Articles with the Tag politics

Time For All Good Socialists To Come To The Aid of the Party

Cameron, liberalism, Socialism, UK politics
Published on

Cleggameron melty waxy thing - can you tell which one it is?

Now that the neoliberal Cleggameron melty waxy thing is in power – whether it’s for 5 years or 5 minutes – a strong principled opposition is required, and we’ll hardly get that from the Labour party as currently constituted.

I posted this after Labour’s disastrous results in the 2008 local elections and I think my suggestion – that socialists take over Labour from the ground up – still holds true.

Go Cry Emo Party
May 3rd, 2008

Is there any way for Labour to regain any shred of credibility as a working class party, after the complete and utter fuckup they’ve made of things? Because if not, Labour is a dead party.

Well, possibly. First, if socialists rejoin the party en masse and use their heft to stack constituency and regional committees – a return to entryism, but in the open. Then if they get rid of Brown and an entire discredited generation of leadership, elect a new, visibly English (as opposed to Scots) and working class populist leader,

My money is still on Alan Johnson as leader. Johnson’s man-in-the-street qualities will serve Labour better in the media, a foil to the plummy Establishment Etonians who seem destined to have power (as so much else) dropped in their laps as an unearned benefit of the electorate’s reflexive disgust with the current government. The Tories have little in the way of actual policies – they are as frozen in the headlights of current world conditions as are all the other parties, and that they’ve done so well so far has been because of a mixture of expert media management and New Labour’s own exhausted disarray.

Politics in the next two years, if economic forecasts are accurate, is likely to become ever more class-based as those that have seek to hang on to what they’ve got and the less well-off, taxed beyond endurance, become more and more angry at the rich and those who enable them.

If the Labour party is to survive the left will have to rejoin the party en masse and force a generational putsch of Blairite/ Brownites. Co-opt the party to rescue the brand, in marketing terms; what other left organisation has the same brand presence? Why try to launch an alternative to Labour when the party is ripe for the plucking? There is a crying need for a party that’ll fight class war and which has an actual working class person leading it, rather than the closeted public schoolboys, incompetent Scots party droids, failed suburban solicitors and legacy Labour pubescents we’ve been subjected to so far.

But Emo Labour hasn’t got the gumption for root and branch reform to judge from the lame reaction by Brown and other Labour types on the news this morning. The only chance that Labour just might survive as an electoral force is if the real left get off their self-involved arses and take over a party that’s weak and ripe for the plucking, purge the Blairites and Brownites and force MPs to push through electoral reform pronto.

Hey, it could happen. I’m not holding my breath though. When push comes to shove most leftists would much rather wring their hands and talk theory on blogs than actually get out and do anything. But if Labour is about to be unelectable for yet another generation, the least the actual left can do is try and make it an opposition to reckon with.

Alan Johnson is saying he will not stand as party leader and that his money’s on David Milliband. Don’t lose me a fiver, Alan – and more to the point, if you enable Pitt the very much younger to lead the party, it’s absolutely positively no longer a party of the left and deserves to stay in the political wilderness for ever.

Linky Linky Shminky Pinky Heth – eth – eth – eth – eth – eth – eth – eth – eth! Chris Waddle

Linky Linky
Published on

Bono Estente!

Cheers, Simes!

It’s finally election day, I appear to have a semi-reliable (so far) WiFi connection, I’ve rewritten and reposted the post WordPress ate last night and the hospital telly is allegedly fixed, so fingers crossed for the rest of the day – let’s hope the UK electorate is giving the politicoliterati the collective kick up the arse they so richly deserve. But we won’t know that till the results start rolling in when the polls close at 10pm Greenwich time, so until then here’s some interesting stuff to look at.

Ukip’s loudmouth-in-chief Nigel Farage and his pilot are injured while trailing a a campaign banner from a light aircraft

CNN: Sex slave girls face cruel justice in Iraq:
“

When Fatin found out her father was attempting to sell her, she immediately sought help from the law.

“I ran away from Najaf and escaped to Baghdad where I found my mother and asked her if she knew what my father was planning,” says 22-year-old inmate Fatin, “So she took me to court in Baghdad, we got a lawyer and brought a case against my father.”

Months passed and the lawsuit was never heard. While awaiting justice, Fatin says her father raped her. After the attack, she killed him, was tried, and is currently serving the fifth year of a 15 year sentence.

From astronomy blog Starts With A Bang : A Mysterious Light on the Darkest Night “….say hello to the gegenschein…” and some gorgeous time-lapse video of the Milky Way too.


Mr Benn becomes deputy leader of the Labour Party

I am the Isabella Blow of whiny transplant patients. Much obliged to Unfogged (yet again) for turning me on to The Rosa Parks of Blogs

Everybody is the Rosa Parks of something—or at least the Michael Phelps, Cap’n Crunch, Dick Cheney, Elmer Fudd, or Paris Hilton of whatever. This blog collects examples of the adaptable idiom “X is the Y of Z”, which is a snowclone. Feel free to use these descriptions when discussing your beautiful children, longtime companions, sworn enemies, favorite foods, and elected congressvermin. And if you need even more absurd comparisons, then you’re in luck.

Boneless, slithery and sometimes slimy but always fascinating, Circus of the Spineless No. 50 is up at Arthropoda.

Carry on, Master Bates….From the BBC News election campaign liveblog

Ever wondered if it’s OK to dress as a pirate when you head to the polling station to exercise your democratic right? For a list of the things you can’t do in a polling station, have a have a read of this

Apparently it’s OK to vote with bare manboobs, but not bare actual boobs

“Pyjamas are fine, provided they’re not indecent. And so is a builder who’s stripped to the waist. We want people to vote, we don’t want to turn people away,” he says. But a line does have to be drawn somewhere, he says. “A topless woman wouldn’t be appropriate as voters might get distracted.”

I’d’ve thought the returning officers would be more concerned about naked vote-stealing than naked norks. Sexist bastards.

And for my final flourish – from the Fast Show, it’s Channel 9 neus:

Falia helé, Falia hela, Falia helé, and don’t forget to vote.

Comment of The Day

Comment of the Day, liberalism, Life under Capitalism
Published on

Hello again. Did I miss anything?

Anyway first day back online after a leisurely summer being poked prodded, dialysed and made hideously and explosively sick with antibiotics and weird blood chemistry and already I have my CoTD, on the death of Ted Kennedy. Exactamundo, WILFSSON:

WILFSSON

27 Aug 09, 2:12am (about 6 hours ago)

‘He became one of the great senators of our time’ says Obama and the Washington claque echoes him.

But, great as in comparison to who – or rather what?

Joe Biden? John Kerry? Jesse Helms? Hilary Clinton? John Edwards?

Considering a forty-year Senate career in which virtually every member has been a bought and paid for corporate hack, the question of greatness is surely rather moot.

He may have endorsed Obama, he may have helped the NI peace process but for all his eloquence on democracy and justice he would never have been in office had Kennedy senior not been a fascist, a bootlegger and an arms dealer Ambassador to Britain and Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission who essentially bought his sons into office with both money and influence. “We’re going to sell Jack like soap flakes” he said. Ted Kennedy was a rich man from a rich family who expected to have political power.

So he lost two brothers to political assassination – “Hello. I’m Edwardus Kennedius Maximus, brother of a murdered politician, brother of another murdered politician” – but just because you’ve been bereaved it doesn’t make you any more moral. If that were the case humanity would’ve reached a much greater state of moral perfection by now.

He was untrustworthy in marital life and drove his first wife to drink with his many blatant affairs. He drank massively, which was a running joke in the media. Under the influence of drink and at a surprisingly late stage in his ‘distinguished’ life and career he played a very shady role in the commission and cover-up of a drunken rape by his nephew.

This is greatness?

There are those who will argue that tangled private life and personal peccadilloes like a few affairs and a constant smell of whisky have no bearing on the political greatness or otherwise of any given powerful man (because a woman would never recieve such generosity from the media, but that’s a whole other subject). It’s what He Does, not what he does that’s important – political achievements are somehow supposed to outweight complete arsery.

And he was an arse. What it always, always came back to for me with Kennedy is that the distinguished senator and sprig of American nobility left a girl to drown in a car wreck. He ran to save his own skin, and then he lied about it. He simply did not care whether she was alive or dead, provided he and his family not have any trouble. To me it said all that needed be said about his basic humanity, irrelevant of his politics.

Mind you I can’t let Kennedy politics go completely unremarked. They were of the white-bread, business as usual, carry on guys, let’s do a deal here school of politics, leavened with a hefty dose of guilt-fuelled ‘Hey, let’s be a little nicer to the servants, then we won’t have to deal with too much unpleasantness’ and a soupcon of “Oh yeah, lets give a concessions to the chicks, too while we’re at it. That’ll get me laid at least once.”.

Don’t get me started on the Kennedys and the Catholic church. I’ll be here all bloody day.

Comment of The Day: Redacted Holiday Fun

Sleaze, UK politics
Published on

From The Guardian comments pages –

UpsideDownCakeEater
19 Jun 09, 1:02am (about 6 hours ago)

Seen the claim from the PM and the Speaker when both attended ████████ in █████████ paying £ ███.██ just to watch two █████████. Both claimed £ ████.██ as though they actively took part ?
Shocking.

What’s █████████ ? We might well ask.

If it weren’t for the Daily Telegraph’s uncensored leaks, for all we’d know of it █████████ could have been anything, from a Harrods rocking horse to a box of man-size Pampers to an Agent Provocateur gimp mask.

At least if you’re on holiday and it rains this week there’s no need to be bored; you can always play redaction bingo and insert your own words. All those blacked out spaces leave lots of scope for the imagination and reading censored expenses claims is much more entertaining that way. Holiday fun for all the family!