What’s left of the Left?

I turned out to the splendour of the ICA’s Nash Room on a Monday night for the same reason as I assumed other people would go – to see that traitor of the left Nick Cohen publicly crucified on the painted stucco walls. The title was a ruse, the 1968 New Left sub-plot merely to draw this Quisling out into the open to be held to account for his support for the invasion of Iraq.
To fast forward to the end of the event the only thing keeping me awake is the desire to ask the panel how we’ve managed to talk about the left for nearly two hours without mentioning the working class once. Not once did Hilary Wainwright, Mick Hume or Cohen mention the working class. Martin Kettle talked about how the New Left of 1968 was a rejection of workerism – well as an Oxford grad that would have appealed wouldn’t it.

Nick Cohen predictably enough saw it as the point at which the left dabbled with the dark forces with the non-western extreme right such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Mick Hume seemed to think the left owed its inheritance to the Enlightenment.

None of this was a left that I recognised. My inheritance came via my grandfather who went from the coalmines of Co. Durham to the trenches at Vimy Ridge and back to shifts in the Wycombe paper mills. I’d grown up thinking my political inheritance went back through the Trade Unions (another word not used) to the Diggers and the Peasants Revolt via religious non-conformists.

It ended up, contributions from the floor included, as posh people talking about the Third World and postmodernism, intervention, environmentalism and multiculturalism. Nobody mentioned class or property or ownership. These were the bedrock of the left, not interventionism. Not Iraq – I know plenty of people down in Devon who are pro-hunt and anti-war, bloody hell even the Daily Mail are against the war now, it’s hardly a left issue. But class is a Left issue, when Nick Cohen bangs the drum for war it's working class men who'll fight it, just as my step-grandfather did in Iraq in the 1920's (before seeing out his days in the engineering works).

The question I was left with at the end, was not to Nick Cohen about how he lost the plot and joined the Neo-Cons and became one of the people he writes about who calls themselves Left-wing whilst supporting the far right. It wasn’t to Mick Hume the supposed Lefty who takes the Murdoch dollar. But to all of them, was this New Left legacy that they supposedly represent a Non-Left, a splintering into bourgeois single issue groups, the politics of the farmers market, a smug belief in property and investment and that we’re all better off than we used to be.

I withdraw, frustrated, to the pub with Jerry (we met at Hilary's 'Socialist' paper in '92 - I made tea and opened the post) and over the next couple of hours and pints (excuse the typos, blame the Stella) found a left that we recognise, one in which the event of '68 are a blip. We talk about Venezuela not in starry eyed, distant terms but as "well if they can do it why can't we?".

Whilst you're here why not have a look at Islingtongue>Leytonstongue

No 10 rejects police state claim

Tony Blair has rejected claims that the UK is a "police state for Muslims" as "categorically wrong".
Abu Bakr, who was arrested, questioned and then released without charge over an alleged kidnap plot, made the remarks on BBC Two's Newsnight. But the prime minister's official spokesman said anyone arrested in a police state would not have been freed and allowed to appear on television. He said: "It is a gross caricature of the political process in this country." Chancellor Gordon Brown described Mr Bakr's comments as "unacceptable".
Commons leader Jack Straw also attacked the claims during business questions in the Commons.

Methinks they doth protest too much!
When was the last time that the PM, the Chancellor, and Jack Straw all spoken out on something within hours - and all agreed! Well not since the Celebrity Big Brother racism row, and that was the first time.

Politics in Leytonstone

At one entrance to Leytonstone tube station the Socialist Workers have a stall with their papers on and a lady is giving out fliers for a meeting organised by Respect starring Gorgeous George Galloway MP (I thought the SWP didn’t believe in bourgeois democracy). Titled "British Politics after Blair", it’s taking place at the al Badr Hall on Lea Bridge Road on Friday 9th.

Through the underpass at the other entrance a member of the Labour Party is giving out leaflets (no stall note) entitled "Labour, the Leadership and the War. This meeting boasts 3 MPs (Labour have an unshakeable belief in bourgeois democracy) and takes place at the Welsh Church on Leytonstone High Road.

The leaflet, and the man giving them out boast that "all three MPs are anti-war". You know our democracy is a bad state when our elected representatives try to impress us with the fact that they voted against an illegal war against a sovereign state that has cost the lives of over 600,000 people – surely any sane person would do the same.

What else can I read about the politics of the nation from this encounter? Both groups seem to gravitate to religious buildings. Respect/SWP to an Islamic venue adjoined to a mosque, in order to show that they are no Islamophobes and can communicate with the ‘Arab Street’ (they never believed in gender politics anyway).

Labour are drawn back to their Celtic roots, still more comfortable with Methodism than Marx.
What ever happened to Working Men’s Clubs?

RAF in Iraq in the 1920's

The Guardian reports that the American forces in Iraq are concerned that Iraqi insurgents (who would be called 'freedom fighters' in any other scenario) have acquired anti-aircraft missiles. This development is deemed newsworthy enough to make the lead story in the International section of the one of Britain's leading papers. Now considering that the US and Britain have been dropping bunker busters (a "final solution type weapon" in the words of one American GI), cluster bombs, cruise missiles and lord knows what else on the Iraqis for the last four-and-a-half years as well as strafing them with machine gun and rocket fire from helicopter gunships it is quite incredible that it has taken them this long to get hold of something to hit back with.

Reading about such stuff always make me think of discussing the first Gulf War with my Step-Grandfather, Sid, who of course corrected anyone calling the 1991 conflict the "first Gulf War" because he'd been fighting with the RAF in Iraq in the 1920's. Sid's memories of his time in what was then called Mesopotamia were almost wistful and happy and incredibly lucid for a man in his 90's. He used to correct the newsreaders pronunciation of Iraqi towns and villages. He told me how his mission was to sit in the back of his By-Plane and shoot at Kurds in the mountains.
So in fact, it's taken the Iraqis about 80 years to get fed up with having people drop things on them from the sky. Now that's what The (so-called left-leaning) Guardian should be writing about.

This story in the same paper put a smile on my face:
A diplomatic gaffe marred the inauguration of a China-financed stadium in Grenada when a band performed Taiwan's national anthem.
Chinese ambassador Qian Hongshan and scores of Chinese workers who built the new £20m Queen's Park stadium as a gift from Beijing were visibly uncomfortable as Taiwan's anthem echoed inside the 20,000-seat venue on Saturday.
Describing it as a blunder, Grenada's prime minister, Keith Mitchell, pledged an investigation into how the Royal Grenada Police Band could have prepared the anthem of Taiwan instead of China.
I only hope that rather than being an innocent mistake it was a politically motivated act of subversion.