(Jacinda illustrations from John Moore facebook page)
Jacinda – Labour’s most pleasant leader
Jacinda’s plan of hitting workers with more indirect tax
Jacinda’s party and bourgeois respectability
and for our wider collection of articles on Labour see: Redline on the Labour Party
by Don Franks (Rewrite of Blind Alfred Reed song)
There was never a time when everything was cheap
But these days the cost of living is so steep
If you’re stuck on a benefit
You just know that you’ll be hit
Tell me – how can the poor folks stand such times and live?
Meritia used her platform for the poor
Like Oliver Twist, please sir, we want some more
The bourgeoisie wouldn’t let that ride
She was duly crucified
Tell me – how can the poor folks stand such times and live?
Not so long ago , Labour was little lead
Now everywhere you look is blazing red
Well, you can believe the dazzling spin
Just remember what class you’re in
Tell me – how can the poor folks stand such times and live?
Now in a few more days, we all get to vote
They say that means we’re all in the same boat
parliaments for the smug well dressed
Its not there for the dispossessed
Tell me – how can the poor folks stand such times and live?
Thomas Suarez, State of terror: how terrorism created modern Israel, London: Skyscraper Publications, 2016, pp418, £20. Reviewed by Tony Greenstein.
The state of Israel prides itself on being at the forefront of the ‘war against terror’ and the war on Islam and it is this which makes Israel the darling of Europe’s far right. But this book documents how the Israeli state was born in a wave of terror that makes Palestinian guerrilla groups seem like children at play.
Terror was remorselessly directed at the indigenous Palestinians by the three main Zionist militias – the Labour Zionist Haganah and its Palmach shock-troops; the revisionist Irgun, a split-off from Haganah in 1931 (Haganah Bet); and Lehi or the Stern Gang, a breakaway from Irgun in August 1940. The Irgun was commanded by Menachem Begin, who in 1977 was elected prime minister of Israel. Lehi, which parted from Irgun on the question of continuing the war against the British, was initially commanded by Avraham Stern and later a triumvirate, which included future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir (1983-84, 1986-92). Lehi distinguished itself by making two proposals in 1940 for a military pact with Nazi Germany against the British!
Suarez’s book is based on copious research from the Public Record Office at Kew. A clue to this book’s importance is the fierce campaign waged by the Zionist movement against it and its author. In Cambridge the Zionists managed to get a meeting relating to it cancelled.1 In Portsmouth the Zionists enlisted the aid of the Council’s Prevent officer, Charlie Pericleous, in order to put pressure on venues to cancel such talks. Presumably opposing Zionism makes you an ‘extremist’ and therefore a potential terrorist – a good example of how anti-terror laws are used to attack free speech. A talk at the School of Oriental and African Studies was disrupted by a group of Zionists led by Jonathan Hoffman, a well known activist, former Zionist Federation official and someone who has no problem with working with fascist and anti-Semitic groups, such as the English Defence League.
A talk held at the House of Lords on December 15 2016, hosted by Baroness Tonge, was subject to the same bogus complaints of anti-Semitism (on March 15 2017 an ethics committee of the House of Lords dismissed the allegations as baseless).
The Daily Mail, the paper which waged a campaign against Jewish immigration from Nazi Germany and tsarist Russia, became (more…)
Epitomising sanctimonious bourgeois respectability
by Phil Duncan
Labour is, politically, a respectable bourgeois party.
Sociologically, it is peopled largely by respectable liberal middle class people. Just take a look at the backgrounds of Labour MPs, the party’s top managers and new folks on the Labour party list for September.
They are overwhelmingly people who are thoroughly removed from the reality of poverty and people struggling to make ends meet.
They want all the poor people – people struggling to survive on the smell of an oily rag – to be respectably bourgeois like themselves. Such well-behaved poor people can then be grateful supplicants, looked after by the patronising Labour do-gooders.
And poor people who help themselves – like to a few extra bucks to feed their kids, as Metiria Turei did – are to be roundly condemned by respectable bourgeois like Jacinda Ardern and her idiot fan club.
Reminds me of the (more…)
Below is the text of a talk delivered by Dani in Dunedin on Friday, July 21.
by Dani Sanmugathasan
Good evening! My name is Dani Sanmugathasan, and I am a member of the British Marxist and Leninist organisation called the Revolutionary Communist Group. The following talk will be on the topic of ‘Corbynmania’ – the opportunist phenomenon that’s swept through the labour movements in core economies over the last two years – and a good place to start is at the events in London earlier this month.
INTRODUCTION
“Oh, Je-re-my Cor-byn!” rang out the chants of many on the streets of London on the 1st of July at the People’s Assembly’s ‘Tories Out’ march. The People’s Assembly, Momentum, Radical Housing Network, the Socialist Workers Party, the Stop the War Coalition, the Socialist Party, and the large trade unions (PCS, RMT, CWU, Unison, Len McCluskey’s Unite the Union…) were all rallying round the Labour Party leader, the holy Son of Attlee, the man who would save Britain from the iron grip of Tory austerity.
But beside these organisations, a distinct second current of marchers – composed of such organisations as Class War, the Focus E15 Mothers, Lesbians & Gays Support the Migrants, Architects for Social Housing, Movement For Justice, the Revolutionary Communist Group, and trade unions like the IWGB – led a different chant: “Labour, Tory, same old story!” These groups made (more…)
No-one on the anti-capitalist left in this country today puts forward a case that Labour is on the side of the working class. There are certainly people who call themselves ‘socialist’ who do, but they are essentially liberals with vested interests in Labourism – often for career reasons.
Nevertheless, there are certainly sections of the anti-capitalist left who, in practice, retain illusions in Labour. Some think Labour is still, at its core, some kind of “workers’ party” and that it is therefore permissible to vote for it and call on others to vote for it. Or to take sides in Labour leadership elections. Or to invite Labour speakers to speak at their educational conferences. Or to demonise National in such a way that points clearly to support for Labour, without actually saying so.
Even on the anti-capitalist left, there are also some illusions about the first Labour government. And illusions about the early Labour Party from its founding in 1916 to the formation of the first Labour government.
It is a form of comfort politics. Just as some infants require comforters, a left which hasn’t yet grown up and been prepared to face the harsh realities of the 21st century capitalist world requires the comfort of thinking that there was once a mass force for socialism in this country and that it was the early Labour Party.
In fact, there has never been a mass force for socialism in New Zealand. There were certainly revolutionary elements in this country – marxists, anarchists, syndicalists – in the early 1900s and there were far more of them then, when New Zealand only had a million people, than there are today when the country has 4.5 million people. One of the functions of the early Labour Party was to destroy these revolutionary elements, in part by mopping them up and sucking them into Labour, transforming them into harmless social democrats. Where they couldn’t do this, they worked to marginalise them and destroy their organisations.
All the while, through the 1920s, Labour moved rightwards, becoming more and more oriented to saving and running the system than getting rid of it. Labour was always far more hostile to the anti-capitalist left than it was to capitalism. And, of course, the early Labour Party staunchly advocated for the White New Zealand policy, indicated that they preferred a divided and politically weakened working class – ie one more likely to turn to Labour as its saviour – than a united, politically powerful working class which didn’t need the Labour Party.
Over the five years that this blog has existed, we have run a lot of articles on Labour, including some major, lengthy pieces. Below are many of the major ones but, for a full list, go to the Labour Party NZ category on the left-hand side of the blog home page.
Labour on immigration – from bad to worse
Political donations and the National-Labour siblings
Labour’s immigrant bashing has a human cost
What every worker should know about Labour’s 1987 Labour Relations Act
A comment on Labour’s ‘Ready to Work’
Latest opinion poll – Labour just can’t catch a break
The truth about Labour: a bosses’ party
First Labour government wanted ‘Aryan’ immigrants, not Jewish refugees from the Nazis
Labour’s introduction of peacetime conscription and the fight against it
1949 Carpenters’ dispute: Labour and the bosses versus the workers
More Labour anti-Chinese racism and the left tags along behind them still
Anti-working class to its core: the third Labour government (1972-75)
Labour’s legal leg-irons – thanks to fourth Labour government
Some further observations on the fourth Labour government
Workers, unions and the Labour Party: unravelling the myths
For a campaign for union disaffiliation from the Labour Party
Labour’s leadership contest: confusions and illusions on the left
Recalling the reign of Helen Clark
Income and wealth inequality unchanged by last Labour government
Darien Fenton at the fantastic conference
New Labour Party general-secretary indicative of party’s managerial capitalism
Why Labour wasn’t worth the workers’ ticks
Chris Trotter’s false recovered memory syndrome
Union movement gathers for ‘fairness at work’; Labour gathers missionaries
The paperback version of The City: London and the Global Power of Finance, is released today. This edition contains a sixteen-page Afterword on the following topics:
These develop and update points raised before.
With a cover price of £10.99 and US$16.95 in the global book market, the paperback version of The City is currently available at the following prices:
Verso, £7.69
Amazon.co.uk, £9.98
Amazon.com, $11.52
An eBook is also available.
Do your own arbitrage!
