Letters

Nationalism

‘I’m not racist, but …’ So often of late this phrase, or something very much like it, has been the preface to a vox populi of a broadcast or print media interview with an EU outer. It may even be true in a personal sense: the eastern European or Asian-origin individual or family are fine - it’s the torrent of unknown others who will take all the jobs, housing, school places and hospital beds.

An upsurge in abuse and actual physical attacks on persons identified as non-British (or should that be non-English?) both before and after the EU referendum is an extreme indication of the visceral nature of such popular reaction.

Such is the inevitable consequence of nationalism. There were media and anecdotal reports of anti-English feelings being aggressively expressed during the Scottish independence campaign. No matter how liberal or progressive nationalists portray themselves, their whole ideology is posited on difference and exclusivity. Undoubtedly, the fertile soil in which the seeds of nationalism are planted is popular discontent - a widespread if unfocused feeling of being powerless.

Alienation is a central feature of capitalism: people feeling increasingly distanced from their employment (or lack of it), political parties claiming to represent them, the country they live in. So, given an apparent chance to take something back, many succumb to the temptation of what appears to be an easy option: vote ‘leave’ and take control of the borders. The actual root cause of popular discontent remains. Capitalism may have a few short-term shocks, but as a system it remains largely untroubled.

Capitalism has proved to be remarkably resilient: while many look to its crises as harbingers of its downfall, they are continually disappointed. A crisis might well provide an opportunity, but the actual dismantling of capitalism and its subsequent replacement by a superior system - socialism - will have to be a conscious act.

Division only serves capitalism as a buttress, with people turning on each other, rather than the actual cause of their problems. The political shambles in both Labour and Conservative parties merely demonstrates that it is the self-seekers who look to benefit. For the supposed party representing working class interests, Labour, it has been an unedifying spectacle, as MPs show themselves more concerned about acquiring the trappings of government rather than shouldering the difficult ideological burden of fighting for principles that would mean achieving worthwhile government.

Such an ideological struggle has been made even more difficult by a political process, the EU referendum, which has divided rather than unified the working class. As there was little rational ground for making a choice one way or the other, it left the irrational to become the determining factor. And there lies the source of nationalism. It is not such a great step for nationalism, especially in a context of political disengagement and ineptitude, to turn very unpleasant indeed.

All too easily do strong leaders arise to rescue the national cause, all too easily are armies sent marching. Over a hundred ago, before World War I provided confirmation, Rosa Luxemburg wrote, “The disasters into which capitalism is plunging are not in themselves any guarantee of the victory of socialism. If the working classes cannot find the strength to free themselves, then society as a whole may destroy itself by internecine strife.”

A century and more later, in a turbulent and conflicted world, not only will borders not ensure safety: they are more likely to be the focus of conflict. Votes in a referendum will not change that, the electorate being merely consumers choosing between the political products that competing capitalist formations have on offer.

D Alton
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Islamic threat

When I initially joined a left group in the early 1970s, the situation was - no pun intended - black and white. Nearly every Saturday we would travel to some place, such as Bradford, Blackburn or Lewisham, to protest against the National Front. I don’t know how much good this did, as I suspect that the NF would take Saturday off and return in force on Sunday. Many leftists, including myself, were also in the Socialist Workers Party-run Anti-Nazi League, which specialised in telling everyone who would listen how ‘Nazi’ the NF was and how we did not want to return to the horrors of World War II, ‘Never again’ being a major slogan. This can loosely be described as attempting to “fight fascism with British nationalism”.

Realising that they could not be there all the time, much of the left promoted the slogan of ‘Self-defence is no offence’, which led to the setting up of some Asian-community defence groups. A recent series of documentaries by Ragee Omar charts the transformation of most of these outfits into criminal gangs, concerned with the usual activities of drugs, prostitution and protection.

In academia, multiculturalism was a strong influence and those of us who failed to see how living apart would lead to integration were informed in morally superior tones that we were racist or at best ‘unconscious racists’. In other words, unable to actually explain their views, the proponents of multiculturalism were content merely to label any criticism, and indeed any queries, as racist. Now that even its chief proponents, such as Trevor Phillips, have denounced multiculturalism as having created ghettos in places such as Bradford, Oldham, Leicester et al, the ‘theory’ is not so popular. Note that never a word of apology has ever been issued by multiculturalism’s former proponents either as to being completely incorrect or preventing any criticism of their project (see Rumy Hasan’s Multiculturalism: some inconvenient truths).

How different is this situation from today, when we have YouTube video of Britain First and the United Against Fascism opponents screaming ‘Nazi scum!’ at each other. UAF opposes all fascisms except Islamic fascism! In a situation where much of the left support Islamic extremism, the situation is much more complex than in the 70s. At least for some of us it is. For Yassamine Mather, however, the whole situation can neatly be blamed on the residential population of Britain - or what would in the old days be called the working class in Britain (‘Orlando. Brexit and the media’, June 23).

Whilst Mather seems to feel qualified to talk on behalf of all immigrants, foreigners and refugees, I feel limited to talk only for one member of the resident population. Talking about feeling unwelcome, Mather says: “Yet most of us are not in the UK because we wanted to leave our homeland, many (if not most of us) had no other choice. I would not be here if Iran’s Islamic regime had not sentenced me to death for “waging war on god” - ie, being a member of a leftwing organisation. Tens of thousands of Iranians like me had to leave the country and have been unable to go back. So living in the UK was not a choice - we were forced into this situation.”

I agree that the solidarity from the British left during the Iranian Islamic counterrevolution was negligible. I recall a large demonstration departing from Trafalgar Square, where a physical fight took place to force the Spartacist League from the event because of their slogan, ‘Down with the shah, down with the mullahs!’ Apparently someone organising the demo, unelected and unnamed, had decided that this was ‘ultra-left’ and, of course, it went against the desperate project of finding something - anything - ‘progressive’ about Khomeini and his venomous acolytes.

Mather says that “living in the UK was not a choice”. Just as a matter of interest, why the UK, when many refugees in fact do have the choice of living in perfectly safe countries, such as France or Germany? A member of the residential population is perfectly entitled to ask such a question, when many immigrants, foreigners and refugees waste little time before informing us what a shithole Britain is. There appears to be a real logical contradiction here. The problem is more serious with some of the Islamic immigrants, who not only do not wish to in any way accept the cultural norms of British society, but actively wish to implement sharia law. Does the residential population have any rights? I suggest that they do and that any other perspective would be perverse.

In Yassamine Mather’s case one can fully accept that she was “forced into this situation”, but what about the refugees now, who, we read, are paying thousands of dollars to travel to Europe. Given the ambition of many of these people to eventually reach Britain, it again raises the question of why, if Britain has such a negative attitude towards refugees.

“Over the last few years I have had so many uncomfortable experiences when reading Persian websites (which use Arabic fonts) on public transport that I have stopped using my phone or tablet for accessing them. The assumption is, if you are reading Arabic you could be a ‘terrorist’.”

I have had similar experiences when reading the hard-copy Weekly Worker on the train (it is the front and back title pages which attract attention). However, I simply cannot see why reading stuff on a tablet should attract any attention. After all did not the Kindle e-reader experience a temporary sales boom, so that female readers in particular could read the ‘mommy porn’ 60 shades discreetly. What on earth is Mather doing to attract any attention with a phone when you can keep the thing in the palm of your hand?

I may well mix with a different social milieu from Mather, but I have not noticed at all the increased level of hostility towards immigrants which she claims. As a uni lecturer she will be mixing with people much more economically disadvantaged than those I do. Surely these petty bourgeois layers are not ‘racist’ - I thought that this was a discriminator reserved for the resident white section of the working class.

As for the comments on Orlando, which are little more than an apology for militant Islam, Mather needs to decide whether she is a communist or a follower of Islam. The fact is, though most on the left would never acknowledge it, that Islam is incompatible with western civilisation and in particular its rejection of democracy and call for sharia law. No, thanks - communists want a vast increase in democracy, rather than to lose what little bourgeois democracy we already have.

Ted Hankin
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Class or racism?

David Douglass claims of the working class Brexit vote that “little of this had anything to do with racism or xenophobia” (Letters, July 7). Yet he writes of “European migrants” seeking jobs in the UK in competition with others here.

Migrants are workers and sometimes workers move from one locality to another in search of a job. The comrade indicates his locality as South Shields. Would he consider jobseekers moving into his locality from North Shields to be migrants? Or perhaps further afield, from Carlisle? No, the context of the referendum and the fulcrum of all its arguments about migration were Europe and other countries, not movements of UK citizens: in other words, racism and xenophobia.

René Gimpel
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Sovereignty

The UK is a conservative country, where republicanism - the sovereign power of the people - exists in disguise. It is a love that dare not speak its name. The issue of sovereignty appears, for example, in the Labour Party in the contest between MPs and rank-and-file members over who can elect or remove the Labour leader or deselect local MPs. The coup against Corbyn is an attempt to overthrow the sovereignty of the members.

People power was at the heart of the Iraq war. In 2003 opposition to war became a struggle between the crown-in-parliament and millions mobilised on the streets. Labour’s unaccountable MPs, supported by the Tories, voted for war. The crown won the battle for parliament and crown forces went to war in Iraq with disastrous consequences for the Middle East.

The Chilcot report dug up millions of facts, but did not get to the whole truth. This was first and foremost an American war. British crown forces did not and would not have invaded Iraq on their own. They acted only as an appendage to US armed forces. Hence the cause of war is buried in files in Washington, not London. Chilcot could not access to the full truth.

Oil is central to the story. As reported, Bush was planning the future of Iraq’s oil “within weeks” of taking office in 2001 and before the 9/11 (2001) attack on New York’s Twin Towers. The US oil industry had a plan for selling off Iraq’s oilfields. This was set aside by US neoconservatives, who wanted much more production to destroy the Opec oil cartel. It would be neoliberal economics at the point of a bayonet.

The plan for Saddam, as one US soldier observed, was to “kick his ass and steal his gas”. No US president or British prime minister will explain that profit is imperialism’s real modus operandi. Instead skilful politicians, like Blair, spin their own fairy stories that wars are fought for the highest human values, such as peace, freedom, democracy and liberation. It was not for nothing that BP was known as Blair Petroleum. Yet Blair’s whole discourse about Iraq was in terms of saving the world from weapons of mass destruction and evil dictators. Not a drop of oil passed his lips.

9/11 changed the situation. The Bush plan for oil suddenly became feasible. The centre of gravity of US public opinion changed. Many wanted retribution. Bush seized the moment to go for a quick, easy victory. Saddam’s weakened army would not survive more than 45 minutes when facing US weapons of mass destruction.

British public opinion was not in the same mood. Blair would do a merry dance around the United Nations to convince the cabinet, parliament and the British public he was a man of peace, working day and night to persuade the Americans not to go to war. It was a charade Bush was prepared to play. He needed UK political support to help convince Americans this war was legitimate. Bush was nevertheless clear: the US would go to war with or without the UK.

The UN weapons inspectors were a problem to steer around, as was the UK weapons expert, Dr David Kelly, who knew the truth about Iraq’s weapons. He then committed suicide in controversial circumstances.

Whether Blair lied is a technical point. He was involved in a conspiracy to manipulate and manoeuvre the country into a war for regime change. Since that was illegal, he told parliament the country was threatened by WMD. The capitalist press played their role in whipping up war fever.

There are two ways of overthrowing dictators like Saddam - imperialist war and popular democratic revolutions. Bush and Blair waged an imperialist oil war and put the country into the hands of sectarian bourgeois politicians. This was no war of liberation. If the Iraqi people felt liberated when Saddam’s statute was toppled, they soon saw it was a false dawn. Their hopes were dashed. The country descended into barbarism.

The British crown is the name for the political class who govern the United Kingdom. They include senior civil servants, important ministers, such as the chancellor, the foreign secretary, the heads of the intelligence services and the armed forces. The queen is chair of the board and the prime minister its chief executive. Blair did not and could not go to war without the support of the crown. The prime minister is a powerful position, but he or she can’t act without the political class.

The Iraq war was a disaster for the Iraqi people and a tragedy for those soldiers who were injured or lost their lives. The lessons are not about the duplicity of Tony Blair and his conspiracy with George Bush. Blair should be held to account, but to focus solely on one man is to miss the real lesson. The dangerous and damaging concentration and centralisation of power in the British political and constitutional system continue to this day.

Under the UK constitution, the political class, under the cloak of secrecy, is able to do largely as it will. Many crimes and cover-ups - not least the Iraq war - have been carried out without all those responsible being held to account by the people. In 2003 mass mobilisation against the Iraq war and people’s assemblies were the embryo of popular sovereignty. Today Blair is gone and politics is shaken up like never before. Yet the sovereign power of the people, the republic, seems as elusive as ever.

Steve Freeman
Left Unity and Rise

It’s the system

‘General election now’ was a good article, nailing the nonsense the hard left have written about the Tory Party splitting over Brexit and the leadership election (July 7). It usually goes, they will call an election, Corbyn will be elected and they will ensure that we have a hard-left party governing Britain. Austerity will end and the next election will see a workers’ government in power.

Only it is rubbish - you are correct that a more realistic outcome is the Conservative Party winning the next election. But at least we know that governments are only in office and not in power. Capitalism does not care who is in office, as the system obeys its own rules.

Though what is amusing and disturbing is the cult of personality that the left has created around Corbyn. He’s a pretty meat-and-potatoes politician who hasn’t actually done anything yet. At least Livingstone lowered tube fares and Tony Benn made sure his constituents had jobs building Concorde. But is anyone daft enough to believe that Corbyn, or indeed any politician, can end austerity?

Steven Johnston
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Reselection

It’s been a busy but encouraging couple of weeks for the Teesside branch of Momentum. On July 4 we called an emergency public meeting in response to the attempted coup against Jeremy Corbyn. That meeting was attended by around 130 people and approved the following statement:

“1. We express our support for, and solidarity with, Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party;

2. We condemn the attempt by some members of the Parliamentary Labour Party to override democratic process and force his resignation;

3. We demand that the PLP respects Jeremy Corbyn’s democratic mandate;

4. We thank the Labour MPs who have stood by Jeremy and defended democracy in the Labour Party.”

Then, on July 12, our regular monthly meeting had to decamp to a larger room, when 50 turned up, compared with the usual attendance of 15-20.

At the second meeting we agreed to “demand that Jeremy Corbyn must have an automatic place on the ballot paper, if a leadership challenge is made” just before the news came through that Labour’s NEC had decided to do just that.

The meeting also approved a Labour Party Marxists motion on mandatory reselection as follows: “Momentum Teesside urges Momentum nationally to campaign for the introduction by the Labour Party, at the earliest opportunity, of mandatory reselection of Labour MPs, MEPs, councillors and all Labour Party representatives before each election. Trigger ballots should be abolished. No incumbent should have the right to represent the party without facing the scrutiny, challenge and competition of a democratic selection process.”

The Teesside branch then went on to support a statement calling for Momentum to fight in the Labour Party “to guarantee the right to remain for migrants already in the UK, but also defend freedom of movement more broadly, and fight to extend it”.

And we expressed our support for Jeremy Corbyn’s statement apologising on behalf of the Labour Party for the decision of the Blair government to go to war in Iraq. We urged “all Labour MPs to support the impeachment of the former prime minister for the misleading information he provided in order to justify the policy of regime change through military intervention”.

We usually meet on a monthly basis but decided to meet again in a fortnight due to the crisis situation the party is in. The next meeting will therefore be held on Tuesday July 26 at 7pm in St Mary’s Centre, 82-90 Corporation Road, Middlesbrough TS1 2RW. For further information, write to MomentumTeesside@gmail.com.

Steve Cooke
Stockton-on-Tees

Lasting impact

A pro-Corbyn, anti-PLP motion was carried at an all-members meeting of Crewe and Nantwich Constituency Labour Party last week, by about 50 votes to five.

Speakers from the floor expressed anger towards those behind the coup, some demanding deselection. Perhaps just as significant was the result of the ballot for 12 representatives to sit on the Cheshire East local campaign forum. Thanks to lobbying by Momentum, this resulted in a clean sweep for Corbyn supporters, most new to the job.

What is a local campaign forum, you ask? It should have four main functions: recruitment of new candidates for borough elections; selection of candidates; designing and implementing campaign strategy; and working with Labour groups to engage on policies and future manifestos.

If the election of Corbyn as leader is to have a lasting impact on Labour, then it is essential for the new recruits to get involved in the superstructure of the party. Momentum needs to lead the battle to change the way the party works from local branches all the way up to the NEC and the PLP.

I hope our positive results in Crewe will be matched in all the branch and CLP annual general meetings being held just now.

Ivor Bentley
Crewe

CLP ‘democracy’

Let’s not allow members to discuss the crisis in our party or show any support for its leader.

Last month my Labour Party branch in the north east of England was able to approve a resolution - about a banner - that hadn’t been circulated in advance and which evolved out of discussion of ‘any other business’. But this month the meeting’s chair told us that a resolution supporting the democratically elected leader of our party at a time of crisis could not be discussed because it had been circulated five days in advance rather than seven days.

Oh, and it was a ‘joint branches’ meeting of three branches together rather than an individual branch, so it apparently didn’t have the power to agree any resolutions at all. Funny that, because last month’s meeting was a joint branches meeting too - as are all of them except for the annual general meetings, when the three branches hold separate meetings in the same room to elect officers before coming back together for a joint meeting. These joint meetings arose because there weren’t enough active members in each ward to hold proper meetings.

And then the chair said that not everyone had email, so some might not have known that the meeting was being held or that there was a motion supporting our leader on the agenda. Hmm, that’s rather like last month’s agenda then and the motion that arose only in the meeting. The members without access to email wouldn’t have known about that either, but somehow that wasn’t used to rule out any discussion or decisions on that occasion.

Members asked if we could call for an emergency meeting of the CLP to discuss the current crisis in the party and consider resolutions from members. Well, we were told by the councillors present, who also serve on the CLP executive committee, that it would be wrong for such a meeting to have resolutions sent out in advance because they ought to evolve out of the discussion. Erm, didn’t you just say they had to be circulated so many days in advance?

Could the executive committee call for a special meeting of the CLP? Yes, we could ask the secretary to do that, replied the councillors. Will you ask him to do that? We could ask him. But the exec isn’t meeting until September, so we wouldn’t be able to ask him until then.

So are you saying that the CLP secretary couldn’t call a special meeting of the CLP if the executive members asked for one? If there was a flood next week and assets belonging to the CLP were destroyed, couldn’t the exec meet for another two months to discuss the situation? Well, it could, yes.

But our party is falling apart in public and we can’t discuss that? Er …

And then they wonder why there aren’t enough people attending to hold proper branch meetings in this CLP.

Phil Rawlinson
email

Getting nowhere

Call me a disconnected utopian or just a burnt-out cynic peddling petty bourgeois messages of negativity, of doom and gloom, but in any event here we have things as I see them.

Jeremy Corbyn up there at the head of his both reinvigorated and newly engaged supporters in the freshly leftist UK Labour Party - seemingly expanding quite successfully before our very eyes. Alternative for Germany getting close to Nazi rabidity, as a string of others follow suit around Europe, such as Geert Wilders in Holland. Bernie Sanders and Trump in the USA generating similar new fervour - in one case of a progressive and desirable variety, but counterbalanced from that almost surreal as well as dangerously ‘rabble-rousing’ populist direction. British voters pretty much matching it all, as they opt to lunge out of the European Union, whilst giving racism lite both some time in their heart and space in their mind.

At the very sharpest (and indeed the most blood-soaked) end of matters, African Americans routinely being slain by their neighbourhood police and now opting to return the favour. Palestinian men and women and even teenagers being reduced to using kitchen knives to resolve their pretty much equivalent problem. Oh, and I nearly forgot - “swarms” of refugees and migrants trying to reach a tolerable life in Europe, if not otherwise meeting an horrific end in the Med!

So, in summary then: an early 21st century version of bog-standard racism in conjunction with continued abuse, oppression and bigotry from our new right; disillusionment and disorientation but also some new vogue decency and a little hope from the reformism-‘handcuffed’ left.

So where the hell is our Marxist-Leninist plus Trotskyist so-called ‘movement’ in the midst of all this, comrades? Where do we feature in this exciting and exhilarating whirlpool of revolutionary opportunity?

Getting anywhere, are we? Doesn’t seem so, it has to said and faced up to. Indeed, faced up to pretty damned quickly. Certainly before those reptiles like Ukip and that supra-disgusting Trump get their way, not to mention modern-times Israeli Zionists (or even Islamic State!)

Yep, before those sordid, ghastly and in some cases readily barbaric types secure even more traction with either the confused and deluded or even the willingly/knowingly ‘collaborative’ within their respective societies and countries.

Bruno Kretzschmar
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