The existing third force having collapsed, a vacancy now exists.
The coalition of the Tankies, the Trots and the Islamists has been proved right on Afghanistan (about which much of the public always did have grave misgivings), always spoke for 90 per cent of the country on Iraq, and is being proved right in having articulated the widely held reservations about Libya. It will be spectacularly correct if we are so spectacularly stupid as to go to war against Iran.
In 2005, a parliamentary seat was in fact captured, albeit by a candidate who was not himself either a Marxist or a Muslim, by having Trotskyist students deliver Islamist leaflets that they could not read. Had George Galloway been more diligent an MP, and had he never gone into the Big Brother house, then not only would that seat have been retained in 2010, but several more would have been added to it.
All because those paid public money to provide an Official Opposition have been grossly derelict of that duty for 10 years and counting. Stalinism, Trotskyism and Islamism have, when acting in unison, been made credible because their activists have happened to be a tiny number of that great mass of the population which held certain views, views which were nevertheless afforded no other political vehicle. That is about to happen again, and on its biggest scale yet.
Over the last decade, the New Left Establishment has been unable to deal with many things: how to do, or how it could with any consistency not do, for political Islam what it had defined itself by doing for environmentalism, feminism, homosexualism, Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism; the neoliberalism and neoconservatism to which so many of its own members had come to adhere; and the re-emergence of those who had moved away from conventional Stalinism, Maoism or Trotskyism hardly, if at all, but who were, with the Islamists, the only people bothering to lead any resistance to the neoliberal and neoconservative tyranny, even as globalisation in general and European federalism in particular, causes particularly beloved of the New Left, have collapsed altogether since 2008.
Unless we want the future, or indeed the present, to be fought out between, on the one hand, the Red-Green Alliance of Old Leftists and Islamists, and, on the other hand, the Red-Brown Alliance of New Leftists and the New Rightists who shilled for Pinochet's Chile and for apartheid South Africa, then we need to energise and activate the forces now even more marginalised and excluded than environmentalism, feminism, homosexualism, Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism once were: the views and voices of trade unionists, of co-operators and other mutualists, of working-class patriots, of orthodox Catholics, of attendees at the black churches, and of so many others who reach back to the Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and other roots of the Labour Movement.
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Any news on the Kamm and Co response to your impending book?
ReplyDeleteWhy would there be, necessarily? If theirs never materialises, then that will reflect only on them and on him; on the Red-Brown Alliance.
ReplyDeleteThese days the leaflets are in English and accuse leading local Lib Dems of being gay.
ReplyDeleteThey are distributed in Muslim areas as official Labour leaflets on behalf of an old mate of yours by the staff of a new mate of yours. Your new mate bussed them all the way from London to Leicester on council time to do the leafleting and got special thanks at the victory party when your old mate won. Like you, your new mate has been expelled from Labour and has not been readmitted.
Your old mate, so publicly grateful to your new one for his homophobic Third World rabble rousing, has just been made a whip within a few months of entering Parliament by his own old mate, Ed Miliband. Your new mate pledged his support for Ed Miliband at that victory party, but like you that is not enough to make him rejoin Labour. Despite his close links via London Citizens (more mates of yours) to Lord Glasman (another mate of yours) and Blue Labour (still more mates of yours), with their immediate access to Ed Miliband.
Instead, he runs a separate party, economically leftist, socially Islamist, Bengali communalist, operating through industrial and municipal machines in the East End, half in and half out of the Labour Party. With clear links via Blue Labour, the Whips' Office and the Leader's Office to your motley crew: economically leftist, socially Catholic fundamentalist or fellow travelling, British nationalist, operating through industrial and municipal machines in Co. Durham, half in and half out of the Labour Party.
That is before we start about his links to Bangladesh and other places, or yours to the Middle East, or yours via Neil Clark to Eastern Europe, the Middle East and South America.
I want my party back. At least I am still in it. He is not, Neil Clark is not and neither are you. David Miliband for Leader to expel everyone associated with Blue Labour and purge the London Labour Party as well as the right wing faction that previously ran Derwentside Council and has persistently refused to respect the validity of your expulsion, treating you like some sort of Jacobite heir waiting to be restored.
"I want my party back" is the cry of the US PUMAs who supported Hillary Clinton for President. Is that what we are seeing in Britain, the appearance of people like them in relation to David Miliband? There are all sorts of similarities so maybe we are.
ReplyDeleteDavid, your many writings on this theme, online and forthcoming in print, would be a shameless pitch for Deputy Leader under whoever succeeds Ed if you were already an MP or even if you were already a born again Labour party member. In your present position outside parliament and the party, I do not know what the word is, shameless hardly begins to cover it.