Wednesday 22 August 2018

Bad Enough?

According to one of Twitter's bitter lemons, "Bad enough David Lindsay wants to be @chevenement and might already have links. But he is really @larouchepac. Yet he is on 30-30-30 with @LauraPidcockMP and the Tories. Any one of them could have been First Past the Post but @DPJHodges will beat them all."

Well, the comparison with Jean-Pierre Chevènement is nothing if not flattering, not least because he himself has sometimes been compared to one of my own great political heroes, Peter Shore.

Chevènement co-founded the French Socialist Party. He resigned as Defence Minister in order to oppose the Gulf War. He campaigned against Maastricht and against all subsequent European integration. He refused an alliance with those who were prepared to appease Corsican separatism. He has always opposed French participation in the NATO command structure, or any other subordination of French foreign policy to that of the United States.

Chevènement is an opponent of finance capitalism, and a stinging critic of the Socialist Party's capitulation to "neoliberal globalist dogma". He recognises that recession was and is the result of austerity, including the austerity that was imposed in order to save the euro, which has always opposed, during the debt crisis.

Chevènement is a Keynesian, a pragmatic protectionist, and a proponent of the reindustrialisation of his country as part of an economic "deglobalisation". He understands that public services and welfare provisions are impossible without a strong productive base. He supports civil nuclear power. He is a major figure in the fostering of links with Russia. He works hard to build alliances with those, such as Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who have arrived at similar conclusions from different ideological starting points.

And Chevènement is a longstanding enemy of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, an opponent of the legalisation of drugs, a critic of the video surveillance of the public and of France's Hadopi law to restrict file-to-file sharing, a proponent of an education system based on the transmission of knowledge from the teacher to the pupil on the basis of the former's authority, an advocate of the cultural assimilation that is always a two-way process, an opponent of positive discrimination, and an implacable foe of more-or-less separatist tendencies.

In Britain, those last would abandon the huge numbers of people who desperately need the freedom and equality that come from the democratic political control of the commanding heights of the economy, but who will always live under Conservative councils, or regional assemblies were there to be such things, in the arc that stretches from the Fens, down through Essex and Kent, along the South Coast, and up across the West Country.

All in all, and although there are issues on which I do not agree with him such as secularism or the inherent evil of carbon dioxide, I have been called a lot worse than a younger version of Jean-Pierre Chevènement.

But what about being called a much younger version of Lyndon LaRouche? And yes, he is still alive. Well, I have never believed that the Queen was a drug dealer, or that Henry Kissinger had been a Soviet agent of influence. As with Harold Wilson, against whom that allegation was also made, the Soviets ought to have demanded their money back.

But then, nor have I ever believed the official version of events in relation to Orgreave, Westland, or Hillsborough. Or any of all manner of claims that have been made by, or in support of, the Clintons. Or in the murder of 100,000 military age males in Kosovo. Or in the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and in their capacity for deployment within 45 minutes. Or in Saddam Hussein's feeding of people into a giant paper shredder, and in his attempt to obtain uranium from Niger. Or in an imminent genocide in Benghazi, in Gaddafi's feeding of Viagra to his soldiers in order to encourage mass rape, and in his intention to flee to Venezuela. Or in an Iranian nuclear weapons programme. Or in Assad's gassing of Ghouta, as if that were an undisputed fact. And so on.

The people who have propounded those fantasies were doing so a very great deal more recently than LaRouche was making his claims about Kissinger or the Queen, and some of them are still peddling the Wilson theory to this day, along with suggestions that the Sino-Soviet split was faked, that the Soviet Union somehow never really collapsed, and much else besides. They are not without access to very highest levels of the present Government, and they are directly responsible for the campaign against Jeremy Corbyn both within and beyond the Labour Party.

No claim made in the course of that campaign is any less credible than anything that LaRouche has ever said, and those claims are being made now, not in the 1970s or the 1980s. In that latter decade, LaRouche's advocacy of AIDS quarantining was mainstream comment. We know better now. But who did at the time? Critics raise the questions around the death of 22-year-old Jeremiah Duggan in March 2003. But they themselves have far more questions to answer about the deaths of far greater numbers of young people, largely young men.

LaRouche opposes any attempt to impeach Donald Trump, or otherwise to remove him this side of the 2020 Presidential Election. He is right to do so. The first such move would in any case fail in the Senate, and any variation on the second would result in appalling civil unrest. LaRouche scathingly rejects all talk of Russian hacking or what have you. He is of course entirely correct to do so.

LaRouche wants to restore the Glass-Steagall division between investment banking and retail banking, and he wants to return to the Hamiltonian American System, as expanded by the American School, which made America the world's largest economy, with the world's highest standard of living: large amounts of federal credit, at low interest rates and over a long term, to build great national projects, notably enormous expansions in infrastructure, which then pay for themselves many times over.

America urgently needs all of that, and so does Britain. Like America, Britain urgently needs industrial protection through tariffs or subsidies; I prefer the latter, where possible. Like America, Britain urgently needs targeted government investment to improve infrastructure on a colossal scale. And like America, Britain urgently needs a National Bank that promotes the growth of productive enterprises rather than speculation. Brexit offers Britain these opportunities at last.

LaRouche insists that economic growth must deliver high wages, with absolute priority given to industrial and agricultural protection over finance capital, and with the protection of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. He advocates co-operation with the BRICS countries, and integration into the Belt and Road Initiative. He has no time for those whose response to climate change is retreat from human progress. He is committed to real mass education, providing the general population with access to the best that has been known and thought. And he is as implacably hostile to drugs as he has always been, viscerally contending against the stupefaction of the workers, the poor and the youth. What's not to like about being compared to that?

I am no fan of the City of London, either. I would demand the reassertion of democratic political control over the Bank of England, including that the approval of the House of Commons be required for changes to interest rates, and I would demand the assertion of democratic political control over the City of London, with a Glass-Steagall division between investment banking and retail banking.

I would close all tax havens under British jurisdiction, since they have the option of independence if they did not like it. The entire concept of non-domiciled tax status must be abolished. As a member of the House of Commons, I would campaign most actively for supporters of economic equality to be elected to the City of London Corporation, to the States of Jersey, to the States of Guernsey, to Tynwald, and to the legislatures of the British Overseas Territories.

And I am also rather keener on the British monarchy in theory than I am in practice. It keeps sweet the people who need to be kept sweet, but I am entirely at a loss as to why it has that effect on them. What has it ever done for them? I would transfer all non-ceremonial exercises of the Royal Prerogative, including Royal Assent, to six, seven, eight or nine of nine Co-Presidents, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the top nine elected to hold office for eight years.

As for LaRouche's latest cause, that of fusion power, well, we all laughed at what seemed to be his obsession with colonising Mars, but our species is now in the earliest stages of that very process. Fusion power looks very exciting to me. Like the space exploration that it could power, in fact. Think big, or there would have been no cars. Think big, or there would have been no railways. Think big, or there would have been no wheel.

As with Chevènement, and if anything even more so, I have very considerable differences with LaRouche, as my own position makes clear. Not least, he seems yet to have realised that his economic programme now depends on the implementation of Modern Monetary Theory, and he is instead still pining after fixed exchange rates rather than rejoicing in the opportunities that can be afforded by the free floating fiat currencies of sovereign states, if those sovereign states are governed by the right people.

But I, too, know what it is to be subjected to a malicious criminal prosecution by my political enemies, and that for expressing the above opinions. It is an honour to be compared to Jean-Pierre Chevènement. Politically, since I pass no comment here on anything else, it is not necessarily an insult to be compared to Lyndon LaRouche.

There is going to be another hung Parliament, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in in it. I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning. My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.

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