Pot87pouri

Before anyone else points it out, there have indeed been two Pot85pouris. The house rule is friendly ties and so this becomes number 87.

There's lots of stuff happening in Otley at the moment. This weekend for example is the Folk Festival, which means the streets are full of people who look like this:

I believe that the next lot are meant to be crows although why that means they have to whack each other with sticks I don't know.

This bunch are dancing with swords, although my photograph doesn't really show it very well; nice waistcoats though.

And then there were these ladies, who took it all very seriously indeed, but in fairness had a really slick entrance and exit routine.

Anyway, that's enough pot/kettle mockery of other people's strange hobbies so let's turn instead to the recent Vintage Transport show. There weren't many traction engines this year, which is a great shame, but there were a few military vehicles including this one which gave rise to a question in my mind.

In the film 'A Bridge Too Far' (and I am specifically talking about the film rather than reality) Sean Connery complains at one point that something hasn't arrived and is consoled in traditional British fashion with a cup of tea. The question I am asking myself is whether the thing that has gone missing was a jeep itself or a specially designed airborne motorbike such as is strapped to the front of this one. It's bugging me more than it should and I may have to watch the film again. Inevitably it will be a hugely disappointing experience and another fond memory of my youth will be spoiled.

Finally, I expect that you are all waiting eagerly for my insider's view on the latest shenanigans within the Labour Party. In particular you want to know what prompted the aborted attempt to abolish the position of Deputy Leader, an attempt which seemed to come from nowhere and catch everyone, especially the incumbent Deputy Leader himself, by surprise. My view is that we should interpret it to mean that Jezza is intending to stand down fairly soon and the manoeuvre was driven by the wish for Tom Watson not to be in interim charge while a new leader is elected. You will recall that the pair have very different views on the big issue of the day. You heard it here first.

Antisemitism in the Labour Party

"Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken." - Jane Austen

If overseas readers will excuse the omphaloskepsis, I intend to return to the carryings on within the UK Labour Party. One of the ironies in my recent post on the splits within the Labour Party was that the quote at the beginning was of course from one of a (fictional) band of Jewish zealots, and those same overseas readers referenced above may be excused for believing from the title of this post that the starting point relates to prejudice against Jewish people, zealots or otherwise. Instead it all actually stems from that old hobby horse of mine: democracy with the party. Antisemitism, to the extent it exists at all, is merely tangential.

I think it was Woody Guthrie who said that one can only write what one can see, and the reason that I haven't before covered this subject is that I have never witnessed any antisemitism within the party. As it happens my own MP, Alex Sobel, is both Labour and Jewish and when asked a few weeks ago he said that he had never experienced any antisemitic abuse, contrasting that with that he received from extreme right-wingers following speeches he made in parliament about the holocaust and the new Polish anti-defamation law. In mathematics there is a concept known as reductio ad absurdam, which basically means that something is disproved if in order for it to be true something patently ridiculous would also have be true. For me we reached that point a fortnight or so when a Labour councillor defected to the Tories citing antisemitic abuse she had received as the cause despite not actually being Jewish in the first place. It turned out that what had actually happened is that she hadn't been re-selected to stand in the forthcoming elections and, her enjoyment of being on the council being stronger than her political principles she had transferred to the opposition on the promise that she would be allowed to stand for them. All that seems to suggest to me is that the comrades made the right call at the selection meeting.

I see four drivers behind all the current furore:

Firstly, and notwithstanding what I have written above, there clearly is abuse going on. I am not going to rehash arguments that you all know about the pernicious effect social media has on discourse of all sorts not just political. And I have myself on previous occasions lamented the lack of historical perspective and intellectual hinterland of our leading politicians; it is obviously not going to be any better amongst their acolytes. The world is full of ignorant bastards and some of them are inevitably going to be found in the Labour Party; when they are identified as such they should be thrown out.

Secondly, there are people who are actively seeking to widen the definition of antisemitism to include any criticism of Israel. Many of the complaints actually relate to such criticism, and if we value free speech these must be rejected. This is an important point of principle which should be defended, Voltaire like, even by supporters of that state.

Thirdly, it is a convenient stick with which to beat Jeremy Corbyn. In this case I think that he, and those who support him will just have to suck it up. If it wasn't antisemitism it would be something else; it it wasn't Jeremy Corbyn it would be someone else. Cast your mind back to the vitriol thrown at the previous leader of the party by the Tories and the right-wing press: he couldn't eat a bacon sandwich properly (if the overseas readers are still with me, as bizarre as it sounds that is absolutely true), he somehow stabbed his brother in the back by standing against him (whilst mysteriously the opposite wasn't the case), and he couldn't be trusted with national security because his father was a foreign (i.e. Jewish, which you have to admit is quite funny in the circumstances) refugee.

Fourthly, it is a lever to try to remove democratic control from the hands of party members who have only recently seized it. Margaret Hodge wants to close down branches that dare to comment on the situation, whilst her and her friends appear daily in the press with their sob stories and crocodile tears. Tom Watson has called for the deselection process for MPs to be 'suspended', thereby rather giving the game away about his real concern. These people see politics as a nice little game for a select coterie - of whom they are of course members for life - while the rest of us are foot soldiers and cannon fodder. This affair is one further (possibly the last?) attempt to turn back the tide; Canute without the self-knowledge. But, as on that occasion, it won't work.

Splitters

"The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front." - Reg

If you ask me - and I completely accept that you didn't - the decision of seven MPs to leave the Labour Party owes far more to thwarted ambition than it does to principle. The only one of them that I have ever met is Chris Leslie, who at one point, when he was MP for Shipley, I knew quite well. He was among the youngest of those elected in the Labour landslide of 1997, and when I first came across him was very humble and overtly conscious of how much he had to learn. However, just a few years later at the time of the Second Iraq War he was to be found holding forth on the geo-political issues of the day as if he was Winston Churchill reincarnated. You will recall that it was self-evident at the time (and indeed has been subsequently proven) that Bush and Blair were lying through their teeth and so Leslie's support for them could only be interpreted in one of two ways: either he was an idiot unable to understand what was happening, or he was happy to go along with the invasion because he thought it would be better for his career. As I knew him and you didn't, please take it from me that it was the latter. With hindsight it is no surprise that there was a spontaneous, completely disorganised, but not insignificant attempt to deselect him in which your bloggist played a prominent role. 

The other noteworthy thing about him - and I ought to say that he is actually an extremely personable and pleasant chap - was that he always described himself as a Social Democrat. Now this is a subject of such an arcane nature that even I don't really give a toss. If pushed I would probably describe myself as a Democratic Socialist, but I'm not so bothered. The thing is that notwithstanding anything that the MPs said this morning, the Labour manifesto at the last election wasn't particularly left wing. Both it and Jeremy Corbyn are pretty much in the mainstream of Western European social democracy. I touched on this subject recently, but it's worth pointing out that it is actually Leslie and his fellow conspirators who hold a Leninist view of the role of political parties. According to them, we the members should bow our heads, touch our forelocks and agree with whatever our leaders tell us. I have never taken that view, and now nor does the wider Labour Party. There is no way back to power for top-down, control freak apparatchiks like Leslie, and that is why they have left.

Don't ask me

Readers may be wondering why your bloggist hasn't commented on the latest carryings on by the UK government, or perhaps it would be better to say what passes for a government. Tempted as I am, I shall just quote W.B. Yeats:

"I think it better that in times like these

A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth  We have no gift to set a statesman right"

Interestingly the US government is just as big a shambles. How hard it must be for young people today to believe that the two democracies had stood together to save the world as recently as the mid-twentieth century and had then subsequently seen off the challenge of the other tyranny with which they had expediently allied to do it. Now of course the heir of the Soviet Union would seem to be having the last laugh. It will not have escaped your notice that yesterday's post was to mark the centenary of the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Luxemberg didn't have much time for Lenin, and one assumes that she would have had even less for Stalin had she lived that long. She was also not so keen on Bernsteinian revisionism (*), which is essentially the form of socialism as preached and occasionally practised by all mainstream Western European parties of the left, including, now that Jeremy Corbyn has recaptured it from the neo-liberalism of the Blair years, the Labour Party. What Luxemburg did believe in was grassroots activism, whereby society was controlled from below rather from above; she took the view, which I think we can agree was borne out by events, that otherwise the new boss would be as bad as the old boss. In these dark and challenging times it doesn't do any harm to reflect on what she wrote in her critique of the Russian revolution: "Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" "Freedom is always freedom for the one who thinks differently" * Eduard Bernstein was a friend and associate of Engels, but nevertheless spent all of his long life campaigning for the achievement of socialism by peaceful means through incremental legislative reform in democratic societies. I have no idea how he found the time to write 'West Side Story' as well.

Pot71pouri

Your bloggist spent an hour and a half in the dentist's chair yesterday and is feeling pretty bashed about this morning, so I shall be brief.

I am also feeling pretty bashed about in a wargaming sense. The first game of the year saw me in command of a small Prussian army taking on a larger combined Russian and Austrian force. I was promised that the discrepancy in force size was offset by the superior quality of mine, but I have to say that I haven't seen any sign of it yet. The real problem is that having deployed everything I then abandoned my original plan within the first ten minutes, and spent the rest of the evening repositioning my forces so that next week I can try something different. The exercise did at least lend some support to Peter's assertion that Piquet allows a fighting withdrawal to be conducted in a manner that U go-I go rules don't. I sank into existential despair about the game's outcome even earlier than I usually do, but possibly that was just the anaesthetic wearing off.

In other news, the mainstream media has been strangely silent about the recent meeting between on the one hand a dangerous Marxist and republican, who holds much of British society in complete contempt, and on the other hand the Rt Hon Jeremy Corbyn MP. Fortunately a photographer was around to record it for posterity.

The Judean People's Front

"To rely upon conviction, devotion, and other excellent spiritual qualities; that is not to be taken seriously in politics." - Lenin

One of the minor, incidental pleasures of going to the theatre is watching the contrast as separate audiences for shows in different performance spaces converge and mingle; indeed I have written about it before here. It was with some amusement therefore that I watched the young man trying to sell copies of the Socialist Worker (a) to bemused parties of ladies arriving to see 'Thoroughly Modern Millie' at The Grand in Leeds whilst at the same time shouting (him, not them) "May must go, Corbyn must stay" (b). The reason for this was not some unexpected political message to be found in the musical (although like most love stories it is really about money and the power that goes with it - if you don't believe me then go and watch it again), but because Tariq Ali was speaking on Lenin in the Howard Assembly Rooms, which are attached to the Grand. It was naturally to the latter that I was headed.

The rooms are owned and managed by Opera North and there was a Steinway on stage. I did wonder idly whether the Russian revolution was going to be explained by means of comic song in the style of Richard Stilgoe or, even better, Victoria Wood. However the truth was equally unexpected and just as pleasurable. A pianist appeared and played the first movement from Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata as a sort of warm up, an approach to public speaking of which I heartily approve. Ali was introduced as a public intellectual (no definition of this term was provided) and much of his talk seemed to me to be spent justifying the importance of the intelligentsia in early twentieth century Russia and, by extension, to the modern world as a whole, so perhaps there was an element of theatricality in all this; convincing the audience that we were in the elite because we had listened to a bit of classical music. It worked for me.

Ali's talk was interesting and very wide ranging; indeed it wandered off the advertised subject for long periods. There was a substantial section on Operation Barbarossa for example, with the confident claim made that had Tukhachevsky not been purged by Stalin in 1937 that the German invasion would have been defeated quite quickly. I have no idea on whether that hypothesis has any substance, but I do know that it has bugger all to do with Lenin. Nonetheless, as I say, it was all rather stimulating and thought provoking.

The question and answer session afterwards was, however, a whole different thing. There was a sizeable audience, perhaps a couple of hundred people, many of whom seemed still to be living in the 1970s. The chap who put out the water for the speaker and interlocutor was even wearing a beret in what appeared to be a Wolfie Smith homage. I can't believe that those who spoke from the floor had not seen the famous satire on British Trotskyism in the 'Life of Brian', but they certainly hadn't learned from it. As far as I could make out, in their opinion, all of the world's current problems were caused by Ali's joining the International Marxist Group in 1968, only to be made worse by him leaving the IMG some years later, or possibly it was the other way round. Only two things were clear: I was the only one there who had not come with an agenda to slag off the speaker, and that everything - and I mean everything - was his fault. It was all truly bizarre, although I must say that it was also somewhat nostalgic for anyone with first hand experience of how far left groups carried on back in the day .

Wolfie was of course prone to shouting 'power to the the people' at inappropriate times. John Lennon's 1971 song of the same name was inspired by a meeting with Tariq Ali. Everything is connected.

(a) It has been a long, long time since a photograph of your bloggist last featured in the pages of the Socialist Worker. For those suffering withdrawal symptoms I can be found in the current spring edition of the One Traveller newsletter, New Horizons; less hair is involved on this occasion.

(b) With a bit more imagination he could have made that slogan rhyme.

Pot61pouri

"I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world." - Socrates 

Needless to say, I fully concur with him. Nathanial Hawthorne once wrote that "Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth." Nothing demonstrates that lack of flourishing more than the stunted moral compass of Theresa May and her Little Englander acolytes.

My health continues to improve, although I still get tired very easily. Nevertheless I have managed to get out to a number of things, albeit far fewer than those that I had tickets for and didn't get to. I saw the National Theatre's broadcast of 'The Threepenny Opera', which was excellent. At the risk of repeating myself, these broadcasts really are a great resource for those of us who live in the provinces. I have also seen a touring production of 'A Tale of Two Cities', entertaining enough, but Sidney Carton's actions never get any more plausible. I find the alternative put forward by Keith Laidler in 'The Carton Chronicles' to be much more convincing. Last, but not least, I have been to see Peggy Seeger. Despite being in her eighties she is still in fine voice and is a more than effective multi-instrumentalist. She was strongest on the more personal songs, those written for her by her late brothers or by Ewan MacColl. And the young chap accompanying her did what I thought was impossible; he played a banjo - a fretless banjo in this case - in a way that I actually enjoyed.

And, for the record, I voted for Jeremy Corbyn again.

Beardy Branson is a twat

 "Sob, heavy world
  Sob as you spin
   Mantled in mist, remote from the happy:"

                  - W.H. Auden

The spin that Auden referred to was - at least I assume it was - the actual rotation of the earth. ["I hope," says the Rhetorical Pedant, returning after being far too long absent from this blog "I really hope, that you're going to go off on one about the length of days at the equator again."] But my gripe is with spin in the other sense of Public Relations, or lying as it used to be called when I was at school.

I'm speaking specifically of course of all this guff about Jeremy Corbyn and the train. Now, obviously I have no idea what actually happened and have spent many hours strenuously trying to avoid finding out. As Marcus Aurelius put it "Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth". Harry Pearson, wargamer and author of Achtung Schweinehund!, puts it thus: "Claims there were vacant seats on a Virgin train a typical Trotskyite slur on great British entrepreneur and his sales force."

However, of one thing I am, from personal experience, absolutely certain, Virgin East Coast provide a terrible service and it is substantially worse than it was when it was run by the state-owned East Coast Mainline. People do, genuinely and often, have to sit on the floor. The power sockets regularly don't work. The train that I came up from London a couple of weeks ago had one carriage out of action because the doors had jammed and one where the heating was stuck on full blast - on a day when the temperature outside was 28˚C; the main point being that no one was in the slightest surprised. They've just put the fares up for the second time this year. Therefore, whatever the rights and wrongs of that particular train, Virgin Trains have rightly been called out for being useless at what they are supposed to do in return for our money.

And yet their slick PR machine, taking full advantage of the media's existing antipathy to Corbyn, have switched the narrative from one where they are held to account for their performance to one where they are the victims. As Mark Twain never said “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”. And all the while the long-suffering passenger longs to see Branson humbling himself in the style of Japanese management as atonement, preferably followed by then ritually disembowelling himself Japanses style as well.

 Before anyone points it out, I know that the line is managed and 90% owned by Stagecoach, but if Branson wants to be the face of the firm then he must take the consequences. Unsurprisingly I would be perfectly happy for Gloag and especially the homophobic Souter to join him. And it's the Stagecoach link I think that explains the attempts to smear Corbyn. A Corbyn government (I shall return soon to discuss whether such a thing is even remotely possible) would not just renationalise the railways, but would regulate bus companies. They're just getting their retaliation in first.

Politics I'm afraid

Firstly, a comment on our government:

"Stupidity has a knack of getting its way" - Albert Camus

And secondly, a comment on our opposition:

I shall be voting for Jeremy Corbyn again. I acknowledge that he is the wrong man for the job, but Owen Smith - who I freely confess that I had never heard of until a couple of weeks ago - has done one thing that means I can't vote for him. He has announced the policies he would introduce were he elected. I do not want a leader who decides on policy; I want a leader who will champion and implement the policies decided on by the Labour Party. So do the majority of party members, and that, above all else, is why Corbyn will be re-elected.

Camaraderie

"Socialism involves a process of striving to advance the goals that define it." - Ralph Miliband

So, Epictetus old chap, what do you think about all this Jeremy Corbyn stuff then? Well, as it happens, I have been giving this some thought. Obviously I have no greater qualifications for having an opinion than having first joined the Labour party on the day after Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, but nevertheless I do have them. Opinions.

Firstly, I have long adhered to the view that the parliamentary Labour party should be representing the views of the wider Labour party and its members rather than dictating policy itself. Should MPs wish to belong to a party where decisions are taken at the top and adhered to with iron discipline all the way down to the foot soldiers (a term I use deliberately) then I suggest they join Sinn Fein.

On the other hand, Corbyn really isn't cutting the mustard. He is, or at least it seems to me, treating the job as some sort of inconsequential adjunct to his normal activities of supporting and publicising various worthy progressive causes. Despite the fact that I agree with most of what he says, that isn't what I want him to do. What is required is someone to organise and deploy an effective opposition to the apalling people currently making an appalling mess of running the country.

And then, and by no means least, what about the workers? The one generally accepted point about the situation in Britain today is that at an ever increasing pace the benefits of society are accruing to a small group of people and everyone else is feeling the pain. Our right wing government promises more of the same disguised behind a facade of disingenuous scaremongering, scapegoating, authoritarianism and indifference. What the country needs is a cogent left-of-centre alternative. All the PLP appear to offer the country is to not be the Tories, while at the same time asserting that the only way to get elected is to be very much like the Tories anyway. For all his faults - which are many - Corbyn at least offers such an alternative vision. In response the only thing that the PLP can say is that their not-Tory offering would be more likely to be accepted if put forward by not-Corbyn.

If, somewhere in the PLP, someone exists who can bring together under one banner the MPs (in their current guise of the political wing of the Economist magazine; socially liberal and economically conservative), the Labour party in the country (socially liberal and righteously socialist economically), and the traditional Labour voting white working class (socially conservative and subconsciously dirigiste economically if one is kind; bigotted and ignorant if one is realistic) then let he or she declare themselves. We all stand ready to be inspired and led on to the new Jerusalem. Sadly, I do not believe such a person exists.

So, there you have it; many opinions, but no solutions.

And at last ends the age of cant

Politics, which was meant to have been driven out by culture in this blog, has obviously loosened the catch on its Browning, because it's back. Two short pieces worth reading about Jezza's victory are here and, er, in the new edition of Private Eye which you'll either have to pay for or read for free in W.H. Smith. If the latter, and you need to find it quickly before the staff spot what you're up to, then it's the first item in the HP Sauce column on page 11.

I don't sing no national anthem

I have been to London once more (it rained) and, yet again, Virgin maintained their 100% record for cancelled and delayed trains, plus sneaking in an extra 'socket with no power' just to pour salt in the wounds. I arrived home in the middle of the night via Derby.

For some reason I have got into the habit of recording boardgames played monthly in arrears. I would like to break that, but time doesn't permit me to do it now. Can I therefore just say that I have now had a chance to try the Air Marshall expansion to Quartermaster General and damn fine it is too. However, my opinion should be viewed with a slight reservation because despite playing twice I never used either of the two newly introduced mechanics. These are unsurprisingly air forces plus Bolster cards, which are essentially Response cards played directly from the hand. But observing others using them and listening to their comments convinced me that the expansion improves an already excellent game. For the record I won once as the Soviet Union (where I did nothing except keep building armies in the Ukraine while the US saved the world) and lost once as Japan (where I captured China, India, Australia and the Middle East and still ended up on the losing side; God only knows what the Germans and Italians were up to).

Now, this is an anthem:

Jez we can

Absolutely no on has asked me how I intend to vote in the Labour leadership election. I admire your restraint. However, it has done you no good because I am going to tell you anyway. I voted for Jeremy Corbyn of course.

The one aspect of this whole process that has worried me more than any other - and believe me there has been much to make me unhappy - is the Lilliputian nature of those standing. When I first became interested and active in politics, the Labour Party was led by heavyweights such as Harold Wilson, Dennis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Barbara Castle and many others. In 1997 as well as Blair and Brown there was the fierce intellect of Robin Cook plus others of gravitas such as Jack Straw, Mo Mowlam, Donald Dewar etc. Today, just to pick out two of the many pygmies involved, we have Chris Leslie posturing over his refusal to serve under the democratically elected leader of the party and Caroline Flint astonishingly having the gall (and lack of self awareness) to put herself forward to be its deputy leader. I choose to highlight those two in particular because I've had extensive personal dealings with both. Leslie is both patronising and arrogant, without either fault being excused by his experience or abilities, while Flint is, let's be blunt, a cretin. It's all very sad. And things appear to be no better in the other parties, except perhaps for the SNP.

I shall finish with a story showing that back in the day even the lightweights had more substance. It concerns George Brown, now largely forgotten, but in the 1960s the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Foreign Secretary and a drinker of heroic proportions. On a tour of South America he is supposed to have attended a British Embassy reception where his eye was caught by a figure in a red gown, whom he promptly asked to dance. "No sir," came the reply "I shall not dance with you. Firstly, you are very drunk; secondly, the music the orchestra is playing is the Peruvian national anthem; and thirdly, I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima".