Just after the turn of the century I read an article in the Washington Post that quoted a State Department report on a crisis in – I think – South East Asia. I then read a statement from the (Labour) UK Foreign Secretary at the time which expressed the UK’s stance on the same issue using almost identical language and some of the same turns of phrase. This cutting and pasting illustrates the point that the dominant current in the Labour Party has often been as supinely Atlanticist as the Conservatives, especially in government. What made this shocking was that the Foreign Secretary concerned was Robin Cook, a man with more principles than most, who at least held out the prospect of an ethical foreign policy as an aspiration.

Getting up the arse of the White House and staying there was an indelicate turn of phrase from Tony Blair, but could be taken as a constant of Labour leadership policy from Gaitskell onwards – with Labour’s opposition to the Suez adventure completely in line with the policy of the Eisenhower White House – albeit with the odd wobble from Harold Wilson keeping my generation out of the Vietnam war (thank you Harold) to Neil Kinnock’s briefly heretical gestures on Nicaragua during the 1980’s and Ed Miliband’s resistance to intervention in Syria (resisted of course by a substantial part of the PLP keen to “do our bit”). The UK has, nevertheless, taken part in virtually every US intervention – Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq (again), and in Libya worked with the French as US proxies- as a matter of national consensus whatever the composition of the government – with only the Labour left awkward squad coming out against in Parliament – sometimes – and increasingly – representing the majority view in society.

Arguments for all these interventions have depended heavily on the notion of the West as a defender of human rights; but the human cost of each of them has been dreadful of course. Three to five million people displaced in Iraq alone and estimates of deaths that range from 98 000 to nearly a million.

I had the same sensation that the text I was reading was a routine palimpsest of someone else’s words when reading the section on Venezuela in Tom Watson’s letter to Labour Party members this week. This was odd in several respects. The tone was ringing rhetoric, not at all the slightly rambly meander that we are used to from Tom: drawing out the detailed bye ways of some aspect of domestic policy that particularly obsesses him. This makes his letters interesting in places where he has genuine expertise but all to often rather inconsequential; as titanic questions like climate change only just peep above his horizons.

Since I have been getting his letters, Tom’s attention very rarely raises to anything beyond the domestic agenda. This may be because, for him, matters of foreign policy outside of Europe are simply a matter of cutting and pasting US State Department press releases; and therefore an area in which an lack of attention is almost required. If you accept the dictates of the Pax Americana – even under Trump – as a given – there really is little point in paying attention to it. Its almost above your place. Until it comes under threat; and at that point Tom will jump to attention and do his bit for it. Of course, one of the threats to it is the leadership of his own Party.

If you look at Tom Watson’s voting record between 2003 and the present day he voted FOR UK military interventions six times (against twice and absent three times) FOR the Iraq war five times (absent once) and FOR an investigation into the Iraq war once – and AGAINST fourteen times. His stance is clear. The casualties involved do not appear to make him squeamish. No doubt he would do it again.

Jeremy Corbyn represents a different kind of socialist tradition, which has hitherto been a very small minority in the UK Labour movement – that sees its alliances in seeking to transform the relations of domestic wealth and power as bound up with other movements and countries internationally that are seeking to do the same. The crisis for traditional Labour currents – like that represented by Tom – is that they have preset limits on the extent to which they are prepared to challenge the powers that be.

Blair’s “Third Way” perception was that a Labour government could only come about if it explicitly did NOT make any challenge to people ” getting filthy rich” – let alone those who already were. This was only possible at a particular moment in UK politics – when the USA’s unipolar moment coincided with rapid globalisation and continuing oil revenues allowing a superficial modernisation on social issues while leaving archaic institutions, imbalances and failings substantially intact. From the 2008 crash that tradition has run into the sand across Europe; and is either facing electoral oblivion after participating in pro austerity coalitions and/or serious challenge to its left. In the UK, the capitulation of the old leaderships to austerity means that the awkward squad now leads the Party – but the defenders of the old order are fighting tooth and nail to save it for the outmoded politics they represent – and if that means destroying it, so be it.

Tom has used an extraordinarily biased report for the UN from former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet on the current crisis in Venezuela and framed it as an attack on international solidarity. “Do not defend the indefensible because someone decides for you that it is socialism.”  Quite so, so lets not skid along the rhetoric, lets make a serious analysis of what is and is not defensible and make our own minds up about what is socialist and what is not.

First, a matter of style. Tom takes a BBC report as evidence but, in his own account, removes all the conditional words that indicate that an inaccurate picture may be being painted. Words like “allegations”, and phrases like “may indicate” are removed from Tom’s account the better to stoke indignation. Accuracy is not a consideration here. Given the way the intelligence services were caught out “sexing up” the “dodgy dossier” you’d think Tom might be a bit more cautious. He does not mention that the Venezuelan government has pointed out 70 factual errors in the draft report, arising from its authors having ignored most of the evidence gathered inside the country or submitted by anyone other than the opposition; relying instead on unverified allegations from opposition supporters in exile – who are responsible for 82% of the statements in the report – none of which are independently corroborated.* Far be it from them to have an axe to grind. These are people who demonstrated with the slogan “Bomb us – we have oil too” so a shovel full of salt might be in order. A more accurate way to talk about this would be to say that the Venezuelan opposition accuses the government of all sorts of dire things and the government denies it.

The same method – of giving credence to opposition allegations while dismissing those of government supporters – was also used in reports from Amnesty and International Human Rights Watch. Why they would produce such a politically biased account is a question for them. The background is that they operate in an international human rights framework in which the US and its allies affect the position of international moral arbiters while ensuring immunity for themselves, their secret services and black ops agents, torturers and armed forces. No US personnel will ever be put on trial in the Hague. Civis Americanus sum. Human rights organisations compete for funds in a world in which the ten main sources are all US Trusts with a particular view of the world+. Any organisation that wants to survive as a viable enterprise has to tailor its view to theirs even if, like Amnesty, they are primarily funded by individual donations. For an assessment of Amnesty’s reports on Venezuela see here. https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14357

You would think from reading Tom Watson’s account that Venezuela had not, since the election of Hugo Chavez in 1999, transformed aspects of Venezuelan society as a conscious attempt to build a 21st century socialism in a way that most Labour supporters would want to defend. Tom sneers about a “socialist paradise”. No one would claim that, but they have done the following in very difficult circumstances.

• extended education to all and eliminated adult illiteracy – building new schools and universities and giving out 4.8 million computers to students to carry their whole learning course from nursery to university
• extended health care – free at the point of use – to all areas – building clinics in the barrios
• provided aid and free or cheap oil to countries in the Caribbean suffering from natural disasters or unnatural economic pressure from the United States ($1.3 billion direct aid and $359 million debt forgiveness to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake for example – between double to three times the $650 million that came from the whole of the EU).
• cleared slums and built two and a half million new homes (for free or very low rent) towards a target of 5 million by 2025, and they are still building
• passed laws against gender, racial and age discrimination and boosted participation by women and the ethnic majorities at every level in society
• vested Venezuela’s natural resources in the Venezuelan people
• generated popular participation in all these missions and projects, so the poorest sections of society that have befitted most from them are also integrally involved in their design and running
• presided over a sharp increase in the number of people registered to vote – up from about 75% in the 1990s to 96% today (from 11 million to 19 million).

Nor in Tom’s account is there any reflection that Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro have won every Presidential election from 1998 to the most recent one in 2018 – in which Maduro won 67.8% of the vote to his nearest rival’s 20.9%, Venezuelan elections use a system described in 2012 by former US President Jimmy Carter in unambiguous terms; “the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world”.

Nor does Tom seem to notice that, since 2014, Venezuela has been subject to sanctions from the United States that are designed to overturn the results of these democratic elections – after an attempted coup in 2002 failed. Kissinger’s injunction to “make the economy scream” applied to the Allende government in Chile in the early 1970’s is being applied to Venezuela today. After all, as Kissinger explained then, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people”. These sanctions have been supported by a coalition of wealthy developed countries (principally Canada and the EU) and US client regimes in Latin America, but spurned by the rest of the world. Not just Russia and China – but everyone else. The effect of these sanctions – on top of a drop in world oil prices that has slashed Venezuela’s annual revenue from $43.9 billion in 2014 to $5.918 billion in 2017 – has been crippling for the Venezuelan economy, but only partly the desired political effect. Support for the Venezuelan Socialist Party has declined but remains substantial and still outnumbers the opposition, especially in the poorer areas where people know and fear what a US led regime would do to them. Latin American has enough experience of this for people to know.

Tom also appears not to have noticed that the man in charge of the US operation in Venezuela is Elliott Abrams. This is a man with form. He was in charge of Central American operations for Ronald Reagan in the 1970s; which involved support for Contra terrorists in Nicaragua (financed by illegal arms for oil deals with Iran) building up the death squads in El Salvador – whose modus operandi included the sorts of horrific murders currently associated with ISIS or Mexican drug cartels; perhaps a clue as to where both got their ideas from – and supporting the Guatemalan government of General Rios Montt – whose campaign against the Maya in Yucatan led him to being tried for crimes against humanity and genocide just before his death in 2017. A question for Tom. What do you think a Venezuelan regime installed at the behest of this bloke would look like – and what do you think it would do to the Venezuelan working class if it took power?

Tom really should be aware that a Center for Economic and Policy Research report co-authored by economists Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot, states that US sanctions have deprived Venezuela of billions of dollars needed to pay for essential food and medicine, leading to a rise in disease and mortality and the displacement of millions. This has disproportionately harmed the poorest and most vulnerable Venezuelans resulting in 40,000 deaths and a 31% rise in general mortality from 2017 to 2018. 40,000. Tom somehow misses this.

By late 2018 more than 300,000 people were at risk due to lack of access to medicines or treatment; including 80,000 people with HIV  16,000 people who need dialysis, 16,000 people with cancer, and 4 million with diabetes and hypertension unable to obtain insulin or cardiovascular medicine. As a former diabetes sufferer you might think that Tom would have more empathy. Instead he describes anyone that points to the responsibility of the Unites States and its supporters for this suffering as “cynics”. Oh to be so innocent.

Tom argues that “Democratic Socialism requires consent”. This is interesting on two counts. Firstly, the sort of socialism being developed in Venezuela requires not consent but participation. So will any attempt to seriously transform the UK through Labour’s investment plans and Green Industrial Revolution. Secondly, the implication of Tom’s argument is that the Venezuelan government does not have consent from its people because there is a violent and racist US supported opposition, primarily drawn for the wealthy elite who formerly ran the country and kept hold of its benefits for themselves. These are taken by Tom to be “the people”. He ignores not only successive election results in which more of “the people” have voted for the government than the opposition, but also very large recent demonstrations supporting it. His caricature of a government ruling by fear over a cowed people is belied by these shows of support. Its fair to say that the impact of the economic crisis has reduced the support that the government has, but the opposition vote has not grown; which says quite a lot about the limits of their appeal. Overthrowing the government will also mean crushing its supporters. There is no neutrality in this. When there is a conflict, anyone who stands aside is consenting to the victory of the power with the greatest force.

So, withdrawal of support from Venezuela by our Party or our unions would be a green light for a US intervention of the sort that Tom has voted for elsewhere in the world; and would, no doubt, have a similar result; with human rights as much a consideration as they were in the Fallujah free fire zone or in Abu Ghraib.

Tom says that the people of Venezuela “deserve a future that they consent to and can forge together.” Quite so. Support for the opposition won’t achieve that. A peaceful and democratic way out of the crisis requires, on the contrary, the mass support that the government has to be taken into account, the opposition to abandon attempts at coups, a dialogue between government and opposition (consistently offered by the government) an end to US sanctions and no further attempts to violently overthrow a democratically elected government from inside or outside the country.

Hopefully all democratic socialists can agree on that.

*https://www.venezuelasolidarity.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Reply-to-Bachelet-report-5-July-20197424.pdf

+

Top Ten Funders of Human Rights Projects Worldwide

1. Open Society Foundations – $261.1m

2. Ford Foundation – $171.1m

3. National Endowment for Democracy – $105.7m

4. W.K. Kellogg Foundation – $59.2m

5. Oak Foundation – $40m

6. Atlantic Philanthropies – $39m

7. Arcus Foundation – $36.6m

8. Vanguard Charitable Endowment Foundation – $32.9m

9. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – $31.4m

10. Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation –  – $28.5m

Suburban Eyesore

Dead cars grow green rot

shaded under dark fir trees

dripping white bird poo.

Council Flat Assassin

Standing motionless

on his balcony. Black hood,

white face, dead eyes.

Having just read a book about the Battle of Britain (by James Holland, younger brother of the better known and more controversial Tom) I have been looking up more nervously than usual whenever a helicopter flies overhead.

Holland is one of those World War 2 historians who focuses entirely on the struggle in the West- the wrong end of the telescope perspective characteristic of the British view. His six dream dinner guests (in a Daily Telegraph article in 2012) – Errol Flynn, Field Marshal Alexander, Cecil Beeton, Keith Miller (cricketer and Mosquito pilot) Ingrid Bergman (primarily to gaze at) and Guy Gibson (the Dambuster) – gives something of a clue as to where he is coming from; as does a curious passage in which he describes Hitler’s aversion to “Jewish Bolshevism” without the inverted commas.

Nevertheless, there are some interesting insights in his account which challenges a lot of received wisdom about 1940: particularly the central myth that Germany had an overwhelming advantage in numbers and material and Britain was simply a democratic North European island, not the centre of a global Empire with enormous reserves of power. In fact, in 1940, the Wehrmacht was less motorised overall than the British Expeditionary Force and had fewer divisions than the French army alone at the start of their offensive and even fewer tanks – and those they had were less well armed. The paradox of the Blitzkreig was not that it was a manifestation of overwhelming power, but an outrageous gamble with just enough forces to try it on that just about came off – which led the Nazi high command to think that similar absurd attempts to chance their arm would work just as well. A self mesmerising belief in their own ubermesch capacity would increasingly come unstuck as time went on. Material reality has a way of imposing itself and did so during the Battle of Britain.

Production. Losses on both sides were extreme. Of the 1,963 serviceable aircraft available to the RAF in May 1940, 1,744 were destroyed by the end of the battle, killing 1,544 air crew.  “The thing that’s always worried me about being one of the few is the way we keep on getting fewer”. Flight Officer David Campbell. The Luftwaffe started with 2,550 planes of which 1,977 were lost by the end, along with 2,585 air crew killed and another 925 captured. This was hard to replace for both sides but, during 1940, Britain produced 15,000 aircraft (about 300 planes a week) to Germany’s 10,000 (200 planes a week) and trained more pilots. The RAF repair system was also quicker than the Luftwaffe’s. So, from May to September the balance of forces was moving inexorably in one direction.

Strategic sense. The German aim was to have decisive air superiority to enable a cross channel invasion with air cover by September. Goering wanted to smash the RAFs Fighter Command in 3 or 4 days and – misled by over optimistic “intelligence” reports from Beppo Schmid (described by Anthony Beevor as “the most disastrous intelligence officer the Wehrmacht ever produced”, possibly because he’d worked out that the best way to prosper – or indeed survive – in Nazi Germany was to tell the higher ups what they wanted to hear) which underestimated RAF fighter strength by 75% at the start and never readjusted- he thought he could get away with it. Like the US army in Vietnam, mesmerised by its massive “kill” count statistics into a belief that it was winning, he kept thinking that one more big push was all that was needed to finish the job; when, in fact, the RAF was getting stronger and the Luftwaffe was getting worn out. He kept shifting priorities too, in a way that was inexplicable to a lot of his pilots – who couldn’t understand what they were expected to do. The RAF, by contrast, had a more straightforward approach – keep enough fighters in the air to grind the raiders down every time they came over and keep replacing the men and machines that were being destroyed – and stuck to it.

The tactical use the Luftwaffe made of its aircraft – within this badly thought out “strategy” – was perverse. In the ME109E they had the most effective fighter aircraft in the battle – faster than the Hurricane, on a par with the Spitfire and with a far more powerful armament. RAF fighters were seriously outgunned and had ammunition for only 15 seconds of firing – so their approach was primarily to get up high, dive, shoot and run. A ME109 had cannon as well as machine guns and could fire for 55 seconds. They were, however, hamstrung by Goering’s order to fly above the bombers at the same speed they were going – which was so slow that it was hard for the pilots not to stall their fighters. The Luftwaffe’s bombers were so slow primarily because of their High Command’s obsession with dive bombing. The Junkers 88, designed as a very fast medium bomber which could outrun a Hurricane and give a Spitfire a good race, had to be redesigned to give it a dive bombing capacity; which made it easily catchable by both. Even the huge and ungainly HE 177 – probably the ugliest bomber ever designed – which was intended to be a long range heavy bomber – had not come into production because Heinkel were still working on making it capable of diving – making the outmoded HE111 the main workhorse of the bombing offensive. Towards the end of the battle – and looking for new gimmicks – Goering settled in the wheeze of putting bombs under ME109’s – which its pilots were not trained for, slowed them down and made them more vulnerable. This genius for self sabotage reflected an aspect of Nazi thinking that believed its own myths – that victory was primarily a triumph of the will. Believe in something hard enough and reality will shape itself to match it. An idea that still resurfaces in odd places – from Noel Edmunds’s notion of “cosmic ordering” to Boris Johnson’s stance that a successful Brexit will result from “belief in Britain.”

The human factor. RAF pilots had leave. The strain of continuous flying would be relieved. Air battles were so quick that pilots lost their best friends in seconds, had to fly back, refuel and rearm and take off again. The constant adrenalin rush, fortified by Benzedrine (for the RAF) or Piratin (for the Luftwaffe) ground down the nerves of the pilots. The RAF culture was to get away from this in the evenings – and “talking shop” in the pub or dance hall was frowned upon. The Luftwaffe culture was more dour. Pilots would often sit and discuss tactics when they weren’t flying, so there was no time in which their minds weren’t on the job. Worse, they just kept flying continuously, sometimes several sorties a day, while their friends and comrades were killed around them. The phenomena of Kanalkrankheit (Channel sickness) with pilots either cracking up or pulling a sickie, became increasingly prevalent as September dragged on. A lesson for managements everywhere. Workers need breaks to function.

The underlying point of all this is that Nazi Germany – with an over leveraged and under resourced economy – was only capable of winning short, fast wars and – once it had started – was compelled to keep trying to do so until they bit off more than they could chew in Operation Barbarossa. The Battle of Britain, in wearing out their air force in a long battle of attrition, was a small harbinger of how their entire war machine was to be ground to total destruction by the Red Army after 1941. As Hitler commented to Finnish dictator Mannerheim in 1943 – surfacing from his barbiturates in a moment of realism and lucidity and seeing the writing on the wall – “who would have thought any country could produce 3,000 tanks a month?”

In my local barbers. a tiny shed of a place next to a juice bar, tucked inside a mini mall carved out of an old shoe shop. “Cricket” is on the radio as the barber – a quiet Asian guy who massages my head at the end by knocking it about a bit – buzzes over with the number 2 clippers and my head re-emerges one haircut more lined. The one day world championship roars in the background. The commentary and the crowd are both raucous urging the big hitters to hit big under intense time pressure. Everything rushed, exciting and frenetic. A game that imposes its action not one that draws you in. All over and wrapped up in no time. As I got up I nodded at the radio and said “not the same game as a test match is it?”

In the summer of 1975 I was employed to pick fruit on a farm some miles south of York. It was hot and boring and a couple of other workers brought portable radios to lighten our load with Radio 1’s summer playlist; consisting as it did primarily of the Bay City Rollers and “Woah! I’m going to Barbados” by Typically Tropical played several times an hour.

After a while, around 11 in the morning, someone turned their dial across to Radio 3 to catch the Ashes Test between England and Australia and landed in the middle of an arcane discussion between two of the commentators about the science of swinging a ball in moist conditions; occasioned by a letter from a professor at Cambridge arguing that it was contrary to the laws of physics to do so, even though all fast bowlers did it. This was a different and more intriguing world than anything that could be offered by David Hamilton or Dave Lee Travis.

After a while, others switch over and there is nothing in the wind louder than the snick of leather on willow, Brian Johnstone’s plummy voice rhapsodising over someone’s kind gift of a chocolate cake for afternoon tea and the then youthful Henry Blofeld* name checking the occasional passing bus and flock of pigeons; and the sense of an extraordinary spaciousness in the game…”and there is no run…”

Knowing that we were settled in for a five day ritual, played outside, during an English summer in which infinitely minute changes in the weather – the light, the wind, the moisture in the air, the dampness or dryness of the field or the wicket – could and did affect how the game was played; and even whether it could be played at all. Commentary about an approaching bank of cloud was pertinent factor that we knew the players were taking into account in their multi layered calculations of where they were and what they needed to do.

Each ball in each 6 ball over was a tight battle of wits between bowler and batsmen. For the bowler. whether to bowl over or around the wicket, which length to pitch at, what speed to bowl at, whether there were any spin or bounce in the wicket, how old the ball was, where to place the fielders, how to tempt a batsman into a rash shot. For the batsman, the need to calculate whether a ball needed to be hit, had to be hit and which could be flicked through a gap – all the while taking account of his own score, with the approach to centuries and half centuries especially being a nervous time, the precariousness or safety of the innings and the time left to find the runs they needed. At times a spell of assured bowling would stall the runs and a succession of maiden overs (with no runs scored) would put all the pressure on the batsmen.

The tension of this, and the release of it one way or another when the tiredness of a bowler or a slight shift in the weather allows a batsman to knock a boundary or two and suddenly the field is having to change to hold off the fours and the batsmen can start sneaking singles; or a frustrated batsman takes a risk on a ball he should have left and is snaffled up by the slips – meaning a new batsman has to come in and take time to find his eye and rhythm.

The long periods of apparent stasis punctuated by sudden euphoric shifts in fortune are all hedged around with a poetic language of field placings as reassuring and obscure as the shipping forecast and sounding a bit like long lost country villages- the gully – the slips – deep mid wicket- silly mid off – long leg; and arcane rituals worthy of Gormenghast – like the tradition of the Umpire standing on one leg whenever the score reached 111; considered very unlucky because it looks like a wicket with the bales knocked off, and known as a “Nelson” because at the end of his life Admiral Nelson supposedly had one arm, one eye and one ball.

Even during the days when play was stopped for rain, no one switched back to Radio 1. We listened to the endless stream of anecdotes and speculation as though we were cramming the lore of the game to make up for all the lost time we’d wasted while we were ignoring it.

CLR James – in Beyond a Boundary – argued that cricket was an attempt by an unpoetic people to encapsulate and codify the infinite. A one day match has its moments, but does not begin to approach this.

Post script. Having listened to the end of the ODI world cup final all I can say is that although this version of the game does not have eternity, it definitely has its moments.

*The commentators were, almost to a man, almost cartoon like public school, dyed in the wool Conservatives; often having a moan that England couldn’t play test matches against Apartheid South Africa because of “politics” and so completely absorbed in their own world that it was hard to think they could imagine any others. Even Fred Trueman’s turn from 1974 onwards as permanently grumpy working class Yorkshireman – in more recent years reprised by Geoffrey Boycott as a sort of continuity tribute act –  was absorbed and tolerated for its backward looking disgust at the declining standards of English cricket – taken as a metaphor for the declining status of the country. John Arlott was an exception, a man of broad human sympathies, whose commentary was as poetic as it was informative.

Tom Watson’s latest intervention in the Labour Party appears to be an attempt to create a diversionary disunity where none need exist. In calling for a referendum before an election he repeats the strategic mistake he made in his “Proudly British, proudly European ” article for Labour List in June. Tom’s positions have changed on this. In 2016 the main campaign was to pander to anti-immigrant sentiment among leave voters and criticise Jeremy Corbyn for being too soft on freedom of movement. This is what Tom wrote in Labour List in November 2016

“I know some people feel that politicians who campaigned against Brexit are still trying to stop it happening, ignoring the clear decision the British people made back in June. I have to say those fears aren’t completely unfounded.

“The Lib Dems are desperately, openly, shamelessly trying to recover some sort of electoral relevance by coming out as Brexit Deniers. They talk about using a vote in Parliament to stop the Government triggering article 50. They say they will do their best to block it, come what may.

“I can see why it’s attractive to Tim Farron, as the leader of a party on eight per cent, to want to be the party of the 48 per cent. That can never be an option for a party like Labour, that wants to represent everyone. We are not in denial about Brexit. We will not attempt to obstruct the triggering of article 50.”

A continuity of position reflecting deeply held principles is hard to detect. The only sound point in all this is that Labour “wants to represent everyone”, though that should be recast as representing the 99% not the 1%, the many not the few. 

Original blog starts here.

Every week I get an email from Tom Watson (Deputy leader of the Labour Party). This is nothing personal. Were I to write back I would get no replies. His opening section this week is an almost text book example of how to shackle the Labour Party and the people of Britain and Europe to the limitations of their pasts. He starts off promisingly…

Today we are staring down the barrel of a Boris Johnson premiership. In a little over four weeks away, this most self-serving of politicians will likely be handed the keys to the greatest office in the land. With him comes the looming threat of a no-deal Brexit, heaping national humiliation on our country, and a catastrophic impact on jobs and the economy, as we turn our back on our closest and most important allies and friends.

So far so good. But he misses the driving force behind no deal as an immediate threat. This is not a consequence of Boris Johnson’s personality. Johnson is simply opportunistically surfing the wave; on the Disraelian dictum that the first rule in politics is not to betray your principles but to make sure you don’t have any principles worth betraying in the first place. The question is more, what is generating the wave he is surfing?

For the unreconstructed Atlanticist right – for most of the Twentieth century “our closest and most important ally and friend” has been the United States – at least since it put the UK very firmly in its place during the Suez crisis. This was the last time that Britain actually had to face up to its actual position in the world – that it was no longer an independent imperial power capable to projecting its own interests separate and apart from the Pax Americana. The national humiliation was so severe that the British ruling class dealt with it the only way they know how  – a mixture of hard headed calculation and self deluding denial. A strategic recognition that no action could be taken that crossed the United States has been dressed up as a “special relationship”.

This is presented in public as a friendship, at its most extreme a romanticised (and racially limited) notion of Churchill’s “English speaking peoples”, or as a concurrence of economic philosophy “the Anglosphere”; in order to hide the brutal reality of British subordination. In this, the imperative for the British ruling class to go along with whatever the Americans want is presented as  a choice on the UKs part; or as a happy unity of purpose that exists on a sphere more elevated than that of a grubby calculation of interest. In this way illusions about the UK’s power, status and influence can be kept on life support – and all the old symbolism and traditions of Empire survive in a timeless twilight zone –  as though we are doing the Americans a favour by conferring on them our faded sub feudal glamour in return for being their most eager Igor in international relations- as if it was all Harry and Megan. The reality is better expressed  by Tony Blair’s advice to his ambassador to Washington. “We want you to get up the arse of the White House and stay there”. Whenever anyone uses the phrase “special relationship”, that is the image that should come to mind.

The time for disavowal is unavoidably past however- because the United States is actively and unpredictably disrupting the multi lateral institutions that it has hitherto relied upon to maintain its global dominance. In asserting “America first” they are tearing off the veils that disguise the power relationships and throwing out the delusions that went with them.

This is being driven by the brute realities of declining economic power, the stagnation of the US neo liberal model since 2008, the growing challenge of China and the existential threat to humanity posed by climate change – a direct threat to the fossil fuel companies that dominate the US economy. The US is increasingly attempting to assert itself unilaterally and in the process is undermining the multi lateral organisations that underpinned the Pax Americana until recently. There are no friends – only interests.  So, the United States under Trump now aims to break up the EU, the better to control its component countries.

At the same time, the most adventurist fraction of UK capital is seeking leverage up the proportion of national wealth taken in profits by as dramatic an assault on wages, security at work, social benefits and public provision as that forced through by Thatcher in the 1980s (when this went up from 40% of GDP to 45%). This requires a break with EU regulations and adopting the US model. They are well aware that going out of the EU without a deal is needed to do this. The threat this poses to most of us is real. They are talking about not only slashing tax further for companies, setting up free trade ports and enterprise zones (a development strategy used by emerging third world economies desperate to attract investment – any investment) and aim to pump wealth upwards by reducing workers rights to those in force in the US. Consider just two of these.

• The US is the only advanced economy not have have paid maternity or paternity leave as a right. There is only 12 weeks unpaid leave; and this only applies to those at a company of at least 50 employees who’ve worked for at least a year and work a minimum of 25 hours per week.  That excludes 41% of Americans. Lets spell that out. Four in ten Americans have no right to ANY time off if they have a baby.
• In the EU there is a minimum 4 weeks paid holiday, in the US “the law does not require employers to grant any vacation or holidays, and about 25 per cent of all employees receive no paid vacation time” Wikipedia. Lets spell that out too. One in four American workers have no paid holidays at all.

During Donald Trump’s state visit, the President – with his big black motorcade travelling at speed and stretching from one end of the Mall to the other and his evil Osprey helicopters roaring over central London’s airspace – was acting like a new proprietor measuring up the curtains for when he takes over. He was quite explicit that the Health Service will be on the table in the Trade Deal he envisages after the UK crashes out of the EU with no deal. This very helpfully concentrated enough minds in the Peterborough by election to help Labour prevent Trump’s tools in the Brexit Party winning their first seat.

No one in the UK (apart from Nigel Farage) wants the American health care system. Conservative politicians fell over themselves to say that they would “rule it out” of discussion – as if they’d have the power to do that.

All of this makes uniting everyone who opposes no deal in a campaign ferociously against it an imperative. The argument between those who want to remain in the EU and those who believe that the referendum in 2016 requires some form of conscious decoupling from it while retaining a close relationship is a real one, but a second level disagreement when you put the consequences of no deal for people’s lives up front.

What does Tom argue instead?

That is why these last few days I have been making the case for Labour to come out as an explicitly pro-Remain, pro-reform party…. we will have the opportunity this coming week at Shadow Cabinet to take the historic decision to campaign to remain in the EU.

This draws the dividing line in politics between everyone who wants to remain in the EU as it is and everyone who wants to leave, whatever the reasons for that and whatever form they imagine it might take. It is – bluntly – the wrong place to draw the line. The balance between leavers and remainers is still fairly even. Polarising on that line gives the no dealers a larger hinterland and gives them a chance to get their project over the line. Campaigning instead on the consequences of no deal for everyone’s quality of life could produce a dynamic campaign of mass mobilisation capable of defeating them, throwing the Conservatives out of office, changing Britain and having a political knock on effect into the EU itself. Instead of pushing for such a campaign, Tom substitutes a series of assertions about values that are supposedly already British, Labour and embodied by the EU.

…  I said that “our members are Remain, our values are Remain, our hearts are Remain. We need our Labour party to be true to who we are”.

I argued that the core values of the EU – Internationalism, Solidarity, Freedom – are British, Labour values…

The patriotic choice for Britain is to Remain.

This misrepresents the EU and Labour.

• The EU itself says that its core values are “respect for human dignity and human rights, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law”, so “internationalism” and “solidarity” do not appear in the list. Meatloaf sang – two out of three ain’t bad – but ONE out of three Tom? It, more fundamentally, would be hard to make a case with a straight face that the EU as it stands actually lives up to these values. Just consider the human dignity of refugees; the camps along the Greek border and the use of the Mediterranean Sea as a moat with 597 deaths so far this year. The UK of course – is as complicit in this as every other EU member and would be inside or outside the EU. So no shining city on a hill there – in so far as we want these values in the EU or UK, we have to fight for them and not assume they are already there.
• Many of Labour supporters support continuing EU membership without delusions that the EU as it stands represents any of those values in the way we’d wish it to.

More importantly this minimises the range of support for a campaign against no deal by driving a wedge between everyone who is prepared to be a cheerleader for the EU as it currently is – neo liberal warts and all – and everyone else. In that he is seeking common ground with the Liberal Democrats on their terms. It locks us into a polarisation in which the limits of political possibility are either Trumpian crisis capitalism or the politics of the 2010 -15 coalition – austerity inside the EU.

On the contrary – the campaign against no deal has to be the basis on which both of these limiting – and doomed – options are challenged and overcome. We shall…

Postscript two and a bit month later. It is really gratifying that this is exactly the line that Jeremy Corbyn has led on since the middle of August.

Underneath the tall plane trees of the elliptical garden square opposite St Pancras hospital, a woman takes two wolves for a walk. The wolves seem calmer than she is.

In St Pancras Gardens – tucked behind the stations on the edge of Somer’s town – the empty tomb of Mary Wollstencraft – author of the vindication of the rights of women and dead of childbirth induced septicemia at the age of 38 – stands black and grim like a prehistoric standing stone -her body long since disinterred and reburied in the warmer soils of Bournemouth in a posthumous retirement to the South coast. All around, the lone and level lawn stretches far away.

Underneath the red and white arches in the lost streets to the north of the station, a narrow antique shop window displays a row of decapitated mannequin heads from the 1920’s or 30s like a hint for a Dr Who episode that is yet to be written- a male figure with a Clark Gable mustache, a woman with a cloche hat, a golden haired child – all corpse like, with sinister expectant expressions and fixed smiles.

The canyon between St Pancras and the British Library makes the station look like a cathedral to an evil god.

Inside the British Library an exhibition on Imaginary Cities that takes maps and remasters them digitally to make moving grey fractal patterns based on nineteenth century Paris that are nightmarishly symmetrical, a film of a digital cityscape based on early twentieth century New York that feels like a labyrinth with no escape, a 3D rendering of Chicago that has the look and feel of a circuit board. All of these render the city as a machine or a structure in which the human life that animates and transforms it is simply taken as an unacknowledged given. Dead places.

In the “Treasures”  exhibition there are music scores in the hand of long dead composers – or written by a contemporary on their behalf. Luminously neat and celestially symmetrical black lines of a piece by Byrd – composed and written as an act of worship punctiliously spaced, harmonious as a motet sung by angels and authoritative as a set of commandments- lead on to waves of emotion slashed into a score by the barely contained energy of Beethoven’s pen as though he had to rush to channel his inspiration before it was lost- the draft of a song by Mahler, full of anxious scribblings out- showing that genius takes work and the first draft isn’t the last word. The Bach Fugue playing in the head sets was an old conversation between the left and right hands on the keyboard that will go on forever.

Just as the dialogue from the gravedigger scene in Hamlet spoken in the headphones by Laurence Olivier and Stanley Holloway will. Four hundred year old words about the mutability of life, spoken with such passion and wit by actors who died 30 years ago that the last words – “let her paint an inch thick – to this favour she must come” – stand as an epitaph for their lives that is defied by the continuing power of their work.

Outside in the sunshine, the chilly steel and glass redevelopment of the scuzzy back end of Kings Cross looks like an animated architect’s poster – sufficiently antiseptic to make the people walking through it, or holding meetings behind display windows in rooms with bare chairs and flip charts like every other room in the complex – look like holograms. On  an astroturf seating bank alongside the canal like a hanging lawn of mammon, a set of young people sit scattered watching a film of a corporate panel discussion on “advanced analytics” on a screen on the other side. They seem bored. Several have laid down and seem to be asleep. This is part of a  “Festival of AI and emerging technology ” run by an outfit called Cog X that is taking place amid the reconditioned engine sheds of the age of steam. It has the feel of the Chicago circuit board city – but in the middle of it, the canal continues to flow and big geese paddle through the algae alongside canal boats cluttered with bicycles and geraniums.

In the Liberal Jewish Cemetery in Willesden there are plaques on the wall commemorating the dead. Most are from over fifty years ago and tell simple stories of love and loss in a family; given added poignancy by the knowledge that the mourners who installed the plaque with such loving care will now have joined the mourned in the long tight rows of dignified grey graves outside.

We are as a shadow.

Two, next to each other, tell a wider story in an equally quiet way. One man, born in Breslau in 1903; died in London in the 1960s. An escape from Germany both personal and historic. Another, a young man of 22, eldest son of his loving parents, died of his wounds in Spain in 1938. “Everything he had, he gave for his ideals.”

We are as a grass.

Walter was 95. Sent for safety to his uncle in England in 1937 at the age of 14 as the Nazis tightened their grip, he was arrested by the Gestapo while trying to return to visit his parents in the summer of 1938 and re-deported as a “Jewish alien”. His parents escaped Germany just in time in 1939 – which did not stop Walter and his father being interned at the outbreak of war by the British authorities as “enemy aliens”.

A founder member of CND, Labour Party candidate in the 1959 General Election, he saw his socialism as an expression of his deeply held Jewish faith and values; requiring empathy and solidarity with all oppressed and persecuted peoples; and was as likely to argue with his rabbi as he was his Party Secretary. He never believed that the solution to persecution was to become a persecutor of others. He had more dignity than that.

He marched to Trafalgar Square in 1956 to oppose  the Suez invasion – and from it to Aldermaston in 1958, supported the Committee of 100 sit downs against nuclear weapons in 1960 – and on up to today – he never let up. At the 2005 Labour Party conference – at the age of 80 – he heckled Jack Straw’s claim that the UK was only intervening in Iraq to build peace and democracy. His one word comment “Nonsense!” an irrepressible outburst of indignation at such transparent flim flam, earned him forcible ejection by a pair of security heavies and detained and questioned under section 44 of the Anti-Terrorism Act. The backlash that this generated not only led to Walter receiving an apology from Tony Blair, but also to his election to the Labour National Executive the following year. It also partially derailed a practice, then being sneaked in and becoming habitual, of using Anti -Terror legislation to detain anyone protesting against a centre ground mainstream consensus. According to The Scotsman, 600 other people had been detained under this act at the same conference – some protesting at the Iraq war, some OAPs complaining about pensions.

He was a long time friend of Jeremy Corbyn dating from their time together in CND in the 1980’s. Jeremy would have attended the funeral had he not been in Normandy for the D Day commemoration; and sent a heartfelt message and tribute. Pictures of Jeremy on that day quietly listening to D- Day veterans of Walter’s generation show the kind of humanity and opposition to patriotic bombast that they shared. Its hard to imagine Donald Trump or Boris Johnson sitting so quietly and thoughtfully, nor listening so intently. Walter always stood for the view that respect  comes from love and brings us together – a human quality which we all owe to each other – the opposite of self subordination to those with power or wealth governed by ritual.

He was gentle, irascible, stubborn, principled, dedicated. A good man, whose like we need more of.

I did not know him well, and the longest time I spent with him was when he offered me a lift up to a Labour CND AGM in Sheffield some time in the late 1980’s. When people who knew him asked me how I was getting there and I said “Oh, Walter is giving me a lift”, they would smile and raise their eyebrows. One of them should have warned me.

It was clear almost from the first second I strapped myself into the passenger seat that Walter was a spectacularly bad driver. It got worse from there.

Driving off with barely a backward glance, to a symphony of horns and barrage of startled looks from other drivers, we kangarooed  a bit up to Stoke Newington, where Walter drove into a petrol station by way of the exit.

He parked by the petrol pumps in front of an outraged orthodox Jewish guy – who had come in the right way with every expectation of being able to park at a petrol pump and fill up- but instead had us suddenly appearing right in front of him and blocking his way. He got out in his big black hat, hands on hips, and glared at Walter, who glanced vaguely at him and gave a dismissive wave of the hand; before realising that the petrol tank was on the other side of his car from the pump. Exasperated but undeterred, Walter heaved the pipe across the top of the car and just about got the nozzle into the tank and filled it that way. The other driver looked straight at me and I shrugged with what I hoped was a winning grimace.

Driving round the cars in front and exiting through the entrance, we headed for the Motorway, which you would think might be smoother going.

And so it came to pass, except for Walter’s alarming difficulty in maintaining either a steady speed or any lane disciple whatsoever. We would continually be drifting from the slow to the middle lane and sometimes maintain a steady position straddling both, with other vehicles forced to suddenly brake or swerve around us – some of them honking in terror as they did. Sometimes we would bump over a cat’s eye and Walter would reflexively flinch and take his foot off the accelerator, causing us to slow down unpredictably – forcing more swerves and honks from all around us.

When we got to Sheffield, we encountered a roundabout. Being uncertain of where we were, or which road to go off on, Walter stopped – on the roundabout – while he gathered his thoughts. More honks and swerves.

As we finally walked in to the meeting in Sheffield University, people looked round and smiled at my shocked, ashen complexion and somewhat staring eyes. “Ah, another survivor” said one.

I have been grateful ever since that I’m still here, that Walter, despite this journey and many others like it before and since, lived on to 95 and was as disputatious and questing as ever. Captured by one of his last conversations that has been making me smile since Carol Turner told it at the funeral.

5 in the morning on one of the last days.

Walter: Nothing is certain. I might not make it to the morning.

Carol: Oh, you’ll make it to the morning Walter.

Walter: But how can you be SURE?

We are as grass.

The threatening tattoo on the tightly muscled man at the bus stop turns out to be of Winnie the Pooh in the hundred acre wood.

In the bright clear morning, a grey faced man in a battered green anorak and felt boots, lined beyond his years and looking like Strider in the Fellowship of the Ring but with a bottle leaning heavily in his pocket makes heavy weather of pushing a bike away from the shop.

The slightly plump proprietor of the Afghan greengrocers in Colindale – a tiny labyrinth that still has the floor tiles of the chemists it used to be – crammed with humming refrigerators of Halal meat – fruit and veg that varies from fresh to salvageable, shiny aubergines, bright red vine tomatoes – a new continent of  dried fruits and seeds, golden raisins, red raisins and apricots and nuts with unknown names – caves of biscuits and gur – alcoves of tins and pickles – a wall of unknown Persian pastries -lolls behind his tiny counter like a Pasha; wearing a contented smile and one of those Afghan hats that looks like a pie made of felt. He gives us a good deal for Mangoes.

Trump’s Apprentice

Gurning Nigel sneaks

Out the back as Peterborough

says “You’re fired.”

Willesden High Street

Ziggurats of gold

Baklava – frame thin hunched men

Smoking mean roll ups.

Gravestone

‘Gainst the grave stone

a forgotten umbrella

leans in tribute.