Saturday 13 September 2008

And So To Siobhain McDonagh

Among others today.

I cannot do better than report the reaction of Derek Draper on Newsnight. Draper, who (like Newsnight's other sofa-monkeys Peter Hyman, Daniel Finkelstein and Olly Grender) has never condescended to seek election to anything in his life, dismissed McDonagh's concerns as "a spasm".

Mere MPs like her don't matter. Voters don't matter. They might as well all stay at home next time as vote for any of the three main parties (including the SNP, as wholly owned a subsidiary of the Tories nationally as the Tories are of it in Scotland).

After all, whereas McDonagh has been sacked merely for availing herself of her right under Labour's Constitution to request a piece of paper, James Purnell has not been sacked for failing to rebuff the public offer of his current job in a Cameron Cabinet, nor has Andrew Adonis been sacked for failing to rebuff Cameron's public offer of his current boss's job. Read over that last bit again, and give it time to sink in.

9 comments:

  1. Actually, Danny Finkelstein stood as SDP candidate for Brent East in 1987, and Conservative candidate for Harrow East in 2001.

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  2. I sit corrected.

    Perhaps he should have done an Adonis, from the SDP through the Lib Dems to a Labour peerage and red box, with a Cameron Cabinet seat to follow?

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  3. Labour will repeat the disaster of 1983 - but without the SDP, who were a significant factor in Labour doing so badly. Aside from the Falklands Factor, the state-corporate media campaign against the Labour party did a lot of damage. Why was the SDP formed, you ask? Well in 1981 the Labour conference agreed that capitalism wasn't much cop for working people seeing as the lack of democratic control and the mass unemployment wrecked lives and ripped families apart... Rather than fight their pro-capitalist corner, the splitters got a capitalist to fund their party.

    And would you believe it, early SDP supporters-turned-Labour MPs include Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson?

    Much has been made of the Militant Tendency operating within Labour. But it's influence was more ideological than organisational. For a successful entrist plot, consider New Labour. Now that Cameron's Tories are in the ascendant, the project is being terminated by one of its founders - the meeting of Blairite MPs apparently took place at Blair's house...

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  4. I've just received this news item in my inbox....

    NEW PARTY STALLS AT THE START

    A new political party is today at the centre of an embarrassing political storm. The British People's Alliance Party has failed to complete the necessary paperwork to field candidates in the 2009 European Elections.

    The BPA was launched in 2008 by its leader and founder David Lindsay with the stated aim of contesting elections to the European Parliament in 2009. However, the Electoral Commission has confirmed that the party has failed to provide a statement of its intention to contest European Elections. http://registers.electoralcommission.org.uk/regulatory-issues/regpoliticalparties.cfm?frmGB=1&frmPartyID=848&frmType=partydetail

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  5. Not what the deal old Electoral Commission has told me, dear boy...

    (I get on suprisingly well, I have to say. They even sent me a get well soon, which seems to suggest that they are regular readers of this blog.)

    Charlie, Militant was a sideshow. It hardly existed beyond Merseyside. Derek Hatton was just a newspaper's dream come true, that's all. The real entryists were elsewhere. And we can all see where they ended up.

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  6. I agree David, but I don't think they are unrepentant Marxists, as you sometimes suggest. If a Marxist has abandoned the class struggle and no longer champions working people - they can hardly be described as a Marxist.

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  7. Of course they can. It's about the ends, by any means available. Class struggle was one such means in its day. But that was all that it ever was: a means, available at the time.

    The end - of destroying the family, private property and the State (none of which can exist without the other two) - is completely unchanged.

    When were Marxists ever really concerned about working people? On the contrary, they always scorned things like the Welfare State, workers' rights, full employment, local government and Parliament.

    And they still do.

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  8. David, I am a marxist.

    I want workers' rights, full employment, the welfare state, local govt, and parliamentary democracy.

    I don't want to destroy the family - my family was broken up by the high unemployment & financial stresses of the 80s. I want families to be able to spend more time together - parents with their children, youngsters with their elders.

    I don't want to expropropriate people's cars or houses or nationalise their possessions; I simply want the nation's wealth to be democratically controlled and used for the benefit of the people.

    I don't want to abolish the state, I want it to be on the side of working people.

    So, just as it would be wrong for me to assume, a priori, that you are as a Catholic somehow against equal rights for women & LGBT people it is wrong to make assumptions about my concern for our class.

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  9. I don't see how you are, in that case. From Marx and Engels onwards, the aim has been that these things should eventually wither away.

    The things that we both support were and are scorned (entirely accurately) as devices for saving them, both directing and by preventing a revolution.

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