THE LEFT IS WORSE THAN BLAIR

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 18 February 2005

I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read in the past five years by leftists listing their disappointments with Tony Blair’s government. For some, it’s the war on Iraq, for others the private finance initiative or selection in schools or rights at work. I’ve written quite a few pieces along these lines myself, most of them castigating Blair for his timidity on Europe and constitutional reform.

But in truth I don’t feel particularly let down. I didn’t have great hopes of the government in the first place. And – OK, except on Europe and constitutional reform – the government has not done significantly worse than I expected.

In fact, today I’m much more disappointed with the left than I am with the government. Back in 1997, my own personal great expectation was that the left would be revived by the experience of Labour in government.

This wasn’t because I shared the Trotskyist delusion that the masses would be radicalised through suffering betrayal by perfidious social democracy. I just thought that even a boringly centrist Labour government would open up political space for the left that had been closed off by 18 years of Conservative government. As the 60s hippy guru Richard Neville said, there might be no more than an inch between Labour and the Tories, but it’s the inch in which we live.
 

After all, the left had blossomed under the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s. Those were the decades of radical workplace activism, the student revolt, the rise of the women’s movement and gay liberation, squatting, protests against the Vietnam war, the rediscovery of western Marxism.

True, it had all ended in tears, in the “winter of discontent” and Margaret Thatcher’s election victory. And true, there was plenty that was dreadful about the left in the 1960s and 1970s: the bureaucratic mindset and myopia of much of the trade union left, the lunatic Leninist sects with their revolutionary posturing, the widespread sympathy for Soviet totalitarianism, the bone-headed anti-Europeanism that dominated the Labour left, the incomprehensible jargon of Althusserian academics  –  and so I could go on.

But, hey, by 1997, the worst of the 60s and 70s left had been consigned to the dustbin of history. The Communist Party, still in 1979 the largest and most influential organisation to Labour’s left, had long since imploded. The largest part of its diaspora – the bit with the money, Democratic Left – had renounced Leninism and embraced social democracy. The various true-believer Trotskyist and Stalinist sects, much reduced in membership, were utterly marginal. No one was pro-Soviet any more except nostalgically, because the Soviet Union no longer existed. Anti-Europeanism seemed to have been abandoned by all but a diehard rump of the Labour left. Althusserianism was but a distant memory.

Of course, there were new idiocies abroad. Some young guns had embraced a naive anti-capitalism that blamed all the world’s troubles on the business activities of McDonalds and Coca-Cola. Others were already reduced to blaming everything on Blair, the closet Tory who had hi-jacked the Labour Party and ended its commitment to socialism. On the whole, though, the prospects for an intelligent, engaged and vibrant British left seemed to me better in 1997 than for many years before.

Eight years on, I don’t know how I could have got it so completely wrong. Far from reviving under Labour, the left has continued to decline  –  in numbers, influence and relevance.

OK, I’ll accept that the rise of popular opposition to the Iraq war gave the left a boost. But it was the very worst part of the left that benefited: the diehard Leninists of the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party of Britain, who appointed themselves as the leadership of the Stop the War Coalition. And their hard-core revolutionary defeatism and facile anti-imperialism did more harm than good even in the short term.

All that remains from the mass mobilisation of 2003 is the grotesque sideshow of George Galloway, the SWP and a handful of reactionary Islamists in the Respect Coalition. After the election in Iraq, their support for the murderous Sunni-supremacist “resistance” looks like going down in history as the early-21^st-century equivalent of the old Communist Party of Great Britain’s endorsement of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939.

Iraq apart, all that most of the left has done since 1997 is moan. It whinges about Blair, it whinges about spin, it whinges about PFI, it whinges  –  just like in the 1970s  –  about Europe. There isn’t a coherent left political programme of any description, let alone one that is creative and forward-looking. No one on the left has an alternative economic strategy that is even vaguely credible. Hardly anyone has the faintest idea of what a different foreign policy might comprise. (Setting a deadline for getting out of Iraq, as Robin Cook suggested in a jointly authored piece with Douglas Hurd and Menzies Campbell, is laughably stupid, and the resurgent anti-European Labour left’s plans to dish the EU constitution, in alliance with the Daily Mail, are beneath contempt.) There aren’t even very many leftists  –  even Fabians and Demosites  –  coming up with specific domestic policy bright ideas. For the most part, the left’s line is that if the government is for something, it must be bad.

I’m not denying that there’s plenty the government has done that ought to be opposed. But a left that is merely negative, a left without a project, can never flourish. Eight more years like the last eight, and the left might as well pack its bags and go home.

THE ELECTION IS IRAQ'S BEST HOPE

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 21 January 2005

No one knows for certain what will happen in next week’s election in Iraq — but it is already clear that it will leave a lot to be desired as an exercise in democracy, particularly in the Sunni Arab areas of the country where the insurgency against the occupation is centred.

No election that takes place under military occupation by a foreign power can be truly free. Nor can any election conducted amid a substantial armed insurgency. Most of the 80-plus parties and alliances running for office in Iraq have refused to name most of their candidates because of death threats from the insurgents. The main Sunni Arab partner in interim prime minister Iyad Allawi’s government, the Iraqi Islamic Party, is boycotting the poll, which it said should have been postponed. It appears increasingly likely that the insurgency will make it impossible for polling stations to open in many Sunni Arab areas — and in those where polling can take place there is every chance that a mixture of intimidation by the insurgents and sympathy with them will result in a very low turnout.

So is the poll an utter fraud? Rather a large number of western leftists and liberals seem to think so. But, as ever, some of them deserve to be taken seriously and some most definitely do not.

The least credible in Britain are the assorted Trotskyists and Stalinists who — along with various Islamists — make up the bulk of the Stop the War Coalition and George Galloway’s Respect party. The Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party of Britain and the rest decided early on that Iraq was best left to a bloody civil war because that would most damage Yankee imperialism — which they oppose as their first, last and only political function.

Now they want the Iraqi election to be a complete disaster — and stuff the consequences for the long-suffering people of Iraq. They declare their support for the insurgents in Iraq, whom they describe as the “resistance”, a seal of approval that evokes the heroic struggles against the Nazis in Europe in the 1940s.

The fact that the Iraqi “resistance” today comprises the most reactionary elements of Islamism and the most psychotic diehards from Saddam Hussein’s quasi-fascist regime has passed them by — or rather, they have deliberately ignored it. They have also conveniently failed to recognise that the “resistance” in the past few months has turned from targeting the American military to targeting civilians.

The implications of this brain-dead anti-imperialism have been long apparent to anyone who follows the Leninists’ antics. But they became horribly clear a fortnight ago with the murder of Hadi Salih, the international secretary of the the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions and a prominent member of the Iraqi Communist Party, who was tortured and killed for the “crime” of opting to work through the electoral process (on an anti-occupation ticket). The leaders of Stop the War took an age to issue a weasel-worded condemnation of the murder of a man whose comrades Galloway recently described as “quislings”. Pass the sick bag.

***

Other western critics of the Iraqi election are not defeatists: they are merely pessimists who doubt it will produce a legitimate government or stop what appears to be a drift to civil war. And it is indeed difficult to see how the election will give the Sunni Arabs proper representation or quickly bring the insurgency to an end.

But, flawed as it is, it remains Iraq’s best hope. The Sunni Arabs account for roughly 20 per cent of the Iraqi people. Roughly the same proportion of Iraqis are Kurds, and 50 per cent are Shia. And in Kurdish and Shia areas there is a vigorous election campaign going on — and every indication that there will be massive and enthusiastic participation on January 30.

Of course, the Kurds and the Shias have selfish reasons for voting. The Kurds see the election as a means of guaranteeing themselves substantial autonomy from Baghdad. And the Shias see it as the means — at last — of ending the Sunni Arab minority’s near-monopoly of state power, a feature of every Iraqi regime from the Ottoman era to Saddam Hussein.

What, though, is wrong with that? These people constitute the majority of Iraqis — and democracy is by definition majority rule. A Shia-dominated Iraqi government with overwhelming electoral support from everywhere but the Sunni Arab areas would be infinitely more legitimate than the current interim administration. Who knows, if it managed simultaneously to reassure the Sunnis that their rights would be respected and to persuade the Americans to announce a timetable for leaving, it might even have enough clout to end the insurgency.

LABOUR STILL NEEDS TACTICAL VOTING

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 5 January 2005

There seems to be a growing consensus both in the Labour Party and among the left-of-centre commentocracy that tactical voting against the Tories — a crucially important factor in the 1997 and 2001 general elections — is a thing of the past.

Of course, the reasons the Labour stalwarts and the liberal columnists take this line are very different. For the commentators, the crucial thing is that they believe the government is so disliked that hardly anyone whose first preference is Lib Dem would dream of voting Labour now — and they detect a trend of anti-Labour tactical voting.

For the Labour people, at least the ones I’ve spoken to, what has happened to render anti-Tory tactical voting obsolete is that the Liberal Democrats have declared war on Labour in its urban heartlands in the past couple of years, which makes it imperative that Labour fights back vigorously.

I can see the sense in both points of view. The pundits are surely right that Labour is going to find it much more difficult than in 1997 or 2001 to persuade Lib Dem supporters to vote Labour this time, for all sorts of reasons, the most important of them the Iraq war (though I’m sceptical about the claim that disaffection with Labour is at such a pitch that protest voting will become widespread). And after the Brent East, Birmingham Hodge Hill and Leicester South by-elections and the 2003 and 2004 local elections, it’s perfectly understandable for Labour to decide to face up to the Lib Dems in seats it holds.

But — you could tell that was coming, couldn’t you? — this is not the whole story.

On one hand, the fact that it’s going to be much more difficult for Labour to persuade Lib Dem supporters to vote for its candidates in seats it holds doesn’t mean it shouldn’t try. Indeed, given how important tactical voting against the Tories was in 1997 and 2001, it would be utterly idiotic for Labour to give up on Lib Dem tactical voters. It still needs them — just as much as it needs to persuade its core voters not to vote in protest for the Lib Dems or Respect or anyone else.

This means that Labour cannot afford go too negative on Charles Kennedy and his pals. It has to make it clear that, whatever differences it has had with the Lib Dems on the war, both parties are essentially on the centre-left. And it needs to offer something tangible to liberal opinion to keep the Lib Dem tactical Labour voter’s juices flowing: my choice would be an elected second chamber. In most places with Labour MPs, the message should be no more negative than “Vote Lib Dem and you’ll let the Tory in”.

On the other hand, it remains an incontrovertible fact that the Lib Dems — for all their rhetoric to the contrary — are not realistically targeting many Labour seats. They are in second place in 31 of the Tories’ 100 most marginal seats but second to Labour in only seven of its 100 most marginal. For the Lib Dems to increase their representation in the Commons, they need to beat Tories, and for that they need Labour supporters to vote tactically for their candidates. They also need Labour tactical voters to retain many seats they now hold, most of them in the south where the Tories are their main challengers.

This, however, is where it gets really complicated, because the Lib Dems are rather less interested in getting 20 or so extra MPs than in holding the balance of power in a hung parliament — and for that they need either a giant advance (which isn’t very likely, though you never know) or for the Tories to take a lot of Labour seats but not enough to win a majority. Which means that the Lib Dems, as well as needing Labour tactical votes, also — pay attention at the back! — now have an interest in their supporters voting tactically for the Tories in Labour-held seats where the Tories are second.

So what should Labour supporters do in Tory-held seats where the Lib Dems are the closest challengers or Lib Dem seats where the Tory came second in 2001? They could decide to vote for sure-fire Labour losers to scupper Kennedy’s dream of holding the balance of power — but that would merely improve the chances of the Tories winning a parliamentary majority.

Sorry, folks, but I still think that is the worst possible outcome at the next election — and the best way of avoiding it is to vote tactically against the Tories again. So vote Labour wherever there is a sitting Labour MP or a Labour came second to a Tory in 2001 — and vote Lib Dem wherever there is a sitting Lib Dem MP or the Lib Dem came second to a Tory in 2001. Nothing else makes the remotest sense.

* * *

Finally, on a completely unrelated subject, I’ve spent more time than I should over the holiday writing and editing entries on Wikipedia (click here and follow the instructions), the free online encylopedia — because I discovered rather a large number of entries on the left in Britain, particularly those on the mainstream Labour left, were well below par. I’ve had a go at the worst I’ve come across, but there’s a lot more to be done. Tribune readers, get in there. It’s fun.

GALLOWAY ISN'T QUITE YET IN THE CLEAR

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, December 10 2004

No journalist in his or her right mind argues too vigorously with the judgment of a British libel court — and I’m still just about in my right mind. You won’t catch me saying that George Galloway should have lost his case against the Telegraph because he lied in court and trousered large wads of wonga from that latter-day Mussolini, Saddam Hussein.

Indeed, though I’m no admirer of the MP for Glasgow Kelvin (soon to be candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow), I think he won pretty much fairly and squarely — given the rules of battle and the Telegraph’s legal tactics.

The Telegraph had precisely accused him of lining his own pockets with cash from the Iraqi regime (buying with it, inter alia, a “£250,000 villa” in Portugal). And it did so on the basis of a chance discovery of documents it had not established were genuine. Worse, if they were genuine, they did not show that Galloway had personally received a bean from Iraq.

In court, the Telegraph did not use the established defence of justification, that its defamation of Galloway was provably true (which would have meant demonstrating that the documents were genuine and that they showed he had personally benefited from Iraqi cash). Rather it adopted the weak defence that it had published material in good faith that it believed ought to be in the public sphere — the “Reynolds defence” established (if that’s the right word) a few years ago in a libel defence by the Sunday Times in an action brought by Albert Reynolds, the former Irish prime minister.

Like most hacks I know, I like the idea of the Reynolds defence: there are plenty of circumstances in which publication of defamatory material of provenance a bit too dubious to allow the defence of justification should be protected from libel action. They are, however, limited circumstances.

At very least, it should be incumbent on the publisher to make even the slightest question of the authenticity of such material explicit on publication: “If this letter is genuine, it suggests . . .” And the person who is its subject should at very least be given a serious opportunity to put his or her case.

Splashing unsubstantiated inferences from possibly dodgy documents across the front page at the first possible opportunity without allowing any time for someone to respond is — how shall we put it? — indefensible. And that’s what the Telegraph did.

But (and it’s a very big but) this should not be the end of the story. Galloway and his supporters have been crowing about his supposedly complete vindication by the High Court. But the judgment was much more limited. Galloway won because the judge decided that the Telegraph’s defence of its actions was asinine. It didn’t make clear any doubts it had about its documents, it massively over-egged its story and it gave Galloway only the most cursory opportunity to respond to its allegations.

The judgment does not, however, show that the documents on which the Telegraph based its story were fake. Nor does it put to rest the well sourced story — published by the Guardian earlier this year and not challenged legally by Galloway — that he accepted money for a pro-Iraq political campaign from a Jordanian businessman, Fawaz Zureikat, who got the cash for his donations, with the full support of Saddam’s fascist regime, from the UN programme set up to alleviate the effects on the Iraqi people of the sanctions imposed against Saddam during the 1990s.

This is a less damaging tale than the one published by the Telegraph. There is no evidence that Galloway benefited personally: any cash from Zureikat, he says, went to the Mariam Appeal, Galloway’s anti-sanctions pressure group. And there is no evidence that Galloway ever had even the faintest clue that Zureikat’s cash might have been siphoned off from the UN programme at Saddam’s request.

But this is still pretty damning stuff. At best, it shows Galloway failing to ask questions that he should have asked about where money was coming from. At worst — OK, I’m not going there.

In the meantime, lest we forget, Galloway will live for all time on videotape for his sycophancy to Saddam: “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.”

He was “Saddam’s little helper”, as the Telegraph headline had it, even if he wasn’t personally paid for his services and even if all the documents the Telegraph turned up were fakes. Now he’s decided to stand against Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow, democratic socialists should make sure this apologist for kleptomaniac totalitarian dictatorship is dumped in the proverbial dustbin of history — where he belongs — by volunteering for her campaign.

THE FAR LEFT IS A VERY BAD JOKE

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, November 26 2004

Say what you like about the government, the state of British football or the weather, it has been a marvellous couple of weeks for observers of the ludicrous antics of the British far left.

The biggest spectacle, of course, has been George Galloway’s libel action against the Telegraph in the High Court — unresolved as I write — which has been remarkable for the forthright way in which Gorgeous George explained his famous greeting to Saddam Hussein: “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.”

The MP for Glasgow Kelvin — and soon-to-be Respect Coalition (George Galloway) parliamentary candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow in London’s East End — said he was merely conveying the solidarity of the Palestinian people, whom he’d just met, to the Iraqi people, who would be informed of his salutation by Saddam — aka "Sir". And the Telegraph’s headline, “Saddam’s little helper”, was, he told the court, losing his calm momentarily, nothing less than “a dagger, a sword right through the heart of my political life”. Ooo-er.

To be honest, though, more heat than light emerged from the Galloway-Telegraph show — and for much of the past fortnight it has been almost eclipsed by the shenanigans surrounding another Scottish charmer of the left, Tommy Sheridan, member of the Scottish Parliament and perma-tanned figurehead of the Scottish Socialist Party, which Galloway refused to join after being expelled by Labour.

The story that did the rounds was that Galloway refused to accept the SSP policy of parliamentary representatives taking only an average worker’s wage from their salary: I am happy to report that Galloway says this was down to Sheridan misunderstanding a joke.

Anyway, Sheridan hit the headlines for resigning from the SSP leadership amid tabloid allegations that he had engaged in rumpy-pumpy with a woman other than his wife, Gail, who is pregnant. Sheridan, who came to prominence as the public face in Scotland of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency’s anti-poll-tax campaign in the late 1980s, denied the scurrilous allegations, said he simply wanted to spend more time with his family-to-be and promised he’d sue.

It seemed like end of story. But then it emerged that the SSP executive had forced him to resign for reasons that were at least in part related to his personal life — if not the story that had been splashed over the Sunday newspaper — and there were reports that he had been stitched up by his enemies in the SSP, who had not only conspired to evict him but had also fed the bourgeois media with various sex-romp claims. All the contenders for Mr Sheridan’s coveted position as leader of the SSP are, incidentally, former members of the Militant Tendency.

Phew! And that was before the return of the Redgraves, glory be, to the political fray, with two members of the famous acting family, Vanessa and Corin, announcing a new political party, Peace and Progress (click here), to fight the next general election.

Younger readers of Tribune might think that Vanessa and Corin Redgrave are no more than distinguished thespians with vaguely leftist views — that’s certainly the picture you’d get from the fawning pieces on their new initiiative in the Guardian (click here) and the Observer (click here) — but in fact it ain’t so.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the pair were leading lights in the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, a mad Trostskyist cult, led by the psychopathic Gerry Healy, that was revealed in the mid-1980s to have solicited and taken substantial sums of cash from Arab nationalist dictatorships, including Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Libya and, yup, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in return for favours that included grassing up exiles to their secret police forces (click here, here and here).

The scandal of the WRP’s Middle East pimping came to light after Healy’s sexual abuse of young women members of the WRP was exposed — and it destroyed the party. Yet the Redgraves remained loyal to their leader even after his disgrace. However inspiring they are on the stage, they have a record of political lunacy matched by no one else alive. There is no evidence whatsoever that they regret anything they have ever done.

And the moral of the story? Sorry, but it’s very simple. These people are at best comedians and at worst mountebanks of the worst kind. There is no credible left challenge to Labour at the next election anywhere in Britain. Vote tactically for the Lib Dems, for sure, but don’t waste your time on the candidates of the far left. They are, without exception, a very bad joke.

THE WORLD MAY LIVE WITH BUSH

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, October 29 2004

Like most readers of Tribune, I’m hoping John Kerry wins the US presidential election next week.

I don’t like what George W Bush has done at home — massive tax cuts for the rich, a big squeeze on America’s already inadequate welfare state, favours to big business on every front — and I don’t like his foreign policy. The way the Bush administration has gone about its “war on terror” since 9/11 fills me with despair. Cosying up to the Israeli right; the extraordinary failure to prepare for the “morning after” in Afghanistan and, particularly, Iraq; the vile abuses of human rights in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib — time and again the Bush administration has proved itself irresponsibly short-sighted, incompetent and brutal. It’s time for a change.

Yet although I’m rooting for Kerry, I’m doing so in a manner so low-key it’s barely perceptible. OK, I’m writing this column, which of course will sway opinion throughout the world thanks to Tribune’s amazing syndication deals — aka me posting it on this weblog after the paper went to press.

Otherwise, however, I’ve done sweet FA. I’ve followed the US election campaign in the British newspapers and on TV, but far from obsessively. I’ve been to see Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 and was underwhelmed. And I’ve continued the boycott of American fast-food chains I began immediately after visiting Kentucky Fried Chicken for the first time in the 1970s. Well, they back the Republicans, don’t they?

But I’ve done nothing so bold as sport a Kerry campaign badge, let alone contact an American voter in a swing state urging support for Kerry. The Guardian set up a scheme to do just this last week, encouraging readers to write letters to 14,000 voters in Clark County, Ohio, putting the case for removing Dubya. The stunt has, er, certainly had an impact: it was picked up big-time by the US media, and for a while last week the Guardian’s website was one of the most visted on the planet.

But all publicity is not good publicity. Rather a lot of the American response to my favourite daily’s initiative was elegantly summed up by the disgruntled recipient of a letter who wrote back: “Hey, England, Scotland and Wales, mind your own business. We don’t need weenie-spined limeys meddling in our presidential election. If it wasn’t for America, you’d all be speaking German.”

One reason for my inactivity is that I take the point: we limeys — weenie-spined or otherwise — have no more right to intervene in US elections than have Americans to intervene in elections over here. More important, I can’t think of anything I could do that would make a blind bit of difference to the result on November 2.

But if I’m going to be completely honest, the biggest reason for my atrophy isn’t political realism. I’m as game for hopeless causes as the next dreamer — anyone for socialism, European federalism or proportional representation? The truth is that I don’t believe that the outcome of this election is quite as important — at least for anyone living outside the US — as most commentators seem to think.

Now, I’m not arguing here, as some Leninist crazies do, that there is no difference between Bush and Kerry because they're both capitalist imperialists. There is a gulf between them on domestic policy — on healthcare, on education, on workers’ rights, on pensions, on taxation. And there are at least grounds for believing that a Kerry White House would be rather more Realpolitik-oriented than a Bush White House — less adventurist and more enthusiastic about working through international consensus.

But the differences between Kerry and Bush on foreign policy (except on the environment) are not huge.

On one hand, Kerry is no dove: as Edward Luttwak argued cogently in the Sunday Telegraph last weekend, those peaceniks who think he would adopt a policy of non-interventionism simply haven’t examined his record, which is consistently hawkish (including voting for war in Iraq). Certainly, a Kerry victory would not – thankfully – mean a rapid withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

On the other hand, it’s at least plausible – I would say likely — that a second-term Bush administration would be much more cautious on foreign affairs than the first-term Bush administration has been. The neo-conservatives who lobbied successfully for the invasion of Iraq have also been responsible for everything that has gone wrong since, and their star is on the wane. What’s more, the scale of the US commitment in Iraq — and the likelihood that it will not be brought swiftly to an end — makes it extremely unlikely that any administration will seek out further targets for pre-emptive action.

Maybe I’m complacent, but I just don’t buy the scenario that has Bush marching into Iran or North Korea. Sorry if this sounds like heresy, but I think the world could live with a Dubya victory.

ANOTHER LEFT IS TRULY NECESSARY

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 15 October 2004

Welcome, comrades, to the European Social Forum in England’s London! On this weekend, the activists from all over the Europe and total globe involve and celebrate wildly in a festival of talks and actions against the capitalism and the globalisation. You can meet all progressives of the continent, no kidding — every tendency left on the shelf, pretty much 57 varieties like the Heinz company say! As delegate from the Slavka Movement of the Oppressed Minorities and member of the Slavka Revolutionary Workers’ Party central committee, I salute you!

It is naturally minus the imperialist pro-war social democracy, the opportunist poodler Blair and his co. But it is naturally also embracing the comrades semi-detached from any serious tendency but in struggle against what in the German it calls “the real politics”. I think here of the Red Pepper, Mrs Wainwright’s magazine, in forefront of anti-reality left here, with links to same currents in Brazil and elsewhere, with international circulation and many readers in proletariat!

As well there are — of course! — the Muslim brothers, in historic new alliance against the imperialism. Perhaps they can hook up with the lesbian sisters and come together for peace, like John Lennon sings in Beatles? It is festival against the war and the racist hate — solidarity with the martyrs against criminal Zionists and illegal occupiers of Iraq!

Make no mistake about it, we are one in struggle against imperialism. It is one struggle, one fight against mad dictator Bush and the corporate cronies who bring capitalist “civilisation” in ruins of Iraq.

We salute Respect coaltion, which is rocking the bourgeois politics to foundations in Hartlepool, Leicester and Aldgate East, all famous battles in this year of struggle, followed by comrades worldwide.

We salute also Comrade Scargill, leader of the struggling National Miners’ Union, in headlines this week for famous proletarian unity move. The knees of Blair and fellow scum are trembling in their bed!

The comrades you can listen this weekend are also the most famous top dogs in Britain for struggle.

Biggest dog of all is Comrade Galloway, partisan of anti-imperialist struggle and staunch friend of Iraqi people. He is leader of British proletariat against the lying so-called Labour Government! So what if bourgeois press say he takes shilling of Saddam Hussein? We say there is one solution only, death to bourgeois press scum!

Almost equal supreme dog is Ken Livingstone, leader of London workers. He too is the great anti-imperialist fighter. Many years, he backed the late Comrade Healy against the Pabloite revisionists and degeneration of workers’ international; now he struggles with class-fighters of Socialist Action who are staff of the revolution at City Hall!

But let us not forget the lesser dogs! Comrade Murray, leader of innumerate masses who march against Iraq war last year and rigid member of the mass-party, Communist Party of Britain. Mrs Comrade Chairman, second-in-command of the mass peace movement, militant of the mass-party, Social Workers’ Party. And many other dogs of other mass proletarian tendencies too numerous to mention!

+++

Aaargh! OK, I can’t keep this nonsense up for the whole of a column. I’m no Craig Brown. I admit defeat. And I apologise if it’s not very funny. But seriously — how can anyone take this beano as in any sense politically important?

The participants represent no one but themselves. The overwhelmingly dominant factions on the British organising committee, who stitched up the agenda for the big plenaries, are the dinosaur sects of cretino-Leninism — the SWP, the CPB, Socialist Action. They couldn’t save a deposit in a general election and their politics stinks. The Respect Coalition, the nearest thing they have to a political project, is a principle-free alliance of leftist posturing and Islamist reaction fronted by a charismatic egomaniac.

OK, Ken Livingstone has given the shindig his backing — but that is the London mayor at his most Machiavellian, making sure he never has a challenger from the left however long he continues to pursue the boring gradualist social-democratic capitalist politics that are his (and our) only hope in the real world.

Perhaps if 50,000 people turn up to the ESF, as the organsiers initially predicted, the sheer weight of numbers will give it an unpredictable dynamism. But that is looking rather unlikely: even the organisers are now predicting only 20,000, and the best intelligence is that the actual number will be half that.

But I’ve got better things to do even if 100,000 arrive. Ipswich are playing at home, and I can’t stand Leninist bores.