muslim, the heart of National Action ideology (paralleling Dylann Roof) is conspiracist antisemitism.

Davies also admired ISIS in a twisted way, and at his trial clearly emphathised with Lee Rigby's killers even as he claimed he wanted to avenge Rigby's death. This is not so surprising: Davies' fascism mirrors jihadi Islamism in many ways. It is disappointing that many anti- and "counter"-jihadis fail to take the far right seriously, just as many anti-fascists fail to take Islamism seriously.

***

*For more detail on Roof's brand of white supremacism, see Matthew Lyons.

**This is an aside, but it is interesting the lengths that some "anti-Zionists" who like to think that antisemitism is dead will go in their denial. Max Blumenthal rightly identifies the relationship between Roof's ideology and views that circulate on the fringes of the American ultra-conservatism. But he wrongly claims that Roof loathes leftist and liberal Jews for their "agitation of the black race". It is not leftist and liberal Jews (the good, exceptional Jews of whom Blumenthal presumably includes himself) that Roof loathes; it is Jews in general. And Blumenthal's buddy David Sheen managed to make it about Israel by writing 1000 words on an obscure Israeli site that shockingly expressed empathy for the Charleston victims, thus committing the awful crime of "hasbara", even though churches are attacked in Israel too. CJ Werleman went a step further, claiming, against all the evidence, that Zionism is one of the ingredients of Roof's white supremacist ideology.

***Thanks to Manfred Rosenbauer and Just Quoting for these examples, via Twitter.

****I'd like to say more about the interesting variant of fascism that National Action represent, including their mimicry of anti-fascist and anti-capitalist style, a phenomenon which Czech antifa have named "the big neo-Nazi crib". But that's for some other time.
bobhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-16685252077008581972015-06-06T00:36:00.001+01:002015-06-06T00:36:09.331+01:00On Jewish privilege
The term "Jewish privilege" has been circulating around the identity politics scene, and specifically among Jewish leftists, for some time now - at least since 2010 when deployed particularly ickily by the Canadian Jewish-born Jennifer Peto and by Leah Berkenwald who said Jews need to "own" their Jewish privilege, whatever that means.

The concept draws on the concept of "white privilege" (which ultimately comes from WEB DuBois' insight into the "public and psychological wage" that white workers got by virtue of their whiteness in the Reconstruction period), but subverts it by saying that Jews, not being "people of color", are privileged in the system of white supremacy. This dear, sweet self-flagellating member of the 1%, for example, thinks that being Jewish is part of his privilege that he needs to check.

Maybe I'll write more one day about this, but now I'm not going to go into why I think it's a completely ridiculous line of argument, as that's been done brilliantly by my comrade Disillusioned Marxist already, as has Adam Levick from the opposite end of the political spectrum. (Of course, many Jews are positioned as white in this racist world and therefore do experience many of the "wages" of whiteness -- but not as Jews.)

What I want to note here instead is how the idea has travelled.

The concept seems to be gaining some traction among the hardcore anti-Zionists of MondoWeiss, who recently published on "how Jewish establishment groups... exercise power in an attempt to control public discussions". Apparently, because some museum doesn't talk enough about Palestinian suffering, it is exhibiting" white privilege. It is this same racism, violence, and white privilege that we all need to resist – from Ferguson to Ayotzinapa to Palestine."

From this milieu, the concept has been picked up by the far right - not for the first time fishing in the same waters. "Jewish privilege" is now used by the relative intellectuals of the antisemitic scene at Occidental Observer and in the far right "Traditionalist" scene. And by anti-black and antisemitic fascists at Renegade Broadcasting, by sundry tweeters whose avatars refer to Julius Evola, Nietzche and Odin. And of course by David Duke, who himself tunes in to the figures like Gilad Atzmon from the anti-Zionist scene. This is from his website this week, in an article that closely echoes many of Atzmon's themes:

Today Dr. Duke provided a preview of a major research article that he is preparing on Jewish privilege verses White privilege. The fact is that in American and many other Western societies today, privilege in concentrated in a tiny Jewish minority which when it suits them bills themselves as white. However, this same privileged Jewish elite goes to great lengths to suppress European American representation in important power institutions, such as the Ivy League universities.
And now, finally, the concept is coming to rest on the streets of London, where neo-Nazis are planning to march through Golder's Green to protest "Jewification" and "Jewish privilege". Specifically, to protest "the Jewish occupation of Britain and the Jewish privilege which sets up the Jews as the occupying power". Fuck them.

***

See also: Jewdas on dealing with white supremacists; Rokhl on Why 'Ashkenormativity' isn't a thing

bobhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-91742196663866082082015-06-03T23:05:00.000+01:002015-06-03T23:34:15.214+01:00Morris Beckman z''l
I was very sad to read today of the passing of Morris Beckman, a great anti-fascist, mentsh and citizen historian.

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Photo Janette Beckman – http://www.janettebeckman.com/ via JewishNews
Dan Carrier's obituary of him is nicely titled "Morris Beckman fought fascism, home and away". Here's some of it:

WHEN Morris Beckman returned to London at the end of the Second World War, having risked his life as a radio operator on ships crossing oceans filled with U-Boats, he was disgusted to see British fascists peddling their views on the streets of Camden. Morris, who passed away this week aged 94, would not stand idly by as the far right made speeches and sold pamphlets that denied the Holocaust. Instead, he and other Jewish ex-servicemen set up the 43 Group – an organisation that fought fascists on post-war London's streets.

Morris was born in Hackney in 1921. He had tried to join the RAF in 1939 but was turned down – instead he learned Morse code and became a radio operator on ships making the dangerous Atlantic crossings. During the Battle of the Atlantic in 1942, two of his ships were torpedoed.

Morris went into the clothing trade after the war, running a menswear business until the 1970s. In the 1980s, he turned his hand to writing, documenting his life in the Merchant Navy and the 43 Group. Books included The Hackney Crucible, The Jewish Brigade: An Army With Two Masters, Flying The Red Duster and Atlantic Roulette. In his 1992 book The 43 Group, he wrote of the shock servicemen felt when they saw the doctrine they had defeated in Europe still alive in Britain.

He recalled how he was moved to act after he and his cousin Harry Rose watched a fascist rant on the corner of Star Street in Kilburn. Harry had fought with General Wingate behind Japanese lines in Burma.

"He said to me: 'I'm going to shut that bastard up'," recalled Morris.
"I calmed him down but we asked ourselves – what is anyone going to do about this?"
They tried lobbying MPs and using lawful means but with no success. Instead, they set about disrupting inflammatory demonstrations by fascists.

[...]

He saw his bravery as merely a twist of fate that put him in extraordinary times and he believed he acted as anyone else would do.
This is from a Guardian piece, with Beckman describing why they set up the 43 Group:

"I had been in the merchant navy, survived two torpedo attacks on the Atlantic convoys, and I came back home to Amhurst Road, Hackney to hugs and kisses. My mother went out to make some tea and my dad said, ' The bastards are back – Mosley and his Blackshirts'."

"The Talmud Torah (religious school) in Dalston had its windows smashed. Jewish shops were daubed 'PJ' (Perish Judah). You heard, 'We have got to get rid of the Yids' and 'They didn't burn enough of them in Belsen'."

With the Labour home secretary James Chuter Ede refusing to take action and the Jewish establishment urging peaceful protest, the demobbed Jews had had enough.
Famously, Vidal Sassoon was a member. Sandy Rashtry's JC obit explains why it was called the 43 Group:

43 people (38 men and five women) who formed the group at the Maccabi House sports club in Hampstead in 1946. ...[By] 1947 [it] had more than 1,000 members in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Newcastle....

"We were one of the very few groups of diaspora Jews who took a stand against Jew-baiting by fighting it instead of passively accepting the situation."

He said: "Make no mistake. Mosley was very well connected with the upper echelons of British society. If Hitler had succeeded in invading Britain, there were powerful people in double-breasted suits who would have pinned swastikas on their velvet lapels and supported the deportation of British Jews."
Paul Stott writes:

1/2. Best memory of Morris Beckman is him telling a room of Anarchists 3 countries stood for freedom after 9/11 - Britain, US and Israel.
— Dr Paul Stott (@MrPaulStott) June 3, 2015

2/2 People always listened to Morris Beckman out of respect for his own achievements and the history he chronicled so skillfully.
— Dr Paul Stott (@MrPaulStott) June 3, 2015
 Graeme Kennedy and Andrew French's Unfinished War:

Watch his 2010 talk in Bristol on the secret war against the fascists. Listen to an interview at Last Hours.

Previously:
Anti-fascist history, from Cable St to ARAFA; Banned from the Troxy; Against Mosley; Self-defence is no offence; Jewish hero or Israeli criminal?; Dave Hann z''l; Marek Edelman/Steve Cohen z''l; Majer Bogdanski z''l.
bobhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-19461643205923009172015-05-20T00:47:00.000+01:002015-05-25T22:07:07.795+01:00Kurdish resource page
This page is a list of links to commentaries, mainly from left and anarchist perspectives, on the situation in Kurdish lands. I have tried to follow some of the complex arguments circulating, many of which I have not made up my mind about, and I have also noticed considerable confusion. Along with the understandable ignorance, we are of course dealing with disinformation and willful ignorance (e.g. last week I noticed a lot of social media chatter about "PKK-Peshmerga" being terrorists equivalent to ISIS...) So, while arranging my own thoughts, I thought I would publish this list of resources to help you arrange yours.

In case it is helpful, here are the key players. The PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party, led by Abdullah Öcalan) has on and off been in a state of insurgency in the Southeast of Anatolia or Turkish (Northern) Kurdistan. The KRG (Kurdish Regional Government) is an autonomous sub-state making up most of Northern Iraq or Iraqi Kurdistan, with its capital in Erbil, ruled by a coalition of president Barzani's centre-right KDP and Jalal Talabani's more left-wing PUK. The armed forces of the KRG are known as the Peshmerga. The PYD (Democratic Union Party) is an affiliate of the PKK which (in coalition with the KNC, Kurdish National Council, an alliance of other Kurdish groups sponsored by Barzani's KRG) governs Northern Syria or Syrian (Western) Kurdistan, known as Rojava. Rojava has been effectively autonomous since 2012, in revolution against Assad's Ba'athist regime in Damascus. Its armed forces are the YPG/YPJ (People's Protection Units - male and female respectively). There is also Iranian Kurdistan, but that's not really relevant to our story. All of these proper nouns are rendered differently in different translations of Kurdish and other languages; I have used the most common. It is worth noting that the Kurds are far from homogeneous, speaking a number of related Indo-Iranian languages and dialects (mostly but not all written in Roman script), and practising a range of religions (most are Sunni Muslims but there are also Shia Muslims, Yazidis, the Yarsan, Alevis,Christians and Jews).

The best single resource on the region, and especially on Rojava, that I have seen is that of the Irish-based anarchist Andrew Flood here. His introduction is worth reading first. In that he summarises what is at stake and the issues that have become contentious in the wake of the Da'esh assault on the Kurdish town of Kobane.

For me, as an internationalist, my bottom line is solidarity with the Kurdish people, who have been oppressed in all the nation-states amongst whom their land is cleft, and who bear the brunt of the genocidal advance of Da'esh (Islamic State or ISIS). This means solidarity with their heroic fighting forces, the YPG/YPJ, who are analogous to the French Résistance or the Republican militias of the Spanish civil war. My strong instinct is that our governments in the West should be helping them out too. The political and also social revolution in Rojava, unfolding alongside and partly within the Syrian revolution, is also incredibly inspiring, and many of the links below describe why, including (apparently) forms of direct democracy and a revolution in gender relations.

The role of the PYD in that revolution stands further analysis though. On the one hand, the heritage of the PKK is the most authoritarian tradition of the nationalist left (a purist form of Marxism-Leninism influenced by Mao) and marked by an unpleasant Stalinist-style cult of personality around Öcalan. On the other hand, Öcalan and his party appear to have gone through a significant political evolution in the last decade, adopting a form of libertarian socialism heavily influenced by the late Murray Bookchin, theorist of libertarian municipalism. This libertarian turn has encouraged parts of the global anarchist movement to embrace the cause of Rojava, while a more sternly purist anti-nationalist left communism continues to be suspicious. That is one of the key faultlines; the other is the question of Western intervention.

In the links below, I rely heavily on Andrew Flood's link list, and where it says AF I am directly quoting him, but with some minor typographical edits and some added hyperlinking. There are also several resources here, collected in January 2015 for Libcom. Texts by Kurdish anarchists are here. Other resources can be found at Tahrir-ICN. It is also worth noting that although anarchist-like Kurdish movements have received a great deal of attention in the anarchist scene, Syrian anarchists seem to have been less noticed, although they played a central role in the 2011 revolution; read about them here.

The Rojava revolution

A mountain river has many bends: an introduction to the Rojava revolution

This zine is an excerpt from the book A Small Key Can Open A Large Door, published in March 2015 by Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness. The full book collects this introduction together with numerous interviews, public statements, firsthand accounts, and other articles that help give context to the struggle in Rojava. The book is available from Combustion Books (www.combustionbooks.org), its distributor AK Press (www.akpress.org), and major book retailers.

Stefan Bertram-Lee: Dear Mr. Anarchist, You Aren't Listening (April 2015)

A reply to "Dear Cheerleaders, we need to have a chat about imperialism" about libertarian communist dialogue and criticism in regards to the Rojava revolution and anti-imperialism.

"The Rojava revolution does not need the permission of Western Anarchists to be able to succeed, it does not need us one way or the other... The only people this argument is important for is ourselves. In the west we have failed, while in Chiapas and Rojava a social revolution has occurred. We need to examine our tactics and our methods, and compare them to the PYD and EZLN, and see where we have gone wrong and where they have gone right. We cannot win by fighting as if the territory we are fighting on is the United States prior to WWI, or Spain prior to WWII, the same old tired Anarcho-Syndicalism will not win in the 21st Century. Subcomdanate Marcos says that when he first went to Chiapas all he could do was talk, and not listen, and so he failed. The peasants did not listen to those who could only talk. It is only when he learnt to listen that he was able to move forward, and this lesson is one that must be learnt by all Western Anarchists. We are not winning, and we need to listen to those who are."
The Rojava resistance: rebirth of the anticapitalist struggle - Salvador Zana (April 2015)

An article by Salvador Zana, a volunteer with YPG in Rojava.

Zaher Baher: Anarchist Eyewitness to self-management in Kurdish Syria / West Kurdistan (July 2014)
"Written a few months before the ISIS assault attracted attention this report from a Kurdish anarchist is a great introduction to the region, what is happening and a critical if very sympathetic examination of the reasons why." -AF

Anarchist Eyewitness to self-management in Kurdish Syria / West Kurdistan by Workers Solidarity on  Mixcloud

"
The embedded audio above is a recording of Zaher Baher of the Kurdistan Anarchists Forum speaking at the 2014 London Anarchist Bookfair about the two weeks he spent in Syrian Kurdistan in May 2014, looking at the experiences of self-management in the region, experiments that have become more widely discussed as the result of the defense of Kobane against ISIS. Zaher is also a member of Haringey Solidarity Group." - AF

Joseph Daher: On the Syrian Revolution and the Kurdish Issue (April 2014)
"An interview with Syrian-Kurdish activist and journalist Shiar Nayo who while very critical of the PKK/PYD still sees the experiement as worthwhile. It's also very useful at providing some context of the relationship with Syria, the Assad regime and the other rebel movements." - AF [Arabic original]

Rojava Our World: Syria's secret revolution (video, November 2014)
"BBC documentary that makes for a very useful introduction - Out of the chaos of Syria's civil war, mainly Kurdish leftists have forged an egalitarian, multi-ethnic mini-state run on communal lines. But with ISIS Jihadists attacking them at every opportunity — especially around the beleaguered city of Kobane, how long can this idealistic social experiment last?" - AF

Zafer Onat: Rojava: Fantasies & Realities
"Brief piece that does a good job of quickly outlining both the limited goals of the Rojava revolution and the limitations of the reality of rebellion in the specific economic and social conditions. That it is written as a vehicle to argue for a anarchist international is a little jarring, not least because there is more than one of them already." - AF

Nedcla Acik: Kobane: the struggle of Kurdish women against Islamic State (22 October 2014)
"Introduction to a 40 page PDF report from a recent delegation to the region that provides a useful summary if one from a position obviously sympathetic to the PKK influence." - AF

Rojava: Syria's Unknown war
"Vice documentary from September of 2013 when the YPG/J had launched a counteroffensive against ISIS. Includes footage of a 4km section of border where the Turkish army removed barbed wire to facilitate ISIS recruits crossing the border. Some interesting footage & interviews with militias on the front line who are described as consisting of local farmers."-AF

The constitution of the Rojava Cantons
"As can be seen this important document is radical republican with a built in social democratic leaning but not anarchist or anti-capitalist." - AF

Adam Curtis: Anarchy in Kurdistan
"Curtis blogs the meeting of Ocalan & Bookchin and the influeces around them. Quite a useful quick history of the PKK." - AF

Rafael Taylor: The new PKK: unleashing a social revolution in Kurdistan (August 17 2014)
"Useful explanation of the adoption of Bookchin's ideas by the PKK under Öcalan's direction and a brief sketch of their implementation in Northern Kurdistan (but that may be drawn from the 'Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan' interviews rather than confirming them?)"-AF

Dilar Dirik on "Stateless Democracy" at the New World Summit
"I like her stressing of the importance of the social transformation of society by the women's movement over time--something that I think gets diminished a bit when so much emphasis by the left gets placed on to what degree communal property has been instituted in Rojava and to what extent the PKK is suppressing, tolerating or dealing with the KDP. (video 2, video 3) (via Flint)" - AF

Interview with the Kurdistan Anarchists Forum (KAF) about the situation in Iraq/Kurdistan
"This includes some discussion of anarchist influences in the PKK and how seriously they should be taken."

An Anarchist Communist Reply to 'Rojava: An Anarcho-Syndicalist Perspective
This text is a response to the article Rojava: An Anarcho-Syndicalist Perspective by K. B., recently published on the Ideas and Action website of the North America-based Workers Solidarity Alliance (WSA). In the article, there is an attack on the Rojava revolution in the Middle East, an event in which the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has played a key role.

Sardar Saadi: Rojava revolution: building autonomy in the Middle East (July 25, 2014)

"Kurdish rebels are establishing self-rule in war-torn Syria, resembling the Zapatista experience and providing a democratic alternative for the region."

Ocalan

Ocalan on Democratic Confederalism
PDF pamphlet were Ocalan lays down his concepts, drawing on Bookchin.

A nation state is not the solution but rather the problem - Abdullah Öcalan

Article by imprisoned Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan, arguing against nationalism but instead for "democratic confederalism". However we want to point out the gulf which exists between his words and the still essentially nationalist practice of the PKK in reality, discussed here, not to mention the abuse of female members in the Party, including by Ocalan himself, so we reproduce this article for reference only.

Bookchinite commentary

Janet Biehl: 'Poor in means but rich in spirit'

David Graeber: 'No. This is a Genuine Revolution'

Critiques of the PKK/PYD

Libcom has several critical pieces, collected here. Here are some.

Dear Cheerleaders, we need to have a chat about imperialism (April 2015)

"On the process of change in Northern Syria often called the Rojava revolution, the PYD as proponent of the process, and its alliance with Western imperialist powers."

Juraj Katalenac: PKK, Democratic Confederalism, and Nonsense

A critical text about PKK and the "Democratic Confederalism" from militants who mainly express themselves in Croatian and gave to their structure the name Svjetska Revolucija ("World Revolution").

'I have seen the future and it works.' – Critical questions for supporters of the Rojava revolution

"Almost a 100 years ago, the US journalist, Lincoln Steffens visited the Soviet Union and proclaimed: 'I have seen the future and it works.'[1] Ever since then, leftists have continued to delude themselves, not only about the Soviet Union, but about China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and elsewhere. After a century of such delusions it is crucial that we don't hesitate to ask critical questions of every revolution – even if that revolution is being threatened by a brutal counter-revolution."

Alex De Jong: Stalinist caterpillar into libertarian butterfly? The evolving ideology of the PKK

1. Roots of the PKK
2. People's War
3. Creating the 'new man'
4. Serok Apo
5. A revolution of women
6. Democratic Civilization
7. Whatever happened to socialism?
8. Potent vagueness

On David Graeber: 'Victory in Kobane. What next in the Rojava revolution?'

Anarchist Federation statement on Rojava: December 2014
The Anarchist Federation looks at the "revolution" in Syrian Kurdistan, and the role of the PKK and compares the reality with the rhetoric.

The battle of Kobane

The defence of Kobane - anarchist reportage from WSM
"When the Turkish anarchist group DAF announced some of its members were heading to Kobane I started to pay much more attention to what what happening. This included writing quick reports for the WSM Facebook page during the first weeks of the siege that presented a political analysis of the events that were emerging from the resistance. The link will bring you to a Facebook album that collects those reports as each was intially posted as the caption of an image, now collected into this album."-AF

WSM: Tell Us Lies About Kobanê -unpicking the demand for Turkish & western intervention (9 October 2014)
"The notion that the fall of Kobanê could be prevented by the intervention of the Turkish army is a smokescreen that covers the truth that they are already intervening - on the side of ISIS. The Turkish state's selective blockade of the border, which allows arms and volunteers to cross for ISIS, but strangles them for the YPG defenders of Kobanê is the decisive intervention that is giving ISIS the upper hand."-AF

Anarchists join fight against IS to defend Kurdish autonomous areas (October 2014)

Taken from a report by the French Anarchist weekly paper Alternative Revolutionaire, this short article gives a taste of developments on the ground in the fight against Islamic State.

Kobane's Second Phase: Resistance (March 2015)
Text from the Kurdish anarchists of KAF. (Also here.)

Leila Al Shami: The struggle for Kobane: an example of selective solidarity (October 2014)

"The heroic resistance of the people of Kobane in fighting the onslaught of the Daesh (ISIS) fascists since mid-September, has led to a surge of international solidarity. A multitude of articles and statements have been written and protests have been held in cities across the world. Kurds have flooded across the Turkish border to help their compatriots in the fight despite being brutally pushed back by Turkish forces, and others including Turkish comrades from DAF (Revolutionary Anarchist Action) have gone to the border to support in keeping it open to help the flood of refugees escaping to Turkey. There have been calls to arm Kurdish forces and calls to support DAF and send aid for refugees. Yet this solidarity with Syria's Kurds has not been extended to non-Kurdish groups in the country that have been fighting, and dying, to rid themselves of fascism and violent repression and for freedom and self-determination. It's often said incorrectly, that sectarianism lies at the heart of the Syrian conflict. It's necessary to understand to what extent sectarianism plays a role in our response too."

Ali Bektaş: Rojava: a struggle against borders and for autonomy (July 24, 2014)

As ISIS lays siege on the autonomous Kurdish enclave of Kobanê, thousands of Kurds try to break down the Turkish-Syrian border to join their comrades.

On ISIS

ISIS Jihadism and Imperialism in the post Arab Spring period- an anarchist analysis (Audio & Video)
Following on from the rapid spread of Isis in Iraq & Syria Paul Bowman presented an update intended to inform on the contemporary politics of Jihadism and its entanglement with regional and global imperialist power plays.

WSM: Origins of the hostility and the split between Al Qa'ida and ISIS (17 September 2014)
An anarchist perspective: "Geo-strategically the Al Qa'ida leadership (Azzam, bin Laden, Zawahiri) are products of the Cold War, specifically the Afghan Mujahidin war against the USSR. Rather like their American neo-con previous employers, Al Qa'ida view the end of the Cold War as a victory over the USSR by their own side. The Al Qa'ida perspective is that, having "defeated" one superpower, the global jihad now needs to turn its offensive against the remaining superpower. Al Qa'ida worry that the Zarqawists of ISIS may be restricting the struggle to a parochial Mesopotamian sectarian struggle that could fail to engage Muslim jihadists around the world, outside the MENA region, say in West Africa or Indonesia and the Philippines where the US is a more credible #1 enemy than Iran.

North Kurdistan (Turkey)

Kurdish Communalism
2011 piece by Janet Biehly interviewing Kurdish activist Ercan Ayboga about who the Kurds are, the background of the PKK and the Democratic Autonomy process.

Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan By TATORT Kurdistan, trans Janet Biehl
Book length examiniation of 'Democratic Autonomy' in a couple of parts of 'Turkish' Kurdistan based around interview by members of a solidarity group who briefly vistited the area in 2011. Clearly from a PKK sympatheic perspective but alsol a useful source in terms of understanding the idealised structures and methods of 'Democratic Autonomy' and the real world problems of implementation.

bobhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-53166592103565602602015-05-13T18:48:00.000+01:002015-05-13T18:48:00.060+01:00Resuming normal service
Here are a bunch of things that I think you should read, which have built up in my list since January but which I haven't managed to find time to post about.

Left ad absurdum
A long article in Logos Journal, "The Treason of Intellectual Radicalism and the Collapse of Leftist Politics" by Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson, is a bracing account of how a left that has blossomed in the academy is dying on the streets:

This new radicalism has made itself so irrelevant with respect to real politics that it ends up serving as a kind of cathartic space for the justifiable anxieties wrought by late capitalism... These trends are the products as well as unwitting allies of that which they oppose.
To illustrate this, Coatesy recently hosted some prizes for the most insanely ridiculous writing on the far left. You couldn't make it up...

Confessions of a non-Zionist Jew
This article by Todd Gitlin (via Rokhl) expresses perfectly a lots of the things I feel. Highly recommended.

Drawing clear lines
This deserves a post of its own, but my comrade Spencer Sunshine has written some important texts. "Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism" documented how cryptofascists and pro-White separatists are attempting to make inroads into left political and counter-cultural circles and also sets outs some principles for addressing the problem. Walter Reeves's Daily Kos post, "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing; Racism, Anti-Semitism and Fascism: Infiltrating the Left" introduced some of its key points, generating some enlightening and depressing arguments. "The continuing appeal of racism and fascism" develops these themes further.

One disturbing example of this continuing appeal comes from the UK far left scene, where a former Marxist, Ian Donvan, has, via the influence of Gilad Atzmon and George Galloway, entered a political space we might associate with David Duke.

Like old times, but different 1: Counter-Englightenment
I'd like to find time to give this fine post the attention that it deserves, but you should read Martin Robb's semi-return to blogging here, on his political trajectory and search for an alternative to the Enlightenment rationalism.

Like old times, but different 2: from the end of the world

Roland Dodds is also on a complex political journey. He has put together a book of essays from the last 10 years of blogging at But I Am A Liberal, and started up a new blog at In Hope and Darkness. His first post there was "A Radical in Every Institution", on "social justice warriors". He's also writing at Ordinary Times, where he has written nicely about fatherhood and conservatism and also on the trade-off between multiculturalism and social democracy. (I profoundly disagree with his conclusions in the latter, oddly a topic I've been arguing about on Twitter this week. In my view, welfare states in Europe were born at a time when there was not a sense of a common culture; European societies were sharply divided by denominational sectarianism, by class anatagonisms, by regional cultures. Britain in the early twentieth century had many indigenous non-English-speaking communities, and there was an enormous cultural difference between, say, the Northumbrian shore and the Home Counties. And that picture was repeated across the European states where social democracy was tried out. A sense of commonality was born from the common institutions of the welfare state, not the other way around.)

Like old times, but different 3: wordspiv, layabout, culchie.

Thirdly, Terry Glavin has also deserted blogspot for wordpress. His new site includes blog posts (lately mostly on China), his columns and his "essays and inquiries", as well as a special section on Syria and Kurdistan.

Like old times, but different 4: with nylons and coathanger

Finally, a belated welcome to the blogosphere for Trabi Mechanic.

Counter-histories
This article in Ha'aretz (reproduced here if you're stuck on the wrong side of the paywall) is very interesting for thinking about the relationship between Zionism, anti-Zionism, imperialism and anti-imperialism. It shows that parts of the British imperial state were actively siding with various Arab forces in 1948 in the attempt to forge a Greater Syria and to subvert (or even militarily defeat) the possibility of a Jewish state.

Ukraine, fascism and anti-fascism
I intend to write a proper post on this one day, but I have been disturbed over the past year to see how many "anti-fascists" have been taken in by the supporters of Russian irredentism in Ukraine, an essentially far right movement. Here is Dale Street refuting one instance of this. Here is a collection of texts from the Ukrainian left on the fake ant-fascists of Borotba. And here is an interview with some Ukrainian anarchists.

Truth wars
I'm not sure if I've linked to Kyle Orton's January post "From Kessab to Cannibals: Syria's Media War". If not, I should have. It looks at IS's media strategy briefly, but then in more depth at media use by the Assad regime and its allies Russia and Iran. This is important, because a lot of that media is consumed by leftists and others in the West who somehow think it is more reliable than the so-called "mainstream media". (See these previous posts of mine and their comment threads: The Ukraine truth war; The House of Assad and the House of Rumour; Mother Agnes and the fog of war.)

France after Charlie Hebdo
AWL has published a collection of articles on racism against Jews and Muslims in France by Yves Coleman. Also from AWL: After the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher Jewish supermarket: thinking through the new and rethinking the old - veteran French Trotskyist Pierre Rousset discusses the political aftermath of the January 2015 Islamist attacks in Paris. And Barry Finger explores the connections to the politics of anti-imperialism and what he calls "Third World fascism".

Islam etc
Understanding ISIS: some useful pieces of analysis by Kenan Malik, by Disillusioned Marxist, by Army of Redressers. Understanding the Muslim far-right in Algeria, and beyond: an interview with Marieme Helie Lucas.

A polite hatred
An important series in the Tablet on British antisemitism by Josh Glancy and Ben Judah.

Not so radical
Back in January, James Bloodworth wrote that Syriza's government may not be the radical left-wing triumph we were hoping for. And here is Max Dunbar on Russell Brand, which I completely missed way back in October.

Pseudo-left rape apologists
Steve Hedley not "cleared of domestic violence" with a case still to answer, says the RMT rep representing his former partner in her complaint of physical, emotional and verbal abuse.

Meta-blogging
Phil BC has a nice series of Saturday interviews. Comrade Coatesy was featured some time back.

bobhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-49630402384298366262015-05-11T18:26:00.002+01:002015-05-11T18:26:54.079+01:00F*ck aspiration, we don't need another Tory party

I have been a bit nauseated in the past days hearing the commentariat conclude from Labour's general election defeat that what Britain needs is more middle class oriented centrist politics: a more "aspirational" politics. I think this rushed judgement is based on a fundamental misreading of what happened last week, as I shall try to show in this post.

First of all, where did Labour gain ground and where did it lose ground? Most dramatically, of course, Labour lost Scotland. Crucially, there it lost to a party which positioned itself to Labour's left.

What about in England? These two maps in the Guardian, which take a moment to work out how to read (the map is redrawn to be proportionate to votes) are very important:

The maps show that Labour gained votes almost everywhere in England and lost a lot of votes in Scotland and Wales. Most important for my purposes is where Labour lost votes in England. I don't have the time or knowledge to look closely at each of these, so what I conclude is provisional but the following is what strikes me.

It is true, as the "apirationalists" ("New New Labour" in Ben Judah's witty typology) would emphasise, that there are some places in the Southeast, Southwest and West Midlands (what we could call Middle England) where Labour lost ground - but these are outnumbered by the seats in those regions where Labour gained votes. The most significant English losses are actually up and down the East coast, often in the areas where UKIP gained ground.*

My strong feeling is that in such areas (as well as in the Labour core areas where voter turn out was low), Labour's problem was not that it didn't connect to "aspirations" or that it wasn't middle class enough. Instead, I think Labour's problem was that it was seen as a party of the metropolitan elite - that it was too middle class.

With the figure of Ed Miliband - constantly associated with "Hampstead" and "North London", seen as a "geek" or "nerd" unable to eat a bacon sandwich - it is hard to disentangle this anti-metropolitan sentiment from low-level antisemitism and the simple fact that he comes across awkwardly to camera. But even leaving that aside, Labour was seen as the party that sneered at white van man for putting up England flags.

For many of these people, "aspiration" is probably less relevant than the sense that even you when you work really hard you're still fucked because the decks seem stacked against you.

And surely the most "aspirational" voters - in diverse and migrant-rich London - are now actually Labour's core voters; many of them probably see Labour as a metropolitan party, and see that as a positive.

Beyond the capital, anti-metropolitanism ties in with the belief that the Westminster parties are basically all the same, that all mainstream politicians are un-trustworthy - this is a sentiment that UKIP voters share with SNP voters, who sound almost identical on this issue. (And the UKIP and SNP voters are at least partly right about this, surely.)

A lot of this is about identity politics. While Labour and its metropolitan voters identify with a civic Britishness, the Tories and UKIP played an English card which resonates for many people in England at least as much as Scottishness resonates North of the border.** Local and regional identities matter too, and are one ingredient in the anti-metropolitanism (see Waterloo Sunset's points here).

Labour was (rightly) concerned about making sure that its candidates were gender-representative and ethnically diverse (and indeed, as Paul pointed out, one silver lining in the gloom is the number of new MPs who aren't White British) - but, for all its alleged leftism, it didn't put any thought in how class identities still matter. (Thus it is striking that this more diverse parliament is no less privileged than the last one: 28% went to Oxbridge; 32% went to private schools, of whom one in ten went to Eton - barely changed from 2010.***)

I am not in the business of telling Labour what implication they should take from all this, but I think there are implications for a wider "left" - by which I mean those of us who are scared what five more years of austerity will do for us and who are scared of the consequences of rising nationalism and xenophobia.

The implications as I see them are these: First, we (that wider left) need to re-connect with communities feeling left behind by the globalised world the metropolitan elite seems at ease in - and not sneer at them in a condescending way. We need to start taking seriously and talking about Englishness, as well as Scottishness and regional identities. We should sharpen not soften our attacks on the sorts of class privilege that mean we remain ruled by a narrow elite who went to the same schools and universities.

I don't know if Labour have a chance of addressing these kinds of issues or not (the Murdoch-friend;y talk about "aspirations" and the middle class suggest it doesn'), but in the meantime in communities across the UK we will need to work hard to defend ourselves, our jobs and our public services from the Tories' ideologically-driven slash-and-burn policies, and we can't do that without white van England.

***

Notes:

*Rob Ford, who co-coined the phrase "left behind" in relation to UKIP voters, sums up where Labour lost here. He notes that Labour did leak support in Middle England, but also the UKIP factor:

Ukip surged in seats with large concentrations of poorer, white working-class English nationalists, many of whom sympathised with Labour's economic message but not the people delivering it.
I've been slightly critical of the "left behind" analysis before (e.g. in my 2014 election post on UKIP), arguing that UKIP's vote is not significantly more working class than other parties and that it remains fundamentally a party of the "petit bourgeoisie" in Middle England. If you look at where UKIP came second, I think I'm partly vindicated. What is significant about UKIP is its ability to unite the Farage-like ultra-Conservatives of the Home Counties with up to a fifth of bluecollar voters on the East Coast.

**I just saw that Phil makes this point too, and better than me, at the end of this post. And Nick Cohen makes a related point here:

The universities, left press, and the arts characterise the English middle-class asMail-reading misers, who are sexist, racist and homophobic to boot. Meanwhile, they characterise the white working class as lardy Sun-reading slobs, who are, since you asked, also sexist, racist and homophobic. The national history is reduced to one long imperial crime, and the notion that the English are not such a bad bunch with many strong radical traditions worth preserving is rejected as risibly complacent. So tainted and untrustworthy are they that they must be told what they can say and how they should behave.

What truth there is in the caricature is lost amid the accompanying hypocrisy. The intellectual left deplores racism but uses "white" as an insult. It lambasts the sexism of the right, but stays silent as Labour candidates run meetings where Muslim women's inferiority is confirmed by stewards who usher them into segregated seating .
***This is why Richard Carr is half-right here on Labour's identity politics, but wrong about it not mattering where politicians went to school.

Also read:

Shaun Lawson "Why the polls (and all but one of) the forecasts WERE wrong. Ed Miliband was nowhere near becoming Prime Minister"; David Osland "Labour should steer clear of suicide by Blairism"; Phil BC "Fear, Loathing, and the UK General Election"; Nick Cohen "Labour would do better if it learned to like the English".

For three essential (and brilliantly written) reads to help understand the rise of UKIP and of political Englishness: James Meek writing from Thanet and from Grimsby, and Lisa McKenzie writing from rural Nottinghamshire.
bobhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-70171938014571663882015-05-08T12:18:00.001+01:002015-05-08T17:38:46.439+01:00The morning after
Quite a depressing morning politically, though a few silver linings. Here's a quick run through of how my election priorities fared. [NB: Post slightly edited 17:36.]

Priority no,1: Tories out. Verdict: epic fail

Obviously my biggest desire for this election was my biggest disappointment. As I write this, it's looking like the Conservatives will have just enough seats to form a majority government, without even the almost negligible restraining power of their Lib Dem partners. That's a disaster, for the NHS, for the economy, for schools and for the continuation of the United Kingdom.

Labour needed to make considerable advances to win, and it failed to do so. But while the media narrative is of Tory electoral triumph, it is important to note that Labour increased its popular vote share from 2010 and that the Conservatives lost theirs, and that in England Labour has increased its vote share everywhere (most dramatically in London) apart from the Northeast (where its majority was already enormous) and the East. The Tory victory in the first past the post system was partly a result of the extraordinary SNP surge in Scotland which has effectively wiped out Labour in one of its heartlands, a topic that I plan to write about when the dust settles (Labour took more far seats than it lost in England and Wales) and partly due to Lib Dem losses to Tories.

Priority no.2: Contain the rise of UKIP. Verdict: mixed

We can take some comfort in Nigel Farage not taking the seat he stood in and the Conservatives decisively regaining Rochester and Strood from their former MP Mark Reckless (one of the few times in my life I've taken joy from a Conservative gain). Carswell keeping Clacton is hardly a UKIP victory, as Carswell was surely the least UKIPy and most Tory of UKIP candidates. Farage's promised resignation will be pleasurable, although the next leader may be scarier.

On the other hand, the surge in UKIP votes, to 13% (making it the third most popular party) is depressing. Most depressing is how well it did in working class areas in the East, Northeast and Yorkshire, places like Hartlepool, Boston, Rotherham, Although UKIP's vote was stronger in more affluent parts of the Southeast and commuterbelt, the results in the rustbelt show that the left urgently needs to think hard about the strategy it has used against UKIP up to now. Some will call for more UKIP-friendly Labour policies - tougher on immigration - but I think UKIP voters won't be persuaded by the pale imitation, plus it will feed the narrative on which UKIP thrives. But what is certain is that sneering at UKIP voters as ignorant bigots is not a successful strategy.

Locally in Lewisham, UKIP got too high a vote (8-9%) for comfort in Lewisham East, where their candidate was the toxic Anne Marie Waters (3rd place), and in Lewisham West (4th place). My assumption is that these votes are from the whiter Bromley borderlands.

Priority no.3: Kick George Galloway out of Bradford - and out of British politics. Verdict: resounding success

It is fantastic to see Naz Shah get almost twice Galloway's vote. Congratulations to all those in Bradford West who fought so hard for that. I will relish Galloway's sad face under the silly hat at the count for years to come. His bizarre concession speech gives a good indication into his disturbing mindset, mixing hubris with paranoia:

there will be others who are already celebrating: the venal, and the vile, the racists and the zionists will all be celebrating. The hyena can bounce on the lion's grave but it can never be a lion, and in any case, I'm not in my grave. As a matter of fact I'm going off now to plan the next campaign.
Priority no.4: Leave some space for the left. Verdict: not much space

The Greens did OK, increasing their vote share nationally by a couple of percentage points and holding on to their single parliamentary seat. Green supporters will see this as a reason we need more proportional representation, but it's worth bearing in mind that the same vote share under PR would give the Lib Dems and especially UKIP far more seats in parliament than the Greens. The Greens performed well in Lewisham, increasing their vote share even in least promising Lewisham East, moving into third position in Lewisham West and nearly beating the Tories to second place in Deptford.

I haven't looked closely at the TUSC and Left Unity results yet. As far as I can see, there's not many places where they kept their deposits. Dave Nellist, who has profile as a councillor and former MP in Coventry did well, and less pleasingly an SWP candidate, Jenny Sutton, kept her deposit in Tottenham. Elsewhere, it looks quite bleak. I think there are two lessons from this. First, the far left only performs at all electorally under a Labour government; fear of Tories pushes socialists back to Labour. Second, the right path for building the left is not contesting elections but grassroots single issue campaigns in local communities.

Priority no.5: Destroy the far right. Verdict: promising

I haven't looked too closely at the far right results yet either, but a first glance seems to show they did dismally. I think their strongest result is in Rotherham, where the BNP got a couple of hundred votes (less than most TUSC candidates). In Lewisham West, the vile George Whale got just 44 votes. However, anti-fascists shouldn't take too much comfort from this, as the potential far right vote went to UKIP, and we need to keep a close eye on UKIP-fascist links.

Priority no.6: Get rid of David Ward. Verdict: success

Labour recaptured Bradford East from the vile David Ward, 47% to 30%. But we shouldn't take too much comfort from this, considering how unpleasant the Labour candidate Imran Hussein is - the man whose nepotistic clan-based machine politics pushed Bradford West into Galloway's arms.

bobhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-31178056807247520852015-05-07T12:19:00.004+01:002015-05-07T12:23:36.600+01:00Bob's election priorities no.1: Tories out!
So, we've reached the predictable if rather late in the day culmination of my pre-election series...

For a lot of the time, in this blog I have focused on faultlines between Islamism and secularism or between internationalism and isolationism. I've spent a lot of time criticising the left for its evacuation of working class communities, for its capitulation to postmodern moral relativism and so on - because it is on those issues which I've felt I have something to say. Because of my position on those things, I often find myself in agreement with people on the centre-right. However, those are not the issues which really fundamentally matter to me and my family in our day to day lives, or which I vote on in elections. In this post, I want to focus on the issues which really do matter in a much more concrete way.

The last five years of Conservative-led Coalition government have, I believe, been disastrous for the country, in many ways.

Instead of evidence-based policy on topics such as migration or education, we have had ideological follies and back-of-a-fag-packet gimmicks. David Cameron's contempt for Scotland looks likely to contribute to the break-up of the United Kingdom, despite the fact that a clear majority of the Scottish people voted against independence. A half-baked philosophy of "Big Society" has done nothing to empower citizens. A faux-libertarian rejection of the nanny state and red tape has masked a series of authoritarian laws which put schools and local authorities under tighter than ever central government control. Inequality between ethnic groups has grown, while the government has pandered to "faith communities". A promise of a new greener Conservatism has failed to materialise as its becomes ever clearer that Cameron thinks of environmental protection as "green crap". Public assets such as the Royal Mail have been sold off at a huge loss, benefiting big business while delivering worse value for money for consumers. Our housing situation is in absolute crisis, with growing numbers in abject shelter poverty and an unsustainable property bubble locking even middle income people out of home ownership.

But there are three areas where there has been particularly brutal damage, and where another term of Conservative rule promises the threat of even worse, irrevocable damage. (Note, most of the links below are to charts evidencing the claims I am making.)

THE ECONOMY
David Cameron was talking last night about "the 2008 Labour recession", an idea that seems to have become almost common sense for the mainstream media, even to the point that Labour barely challenges it. The fact is, of course, as any Greek could tell you, the 2008 recession was global, with lots of complex causes (many to do do with the finance industry and the property bubble), Gordon Brown's spending not being one of them.

Similarly, Cameron claims that the Conservatives have steered us out of recession through prudence. In fact, the recovery has been global too (in fact, growth began again in the last three quarters of Brown's government and retreated for the first two years of Cameron's). And while it is true that that the UK's recovery in terms of growth and jobs has been more impressive than many other countries (but not the US), it is telling to look at who has benefited from that growth and what sort of jobs they've been.

While there's been growth, productivity has declined. Growth has been driven by the housing market (benefiting existing home-owners, hurting renters and those who want to buy but can't; in London an average house price is nine times an average salary) and above all by the service sector, the only sector back to its pre-crisis state. The benefits, therefore, have been to home owners (especially in London), the finance sector, and the rich. Manufacturing and production have shrunk.

This means that the types of jobs created have been low-paid service jobs. The rise in zero hours contracts (from 50,000 in 2005 to 200,000 in 2013 to 700,000 now) has been the great scandal of the Coalition period. We've had a growing number of self-employed people, but a huge leap (from 20% to 35%) in the number of self-employed people with very low incomes (below £10,000). Because we now have such a low-wage service economy and a not particularly progressive taxation system, government tax receipts have not kept up with growth, so the public sector debt and deficit (which we've had since Thatcher) has grown not shrunk in the Cameron age of austerity.

Combined with "reforms" to welfare which have mainly hit working people (most welfare recipients are in work not out of work), working poverty has risen, and a cost of living crisis has affected everyone from the very poor to the squeezed middle. Food banks is the other great scandal of this government, with well over a million using the Trussell Trust food banks alone.

Zero hours contracts is one dimension of precarity that makes people insecure; the axing of public services, which has thrown many public sector workers into unemployment as well as destroyed the safety nets the poor rely on, has been another. Those facing benefits sanctions are probably among the most harshly affected.

It is no wonder then, especially as mental health services are cut back, that suicide has risen sharply under the Tories. Their economic policies are literally killing us.

HEALTH

The NHS, created by a Labour government after World War II, is one of the great achievements of which Britain should be proud. From 1979-1997, the NHS experienced systematic disinvestment until it reached close to breaking point. Anyone who spent time in the Third World standard London hospitals of the John Major years and then in the Gordon Brown years will know that massive investment in the NHS by New Labour made a real, palpable difference to the quality of care. Disinvestment impacts quicker than investment, and the period since 2010, as demand for healthcare grows due to our ageing demography, has seen another palpable decline.

But probably more damaging is the attempts this government has made to close hospitals and wards (including wards at my local hospital in Lewisham, where one of my kids was born). These closures have been hard fought by local communities, and the government has changed the law to make it easier to do so under their next term in office.

More serious still is the Conservative strategy to privatise and dismantle the NHS as we know it. Although they are not upfront about this, is it clear from what they have done already. The 2012 Health and Social Care Act removed the responsibility of the Secretary of State to secure comprehensive and universal healthcare provision; it requires contracting out of services to private companies; and it removes accountability in the NHS. £7 billion of new NHS contracts have been given to private companies - many tax avoiders and/or cronies of Conservative MPs.

By lifting the cap on private patient income from Foundation Trusts, the Act allows hospitals to prioritise profit-making activities at the expense of universal patient care. And, in Clinical Commissioning Groups, it has created an incredibly expensive and less accountable new bureaucracy, diverting funds from patient care.

More and more NHS care is being redefined as "non-core" and therefore potentially chargeable; the cumbersome bureaucracy created to charge migrants for their health care creates the machinery for that. Vote out the Tories to save the NHS.

EDUCATION
My son applied to secondary school this year, and was offered a place in his fifth choice school, so this section is pretty personal to me. British state schools have been victims of damaging purely ideological reforms by both Conservative and Labour governments since 1979; the dramatic difference between the Labour years and the Tory years is that the former saw massive investment in school budgets while the latter has seen systematic disinvestment.

Investment in teachers, in teacher training, in existing and new school infrastructure have all collapsed under the Coalition government. Instead, money has been squandered on Free Schools, the gimmicky pet project of Michael Gove, whose only qualification for being education minister was that he once played a vicar in a comedy farce about a British private school. Free Schools have cost us an enormous amount, and there has been no evidence whatsoever of their success. Crucially, because they have been located wherever their sponsors want them to be located, they have completely failed to meet the demand for school places. Free Schools have therefore hindered a strategic response to the school place shortage crisis that this government should have seen coming. Vote out the Tories to save our schools.

bobhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-83303495751012256612015-05-06T16:01:00.001+01:002015-05-07T14:14:39.328+01:00Bob's election priorities no.2: Contain the rise of UKIP
I'm running out of time for this series, and I've left the most important posts for last...

UKIP's support has clearly receded after reaching its high tide mark; I think that my prediction in May still holds that when push comes to shove and the electorate actually votes on a government people will step back from the UKIP brink. However, we can't be complacent. Even if UKIP gets a single figure number of MPs (not the dozen or more it was expecting a few weeks ago or the sizeable number its European election performance suggested), its presence in parliament is a very bad sign. The possibility of UKIP shoring up a minority Conservative government is even scarier (and surely far, far worse than the SNP shoring up a minority Labour government).

I guess in this post I only have four points I want to make.

1. UKIP is not the party of working people
It makes me infuriated that so many chattering class pundits trot out the line that UKIP is somehow speaking the voice of "the ordinary man" or the working class. This narrative has been boosted by Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford's concept of "the left behind", which found that the constituencies UKIP has polled well in are a little whiter, a little more working class and a lot older than the UK average, a fact that has been translated by the commentariat into the claim that UKIP appeals to working class people. In fact, Lord Ashcroft's polls are consistent in showing that UKIP's support is among C2 but not DE voters, and that it is unpopular among working class women and young working class people. Recent British Election Survey data finds it is a part of small businesses:

the working class basis of Ukip has been strongly overstated.The Party's strongest supporters are often the self-employed and business owners... Even within the working class, Ukippers tend to be low level supervisors, and not the disadvantaged semi and unskilled workers often thought to provide the core of the Party's support.
And not surprisingly. UKIP was founded by Alan Sked, an Oxford graduate and (like Ralph Miliband) an LSE professor. Its leader Nigel Farage went to Dulwich College, one of the most elite private schools in England; his father was a Kent stockbroker and his career has been in banking. Its two MPs, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless, went to private schools (Reckless to Marlborough, another of the most elite schools in the UK). Its main funder is investment banker Stuart Wheeler, who went to Eton and Oxford.

None of its policies are designed to benefit working people. It has flip-flopped on the NHS; it supports lower taxes for the rich; on education it favours grammar schools which by definition leave the majority of kids with second class schooling; it has no strategy for ensuring people in work get decent pay; it is aggressively opposed to trade unions.

2. UKIP is a one-trick pony
Although launched to combat the EU, most people in the UK don't really care that much about the EU. So UKIP realises that it reaches people if it talks about one single topic: immigration. As soon as asked to talk about any other topic, its spokespeople flounder about. Even if immigration is a topic many people care about, it's only one issue. I find it genuinely scary a party might have MPs who can hold the balance of power in a hung parliament voted for by people who don't actually know what its policy is on topics such as hospitals or housing.

3. UKIP is the truly nasty party
As I said before, it is absurd to call UKIP fascist (as ignorant liberals do). Certainly, its voters and supporters support it for all sorts of reasons; most of them are no more racist than the rest of us. But the sheer number of fascists who have endorsed UKIP, joined it, or stood for office under its banner is terrifying. To take just a few examples: Derek Wilkes, the Wigan candidate who is a fan of the fascist British First; Jack Sen, the candidate in West Lancashire who told a Jewish MP: "You're about authentic Labour as Ed Miliband. Protect child benefits? If you had it your way you'd send the £ to Poland/ Israel."; Christopher Gillibrand, the Welsh candidaite involved in a far right group which told Stephen Lawrence's mother to go home; Bill Walker, the Aldershot candidate who said that Nepali Gurkha servicemen are "parasites"; candidate John Leathley who fantasised on Facebook about Yasmin Alibhai-Brown getting raped; Robert Blay in Hampshire, who said he'd shoot his "not British enough" Asian Tory rival in the face; Janice Atkinson, the MEP who described a Thai constituent on television as a "ting tong"; or Anne Marie Waters, the Lewisham East candidate, who is starting an anti-Muslim group with the founder of the EDL.

What is worrying is that each time this happens, it doesn't seem to affect the UKIP polling rates. UKIP's existence makes unspeakable racism acceptable, and that makes politics in general nastier.

4. UKIP sets the agenda for the other parties
Nigel Farage's two big political heroes are Vladimir Putin, who represents the kind of macho authoritarian nationalism Farage also embodies, and David Owen. Farage once said:

"The SDP didn't last very long, but it won, because actually they finished up with Tony Blair who was an SDP Prime Minister. They fundamentally changed the entire Labour party. Foot and Benn and the hard left were all gone, and you got a new modernising labour party… so if ever there was a successful pressure group in British politics, it was the SDP."
Just as New Labour (and Cameron's Tories) morphed their parties into versions of the SDP, the Tories (and Miliband's Labour) are keen to out-UKIP Farage's party. That's scary. And the smaller the UKIP vote is tomorrow, the less likely that is to happen.

Previously:
UKIP's bigotry comes to Lewisham East.
bobhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-1732324527117941812015-05-05T19:47:00.000+01:002015-05-06T19:08:03.643+01:00Bob's election priorities no.3: Kick George Galloway out of British politics
This series is going slower than I meant, so I'll have to rush out the final three quick as polling day rushes nearer... We started with David Ward in Bradford East, and now turn to Bradford West...

George Galloway has been MP for Bradford West since 2012. This week, he faces a challenge from Naz Shah, a radical, credible candidate with an extraordinary and inspiring story. I wish her success in this election. Why?

1. Galloway does not serve the people of Bradford. From the moment of his victory in what he called the "Bradford Spring", when he tweeted about his "Blackburn triumph", it was clear he couldn't give a monkeys about his new constituency (later attempting to make out he was hacked by tweeting "Nice try. Password now changed").

As far as I can tell from his Hansard record, he has mentioned Bradford once in parliament over the last year, while regularly mentioning Iraq and Palestine. His third? fifth? fourth wife, 31 years his junior, may or may not still live in the Netherlands, possibly eating in to his time in Yorkshire - although to be fair there are frequent KLM flights there from Leeds Bradford.

2. Galloway is basically a part-time MP. Although his links to his constituency are tenuous outside of election season, maybe he claws back a bit of time for Bradford by rarely turning up in Westminster. This year he's spoken in just four debates and attended just a tenth of votes. On the other hand, he spends a lot of time in Beirut, where he is a TV star. He is, in fact, the third highest-earning MP in parliament. (The last prime minister is the highest earning, but gives it all to his charitable foundation. The other high earners are all Tory businessmen. Unsurprisingly, MPs who earn the most from second jobs statistically "speak in fewer parliamentary debates, submit fewer written questions and miss more votes than other MPs".)

3. Galloway is a shill for dictators. So, what is he doing when he should be in Bradford or Westminster? Mainly, he is appearing on TV stations owned by authoritarian regimes: Iran's Press TV; the Kremlin-run RT (formerly Russia Today - on which see Nick Cohen, Oliver Bullough, James Bloodworth); and the Lebanon-based Al Mayadeen, which is politically supportive of Assad's murderous regime in Syria and is linked to Hezbollah (in fact, some claim it is owned by a cousin of Assad). These stations are not just based in authoritarian countries; they are PR mouthpieces for authoritarian regimes. Not only do they systematically distort the truth in the geopolitical interests of these extreme right-wing regimes, but they also regularly host Holocaust revisionists, 9/11 deniers, British fascists and other cranks. Galloway's politics fit in well with this; in a period when Assad's government, backed by Iran and armed by Russia. has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians, Galloway has remained silent and actually used his scarce time in parliament to table a motion about a brief Israeli incursion into Syria claiming "dozens" of lives.

4. Whether or not Galloway is personally antisemitic, he contributes to an atmosphere in which antisemitic ideas move in to the mainstream. You'll know that a couple of months ago Galloway launched a libel claim against a Jewish journalist who suggested he might be antisemitic. I wouldn't suggest Galloway is personally antisemitic, but he seems to have a lot of time for people who are, and he seems very happy to cultivate an atmosphere around himself in which antisemitism can flourish. Galloway has championed antisemitic Holocaust denier Gilad Atzmon (he reads Atzmon's book to his wife in bed, apparently.) Respect has had to apologise for antisemites again and again. Some point to Galloway's "Israel-free zone" claims and refusal to debate Israelis. This is bad for Bradford. Not long ago, Bradford Muslims saved its synagogue. Now, in an atmosphere nurtured by Galloway (and his Lib Dem twin in Bradford East) Bradford is a less comfortable place for Jews than it should be. [UPDATE: Read "A Jew in Bradford" by Ben Judah.] Most recently, Galloway has tweeted about Netanyahu celebrating his Muslim opponent's coming victory and retweets his followers' aggressive tweets about the synagogue. In fact, many of his most active supporters - people he regularly retweets - come across as antisemites, Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists - and antisemites have been at the heart of his coterie for some time.

5. Galloway is a bully. Whether or not Galloway was being libelled when he was called an antisemitic, his response to the charge - immediately sending threatening legal letters - is a good example of his pattern of bullying. We can see this bullying in his interactions with Israeli students, his interactions with Syrian oppositionists. We can see it in his response to "ThingGate", the light-hearted tweet by a local small business which he threatened as if he the feudal boss of Bradford. In fact, we can see it throughout his pompous and testosterone-soaked social media style, including even his tweets to me.

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<a class="media media-thumbnail twitter-timeline-link is-preview " data-resolved-url-large="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B9f-6UVIgAAEzM0.jpg:large" data-url="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B9f-6UVIgAAEzM0.jpg:large" href="https://twitter.com/bobfrombrockley/status/565200566565871617/photo/1" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: #9d582e; display: inline-block; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 8px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none;">

Most recently, we've seen his bullying in his interactions with his parliamentary opponent. Naz Shah was forced by her parents into marriage as a teenager, and her account of this has gone viral. At a very heated hustings event in Bradford, Galloway revealed that his agents in Pakistan had tracked down her marriage certificate, calling her a liar.

6. Galloway's sexual politics are deeply reactionary. His claim that Naz Shah's marriage was not forced because her parents consented (even though she didn't) was, as Huma Munshi puts it, "playing politics with Shah's history as a forced marriage survivor." It indicates how reactionary Galloway's sexual politics are. Not surprisingly for someone with multiple overlapping marriages to increasingly young women (some civil, some Islamic), who works for Putin and the mullahs of Iran as his day job, and who is deeply soaked in socially conservative Catholic morals, this would not be the first time that Galloway's reactionary sexual politics have come out. The most striking incident was when he claimed that even if allegations against his fellow Russia Today employee Julian Assange these would not constitute rape but rather just "bad sexual etiquette". Galloway just does not get that marriage without consent is rape, that sex with some not conscious and therefore not able to say no is rape. In short, he is effectively an apologist for rape.

7. The hat.

Also read:
Coatesy on Galloway; Aisha Gill on the chance to overturn the patriarchal structures of local politics in Bradford; Huma Munshi on Galloway's sexual politics; Angry of Bradford; top Bradford tweeters; all my Galloway posts.

bobhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-39450304599411519432015-04-30T06:50:00.000+01:002015-05-06T17:36:38.988+01:00Anne Marie Waters: UKIP bigotry comes to Lewisham
When I started my series on my election priorities, with a post on the need to eliminate the far right, I illustrated it with an infographic from UK Aktion on the current far right landscape in Britain. The map had Nigel Farage and UKIP on it, showing their irregular contact with Britain First, the Dad's Army comedy Mosleyites who are rising stars of the far right, as well as its proximity to the English Defence League and Liberty GB, who have floated around its orbit. In some ways this was a mistake, because it is wrong to call UKIP far right.

Many people to whom UKIP appeals are drawn from the Tory base ("a swelling coalition of small businessmen, lone traders and hyper-Atlanticist cowboy capitalists", as Richard Seymour aptly put it). There are even some in UKIP who might have more in common with Old Labour, or who might even be called of the left, as this brilliant piece of writing by James Meek about Grimsby shows. Some of its concerns resonate with ordinary working class people left out by the turbulence of global capitalism.

And yet, somehow UKIP can't stop getting tangled up with the far right. Whether it's chatting on Twitter with Holocaust denying Hitler fans, posting racist cartoons on Facebook, winning the endorsement of Nick Griffin, commenting on Jews' hooked noses, or linking up with fruitcakish European parties, well, UKIP keeps on getting embarrassingly right-wing. This series of tweets gives about a dozen examples of UKIP straying close to fascist territory.

Unfortunately, the candidate UKIP has chosen for Lewisham East* is kind of in this category.

Her name is Anne-Marie Waters. I first noticed her in mid-2013 when she tried to get selected as a Labour Party candidate in Brighton (although she had earlier tried to get selected in Swindon South). Andy Newman of Socialist Unity had attacked her then, and my instinct was to defend her. Newman objected to her strident secularism, arguing that she promoted Islamophobia. At the time, although there were examples of some unsavoury memes in her narrative, I felt Newman's evidence was pretty thin. Waters was associated with One Law For All, a campaign against Sharia law that I strongly support, led mainly by ex-Muslim women. OL4A have a very clear policy that the counter-Jihadi right is their enemy not their potential ally.

However, around this time, Waters seemed to start moving further to the right, away from a secularist campaign against Islamism towards a blanket loathing of Muslims. Worryingly, she started associating more and more with far right activists around the English Defence League and its founder Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Around the time Yaxley-Lennon left the EDL, Waters left Labour (oddly, she made the announcement on a far right Scandinavian website).

Before long, she had joined UKIP. It took a while before her associates in OL4A distanced themselves from her, but eventually, as her association with EDL became more and more blatant, they did so quite unambiguously, using the words "racist hate politics".

For a while it seemed as if she would be selected as UKIP parliamentary candidate in Billericay. To court the swivel-eyed Essex men that would be UKIP's base there, she widened her animosity from Muslims to Travellers.

Hilary Aked of SpinWatch wrote a profile of her for IRR in January. I think that sometimes SpinWatch, in describing a well-funded "neoconervative" counter-Jihadi conspiracy around people like Waters can stretch their web a little too thinly to mean much. But Aked's core allegation, of Waters' links with the far right, is strong and damning, and it is important to ask where Waters' gets her funding from. I hope neither you nor Aked mind if I quote at length:

In June 2014, Waters shared a platform in Copenhagen with Lars Hedegaard, the man behind the anti-Islam organisation the International Free Press Society. A video of the event- the launch of a Swedish edition of Hedegaard's book Muhammad's Girls: Violence, Murder and Rape in the House of Islam - shows her sitting next to the Dane, who was convicted of hate speech in 2011 after stating that 'Muslims rape their children', though he successfully appealed this conviction, on 'free speech' grounds, the following year. Chairing the event was Ingrid Carlqvist, a key member of the Swedish counterjihad network. Also on the panel was psychologist Nicolai Sennels of the anti-immigration Danish People's Party, a prolific purveyor of Islamophobia dressed up as science. The video was produced by Dispatch International (DI), a mouthpiece for the counterjihad movement – for which Waters has written extensively – founded by Hedegaard and Carlqvist.

In her speech, Waters linked Islam to child abuse, saying (16:08) 'it's all linked to Islam', which she characterised as a dangerous 'ideology' being 'appeased', adding (17:45): 'it is exactly the same appeasement that is allowing young girls to be raped in Britain, it's got nothing to do with race, it's got to do with the fact that we will not confront the misogyny at the very, very heart of this religion'.

Waters also seems to have another far-right admirer, of more significance in the UK context. Alan Ayling (aka Alan Lake) helped set up, fund and strategise for the EDL, as an investigation by The Sunday Times revealed. A millionaire evangelical Christian, Ayling's links with the counterjihad movement led Scotland Yard to interview him after Anders Behring Breivik's 2011 massacre in Norway.

In a series of videos taken in October 2014 at Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde Park, which show Waters and others delivering diatribes against Islam, Ayling (wearing a black jacket and black t-shirt with yellow writing) can be seen in the group that appears to be supporting her between 1:08 and 1:19 in this video and from 4.40 in this clip.
Ayling may have showed up uninvited or coincidentally. Though Waters' various online links to the EDL have been documented, there is no definitive evidence of any offline connection. Ayling, in fact, is believed to have parted ways with the EDL, though his views have not changed. He now runs the website 'Four Freedoms' and has links to the far-right Sweden Democrats party. Waters did not respond to repeated requests to clarify her relationship with Ayling or to comment on other matters raised in this article.
Around this time, Waters seemed to fail in her bid to stand in Basildon and Billericay (a UKIP target seat), and got the consolation prize of multicultural Lewisham East.

The Mirror filmed her and another UKIP candidate speaking at a far right rally; they describe her as spouting anti-Muslim bigotry: "a lot of people need to be deported", she said, and "many mosques need to be closed down". And after the election, she is launching a right-wing "thinktank" with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

South London Anti-Fascists have called for a picket of the hustings where she will appear tonight. Although, as I said at the start of this post, I don't think UKIP is a fascist party (and, in fact, although very hard right, nor is Waters), I agree that Anne Marie Waters should not be welcomed in Lewisham East.

***

*Note: Lewisham East is about as safe a Labour seat as it gets, so the question there is who will come second. UKIP did come second in the 2014 council elections in a lot of outer South East London, including one ward in Lewisham East, so some people have suggested UKIP could be the contender there. However, as Clare points out, across the constituency they came sixth in the vote share, with their 8% of votes. So, they don't constitute an electoral threat here.

Previous posts: #GE2015 - Lewisham West's anti-Muslim bigot; Are UKIP a threat in London?; Weighing into the Tommy Robinson debate.
Topics: EDL, Islam, Lewisham. Elections 2015.
bobhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-87773524546221934592015-04-29T20:27:00.002+01:002015-04-29T20:27:46.642+01:00How many foreign nationals are there in Lewisham council homes? And what is Liberty GB?
In his profile in the local paper News Shopper, one of the parliamentary candidates in Lewisham West and Penge, one Dr George Whale, claimed that "much of the borough's social housing is let out to foreign nationals." On the internet, he has thrown out figures such "one in three" and "up to 40%". Does this claim have any basis in fact?

He gives as his source a MigrationWatch "briefing paper" from April 2012 entitled "Who is being allocated social housing in London?" Does this "briefing paper" back up Whale's claim? The MigrationWatch briefing uses data on new social housing lets from the single year 2010; we can assume that longer term tenants are more likely to be "natives". The data shows that "9% of its social housing [less than one in ten] lets went to foreign nationals."

However, because 35% of these lets are marked as having not given their nationality, MigrationWatch say that the proportion "confirmed as going to British nationals is 58%" (six in ten, which is where Whale's "up to four in ten" claim comes from). However, it seems to me this is MigrationWatch spin - why assume those who didn't give their nationality are foreigners? In my experience, it is majority ethnic "natives" who are most hostile to ethnic monitoring, but isn't it safest to just assume the proportions are the same among those who did and those who didn't give their nationality? If that were the case, then just over 13% (still not much more than one in ten) of new lets would be to foreign nationals.

But the figures are out of date. The briefing says that for its "local connection" requirement for getting social housing, Lewisham "just requires the applicant to be resident in the borough". Since then, Lewisham has instituted a two year residence rule, which will have dramatically cut migrants - and certainly new migrants - from the waiting list. Tory reforms have made it harder and harder for migrants to get access to council housing too, further cutting the numbers. (To be eligible, you need "settled status", i.e. permanent residence; to get that you need to have already lived here for three or in most cases five years plus pass a "Life in the UK" test that most of us Brits would fail. There are no situations in which, as Whale claimed when his numbers started to unravel, foreign nationals "get precedence" over British nationals.)

Given that 20% of Lewisham's population are foreign nationals, it looks like they are underrepresented in new lets, and probably even more underrepresented in existing social housing. Which is not surprising as all the evidence shows that most migrants are owner occupiers or private renters, and that most new migrants are private renters.

In short, George Whale is talking nonsense.

Who is George Whale?

Whale represents a party called "Liberty GB", which he founded with his buddy Paul Weston in 2013. Previously, they had a party called the "British Freedom Party", a BNP splinter which they tried to make into the electoral vehicle of the proto-fascist street thugs, the English Defence League - but this didn't work well because the EDL were more interested in booze-fuelled hooliganism than standing in elections.

The <a href="data:image/jpeg;base64,[encoded data, 9728 characters]" target="_blank">British Freedom Party's logo was based on that of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, which kind of sums up Whale and his merry band. Here are some profiles of Liberty GB: from Searchlight, Tell Mama, Hope not Hate, Rational Wiki. Here's the AFN summary:

Liberty GB

Paul Weston surveyed the far right scene in 2013 and was disappointed that there was no party that catered to his particular brand of racist insanity. So, after flirting with the English Defence League and Andrew Brons, Weston did what any self-respecting, self-important racist blowhard would do, and founded his own group. Liberty GB managed to stand three candidates at the European elections in 2014 and achieved a dismal vote. The group will likely disband when Weston's attention span wanes.

Do say: Paul Weston is the only man who can save Britain from the Muslamic invasion.
Don't say: Paul Weston is our only member.
Weston is also standing in the election, in Luton South, under the name "No to terrorism, yes to Britain", after announcing his candidacy at an EDL rally. Weston was last spotted in public speaking at a Pegida UK march alongside a speaker from the openly retro-Nazi "British Movement".

Liberty GB claim to be opposed to "Islamisation" (whatever that means) and jihad, but a quick glance at their track record and election promises - banning mosques, deporting Muslims, banning halal food - show that they can't distinguish between ordinary Muslims and jihadi Islamists. This makes them racist. They have no place in our community.

This is why it was completely sensible for some of the other Lewisham West and Penge candidates to refuse to share a platform with Whale at local hustings, and stupid for the local 38 Degrees group to invite him to theirs at the Honor Oak pub.

Tomorrow, we turn to Lewisham East, and an almost as unsavoury candidate there...
bobhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-84967566252004403282015-04-20T23:34:00.000+01:002015-04-21T00:38:18.517+01:00From London to Yarmouk

A temporary break in the pre-election blogging...

Yarmouk: the Palestinian neighbourhood in Damascus where thousands have died, bombed by Assad, starved under seige by the Syrian regime, and more recently invaded by Islamic State fighters. Mostly ignored by the Western media until ISIS made it somehow news-worthy this month.

I first blogged about Yarmouk in 2012 and have been tweeting about it since the start of 2014. I have questioned why "pro-Palestinian" activists, who manage to mobilise thousands for Gaza, seem to have been relatively quiet about the Palestinian people of Yarmouk, where people have been dying in huge numbers for three years now.

When I saw that there was an emergency demonstration for Yarmouk, called by Palestinian solidarity activists, in London on Tuesday, I thought I should put my money where my mouth is, and go along.

There were dozens of protesters there - somewhere between 50 and 100; I'm no longer good at estimating that sort of thing. A significant proportion of those present were probably from the Palestinian diaspora. There were flags of the Syrian revolution and of Palestine. There was no presence from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign or any of the other groups which organised protests about Gaza. There were two SWP paper sellers, not managing to sell many papers but they did get some people to hold their placards. The comedian Jeremy Hardy was there. The Syrian Solidarity Movement had a banner saying "Syrian refugees welcome here." Jews for Justice for Palestinians had a large banner. There were several keffiyehs. One protester had a banner saying "Yarmouk - made in Israel", but otherwise Israel did not feature in much of the material.

Names of many who have died of starvation in #Yarmouk read out in #London. Desperate situation# Syria #SaveYarmouk pic.twitter.com/wxeS1nFsJw
— Joseph Willits (@josephwillits) April 14, 2015

After a short, powerful statement by the organisers, they read out some of the names of people who have died in Yarmouk: newborn babies, children, adults, elders. Died in airstrikes, killed by sniper fire, died from lack of medical care after suffering from treatable problems - but mostly starved to death. Listening to these names - of people who come to us through the media merely as numbers, if at all - was heart-breaking.

From the #SaveYarmouk demo this evening. Heart-breaking to hear names of residents who've died, mainly of starvation. pic.twitter.com/IP0Nu5BaP2
— Bob From Brockley (@bobfrombrockley) April 14, 2015

Six things I think I know about Yarmouk

1. The story of Yarmouk is the story of the Palestinian diaspora
Yarmouk was established in 1957, to house Palestinians squatting in and around Damascus, mainly families from the northern part of Palestine displaced in what Palestinians calls the Nakba, "catastrophe", the 1948 exodus in the wake of Israel's establishment as a state. Many came from Safad, scene of bitter conflict in 1948; others came from Haifa and Tiberius. Up to 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from Palestine in the conflict. This included up to 90,000 who went to Syria - rising to 127,000 by the 1960s, 400,00 by the end of the century. That multiplication of population was similar across the diaspora, and the descendants of the 1948 refugees now number 5 million, which is not much less than the current Jewish population of Israel, making the ideal of the right of return to Palestine increasingly hard to envisage without generating a new Nakba for the Jews.

2. Calling Yarmouk a refugee camp is misleading

Damascus in 2011 had a population of 2.5 million - that's about the size of Birmingham or Chicago. Yarmouk had a population of over 130,000, possibly as large as 200,000 - so about the size of Oxford or Reading, or a London borough such as Hammersmith and Fulham. Yarmouk is well within the metropolitan area of Damascus and its municipal boundaries. Built on the edge of town, the city has grown up around it. Before the war, it had hospitals, theatres, businesses, beauty salons, internet cafes, a rich cultural life. Its cityscape is dominated by five-storey low-rises. According to the BBC, "It had its own mosques, schools and public buildings. Literacy and numeracy rates among Palestinians in the camp were among the highest not just in Syria, but across the Arab world."

Although it is not an "official" camp, it is known as a camp simply because most of its inhabitants are Palestinians, and therefore retain the technical status of refugees. Palestinian refugees are the only refugees whose status is passed on down through the family line. Their welfare is not administered to by the UN's normal refugee agency, UNHCR, but by a seperate specific agency, UNWRA. This means a kind of permanent homelessness and statelessness for Palestinians - which in many ways has been encouraged by their leadership and by Arab governments, as a weapon against Israel.

3. Assad is no friend of the Palestinians
Assad, like his father and other Arab tyrants, has posed as a friend of the Palestinians. However, Syria's government, while giving Palestinians resident in Syria many of the rights of other Syrians (although of course all Syrians have only limited civil rights in this totalitarian state), denies them citizenship and restricts their property and land ownership rights. Assad has made them dependent clients on the Ba'athist state, in a position of indefinite limbo, unable to return to Palestine, unable to become Syrian.

4. The Syrian regime's crimes in Yarmouk far outweigh those of ISIS
It is clearly true that Daesh are one of the worst things to happen to Syria or the world in the recent past. It is not surprising, then, that their presence in Yarmouk in recent weeks should have finally focused some attention in the West on the its suffering. But Yarmouk's suffering at the hands of Syria's own government was already unimaginably bad.

You may have seen this image, circulated by UNRWA, I think early in 2014. This was over a year into the Ba'athist regime's siege (which began 18 December 2012). The siege, which began with heavy shelling that destroyed much of the urban infrastructure, was Assad's response to the activities of the Syrian revolution in Yarmouk. Under the siege, the residents became largely dependent on UNRWA food distribution, along with occasional dangerous forays out of the district. By mid-2013, the food distribution was disrupted by fighting and only a fraction of the necessary food was getting in. Civilians were dying in the crossfire between the regime and other factions. The arrival of ISIS was simply adding an extra drop to an ocean of suffering long since flowing over.

Sections of the Palestinian leadership (the PFLP) have been in alliance with Assad; others (in the PA) have remained studiously neutral. These factions' allies in the Western Palestinian solidarity organisations have followed their lead. Western governments have uttered stern words about Assad, but done nothing to create a No Fly Zone or take other steps to stop his slaughter. Most of the left, from Ed Miliband leftwards, have actively opposed doing anything about it. We are all complicit in Yarmouk's suffering.

5. Jabhat al-Nusra are not much better than Daesh
The Western media are obsessed with ISIS, but there are marginally less extreme military factions who aren't much better. Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate, took control of large sections of Yarmouk early in 2014. They blocked the entry of aid and tightened rather than lifted the siege on the inhabitants. In December, they executed two Palestinian residents for blasphemy. There are several reports of co-operation with ISIS in Damascus (although they are at war elsewhere they have officially claimed to be neutral on Yarmouk) and there are growing numbers of reports that the two groups are increasingly co-operating in and around Yarmouk.

Significantly, there is considerable evidence suggesting that al-Nusra has been funded and supported by some of the West's allies in the region. The Obama administration has claimed that private individuals in Kuwait have heavily financed it, a claim made in more detail by other experts. Turkey actively supported al-Nusra from 2012 to 2014 and may continue to do so covertly, seeing it as a counterbalance to Kurdish forces. Joe Biden has also claimed that the Saudis and Emirates funded them too - later semi-retracting. And there is lots of evidence of Qatari support too. Crucially, all of these countries are intimately bound through trade and finance (including arms trade) to the US and UK.

And this support came in a period when the US and UK completely stood back from the conflict. Secular, democratic or moderate rebels (Syria's best hope), left without resources due to our lack of support, were rapidly depleted as al-Nusra grew. Once again, then, we are complicit in Yarmouk's suffering.

6. The silence on Yarmouk should shame the left
Given all of this, it is striking at the left has remained quiet about Yarmouk until recently. Electronic Intifada has occasionally mentioned Yarmouk (but often, as with this piece by Asa Winstanley, putting equal blame on "the rebels" and the regime, apparently because rebelling in Syria - unlike in Israel - is reckless provocation). A couple of powerful articles at MondoWeiss (by Talal Alyan and Mariam Barghouti) draw attention to the fact that the dominant mode was silence.

Shameful absence from Palestine Solidarity Campaign and other Palestinian solidarity groups from today's Yarmouk protest. Such hypocrites.
— لينة (@LinahAlsaafin) April 14, 2015
The demonstration last week was only endorsed by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign under pressure at the very last minute, and the PSC had no presence at the demo. The PSC finally posted something that was more than tangentially about Yarmouk on its website on 9 April - curiously avoiding mention of any blame for Assad (or indeed any other specific parties - apart from Israel). Mehdi Hasan has recently written powerfully about this silence, saying "Our selective outrage is morally unsustainable." It seems to me that those in the BDS/anti-Zionist movement who have been silent about Yarmouk are not pro-Palestinian but simply anti-Israel.

bobhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-32109801942495236102015-04-17T18:57:00.001+01:002015-04-19T01:09:40.081+01:00Not much has changed since 1969

The Spectator's archive recently republished something by Richard West from 1969 on the British left's drastic moral failure over Biafra. The left then supported the Nigerian state against the Ibo independence movement which Nigeria brutally crushed. I'd been aware of this before, but what struck me this time that the left trotted out the "blood for oil" trope back then:

If the Biafrans had been black and the Nigerians had been white, the rights and wrongs would have been much clearer... The British left resolved this problem with typically silly arguments. It was 'all about oil.'... Even the British left must now realise that the oil companies and other big business interests were on the side of Nigeria and that Biafra's fight was inspired, not by oil, but by the will to survive.
West was scathing about how the left sat back until it was too late, and then effectively said "well maybe you were right then but now it's too late." This struck me as exactly like Syria, where the left priotised "stopping the war" (i.e. stopping intervention that might prevent a war) while a war raged in which thousands died.

I have been surprised by the callousness of the British left. 'Of course Nigeria must remain united,' a socialist journalist yelled over the lunch table, 'even if two or three million people have to be killed.'
Sounds like the British left on Syria now or Yugoslavia in the 1990s...

West also notes that the usual assumptions about the left and right were wrong over Africa. It seemed as if it was the left wanted Africa to govern itself - but when it came to Biafra, the aspiration to self-government was ignored. I wonder if we can see something similar now, when it is often the right, especially in its neoconservative form, which embraces self-government outside the white world (in the Middle East as well as in a country such as Zimbabwe), while too much the white left is happy for non-whites to be ruled by dictators, because they are their dictators.

West concluded that much of left politics was about white people feeling better, a symptom of powerlessness at home. It made British radicals feel good to protest America's involvement in Vietnam - something Britain had no power over - but they stayed quiet over Nigeria, where the British position still made a fundamental difference. Demonstrations about Vietnam, West wrote,  "are rituals, irrelevant to the stated cause, just as Guy Fawkes's night is irrelevant to the Papist Peril."
bobhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-56260010578870308312015-04-16T15:12:00.000+01:002015-04-19T01:10:18.962+01:00Exclusive: Interview with Chris Flood, TUSC candidate for Lewisham Deptford

This is an email interview conducted earlier this week with Chris Flood. Chris was formerly a Socialist Party councillor in Telegraph Hill in Lewisham Deptford and is now standing as the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) candidate in the parliamentary elections.

What would be your first priority if elected as MP for Lewisham Deptford?
My first priority if elected would be to call a public assembly to oppose austerity & appeal to Lewisham council to stop implementing cuts & join us in fighting for the necessary extra funding from government to deliver health, education and other essential public services.

TUSC is standing over 100 candidates in 2015. Do you think TUSC will make any impact on the election debate?

We think it's crucial that we offer an alternative both locally, where we have had a record, as with Ian Page and myself campaigning against cuts in Lewisham council going back many years. But equally important is that we also start to offer something that has a national focus too, which TUSC does have now with 135 candidates standing in the general election. This is a significant achievement even if we get modest results. So therefore imagine if we get a weak coalition government and there is another election in a year or two? Having shown we can stand 130 plus candidates, what stops us in the next election standing say 200 plus? By this point the electorate may well have had a bellyful of any 'lesser evilism Labour administered cuts.' We will see of course. A lot of this will be determined by events.

Many thousands and thousands of individual trade unionists are supporting the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, who are not politically aligned at this stage. Of course we want all of these strands to be the back bone of a new workers party. TUSC is not just about elections, but part of a process towards developing that new party and to campaign. Straight after the May 7th election therefore, no matter what government is formed, TUSC will be calling public meetings across the country to bring together all those who want to campaign against austerity.

Can you tell us about your record, as a councillor and local activist?

Firstly I'm an active trade unionist and have been since being a young adult doing my nurse training. I am currently the Vice President of the lecturers union (UCU) at City University London where I train mental health nurses and do health services research. I am privileged to work with a great trade union branch and members and other executive members who defend UCU members conditions and education standards and principles daily.

My record as a previous socialist councillor still stands as well, as an elected representative along with Ian Page on Lewisham Council. We would argue these were principled achievements, often achieved having mobilised significant sections of the community to engage in the politics of a given situation with us, showing what socialist councillors can achieve where they are elected.

Readers can take a look here at our record: http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/txt/132.pdf

I'd argue this is a record therefore that people can trust.

But also of course there's my role in the NHS. As a young shop steward in the National Union of Public Employees I was in the leadership of a campaign that successfully defended the threat of closure of Charing Cross hospital in the early 90s whilst I was general nurse there. This was part of the Tomlinson hospital closure programme. Again more recently whilst a Socialist ward councillor in Lewisham council I used my position and health expertise on the Health Select Committee to pressure the powers to be to 'recall' the Picture of Health proposals in 2008, proposals (read as cuts) which we all know were resurrected once again more recently. At Lewisham Hospital in the end, under the weight of public opposition, these Picture Of Health proposals were shelved. Showing how a principled anti cuts councillor position on the council can be used to support public campaigns with great success.

Similarly with the Hyde housing campaign in New Cross where as Socialist councillors and tenants we stopped a massive stock transfer of council homes in New Cross out of the control of the local authority. As we explained at the time stock transfer would not be in the interests of local peoples' housing needs and would in fact be another step towards housing privatisation with all the associated increases in rent, lower accountability, less democracy, less transparency over decision making and closer links with the private sector and so on.

Details of that successful campaign can be read about here: http://m.socialistparty.org.uk/international/all/International/3595

What issues are you active on now?

In terms of current campaigns I am in complete opposition to school academies. The threat to our local Lewisham Prendergast schools is clearly of great concern to all those who support good community democratically accountable schools. Again the 'academization' of our schools reflects a trend also being pursued in health and housing where big business gets increasingly the biggest say and it's hands on the finances, whilst the democratic input by local communities, teachers and parents is completely pushed to one side.

For his reason I am also closely working with other TUSC candidate Martin Powell Davies, a respected National Union of Teachers executive member, and TUSC candidate for Lewisham West Penge, to support and build for the next Stop Academies in Lewisham (SAiL) demonstration and strikes in the coming weeks to oppose the academization of the Prendergast schools.

As well as TUSC, People Before Profit and the Green Party are standing in Lewisham Depford. Is there a danger in splitting the "left" vote?

Within TUSC, we have appealed for all progressive forces who oppose cuts to come together in coalition with TUSC, with their own right to campaign and use their own materials. We don't have to agree on everything, thus allowing for different traditions and minor differences of view. We simply ask that all groups agree to a public declaration of being pro trade union, anti cuts, anti privatisation and to support the other progressive policies that we cite here: http://m.tusc.org.uk/policy.

There are excellent examples of where this has worked. For example in Camberwell and Peckham where Left Unity and TUSC are standing together by jointly supporting Nick Wrack. There are other examples of this nationally as well. There are the rebel Labour councillors that are working with TUSC nationally, such as the two cllrs in Hull, the two cllrs in Leicester, two cllrs in Southampton, two in Walsall and Warrington. In addition there's the former Labour cllrs in London - Kingsley Abrams and in Harrow Nana Asante.

Do you have any predictions for 7 May?

I'd say that obviously people want to drive out the Tories. Especially in our inner city areas where there's a collective memory of older Tory governments and what they did previously. But a decreasing number of the electorate are voting for Tory or Labour, with the options for other parties opening up. This partly reflects a disappointment in Labour for being willing partners in passing on the Tory cuts at local authority level. We want to give a positive anti austerity alternative as there is plenty of potential here and give a voice to a whole section of the electorate that is disillusioned and starting to consider alternatives.

While I hope to see the back of the Tories, the reality is whoever wins in terms of the main parties - (including a Miliband and Balls led Labour government), we will see a continuation of attacks against the working conditions of ordinary people. In other words a continuation of job loses, more difficulties around finding homes and paying for accommodation, reduced public services and pay, all whilst the rich get richer. But we recognise the need to be patient. It's an important period as the space on the left for an alternative is opening up and TUSC wants to be part of continuing that debate on the need for a new workers party. Our intervention in this election is crucial in being part of that.

bobhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-82088204627363924332015-04-11T09:27:00.000+01:002015-05-07T17:29:18.266+01:00Bob's election priorities no.4: Keep some space open for the left

Without electorally credible political space to its left, the Labour Party blows rightward in the breeze, taking for granted that people like me will vote for them so it can play to the middle ground. In Scotland, it can no longer do that: the SNP, previously seen as the Tartan Tories, has pulled of a plausible performance of an anti-establishment, anti-Westminster, social democratic party and pushed Labour off to stage right.

As you'll see as I get through my election priorities posts, I would not vote for a left party if it meant the possibility of letting in a Tory (imagine having voted for Nader in 2000, when GW Bush narrowly stole the US presidential election from Gore - how could you live with that?).

However, if you live in a non-marginal seat, voting to the left of Labour might send out a signal to the party that it can't keep on taking us for granted.

But how appealing are the options?

Greens
I'm not sure if the Greens are exactly a left alternative, given the debacle of its administration in Brighton, which has imposed austerity like the mainstream parties (with refuse collection workers in particular bearing the brunt). I also find its leadership completely unappealing, often posturing in an off-the-shelf leftist way (e.g. saying people who fight for ISIS shouldn't be criminalised, getting involved in silly boycott campaigns, or helping lead the pro-Assad Stop the War Coalition) while lacking any substantively radical social analysis. (Check out Jake Goretzki's #BackingCaroline tweets for a pithier and more amusing version of this paragraph.) However, the fact that the Greens have MEPs and one MP means that the mainstream media is forced to give some acknowledgement that the universe extends further to the left than "Red" Ed. [Previous: The Greens are a viable force in the inner city.]

TUSC
The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) is standing some 130 parliamentary candidates in this election. Founded by Bob Crow, TUSC is an electoral alliance of a few left parties, the Independent Socialist Network (ISN), and some trade unions. In the credit column, it has councillors and former councillors and other local activists with important track records in both community politics and the trade unions. In the debit column, and possibly cancelling out all the positives, one of its constituent units is the Socialist Workers Party, one of the most poisonous forces on the British left.

They have some credible candidates in some places: Nick Wrack in Peckham; in Simon Hughes' Bermondsey and Old Southwark Kingsley Abrams, a former Labour candidate; in Lewisham Deptford former councillor Chris Flood; in Lewisham West and Penge (which includes Forest Hill), Martin Powell-Davis, a well-known local campaigner and teachers' union activist (Twitter/Facebook/blog) and in Coventry Dave Nellist.

On the other hand, make sure to avoid if their candidate is from the SWP. I think that includes Jenny Sutton in Tottenham, Jon Woods in Portsmouth, Ayeesha Saleem in Edinburgh, Ann Lemon in Bristol.

Left Unity
Left Unity are definitely worth watching in general. Its launch by Ken Loach appealed to ordinary people fed up with politics as usual, but as far as I can tell it's at risk from being more or less taken over by the usual suspects of the left swamp and they're probably not worth watching in this election. LU have some kind of electoral pact with TUSC and there are even some joint LU/TUSC candidates, but it is striking that LU, which sees itself as potentially the Syriza or Podemos of the UK, is fielding barely a twentieth of the number of candidates that TUSC is putting forward. Their candidate in Vauxhall is Simon Hardy.

Class War
I'm not sure whether we'd count Class War as part of the left or as a credible electoral force (or instead, as Waterloo Sunset puts it, as "some kind of retro anarcho-80's disco thang"), but they bring a blast of fresh air into the room. They recently launched their campaign in Croydon South, where their candidate is Jon Bigger. Lisa McKenzie (FB, Twitter) is challenging Ian Duncan Smith in Chingford. Her article here explains why she's standing: "Someone has to talk about class politics, social apartheid and the social cleansing in our country on the political stage, someone who has lived it, knows it and feels it." CW's dear leader, Ian Bone, is standing down the road from me in Lewisham West and Penge. And they're standing in a few other places too. Adam Ford was standing for them in Liverpool Riverside, with a great manifesto, although I'm sure I read he'd decided to stand down because he found them un-democratic and London-centric.

Lewisham People Before Profit
PB4P are standing candidates in Lewisham. I think in many ways they have a better approach than many of the other left parties - involvement in ground-up grassroots campaigns, avoiding the sterile dogmatic language of the Trotskyist sects, a broad-based populist appeal addressing bread and butter issues rather an ideological programme. But these posts explain why I will not consider voting for them. George Hallam, their secretary, actually queries why they are in a list of left candidates at all:

It's odd that you have included Lewisham People Before Profit at all as we don't even call ourselves 'left', let alone lay claim to "Marxist, communist, and/or socialist labels".
He's got a point: although their leader might seem like an orthodox tankie, their colourful spokesman once stood for the Tories and asked people to vote UKIP for their second choice in 2014! Note, the "people before profit" name was, I think, first used by the Socialist Alliance, and there is another groupuscule claiming that name in Northern Ireland, which I think is an electoral front for the SWP.

National Health Action
NHA, one of whose figureheads, Louise Irvine, is a Lewisham GP, are standing in a few places. I think it's good for them to be around to raise the dangers the NHS faces, especially from the Tories, but splitting an anti-Tory vote on a single issue basis seems odd to me.

Respect
George Galloway's personal vanity project, the misnamed Respect, is standing in a few places in the North and Midlands. It's wrong to call them a left-wing party: they're an electoral vehicle for opportunistic careerists who can't get to the top in the Labour party's municipal machines; their leader is an anti-feminist, anti-abortion, tea-totalling, pro-religion supporter of the most right-wing regimes in the world who rarely turns up to vote against Tory austerity laws; their political appeal is mainly Islamist and communalist rather than left. In short, don't vote for them, and actively vote against them.

Others
There are some other micro-groupuscules standing too. The oldest socialist party in Britain, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, has several candidates. The Alliance for Green Socialism has three candidates, including Toby Abse in Kensington. Steve Freeman, a member of Left Unity is standing as a Republican Socialist in Bermondsey and Old Southwark, which not only weakens the chance of Labour's Neil Coyle unseating Simon Hughes but also splits the vote of a credible TUSC candidate, Kingsley Abrams. There are seven candidates from the truly appalling Workers Revolutionary Party, six of whom are standing in seats where other socialists are standing.

Cutting off your nose to spite your face:

My fellow left anorak, Phil BC, has a longer list of left candidates here. On his list, an asterisk after the constituency name indicates a clash of far left candidates, which seems insane given hardly any of them polled more than a percent or two last time. For example, in Lewisham, we have TUSC against People Before Profit. This kind of fratricidal instinct is just one of the reasons it's going to be a while before there is a far left actually worth voting for for positive reasons.

UPDATE: Interview with Chris Flood, TUSC candidate in Lewisham Deptford.

Previous posts: The left-of Labour-left is not electorally viable

bobhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-75867690660836783222015-04-04T11:44:00.000+01:002015-05-06T17:40:06.616+01:00Bob From Brockley's election priorities no.5: Eliminate the far right

Image from UK Aktion

As Hope Not Hate have recently said (and it's in their interest to say the opposite), the British far right is at its lowest ebb for two decades. It's fractious and fragmented, a laughing stock with no electoral hope.

It is well known that when there is a Tory government, British fascism doesn't fare well electorally but turns to street activity; it is under Labour governments that it gets traction at the polling booth. This is because the Conservatives are seen as more sympathetic to the anti-immigrant and hang em and flog em politics that the far right uses to build its vote. Now, of course, there's UKIP, which claims it has taken a third of the BNP's vote, its allure for far right voters squeezing the space for actual fascist parties. (Britain First, the most up and coming fascist group in the UK, is endorsing UKIP enthusiastically and won't stand candidates to keep Farage's way clear.)

But we should not be complacent. Far right parties are standing in a few places across the UK. These groups will use the elections to disseminate their propaganda. At a time when anti-migrant and anti-Muslim bigotry is being mainstreamed, we can ill afford for fascist parties' messages to be broadcast.

I will update this post nearer the election with some of the locations where far right parties will be putting in the most effort.

UPDATE 1:

Tess Culnane, nicknamed "the Nazi granny", is standing for the BNP in Dagenham. Culnane, who sadly lives in the fair borough of Lewisham, is a veteran of almost very extreme right group in the UK, and most recently the National Front. She has a long association with the openly neo-Nazi British People's Party.

The British Democrats, an offshoot of the BNP, are standing in Hitler-loving ex-archaelogist Jim Lewthwaite in Bradford East, thinking that because UKIP have stood a Muslim candidate there they might soak up the racist vote.

The National Front, the most openly fascist of the far right parties who field candidates, are standing in Rochdale and a couple of other places.

Another veteran of several far right groups, Paul Weston has launched No to Terrorism, Yes to Britain, and is standing in Luton South, which has in the past had some associations with the EDL. His sidekick George Wale (once a Labour Party member) is standing in Lewisham West and Penge. Whale works at the University of Westminster (he was previously at Queen Mary) and was Weston's deputy in the British Freedom Party (BFP) and Liberty GB. The BFP was a BNP splinter group whose logo was based on that of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Whale's election pitch is that Britain's political class has "declared war" on the English, and cites as evidence of this "the relentless importation of wave upon wave of hostile immigrants" into the country.Here are some of his manifesto bullet points: deport all Muslims considered to be a threat, along with their families; segregate Muslim prisoners within the prison system to prevent conversion of non-Muslims to Islam; ban mosque-building, remove minarets from existing mosques, outlaw the Islamic call to prayer; ban ritual slaughter of animals and importation of ritually slaughtered meat; close all madrassas and Muslim faith schools.

UPDATE 2:

A new post on Liberty GB here.

bobhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-20302649873056295972015-04-02T23:18:00.000+01:002015-05-07T17:31:23.953+01:00Bob From Brockley's Election Priorities no.6: Get rid of David Ward

David Ward is the Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East, elected at the last election with a majority of just 365 votes. As the Liberal Democrats' collaboration with the Conservatives has probably killed off the Lib Dem vote, it seems pretty likely this will be a Labour gain.

David Ward's Wikipedia page gives plenty of reasons why he is unfit to sit in parliament. Here's just one:

On 25 January 2013 the Liberal Democrats reprimanded Ward for his "use of language" in a statement about Israel's treatment of Palestinians which he put on his blog the same day that he signed a memorial book in the British House of Commons marking Holocaust Memorial Day. He wrote there that he honoured "those who were persecuted and killed during the Holocaust" but also commented: "Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools – I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza."[36][37]

Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: "Mr Ward has deliberately abused the memory of the Holocaust, causing deep pain and offence – these comments are sickening and unacceptable and have no place in British politics". Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said: "We are outraged and shocked at these offensive comments about Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the suggestion that Jews should have learned a lesson from the experience."[36] On Twitter,National Union of Students education officer Rachel Wenstone accused him of "casual antisemitism" and Ian Austin, a Labour Member of Parliament, accused him of "racism".[38]

When asked if he was not accusing Jews, rather than the Israeli state, of persecuting Palestinians, he replied: "I'm accusing the Jews who did it, so if you're a Jew and you did not do it I'm not accusing you. I'm saying that those Jews who did that and continue to do it have not learned those lessons."[38]
Here's Ben Judah and Josh Glancy, from the Bradford installment of their excellent current series on British antisemitism:

David Ward, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East, is also widely believed to be anti-Semitic by British Jews for his stridently anti-Israeli remarks, which often accuse the Israeli government of intentional mass murders and other supposed crimes, which British "Zionists" seek to cover up through their supposedly powerful institutions. On Holocaust Memorial Day this year, Ward said that Israel had committed "genocide" in Palestine, and he has mockingly attacked the oldest representative body of British Jews, the Board of Deputies, Tweeting—"What a shame there isn't a powerful, well-funded Board of Deputies for #Roma."

Ward is not only condemned by Jews. At a recent event in London, Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamic radical-turned-mainstream politician, was asked when criticism of Israel becomes anti-Semitism. "I happen to belong to a political party [the Liberal Democrats] which happens to have a member of parliament belonging to it called David Ward. And what he did when people were murdered in Paris for expressing themselves and others were murdered for being Jewish and no other reason he tweeted #JeSuisPalestine. Now we can reverse that and I hope that Muslims if it were reversed would realize just how hurtful such a sentiment at such a time can be," said Nawaz. "Just imagine a member of parliament after the brutal murder of three visible Muslims in Chapel Hill had tweeted #JeSuisIsrael. You'd be horrified. It's just appalling someone could tweet #JeSuisPalestine as if it's an answer."

Ward agreed to meet me in his office in Bradford, festooned with the yellow campaigning colors of his party. But he was nervous and jittery, recording the conversation and backing away from some of his statements without renouncing them completely. Cross-examining the distressed politician makes it clear to me that what Jews find anti-Semitic about this man is a question of rhetoric, not considered views. Under pressure he seemed to have relatively few of these: He admitted that he did not challenge the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East as he is "a firm believer in the United Nations" and accepts the 1947 partition resolution. Ward strongly denied that he is attacking Israel to appeal to the Muslim vote, claiming that when he walks around Bradford, those who come up to congratulate him on his anti-Zionist stance are "mostly from the Church groups."

...But does he stand by his characterization of Israel's actions as genocide? He could neither hold my eye nor respond to this question, insisting that he had been referring to the U.N. definition of genocide and attempting to move on. When I produced a print-out of the U.N. definition of genocide he seemed at some points to look a little scared and began talking about Israeli acts of ethnic cleansing in 1947. "That's pretty serious stuff," he said, "and amounts to the United Nations definition of genocide. I think the harm that's been done to the people of Gaza comes under that definition as well." Since Ward clearly believes acts of massacre or ethnic cleansing count as genocide, had he heard of the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands, I asked. His face betrayed he had not. Asked whether the termination of Jewish life in Arab states are also genocide, he seemed confused, then lost, before admitting—"it sounds like it was."

Just like Galloway, he is at pains to emphasize that he is not anti-Semitic. But equally it is clear that he has not considered, or is not willing to consider what drives the intensity of his Israel-hatred.
Engage has also covered Ward extensively. Here's Sarah on his Charlie Hebdo response and on his Holocaust Memorial Day comments and on his refusal to apologise; here's Lesley Klaff on his Holocaust inversion.

***
However, the contender for Ward's constituency is Imran Hussain, who is not an attractive alternative. Hussain is essentially the placeman of the patriarchal machine politics of Kashmiri clans who dominate Bradford. As Parveen Akhtar and Timothy Peace have written, Hussain's nomination for neighbouring Bradford West in 2010 triggered the anger against nepotism that drove George Galloway's defeat of Labour there, in the so-called Bradford Spring:

As described by the report of Lewis Baston, Imran Hussain's selection gave 'the sense that things were sewn up by a particular subsection of the community by means of influence, organisation, family ties and shadows cast by Pakistani politics, and that victory in selection contests was a matter of successful organisation and manoeuvring rather than legitimately winning a political argument or having the candidate best suited to the task in hand'.
If I lived in Bradford East, then, I'd be hard pressed to know who to vote for: Hussain, for the certainty of removing the odious Ward, or someone else (perhaps the Greens' Dave Stephens?) to cock a snook at both of them.

***
I'll return to Bradford for priority no.3 (you can probably guess what that will be), but for more reading, I'd recommend Ratna Lachman, local blogger J Atkinson, the Guardian's Helen Pidd, or this Twitter list.

ADDED: Read SoupyOne on David Ward.
bobhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-48766807018221139432015-04-02T22:44:00.001+01:002015-05-08T11:03:57.467+01:00Bob From Brockley's Election Priorities
My plan for this blog between now and the UK general election is a series of posts on my hopes for the outcome. I've got six, and I'm going to publish them in reverse order. I'll update this post as I publish them, as a kind of table of contents. If, by any chance, I manage to write and publish all six, I might add more afterwards, but that's a long shot. All my election coverage will be collected under this category.

no.1: Tories out
no.2: Contain the rise of UKIP
no.3: Kick George Galloway out of Bradford - and out of British politics
no.4: Leave some space for the left
no.5: Destroy the far right
no.6: Get rid of David Ward

Other posts:

Exclusive: Interview with Chris Flood, TUSC candidate for Lewisham Deptford
On Lewisham West and Penge's far right candidate George Whale
On Lewisham East's unsavoury UKIP candidate Anne Marie Waters

From the last elections:

The May 2014 UKIP earthquake was a relatively minor tremor
London is neither as exceptional nor as homogenous as the media tells us
The Tories are the main losers from UKIP, and the "left behind" narrative is flawed
The Lib Dems are nearly dead
The Greens are a viable force in the inner city
I now live in a one party state
The BNP is completely dead, but we shouldn't relax too much
The left-of Labour-left is not electorally viable
Gallowayism is dead in Bradford but clings on in East London
The Jewish vote is returning to Labour
Is the Jewish vote leaving Labour again?

In May, when (hopefully) Britain has a new government, normal business will resume.
bobhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-20244530641115127202015-03-14T19:00:00.001+00:002015-03-15T11:48:37.938+00:00Who Is Milo Samuels?
Updated 15 March 11:48 a.m.

As an anonymous blogger, I recognise that there are lots of good reasons why someone might want to be anonymous online or to have multiple identities. From Luther Blissett to the Zapatistas to the Black Block, activists not using their given identities in their activism is nothing odd, and I don't usually have time for "gotcha" style unmaskings. But these tweets caught my eye:

@NUTonline do you know who "Milo Samuels" is in UAF magazine? Heard it's alleged rapist SWP's Martin Smith. SWP/UAF haven't cleared this up.
— Sadia Jabeen (@SadiaJabeen82) February 23, 2015

@SadiaJabeen82 @k_w_a_k @NUTonline Lef's see, Obsessed with jazz? Check. Clunky writing style? Check Thinks Sinatra was a communist? Check.
— The Purple Cow (@the_purple_cow) February 25, 2015

No reply yet from @uaf as to whether the "Milo Samuels" who writes for them is in fact the rapist Martin Smith. Perhaps their funders know?
— Kris (@k_w_a_k) February 24, 2015

@Jacqueimo If any information comes out that Martin Smith is still involved in UAF then obviously I would boycott the organisation.
— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) March 2, 2015

Most of you will know why this is significant, but just in case here goes. Unite Against Fascism (UAF) is a front organisation for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and is mostly funded by trade union affiliations. I've covered it here and elsewhere.

One of its most prominent figures was Martin Smith, who was also national secretary of the SWP. (Others include vice-chair Azad Ali, also spokesperson of the far right Islamic Forum of Europe, and Weyman Bennett.) Smith was at the heart of the "Comrade Delta" controversy in the SWP, in which serious allegations of rape were covered up by the party, causing most of its members to leave. (For details on that see, e.g., Dave Renton, Andrew Coates, Tony Greenstein, Pham Bin or more from Jim Jepps.)

During his time at the forefront of the SWP's alleged fight against fascism, he kept up a good friendship with fellow jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, who he helped get a political platform to spout his increasingly antisemitic views, as I've documented here. Former party member Dave Renton summarises:

In his capacity as head of LMHR [Love Music Hate Racism] Smith also embarrassed the party by forging a relationship between our organisation and the jazz musician Gilad Atzmon. Smith invited him to speak at Marxism in 2004, when Atzmon began spouting some of the anti-Semitic rubbish he now specialises in. Despite SWP members challenging Atzmon from the floor, Smith continued inviting him to SWP events, and to perform with him at concerts as late as 2007.

After Smith was finally forced to step out of the SWP leadership, for embarrassing the party rather than because of anything he was actually alleged to have done to female party members, he also stepped down from his UAF position.

Unsurprisingly, Atzmon defended Smith, although probably not in a way Smith would have liked to be defended:

Between 2005-10 I worked closely with Martin and the SWP. At the time I was the SWP's official Kletzmer. I toured with Martin, performed and spoke in quite a few of those Red gatherings. I met some very nice people in the SWP, but I also came across their many Jewish gate-keepers and tribal operators. But the one thing I never detected in any of those political gathering was a trace of libidinal enthusiasm let alone sexual desire. I assumed at the time that these militant young Marxists had decided to postpone having sex until after the revolution.

However, it didn't take long to realise that Martin Smith was not being pursued because he is a 'sex offender' – he surely isn't – no, our so-called 'progressive' tribals chase Smith because he is a Jazz lover and an enthusiastic fan of my music. They harass him because he gave me a platform in spite of the Jewish demand to ban me. They want to bring Martin Smith down simply because he didn't obey his tribal masters. So If anything, it is Martin who is the rape victim in this saga – he is punished because he refused to bow down to the tribal junta.

Presumably, Smith's move out of full-time SWP/UAF work left him in need of income, so luckily for him a professor at Liverpool Hope University, Michael Lavalette (who happens to be a leading SWP member) got him a paid PhD studentship in, believe it or not, a Social Work department. He also started a blog called Dream Deferred which the SWP have promoted.

UAF have been less prominent since the Comrade Delta debacle, but they were the main component of the Newcastle Unites counterdemonstration against Pegida UK last month and are a major component of the forthcoming Stand Up to Racism and Fascism demo this coming Saturday. (George Galloway, another ally of Gilad Atzmon with dodgy opinions about rape, a speaker at both events - a bit ironic for a supposedly anti-racist organisation.)

More recently, UAF has secured funding from the National Union of Teachers (NUT) political levy to publish a magazine called Unity. Someone with no other web presence named "Milo Samuels" has been appearing in it, billed as "a Love Music Hate Racism activist".

For instance, in the most recent (Autumn 2014) issue, he interviews rock band Kasabian. (Kasabian played the Love Music Hate Racism festival in Stoke in 2004 - which Martin Smith organised.)

In the previous (Summer 2014) issue, he has an article on Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit". (Coincidentally, Martin Smith used to show a documentary about the song at SWP meetings.)

The Summer 2014 issue has a little feature in which, as the magazine puts it, "our panel of artists and writers recommend a song". Apart from "Milo Samuels", all of the contributors are reasonably well known; apart from MS, all but one of the contributors' slots are illustrated with their photos. MS nominates jazz saxophonist John Zorn, coincidentally one of jazz saxophonist Martin Smith's favourite artists,

Personally, I don't think trade unions such as the NUT should be funding UAF anyway, but if their money is paying a wage to Martin Smith I expect union members will have serious concerns about how their political levy is being spent.

You will find a list of UAF's officers here (the chair is Steve Hart of Unite and Hornsey Labour Party) and of the unions which fund it here (I'm ashamed that my union is one of them).

Added 15 March:
Credit for Owen Jones for saying he will boycott UAF if it turns out Smith is still involved. I wonder why he'd be involved with them anyway, as the whole purpose of UAF now seems to be helping SWP launder their reputation.

Further reading

On Comrade Delta: Edward Platt, Angry Women of Liverpool.

On UAF: AWL in 2008, AWL in 2011, me in 2012.

On Newcastle Unites, a UAF group: Northeast Anti-fascists, AWL.

On Gilad Atzmon: Tony Greenstein, Soupy,Andy Newman, Richard Seymour et al, me.

bobhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-29073134070684010082015-01-31T23:29:00.000+00:002015-02-01T00:30:17.830+00:0010th bloggiversary
I can't believe it's a decade this month that I've been blogging.

On my first day of blogging, I posted nine short posts. My first ever post was a picture of Prince Harry dressed as a Nazi. My second was a link to the Alliance for Workers Liberty attacking Stop the War's alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood. My third post was extremely obscure, linking "left-wing clown Michael Moore" with poet John Sinclair and a right-winger called Gerald L Atkinson. My fourth post was on Israel/Palestine, linking to AWL again. The fifth was on the French ethnographer Loic Wacquant. The sixth was on another anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, and what he said about cultural relativism. The seventh was the story of a union organiser in Colombia, living in the shadow of assassination by the hired thugs of American mining corporations. The eighth appears to endorse Hugo Chavez's land reforms and links to the appalling website of the Stalinoid ex-Trotskyist International Marxist Tendency. Finally the ninth links to a superb attack by Joe Lockard against a dreadful leftist paean to Iraqi Islamist thugs.

A few themes there, obviously, that I settled on as the main topic for the Bob From Brockley project, especially in the second and ninth: the articulation from within the left of a critique of the kneejerk anti-American, borderline antisemitic bullshit that has become dominant on the left in current period. Here's Lockard:

It is one politics to demand an end to US violence in and neo-colonial occupation of Iraq; it is another matter entirely to call for solidarity with some of the most retrograde theocratic forces allied with equally retrograde ultra-nationalists and remaindered Ba'athists. They have nothing in common with any progressive politics; indeed, when in power in Iraq the latter forces were responsible for suppressing left-wing political movements and torturing their members. A secular call for solidarity with Shiite theocrats in Iraq is reminiscent of when members of the Western left trailed behind pro-Khomeini demonstrations during the 1970s, but were appalled when Iranian progressives followed immediately after the Shah's supporters on post-revolution arrest and execution lists.
 But there are also a few discontinuities. I was still optimistic about Chavez, for example. The kind of short one-link/no comment posts would by ephemeral tweets now rather than recorded for posterity on the blog. And I was probably more eclectic in coverage than I became, not having fixed on a core purpose for the blog.

It's been a strange ride. I probably got too obsessive about the blog over the first four or five years, devoting too much time to it for not enough return, as I watched my readership grow from single figures to double figures to triple figures. The times I started getting four-figure readerships were generally later, when I invested in quality rather than quantity.

But I made some good friends, some of whom became in-the-flesh friends not just virtual, both in my neighbourhood and across the world (I won't name you all, but you know who you are!). I found a kind of community that provided some succour as I felt increasingly politically homeless. I'm proud of a handful of posts.

Below the fold, some of my greatest hits, but mainly I wanted to say thank you to my friends and readers and to all those who've been writing on their own blogs stuff that has provoked and inspired me, and those who have fought the good fight along with me.

My most-read posts:

1. Gaza/Warsaw Ghetto 24 Jul 2014
This post got traction because Dave Rich linked to it from his excellent HuffPo piece this summer. It expressed my anger at the appalling forms of Holocaust inversion and inappropriate comparison that the genocide against Jews seems to inspire today, and issue much on my mind this week as I watched the 70th anniversary turn on social media into an excuse to throw mud at living Jews.

2. Alexander Cockburn and CounterPunch 11 Jun 2008I think this post got lots of hits when Ron Radosh, a writer I admire, linked to it when Cockburn died:

To read about the background of Cockburn and the links to his father, I highly recommend first this article written a few years ago by a blogger that provides chapter and verse about Claude Cockburn and his son Alex. The writer shows how Alex regularly sought to replicate and endorse his father's lies.

I know this because over the years I was the subject of Cockburn's attacks. They reveal a hard-line Stalinist, not a mythical, crusading journalist heralded by his colleagues at The Nation (like John Nichols) as a simple teller of truth to power.
I'm glad that got some readership, because I put a lot of time into writing it.

3. Satire or smear? Islam-themed cartoons 11 Dec 2013

This was a guest post by my friend Sarah AB. Well worth reading now, in light of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

4. So, the time has come not to renew membership of the Green Party 23 Feb 2011

This post, also heavily commented on, was a guest post by someone I've never met, detailing their experience of antisemitism in the Green Party. An important post.

5. 25 Years of Solidarity 19 Aug 2005

I have not idea why this early post gets so many readers. It's a brief quote of the great Trinidadian Marxist CLR James celebrating the anniversary of Solidarnosc.

6. Triangulating Bobism 1: Harryism and indecency 24 Aug 2010

This is a kind of complicated post, taking in Tower Hamlets politics and in-fighting amongst British leftists, the Yugoslav war, the rise of the "Decent Left" and civility in blogging. The middle few paragraphs, though, set out as clearly as I've managed to what the Bob From Brockley political project is about.

Although the roots for this movement go back much further (in my generation, Steve Cohen's 1984 pamphlet That's Funny You Don't Look Anti-Semitic was a key moment), by the end of the noughties, there were a wide range of groups and individuals expressing some version of the backlash against the new orthodoxy – from liberals such as David Aaronovitch to Trotskyists such as the Alliance for Workers Liberty to ultra-leftists such as Shift magazine. Most of the bloggers on my blogroll, including both Andrew Coates and most of the writers at Harry's Place, as well as Shiraz Socialist and most of the survivors of the sadly defunct Drink-Soaked Trots, would fall into this broad category.

In fact, for some of us who feel alienated by the common sense of the mainstream left, the internet has become a kind of place of refuge where we can connect to others who share our disgust. It was never my intention when I started blogging to concentrate on these sorts of issues (I thought I'd be blogging about stuff like films, TV, books and comics!), but there was something self-indulgently cathartic and something that felt politically important in being a link in this chain. I think I first realised this when my trade union first considered boycotting Israel, and I had a small leap in my readership stats when I posted against this.

Clearly, a group that includes a Class War anarchist like Paul Stott, a Henry Jackson Society member like Marko Attila Hoare and a Pabloite like Andrew Coates is too disparate to be a movement, and most people in this group would reject the label "decent left". But it seems to me that what unites this motley crew is a certain quality of moral decency and an increasingly rare commitment to some of the core values of the left, such as human emancipation, internationalism, women's rights and secularism.
7. A lot of bullshit about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman 18 Jul 2013

I'm less comfortable with this post, as it is about material I don't actually know so well, written in irritated reaction mainly to Anglo liberals' kneejerk reading of the Trayvon Martin case. Here is a post by A Jay Adler, partly written in response.

8. Luton, Lewisham, Cairo, Oslo and elsewhere 7 Dec 2012

This is just a big collection of links that I wouldn't especially recommend you go and read,

9. Seymour on the Paris attacks 8 Jan 2015

This is a surprise late entry to the hit list, a guest post by Contested Terrain on Richard Seymour's response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. (Seymour semi-responded here.)

10. The Killing of Bob Crow by the Coward Boris Johnson 9 Feb 2014

Another guest post, by Rob Palk, a satirical murder ballad that became sadly topical when its subject passed away.

And some of the posts I wish you'd have read:

What's wrong with Chomsky? November 2005: my withering attack on the Noamster.

A great woman. July 2005: my obituary for Hannah Baneth.

Thinking with an open heart. August 2005: why I love Hannah Arendt.

Galloway's hubris.August 2005: my withering attack on the Georgester.

Neo-liberalism's assault on civic culture. July 2006: on schools and stuff.

Germaine Greer versus Monica Ali. July 2006: on Brick Lane.

Where is Sarf London? June 2007. A state of mind, not a place.

Rushdie and "secular fundamentalism" June 2007. Where I stand on the politics of secularism

The conservatism of the anti-war radicals. February 2008: where I argue that the war-stoppers are actually conservatives not leftists. There's also a follow-up here, where I made acquaintance with Dave Semple, who founded the Where Cowards Flinch group blog, through which I have made more friends.

Between Burke and Paine in the twenty-first century and Decentism and defectors, lumpen and otherwise. April 2008. More triangulation of Bobism.

Against rockism. May 2008. On being forced to listen to Virgin radio.

An extraordinary claim. July 2008. On murderous anti-interventionism in Bosnia.

Pernicious nonsense. January 2009. On the intellectual idiots of anti-Zionism.

Harry Siegman's lies. January 2009. Disputing Israeli history.

The Miner's Strike at 25. March 2009. Who broke our broken society?

Ellie Greenwich, z''l. August 2009. An obituary for a forgotten singer.

The lessons of the lucozade plot. September 2009. A survivor's story from the war on terror.

The combination of thinning hair on top and a pony tail at the back would be hard to forget: notes on the police infiltration of anti-fascist groups in the 1990s. March 2010

Triangulating Bobism 2: The Furedi cult. Sepember 2010. On the RCP.

"Influential left-wing ideas." December 2010. The good, the bad and the ugly.

Carnival of Socialism no.51. January 2011. Austerity bites, and the Arab spring erupts.

The revolution of flowers: to thaw in dancing jasmines. February 2011. The Arab spring's days of hope.

On reading obituaries for Christopher Hitchens. December 2011.

Thoughts on the Stephen Lawrence verdict. January 2012.

I miss you Norm. October 2013. For Norman Geras.

The house of Assad and the house of Rumour. February 2014. On truth.

bobhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-79757087125101742622015-01-16T10:43:00.000+00:002015-01-16T15:36:23.338+00:00The New Centrist explains why Michael Lerner is an ass
This is a passage from a recent, dreadful article by "Rabbi" Michael Lerner of Tikkun:

"That media was outraged at the attempt by some North Korean allied group to scare people away from watching a movie ridiculing and then planning to assassinate the current (immoral) ruler of Korea, never wondering how we'd respond if a similar movie had been made ridiculing and planning the assassination of an American president."
In an email, my buddy The New Centrist has an answer to Lerner's question:

They responded with awards.
Actually, there are plenty of reasons that Lerner is an ass, but that's a good one to start with.
bobhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-64192524799686855192015-01-08T18:41:00.001+00:002015-01-09T12:08:23.262+00:00Seymour on the Paris attacks
This is a guest post by Contested Terrain

There is a strange pattern of intellectual retardation on the Left, when otherwise sophisticated individuals are encountered with the nexus of topics relating to anti-Muslim racism, antisemitism, political Islam, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, etc.

Richard Seymour's new article in Jacobin on the Paris attack on the office and journalists of the Charlie Hebdo is the latest example of this.

Seymour's article portrays the attacks in an extremely general way, as if they are somehow a natural (though too violent) response to anti-Muslim racism in France and Europe, rather than being the specific strategic actions taken by specific actors. In his account, even pointing out the specific radical Islam linkages behind this, amounts to supporting state repression against Muslims in general.

While Seymour is absolutely right to warn against an anti-Muslim backlash -- already, multiple mosques have been attacked, and there is reason to fear an increase in an already hostile mood towards Muslims in Europe -- the article is so distorted, that it raises a mystery. This is because his approach here so drastically departs from his otherwise sophisticated analysis of actor groups and strategies.

Seymour's strength is his deployment of a hegemony theory to understand the development, resilience, and remaking of power blocs. He treats these not as homogenous and undifferentiated objects, but as amalgams of different groups, group interests, and motivations, which sometimes purposefully, sometimes unintentionally join, or are joined together, by common projects.

But in his article on the Paris attacks, this sophisticated approach to social dynamics is entirely lost. It is replaced by mechanical movements between two homogenous forces, a racist French public and an anti-racist Muslim response. Of course, he does not say this so explicitly, but this is the general parameter of his argument that is so upsetting the magazine's readership. At the root of these vocal objections to Seymour's portrayal is his article's silence on the radical Islamic motivations of the actors behind the killings.

In stark contrast to Seymour's generalised and mechanical portrayal, Juan Cole presents an argument which one might expect of someone like Seymour, and what one can find in the latter's writings, when dealing with the actor groups and the intentions of competing hegemonic forces. Cole argues that the perpetrators of yesterday's shootings are linked to a specific group of actors with a specific political strategy.

He writes:

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.
Here we have a specific focus on actor groups taking strategic action within a specific social context. You can usually find this kind of analysis in Seymour's other writings, but not when it comes to this topic.

The interesting point here is not simply the stark contrast between portrayals, but the contradiction between Seymour and himself; between his portrayals in his better writings, on actor group plurality and strategic action on the one hand, and his generic and mechanical portrayal in the Jacobin article.

And it is not an uncommon reversion for otherwise intelligent people.Think of Judith Butler's repeated defense of Hamas and Hezbollah as "left and progressive forces". In both of these individuals, you cannot convincingly trace these political utterances back to a stable set of theoretical ideas which they hold. It is a disjuncture.

But are these just idiosyncrasies, or is there is a pattern at work, which drives otherwise sophisticated people to trip up, to stumble, to lose intellectual sophistication, and to begin spewing dogmatic cliches?

That's the real puzzle. Why do otherwise intelligent people revert to vulgar representations and dogmas, when the topic turns to these issues? Why do these complex of issues retard the intellect of intelligent people? That is a mystery.
bobhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-66663385072922983812014-12-31T11:57:00.000+00:002014-12-31T11:57:00.311+00:002014 in first lines
I've done this every year for the last few years, recalling a habit of the late, great Norman Geras, to recall the year through the first line of every month's blogging.

January: 2014 will mostly be shit, more or less everywhere.

February: They said he was like Castro, they said he was like Mao, but he stuck up for the workin' man, don't even ask me how.

March: Yesterday was Budget Day, and our Tory government gave us a penny of a pint of beer and reduced tax on Bingo, claiming this was "to help hardworking people [note how "hardworking" has become a single word under the Tories, their austerity policy even extending to dashes and spaces] do more of the things they enjoy", the keyword being "they". Meanwhile, in London, Mayor Boris Johnson approved the use of watercannon against disorder in the capital, presumably for when us hardworkingpeople are no longer sufficiently distracted by beer and bingo.

April: Displaying our own liberal cleverness is always a worse strategy than sharing human stories; the left-liberal intelligentsia's masturbatory performances of smartness are bad politics in a human world, and such performances won't win people over even when the facts are on our side, as with welfare reform and migration.
May: The main reason not to vote for Duwayne Brooks is that he is a candidate of the Liberal Democrats.

June: There is a war of words going on in the West over Ukraine. A shocking number of people have been taken in by the narratives and outright lies circulating from the Kremlin and its propaganda outlets. The Kremlin's totally unreliable Russia Today (RT.com), which regularly gives airtime to antisemites, UKIP, Holocaust deniers, 9/11 truth cultists and Bilderberg conspiracy nutcases, is somehow seen as the fount of "truth" about Ukraine.

July: Auschwitz wasn't any kind of positive learning experience, and the overwhelmingly majority of the Jews who had anything to do with the Holocaust learned nothing from it because they were killed by it.

August: Ray Woolford of Lewisham People Before Profit is a colourful character and prolific tweeter.

September: As a resident of England, on one level this is none of my business: Scotland has the right to self-determination without interference from South London.

October: Still seething at @martjacques' vacuous apologia for Chinese state capitalism & scorning of #OccupyCentral movement.

November: The enormity and complexity of what's going in Syria, in Iraq, in Israel/Palestine and in the wider region makes it hard for me to begin to take sides or recommend courses of action. Rather, I will say something about how all this is refracted here in the West: in the leftish scene I move among, in the South London neighbourhood I live in, in the newspapers I read.

December: Quite a few Western leftists still think Assad is some kind of anti-imperialist hero and that we need to "stop the war" against him. As it happens, fascist ex-leader Nick Griffin (who this week endorsed both UKIP and Putin's RT.com) is in Syria doing some PR for Assad, along with Polish far right MEP Korwin-Mikke (whose party is allied to UKIP in the European parliament).

Confession: I've been a little liberal in interpreting "first lines" in a few of the less interesting months. I didn't actually blog once in August so I've stolen the first line of the last post of July for that slot. I didn't blog in October either, so I used my first tweet of that month instead.
bobhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-89175367079029042822014-12-28T17:34:00.000+00:002014-12-28T17:34:00.323+00:002014 at Bob From Brockley: the most popular posts
Here are the posts you've been reading in 2014.

1. Gaza/Warsaw Ghetto
This is one of my most-read posts ever, thanks mainly, I think, to a link from an excellent HuffPo open letter to pro-Palestine protesters by Dave Rich, on antisemitism in the protests about Gaza. In that letter, Dave gave some pieces of advice on how to protest Israel without being racist. He said:

While you are at the demonstration, do not compare Israel to Nazi Germany. Gaza is not the Warsaw Ghetto. If you can't tell the difference, this post explains it. It's a totally false comparison that plays on Jewish sensibilities in order to provoke a reaction. Another word for that is Jew-baiting. Don't do it.
If you liked that post, you'll like this one.

2. The Killing of Bob Crow by the Coward Boris Johnson
This mock murder ballad by Rob Palk became unexpectedly topical when Bob Crow actually sadly died.

If you liked that post, you'll like this one.

3. Our Politics and Theirs
I'm pleased this placed so highly. It starts with a post by David Hirsh on Engage, "Opposing the campaign to exclude Israelis from the global academic community", but uses that to spell out some of the features of a rebooted radical politics. Riffing on some of David's points, I argued that we need to recover the tradition of the great cosmopolitan Third Camp left such as Orwell and Hal Draper, but re-purpose it in an age of retreat, of defeat, of resistance, of waiting. Marxists and ex-Marxists would recognise that the title is taken from a brilliant but highly problematic 1938 essay by Trotsky, "Our Morals and Theirs", dedicated to his son Leon Sedoff, who had recently been murdered by Stalin's agents. Here are some lines from that essay:

DURING AN EPOCH OF triumphant reaction, Messrs. democrats, social-democrats, anarchists, and other representatives of the "left" camp begin to exude double their usual amount of moral effluvia, similar to persons who perspire doubly in fear. Paraphrasing the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, these moralists address themselves not so much to triumphant reaction as to those revolutionists suffering under its persecution, who with their "excesses" and "amoral" principles "provoke" reaction and give it moral justification. Moreover they prescribe a simple but certain means of avoiding reaction: it is necessary only to strive and morally to regenerate oneself. Free samples of moral perfection for those desirous are furnished by all the interested editorial offices.

The class basis of this false and pompous sermon is the intellectual petty bourgeoisie. The political basis – their impotence and confusion in the face of approaching reaction. Psychological basis – their effort at overcoming the feeling of their own inferiority through masquerading in the beard of a prophet.
If you like that post, you'll like these ones.

4. Alison Weir: If Americans Knew
This was a guest post by my comrade Spencer Sunshine, taken from a recently published Political Research Associates report Constructing Campus Conflict. It is an anatomy of a right-wing antisemite, Alison Weir (not to be confused with the popular historian of that name) much circulated by allegedly "left-wing" self-defined "anti-Zionists".

If you like that post, you'll like these ones.

5. People Before Profit and the Jewish Lobby
This post was provoked by my friend Chimpman, who noticed that a colourful Lewisham political activist had (during the Gaza war) developed an obsession with Jewish power. Again, the activist in question is supposedly left-wing, although he has stood for election for the Conservative Party and is quite chummy with UKIP. His antisemitism, unlike Alison Weir's, is of the casual everyday kind, rather than ideological. More disturbing to me was the denial of any shades of racism from his party, People Before Profit, who also have some track record of dabbling in "anti-Zionist" antisemitism.

If you like that post, you'll like these ones.

6. Brandeis University and Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Moving from Israel to the other hot button I-word, Islam, this is a guest post from my friend Sarah AB, thoughtfully and carefully thinking through what issues around acceptable and unacceptable speech on campus.

If you like that post, you'll like these ones.

7. The House of Assad and the House of Rumour
This is a post of which I'm quite proud, about esoteric politics: the contemporary obsession with hidden "Truth", an obsession which manages to hide the more obvious truths, such as the dictator Assad's mass slaughter of Syrian civilians.

If you like that post, you'll like these ones.

8/9. #Lewisham2014: The mayorals and The council elections
I wrote these posts in April/May, in the lead-up to the UK elections then, focusing on two sets of local elections in Lewisham.

If you like that post, you'll like these ones.

10. Ukraine: The truth war
This is not the most finely crafted piece of written, but I'm glad it gets a little air play. It discusses some of the groups on the British "left" (from centre-left Scottish nationalists to nutty Stalinsts and Trots) who uncritically circulate propaganda for the far right authoritarian government in Kremlin, and its neo-Nazi puppet "People's Republics" in eastern Ukraine, pointing out that these leftists are on the same page as many British and European fascists on this topic. The post finishes with a few links to actual anti-fascists in Ukraine.

If you like that post, you'll like these ones.
bobhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com