Lords

A two year Parliament, which we now have, shags the Parliament Act. It cannot be used as a threat to the House of Lords on Brexit because the Brexit timetable runs out before the Commons can overrule the Lords. …

History

I found this on Facebook called, “Why Should We Care About Social Democracy?”

 

Jonah Burch looks at Europe’s Social Democratic parties, their successes and collapse and calls for a reinvestment in class struggle tactics.

Things, I think he missed.

In the UK, the ’83 manifesto, allegedly the longest suicide note in history’ the election was lost for two main reasons, the Right walked out and founded a new centre left party (without the Unions). The UK’s first past the post electoral system punished Labour for this and it took many years to recover those votes. The second factor was Thatcher’s post Falkland’s war popularity, a feature of which was WW2 veterans refusing to back Lbaour’s perceived pacifism in the face of an assault by a military dictatorship.

The Miner’s strike, together with weaker public sector strikes gutted the confidence of the Unions. It was a strike that Government (and Capitalism) had to win as they transitioned to the Oil economy. Coal was no longer need in the UK (or anywhere in Europe). We are only just discovering how far they went. See Justice for Orgreave.  Today, it’s the Oil Tanker drivers wo are the only Union that cannot be defeated and the state has colonised them in the same way they colonised the Electricians in the 70s & 80s. Today though we see new hope as the old Unions organise in the 21st century factories, and new Unionism takes on the gig economy.

The Thatcher era home owner revolution and the pension industry (social security?) reforms are also major inhibitors of the sort of action that the organised working class had been capable of. The former creates debt and a need for cash flow, the latter makes confiscatory or damaging anti-capitalist reforms even those based on direct action less popular.

I wish he’d mentioned the direct action, particularly around housing repossession that are or have taken place in Spain.

I also think he should have spent a bit more time on Germany. It’s role as the front line in the Cold War, the historic 20th century weakness of its centre-left, and the current post-wende bifurcation of the Left within the united German state are all worthy of study, as is the destruction of the post-soviet economies, critically in East Germany but also in the rest of Eastern Europe.

Don’t you just want to live in Denmark or Sweden?

  …

Treason

The Canary catalogues the internal furore in the Conservative Party in Parliament. It seems they are referring to each other as fuckers (Brexiters) and wankers (Remoaners). Lovely. There’s one line where the Canary suggests that the Brexiteers might actually ally with Labour to stop a Tory U-turn. It would be astonishing if they did, but Enoch Powell, at that time still a Tory recommended  Labour vote over Europe in 1974.

We need to keep our nerve in the Labour Party. Respect the voters, get the best deal available, and then decide if its what we want! …

Re-selection

More reading about re-selections, and I came across this. Patrick Seyd describes the case of the Sheffield Brightside deselection of Eddie Griffiths that considers all the other factors at work, see; Patrick Seyd, The rise and fall of the labour left, pp.58-60. I can’t find this for free, I wonder what happened. …

Inclusion

While looking up the Labour’s rules for something else, I came across this gem, which seems in fundamental disagreement with the behaviour of the General Secretary and Compliance Unit in auto-excluding people for “supporting … organisations other than official Labour “.

Many Labour supporters are also progressive campaigners, community activists and social entrepreneurs who forge positive change in their own neighbourhoods. We value this contribution and should embrace their activism. We need dialogue and to work in partnership with our Labour supporters. The Party’s organisation needs to match the way people live and reach out beyond its membership to our Labour supporters. Staying permanently in touch with our supporters, our local communities and the voters we seek to serve will mean we stay in government and are always a contender for government.

It’s in Appendix 1 NEC statement on the importance of our members. It’s a rule that means the auto-exclusion cannot be just applied to any one person, whoever they are wants, and therefore cannot be automatic. …

Too long?

There’s a bit of a kerfuffle going on about whether Momentum is going to launch a mass purge of the PLP. I doubt they have the organisational skills, however I was interested in just how long members of the PLP had served as MPs and what the politics of the Party were when originally selected. So I scraped a list of the parliament site and organised it as a table. This note talks about the profile of the longevity of PLP members, and which leadership made them. Further thoughts on the political consequences have put in the comments section. …

Vulnerable

This popped up in one of my news feeds, it’s at the Daily Mail online site, but interesting and informed. Hastings argues that the two new ‘Fleet’ carriers planned for the Royal Navy, although unfinished are already obsolete.

He argues that they are very expensive and their strike power could be replaced with cruise missiles and drones which require considerably cheaper launch platforms. It is proposed that we buy US F35 warplanes to fly off them which are so expensive, that the numbers to be purchased have been reduced twice. The F35 is multi-role which means that it has an air defence capability but missiles (if you have enough) are good for fleet defence. Hastings also states, that the Navy now only has 17 surface warships all of which would all be needed to defend the carriers at sea which would be very vulnerable to the modern surface to surface anti-ship missiles.

He argues for their cancellation or mothballing, but while the decisions were taken under a Labour Government, the Tories have had seven years to do something about it and inherited responsibility with the publication of the 2010 Strategic Defence Review. …