SOCIALIST UNITY

I must admit, I get some stuff from Fidel in the in box and tend to think, yes I agree with this.  Is growth ecologically sustainable?  I don’t think so, this does not mean austerity but production for need, social sharing, no trident, etc….any way on to the IMF versus the WWF.  Any way on to Fidel.

Reflection by comrade Fidel

THE WORST CHOICE

Today, I read that the US Federal Reserve had opened a new line of credit for the Central Banks of Mexico, Brazil, South Korea and Singapore.

The same report claimed that similar credits have been issued to the Central Banks of Australia, Canada, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland and the European Central Bank.

Based on these agreements, the Central Banks shall receive funds in exchange for hard currency reserves from these countries which have sustained considerable losses due to the trade and financial crisis.

This way the economic power of the US currency is asserted, a privilege granted at Bretton Woods.

The International Monetary Fund, which is the same people under a different name, has announced the release of high sums of money to its clients in Eastern Europe. Hungary will be receiving the equivalent of $20 billion euros; a large part of these are dollars coming from the United States. The machines keep minting bills and the IMF keeps granting its unfair loans.

On the other hand, the World Wild Fund stated in Geneva yesterday that at the present spending rate, by 2030 humanity will need the resources of two planets to keep up its life style.

The WWF is a serious institution. There is no need to be a University graduate of Mathematics, Economics or Political Sciences to understand what this means. It’s the worst choice. The developed capitalism hopes to continue plundering the world as if the world could still stand it.

Fidel Castro Ruz
October 30, 2008
8:05 p.m.

In 2005 I stood against Labour MP for North Swindon, Michael Wills, in the general election - on the basis that Wills was an enthusiastic backer of the war on Iraq, and remains a thoroughly unrepentant one. It was a rich experience, and (if you ignore the fact that almost no-one actually voted for me!) quite a sucessful one, in terms of ensuring that socialist arguments were consistently reported in the local press throughout the campaign, and in raising the profile of the socialist left in the town.

Michael Wills is an urbane chap, and his claim to fame prior to entering politics is that he was the BBC producer who struck upon the cunning wheeze to defy Margeret Thatcher’s ban on allowing Sinn Fein representatives to speak on TV, by lip synching actors  to the film faultlessly  mimicking Gerry Adams’s voice.

Michael Wills is a very strong British unionist, and is apparently the brains behind Gordon Brown’s campaign about Britishness and British values.

So I was very interested to read the following on the always rewarding Little Man in a Toque blog

Back in March, in his speech on the Politics of Identity, Michael Wills informed us that “Our British identity is different from our English identity…because it is quintessentially plural. And therefore inherently inclusive”.

His speech was informed by the findings of an Ipsos MORI poll, which has only this week seen the light of day on the Ministry of Justice website. I was particularly interested to see that the MoJ chose to break down the results into ethnicity: “BME” (Black and Minority Ethnic) or “white”.

When asked “How strongly, if at all, do you feel a sense of belonging to Britain?”, 81% of whites and 75% of BMEs pick “strongly”.
In England alone when asked “How strongly, if at all, do you feel a sense of belonging to England?“, 82% of whites and 77% of BMEs pick “strongly”.

	England		Britain
Ethnicity	White	BME	White	BME
Very Strongly	47%	39%	43%	36%
Fairly Strongly	35%	39%	38%	40%
Not Very Strongly	13%	14%	15%	17%
Not At All	4%	3%	4%	4%
Don’t Know	1%	5%	1%	4%
Strongly	82%	77%	81%	75%
Not Strongly	17%	18%	18%	20%

In other words both whites and BMEs feel a greater sense of belonging to England than they do to Britain, which casts doubt on the idea that “British” is a more inclusive umbrella identity than “English”.

Of course, Michael Wills neglected to mention these facts when he gave his speech on Politics and Identity; what he said was: “What emerges strongly from these findings is the strength of British identity as a source of belonging. And this is true across age, gender, region and ethnicity. 75% of black and minority ethnic respondents, for example, said they felt a strong sense of belonging to Britain.”

Of course it doesn’t necessarily follow that BMEs feel comfortable describing themselves as English, but it does tend to suggest that England is just as plural a nation as the much heralded inclusive Britain (or possibly more so given that the former has a higher %age of BMEs than the latter).

I am working in Berlin at the moment. I was thinking of  writing something about the final closure today of Tempelhof airport, that became world famous during the Berlin airlift; but what I think is a more interesting story has come up.

Certainly the ideological and political legacy of the former socialist state of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) is going to be an important theme over the coming year that sees the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the DDR. With capitalism being rocked by financial and economic instability there will be an intensified effort to discredit any socialist alternative.

German politics is poised at a crucial turning point with the left making an extraordinary recovery, in the election a few weeks ago the left party, die Linke, received 37% of the votes in Potsdam, just outside Berlin.

So it is illuminating to see how the right wing government party, the CDU, backed up by their SPD coalition partners, are playing politics with the 70th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom against Germany’s Jews in order to attack the left.

The anniversary is on 9th November, and preparations have been going on for several months for all the political parties in the Bundestag to mark the event with a joint condemnation of anti-Semitism. But during October leading members of the CDU overruled the joint cross-party initiative and said they wouldn’t sign a joint statement with the left party, because they said die Linke has not [in their words] “distanced itself enough from the anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist stance” of the former Socialistische Einheits Partie (SED) that ruled the DDR.

This is scandalous at so many levels.

Markus Loening of the liberal FDP party has angrily expressed his disgust that the cross party consensus has been destroyed by the CDU and SPD playing party politics with the legacy of the holocaust; and Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Zentralrats der Juden (the main organisaton of German Jews) has said that it is very sad there is no consensus, and has called upon an effort to rescue the honour of parliament.

What is so disgusting is that the CDU are a party steeped in anti-Semitism themselves! The first Kanzler of the West German republic, Konrad Adenauer had as his national security adviser and closest confidante a man called Hans Globke.

Globke was the top lawyer in Nazi Germany. He had drafted the emergency powers act in 1933 that gave Hitler the position of dictator; he had been the author of the scandalous Nurenmburg laws that withdrew citizenship from German Jews; and he was the chief legal advisor on Jewish affairs to Heinrich Himmler. In 1938 he was appointed a government minister in Hitler’s inner circle. He applied to join the Nazi party, and was a committed Nazi ideologue, and only did not have formal party membership through the accident of a veto from Martin Bormann, due to a personality clash.

Globke was Director of the West German Bundeskanzleramt between 1953 and 1963 – effectively head of the federal government administration – during this time he brought in former Nazi Generalmajor Reinhard Gehlen to head West Germany’s spy service. Gehlen’s spy organisation for the CDU government included one Alois Brunner, responsible for the murder of 140000 Jews.

Hans Globke also appeared as a character witness at the trial of his former colleague, Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, who has participated in the infamous Wannsee conference that designed the industrial mass murder of the Jews. Globke argued in court that Stuckhart was a misunderstood patriot. There was extremely limited de-nazification of the legal profession in West Germany, and previously over 60% of lawyers had been committed members of the Nazi party – hence the extremely lenient treatment of Nazis in the West German courts throughout the 1950 and 1960s.

Another prominent politician who was a member of the CDU was Theodor Oberländer, from 1953 to 1960 Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and Victims of War. Oberlaender knew something about the victims of war – as he was the Nazi party member acting as main political adviser for the Nachtigall Battalion, which murdered 4000 Jews in the Ukrainian city of Lvov in 1941. [There is a whole industry in  Germany dedicated to discrediting this claim, based mainly on dubious testimony of Ukrainian volunteers in the Nazi army – but Jewish survivors confirm the involvement of Oberlaender’s Nachtigall Battalion, a claim accepted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.] In any event Oberlaender WAS a Nazi, and then later a CDU government minister. But the fact that the CDU became the political home for so many ex-Nazis is only one part of their current extraordinary hypocrisy.

The CDU government is claiming that the East German SED party were anti-Semitic because they opposed zionism! The CDU are specifically seeking to asscociate modern day support for the Palestinians with the Nazi Holocaust.

Writing in today’s Der Tagesspiegel , leader of die Linke, Gregor Gysi (himself of Jewish descent, and whose father was a government minister in the DDR’s government - there were many Jews prominent in the DDR), explains that the DDR supported the Palestinian cause, but entirely separated their political opposition to Zionism from any hostility to Jews.

As Gysi says:; “For 60 years the Israelis have had a state, the Palestinians have not. The Israelis are undoubtedly stronger both economically and militarily than the Palestinians. It is typical that the CDU prefers to stand on the side of the strong, and the left stands on the side of the weak”

BEANZ MEANZ WARZ

Serious Congressional and Senate inquiries are few and far between, and for good reason. Some sort of national trauma results. The celebrated inquiries which delved into U.S. foreign policy and served up uncomfortable truths (albeit in a diluted form) were precipitated by the kind of criminality and insanity that scares the bejesus out of just about everyone: Nixon’s unhinged foreign policy, a prime example. Now, was it the Church or Pike Committee which judged U.S. foreign policy to be “evil”? And that’s toned-down diplomatic language.

Whichever it was, a like-minded committee would have its work cut out if given free access to all records and internal government memoranda on Iraq. Certain myths would still persist: the real humdinger being that the U.S. is staying the course in Iraq to ensure the success of democracy. Meanwhile, here in Blighty it is a given that our inquiries will never reach the high standards of Church or Pike. Must I remind you that Lord Hutton cleared Blair of even “unconsciously” doing anything untoward? Indeed, Lord Hutton possesses great powers. So if Blair and Co. are to be undone, it’ll almost certainly be down to any future U.S. inquiry and/or the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

If I may be so bold, along with the “Niger yellowcake” fable (Iraq already had over 500 metric tonnes of the stuff in its possession), high on any future inquiry should be the investigation of the fantastic tale of Baathist Iraq’s alleged links with Ansar al-Islam, a fanatical band of merry Islamists based in Iraqi Kurdistan, whose own ties to Al Qaeda via the psychopathic Zarqawi and alleged development of rudimentary WMD was a major indictment in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Having seen all their other reasons turn to dust, some commentators still use Baathist-Zarqawi link as an argument for their support of the invasion. (Let us leave aside for the moment the fact that anyone with a food processor and access to the internet could likewise make biological and chemical agents, and that castor beans, chapatti flour and hair dye have been put to deadly effect, or apparently would have been put to deadly effect had it not been for the same numbskulls who, having witnessed an unarmed man slowly walk and then board an underground train, judged this to be highly dangerous behaviour and decided that there was no other option than to unload seven bullets into his brain. Meanwhile the numerous reports by concerned Muslims of jihadis in “extremist mosques” advocating terrorism, even undertaking weapons training within the mosques, went strangely unnoticed by the security and intelligence services.)

Given that the security and intelligence services are astoundingly incompetent and stupid (recruiting and training jihadis, some from Afghanistan, for a dirty war against Serbia, though the first attack on the Twin Towers back in the early nineties could be traced to such radical networks, and instead using up valuable resources and time to put under surveillance peace groups) it is no surprise that it never crossed their collective minds to simply ask the Peshmerga, the Kurdish militia, to crush this tiny Islamist gang that was said to pose a threat to world peace. And so it came to pass that Ansar al-Islam was linked to Baathist Iraq: the strange bedfellows argument that was trumped out when things looked bleak, as they always did for the “liberals mugged by reality”. Liberals would brood on Hitler and Stalin, and then see a twenty-first century replication of yesteryear in Saddam and Zarqawi. (Incidentally, you will note that those who trot out “Hitler-Stalin pact” like a broken record have trained themselves not to say “Hitler-Chamberlain pact” or for that matter “Reagan-Saddam pact”.)

AL QAEDA IN PARLIAMENT? 

Imagine my surprise, then, on learning that the founder of Ansar al-Islam, one Ali Bapir, has found himself promoted by the U.S.-backed Kurdistan Alliance in the Iraqi parliament. The strange bedfellows argument is not put to President Jalal Talabani, a Bapir cheerleader yet also an alleged foe of totalitarian theocracy. That the U.S. has seen Bapir assume any position on the national political stage is some achievement and indication of how wrong U.S. plans have gone, especially given the U.S.’s own efforts in imprisoning and torturing the bloke. Not a peep has been heard from the goofy “liberals mugged by reality” who cried “fascist” not so long ago at the mere mention of this Islamist freak show, whose amateur fumbling with beans shook them out of their liberal slumbers and into a neoconservative dawn. President Talabani and the Kurdish alliance are where their “liberal” hopes lay, so do not mention the Talabani-Bapir pact. Move along. These are not the droids you’re looking for. This particular fact can be found on page 441 of Ali A. Allawi’s staggering book, “The Occupation of Iraq”.

Although the book is soaked with shocking disclosures of this kind and indeed many much worse, Allawi bends over backwards to be charitable to the U.S. (book sales may account for the pulling of punches), concluding that the Bush administration is staffed, from top to bottom, by well-meaning but simpleminded fantasists and clowns who couldn’t organise an empty drawer, let alone a transition to democracy. Although this is now the accepted wisdom, Allawi never digresses from this path to venture the obvious, for which there is overwhelming evidence, and none more so than in his book, that the U.S. was, and still is, trying to subvert Iraq’s fledgling democracy, having tried to murder it at birth while posing as midwife.

The original Feith programme, as it were, would have seen the quick elevation of Ahmed Chalabi as “President”. This was discarded when Grand Ayatollah Sistani demanded elections. Instead, the U.S. put its chips down on a Baathist-lite dictatorship, led by Ayad Allawi, and sought to rehabilitate the Baathists purged: this is essentially the “Saddamism without Saddam” plan that was all the rage in “realist” policy circles prior to the invasion and later embraced by Bush when the neoconservatives made a walk in the park into the Marathon des Sables. Unfortunately for the U.S., Sistania and the Shia clergy laid waste to that plan too. That Shia theocrats would prove to be the most desirous of democracy in Iraq is one of the supreme ironies of the invasion, at least from the point of view of the Kissingerian Bush, Cheney and Bremer and their neoconservative cousins.

MILO MINDERBINDER IN IRAQ

Other disclosures have the feel of Kafka meeting Heller. For instance, the Iraqi “security” firms and tribes paid to protect oil pipelines are in fact blowing them up, so as to secure a bigger budget. At the same time, though, they are operating an oil smuggling racket running into billions of dollars a year. And while it is no surprise to learn that the “reconstruction” is being done with Iraq’s money, it beggars belief that these desperately needed funds are winging their way straight into the pockets of firms favoured by Bush and his cronies, it is shocking that the occupying powers passively watched the systematic looting of Iraq’s wealth by the Saddamists reinstated by Paul Bremer. So which institution was invested with the power to audit this grand larceny and bring the criminals and profiteers to book? Perhaps a major accountancy firm, or maybe a U.N. agency, or even the U.S.’s own G.A.O.? In an extraordinary decision, and one that was received with complete disbelief, the Bush administration awarded the contract to some unknown Joe who doesn’t know anything about auditing and works from his living room. He’ll get to the bottom of things alright.

Ordinarily, U.S. foreign policy does not favour any select group but works in what is quaintly termed the “national interest”. The Bush administration put paid to that and just couldn’t help behaving like the Banana Republicans they are by rewarding their backers with juicy contracts – “contracts” that have been called the greatest robbery in history.

Just prior to the U.S. invasion it was made clear to the major Shia power, SCIRI (interestingly now called SIIC, presumably believing to have affected their “Islamic Revolution”) that were they to “enter the battle” to topple Saddam then they “would be considered an enemy combatant and treated accordingly”. Iraq is not the concern of Iraqis and will be blown away if they believe otherwise. For those who know little about Iraq and are hypnotised by the word “de-Baathification” with respect to the dismantling of the Iraqi army, even though the U.S. oversaw the return and empowerment of leading Saddamists, it is a welcome reminder that most of Iraq’s soldiers were Shia (even within the officer corps very few could be labelled Saddamist), and that the reason the army was disbanded was simply it was the epicentre of Iraqi nationalism and would never countenance occupation. The only genuine “de-Baathification” was instituted by the Shia bloc, after the U.S. rehabilitated a number of the Baath Party’s most culpable members in an effort to stem the rise of Shia power.

THE “AWAKENING” NIGHTMARE

At no point did the “coalition” think it a good idea to patrol Iraq’s borders and stop foreign fighters crossing to wreak havoc. The recent bombing of Syria is a damning indictment of a neoconservative policy to ensure the complete disintegration of Iraq so that Chalabi, then Allawi, would saunter into power without a murmur. This, we learn, was another Feith based plan. The powerful Shia theocracy soon put an end to Feith’s wacko policies. When one learns that the U.S. did not even realise the considerable influence, let alone power, of the Shia clergy one starts to gauge the sheer arrogance and ignorance of a dangerous foreign policy clique once dubbed “crazies” by the nutcases of the Reagan administration. It is little wonder that General Tommy Franks said of Douglas Feith that he was “the dumbest motherfucker on the face of the earth”.

One of the few weapons left in the U.S. arsenal to break Iraq is economic. Unsurprisingly, news reaches us that the “sovereign” government of Iraq is being threatened with financial meltdown. The U.S. has been forcing through U.N. resolutions for some time, but none is more concerning than that of allowing the U.S. to “administer” Iraq’s foreign reserves. Recently, disgruntled Iraqis leaked the details of U.S. plans put to the Iraqi government. Unless Iraq accepts a permanent American military presence, the U.S. will continue to hold hostage Iraq’s economy. Is it not strange that the U.S. should be forcing Iraq to accept an occupation that it itself claims will not last a second longer than necessary?

For various reasons the Maliki government is said to be a lot more confident now and is perhaps even willing to face down the U.S. There is some evidence for this: to American fury, Maliki is openly discussing a “timetable” for U.S. withdrawal. Seeing that drastic measures might be necessary (which has proven to be the case), the U.S. countered the increasing independence of the Shia-led government by supporting what is termed the “awakening” movement: that is, arming those same Sunni insurgents branded “fascist” when they targeted “coalition” forces.

These new allies serve a dual purpose. Although the “awakening” movement has wiped out “Al Qaeda in Iraq”, it is interesting to note that this is something the U.S. could not do (having allowed these totalitarian crackpots to enter Iraq and then inadvertently empower) and something that would have been done years ago, thereby saving Iraq the descent into the years-long sectarian bloodletting, had it not been for the U.S. enflaming an insurgency hitherto unworthy of the title by destroying any village, town or city that housed an insurgent. The other purpose is as an auxiliary force to limit Shia power. Whether the Iraqi government can reason with the “awakening” movement, armed by the U.S. and heavily financed by the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and which believes that the Maliki government is an Iranian front, is the next challenge for Iraq. It is clear what the U.S.-Saudi nexus has in store for Iraq: a Shia-Wahhabi war. After all, the U.S. did not invade Iraq so as to hand it over to a Shia clergy on good terms with Iran’s theocracy and whose very existence as a Shia dominated democracy could lead to the secession of the oil rich Shia regions of Saudi Arabia.

Capitalism in crisis – come and hear the case for socialism

Activists, left trade union leaders, workers in struggle and young people to discuss the fight-back against the bosses’ crisis.
Speakers from across the globe to attend rally in central London.

We are living in historic times. The utter unplanned chaos of those ‘in control’ of the levers of finance has been revealed to working-class people. The self styled ‘masters of the universe’ have been exposed for the parasites - who have gambled away trillions - that they are. People are outraged, firstly at these creatures’ wanton recklessness, but even more so at the fact that they have been bailed out with our money.

The situation urgently cries out for a socialist explanation of the crisis-ridden capitalist system and what to do about it. And that is what you will get Socialism 2008 on 8 & 9 November. Left trade union leaders, activists and workers in struggle from across the globe will gather together to discuss how working people can best respond to the crisis.

Speakers include:

· Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary

· Janice Godrich, PCS president

· Mark Steel, stand up & activist

· Cllr Dave Nellist, Socialist Party councilor and ex-Labour MP

· Peter Taaffe, Socialist Party general secretary

· Hannah Sell, Socialist Party Deputy General Secretary

· Kevin Ovenden, RESPECT

· Robbie Segal, candidate for the presidency of the USDAW shop-workers’ union (she won 40% of the vote in the general secretary election)

· Fang Guoli, a Chinese socialist and activist

· David Redelberger, a German school student strike leader

· Nikos Anastasiadis, a leading activist from the new Greek coalition of the radical left, Syriza

· Onay Kasab, Greenwich Unison branch secretary, currently being witch hunted by Unisons national leadership

· Tony Mulhearn, one of the leaders of the Liverpool council struggle in the 1980s

· Lynn Walsh, editor of Socialism Today magazine

I loved this from Rust Belt Radical, says it all…of course in the south we have a Green Party government in coalition with a Fianna Fail regime who are building motorways through prehistoric monuments and cutting services, I suppose this is why I am sympathetic to a lot of groups on the left, they have to apologise for past mistakes, while I have to apologise for present greens who seem to be fading in colour.

Any way on to these signs of ‘environmental advance’ in the north of the country.

Every year on the 12th of July (and for months surrounding that hallowed date) loyalist bigots build bonfires across the North of Ireland in celebration of defeat and subjugation of the native population as part of Britain’s conquest.  Hardly a mildly unamusing throwback to a bloody conquest, these bonfires are symbolic of a continuing sectarian domination and division.  They are bigoted protestations of Protestant supremacy and are so innocuous that half the nationalist population of Belfast heads to Donegal for the week.  The other half bolts the shutters in hope that a petrol bomb doesn’t fly through the window from the hands of a drunken mob.

The celebrations of the Glorious Twelfth promise to get eco-friendly next year.  The bonfires may be replaced by wood burning “beacons”.  Sammy Wilson, loyalist bigot, of the Democratic Unionist Party says: “We do not want to undermine tradition. However, we cannot overlook the fact that they have increasingly become environmental liabilities, stacked with heavily polluting tyres and wooden pallets.”  They burn effigies of Catholics on these fires, and occasionally real ones around the 12th, and the concern is the pollution from burning rubber tires?  In this day and age who can afford not to seem environmentally conscious?  The loyalists, after all, need their government grants.

The Twelfth is indicative of some serious social problems, to put it mildly, in the North, I would not have thought that pollution was the most important problem one would see the bonfires as representing.  Perhaps we can ask the Klan to use flashlights (hand cranked of course; batteries seep all kinds of pollutants) to alight the Fiery Cross rather than environmentally damaging kerosene and tar wood next time they would like to instill a little racist terror?  We, each one of us, have our part to play in saving the planet.

More here.

Events over the past week illustrate the extent to which a sea change has taken place in public consciousness as a result of the financial crisis which has plunged the British economy into recession.

The furore over the obscene phone messages left by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross on the answer machine of actor, Andrew Sachs, during which Brand boasted about having slept with Sachs’s granddaughter whilst being egged on by Ross, is more than just a spat over good taste and the upset caused to the sensibilities of an old man, as serious as that is.

The deep anger felt by the British public over this affair, exemplified in the mammoth number of official complaints that have been made to the BBC thus far (27,000 at time of writing), and the wrath directed at both Brand and Ross in particular, is more to do with the massive salaries they are paid at a time when home repossessions are up 71 percent on last year; at a time when official unemployment figures have reached 2 million and rising; and at a time when tens of thousands of pensioners are facing the hard choice of either feeding or heating themselves this winter.

Where before Ross and Brand were loved by many for their raw, edgy humour and extrovert prankish style of entertainment, now they seem in every respect like the ghost of Christmas past, belonging to a different age when money was no object and the British economy was fuelled by unfettered greed and individualism.

Well, not anymore. Now, with the economic crisis continuing to unfold and bearing down on every strata of society, a fresh light is being shone on the salaries paid to corporate executives, celebrities, and sports stars. Indeed, you know that things have changed when a Tory mayor of London sees fit to write to every major football club in England this past week concerned at the poverty wages being paid to cleaners, programme sellers, and other ancillary staff employed at grounds the length and breadth of the country.

The thought that an individual can be paid over 100 grand a week for playing football, not to mention the added tens of thousands made from sponsorship and advertising deals, when people are losing their homes and more pensioners will certainly die from cold this winter than ever before, is beyond repulsive. It is longer acceptable to cite the ‘market’ as justification for such glaring inequality, and it is right that the government is coming under increasing pressure to intervene and aid low paid workers, pensioners, and others who exist on the sharp end of the income scale in society.

Gordon Brown’s recent public statement over the Brand and Ross controversy has been criticised as empty political posturing at a time when there are far more grave matters for him to be concerned with. It is clear that he is currently riding a wave of resurgence in the polls in relation to his odious rival on the opposition benches, David ‘old Etonian’ Cameron. Regardless, the prime minister remains one of the key players responsible for turning the British economy over to the coterie of unelected bankers and speculators in the City who’ve created the culture of greed that has poisoned society from top to bottom. Rising crime, huge personal debt, broken families, and deepening poverty - this is Britain after 11 years of a New Labour project which has brought nothing but despair to millions whilst lining the pockets of a relative few millionaires and billionaires.

And lest we forget, Gordon Brown is also a man with the blood of unknown thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women, and children on his hands for the part he played in Britain’s involvement in an imperialist adventure which has devastated Iraq and polarised the world.

Yes, the messages sent by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross last week to an old man which were broadcast by the BBC were obscene and offensive. However even more obscene and offensive are the salaries paid to the nation’s top entertainers, football players, and corporate executives at a time when more and more people the length and breadth of the country face home repossession, unemployment, and are being suffocated by crippling personal debt.

These are crimes yet to be punished, and no amount of posturing over the contents of a radio show can absolve Gordon Brown of his culpability.

End.

If a week is a long time in politics, a year is what? An eternity, perhaps? With that in mind and the absolute certainty that a team of monkeys before a set of typewriters will eventually tap out the works of Shakespeare, what chance a liberal laptop bombardier denouncing holocaust denial?

Well, a year has passed and I haven’t come across any liberal indignation at President Bush’s holocaust denial. Since there was no great liberal harrumphing at Berlsusconi’s own astonishing Holocaust denial, I didn’t expect to see any at Bush’s holocaust denial. For those who are interested, Berlusconi put up a pretty stern general defence for Mussolini as a pretty good chap and denounced the historical case against Il Duce as an active participant in the Holocaust. To crown Berlusconi’s impressively gormless defence of fascism, he went on to say that those Jews who were rounded up and put on trains for Nazi death camps were in fact being sent on “holiday”. The Anti-Defamation League, a thuggish defamatory outfit, awarded him their top honour, and liberal commentators looked the other way. Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad’s own Holocaust denial, whether feigned or not, gets liberals into a stupendous flap. It is therefore clear that genocide denial is not what agitates our leading liberal commentators. It is who is denying what and for what end.

And so we move to President Bush pressuring, in October 2007, the U.S. Congress from recognising the Armenian genocide. U.S. Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns thundered: “Turkey deserves to be treated with respect”. Apparently, respect comes in no finer form than historical revisionism and denial. Secretary of State and Bush Capo Condoleezza Rice, alleged super-intellectual and goddess of international relations, made Burns look positively benign: “I think that the historical circumstances require a very detailed and sober look from historians, and what we’ve encouraged the Turks and the Armenians to do is to have joint historical commissions that can look at this, to have efforts to examine their past, and in examining their past to get over their past,” she lamented, as if this were a case of history being unable to decide on a petty detail. When Congress did the right thing and called genocide by its rightful name, the “leader of the free world” was visibly saddened: “We will obviously impress upon the Turkish leadership our deep disappointment and the fact that we opposed this resolution and that the administration worked very, very hard to produce a different vote,” he said.

What of liberalism’s Praetorean Guards? Did they rush out to denounce this call for “historians” to take a “very detailed and sober look” and follow in David Irving’s footsteps? Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a peep. One can imagine what the reaction would have been had the “President” of Iran, and his leading foreign ministers had made similar remarks about the Jewish Holocaust. As revolting as the Bush administration is, I never imagined it would demand of its own chambers of democracy that it grant Hitler a victory from the grave: “Who remembers the Armenians?” the monster asked. The Bush administration “worked very, very hard” to ensure that Hitler was proved right. One will look in vain for a better demonstration of how governments define genocide: facts are irrelevant, politics is all, what we say goes.

Hannah Arendt’s beautiful line applies just as equally to the commentators who stayed quiet as to the politicians who toed this depraved line of holocaust denial: “The hypocrite’s crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil, but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”

That’s not only nicely put but unarguable: hypocrisy is the “vice of vices” and its practitioner is “rotten to the core”. I can think of no better epitaph for the Bush administration and the faux liberal commentators who given the opportunity to speak out stayed deathly silent. Perhaps they were simply respecting the right of free speech and the right to holocaust denial? Although it is an absolute certainty that given enough time monkeys will reproduce the plays of Shakespeare, it is far from certain that pro-war liberal commentators will denounce the Bush administration’s upholding the standards of Hitler.

When the issue of disability benefits rears its ugly head, almost every section of the Left seems subject to a cognitive dissonance that is not only glaringly intellectually unsound even to the holder but practically dangerous, for it plays into the Right’s hands and gives the appearance of there being a bleeding-heart conspiracy towards idlers and deadbeats – not that I’m averse to such a policy of “benefit fraud”. Like the issue of fox hunting, I find it difficult to rouse any serious indignation on the issue of alleged disability benefit fraud. What’s the cost, anyway? One billion pounds? Two billion pounds? Big deal. Let’s just say it is not something that keeps me awake at night.

It is manifestly true that most people do wish to work, but it is also demonstrably true that there is a significant number of people who have no interest in ever working, whether capitalism exists or not, and, to partially invert Oscar Wilde’s point in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, we’ll just have to put up with this most unsocial of behaviour as an unfortunate cost to ensure a better world. That is to say, one who does not work must still eat.

Now I have absolutely no idea whether ten percent of the working population is actually “disabled”, let alone the estimated fantastic twenty percent alluded to in a recent informative letter in the Guardian. However, since I don’t know anyone who is literally disabled, and I don’t know anyone who is incapable of work, the issue may not be quite as it seems. But, then, I would also add that none of my family or friends knows anyone who is disabled or so infirm as to be incapable of work. Perhaps we are a statistical oddity. Since personal experience is the best guide in something like this, albeit a very limited guide, maybe, just maybe, something is amiss with respect to the disability figures.

Someone kindly wrote to me some time ago to inform me that the figures include drug addicts, alcoholics, those who have had breakdowns, mental health problems and certain other medical disorders. Forgive me if I seem insensitive, but I do find it difficult to believe that, on top of all the relatively few wheelchair-bound people I have ever seen and the exponentially-growing number of people with alleged back problems (of whom I have never met one), one in ten people of the working population suffers from an ailment which keeps them from work. In this I may well be wrong, but I do find it, well, unbelievable.

We know that during the Thatcher years there was a cynical massaging of the unemployment figures by putting hundreds of thousands of healthy workers on disability benefit. Apparently in one Welsh town about half the working population are on disability benefit. (Incidentally, how did these healthy people get a medical note to the effect that they were incapable of work? And if it were possible then, what it to rebut the charge that bogus medical notes are handed over today, at the drop of a hat?) This Tory swindle is undeniable, not least because Tories themselves admit to it.

Given that these workers really are fit to work, and the Left never stops banging on about the Thatcher swindle, then it is downright embarrassing to say that they’re not. One can’t hold both arguments concurrently: the unemployment figures were massaged by shunting healthy and capable people on to disability benefit and that these people are actually incapable of work. Or are we to have it both ways and hope no one figures out the absurdity of the argument. The point about cognitive dissonance is that the holder of two diametrically opposed views does not know it, but in this we all seem to know but carry on regardless. Frankly, this seems to me rather weird.

Now, one imagines, a perfectly good argument could be made to the effect that these healthy individuals have become ill by being unemployed for years or decades. If this is the case, I’d like to see some evidence for it. Another argument could be that in the last thirty years or so an unknown malady has suddenly afflicted a staggering percentage of working adults such that they are incapable of work, when previous generations were strangely not prone to this affliction. Again, if this is the case, I’d like to see the evidence for this sudden rash of disability.

It goes without saying that I don’t believe a word New Labour says and assume that their interest in disability payments has nothing to do with anything other than some sordid political game, but that doesn’t mean that they are not inadvertently arguing something that is true! Similarly, New Labour may well believe that the Earth is flat but argues otherwise for political ends. As I’ve pointed out, the issue of disability benefit fraud is not one that keeps me up or induces me to leap out of bed, but I’d certainly like to know what the extent of disability is. So, in the immortal words of John Lennon, Help.

The BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, has been brooding and examining his professionalism. After much vexing and agonising, he concluded: “The biggest self-criticism I have was I got too close to government in the reporting of the Iraq war. I didn’t do enough to go away and say ‘Well, hold on, what about the other side?’ It is the only moment in my recent career where I have thought I didn’t push hard enough, I didn’t question enough and I should have been more careful.” Since this minor “self-criticism” would never cross the minds of the abominably bad BBC correspondents Paul Wood and Jane Corbin, one could say that this is a commendable attitude. (The Beeb could save itself a good deal of money by discarding the intermediary spooky human puppets who go by the names of Wood and Corbin and instead simply broadcast government press releases.)

No doubt, however, Robinson is counting on an audience who can’t remember his energetic dance of ankle-clutching and derriere-kissing. Nearly six years on, his ankles are still lukewarm and his nose is a fainter shade of brown. At the time, the time he is reflecting upon, Robinson was a lowly political hack at ITN. Given the BBC’s ability for self-censorship and ability to put almost any government policy in a good light, it is irrelevant whether the security services still vet and veto candidates for high BBC positions. So Robinson’s disgraceful performance during the countdown to invasion made him a shoo-in as the new Andrew Marr.

Of the innumerable and presumably unintentionally tragicomic incidents that make up Robinson’s career, my favourite made its appearance on Sunday 17 November 2002. Correspondent Robinson was dispatched by the Jonathan Dimbleby programme to interview the ghoulish Mike O’Brien, a Minister at the Foreign Office. Did Robinson use this important opportunity to do his journalistic duty and examine in detail the government’s case for war? Did he put O’Brien through the wringer? No, he laughed and joked with O’Brien, applauded the government’s reasonableness and good sense, mocked and dismissed Iraq’s arguments (“here we go again,” he sniggered at Iraq’s consistent line that it had no WMD), and set the stage for O’Brien’s war propaganda. A performance like that is impossible to forget.

This was not a case of not “doing enough” or not “pushing hard enough” or not “questioning enough” or being “too close to government”. Why Robinson has now come out in this way is a mystery. If Robinson is counting on collective amnesia with respect to his journalism, then inadvertently bringing attention to his own disgraceful record is not perhaps the best way of instilling confidence in his abilities. This impression of knowingness reminds me of Bellow’s line: “…they wear a knowing look, but since there is nothing to be knowing about they only convey [his] foolishness”. On the whole, I think I prefer the useless Paul Wood and Jane Corbin to the cynicism and foolishness of Nick Robinson.