Neil Clark writes:
Anyone who argues that, as a political force, socialism is dead, ought to visit the Netherlands. The Socialist Party of the Netherlands (SP) is the fastest growing political group in the country.
They won 25 seats in the last general election - an increase of 16 seats - and made huge gains in last year's local elections. They are now the third largest party in Holland in terms of members and could well replace the Dutch Labour Party as the main alternative to the Christian Democrats.
Why are they so successful? I would suggest that it is because they are a socialist party that actually has socialist policies. They oppose the privatisation of public services, advocate higher taxes on the very wealthy and have condemned the "the culture of greed" caused by "a capitalism based on inflated bonuses and easy money". They oppose war and Nato and the nascent European superstate. They were the only left-wing Dutch party in Parliament to oppose the new EU Constitution in the 2005 referendum.
Of course the fact that they have one of the most charismatic - and photogenic - of all of European political leaders in the 41-year-old epidemiologist Agnes Kant (pictured above) does them no harm.
Part of its popularity with the voters lies in one particular policy which differentiates it from British or other European parties of the left: they oppose large scale immigration. The SP see the 'free movement of labour' as part of the neoliberal globalist package - something which benefits big business but not ordinary people. Their opposition to immigration is not based on racism - as tends to be the case with the BNP and other far-right parties in Europe - but on their socialist ideology.
A recent publication by the SP asserted that labour migration in the EU was making "more acute the contrasts between rich and poor and competition between different groups of workers within the EU". Instead of lauding the free movement of labour as other parties on the left do, the SP calls for policies "to make migration unnecessary" and for the EU funds to be used to enable poorer regions of the continent to be self-supporting.
The SP's opposition to large-scale immigration is not a recent development. In the 1980s, the party's booklet Gastarbeid en Kapitaal (Migrant Labour and Capital), denounced the migration of foreign workers into the Netherlands as a capitalist ploy to drive down wages and destroy working class solidarity.
This is a far cry from the traditional position of the British left - which despite overwhelming evidence that large-scale immigration does reduce wages - still clings to an the ideology of open borders. In doing so, they are not only complying with the wishes of big business, who for obvious reasons welcome the influx of large numbers of people from low-wage economies onto their labour market; they are also espousing a policy which is unpopular with large swathes of the electorate and which is likely to become even more unpopular as unemployment grows.
The success of the Socialist Party of the Netherlands shows that there are lots of votes to be won by an unequivocally left-wing party which has the courage and sense to oppose large-scale immigration on non-racist, anti-capitalist grounds.
Monday, 24 November 2008
Phillip Blond On Deflation
Here.
But falling prices of basic essentials and little luxuries are still fundamentally a good thing.
But falling prices of basic essentials and little luxuries are still fundamentally a good thing.
Chambliss Is A Shambles
From Right Democrat:
Tragedy struck a Georgia factory in February when combustible dust caught fire and exploded at the Imperial Sugar plant in Port Wentworth, killing 14 workers and injuring many more.
Now, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), an opponent of working families who’s in a tough runoff to defend his Senate seat, is facing questions about whether he improperly aided Imperial in its efforts to avoid the consequences of its negligence.
The Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) hit the company with $5 million in fines for “willful and egregious safety violations” over the blast. And a Senate subcommittee held a hearing in July, finding that Imperial had no plan to deal with the dangerous combustible dust and ignored warnings about plant safety.
During that hearing, Chambliss—who has received $21 thousand in campaign contributions this election cycle from the sugar industry—berated a corporate whistle-blower who exposed the dangerous conditions at the plant.
Mark Tate, an attorney representing families of two workers killed in the blast as well as two injured workers, has subpoenaed Chambliss to testify about his involvement in trying to protect Imperial Sugar from consequences of the explosion. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Chambliss is accused of interfering with the case both inside and outside of Congress.
Tate says he wants to know if Imperial Sugar executives persuaded Chambliss to sharply criticize a company whistle-blower during a July Senate hearing on the explosion. He says he also wants the senator to respond to plaintiffs’ claims that the company arranged a meeting between Chambliss and victims’ families to dissuade them from suing.
Chambliss is refusing to answer the subpoena and testify about his actions, but Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) says his claims of immunity don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Neither does the anti-worker record of Chambliss. He has opposed workers’ interests on issues like the minimum wage and overtime protection. Chambliss needs to put workers first and come clean about his relationship with Imperial Sugar.
Chambliss’ opponent in the Senate race, Jim Martin, has been endorsed by the AFL-CIO. www.martinforsenate.com
For more information on the shameless record of Saxby Chambliss, check out this website.
Tragedy struck a Georgia factory in February when combustible dust caught fire and exploded at the Imperial Sugar plant in Port Wentworth, killing 14 workers and injuring many more.
Now, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), an opponent of working families who’s in a tough runoff to defend his Senate seat, is facing questions about whether he improperly aided Imperial in its efforts to avoid the consequences of its negligence.
The Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) hit the company with $5 million in fines for “willful and egregious safety violations” over the blast. And a Senate subcommittee held a hearing in July, finding that Imperial had no plan to deal with the dangerous combustible dust and ignored warnings about plant safety.
During that hearing, Chambliss—who has received $21 thousand in campaign contributions this election cycle from the sugar industry—berated a corporate whistle-blower who exposed the dangerous conditions at the plant.
Mark Tate, an attorney representing families of two workers killed in the blast as well as two injured workers, has subpoenaed Chambliss to testify about his involvement in trying to protect Imperial Sugar from consequences of the explosion. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Chambliss is accused of interfering with the case both inside and outside of Congress.
Tate says he wants to know if Imperial Sugar executives persuaded Chambliss to sharply criticize a company whistle-blower during a July Senate hearing on the explosion. He says he also wants the senator to respond to plaintiffs’ claims that the company arranged a meeting between Chambliss and victims’ families to dissuade them from suing.
Chambliss is refusing to answer the subpoena and testify about his actions, but Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) says his claims of immunity don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Neither does the anti-worker record of Chambliss. He has opposed workers’ interests on issues like the minimum wage and overtime protection. Chambliss needs to put workers first and come clean about his relationship with Imperial Sugar.
Chambliss’ opponent in the Senate race, Jim Martin, has been endorsed by the AFL-CIO. www.martinforsenate.com
For more information on the shameless record of Saxby Chambliss, check out this website.
Sunday, 23 November 2008
Trustafarians Against Tax Cuts
I have never met an Old Etonian I didn’t like. (Admittedly, I have never knowingly met a member of the Bullingdon Club.) I shared a student house with one, who is now one of my friends on the thing Facebook of which the young people speak. I am even rooting for Ed on Last Man Standing.
But there are OEs and OEs, just as there are no doubt old Saint Paul’s boys and old Saint Paul’s boys.
Tomorrow, David Cameron and George Osborne will denounce a rise in the income tax threshold, or a reduction in VAT, or something like that. The Shadow Cabinet is known to be riven between the independently wealthy (Cameron, Osborne, that crowd) and those jumped-up oiks who have to “work” for their six, seven and eight figures per annum in the City (now a theme park maintained at public expense, but of that another time).
When the Bullingdon Boys ask about taxpayers’ money, then Brown and Darling should have no compunction is shouting back, “What’s it to you? You have colleagues who take out in bailouts so that they don’t ever become so poor that they might have to pay in. But you, Dave and Gideon, have no relationship whatever to the taxation system. So mind your own business.”
And if VAT is lowered, then the rest of us should be shouting about how it cannot be lowered any further, because the EU won’t allow it to be. There will certainly be no such shouting from the party that, as required by its own Maastricht Treaty, imposed VAT on fuel and on domestic power, and which went into the 1997 Election determined that Chancellor Ken Clarke (who would also have taken us into the Euro – thank Gordon Brown for keeping us out) would impose that Eurotax on food, too.
But there are OEs and OEs, just as there are no doubt old Saint Paul’s boys and old Saint Paul’s boys.
Tomorrow, David Cameron and George Osborne will denounce a rise in the income tax threshold, or a reduction in VAT, or something like that. The Shadow Cabinet is known to be riven between the independently wealthy (Cameron, Osborne, that crowd) and those jumped-up oiks who have to “work” for their six, seven and eight figures per annum in the City (now a theme park maintained at public expense, but of that another time).
When the Bullingdon Boys ask about taxpayers’ money, then Brown and Darling should have no compunction is shouting back, “What’s it to you? You have colleagues who take out in bailouts so that they don’t ever become so poor that they might have to pay in. But you, Dave and Gideon, have no relationship whatever to the taxation system. So mind your own business.”
And if VAT is lowered, then the rest of us should be shouting about how it cannot be lowered any further, because the EU won’t allow it to be. There will certainly be no such shouting from the party that, as required by its own Maastricht Treaty, imposed VAT on fuel and on domestic power, and which went into the 1997 Election determined that Chancellor Ken Clarke (who would also have taken us into the Euro – thank Gordon Brown for keeping us out) would impose that Eurotax on food, too.
Hazel And The Nutters?
Hazel Blears is of course quite right. Jean-Marie Le Pen once got himself as far as the second round of a Presidential Election by playing on the undeniable abandonment of the French white working class to poverty, dereliction, crime, drugs and disorder.
Maps published on the Internet in the last week show a concentration of BNP members here in County Durham, with fully one per cent visible ethnic minorities and with no asylum seekers at all, and particularly in the east of the county, where Easington was the only district in the United Kingdom to be one hundred per cent White British at the last census. Have you ever been to County Durham in general and to East Durham in particular? No, it is not multicoloured. What much of it is, is poor. Grindingly, hopelessly poor. After eleven years of “Labour” government.
There are not twelve thousand eugenicists or Holocaust-deniers in Britain today. Of course there aren’t. So now that this membership list is available, perhaps someone in academia will undertake a proper piece of research, surveying all those listed, in absolute confidence, about their political views. Just what is it that only the BNP is addressing?
We may mercifully conclude that no major party is going to adopt a policy in favour of capital punishment. It is also just as well that none is going to adopt a policy in favour of an English Parliament.
But the three great political traditions in this country have at least potential answers to the questions of loss of sovereignty (to all three of the EU, the US, and global capital), of the consequences of that loss (from the Common Fisheries Policy to the Iraq War), of the importation of a new and compliant working class that largely cannot speak English, of the abandonment of Police foot patrols, of light sentencing, of the legalisation of drugs in all but name, of the erosion of the traditional family and its values, of the way in which the traditional white working class has come to be completely ignored, of institutional deference to Islam, of the admission of a fully armed and highly active terrorist organisation to government in Northern Ireland, of devolution without majority support in Scotland and with only twenty-six per cent support in Wales, of the oppression of Wales’s English-speaking majority, and of so much else besides.
Those concerns are shared far beyond those who do, or who would ever, support the BNP. Not least, they are very widely, deeply and strongly shared within the ethnic minority communities.
Of course, if any of our existing parties were anything to do with any of the three great political traditions in this country, then (like the underlying situations giving rise to the calls for hanging or for English devolution) these problems would never, and could never, have arisen in the first place.
Maps published on the Internet in the last week show a concentration of BNP members here in County Durham, with fully one per cent visible ethnic minorities and with no asylum seekers at all, and particularly in the east of the county, where Easington was the only district in the United Kingdom to be one hundred per cent White British at the last census. Have you ever been to County Durham in general and to East Durham in particular? No, it is not multicoloured. What much of it is, is poor. Grindingly, hopelessly poor. After eleven years of “Labour” government.
There are not twelve thousand eugenicists or Holocaust-deniers in Britain today. Of course there aren’t. So now that this membership list is available, perhaps someone in academia will undertake a proper piece of research, surveying all those listed, in absolute confidence, about their political views. Just what is it that only the BNP is addressing?
We may mercifully conclude that no major party is going to adopt a policy in favour of capital punishment. It is also just as well that none is going to adopt a policy in favour of an English Parliament.
But the three great political traditions in this country have at least potential answers to the questions of loss of sovereignty (to all three of the EU, the US, and global capital), of the consequences of that loss (from the Common Fisheries Policy to the Iraq War), of the importation of a new and compliant working class that largely cannot speak English, of the abandonment of Police foot patrols, of light sentencing, of the legalisation of drugs in all but name, of the erosion of the traditional family and its values, of the way in which the traditional white working class has come to be completely ignored, of institutional deference to Islam, of the admission of a fully armed and highly active terrorist organisation to government in Northern Ireland, of devolution without majority support in Scotland and with only twenty-six per cent support in Wales, of the oppression of Wales’s English-speaking majority, and of so much else besides.
Those concerns are shared far beyond those who do, or who would ever, support the BNP. Not least, they are very widely, deeply and strongly shared within the ethnic minority communities.
Of course, if any of our existing parties were anything to do with any of the three great political traditions in this country, then (like the underlying situations giving rise to the calls for hanging or for English devolution) these problems would never, and could never, have arisen in the first place.
Hear, Oh Israel
It comes as no surprise to me that the British-Israelite Fellowship that meets on Durham’s North Road has links to the BNP. There have been more than rumours about that for years, which is why I have never indulged my idle curiosity and taken myself along to the Shakespeare Hall on a Saturday afternoon.
But the British-Israelite position is not in itself any more preposterous than the belief that the Ashkenazim, the Sephardim, the Ethiopian Jews and the rest are all one ethnic group, some members of which have presumably just been out in the sun longer than others.
Nor is it any more preposterous than the assumption that, simply because they speak Arabic and most of them are Muslims, the present non-Jewish inhabitants of the Levant are purely and simply the descendants of Arab, Muslim conquerors.
In fact, there is of course at least as much Israelite blood in the average Levantine Arab, and indeed probably a great deal more, than in the average Jew. Jews, like Palestinians and like “Anglo-Saxons”, are a thoroughly mongrel lot.
Not that it really matters. Identifying with Israel, like identifying with Greece or Rome, is about behaviour, not blood. Specifically, it is about adherence to the only true continuation of any of those three, namely the recapitulation of all of them in Jesus Christ and His Church.
But the British-Israelite position is not in itself any more preposterous than the belief that the Ashkenazim, the Sephardim, the Ethiopian Jews and the rest are all one ethnic group, some members of which have presumably just been out in the sun longer than others.
Nor is it any more preposterous than the assumption that, simply because they speak Arabic and most of them are Muslims, the present non-Jewish inhabitants of the Levant are purely and simply the descendants of Arab, Muslim conquerors.
In fact, there is of course at least as much Israelite blood in the average Levantine Arab, and indeed probably a great deal more, than in the average Jew. Jews, like Palestinians and like “Anglo-Saxons”, are a thoroughly mongrel lot.
Not that it really matters. Identifying with Israel, like identifying with Greece or Rome, is about behaviour, not blood. Specifically, it is about adherence to the only true continuation of any of those three, namely the recapitulation of all of them in Jesus Christ and His Church.
Fair Pay
Nick Cohen is infuriating. A textbook neocon most of the time, every so often he seems to move back Left, even if never for very long. And Cohen’s call today for no one in the public sector to be paid more than the Prime Minister is spot on.
Furthermore, we must ban any company from paying any employee more than ten times what it pays any other employee, with the whole public sector (including MPs and Ministers) functioning as one for this purpose, its median wage pegged permanently at the median wage in the private sector.
Furthermore, we must ban any company from paying any employee more than ten times what it pays any other employee, with the whole public sector (including MPs and Ministers) functioning as one for this purpose, its median wage pegged permanently at the median wage in the private sector.
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