Letters

Programme

I am grateful to Jara Handala (July 28) and to the Weekly Worker for allowing me to contribute. I think we have to just agree to differ. Nowhere in the Labour Party rules does it state an incumbent leader is automatically on the ballot paper.

It is certainly the case that a high court judge has now ruled in favour of the Labour Party’s national executive, agreeing that the rules do not require an incumbent leader to be nominated. However, I suspect that had more to do with avoiding bringing the judiciary into disrepute by an intervention which would in effect have changed the leader of her majesty’s loyal opposition without an election. If I was being more conspiratorial, I would suspect the establishment are quite comfortable with Mr Corbyn remaining as leader.

I think the Labour Party rules are genuinely ambiguous and inadequately thought out, as was the decision to abolish the previous tried and tested electoral college, which brought together all the significant sections and wings of the party, in favour of an atomised plebiscite.

Both the Labour and Conservative parliamentary parties once had automatic annual leadership elections, in which the incumbent was mostly automatically re-elected without a challenge, but still had to be formally nominated and endorsed each time. When these rules were changed, you then had to have a mechanism for triggering a leadership election in exceptional circumstances, where an incumbent was thought to have lost the confidence of their electorate. That was the basis of having a higher nomination threshold for a challenger than would be the case in an open leadership election.

Consistent democrats should surely favour an automatic annual re-election of the leader to formally test their support and ensure effective accountability. Both the incumbent and any other candidate might have to obtain a minimum number of nominations from MPs and/or constituency Labour parties in order to run, but the requirement should be the same for all.

I would like to make clear that I feel Jeremy Corbyn has an incredibly strong, indeed astonishing, mandate to be leader of the Labour Party and had the right to expect, even demand, loyalty and respect from the PLP. MPs should be servants of the party and of the people. They should at minimum respect the office of the leader, if not the person, his mandate and the party membership who put him there.

What right has any MP to ‘opt out’ of doing their basic duties, of supporting the leadership team and the party as a whole which put them there? One senses that the contempt, even hatred, some show Corbyn is in effect contempt and hatred of the party membership itself, and working class people more generally.

It would be half understandable if these critics of Corbyn were themselves incredibly talented, dynamic, charismatic and inspirational, yet the great majority are colourless, shallow nonentities. The idea any of these will provide the first step on the road to socialism is risible.

Mr Corbyn should have been given at least until 2017 or 2018 to show what he and his team could do, to give due respect to his mandate. His progress and electoral record to date has, however, been very ordinary, although not disastrous.

Steve Richards’ three-part series on Radio 4 showed what we all knew: that Corbyn was the very last person who wanted to put himself forward, still less to become leader, let alone potential prime minister. He was very comfortable, having been an MP for 33 years, indulging in his pet hobbies, and immersed in his north London constituency. That was undoubtedly part of the attraction. He had none of the obvious nastiness and factionalism of a John McDonnell, or the arrogance and clumsiness of a Diane Abbott.

For me the launch of Corbyn’s campaign for re-election of leader encapsulated the problem. Corbyn’s speech was printed in full in the Morning Star of July 22 (today’s Morning Star is a very open, diverse and attractive product - a great asset and platform for the labour and progressive movement). Corbyn has been described as a socialist, yet he hardly ever uses the word, let alone attempts any definition. He talks of a “better, more decent society”, in which “opportunity and wealth is shared”, as do or did John Major, Tony Blair, David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

Corbyn invoked the ‘five great ills’ of the Beveridge report and, you might have thought, the 1945 great, reforming Labour government. He set out his new five great ills. Are prejudice, discrimination and neglect really three of the biggest indictments of capitalism?

One might have expected some grand strategic programmatic response to the new five ills, an outline programme for a future series of radical, reforming Labour governments. Instead we had just one policy commitment. All employers with over 21 staff (very precise) are to publish equality pay audits!! Not exactly the storming of the Winter Palace.

Ten months into his leadership, this really is not good enough or in any way adequate. If the Labour Party is to be of any use to the labour movement, the working class and working people more widely, it has both got to be capable of winning general elections and it has to have the policies to make a real difference for working people. There is a tension between the two objectives, but also a tight interrelationship. There is no point in adopting issues and concerns which are faddish or irrelevant to the day-to-day concerns, stresses, hopes, aspirations and ambitions of the majority of working people.

But we do need policies which are class-based and which will make a real tangible difference to working people right across the country, including in the south-west, south-east and the home counties. It is ridiculous that these are Conservative and, until recently, Liberal strongholds. The ideologies, values and attachments of the capitalist class who live in these regions have heavily permeated the consciousness of the still significant sections of the population who depend on a wage or salary to survive.

Most working people in the United Kingdom are still driven and motivated by the old Protestant work ethic and social contract. If you work hard, you should expect to have a stable and secure life, and be able to afford the basics and some luxuries. To create a stable, nurturing and loving environment for children to grow up and develop, to have a good and well-rounded education to help make them balanced, productive and considerate human beings. To have your health needs met and where possible prevented. To live in a safe, warm and comfortable home and in a clean, healthy and green environment. To enjoy a stress-free, secure and funded retirement. To know the newer generations, including your own children and grandchildren, will be materially, spiritually and morally better off than you, and that you can look back on a life and work and feel you have made a positive difference.

It’s not much to ask for in the 21st century, but it is under capitalism. That should be the case for socialism, and it should be the programme of the mass political party of the working class.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Dicing

Vote for Owen Smith in his Labour Party leadership bid? Er, no thanks, I don’t think so. What a snake in the grass!

Having said that, surely those Darwinian forces of ‘survival of the fittest’ at work before our very eyes within the Labour Party present a real problem to those of us who are members primarily with a perspective of edging things towards the left.

Do we continue to support Jeremy Corbyn, the original flag-flyer for that at least honourably well-intentioned semi-leftward turn of his? Or do we switch horses, now that we’ve been presented with Owen Smith’s brand new and distinctly shiny public platform cum mission statement of outflanking Corbyn with a sort of faux socialism on steroids?

Of course, any such decision would need to be made whilst bearing in mind that pitch from Owen Smith almost laughably seeming to be in imitation of Michelle Obama at the 2016 Democrat convention - with his descriptions of “a faith that our country can’t just have a brilliant past but a future as bright as its past”, whilst simultaneously calling for a “cold-eyed, practical, socialist revolution” - also known as doing a ‘Bernie’.

In any event, all of that from a challenger to the incumbent whose own blurb for Labour Party voters heavily promotes the ‘selfless’ image of a man who comes from an unimpeachably worthy working class background in Wales.

Did I say ‘snake in the grass’ at the outset? To put some proper breadth and depth on things, obviously it would be far better to describe Owen Smith as a capitalism-compatible/system-compliant sheep-like creature, who is attempting to masquerade as a fulsomely leftwing and deeply progressive-minded ‘wolf’.

So, yes, all in all, I think anyone interested and/or eligible in the Labour Party leadership election had best roll their vote towards that Jeremy Corbyn fellow, and then wait to see how the spots come up on that particular dice.

Bruno Kretzschmar
email

Thumping

Ah, Enoch Powell - John the Baptist to Thatcher and Brexit (‘From Powell to Brexit’, July 28). As for now, what about racism, anti-racism and multiculturalism? Do we just dismiss the lot as trivial concerns compared to class? But whatever happened to combatting ideas of social chauvinism and nationalism in the labour movement? Lenin didn’t need to believe the working class was either/or - racist or non-racist; he had opportunism and pro-imperialism to fight.

What distinguishes Marxism is the idea of collective liberation - social and mass movement - as opposed to the personalised liberation associated with existentialism, sexual libertarianism, ethnic nationalism and other post-1945 career paths. This led, in the postmodernist 1980s, to the idea of freeing yourself from oppressive ‘language’, the subject, the other and being free to be ‘oneself’, which usually meant ethnically particular or just damn liberated in a private life.

However, to think that these freedoms and unfreedoms can exist untouched by an economic system parasitic on almost everybody is to avoid the question of what the world is like as a whole rather than concentrating on the position of group members (usually posh) within it, as in the ‘glass ceiling’.

Incidentally, Lenin was also concerned with oppressive personal relations. In 1922, in his notes on nationalities, he made observations on the relationship between citizens, especially leaders, of the Great Russian area and those of other nations in the Soviet Union. Lenin was very much the practical politician, responding to the occasion as it arose, though never simply pragmatic. Each decision, each turn, was made by analysing the whole situation and with an end in mind. These notes of December 31 1922 were made in opposition to the policy of Stalin, whose idea was to absorb other ‘nationalities’ into a greater Russian whole - a policy known as ‘autonomisation’ or the incorporation of local republics into a Russian-led federation.

Lenin remarks that “Internationalism on the part of [members of] ‘great’ nations, as they are called (although they are great only in their violence, great only as bullies), must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations, but even in an inequality of the oppressor nation, the great nation, that must make up for the inequality which obtains in actual practice.” The emphasis here is on the legacy of oppressive relations.

“It is absolutely essential,” Lenin advises, “that the [proletarian] should be assured that the non-Russians [the outsider groups] place the greatest possible trust in the proletarian class struggle. What is needed to ensure this? Not merely formal equality. It is necessary to compensate the non-ethnic Russians for the lack of trust, for the suspicion and the insults to which the government of the ‘dominant’ nation subjected them in the past.”

This is not a case of fetishising group identity, but recognising the historical legacy and not disregarding it in a drive for absorption in the nation - a chauvinist and petty bourgeois approach. It is nationalist, not internationalist, to dismiss these differences. However, unlike in racism or official multiculturalism, this position begins from the premise that people are not predestined to be a member of such a (traditionally defined) group, just as the worker isn’t predestined to take orders from an overseer. The aim is a society (global) in which all are equal in power, where we may fulfil our human destiny as disalienated world citizens, regardless of the past, which nevertheless still weighs on us like “the tradition of all the dead generations” (Marx Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte1852).

We are about to have a carnival of ‘free to be me’ rhetoric from Hillary Clinton, that New Democrat - nodding to multicultural fairness, while serving her Wall Street sponsors and thumping ‘America’s enemies’ abroad.

Mike Belbin
email

Illusory

In the Weekly Worker’s July 7 issue, a letter-writer quotes from Peter Hain’s report on the far left: “One of the least appealing attributes of the far left is its self-righteousness: its claims to possess a monopoly on socialist wisdom, on morality and honesty ...”

In the July 21 edition, we have a paradigm example of this approach with much enhanced indignation in letters from Josh Guiry and Maren Clarke.

There is a typo in my original letter (my fault), which should have read: “As a uni lecturer she will be mixing with people much more economically advantaged than those I do” (July 14). This is presuming that people tend to mix with their own socio-economic group, which is not an unreasonable assumption. My experience in talking to people who could legitimately be described as working class and in some cases proletarian was, and is, that racism was not a primary motive in their Brexit vote and indeed some voted ‘remain’. I was surprised that Yassamine Mather was finding a high level of ‘Brexit racism’ in the petty bourgeois social strata. Since Brexit some sociologists have been suggesting that with the CEOs of major corporations, top government officials, celebrities, bankers and all the rest of them calling for ‘remain’, there was a section of the working class determined to give ‘the establishment’ a bloody nose.

Much as the Weekly Worker and some of its epigones may not like it, the scenario behind Brexit may be much more accurately portrayed by the Socialist Workers Party than your good selves. Actually, no-one knows because the necessary research has not been done. So, despite Guiry’s comment, nothing to do with names.

The rest of the letter consists of personal abuse which adds nothing of substance to any debate. Gulry’s fury seems to be that I discuss immigration in anything but reverential terms. How dare one query “an Iranian woman”, Guiry asks, without even noticing the ‘victim status’ he has attributed to her in this deeply patronising comment.

Regarding Clarke’s claims about the motives of the Orlando gunman, she is claiming insights which are confined to the mind of the gunman and which she could not possibly know. In response to the jibe, “why do people like Ted Hankin put two plus two together and always come up with Islam?”, I could just as easily reply, why do people like Maren Clarke occupy a default position of always apologising for Islam? Certainly on the ‘left’, this latter is somewhat more prevalent with the now regular terrorist attacks in France than any attempt to illegitimately suggest that Islam is inevitably responsible. Guiry and Clarke end up as crude apologists for some of the most reactionary people on the planet.

In my view, it is better to maintain the left’s traditional support for women’s rights, gay rights and human rights than junk these for some illusory ‘alliance’ with Islamic extremism.

Ted Hankin
email

Awol

I was shocked and stunned that there was no letter from Steve Freeman in a recent Weekly Worker. Should we send out a search party?

Ross Bradshaw
Nottingham