Monday, 30 November 2015

The Case for Jeremy Corbyn.

Everyone has been, over the last decade or so, bemoaning the disengagement of ordinary folk from politics. Suddenly we have had two historic examples of the masses being motivated to join political parties en masse.
Firstly the SNP’s campaign for a Yes vote energised a nation and indeed the subsequent reaction to the UK parties now infamously broken Vow (which persuaded many undecideds to vote NO at the last minute) saw the membership of the SNP treble in a couple of weeks, with it now standing at approx. 115,000 members. Now, that’s engagement. Was it welcomed? No. because the established political class do not really want mass political engagement as it threatens to take the reins of power from their hands and actually change things that political leaders only pay lip-service to changing. God forbid the 99% gain power, eh Tristram Hunt?
Then we had the astonishing Jeremy Corbyn affair. A man who was considered so out of touch by the Labour Party grandees that they felt comfortable to condescendingly allow him onto the list for leadership of the Labour Party.  Wow. Talk about out of touch? Due to his inclusion ordinary members of the public joined Labour in an unprecedented surge. Why? Because, for the first time since John Smith, here was a figure who, when he spoke, spoke for people long discarded by the New Labour Project, discarded in favour of Tony and Peter’s new rich and powerful friends whom they considered capable of delivering more votes by editorial support than the committed Labourites could manage by persuasion.
But, as the subsequent events illustrated, these were shallow votes, votes that could disappear in an instant because while Labour might have won the votes it did not win the hearts. These were votes at a high moral price. These were votes at the editorial mercy of a man (Murdoch) who supported fully the illegal invasion of Iraq. And to those who complain that Iraq was over 12 years ago, I say, well, it’s not 12 years ago for the people of Iraq. They are still living every moment of every day with the consequences.
Many true Labour people left the party or ceased considering Labour a party worth voting for after that. Many of those who remained did so only because Labour was the least bad option. How inspiring, eh. Iraq however was just one factor. Remember the troubling scenes when an old party member was bodily lifted out of a Labour Party Conference for heckling the platform? The party members thrown out the party in the late 1990s purge? The support for Tory party policies and the surrendering of Labour party principles?
The doffing of the cap days were not only not fought against by the Blairites but actually sought after as somehow being the best protector of working people’s living standards. Let’s suspend judgement for a moment and suppose this was a misguided attempt to lessen the blows on the working class in the post-Thatcher world. Resistance was now unfashionable. Bowing to the supposedly inevitable was in.  Many who argued against this narrative were misrepresented, marginalised, excluded, maligned, defeated.
Then came Corbyn. A man who had never left the party and whose party credentials were impeccable. A man who opposed the war. A man who never ceased challenging all the weak and superficial narratives that were spun and now were unravelling. A man who garnered support from many of the people who had ceased voting years ago.
Russell Brand was castigated for daring to point out the obvious - that there was very little to choose from electorally between the main parties. In fact, there were ironically similarities with our new politics and Old-Style Soviet political system in that you could stand for election as long as you didn't challenge the status quo, the allusion suggesting that Labour and Tories were now just two wings of the same establishment party.
And now here came a man who offered an option. An opportunity for Labour to reach out to the millions it had considered unworthy of the party's attentions, to those it had forgotten, and to the millions who simply had not voted for decades. Here came a man who offered these people something that had been forbidden them for a long, long time. Hope. Hope that their environment, employment prospects, wages and conditions might be once again on the table. Hope that trillions wouldn’t be wasted on pointless weapons and wars and hope that mass murder would no longer be committed in their name. A man who is as we speak is inspiring thousands to go back out into the rain for Labour, to argue a case that has not been properly argued for a long time – the case for Labour.

Friday, 6 November 2015

Wearing of the Poppy

Militarism in all its forms is saddening. At best it is legalised barbarism, at worst it is pathetic machismo. It’s significant that some of the most sustainable progressive reforms have been influenced by fearsome opponents of militarism rather than military power. Suffragettes, Ghandi and Martin Luther King come to mind. War doesn’t achieve anything talking doesn’t. That’s why, after war, they always have to talk anyway. So why not fast forward to the talking bit?

I oppose para-militarism as well as so-called legal armies but I do not accept that any armies have moral superiority. All armies commit atrocities, whether by accident or design. All armies kill civilians, no matter what technological or moral safeguards our leaders claim are in place.

See, our leaders are not like you and me. They are playing geopolitical games where their own aims and reputations are far more important to them than mere human life.  In this military-political moral twilight, politicians become psychopaths in that they suspend all empathy with mothers of babies, of children with parents, brothers with sisters as they prepare to force a path through human life in pursuit of their sacred aims which usually are presented as “saving civilisation”, the same civilisation they are reducing to rubble and grief.

This gives some understandably a problem when it comes to the poppy. For many, especially victims of militarism, the seeming worshiping of the poppy is alienating as those telling us to wear poppies are often (though not always) unconditional supporters of British militarism. If your family or community has been abused, maimed or killed by an army supported by poppy wearers then naturally you’d feel that you were not part of the same society that has institutionalised support of the poppy.

But it depends on what the poppy means to the wearers, of which I am one. The thought that my wearing the poppy signifies support for an increasingly jingoistic war machine disgusts me. It is also obscene for a poppy to be used as a weapon by ultra-British nationalists as a weapon to beat everyone else into fealty to “our boys” and “our country”.  This was a feature of British nationalism in Ireland for many years and sadly it seems to be seeping “over the water” as Bullingdon-led Britain seeks to ensure that near worship of the Union Jack becomes a prerequisite to being considered a ‘good citizen’.

I don’t wear my poppy for those cynical hypocrites most of whom, tellingly, have never seen battle in their lives.  To me the poppy symbolises not just remembrance of loved ones passed but also of wanton waste of life, the folly of war and the need to never again let a generation of the world’s youth be buried in mud in another land far from home in pursuit of imperial aims. When I wear my poppy I am thinking of poor terrified young men being forced over the top to near certain death at the behest of a class who seemed to glory in war like it was a game.  

I’ve no beef with being British. Several close relatives of mine, generations in fact, have served in British forces. Those I was fortunate to know personally were thoroughly decent men who believed they were making the world better. They would not be approving of this co-opting of a symbol of remembrance for comrades and family being tainted as it is now when it is used as pseudo-moralistic battering ram against people reluctant to worship slaughter.