The ship has been scuttled before the rats could leave

Further proof that Decentism is dying or dead: house organ Democratiya has been assimilated by the ur-decents Dissent Magazine, last seen ratfucking the anti-war movement in the runup to the War on Iraq. Meanwhile the Euston manifesto is moribund, while certain of Decentism more outspoken cheerleaders like Nick Cohen, seem to have dropped all pretense at being on the left and are metamorphosing into Tory supporters.

All of which might just have something to do with the slow collapse of New Labour’s prospects of winning the next election during the past two years, now made painfully clear at their party conference: barely any lobbyists and the party faithful putting their hopes in Mandy. The news that The Sun is now supporting the Tories was just the rancid icing on the Labour shitcake and the only question is what took them so long:

It would obviously be too much to expect a bullying, toadying media operation like the Sun to attack Gordon Brown when he appeared to be strong. But he’s been visibly weakening for the past year, and the paper still seemed nervous about changing sides, even when it became increasingly apparent that the illness was fatal. They didn’t attack him when he was strong. They were still scared of changing sides when he was weak. It’s only when he seems to be definitively, authoritatively and absolutely politically dead that they break into the funeral home and shoot the corpse.

It’s no more than fitting that such an embarrasing display was answered by Tony McNulty ripping up a copy while playing up his scouser roots and Harriet Harman making Page 3 jokes, something neither of them would’ve dreamed of even last week. Both sides have always been scared to test each other’s strength. But The Sun‘s “treason” does show how little appeal is left in New Labour even for business interests like Murdoch — Brown may have reason to be grateful for the economic crisis, as it meant he kept his usefulness longer. Interestingly, The Sun has not just ditched New Labour, but also its foreign policy the paper once cheerleaded. The whole idea of the Decent Left/Euston Manifesto/humanitarian interventionism seems increasingly unlikely to survive the demise of the political party with which is most associated.

How the Greens got Nick Griffin elected

Or, the failure of tactical voting. As one disgruntled Socialist Party member and campaigner for the No2EU coalition writes:

I don’t begrudge the Greens their success; two MEPs, a net increase of zero over the last time while the Labour Party is shedding seats the way a yak on vacation in Bali sheds fur, is respectable; but a lot of their increase in voter share was because the Greens were selling very hard this idea of “vote for the Greens, even if you disagree with them, to keep Nick Griffin out”.

So, a bunch of people on the Left did just that.

And Nick Griffin is currently picking out curtains for a Brussels flat.

[…]

So if I am on the Left but I’m not a Green — for whatever reason, and the possible reasons are myriad — and I’ve just held my nose and voted Green on the promise that it was a necessary step in order to keep out the fascists, and I’m sitting hear reading these electoral results…well, I couldn’t help but feel that maybe I’ve just been had.

Recieved opinion has it that it’s so important to keep out the fascists that leftists should hold their nose and vote for parties or candidates they wouldn’t otherwise. The most famous example perhaps being the campaign to keep David Duke from becoming governor of Louisiana. His opponent had long been accused of corruption so the anti-Duke campaign’s (unofficial) slogan was “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important”. Duke lost, but Louisiana still ended up with a crook for governor…

In the EU elections it was the Greens who, as Edmund writes, campaigned on an anti-BNP platform and which was supported by the Respect party. They failed and and if, like Andy Newman, you can blame the No2EU campaign for this as they “stole” votes from the Greens, why can’t you blame the Greens from taking votes from No2EU?

As the election results make clear, the BNP did not win that much more votes this time then they did in 2004; it’s the collapsing Labour vote which helped the BNP win their two seats. Their voting totals went slightly up while over two million less people voted in total than did in 2004. So while the anti-BNP campaign was focused on getting people already voting to vote Green, it would’ve done better to persuade more people to vote in the first place. The economic crisis, the corruption in parliament and the lack of a credible alternative on the left meant people stayed home because voting was pointless.

Tactical voting campaigns don’t work and this is the best proof of it. Election after election the radical left mounts another campaign to either persuade voters not to go for the BNP or to get them to vote for some party supposedly best placed to stop the BNP. The effect of these campaigns is marginal; in this case non-existent. What’s desperately needed is something to vote for. Voters turn away from Labour in droves while finding the two mainstream alternatives, Tories and Lib Dems just as unappealing. Few but out and out racists want to vote BNP but on the left there still isn’t a credible alternative for Labour. The Greens are decent but like the Lib Dems too centrist, while the various socialist splinters barely register on most voters’ radars. One hopeful sign is the surprisingly strong showing of the Socialist Labour Party, which barely campaigned but still managed to get some 173,000 votes.

What’s needed is a realisation that there are no magic bullet, for English socialists to stop chasing the shortcut to a replacement for Labour, be it Socialist Alliance, Respect or No2EU. The only way socialists can make headway and stop the BNP is to go for the hard slog and build the party from the ground up, to not just campaign against the BNP but to grab the moment and offer a true socialist alternative.

Stephen, you ignorant slut!

In a week that’s designed to showing the folly of taking the opinions of your favourite writers (*cough* LoisMcMasterBujold *cough*) or entertainers too seriously, Stephen Fry has decided to up the ante by blowing off the public anger about the way members of parliament have been fiddling their expenses. His comments on what he characterised as “this rather tedious bourgious obsession with whether or not [MPs] charge for their wisteria” could’ve only been made by somebody whose bank account is comfortably in the six or seven figures. He scolds that we should concentrate on the things that “really matter” rather than this “journalistic made-up frenzy”, but then he is unlikely to ever again get into a position where he’ll have to explain a discrepancy of five pounds to a bored department of work and pensions civil servant who is going to decide whether or this means he’ll lose his benefits or just has to pay a fine he can’t afford.

The point is that after twelve years of Labour government, inequality is at its highest since the sixties while the MPs and Labour ministers supposed to look out for the poor and the common people have been stuffing their face. Millions of people have to survive on wages or benefits of less than 20,000 per year without any expense account and when they “forget” to declare income or get slightly more benefits than they’ve got a right to, whether through their own fault or not, they get prosecuted to the full extent of the law for it. And all this time, with succesive work and pensions ministers talking tough about taking on benefit cheats, MPs of all parties felt entitled to not just their sixty grand salary and very favourable expense account but to every dirty trick that could squeeze a few more pounds out of the taxpayer. It’s not just getting your 1500 quid new telly reimbursted, it’s getting sweetheart deals for your second home, building miniature property empires, getting rich out of being in parliament. The worst example being one T. Blair, now worth several millions on the back of the contacts made during his premiership.

What’s we’ve seen these last twelve years in parliament is a frenzy of corruption and greed mirroring the corruption and greed in high finance; it’s no accident that Brown’s economic policy has always revolved around the financial sector. Even before they got into power it was obvious New Labour had been seduced –had willingly thrown itself in the arms of — this sort of Cool Brittania view of a classless society where everybody is rich, young and has a job doing something interesting in new media or finance or property. A New Labour MP is somebody who wanted to be a banker or stockbroker but was too stupid for it, who compares himself to them rather than to the rest of us and it’s this attitude that has lead directly to this widescale expense fiddling.

It’s not the expenses therefore, it’s the culture, of having one law for the rich and another for everybody else. To say it’s all a media hype isn’t just downright stupid, it’s dangerous. This corruption needs to be rooted out if Britain stands a chance of solving its problems.

Once again, justice for Jean is denied

Jean Charles de Menezes, murdered by police now more than three years ago is once again denied justice, as the coroner in the inquest to his death ruled out a verdict of unlawful killing:

Menezes lying in the carriage after his murder

The family of Jean Charles de Menezes walked out of his inquest yesterday as the coroner ruled the jury was forbidden from considering whether he was unlawfully killed.

Sir Michael Wright said he did not believe the testimony justified him allowing them to return a verdict which was tantamount to accusing police officers of murder or manslaughter.

As the De Menezes family and their supporters walked out the coroner said he knew the jury’s hearts would go out to the dead man’s mother, Maria Otone de Menezes. “But these are emotional reactions, ladies and gentlemen, and you are charged with returning a verdict based on evidence,” he said.

And so the establishment once again take care of its own. Can’t embarass the police, especially after they have been so obliging to the government recently. No wonder Craig Murray is furious, especially about this shitty bit of reasoning from “sir” Michael wright:

But he urged caution on judging anything they viewed as lying too harshly. “You must decide whether the person has lied or made an honest mistake. If you can prove that the witness has lied you should bear … in mind people tell lies for a variety of reasons, not necessarily to put their own part.

“Do please excuse the police for not just murdering Jean, but lying about it and covering up their murder almost from the moment his body hit the floor”. Disgusting, but it fits in with how this case has been treated from the start. This has never been about getting justice for Jean, but about exculpating the police for his murder. It’s an old, old pattern in British policing, which has a shameful record of wrongful killings and people dying in its custody and getting away with it. It’s the other side of the same coin that saw antiterrorist police arrest Damien Green MP. Three years ago the government allowed the police their ritual murder to relieve their frustration, last week we saw the police returning the favour through a nicely staged bit of political intimidation.

Both cases sent a message to the British public. In the de Menezes case it’s “we can and will murder you with impunity if we feel like”, in Green’s case it’s “it doesn’t matter how powerful you are, step out of line and we’ll squash you”. With Green, he himself may “only” suffer a humiliating and frightening arrest and questioning, but to everbody with less clout than him this message comes through loud and clear.

Together these two cases are the clearest indication of police state Britain, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. As Jamie said, talking about the Green case:

People have a crude idea that a police state involves a leader ordering the cops to arrest his enemies. It’s mainly an environment where the police have expanded powers over the general administration of the state which they can exercise with a large degree of autonomy. Their turf gets bigger, and is defended and expanded more aggressively.

Which is exactly what has happened under New Labour. From the very beginning they’ve used the police and the justice system as a political tool, unleashing a torrent of ill-thought out, unworkable policies to curry favour with the tabloids, an equally large torrent of dodgy statistics and press releases to show the succes of these policies, all topped with the occasional potemkin showpiece of serious policing. After September 11 these tendencies only worsened. Remember the tanks at Heathrow the day before Parliament had to vote on the War on Iraq? Long before the British establishment finally noticed last week therefore the police had been politicised and the murder of Jean charles de Menezes as well as the arrest of Damien Green are a logical outcome of this. New Labour flacks may not even been lying when they insist Green’s arrest was the police’s own idea, but the responsibility is still theirs.

Mandy and Georgie sinking in a yacht, b.i.t.c.h.i.n.g.

You could smeel the relief in the papers the past week, when little Georgie Osborne challenged Lord Mandy to a bitchslap. Fun politics again, hot gossip and dodgy Russian billionaires and sundrenched yachts on exotic Greek islands: much more interesting than this boring old credit crisis turned recession that’s bringing everybody down in the whole world and you actually have to know too much about to write about it. Dangle a sausage of juicy innuendo in front of the British media and they’ll happily ignore everything else that’s going: perfect timing, now even Gordon has to admit Britain is sliding towards recession –“ending the era of boom and bust” indeed.

In the end it doesn’t matter whether little George or Mandy was right, whether George wanted fifty thousand pound or not. The real scandal is the shadow chancellor and the European Commissioner for Trade palling around not just with an at the very least somewhat dodgy Russian oligarch but also the heir to the
quintessential banking fortune
. Yes, any party with asperations towards government in any western country has to be pals on one level or another with the real owners of the world, the ultrarich men and women who don’t care who rules the plebs, as long as their fortunes are safe, but to do it this blatantly?

This is one of those fights in which you wish all the participants would lose, but how much of this was choreographed from the start, what with Rothschild and Osborne being such old friends and all? Or is this just a long simmering inferiority complex coming to the fore, Osborne doing something stupid as telling on Mandelson because he’s jealous of the easy way Mandy gets easy acces to the dinner table
when he has to beg for the scraps? On Have I Got News For You Friday nigth they described the initiation rite Osborne had to go through at the Bullington Club was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: “What are you?” They said the answer was “I’m despicable”, but that was not quite it, as another gossipmonger disguised as journalist, Marina Hyde revealed. It was actually “I am a despicable cunt”. Not to play the armchair psychologist here, but that sort of thing must smart.

In a month when governments frantically pumped money into the financial system, capitalism’s heartland and talked tough about better and stronger regulation and an end to the greed and bonus culture in the City, this affair showed crystal clear where the real power still lies. It was best shown in the way Rothschild warned Osbornewhen the latter went on to deny the allegations against him:

Nat Rothschild, the merchant banker who accused shadow chancellor George Osborne of soliciting a £50,000 donation from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, has warned he will destroy Osborne if the Tories continue to question his account of the discussions that took place at his villa on Corfu.

Declaring a form of uneasy truce, friends of Rothschild said he did not at this stage want to escalate the public battle with his old friend. They said Rothschild had not intended to bring Osborne down by disclosing the shadow chancellor’s involvement in talks about
raising money from Deripaska. Instead, the friends said, Rothschild had intended it as a “slap on the wrist” because he was furious
that Osborne had breached confidences in an attempt to damage Labour business secretary Lord Mandelson.

If that isn’t the voice of naked command, nothing is. “You boys can go on playing your little games, as long as you don’t bother us. But if you do, we’ll crush you effortlessly”. Osborne seemed to have gotten the hint, but I wouldn’t be too cocky if I were Rothschild. In this bourgeoisised world such blatant reminders of the old class system are not appreciated; even the queen has to “dress down” so to speak. Tories like Osborne can nurse a grudge as well and the political climate is ripe for a bit of populist rabble rousing…