Values and History

Kammiknickers in a twist because Young Labour fails to pledge fealty to NATO and to the Israeli Labor Party, neither of which has had any meaningful existence during the lifetimes of its members, and each of which has finally died. Incidentally, Kammiknickers is characteristically frivolous and ignorant in calling for supporters of Cuba to join the SWP.

NATO was only ever going to last until the Americans were no longer prepared to pretend that they could see the purpose of it, and that point has now been reached, as it would have been under either of last year's realistic Presidential candidates. The base at Bagram is the size of a respectable town, and it is now in the hands of the same Taliban who triumphantly fly Black Hawks over Kandahar, thereby demonstrating that, unlike 20 years ago, they now had people who were capable of doing so.

Kammiknickers is obsessed with Labour's role in creating NATO, but at least as instrumental were the extremely recent Nazi officers who were immediately given senior positions in its command structure. In any case, the likes of Kammiknickers have never shown the slightest interest in defending any domestic aspect of the legacy of the Attlee Government. Their beloved Blair regime brought the privatisation of the National Health Service from the outermost fringe, where Margaret Thatcher had firmly kept it, to the heart of government. And which industry that was nationalised by Attlee would Kammiknickers renationalise today?

British Jews have barely voted Labour in decades, and most of those who have done so have been opponents of the IHRA Definition. Therefore, Keir Starmer is gaining nothing in return for his loss of most other, far larger, ethnic minorities by his failure of the litmus test of one's attitude to the specific phenomenon of white violence against people of colour throughout the world, including in Britain. His ignorance has also lost Labour a million Kashmiri votes, largely in key electoral battlegrounds. Kashmir is another legacy of the disastrous overseas policy of the Attlee Government.

Between them, Meretz and Ra'am have more Members of the Knesset in the ruling coalition than Labor has. When Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid can deal directly and fruitfully with Meretz and Ra'am, then what is Labor for? As for the British Labour Party's historic links to it, I shall do Kammiknickers the courtesy of assuming an awareness of the sometime Agent of the Durham Miners' Association, General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers (Durham Area), and longstanding member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, Sam Watson.

There is a room named after Watson in the Knesset building, which is not the kind of honour that is conferred on a casual acquaintance. He conspired to close pits, he opposed all local strikes, he supported the sacking of his own due-paying members, and he secured for the Durham miners the lowest wages in the country, a situation that was not rectified until the strikes of 1972 and 1974. Good riddance to "values and history" like that.