Category Archives: Guest Posts

The death of Baroness Thatcher – a poem by Kevin Higgins

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by Kevin Higgins

brown-thatch.bmpThe Death of Baroness Thatcher
after Patricia McGuigan and Alexander Pope
Her hair was a headmistress dreaming
of again being allowed to use the cane.

Her ambition was a brass door knocker
on what was once a council house.

Her brain was a conversation about money
Sir Keith Joseph had with himself.

Her back passage was Basil Fawlty
complaining about car strikes to the Major.

The look in her eyes was a shoot to kill policy
in Northern Ireland.

Her sentimentality was a spinster’s thimble
in which you could fit what’s left of the Tory Party
in Scotland, Liverpool, Manchester,
Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle…

Her clenched fist was a skinhead
in nothing but Union Jack y-fronts.

She said the word ‘Europe’
like a woman coming down
from a severe overdose of Brussels Sprouts.

Her Christmases were dinner at Chequers
with a recently deceased sex offender.

Her ‘out’, ‘no’, ‘never’
were striking print workers
being given the cat of nine tails.

Her fingers and thumbs
were ten riot shields in a row.

Her final nightmare
was the silent, black eyed ghosts
of Joe Green and David Jones ,
who did nothing but each offer her
a hand.

NOTES
David Gareth Jones, from Wakefield, died amid violent scenes outside Ollerton colliery in Nottinghamshire on 15 March 1984. On 15 June Joe Green was crushed to death by a lorry while picketing in Ferrybridge, West Yorkshire.

Sex, sexual exploitation and Pakistani men – in response to Ajmal Masroor

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This is a guest post by Nadir Ahmed, in response to an article claiming that 80% of sexual exploitation offences are committed by Pakistani men. Nadir can be contacted on twitter.

CEOP report coverIt’s not often that I’m exercised enough about something that I feel compelled to write more than 140 characters on the subject. Yesterday morning I read a lengthy tract by Ajmal Masroor on the issue of sex, sexual exploitation and Pakistani men – it was probably in response to Tuesday’s news of the conviction of seven men in Oxford in the latest prosecution of sexual exploitation of young, vulnerable girls. The post was entitled ‘Sex grooming – whats (sic) gone wrong with Pakistani men?’ After a wave of criticism, the original post (the link is to a screenshot of the now-deleted post) was removed, edited, and reposted. But the gist of it remained the same – he simply added more brown people to have a go at.

No-one should question the severity of their crimes: abusing and exploiting some of the most vulnerable members of society. These men, and others like them, took advantage of young girls who had been otherwise abandoned and rejected by society.

Questions need to be, and are being, asked of the agencies with statutory responsibilities – local authority social services and police forces – and those people who failed these young girls also need to be held to account. No expense should be spare in providing the victims the support they need and measures need to be put in place to ensure other vulnerable young people never have to suffer as they did.

Back to Masroor’s post. He makes a number of assertions in his post that I profoundly disagree with.

First of all, Pakistani men are no more predisposed to sexually exploiting young girls than men of any other ethnic origin. The reason we’re hearing so much about these specific cases is because they fit with a particular narrative which needs to evoke images of dusky savages in order to be maintained. The Muslim community in the UK has been under unrelenting attack – in the political sphere and in the media – for a number of years now. This focus on the religion and ethnicity of the offenders is only a continuation of those attacks. It’s no coincidence that at a time when Muslims are under such sustained attack by the media and the state, so much more attention is paid to heinous crimes, whether that be terrorism or sexual abuse of children, when the perpetrators are brown and Muslim.
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The Oslo Illusion

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This is a fantastic article from Adam Hanieh, analysing not just the failure of the Oslo process, but the effect it’s had on the economy of Palestine. It was published in Jacobin, a left-wing ‘magazine of culture and polemic’ in the US, and is published here with permission. Jacobin is a great example of solid but engaging left-wing writing – it’s well worth a read.

The Oslo Accords weren’t a failure for Israel — they served as a fig leaf to consolidate and deepen its control over Palestinian life

Jacobin article illustrationThis year marks the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli government. Officially known as the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, the Oslo Accords were firmly ensconced in the framework of the two-state solution, heralding “an end to decades of confrontation and conflict,” the recognition of “mutual legitimate and political rights,” and the aim of achieving “peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and security and … a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement.”

Its supporters claimed that under Oslo, Israel would gradually relinquish control over territory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with the newly established Palestinian Authority (PA) eventually forming an independent state there. The negotiations process, and subsequent agreements between the PLO and Israel, instead paved the way for the current situation in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Authority, which now rules over an estimated 2.6 million Palestinians in the West Bank, has become the key architect of Palestinian political strategy. Its institutions draw international legitimacy from Oslo, and its avowed goal of “building an independent Palestinian state” remains grounded in the same framework. The incessant calls for a return to negotiations — made by US and European leaders on an almost daily basis — harken back to the principles laid down in September 1993.

Two decades on, it is now common to hear Oslo described as a “failure” due to the ongoing reality of Israeli occupation. The problem with this assessment is that it confuses the stated goals of Oslo with its real aims. From the perspective of the Israeli government, the aim of Oslo was not to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or to address the substantive issues of Palestinian dispossession, but something much more functional. By creating the perception that negotiations would lead to some kind of “peace,” Israel was able to portray its intentions as those of a partner rather than an enemy of Palestinian sovereignty.
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Brighton pay strike: why Jason Kitcat’s numbers don’t add up

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This post was by Neil Harding, and was originally posted on his blog. It is reproduced here with permission

Support for CityClean workers in BrightonThe Green leader of Brighton & Hove City Council Jason Kitcat recently mentioned that the pay bill for Brighton & Hove Council is £180m.

By this he is referring to the total “controllable” wage bill. i.e that which is not subject to national agreement. (The total budget for the council is £750m)

We have also heard that around 6,000 of the total 8,000 workforce receive allowances. And also that 80% of these staff will see no change to their pay.

Of the other 20%, some of the hardest hit are the 260 refuse & parks workers at the CityClean & CityParks departments. They are 4.3% of the total B&H staff with a total wage bill of around £5m. Which is just 2.8% of the total overall wage bill of the council.

So, these 4.3% of staff receive just 2.8% of the wage bill. i.e. they are some of the lowest paid and are facing cuts of up to £4,000 per annum, with the average loss around £2,000 on top of losing 8 days from their holiday allowance.
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The spirit of ’43

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Mark Perryman from Philosophy Football explores a year when the tide turned against Fascism

copyright People's History Museum

Ken Loach’s recent film Spirit of 45 brilliantly celebrates the triumphant mood that delivered a Labour landslide election victory at the end of World War Two and the establishment of both the Welfare State and nationalised public utilities. What is made less obvious was the essential anti-fascist character of the war which contributed so significantly to Labour’s victory. Perhaps, for entirely understandable reasons, this is because the Left finds it difficult to celebrate war, any war, whatever the cause. Yet to understand ’45 we also need to account for 1943, the year the tide turned against Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Labour’s victory was only made possible because people, including crucially those in the armed services, knew what was at stake in the battle they were fighting.

The victory of the Red Army at Stalingrad in February 1943 had already proved that Hitler’s previously invincible Blitzkrieg offensives that had successfully invaded and then established hateful occupation regimes in France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Greece and elsewhere could be defeated. The immediate likelihood of a seaborne invasion of Great Britain had receded too. The Communist Party-led campaign to open a Second Front in the West was not only its most popular in its history but also helped to change the mood of the nation. Building on the party’s anti-fascist credentials from Cable Street and the Spanish Civil War’s International Brigades the campaign helped the CP recover from its disastrous description 1939-41 of this as an imperialist war. In 1945, something not mentioned in Ken Loach’s film, two Communist Party MPs were elected as part of the Landslide with the party’s leader Harry Pollitt coming within a few hundred votes of being elected as a third Communist MP.

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Hawking’s right to boycott Israel

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by John Haylett, Morning Star

Boycott Israel (pic: PSC)Anyone harbouring doubts over the effect of boycotting Israel should reconsider in the wake of responses to Stephen Hawking’s decision not to attend a conference there.

Hawking, who has previously visited Israel on four occasions, had originally intended to attend the Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem, noting that “this would not only allow me to express my opinion on the prospects for a peace settlement but also because it would allow me to lecture on the West Bank.”

However, the Cambridge professor of cosmology received a number of emails from Palestinian colleagues.

“They are unanimous that I should respect the boycott. In view of this, I must withdraw from the conference. Had I attended, I would have stated my opinion that the policy of the present Israeli government is likely to lead to disaster,” he reported.

Israel Maimon, who chairs the Israeli Presidential Conference, declared Hawking’s decision “outrageous and wrong.”
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Disability: Lazy journalism from right-wing libertarian

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This is a guest post from Sean McGovern, the Disability Delegate to the Unite Executive, Chair of the TUC Disabled Workers’ Committee, Chair of the Lambeth Pan-Disability Forum, a member of DPAC. He blogs as BombasticSpastic

“Left-wing activists’ treatment of disabled people as objects of pity is far more disgusting than anything the government has done…” – Brendan O’Neill

Disabled groups in welfare protestBrendan O’Neill’s recent article The Daily Telegraph is yet another example of the lazy journalism to which we’re exposed all too frequently these days. Here we have another ex-Leftie turned right-wing libertarian attempting to paint the Left as a politically moribund entity bereft of ideas and direction; while portraying the Right as the true champions of the working classes and disabled with their ‘work is the only solution’ message.

From beginning to end this piece is a gross insult to the very group O’Neill purports to defend – disabled people. He begins the article by speaking as though the “…Left-wing observers…” (the villains of this piece) are the spokespersons for disabled people; when the reality is that it is disabled people who are speaking up for themselves on a variety of social media sites- in blogs, on Facebook, on Twitter, in newspapers and out on the streets via direct action.

So, O’Neill’s take on the fear for many disabled people expressed by themselves is a casual “Concerned commentators tell us disabled people will be propelled into “destitution” by the government’s overhaul of disability benefits.” O’Neill, we are the concerned commentators; and many of us are enduring the real destitution caused by the dismantling of the welfare state!

“They claim disabled people will commit suicide in droves if their benefits are changed or removed.” O’Neill, look to sites such as Black Triangle, DPAC and ATOS Stories for proof of the suicides caused as a result of a flawed system that disregards the frailty and sense of hopelessness associated with some disabilities and conditions, especially those of a mental health nature. Click to continue reading →

Ukip: Election breakthrough demands a serious response from the left

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This is a guest post by Kevin Ovenden.

Ukip 'reservation' election leafletThe surge by Ukip in the local government elections this week is nothing short of a breakthrough for the right-wing, xenophobic, nationalist party.

It demands a serious and sustained response from the broad coalition of forces which over the last decade has come together to resist fascism and racism in Britain.

That’s not because Ukip is itself fascist. It is not. But it is a racist party which has hardened and foregrounded the scapegoating of immigrants as it has risen in the polls and at the ballot box over the last 12 months. Its central slogan in the Eastleigh by-election, where it came second, was “stop open-door immigration” (which we haven’t had in Britain for over a century). Anti-immigration and anti-multicultural themes linked together the disparate campaigns it ran in this week’s elections also.

As Dr Matthew Goodwin of Nottingham University wrote last year:

‘At various points, Ukip elites have voiced concern over Muslim “breeding”, party organisers have referred to “Muslim nutters”; UKIP candidates have described Islam as “degenerate”, suggested Britain forcibly repatriate Muslims and endorsed Wilders’ description of Islam as a “retarded ideology”.’

Ukip leaders make great play of the fact that the party’s constitution bans former members of fascist organisations such as the BNP from joining. But few interviewers have bothered to ask Ukip’s Nigel Farage why such as clause is necessary.

The answer is that the anti-immigrant, Islamophobic – indeed racist – underpinning of the Ukip call to “get our country back” has more in common with the BNP’s election rhetoric when it has previously made advances in the polls. Indeed, the analysis by Goodwin and his colleagues showed that the “core” Ukip vote 12 months ago held attitudes against immigrants, diversity and Muslims which were closer to the BNP than to mainstream of even the Tory party. Goodwin wrote:
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George Galloway: Ed Miliband & me

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This post was written by George Galloway for his Red Molucca blog

Secrets are sometimes necessary in politics. So is telling the truth but not the whole truth. What is never acceptable are lies. Especially from the leader of a party still in recovery from a predecessor who may have fatally wounded it by the tower of lies he built along the path which led to a million dead Iraqis and cascading extremism around the world.

Earlier this year the Leader of the Opposition Ed Miliband asked me to come and see him in his suite of offices overlooking the River Thames in the Norman Shaw Building in parliament. In fact he asked me again and again. When my diary proved uncomfortably crowded his office tried even harder to make it happen. “Ed is very keen to meet George” says one e-mail.

It’s not that I was avoiding him, in fact I was intrigued as to what this meeting – with no specified agenda – might be about.

In any case I would never refuse to meet any parliamentary colleague, still less the leader of the opposition. Such meetings, often private, are the stuff of politics at Westminster.

And when the leader of the opposition asking for the meeting is the leader of the party I joined when I was 13 years old, served in at every level for 36 years and loved a lot more than the leader Tony Blair who kicked me out of it ever did, it’s obvious I would fit him in. I’ve known many Labour leaders after all.
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KICK, RUN AND THINK BOOKS

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Mark Perryman from Philosophy Football offers a selection of the best football, running and sports politics books of the quarter

Zirin: Game overIn England there’s no sports writer quite like Dave Zirin. He writes about sport from the Left with such passion and style that readers will never spot the join. An American, the bias is unsurprisingly towards baseball, basketball and their own bastardised version of ‘football’, yet both the issues raised and his range of coverage are unmistakably internationalist. Dave’s latest Game Over should by rights be a major publishing event for the committed British sports fan, yet our fan culture is so parochial this superb book will be lucky to get a mention of two. Ownership, athletes on strike and supporting others on strike, Egyptian fans at the core of the Tahrir Square protests, the failed legacy of World Cups and Olympics. this book has the lot and more. The writing style provides a template for how to mix politics and sport yet keep the reader engaged whose interests leans more towards one or the other. Simply unmissable.

Cohen - On the wrong side of the track?The London 2012 Olympics more than any other event has helped stimulate at last some writing over here of the sort Dave Zirin provides in the USA. Accounting for sport’s meaning beyond the touchline, track, pool or ring. In the build up to the Games Matt and Martin Rogan’s Britain and the Olympics provided a rare moment of context. Revisiting the 1948 London Olympics, dubbed the ‘austerity games’ for an insight into what London 2012 might become in a period of similar economic recession. Rich in interview material, one year on from London’s Games this is a book that deserves to be revisited as we ponder over the reality of the legacy claims. Written since the Games ended Phil Cohen’s On The Wrong Side of the Track? locates those legacy claims firmly in the social and geographical context of East London. This was where the regeneration was supposed to take place, acting as a leveller between the city’s tourist and retail mecca, the West End, and the depressed East End. Beautifully written, with an uncanny eye for cultural detail Phil’s book is a powerful response to the overblown myths and broken promises of the Olympian legacy agenda.
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WHY MARGARET THATCHER HEARTED ISLAMISTS

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This is a guest post by Nu’man Abd al-Wahid

Upon Margaret Thatcher’s death, her champions naturally eulogised her as a fighter for liberal democracy in Eastern Europe, while her detractors brought attention to the fact that she was highly supportive, even complimentary, of dictators and apartheid in the Global South such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Chile, Indonesia and South Africa as well as her assistance to the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Overlooked in both scenarios is her support of political Islamism and by extension Jihadis. Here is Thatcher in December 1979, advocating a political Islam as a counterweight to left-wing or communist ideology which she derogatively dubbed “imported Marxism”:

“I do not believe that we should judge Islam by events in Iran…There is a tide of self-confidence and self-awareness in the Muslim world which preceded the Iranian revolution, and will outlast its present excesses. The West should recognise this with respect, not hostility. The Middle East is an area where we all have much at stake. It is in our own interests, as well as in the interests of the people of that region, that they build on their own deep religious traditions…” [1]

Thatcher’s corollary that “our interests as well as…the interests of the people of that region…” are one and the same initiative is rooted in a particular type of British imperialist strategy that was generally articulated by Frederick Luggard.

An imperial officer in Northern Nigeria in the nineteenth century, Luggard managed the local Fulani emirs (rulers) on the basis they “were allowed to retain the trappings of power so long they accepted the advice of their new overlords.” [2] There was nothing new about this puppet-overlord relationship in the history of British Imperialism and indeed Empire. But what Luggard added, inter alia, is a further aspect to this relationship. He framed the Empire’s relationship with its subjects “in terms of the preservation” of their way of life. So therefore the British Empire’s responsibility or mandate was to partly preserve and conserve their subject’s culture, religion or whatever the belief system maybe. [3] Hence, Thatcher’s notion that the “Muslim world” should “build on their own religious traditions”
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Spring Books into Action

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Mark Perryman from Philosophy Football reviews the best reading of the quarter

God bless the NHSAs the Thatcher funeral hoopla fades away and the focus shifts to the likely rout of the Con-Dems in the 2 May local elections, the political landscape outside the Westminster bubble in the next few months is likely to be further shaped by the deepening impact of the cuts. Central to this, and sparking enormous local campaigns such as in Lewisham remains the not-so-creeping privatisation of the NHS and the resultant cuts in vital services including A&E. Roger Taylor’s carefully-argued God Bless the NHS isn’t perhaps the call to action some campaigners might be looking for yet his depiction of the rude health of an NHS as the closest thing we have to a ‘national religion’ is a spectacular contrast to the so-called crisis the government claims to be fixing with its marketised reforms. Those reforms and the ideology behind them are brilliantly dissected in this powerfully argued book.

Perhaps less central, except for those immediately affected, the university sector has been affected by the most revolutionary change of all. The student-led tuition fees protests were the first mass resistance to the government; now the eye-watering £9,000 a year fees are turning these places of learning into just another marketplace that will have enormous social consequences in years to come. Andrew McGettigan’s The Great University Gamble spells out in chilling detail what the future of Higher Education run as a business will look like. It is hard to imagine another crisis won’t be sparked as the scale of these changes start to turn our universities into upper middle-class finishing schools and never mind the rest. In all the acres of newsprint eulogising Thatcher few remarked on the fact that student loans replacing grants and £9000 per year university tuition fees were policies not even she and her ministers dared contemplate. Many on the Left argue that in order to understand the sheer scale of the austerity agenda onslaught we need a broader analysis of its roots combined with an effective counter-narrative.
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Thatcher’s Legacy

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This is a guest post by Labour MP Jon Trickett

Although the right wing did not hesitate for a second to criticise Hugo Chavez following his death, in Britain the bulk of the Left have accepted the feeling that it is not appropriate to attack Mrs Thatcher personally at this time.

It is not however impossible to discuss Thatcherism in a critical way while exercising appropriate constraint about Mrs. Thatcher following her death.

The background to the rise of Thatcherism lies in the 1970’s. All who were politically aware, as I was, at the end of the 1970’s understood the relevance of W B Yeats’ celebrated line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”.

The post war settlement introduced by Labour under Attlee was under increasing strain, partly as a consequence of a fiscal crisis brought about by the falling profitability of British capitalism. First Heath and then Wilson and Callaghan sought to maintain the 1945 consensus. By the end of the Callaghan Government Labour’s Leaders were exhausted physically and intellectually as brilliantly captured in the play ‘This House’ which is currently showing at the National in London. Britain was trapped in an impasse. Something had to give. Gramsci had described such a moment as an interregnum. In our country, “the past was dying; and the new cannot be born.”

The 1979 election could not be like the others and the same is true of 2015. It had to be a moment of rupture in order to break the sclerotic British structures Britain’s. Of course, we were aware that nothing in politics is certain. For the Left, the solution was clear and, many thought, inevitable. Britain should move beyond the Attlee consensus and into a more socialist society.

But when a country arrives at a turning point, as we clearly had, the direction which it takes is not pre-determined.
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Thatcher: ‘rejoice’ T-shirt

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Thatcher dead - rejoice!

In funeral black, a special T-shirt from Philosophy Football

This one is for the miners, the steelworkers, the printers, the millions unemployed, the injustices the Hillsborough familes were forced to endure, the Poll Tax protesters, those who lost their lives on HMS Sheffield, and the Belgrano, for what? For the women of Greenham Common and the Trident missiles we didn’t want. For the NHS and the nurses, our schools and teachers, the council houses sold off, the privatisation of our public utilitie, railways and buses. For our school milk. For the reputation of St Francis of Assisi.

In remembrance of all we lost 1979-90, much of it never returned to us. A life remembered with decent human sympathy. But lifetimes remembered too, scarred by divisions we’ll never forget .

Special offer – just £17.99 until the ceremonial funeral.

Order before Friday 12th and Philosophy Football will do their very best to get in time for you to wear on the day of the Funeral.

Order your t-shirt now, from here

Economics and the Debate on Immigration

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This is a post by Michael Burke from Socialist Economic Bulletin

Political parties in Britain have once more begun to talk about immigration, especially in the wake of the Eastleigh by-election. Unfortunately the debate is usually an all-informed one and typically just a cover to introduce racist notions about the impact of immigration. Therefore it is useful to examine some of the more important economic aspects of immigration.

Immigration

There are a number of countries in the world which have a higher per capita GDP than Britain. There are also a number of countries in the world who have a higher proportion of migrants as a proportion of the population. Both those facts are worth stating simply because discussion in Britain often seems to be dominated by the implicit assumption that Britain is both uniquely attractive to migrants and that it alone experiences immigration.

Per Capita GDP - Migrant PopulationThe chart on the left shows the countries with higher levels of per capita incomes than Britain. It also shows those countries proportion of the population which is migrant, that is not born in the host country. The table below specifies the data shown in the chart.

There are 13 countries in the world with a higher per capita income than Britain. Of these, 10 countries have a higher proportion of migrants. Some of these, such as Australia, Switzerland and Luxembourg have very much higher levels of immigration and have a much higher level of incomes.

Per Capita GDP - Migrant Population (table)There are 3 countries which have higher incomes but lower levels of immigration. However, of these 2 countries, Norway and Iceland have higher per capita GDP because they have a very large energy resource that comes pumping out of the ground (oil and geothermal energy). The remaining country is Belgium, whose geographic position means it has an exceptionally high proportion of people who work in Belgium but commute there from other countries.

By contrast, among the 18 OECD countries with a lower per capita income than Britain 12 also have a lower proportion of the population as migrants. The remaining 6 countries are small economies which generally have specific geographic or historical reasons for unusually high levels of immigration, or both. (The exception in this group is France).

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