Geoff Hoon’s obituary

Posted on March 23, 2010 by Liam

It’s hard to believe that even Mrs Hoon could ever get too passionate about her husband, former Defence Secretary Geoff. Yet since his now famous TV appearance which, with the aid of a hidden camera, he was made to this to resemble one of the seedier members of Silvio Berlusconi’s coterie he’s been attracting the dripping contempt he’s long deserved.

This wonderful tour de force, transcribed from the BBC’s World At One, is by John Knight, leader of Ashfield District Council. It’s Hoon’s political obituary and the opening few paragraph’s of New Labour’s.

I would like to tell you I was shocked and surprised but frankly I wasn’t. I’d have been more shocked and surprised if he’d said “you know what, I don’t want this money I’m already a multi-millionaire. I want to devote the rest of my political career, such as it will be, to the working class people of Ashfield. That would have made me fall off my seat.

“I was disgusted really. Here you’ve got a man, who’s quite frankly a cold-blooded, unprincipled usurper of a once great political party and it stinks. But the real tragedy is that it’s not just about Geoff. Here’s a man who personifies an entire generation of middle class Labour MPs who’ve had absolutely no affinity with or understanding of the people they’re supposed to represent.

Last May we had the same thing where we had the expenses row and in Nottinghamshire we had the county council elections and in the entire district of Ashfield only myself and one of my colleagues got back – just. Every single door you knocked on they said the same thing “I’ll vote for you but I’m not voting for Geoff”. Frankly, you couldn’t defend it and I didn’t even try. I just said “thank you” and walked off.

This is a man who really didn’t care about the ordinary working class people in Ashfield, who was out for his own career. In a sense I don’t blame Geoff for that. If you’re a careerist what is the one thing that you’re motivated by? Money and making money. Well that’s great if you’re a butcher but you’re a politician and particularly if you’re a Labour politician you’re supposed to working for the working class people that vote you in. I saw little of that in Geoff’s time.

As I say my real issue now is not Geoff because he’s announced he’s going to resign anyway but soon the entire parliamentary Labour Party will be absolutely filled to the gunwales with this kind of person. It really needs review and reform from within and I’m really looking to the Prime Minister to sort this out.

If we carry on like this it will be the slow death of the Labour Party. It’s like a black hole that’s going to implode on itself.”

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Obama’s boost for medical-pharmaceutical-insurance complex

Posted on March 22, 2010 by Liam

What this bill does is not only permit the commercial insurance industry to remain in place, but it actually expands and cements their position as the linchpin of health care reform…Not only does it keep them in place, it pours about $500 billion of public money into these companies over 10 years…and it mandates that people buy these companies’ products for whatever they charge.

Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine

image This is a trimmed down version of Helen Redmond’s piece in Socialist Worker (US)  which suggests that the trumpeted health care reform isn’t as great as it’s been presented. The catchy headline is mine, not Helen’s.

Former Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean was a vociferous critic of the Senate bill last year. In an op-ed article, he presaged how the health care endgame would play out.

In Washington, when major bills near final passage, an inside-the-beltway mentality takes hold. Any bill becomes a victory. Clear thinking is thrown out the window for political calculus. In the heat of battle, decisions are being made that set an irreversible course for how future health care reform is done. The result is legislation that has been crafted to get votes, not reform health care.

That’s exactly what’s happened–but Dean is now a supporter of the Senate bill.

These surrenders are only the latest steps backward–away from the promises during the 2008 campaign of a reformed health care system, where the abuses of the insurance industry would be stopped, and toward the dismal reality of legislation that will do the opposite.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

IN SPITE of the hysterical complaints of Republicans, the truth is that the health care measure House Democratic leaders hope to ram through this weekend is a disaster in the making for working people and a massive giveaway to the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance complex.

It will “mandate” people to buy policies from private insurers, without any guarantees of affordable premiums or adequate coverage. It won’t have a “public option.” It will slash spending and benefits for the federal government’s Medicare program by $500 billion. It will impose a tax in some form on employer-provided insurance–supposedly aimed at expensive “Cadillac” plans, but in reality affecting any insurance that has decent benefits.

A lot of the media’s attention has been focused not on the content of the legislation but the bizarre maneuvering of the Democrats now that a united Republican Party has 41 votes in the Senate–enough to block a final version of the legislation negotiated between the House and Senate from coming to a vote.

Instead, House Democrats plan to approve the health care bill passed by the Senate late last year, but with a number of revisions that would be included in a separate measure called a budget reconciliation bill. The reconciliation measure could bypass a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

In any case, the convoluted parliamentary maneuvers were an excuse for still more retreats. For example, in compiling the revisions that the House wants in the Senate bill, Democratic leaders dropped a measure supported by Obama that would give the federal government the authority to regulate health insurance premiums.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

THE ADMINISTRATION’S push for health care legislation has been in trouble since January, when Republican Scott Brown won the special Senate election in Massachusetts. The Democrats still have the biggest majority in both houses of Congress than either party has had for years–but the fact that they don’t have the super-majority necessary to overcome Republican filibusters under the undemocratic rules of the Senate has become the all-purpose excuse for Democrats to act like a panicked minority.

Nevertheless, the administration got a new boost of momentum–ironically, from something that shows the need for much more radical measures to fix the health care crisis.

In February, Anthem Blue Cross, a division of WellPoint, raised premiums by a whopping 39 percent on 700,000 individual plans in California. The increase caused an uproar that the Obama White House exploited to renew pressure on Congress to take up health care legislation.

Summoned to a congressional hearing, a well-coached Angela Braly, CEO of WellPoint–which netted $4.7 billion in profits last year–was unapologetic. “Raising our premiums was not something we wanted to do,” Braly declared, “but we believe this was the most prudent choice given the rising cost of care and the problems caused by many younger and healthier policyholders dropping or reducing their coverage during tough economic times.”

Braly went on to criticize the Democrats’ health care proposals for having a weak “personal coverage requirement”–read: mandate. In fact, the legislation will force tens of millions of people into the arms of private insurers, but that’s not good enough for Braly and Co.–they want no one exempted from the mandate and higher financial penalties for anyone who doesn’t get coverage.

The next stop for Braly–along with Stephen Hemsley, CEO of UnitedHealth, the country’s largest health insurer–was a private meeting at the White House with Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. The meeting was described in the New York Times as “surprisingly cordial,” but there were no concessions from the insurers on the premium increases.

The farce continued when Sebelius was dispatched to a meeting of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the insurance industry’s association–not to demand anything, but to politely ask insurers to disclose requests for increases in premiums, along with data showing costs and other factors that justify the hikes. Insurance companies in 27 states have to do this already.

“It’s not too late to work on this issue together–for insurance companies to come to the table and work with us,” Sebelius told the meeting. But the truth is that the insurance bosses have been at the table from day one, shaping the Obama administration’s proposals to be more in their favor.

The health care industry has used a two-pronged strategy with Washington. Its representatives participated as “stakeholders” in discussions with the Obama administration–and even more centrally with members of Congress, like Sen. Max Baucus, who actually wrote the legislation.

But the health care bosses have also kept up a steady stream of criticism of the Democrats’ proposals, and provided financial and political support for the Republicans’ opposition to all reform. This is meant to box in the Democrats from considering more radical proposals. For the health care giants, it’s a win-win situation.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

MEANWHILE, THE administration’s push to get health care legislation passed at all costs is being aided and abetted by liberal commentators and some progressive Democratic-aligned organizations.

Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claims that the Senate version of “reform” is “a seriously flawed bill we’ll spend years, if not decades, fixing.” Nevertheless, he writes, “For a real piece of passable legislation, however, it looks very good. This is a reasonable, responsible plan. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

Wendell Potter–the former director of corporate communications for insurance giant Cigna-turned-whistleblower and trenchant critic of the insurance industry–now supports the Senate bill. In an interview with PBS’s Bill Moyers, Potter declared, “Yes, it’ll be a win for the insurance companies, but I don’t think we’re going to wind up with the insurance companies walking away and winning the whole ball game. If we don’t do anything right now, that’s what will happen.”

Krugman, Potter and other liberal voices–some of them previously passionate defenders of single payer–who claim that “something is better than nothing” are wrong. The health care legislation that the White House and Congressional leaders want to pass is worse than nothing at all.

As Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and a sharp critic of the Democrats’ proposals, explained:

What this bill does is not only permit the commercial insurance industry to remain in place, but it actually expands and cements their position as the linchpin of health care reform…Not only does it keep them in place, it pours about $500 billion of public money into these companies over 10 years…and it mandates that people buy these companies’ products for whatever they charge.

One argument in favor of the Senate version of health care legislation made by Democrats and groups like Health Care for America Now, the labor-backed organization that has been for the Democrats’ highly restricted “reform” proposals all along, is the claim that 30 million people without insurance today would gain coverage under the bill.

What they don’t say is that it will take 10 years for that number to gain coverage. Fully half will be covered by Medicaid, a program that is in fiscal crisis in every state, where officials have made drastic cuts to balance budgets. More and more doctors are refusing to take Medicaid patients because reimbursements rates have been slashed.

And on top of that, more than one-third of the uninsured today, or around 20 million people, will still be uninsured 10 years into the reform–among them, millions of undocumented immigrants who won’t be eligible for federal subsidies.

The other measures that can be painted as reform–like forbidding insurers from denying coverage to patients with pre-existing conditions–are long overdue, but are offset by concessions to insurers, like provisions allowing them to charge older patients more than younger ones.

On one point, according to liberals, the Senate bill is superior to the health care bill passed by the House last year: women’s reproductive rights. The House version contained an amendment proposed by Democrat Bart Stupak that would have barred any insurer participating in the government insurance exchange for the uninsured from covering abortion as a medical procedure.

The Senate language on abortion, written by anti-choice Democrat Ben Nelson, isn’t as all-encompassing–but it still represents an outrageous attack on women’s rights. Women could buy a policy through the government insurance exchange that covers abortion, but they would have to write two checks each month, and insurers will have to keep the income in separate accounts. The incentive will be for insurers to drop abortion coverage.

Republicans and some Democrats still claim this isn’t tough enough–but it was good enough for the organization that represents 90 percent of the 59,000 Catholic nuns in the U.S. to put its support behind the Democrats’ health care measure.

If Obama and Pelosi get their way and the Senate bill is rammed through the House this weekend, we’ll hear that the vote was historic. And it will be–a historic failure to mobilize the massive popular sentiment to get profit out of health care and truly reform a broken system.

Filed under: United States | 3 Comments »

Bolton – a video selection

Posted on March 21, 2010 by Liam

Here are a few videos  from a quick trawl on YouTube. I’ve included one from a pro-fascist in which a cop gives the state’s rationale for their operation and one showing the fascists entering the square. It does look like the balance of forces was  very unfavourable to the anti-fascists, a fact the police exploited with their decision to arrest Weyman Bennett and Martin Smith.

The report underneath is taken from Permanent Revolution. Even if you don’t agree with the political conclusions it’s self-evidently a strong eye witness account.

 

 

 

 

I was in Bolton, and I want to write a factual and reasonably unbiased account of what I saw, leaving commentary and criticism to others, but I don’t think I’ll be able to give an honest account of what happened without criticizing UAF. I know it’s a cliché to blanket criticize the SWP, but on this occasion I think their conduct deserves it….writes Bolton anti-fascist….

Police out of control from the start

Firstly, the police were heavy handed and violent towards us from the outset, with little or no provocation that I could see. Before anyone criticizes any of their comrades about what went wrong in Bolton, just remember that the police were completely out of control. The dogs were set loose on people for no reason, I saw one person get bitten just for having the rotten luck to be in the dogs path, and subsequently get taken to hospital with quite serious arm injuries. These initial ructions began at 9:30 and carried on for the next 2 hours.
After assembling in the square and seeing the barriers and portaloo’s they’d provided it was quite clear that we were going to be kettled all day, so some people tried to keep the exits to the square open and not let the police box us in so easily. The EDL had been sneaking people into our crowd through these exit points the police had set up, so early on I stood on one of the exits with a few people, trying to spot potential EDL and point them out. I feel the Police allowed people who were clearly EDL into our section of the crowd and put a lot of innocent people in danger by doing so. I also think that the UAF stewards, with a few very important exceptions, were too busy trying to set up their stalls and PA systems and get the generators going to cover the exits and keep an eye on what was going on. Despite trying to keep the exits clear, any attempts to get freedom of movement were short lived, and after about 10am all attempts to get out of the kettle were met with hostility from the police. The police manhandled anyone who tried to move through the choke-points they had created, and this is what led to the hostile atmosphere between the UAF and the police early on.
Between about 10-12 the police gradually became more and more hostile, refusing to allow groups of protestors from getting into the kettle to protest, resuting in chants of “Let them in” from the UAF PA system. As the situation was getting more heated, the police made the decision to arrest Martin Smith and Weymann Bennet by sending two snatch squads of riot police into the crowd to pick them up. I saw people putting up a brave fight in front of the police to prevent them being nicked, but the subsequent reaction of the SWP Martin Smith loyalists after this happened was problematic. A lot of them fell to bits, the only thing I saw them do in response was try to provoke chants of “let Martin go”, which seems like a pretty weak strategy to fall back on when your leadership has been arrested. It appeared that the SWP leadership, including Weyman Bennett before his arrest did not have much of a strategy. Weyman’s arrest was an outrageous provocation for the entire movement. We need to demand that all those arrested yesterday have the charges dropped now, they are an attempt to intimidate us all and we must unite to fight them together.

After the arrests

After the arrests, the SWP contingent were angry and leaderless, so the UAF stewards started to tell everyone to link arms and “hold the line” against the police, thereby ignoring the EDL gathering on the other side of the barriers. People were being encouraged to stand away from the EDL and direct their anger at the police. I could not for the life of me think why we should’ve done this, and I had it out with a few red-shirted stewards making this very point. There were no EDL on the other side of the police, only our own protestors who were just as hopelessly kettled as we were, and the police were allowing people to leave in ones and two’s if you needed to get out. I remember getting dragged into a pushing and shoving match with the police, out of pure herd mentality, then walking off around the side of the police lines and getting behind them without any hindrance! Then they let me back in! What’s also telling is that the UAF only attempted to do this when they knew the police were in sufficient numbers to handle it, they were not so keen to do it when they had a realistic chance of getting out of there through police lines. I personally feel they just wanted to link arms and push the police, partially out of revenge for their leader being arrested, and partially because I think they feel that’s what constitutes direct action, a bit of “we shall not be moved” and linking arms. Just going through the motions. There’s no point linking arms and chanting “we shall not be moved” when you’re kettled and unable to move anyway! It also led to people being needlessly arrested, good comrades of mine spent the night in jail and some of them are looking at serious charges for getting involved in that pointless waste of energy.
In the meantime the EDL were on the other side of the fence, having a smoke, walking around unhindered, throwing lighters at people and generally being the sort of fascist scum you can imagine. Their numbers were very small for most of the day and those who did stand there and chant at them, rather than needlessly fight the police, did a good job of unnerving them. It was certainly more constructive than perpetually charging the police lines in the circumstances. By the time the main EDL contingent had arrived a lot of our best people had been arrested and others had been pushing and shoving the police for 3 hours and were dead tired. We were tired, demoralised, rain-soaked and bruised by the time they showed up.

EDL not so big

Their numbers weren’t that big, 2,000 was an exaggeration I’d say around 1,300 for them and around 1,500 for us, and for most of the day they only had around 100-200 Bolton inbreds stood gormlessly on the other side of the fence. Also, when me and my contingent left town, we were confused with being EDL by the police and sent down the street to where they being held. A group of about 12 of us had to walk through 60 EDL outside a town centre pub, who’s name I don’t want to mention, and despite their huge numerical advantage we not only walked through them unharmed but even stood and gave them some abuse, all without any hindrance or threat of retaliation. Their average age was about 17 and when I stood there and said to them, eyeball to eyeball, they were fighting on the same side as Adolf Hitler, they just looked at the ground and said nothing. Without their hardcore off the coaches, who I assume are footie hooligans, the EDL were not at all scary, and every face to face encounter I’ve had with them they’ve bottled it.
The local Asian youth were up for it this time, although they didn’t come ’til later, they seemed much smarter and better organized than the UAF. They didn’t get kettled, and they didn’t spend 4 hours in the rain being battered by the police. They arrived later, in small mobile groups with cars and backup, and cleared Bolton of all the stray little groups of EDL that were lurking down the side streets. I don’t worry about the banner that says “Allah is the greatest”, it’s just something to wind them up a bit, the same way they have American and Israeli and Anti-Nazi flags to piss us off. Not all the Asian youth were associated with that banner anyway, some I heard even objected to it. It isn’t for me to judge to be honest.

UAF has failed

If we can take one thing from Bolton it is that the UAF has failed and the the SWP may well go down with it. I do not think putting the hopes of militant anti-fascism into the hands of a dying and outdated organisation, riven with factions and bitter personal disputes, is a smart idea. People should build demo’s locally, involve their trade unions, and when in the town centres try to be peaceful and co-operate with the police. If you want to confront fascists physically, do it in small groups, away from the peaceful protests, or even better do it before they even get into town. Small autonomous and mobile groups that have no names, no banners, no PA and no way of being kettled. That’s the way forward.
I want to apologize to all the staunch comrades who I know in the SWP who were there that day and who weren’t responsible for the terrible strategic mistakes that were made. I’m not directing what I say here at the whole SWP, and I hope the good ones salvage something out of the organization. Lions led by donkeys is a phrase that springs to mind.

Filed under: British politics | 23 Comments »

Catholophobia

Posted on March 20, 2010 by Liam

image Is there such a thing as “Catholophobia”? A casual reading of the liberal press might make you think so.

But first a bit of background.

Kincora Boys’ Home, like many institutions in Britain and Ireland of its sort, was a loveless place where the young inmates were routinely emotionally, physically and sexually abused. What made it rather different was that both the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and MI5 knew about the extent of it and the participants’ identities.  It’s a murky area but it’s widely accepted in the north of Ireland that the state permitted the abuse to continue in order that it could blackmail those involved into providing intelligence about some of the loyalist gangster organisations. A similar concern for the welfare of abused children was displayed by both the RUC and the Republican Movement when Gerry Adams’ niece went to them with allegations of abuse against her father. The cops wanted her to provide information about family members.

On the radio earlier this week to plug his book Against All Odds was Paul Connolly. He  is “a celebrity fitness trainer and creator of the hugely popular Boxerobics”. Connolly spent his childhood in St Leonard’s Children’s Home in East London and his description of systematic sexual abuse by staff and older children was horrifying. in his account some staff members worked in the home for other purpose than to have access to children whom they could abuse. Until the mid 1980s there seemed to be no effective safeguards to protect children from any form of abuse in either state or church run institutions in Britain or Ireland and for some state agencies this was a perfectly valid tool for them to use in their counter-insurgency strategy.

Coming right up to date Birmingham Social Services is currently short of 150 staff. Under these circumstances it’s not surprising that children for whom it is responsible are being murdered by their parents and with the cuts that the council is proposing it is not easy to see how child protection is going to be enhanced anytime soon. You could make a fairly persuasive case that both the local and the national state are complicit in this abuse.

Yet no other organisation is receiving anything like the hammering that the Catholic Church is taking for a series of crimes that happened, for the most part, more than twenty years ago. Much of this opprobrium is well deserved. Its longstanding toleration of abuse and callous attempts to cover it up earned it that. It was one organisation among many which was charged with looking after children and instead destroyed them.

In Pope Benedict’s letter to be read out tomorrow he says to Irish Catholics  “Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated. I am truly sorry. I know that nothing can undo the wrong you have endured." He probably means it but whether or not it does any good is moot. Sean Brady got a round of applause for his apology earlier in the week.

The one thing that is certain is that the liberal press is going to carry on presenting every Catholic parish as a hotbed of child rape, intimidation and emotional violence. Having decided that climate change isn’t so important after all news outlets like the Guardian and Channel 4 have decided that the Papists are the biggest threat to right thinking people. This is a theme that Splintered has explored as well. The trouble is that it has nothing in common with the experience of currently active Catholics. The organisation has spent fifteen years putting in place safeguards comparable to those in the state sector. Catholic churches tend to be places where people come together for a sense of community and things that the outside world does not offer them. One sure way to antagonise lots of working class people will be if some militant secularists decide to protest when Benedict visits Britain. No one is forced to be a Catholic and, if we take the evidence of birth rates, not too many people listen to what the priests tell them about family planning or pre-marital sex.

There are a couple of distinct strands to the attacks on the Catholic Church. The sickly creature that was Irish liberalism is having a field day biting chunks out a big beast to make up for the decades in which it was unwilling to confront it politically. Yet  even still there are not too many voices in Ireland making the obvious demand to take the schools and hospitals out of Church control. Government ministers complain that they can’t afford to it and no one challenges the assertion.

Accompanying this is the bunch that wants to take a Dawkinsesque  pop at any manifestation of religious belief. It’s not just that they don’t take the trouble to find out what actually happens in active Catholic communities in 2010 it’s the laziness and obvious partiality of a lot of the coverage that becomes irritating.  Rather than devoting investigative resources into exploring how government spending decisions in Britain and Ireland are about to make the lives of many thousands of vulnerable children a great deal worse they take the much easier option of a bit of indignation about the Church’s crimes and cover ups.

That’s liberalism for you.

 

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Students’ whimsical choice of anti-racism officer

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Liam

With occupations at Sussex, the elections of Clare Solomon and Ian Drummond, this Saturday’s march against redundancies and Mandelson’s £449m budget cuts there are signs of radical life emerging from the universities.

Bucking the trend slightly are the students of the London School of Economics who while electing a Marxist as education officer have plumped for the Israel Society’s candidate as their anti-racism officer.

Just to refresh your memory the Israeli state is the one which has been starving the people of Gaza since they voted for a Hamas government and just over a year ago subjected them to a medieval siege using twenty first century weaponry. It’s the one which prevented its Muslim citizens from praying in the Al-Aqsa earlier this week and which was established by displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Not too much empathy is needed to work out that it’s a template of an apartheid, colonial, racist state.

Students are entitled to be a bit irresponsible and no one minds when they bathe in beans for charity or subsist for three years on Pot Noodles and Jeremy Kyle. It’s part of growing up. It’s not so funny when they subvert the very concept of anti-racism by electing an advocate of an aggressively and murderously racist state to an officership.

Looking at the results it’s obvious that this travesty was only made possible by the splitting of the serious anti-racist vote. What needs to happen next is that a motion of no confidence be put and won to be followed by a fresh election with unity around a candidate who displays a rudimentary understanding of anti-racism.

Filed under: British politics | 43 Comments »

Hooters, shooters and w#nkers

Posted on March 17, 2010 by Liam

Here’s an unexpected and squalid consequence of the opening up of Poland to the mass tourist industry. Alongside the prostitution and hundreds of drunken racist buffoons there’s an almost unbelievable trivialisation of the Holocaust.

Some “specialist” British companies offer packages which include strip clubs, firing AK47s and white water rafting. They have names like “hooters and shooters” Here’s a quote from one of them offering something extra:

“Why not take a break from your stag weekend mayhem and immerse yourself in a little world-defining history before the 20-odd pints later in the evening?”

It’s a tour of either Auschwitz or Birkenau.

With the sensitivity you’d expect from the sort of people who think that combination is a good idea they turn up at the camps with “tour” T-shirts saying “Warsaw, Krakow, Auschwitz”. F##king hilarious, eh?

Is there a big enough tosser out there to justify this?

Of course there is. You’ll always find someone to grub around in a gutter if there’s money in it. Out of sheer contempt we’ll not name either the man or the firm but he seems to think that his customers’ inner monologue as they pose under the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign is:

“To hell with that, we have seen the worst humanity had to show and then gone out on a major night on the tiles with strippers and booze”.

Would anyone like to suggest another use for the AK47s?

Filed under: wankers | 7 Comments »

Happy St Patrick’s Day (unless you’re LGBT)

Posted on March 17, 2010 by Liam

image Irish homophobia has been rather eclipsed by the sound and fury about everyone else’s. It’s only right on the day Irish people all round the globe feel a patriotic obligation to drink themselves senseless that the  country’s world beating historical record in this department is reasserted. Not just that, it’s been exported all over the world.

Gerry “I am against exclusion, I am for inclusivity” Adams will be attending the Boston parade which also bans openly LGBT participants.

This comes from Pink News.

image A gay rights group in New York will protest at the traditional St Patrick’s Day Parade today.

The group, Irish Queers, plans to disrupt the parade, which excludes members of the LGBT community on the grounds that it is a religious event.

“We’re sick of hearing city officials say they can’t intercede in the homophobia because it’s a religious march,” said Tierney Gleason of Irish Queers.

“If it’s a religious anti-gay parade, and uniformed cops and firefighters have to be pulled out.

“It can’t be both privately religious and publicly Irish.”

Today’s St Patrick’s Day parade will be the 247th in the New York’s history.

The parade is organised by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish-Catholic fraternal organisation. In 1991 it was legally redefined by the NYC Parade Committee, meaning that organisers could ban gay groups.

The parade is one of the largest St. Patrick’s Day events in the world. In 2006 more than 150,000 marchers took part in the procession and around 2 million spectators watched on from the streets.

Christine Quinn, the openly gay New York City Council speaker, last year boycotted the event in favour of Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Day.

She tried, unsuccessfully, to broker a deal with the organisers to allow gay and lesbian participation. Quinn, a potential candidate for the Mayor of New York City in 2009, is still hopeful that LGBT Irish-Americans will one day march.

Filed under: Sexual politics | 5 Comments »

Spring flowers

Posted on March 16, 2010 by Liam

image

The days are getting longer and the weather is getting milder. Spring is with us. So, in search of a new jumper and some obscure German music, I took a stroll to Brick Lane on Sunday and it’s not just the flowers that are bursting out. There was a bumper harvest of political ideas emerging from their winter dormancy.

First up outside Tesco was the Communist League catering for the shopper who wanted a bit of Thomas Sankara or Fidel Castro to read over their Sunday roast. It’s one of the smaller Tesco branches and only sells papers and magazines so they’ve spotted an obvious gap in the market. Once again the League is contesting the Bethnal Green seat and while superficial thinkers sneer at the thirty five votes they got last time I think that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what the figure represents for a group demanding a workers’ and farmers’ government. A rough reckoning suggests that they must have got almost 100% of the votes of the staff of the three city farms in or near the constituency. That’s the real headline number.

In Brick Lane itself your first political contact is with a group with a fairly similar world view to the Communist League, and even if they are really different I’m not remotely interested in finding out what the dividing lines are. Fight Racism Fight Imperialism were asking the hung-over locals and curious tourists to sign a petition “to help the people of Haiti”. A few hundred yards away the same audience was asked to sign a petition to “stop the BNP”. How’s this supposed to work? Do the petitions get delivered to Nick Griffin or Ban Ki-moon who then says “gosh, I didn’t realise so many Spanish tourists felt so strongly about things. It’s time for a radical change of direction”?

Outside the fur shop was a very muted group of animal rights protesters keeping the sort of distance from the premises which makes you think they’ve been served with an injunction. Just beside them was a sizeable bunch from the Whitechapel Anarchist Group  giving away their highly entertaining free paper. The last time I saw the anarchists the cops were all over them taking photos of all their members as well as passers by who asked for a copy of the paper. You’d have thought that they’d just returned from a two week training course with Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau. In common with most taxpayers my thoughts on seeing this were “leave those radicals alone. There are dozens of bastard bicycle thieves in this street you should be tormenting.”

I’m no lawyer but one interpretation of the cover of the free newspaper they were handing out could be that it’s inciting readers to go postal as their contribution to the electoral frenzy and the text inside the target area saying “enemies of the people” does support that opinion. It’s combined with a slight encouragement to arson. What you don’t see from the image is that carefully taped to the front of each copy is a match, the idea being that you use it to burn your ballot paper, assuming you’ve not already been arrested for taking pot shots at Nick Clegg.

On the back page is an advert for an event on election day at which there will be music, fun, food and a mass ballot paper burning. Unlike their Catalan sisters and brothers the British anarchists are obliged to include the rider “weather permitting”. And people accuse them of being unrealistic.

My hunch is that after the election we are likely to see a growth in anarchist influenced currents. The content of the paper rages against all the things it’s right to be angry about and, even if they are a bit short of solutions other than setting fire to things and revolution tomorrow, they are expressing a deeply held contempt for the political classes and a growing distance from bourgeois democracy among large numbers of young people. The French election results remind us of that.

Filed under: Political Organisations | 11 Comments »

French elections – first thoughts

Posted on March 15, 2010 by Liam
results Sarkozy took a well heralded pummelling in the first round of the French regional elections and some of the lessons from France are likely to apply in the upcoming British polls.

A few things leap out from the raw figures. The first is that lots of people decided not to vote.

According to one poll cited in Libération 53.5% of voters abstained. The NPA, which scored a modest 2%, suggests reasonably enough that it was young people, workers and the unemployed who stayed at home.

The second is the strength of the far right. The Front National won 11.7% of the vote dispelling any fantasy that it’s a spent force. The racist and Islamophobic undercurrent which ran throughout the pre-election period must have benefited Le Pen. On the other side of the coin Europe Ecologie (EE) won 13.3% making it the third largest force after the UMP and the Socialists.

The combined results of the anti-Sarkozy forces SP (30%), EE (13%), Front de gauche (6.2%) and the NPA and LO’s combined 3.3% tally up to a serious rejection of his project. However the third lesson, which we can take from the NPA’s relatively weak performance, is that offered a choice between an explicitly capitalist party and even a neo-liberalised social democratic party working class voters will, in the first instance return to social democracy rather than taking the more radical new option.

As Greece shows having a social democratic government offers very little protection at all when the IMF and the European Union start demanding pension cuts, wage reductions and job losses. A lot of SP voters are heading for a hangover. The question then becomes one of offering a political expression for their inevitable disillusionment when the SP comes into office.

Filed under: France | 22 Comments »

Million climate jobs conference

Posted on March 14, 2010 by Liam

image Yesterday’s conference for a million climate jobs was the third organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Group. Videos of all the principal contributions will be on the website over the next few days and details of how to get the pamphlet which makes the case for climate jobs are here. Around 150 people attended, making it slightly smaller than last year’s conference, which itself was not as big as the previous year’s. Let’s return to the reasons for this later.

Life’s too short and my boredom threshold is too low to give an exhaustive account of everything that was said so I’ll pick out a few random points from my sketchy notes to give a flavour of the discussions. Feel free to chip in with your own observations.

Tony Kearns of the CWU, who has been deeply involved in all three conferences and displays a better grasp of the issues than most union leaders, took issue with all those apocalyptic  descriptions of the Copenhagen talks as a “last chance saloon” for humanity to take action against climate change. He pointed out that the logic of that position is that all we can do now is wait to die. Not the most positive of messages. Tony was the first to refer to a recurring theme of the day, the growth of climate change scepticism. It’s no longer only the domain of cranks and has started to find an echo both in the mainstream press and among a growing number of union post holders.

Alex Gordon of the RMT offered an interesting contribution which looked at how the European Union’s legislative framework actively prevents national governments taking action. He recounted a meeting with a minister called Lord Hunt who told the union that EU rules made it illegal the British government to put money into wind turbine production. The same rules also make it illegal to remove the railway system from private ownership and put huge obstacles in the way of any attempts at a planned transport system. Alex singled out the Irish and German Green parties for being very pro-EU and he isn’t wrong.  Yet my recollection in recent years is that the Labour Party has been even more so and that many British unions have generally preferred to use European legislation to defend their members rather than do very much themselves.

Speaking on behalf of the Bolivia Solidarity Campaign Amancay Colque offered a refreshing contrast between the way the Bolivian delegation organised and participated in the Copenhagen talks and those of other countries. Behind each negotiator were two trade union officials to whom they were answerable. It’s clear that the real leadership at Copenhagen was offered by the Bolivians and there was a lot of enthusiasm for the upcoming Cochabamba conference.

As you’d expect there was a fair bit of detailed discussion about what types of jobs could be created, the need for these to be unionised and looking at ways to make the demands of the campaign more widely known. And that brings us to the paradox of the day – the contradiction between the objective necessity of the conference and what actually happened. The event was politically hegemonised by the far left and, even though it was on its best behaviour, it was apparent that no significant connection has been made with either the younger radicals who take part in things like Climate Camp or the tens of thousands who took part in the demonstration in London in December. This is despite the fact that every union meeting to which the resolution was put agreed to support the conference with money, buying pamphlets and sponsoring delegates. It just did not translate into significant numbers of non-affiliated union activists turning up on the day.

In a sense it’s hard to work out why. There’s a recession. Unemployment is increasing. An election is imminent. Despite the growing temporary scepticism most serious militants accept the scientific basis of climate change. Partly it may be that there’s still a feeling among many union activists that the climate has nothing to do with either working class politics or their trade unionism and with the exceptions like Chris Baugh of the PCS, Manuel Cortes of TSSA (who gave a very rousing speech) and Tony Kearns it’s not easy to identify a wider group of union leaders who keep plugging away at the issue.

This idea of the objective necessity is an important one. Modest as it was yesterday’s conference represented a serious effort to articulate a working class answer to both recession and climate change. For that reason alone, even though a rethink is needed, the campaign has to be sustained.

Filed under: Climate change, Ecosocialism, Trade unions | 5 Comments »

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