Labour Party Quotes

Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets

There is only one hope for mankind - and that is democratic socialism. There is only one party in Great Britain which can do it - and that is the Labour Party.

No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes... ....Tories, Liberal Party and Labour Party for what do they battle except their own prestige - No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes....Tories, Liberal Party and Labour Party for what do they battle except their own prestige

Ivanov- "Up to now , all revolutions have been made by moralizing diletantes. They were always in good faith and perished because of their dilettantism. We for the first time are consequent..." "Yes," said Rubashov. "So consequent, that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Artic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the Party line to be followed in Indo-China. ...

Let these men sing out their songs, they've been walking all day long, all their fortune's spent and gone... silver dollar in the subway station; quarters for the papers for the jobs.

Pious references to the Labour Party being a ‘broad church’ which has always incorporated many different strands of thought fail to take account of a crucial fact, namely that the ‘broad church’ of Labour only functioned effectively in the past because one side – the Right and Centre – determined the nature of the services that were to be held, and excluded or threatened with exclusion any clergy too deviant in its dissent.

Thus the Labour Party is a ‘capitalist workers’ party’.

In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries. The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and the pleasure routine. Man becomes a 'nine to fiver', he is part of the labour force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks and managers. He has little initiative, his tasks are prescribed by the organisation of the work; there is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the bottom. They all perform tasks prescribed by the whole structure of the organisation, at a prescribed speed, and in a prescribed manner. Even the feelings are prescribed: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction. Fun is routinised in similar, although not quite as drastic ways. Books are selected by the book clubs, movies by the film and theatre owners and the advertising slogans paid for by them; the rest is also uniform: the Sunday ride in the car, the television session, the card game, the social parties. From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening - all activities are routinised, and prefabricated. How should a man caught up in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and separateness?

The Lib Dems found it very hard to decide whether they were Labour or Tory supporters, mostly because they're Lib Dem supporters. I mean had most of them agreed with one of the major parties they would probably have applied to join those parties instead of standing at the back of town halls looking disappointed.

George Lansbury, an aging Labour Party official, backed up the Conservative PM by telling the House, “I hear all this denunciation of Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini. I have met both of them, and can only say that they are very much like any other politician or diplomat one meets.

The Labour party on the whole has not been a very effective opposition since the election, partly because it spent months and months electing its new leader. I think the Labour party should, for one thing, stress much more that for most people in the past 13 years, the period was not one of collapse into chaos but actually one where the situation improved, and particularly in areas such as schools, hospitals and a variety of other cultural achievements—so the idea that somehow or other it all needs to be taken down and ground into the dust is not valid. I think we need to defend what most people think basically needs defending and that is the provision of some form of welfare from the cradle to the grave.

I voted for Jeremy Corbyn reluctantly, because as an intersectionalist I would have preferred a black lesbian in the role. But there’s always the possibility that Corbyn might transition at a later date, or that Diane Abbott might assume the Labour Party leadership and develop a taste for flange.

If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media - having tasted blood - would demand next that it expelled all its Socialist and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed of the National agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed… it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.

I didn't come into politics to change the Labour Party. I came into politics to change the country.

In the early 1980s, the key political rivalry in St. Kitts and Nevis was between the Labour Party and the People’s Action Movement (PAM).

The right to demand the best and refuse the worst and do so not by virtue of your wealth, but your equal status as citizen, thats precisely what the modern Labour Party should stand for

Slavery was a long-established practice among African tribes. Any raiding party that successfully attacked a neighbour would expect to return with slaves. But what made the Portuguese demand for slaves different was its scale. The simultaneous discovery of the Americas by European explorers created an apparently limitless demand for labour to work on the plantations of the New World, and in Europe’s African toeholds slavery was turned overnight from a cottage industry into a major, global concern.

Professor Harold Laski declared that the attainment of power by the British Labour Party in the normal parliamentary fashion must result in a radical transformation of parliamentary government. A socialist administration needs ‘guarantees’ that its work of transformation would not be ‘disrupted’ by repeal in event of its defeat at the polls. Therefore the suspension of the Constitution is ‘inevitable’.

Girls are better at this sort of labour, often called 'emotional labour', not because there's anything in the meat and matter of our living cells that makes us naturally better but because we're trained for it from birth. Trained to make other people feel good. Trained to serve the coffee, fill in the forms, organise the parties and wipe the table afterwards. Trained to be feisty, if we must, but not strong. To be bubbly, not funny. You must at no stage appear to have a body that functions in a normal human way, that pisses and shits and sweats and farts and falters. Decorate the prison of your body. Make yourself useful. Shut up and smile.

One thing was clear. Public opinion would never be on our side. Richard Kerbaj, Murdoch, Trump, Alistair Burt, Javid, FCO, a weak Labour party, Brexit, populism, Twitter, and general Islamophobia had all made sure of that.

New Labour leader Ed Miliband announces plan to 'make this party slightly less unelectable by 2015'. He added: 'I am Ed, the Almighty One.' Defeated brother David Miliband overheard muttering: 'Now I know how Wayne Christ felt after little Jesus came along.

She committed her energies to the Labour Party in 1944 but expressed disappointment with its leaders, complaining to David Hicks in May of ‘the usual lack of unity and intelligent leadership on the left’. To her surprise and delight, however, the Labour Party swept to victory in July 1945.

Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows—but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe . . . no, that’s holy? . . . We

My own view is that, since we have it and since it gives such pleasure to so many, especially around the world, it would be folly to get rid of it. The backside of whom are we going to lick when we send a letter in the Republic of Britain? William Hague? Harriet Harman? An elected British President will not glamourize the heads of state of other countries when they come on a state visit. Compared to carriages, crowns, orbs and ermine, an entry-level Jaguar and Marks & Spencer suit offer no edge over other nations when vying for trade advantages. By definition half the country will despise a Labour President or a Conservative one, and you can bet your bottom dollar that politicians will ensure that, if we do become a republic, there will be little other choice than the major parties. Which, at the time of writing, might include UKIP. Lovely.

Orwell thought of himself as a member of the ‘dissident Left’, as distinguished from the ‘official Left’, meaning basically the British Labour Party, most of which he had come, well before the Second World War, to regard as potentially, if not already, fascist. More or less consciously, he found an analogy between British Labour and the Communist Party under Stalin – both, he felt, were movements professing to fight for the working classes against capitalism but in reality concerned only with establishing and perpetuating their own power. The masses were only there to be used – for their idealism, their class resentments, their willingness to work cheap – and to be sold out, again and again.

The labour of those who enjoy the confidence of the Party is imperceptible. But it is a vast labour – one must expend one’s mind and soul generously, keeping nothing back.

I vote Labour. To me, voting Labour is like wiping your bottom: I can't say I like doing it but you've got to - because you're in a worse mess if you don't.

From my governor, to be neither of the green nor of the blue party at the games in the Circus, nor a partisan either of the Parmularius or the Scutarius at the gladiators' fights; from him too I learned endurance of labour, and to want little, and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with other people's affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander. From

This false appearance distinguishes wages labour from other historical forms of labour. On the basis of the wages system even the unpaid labour seems to be paid labour. With the slave, on the contrary, even that part of his labour which is paid appears to be unpaid. Of course, in order to work the slave must live, and one part of his working day goes to replace the value of his own maintenance. But since no bargain is struck between him and his master, and no acts of selling and buying are going on between the two parties, all his labour seems to be given away for nothing.

the KGB was working hard to try to ensure that Thatcher lost the 1983 general election. In the eyes of the Kremlin, Thatcher was “the Iron Lady”—a nickname intended as an insult by the Soviet army newspaper that coined it, but one in which she reveled—and the KGB had been organizing “active measures” to undermine her ever since she came to power in 1979, including the placing of negative articles with sympathetic left-wing journalists. The KGB still had contacts on the left, and Moscow clung to the illusion that it might be able to influence the election in favor of the Labour Party, whose leader, after all, was still listed in KGB files as a “confidential contact.” In an intriguing harbinger of modern times, Moscow was prepared to use dirty tricks and hidden interference to swing a democratic election in favor of its chosen candidate.

has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday’, you say, ‘I respect that’. Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows – but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe . . . no, that’s holy? . . . We are used to not challenging religious ideas but it’s very interesting how much of a furore Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be. Here

That's the point. If these Labour MP's were really working men, they'd have some sense. But most of 'em, or at least the ones I've met, seem to be half-baked intellectuals who've specialized in economics or some such dreary muck.

People were surprised in the 1990s when multinationals began to contribute heavily to New Labour, favoured even above the Conservative Party. But this move of Labour to New Labour was much more important to capitalism than simply having one party to support, for if you can have both big parties you have achieved the ultimate switch from a capitalist democracy to a totalitarian capitalist democracy, such as was accomplished in the USA many years previously.

One of the fruits of the long predominance of labourism is precisely that the party of the working class has never carried out any sustained campaign of education and propaganda on behalf of a socialist programme; and that Labour leaders have frequently turned themselves into fierce propagandists against the socialist proposals of their critics inside the Labour Party and out, and have bent their best efforts to the task of defeating all attempts to have the Labour Party adopt such proposals. Moreover, a vast array of conservative forces, of the most diverse kind, are always at hand to dissuade the working class from even thinking about the socialist ideas which evil or foolish people are forever trying to foist upon them. This simply means that a ceaseless battle for the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people is waged by the forces of conservatism, against which have only been mobilised immeasurably smaller socialist forces. A socialist party would seek to strengthen these forces and to defend socialist perspectives and a socialist programme over an extended period of time, and would accept that more than one election might have to be held before a majority of people came to support it. In any case, a socialist party would not only be concerned with office, but with the creation of the conditions under which office would be more than the management of affairs on capitalist lines.

Viktor Bryukhanov, along with Nikolai Fomin, who approved the test, paid the price with a sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment in a labour camp and expulsion from the Communist party.97 Countless others paid for it with their health and their lives.

I cannot forget the figures of Slobodan Milošević, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein, who made terrified fiefdoms out of their "own" people and mounds of corpses on the territory of their neighbours. I was glad to see each of these monsters brought to trial, and think the achievement should (and one day will) form part of the battle‑honours of British Labour. Many of the triumphant pelters and taunters would have left the dictators and aggressors in place: they too will have their place in history.

1934 it became apparent that the Germans were swiftly rearming, the leader of the British Labour Party vowed “to close every recruiting station, disband the Army and disarm the Air Force,” and he got his candidate elected by saying so.7 The Peace Ballot, a national survey of public opinion, was distributed throughout Great Britain in 1935 and a majority of those polled stated that while they supported collective national security, they did so only “by all means short of war.” At a time when Hitler was

Why do the Fascists want violence?” Ethel asked rhetorically. “Those out there in Hills Road may be mere hooligans, but someone is directing them, and their tactics have a purpose. When there is fighting in the streets, they can claim that public order has broken down, and drastic measures are needed to restore the rule of law. Those emergency measures will include banning democratic political parties such as Labour, prohibiting trade union action, and jailing people without trial—people such as us, peaceful men and women whose only crime is to disagree with the government. Does this sound fantastic to you, unlikely, something that could never happen? Well, they used exactly those tactics in Germany—and it worked.” She went on to talk about how Fascism

The Socialist Party had a slight, sympathetic contact with the Bolsheviks. In March, 1915, the Socialist Standard had on its front page a statement headed A RUSSIAN CHALLENGE. The Russian party, finding itself uninvited to a London conference of social-democrtic parties of the Allied nations,sent a declaration which every left-wing paper refused to publish before it was recieved by the SPGB...the statement condemned the war and the 'monstrous crime against socialism' of the labour leaders who had entered war governments.

you’ve thrilled yourself with these dark imaginings you end with the ultimate in wish-fulfilment: the EU is a front for a German cabal and this will save Brexit. It is hard to overstate the extent to which Brexit depended on the idea of who really runs the EU: German car manufacturers. For some of those at the top of the Labour Party, the idea of the EU as a mere front for the bosses and moguls of Europe was a reason to be secretly pleased that Brexit would allow Britain to escape their clutches and build socialism in one country.

This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term.

The end of the war was not celebrated in the Socialist Standard...The four year's madness had shown the so-called socialists of the world in their true colours: Kautsky, Jack London, the advocates of international brotherhood everywhere had chosen nationalism and militarism in the hour of trial.The ILP in Britain had rejected the war, but its association with the Labour Party deprived it of all credit in the eyes of the SPGB.The members who had come through the war were confirmed as never before in the belief that they,and no one else, held the truth and menaced the system.

The dream of true economic, gender and racial equality in a free society, which was cherished (if not achieved) by Leftists of the post-war generation, died under New Labour; but the egalitarianism at its heart was resurrected by a merciless minority as the brain-sucking zombie of Political Correctness.

It was on 7 March 1936 that Hitler comprehensivelyviolated the Versailles Treaty by sending troops intothe industrial region of the Rhineland, which under Article 180 had been specifically designated ademilitarized zone. Had the German Army beenopposed by the French and British forces stationednear by, it had orders to retire back to base and sucha reverse would almost certainly have cost Hitler thechancellorship. Yet the Western powers, riven withguilt about having imposed what was described as a‘Carthaginian peace’ on Germany in 1919, allowedthe Germans to enter the Rhineland unopposed. ‘After all,’ said the influential Liberal politician andnewspaper director the Marquis of Lothian, who hadbeen Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in RamsayMacDonald’s National Government, ‘they are onlygoing into their own back garden.’ When Hitler assured the Western powers in March 1936 thatGermany wished only for peace, Arthur Greenwood,the deputy leader of the Labour Party, told the Houseof Commons: ‘Herr Hitler has made a statement…holding out the olive branch… which ought to be takenat face value… It is idle to say that those statementsare insincere.’ That August Germany adopted compulsory two-year military service

This is a huge strategic problem for Labour. Mr Laws is a magnificent deployer of Tina; every particular cut he makes, every specific tax increase, is justified on the basis that There Is No Alternative, and that anyone who says different is a Flat Earther. But if Labour complains, it encounters Tina's new boy-friend Alf — All Labour's Fault.

For weeks all opinion polls and all responsible commentators had been predicting that there was no hope of the Labour Party being elected on a programme like this. Ever since Harry Perkins had been chosen to lead Labour at a tumultuous party conference two years earlier, the popular press had been saying that this proved what they had always argued – namely that the Labour Party was in the grip of a Marxist conspiracy. Privately the rulers of the great corporations had been gleeful, for they had convinced themselves that the British people were basically moderate and that, however rough the going got, they would never elect a Labour government headed by the likes of Harry Perkins.

See? You can have cartoons about any of the parties, but you mustn't put anything in favor of Socialism, because the police won't stand it. Once I did a cartoon of a boa constrictor marked Capital swallowing a rabbit marked Labour. The copper came along and saw it, and he says, 'You rub that out, and look sharp about it,' he says. I had to rub it out.

But nowadays -- Our weakness for the last few years has been the ineffectiveness of the Opposition. This Labour Party has never had the quality of a fighting Opposition. It has just sucked the life out of Radicalism. It has never had the definite idealism of the Whigs and Liberals. 'Give us more employment and slightly higher pay and be sure of our contentment,' says Labour. 'We're loyal. We know our place. But we don't like being unemployed.' What good is that as Opposition? It's about as much opposition as a mewing cat. We mean more than that. I tell you frankly. Our task, I take it, my task, is to reinstate that practical working Opposition which has always been Old England's alternative line of defence... For the good of all of us...

You might think that the Left could have a regime-change perspective of its own, based on solidarity with its comrades abroad. After all, Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party consolidated its power by first destroying the Iraqi communist and labor movements, and then turning on the Kurds (whose cause, historically, has been one of the main priorities of the Left in the Middle East). When I first became a socialist, the imperative of international solidarity was the essential if not the defining thing, whether the cause was popular or risky or not. I haven't seen an anti-war meeting all this year at which you could even guess at the existence of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, an opposition that was fighting for 'regime change' when both Republicans and Democrats were fawning over Baghdad as a profitable client and geopolitical ally. Not only does the 'peace' movement ignore the anti-Saddam civilian opposition, it sends missions to console the Ba'athists in their isolation, and speaks of the invader of Kuwait and Iran and the butcher of Kurdistan as if he were the victim and George W. Bush the aggressor.

On the other hand, the militant left, and many socialist intellectuals such as my old friend Ralph Miliband (whose sons were to become important figures in the offices of Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown), also wrote off the Labour Party until the moment when it had been captured and was ready to become ‘a real socialist party’, whatever that meant. I outraged some of my friends by pointing out that they were not seriously trying to defeat Mrs Thatcher. Whatever they thought, ‘they acted as though another Labour government like the ones we have had before from time to time since 1945 were not just unsatisfactory, but worse than no Labour government … (i.e.) worse than the only alternative government on offer, namely Mrs Thatcher’s

There are two primary strains in the Conservative Party: grocers, and grandees. … By ‘grandees’ and ‘grocers’, I am not referring to social class or any of that; nor do I refer to the Worshipful Company of Grocers, all cloves and camels. I refer rather to two fundamental positions within the Conservative Party, regardless of one’s antecedents. … A grandee Conservative sees the country as a village: a village of which he and his party, when in government, act the Squire. As the Squire, the grandee moves jovially amongst his tenants in their tied cottages, dispensing largesse and reproof…. There are two problems with this model. The first is that HMG is not the Squire and the subjects of the Crown are not the smocked tenantry of the government of the day. The second is that these principles – or instincts, as one can hardly call them principles – however different they may be to the fiercely held maxims of Labour old and new, lead in the end to the same statist solutions as those the Left proposes, and to accepting and ‘managing’ statism when a Conservative government succeeds a Labour one. It is the grocers who will always and rightly attempt to roll back the State and its reach in favour of liberty.

On December 20, Denis Healey asked Eden in the House of Commons whether Britain had had any foreknowledge of the Israeli attack. “There were no plans got together [with Israel] to attack Egypt,” he replied. Commenting in 1994, Healey remembered: “He told a straight lie.”59 Cabinet members continued to insist that there had been no conspiracy. “The wild accusations of collusion between the British, French, and Israeli Governments which were hurled by the Labour Party had absolutely no foundation in fact,” lied Lord Kilmuir in his 1964 memoirs.60 That afternoon, Eden told the cabinet secretary Sir Norman Brook to destroy all records of Britain’s collusion with Israel. Brook apparently did so the same day.61 The attempt to cleanse the historical record did not work: far too many people knew the truth. As with most cases of the destruction of documents, all it did was make the perpetrators look even more guilty.

In the 1960's, Labour had gained some power, or at least respectability. Spokesmen for the working class - but of course not necessarily coming from that class or belonging there except through ideology - were upset by the exposed inequalities and abuses disguised as treatment. It did not exactly strengthen the credibility of these measures that most receivers of this type of treatment for crime turned out to belong to just those classes supposed to be in political power.

Unless the Labour leadership candidates decide to settle the issue through televised mud-wrestling (Adam Boulton, I think, for referee, and he may even take part) they will find it hard to gain massive attention for their utterances. Nor would the wannabes be wise to sign up to Lord Adonis's optimistic gloom about the coalition not lasting. Watching David Laws this week going about deficit reduction with an avidity bordering on the erotic, I realised that there are very good reasons why the centre should hold.

That doesn’t matter. Gorky’s a vain man. We must bind him with cables to the Party,” replied Stalin.3 It worked: during the kulak liquidation, Gorky unleashed his hatred of the backward peasants in Pravda: “If the enemy does not surrender, he must be exterminated.” He toured concentration camps and admired their re-educational value. He supported slave labour projects such as the Belomor Canal which he visited with Yagoda, whom he congratulated: “You rough fellows do not realize what great work you’re doing!”4 Yagoda,

Sonia Gandhi and her son play an important part in all of this. Their job is to run the Department of Compassion and Charisma and to win elections. They are allowed to make (and also to take credit for) decisions which appear progressive but are actually tactical and symbolic, meant to take the edge off popular anger and allow the big ship to keep on rolling. (The best example of this is the rally that was organised for Rahul Gandhi to claim victory for the cancellation of Vedanta’s permission to mine Niyamgiri for bauxite—a battle that the Dongria Kondh tribe and a coalition of activists, local as well as international, have been fighting for years. At the rally, Rahul Gandhi announced that he was “a soldier for the tribal people”. He didn’t mention that the economic policies of his party are predicated on the mass displacement of tribal people. Or that every other bauxite “giri”—hill—in the neighbourhood was having the hell mined out of it, while this “soldier for the tribal people” looked away. Rahul Gandhi may be a decent man. But for him to go around talking about the two Indias—the “Rich India” and the “Poor India”—as though the party he represents has nothing to do with it, is an insult to everybody’s intelligence, including his own.) The division of labour between politicians who have a mass base and win elections, and those who actually run the country but either do not need to (judges and bureaucrats) or have been freed of the constraint of winning elections (like the prime minister) is a brilliant subversion of democratic practice. To imagine that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are in charge of the government would be a mistake. The real power has passed into the hands of a coven of oligarchs—judges, bureaucrats and politicians. They in turn are run like prize race-horses by the few corporations who more or less own everything in the country. They may belong to different political parties and put up a great show of being political rivals, but that’s just subterfuge for public consumption. The only real rivalry is the business rivalry between corporations.

It was his first definite encounter with the wary-eyed, platitudinous, evasive Labour leaders, and he realised at once the formidable barrier of inert leadership they constituted, between the discontented masses and constructive change. They seemed to be almost entirely preoccupied by internecine intrigues and the "discipline of the Party". They were steeped in Party professionalism. They were not in any way traitors to their cause, or wilfully reactionary, but they had no minds for a renascent world. They meant nothing, but they did not know they meant nothing. They regarded Rud just as in their time they had regarded Liberalism, Fabianism, Communism, Science, suspecting them all, learning nothing from them, blankly resistant. They did not want ideas in politics. They just wanted to be the official representatives of organised labour and make what they could by it. Their manner betrayed their invincible resolution, as strong as an animal instinct, to play politics according to the rules, to manoeuvre for positions, to dig themselves into positions -- and squat...

I awoke to the fraud that had been committed in socialism’s name, and felt an immediate obligation to do something about it. All those laws formulated by the British Labour Party, which set out to organize society for the greater good of everyone, by controlling, marginalizing or forbidding some natural human activity, took on another meaning for me. I was suddenly struck by the impertinence of a political party that sets out to confiscate whole industries from those who had created them, to abolish the grammar schools to which I owed my education, to force schools to amalgamate, to control relations in the workplace, to regulate hours of work, to compel workers to join a union, to ban hunting, to take property from a landlord and bestow it on his tenant, to compel businesses to sell themselves to the government at a dictated price, to police all our activities through quangos designed to check us for political correctness. And I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe.

To The Times. Steeple Aston 19 April 1974 Sir, I hear on my radio Mr Reg Prentice, of the party which I support, saying to a gathering on education the following: ‘The eleven plus must go, so must selection at twelve plus, at sixteen plus, and any other age.’ What can this mean? How are universities to continue? Are we to have engineers without selection of those who understand mathematics, linguists without selection of those who understand grammar? To many teachers such declarations of policy must seem obscure and astonishing, and to imply the adoption of some quite new philosophy of education which has not, so far as I know, been in this context discussed. It is certainly odd that the Labour Party should wish to promote a process of natural unplanned sorting which will favour the children of rich and educated people, leaving other children at a disadvantage. I thought socialism was concerned with the removal of unfair disadvantages. Surely what we need is a careful reconsideration of how to select, not the radical and dangerous abandonment of the principle of selection. Yours faithfully, Iris Murdoch

Delight in smooth-sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the State, genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation, obvious lack of intellectual vigour in both leaders of the British Coalition Government, marked ignorance of Europe and aversion from its problems in Mr. Baldwin, the strong and violent pacifism which at this time dominated the Labour-Socialist Party, the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality, the failure and worse than failure of Mr. Lloyd George, the erstwhile great war-time leader, to address himself to the continuity of his work, the whole supported by overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Parliament: all these constituted a picture of British fatuity and fecklessness which, though devoid of guile, was not devoid of guilt, and, though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries which, even so far as they have unfolded, are already beyond comparison in human experience.

Now, questions of politics must ever divide the minds of men; for they are not decided by any recognized standards of truth, but by the competitions of interest and passion. Hence, it is inevitable that he who embarks publicly in the discussion of these questions, must become the object of party animosities and obnoxious to those whom he opposes. How then can he successfully approach them as the messenger of redemption? By thus transcending his proper functions, he criminally prejudices his appointed work with half the community, for the whole of which he should affectionately labour.

Marxism cannot, even on the grounds of political expediency or party solidarity, be reduced to a rigid formalism like mathematics. Nor can it be treated as a standard technique such as work on an automatic lathe. The material, when it is present in human society, has endless variations; the observer is himself part of the observed population, with which he interacts strongly and reciprocally. This means that the successful application of the theory needs the development of analytical power, the ability to pick out the essential factors in a given situation. This cannot be learned from books alone. The one way to learn it is by constant contact with the major sections of the people. For an intellectual, this means at least a few months spent in manual labour, to earn his livelihood as a member of the working class; not as a superior being, nor as a reformist, nor as a sentimental "progressive" visitor to the slums. The experience gained from living with worker and peasant, as one of them, has then to be consistently refreshed and regularly evaluated in the light of one's reading. For those who are prepared to do this, these essays might provide some encouragement, and food for thought.

Labourism was to be the bete noire of the Party, hated as much as the capitalist system itself. Its growth was to lead to the hardening of Party attitudes almost to the point where even the wish to improve everyday conditions was considered iniquitous. The resentment was heated by the fact that many of the rising Labour leaders had been fellow members of the Social Democratic Federation and once professed the revolution.No words were strong enough for the Party's contempt. In the the Socialist Standard they were 'fakirs', a strong allusion to self-seeking piety, and on the platforms 'Labour bleeders',...

On the labour front in 1919 there was an unprecedented number of strikes involving many millions of workers. One of the lager strikes was mounted by the AF of L against the United States Steel Corporation. At that time workers in the steel industry put in an average sixty-eight-hour week for bare subsistence wages. The strike spread to other plants, resulting in considerable violence -- the death of eighteen striking workers, the calling out of troops to disperse picket lines, and so forth. By branding the strikers Bolsheviks and thereby separating them from their public support, the Corporation broke the strike. In Boston, the Police Department went on strike and governor Calvin Coolidge replaced them. In Seattle there was a general strike which precipitated a nationwide 'red scare'. this was the first red scare. Sixteen bombs were found in the New York Post Office just before May Day. The bombs were addressed to men prominent in American life, including John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is not clear today who was responsible for those bombs -- Red terrorists, Black anarchists, or their enemies -- but the effect was the same. Other bombs pooped off all spring, damaging property, killing and maiming innocent people, and the nation responded with an alarm against Reds. It was feared that at in Russia, they were about to take over the country and shove large cocks into everyone's mother. Strike that. The Press exacerbated public feeling. May Day parades in the big cities were attacked by policemen, and soldiers and sailors. The American Legion, just founded, raided IWW headquarters in the State of Washington. Laws against seditious speech were passed in State Legislatures across the country and thousands of people were jailed, including a Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. To say nothing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 which took care of thousands more. To say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. On the evening of 2 January 1920, Attorney General Palmer, who had his eye on the White House, organized a Federal raid on Communist Party offices throughout the nation. With his right-hand assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, at his right hand, Palmer effected the arrest of over six thousand people, some Communist aliens, some just aliens, some just Communists, and some neither Communists nor aliens but persons visiting those who had been arrested. Property was confiscated, people chained together, handcuffed, and paraded through the streets (in Boston), or kept in corridors of Federal buildings for eight days without food or proper sanitation (in Detroit). Many historians have noted this phenomenon. The raids made an undoubted contribution to the wave of vigilantism winch broke over the country. The Ku Klux Klan blossomed throughout the South and West. There were night raidings, floggings, public hangings, and burnings. Over seventy Negroes were lynched in 1919, not a few of them war veterans. There were speeches against 'foreign ideologies' and much talk about 'one hundred per cent Americanism'. The teaching of evolution in the schools of Tennessee was outlawed. Elsewhere textbooks were repudiated that were not sufficiently patriotic. New immigration laws made racial distinctions and set stringent quotas. Jews were charged with international conspiracy and Catholics with trying to bring the Pope to America. The country would soon go dry, thus creating large-scale, organized crime in the US. The White Sox threw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. And the stage was set for the trial of two Italian-born anarchists, N. Sacco and B. Vanzetti, for the alleged murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Mass. The story of the trial is well known and often noted by historians and need not be recounted here. To nothing of World War II--

for the Labour Party – splendid news. That increasingly leftward bound organisation is in process of splitting, and Shirley Williams,fn31 Roy Jenkinsfn32 etc. will found a new Social Democratic Partyfn33 (this oddly repeats events in Oxford circa 1940 when I was chairman of the leftward bound Labour Club and Roy Jenkins led a group to found a new Social Democratic Club. How right he was!). It’s a pity about the Labour Party but given the whole scene the split is best. It is now official Labour policy to leave the Common Market and NATO! And unofficially are likely to abolish the House of Lords instantly and have no second chamber, abolish private schooling etc. And of course (this is perhaps the main point) to have the leadership under the control of the executive committee (and Labour activists in the constituencies) substituting party ‘democracy’ for parliamentary democracy. I blame Denis Healey and others very much for not reacting firmly earlier against the left. A crucial move was when the parliamentary party elected Michael Foot, that wet crypto-left snake, as leader instead of Denis. Now Denis and co. are left behind, complaining bitterly, to fight the crazy left. Shirley still hasn’t resigned from the party so it’s all a bit odd! ‘On your bike, Shirl,’ the lefty trade unionists shout at her!

Specialisation, accompanied by exchange, is the source of economic prosperity. Here, in my own words, is what a modern version of Smithism claims. First, the spontaneous and voluntary exchange of goods and services leads to a division of labour in which people specialise in what they are good at doing. Second, this in turn leads to gains from trade for each party to a transaction, because everybody is doing what he is most productive at and has the chance to learn, practise and even mechanise his chosen task. Individuals can thus use and improve their own tacit and local knowledge in a way that no expert or ruler could. Third, gains from trade encourage more specialisation, which encourages more trade, in a virtuous circle. The greater the specialisation among producers, the greater is the diversification of consumption: in moving away from self-sufficiency people get to produce fewer things, but to consume more. Fourth, specialisation inevitably incentivises innovation, which is also a collaborative process driven by the exchange and combination of ideas. Indeed, most innovation comes about through the recombination of existing ideas for how to make or organise things. The more people trade and the more they divide labour, the more they are working for each other. The more they work for each other, the higher their living standards. The consequence of the division of labour is an immense web of cooperation among strangers: it turns potential enemies into honorary friends. A woollen coat, worn by a day labourer, was (said Smith) ‘the produce of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser . . .’ In parting with money to buy a coat, the labourer was not reducing his wealth. Gains from trade are mutual; if they were not, people would not voluntarily engage in trade. The more open and free the market, the less opportunity there is for exploitation and predation, because the easier it is for consumers to boycott the predators and for competitors to whittle away their excess profits. In its ideal form, therefore, the free market is a device for creating networks of collaboration among people to raise each other’s living standards, a device for coordinating production and a device for communicating information about needs through the price mechanism. Also a device for encouraging innovation. It is the very opposite of the rampant and selfish individualism that so many churchmen and others seem to think it is. The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust.

The fall of France,’ wrote the American journalist Rosie Waldeck from Bucharest in 1940, ‘formed a climax to twenty years of failure of the promises of democracy to handle unemployment, inflation, deflations, labour unrest, party egoism and whatnot. Europe, tired of herself and doubtful of the principles she had been living by, felt almost relieved to have everything settled – not satisfactorily, but in such a way that it absolved her of all responsibility.’ Countess Rosie Waldeck was the American equivalent of Bella Fromm. The pen name of Rosie Goldschmidt-Graefenberg-Ullstein, she was a Jewish banker’s daughter who, after a number of divorces, ended up writing society columns and moving effortlessly in the most select circles, and who beneath all her charm

What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour. It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate. We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of their labour. Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of provisions; sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work. But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters upon these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the necessity superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing, but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders. But though in disputes with their workmen, masters must generally have the advantage, there is, however, a certain rate be.

Michael saw Northampton Castle being built by Normans and their labourers, while being pulled down in accordance with the will of Charles the Second fifteen hundred years thereafter. A few centuries of grass and ruins coexisted with the bubbling growth and fluctuations of the railway station. 1920s porters, speeded up into a silent comedy, pushed luggage-laden trolleys through a Saxon hunting party. Women in ridiculously tiny skirts superimposed themselves unwittingly on Roundhead puritans, briefly becoming composites with fishnet tights and pikestaffs. Horses’ heads grew from the roofs of cars and all the while the castle was constructed and demolished, rising, falling, rising, falling, like a great grey lung of history that breathed crusades, saints, revolutions and electric trains.

I never heard communism seriously propounded or argued; perhaps I was too deeply preoccupied with my own dissipations; and, as it turned out in the end it was a way of thought that I was denied or spared by a geographical fluke. From the end of these travels till the War, I lived, with a year's interruption, in Eastern Europe, among friends whom I must call old-fashioned liberals. They hated Nazi Germany; but it was impossible to look eastwards for inspiration and hope, as their western equivalents--peering from afar, and with the nightmare of only one kind of totalitarianism to vex them--felt able to do. For Russia began only a few fields away, the other side of a river; and there, as all her neighbours knew, great wrong was being done and terrible danger lay. All their fears came true. Living among them made me share those fears and they made stony ground for certain kinds of grain.

Whatever the future may bring, I beg and pray all Magyars worthy of that name, whether living in silence under foreign overlords or in exile far from their homes, to hold together, to forget party strife, and to keep before their eyes a single purpose: the restoration of Hungary’s freedom. Let us remember, lest their sacrifice was in vain, all those who gave their lives for their fatherland and those prisoners of war who have not yet returned home. The Hungarian people, and especially the Magyar peasants, are noble-minded. If the peasantry, the backbone of our nation, can succeed in retaining its well-tried, centuries-old national sense, its moral integrity, its martial courage and its joy in labour, even in times of terror and subjugation, if it refuses to heed those political agitators who preach class hatred and kindle the passions of the multitude, then, one day, Hungary will regain her freedom. To her defence and protection I dedicated my life.

So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the party line to be followed in Indo-China. Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or the scaffold; the higher officials in our administration ruin and destroy their subordinates, because they know that they will be held responsible for the slightest slip and be destroyed themselves; our poets settle discussions on questions of style by denunciations to the Secret Police, because the expressionists consider the naturalistic style counter-revolutionary, and vice versa. Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that its average length of life is shortened by a quarter. In order to defend the existence of the country, we have to take exceptional measures and make transition-stage laws, which are in every point contrary to the aims of the Revolution.

Cuba has nine official National Public Holidays January 1st - Liberation Day & New Year’s Liberation Day is also called “Triunfo de la Revolucion.” This day celebrates the removal of dictator Batista from power and the start of Fidel Castro’s power. January 2nd - Victory of the Armed Forces A holiday commemorating its revolution’s history. Good Friday Good Friday became a national holiday following the visit of Pope Benedict XVI. The first Good Friday recognized as a holiday was in 2014, according to Granma, the Official Body Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. May 1st - International Labour Day Called “Dia de los Trabajadores,” Havana-Guide.com noted there are many celebrations this holiday, including “speeches on the ‘Plaza de la Revolucion’ celebrating the work force and the Communist party.” July 25th till 27th - Commemmoration of the Assault to Moncada/National Rebellion Day This three-day long holiday remembers the 1953 capture and exile of Fidel Castro, according to VisitarCuba. This happened near Santiago in the Moncada army barracks. This week is also celebrated with carnivals in Santiago as the saint day of St. James (Santiago). October 19th - Independence Day, “Dia de la Independencia” Independence Day celebrates the early independence of Cuba in 1868, when Carlos Manuel Cespedes freed his slaves and began the War of Independence against Spain, according to Travel Cuba. December 25, 2017 - Christmas, “Natividad” Christmas has only recently been re-established as a holiday due to Pope John Paul’s visit in 1998.

There is also another political party, who desire, through the influence of legislation and coercion, to level the world. To say the least, it is a species of robbery; to some it may appear an honorable one, but, nevertheless, it is robbery. What right has any private man to take by force the property of another? The laws of all nations would punish such a man as a thief. Would thousands of men engaged in the same business make it more honorable? . . . I shall not, here, enter into the various manners of obtaining wealth; but would merely state, that any unjust acquisition of it ought to be punished by law. Wealth is generally the representation of labour, industry, and talent. If one man is industrious, enterprising, diligent, careful, and saves property, and his children follow in his steps, and accumulate wealth; and another man is careless, prodigal, and lazy, and his children inherit his poverty, I cannot conceive upon what principles of justice, the children of the idle and profligate have a right to put their hands into the pockets of those who are diligent and careful, and rob them of their purse. Let this principle exist, and all energy and enterprise would be crushed. Men would be afraid of again accumulating, lest they should again be robbed. Industry and talent would have no stimulant, and confusion and ruin would inevitably follow. Again, if you took men's property without their consent, the natural consequence would be that they would seek to retake it the first opportunity; and this state of things would only deluge the world in blood. So that let any of these measures be carried out, even according to the most sanguine hopes of the parties, they would not only bring distress upon others, but also upon themselves; certainly they would not bring about the peace of the world.

In all these battles the Labour right has enormous reserves of political power. The Parliamentary Labour Party is overwhelmingly hostile to Jeremy Corbyn. Of the 232 Labour MPs no more than 20 can be relied on to back him. Back bench revolts, leaks, and public attacks by MPs opposed to the leadership are likely to be frequent. Some Labour left wingers hope that the patronage that comes with the leader’s position will appeal to the careerism of the right and centre MPs to provide Jeremy with the support he lacks. No doubt this will have some effect, but it will be limited. For a start it’s a mistake to think that all right wingers are venal. Some are. But some believe in their ideas as sincerely as left wingers believe in theirs. More importantly, the leading figures of the Labour right should not be seen as simply part of the Labour movement. They are also, and this is where their loyalty lies, embedded in the British political establishment. Commentators often talk as if the sociological dividing line in British politics lies between the establishment (the heads of corporations, military, police, civil service, the media, Tory and Liberal parties, etc, etc) on the one hand, and the Labour Party as a whole, the unions and the left on the other. But this is not the case. The dividing line actually runs through the middle of the Labour Party, between its right wing leaders and the left and the bulk of the working class members. From Ramsey MacDonald (who started on the left of the party) splitting Labour and joining the Tory government in 1931, to the Labour ‘Gang of Four’ splitting the party to form the SDP in 1981, to Neil Kinnock’s refusal to support the 1984-85 Miners Strike, to Blair and Mandelson’s neo-conservative foreign policy and neoliberal economic policy, the main figures of the Labour right have always put their establishment loyalties first and their Labour Party membership second. They do not need Jeremy Corbyn to prefer Cabinet places on them because they will be rewarded with company directorships and places in the Lords by the establishment. Corbyn is seen as a threat to the establishment and the Labour right will react, as they have always done, to eliminate this threat. And because the Labour right are part of the establishment they will not be acting alone. Even if they were a minority in the PLP, as the SDP founders were, their power would be enormously amplified by the rest of the establishment. In fact the Labour right today is much more powerful than the SDP, and so the amplified dissonance from the right will be even greater. This is why the argument that a Corbyn leadership must compromise with the right in the name of unity is so mistaken. The Labour right are only interested in unity on their terms. If they can’t get it they will fight until they win. If they can’t win they would rather split the party than unite with the left on the left’s terms. When Leon Trotsky analysed the defeat of the 1926 General Strike it was the operation of this kind of ‘unity’ which he saw as critical in giving the right the ability to disorganise the left. The collapse of the strike came, argued Trotsky, when the government put pressure on the right wing of the Labour movement, who put pressure on the left wing of the movement, who put pressure on the Minority Movement (an alliance of the Labour left and the Communist Party). And the Minority Movement put pressure on the CP…and thus the whole movement collapsed. To this day this is the way in which the establishment transmits pressure through the labour movement. The only effective antidote is political and organisational independence on the far left so that it is capable of mobilising beyond the ranks of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy. This then provides a counter-power pushing in the opposite direction that can be more powerful than the pressure from the right.

But Muslims now find themselves in a world shaped by western theories and western values. If we are to consider how Islamic communities conducted their affairs throughout the greater part of their history, it may be convenient to compare and contrast this way of life with the contemporary western model. Today the Muslims are urged to embrace democracy and are condemned for political corruption, while western scholars debate whether Islam can ever accommodate the democratic ideal. On the whole, they think not. Democracy, they believe, is a sign of political maturity and therefore of superiority. Western societies, since they are seen as democratic, exemplify this superiority. So there is one question that has to be pressed home: what, precisely, is meant by democracy? Let me put forward an imaginary Arab who knows nothing of western ways but would like to learn about them. He is aware that the literal meaning of the word democracy is "mob rule", but understands that this is not what westerners mean by it. He wonders how this meaning has, in practice, been modified and, since his questions are directed to an Englishman, he is not altogether surprised to be told that Britain is the exemplary democracy. He learns that the people—all except children, lunatics and peers of the realm—send their representatives to Parliament to speak for them. He is assured that these representatives never accept bribes to vote against their consciences or against the wishes of their constituents. He enquires further and is astonished to learn that the political parties employ what are known as Whips, who compel members to vote in accordance with the party line, even if this conflicts both with their consciences and with the views of the people who elected them. In this case it is not money but ambition for office that determines the way they vote. "But is this not corruption?" he asks naively. The Englishman is shocked. "But at least the party in power represents the vast majority of the electorate?" This time the Englishman is a little embarrassed. It is not quite like that. The governing party, which enjoys absolute power through its dominance in the House of Commons, represents only a minority of the electorate. "Are there no restraints on this power?" There used to be, he is told. In the past there was a balance between the Crown, the House of Lords and the Commons, but that was seen as an undemocratic system so it was gradually eroded. The "sovereignty" of the Lower House is now untrammelled (except, quite recently, by unelected officials in Brussels). "So this is what democracy means?" Our imaginary Arab is baffled. He investigates further and is told that, in the 1997 General Election, the British people spoke with one voice, loud and clear. A landslide victory gave the Leader of the Labour Party virtually dictatorial powers. Then he learns that the turn-out of electors was the lowest since the war. Even so, the Party received only forty-three per cent of the votes cast. He wonders if this can be the system which others wish to impose on his own country. He is aware that various freedoms, including freedom of the press, are essential components of a democratic society, but no one can tell him how these are to be guaranteed if the Ruler, supported by a supine—"disciplined"—House of Commons enjoys untrammelled authority. He knows a bit about rulers and the way in which they deal with dissent, and he suspects that human nature is much the same everywhere. Barriers to oppression soon fall when a political system eliminates all "checks and balances" and, however amiable the current Ruler may be, there is no certainty that his successors, inheriting all the tools of power, will be equally benign. He turns now to an American and learns, with some relief since he himself has experienced the oppression of absolutism, that the American system restrains the power of the President by that of the Congress and the Supreme Court; moreover, the electe

Patronising women is another manoeuvre, an infamous example being then British prime minister David Cameron’s ‘Calm down, dear’ to Labour MP Angela Eagle in 2011.48 In the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s (IPU) 2016 global study on sexism, violence and harassment against female politicians, one MP from a European parliament said ‘if a woman speaks loudly in parliament she is “shushed” with a finger to the lips, as one does with children. That never happens when a man speaks loudly’.49 Another noted that she is ‘constantly asked – even by male colleagues in my own party – if what I want to say is very important, if I could refrain from taking the floor.’ Some tactics are more brazen. Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi told the Guardian that male colleagues use intimidation to frighten female MPs into silence – and when that fails, ‘The leadership cuts our microphones off’.50 Highlighting the hidden gender angle of having a single person (most often a man) in charge of speaking time in parliament, one MP from a country in sub-Saharan Africa (the report only specified regions so the women could remain anonymous) told the IPU that the Speaker had pressured one of her female colleagues for sex. Following her refusal, ‘he had never again given her the floor in parliament’. It doesn’t necessarily even take a sexual snub for a Speaker to refuse women the floor: ‘During my first term in parliament, parliamentary authorities always referred to statements by men and gave priority to men when giving the floor to speakers,’ explained one MP from a country in Asia. The IPU report concluded that sexism, harassment and violence against female politicians was a ‘phenomenon that knew no boundaries and exists to different degrees in every country’. The report found that 66% of female parliamentarians were regularly subjected to misogynistic remarks from their male colleagues, ranging from the degrading (‘you would be even better in a porn movie’) to the threatening (‘she needs to be raped so that she knows what foreigners do’).

In Andhra, farmers fear Naidu’s land pool will sink their fortunes Prasad Nichenametla,Hindustan Times | 480 words The state festival tag added colour to Sankranti in Andhra Pradesh this time. But the hue of happiness was missing in 29 villages along river Krishna in Guntur district. The villagers knew it was their last Sankranti, a harvest festival celebrated to seek agricultural prosperity. For in two months, more than 30,000 acres of fertile farmland would be acquired for a brand new capital planned in collaboration with Singapore. The Nara Chandrababu Naidu government went about the capital project by setting aside the Centre’s land acquisition act and drawing up a compensation package for land-owning and tenant farmers and labourers. Many are opposed to it, and are not keen on snapping their centuries-old bond with their land and livelihood. In Penumaka village, Nageshwara Rao, 50, fears the future as he does not possess a tenancy certificate that could have brought some relief under the compensation package. “The entire village is against land-pooling but we hear the government is adamant,” Rao says, referring to municipal minister P Narayana’s alleged assertion that land would be taken with or without the farmers’ consent. Narayana is supervising the land-pooling process. “Naidu says he would give us Rs 50,000 per year in lieu of annual crops. We earn that much in a month here,” villager Meka Koti Reddy says. To drive home the point, locals in Undavalli village nearby have put up a board asking officials to keep off their lands that produce three crops a year. Unlike other parts of Andhra Pradesh, the water-rich land here is highly productive yielding 200 varieties of crops. Some farmers are also suspicious about the compensation because Naidu is yet to deliver on the loan-waiver promise. They are now weighing legal options besides seeking Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention to retain their land. While the villagers opposing land-pooling are allegedly being backed by Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress Party, those belonging to the Kamma community — the support base for Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party — are said to be cooperative.  It is also believed that Naidu chose this location over others suggested by experts to primarily benefit the Kamma industrialists who own large swathes of land in Krishna and Guntur districts. But even the pro-project villagers cannot help feel insecure. “We are clueless about where our developed area would be. What if the project is not executed within Naidu’s tenure? Is there a legal recourse?” Idupulapati Rambabu of Mandadam says. This is despite Naidu’s assurance on January 1 at nearby Thulluru, where he launched the land-pooling process, asking farmers to give land without any apprehension. He said the deal in its present form would make them richer than him in a decade. “We are not building a mere city but a hub of economic activity loaded with superior infrastructure that is aimed at generating wealth. This would be a win-win situation for all,” Naidu tells HT. As of now, villages like Nelapadu struggling with low soil fertility seem to be winning from the package.

The tactical situation seems simple enough. Thanks to Marx’s prophecy, the Communists knew for certain that misery must soon increase. They also knew that the party could not win the confidence of the workers without fighting for them, and with them, for an improvement of their lot. These two fundamental assumptions clearly determined the principles of their general tactics. Make the workers demand their share, back them up in every particular episode in their unceasing fight for bread and shelter. Fight with them tenaciously for the fulfilment of their practical demands, whether economic or political. Thus you will win their confidence. At the same time, the workers will learn that it is impossible for them to better their lot by these petty fights, and that nothing short of a wholesale revolution can bring about an improvement. For all these petty fights are bound to be unsuccessful; we know from Marx that the capitalists simply cannot continue to compromise and that, ultimately, misery must increase. Accordingly, the only result—but a valuable one—of the workers’ daily fight against their oppressors is an increase in their class consciousness; it is that feeling of unity which can be won only in battle, together with a desperate knowledge that only revolution can help them in their misery. When this stage is reached, then the hour has struck for the final show-down. This is the theory and the Communists acted accordingly. At first they support the workers in their fight to improve their lot. But, contrary to all expectations and prophecies, the fight is successful. The demands are granted. Obviously, the reason is that they had been too modest. Therefore one must demand more. But the demands are granted again44. And as misery decreases, the workers become less embittered, more ready to bargain for wages than to plot for revolution. Now the Communists find that their policy must be reversed. Something must be done to bring the law of increasing misery into operation. For instance, colonial unrest must be stirred up (even where there is no chance of a successful revolution), and with the general purpose of counteracting the bourgeoisification of the workers, a policy fomenting catastrophes of all sorts must be adopted. But this new policy destroys the confidence of the workers. The Communists lose their members, with the exception of those who are inexperienced in real political fights. They lose exactly those whom they describe as the ‘vanguard of the working class’; their tacitly implied principle: ‘The worse things are, the better they are, since misery must precipitate revolution’, makes the workers suspicious—the better the application of this principle, the worse are the suspicions entertained by the workers. For they are realists; to obtain their confidence, one must work to improve their lot. Thus the policy must be reversed again: one is forced to fight for the immediate betterment of the workers’ lot and to hope at the same time for the opposite. With this, the ‘inner contradictions’ of the theory produce the last stage of confusion. It is the stage when it is hard to know who is the traitor, since treachery may be faithfulness and faithfulness treachery. It is the stage when those who followed the party not simply because it appeared to them (rightly, I am afraid) as the only vigorous movement with humanitarian ends, but especially because it was a movement based on a scientific theory, must either leave it, or sacrifice their intellectual integrity; for they must now learn to believe blindly in some authority. Ultimately, they must become mystics—hostile to reasonable argument. It seems that it is not only capitalism which is labouring under inner contradictions that threaten to bring about its downfall …

The only difference between compassionate conservatism and conservatism is that under compassionate conservatism they tell you they’re not going to help you but they’re really sorry about it.

For weeks all opinion polls and all responsible commentators had been predicting that there was no hope of the Labour Party being elected on a programme like this. Ever since Harry Perkins had been chosen to lead Labour at a tumultuous party conference two years earlier, the popular press had been saying that this proved what they had always argued – namely that the Labour Party was in the grip of a Marxist conspiracy. Privately the rulers of the great corporations had been gleeful, for they had convinced themselves that the British people were basically moderate and that, however rough the going got, they would never elect a Labour government headed by the likes of Harry Perkins. Picture, therefore, the dismay that swept the lobby of the Athenaeum as the television showed Perkins coming to the rostrum in Sheffield town hall to acknowledge not only his own re-election with a record majority, but to claim victory on behalf of his party. “Comrades,” intoned brother Perkins. “Comrades, my foot.” Sir Arthur Furnival was apoplectic. “Told you the man’s a Communist.

1926. The General Strike in Leith. You read all that and what they said then and you pure see what the Labour Party used to believe in - freedom for the ordinary cat.

The Hercule Poirot Reading List It is possible to read the Poirot stories in any order. If you want to consider them chronologically (in terms of Poirot’s lifetime), we recommend the following: ❑ The Mysterious Affair at Styles [1920] ❑ The Murder on the Links [1923] ❑ The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories (US Short Story Collection) [1939] ❑ Poirot Investigates (Short Story Collection) [1924] ❑ Poirot’s Early Cases (Short Story Collection) [1974] ❑ The Murder of Roger Ackroyd [1926] ❑ The Big Four [1927] ❑ The Mystery of the Blue Train [1928] ❑ Peril at End House [1932] ❑ Lord Edgware Dies [1933] ❑ Murder on the Orient Express [1934] ❑ Three Act Tragedy [1935] ❑ Death in the Clouds [1935] ❑ Poirot and the Regatta Mystery (Published in The Complete Short Stories: Hercule Poirot) [1936] ❑ The ABC Murders [1936] ❑ Murder in Mesopotamia [1936] ❑ Cards on the Table [1936] ❑ The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories (US Short Story Collection) [1948] ❑ Murder in the Mews (Short Story Collection) [1938] ❑ Dumb Witness [1937] ❑ Death on the Nile [1937] ❑ Appointment with Death [1937] ❑ Hercule Poirot’s Christmas [1938] ❑ Sad Cypress [1940] ❑ One, Two Buckle My Shoe [1940] ❑ Evil Under the Sun [1941] ❑ Five Little Pigs [1942] ❑ The Hollow [1946] ❑ The Labours of Hercules (Short Story Collection) [1947] ❑ Taken at the Flood [1945] ❑ Mrs. McGinty’s Dead [1952] ❑ After the Funeral [1953] ❑ Hickory Dickory Dock [1955] ❑ Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly [2014] ❑ Dead Man’s Folly [1956] ❑ Cat Among the Pigeons [1959] ❑ Double Sin and Other Stories (US Short Story Collection) [1961] ❑ The Under Dog and Other Stories (US Short Story Collection) [1951] ❑ The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories (US Short Story Collection) [1997] ❑ The Clocks [1963] ❑ Third Girl [1966] ❑ Hallowe’en Party [1969] ❑ Elephants Can Remember [1972] ❑ Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case [1975]

remedy. The issue of Europe, he suggested, should be taken out of the hands of governments and parties, and put directly to the people in a referendum. Such a vote would be constitutionally new, but then so was signing away power to a European body. It could be justified on the grounds that the issue affected the rights of every citizen. From Labour’s point of view, there was the advantage that it would make it possible for non-partisan front-benchers to avoid any outright personal commitment, or contradiction of earlier positions – without loss of face.

The motto of the Labour Party is “bread and roses”, but I always wonder if we are really fighting for daily bread or for the freedom of citizens. Eternal liberty over filling only your stomach.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles [1920] ❑  The Murder on the Links [1923] ❑  The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories (US Short Story Collection) [1939] ❑  Poirot Investigates (Short Story Collection) [1924] ❑  Poirot’s Early Cases (Short Story Collection) [1974] ❑  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd [1926] ❑ The Big Four [1927] ❑  The Mystery of the Blue Train [1928] ❑ Peril at End House [1932] ❑ Lord Edgware Dies [1933] ❑  Murder on the Orient Express [1934] ❑ Three Act Tragedy [1935] ❑ Death in the Clouds [1935] ❑  Poirot and the Regatta Mystery (Published in The Complete Short Stories: Hercule Poirot) [1936] ❑ The ABC Murders [1936] ❑ Murder in Mesopotamia [1936] ❑ Cards on the Table [1936] ❑  The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories (US Short Story Collection) [1948] ❑  Murder in the Mews (Short Story Collection) [1938] ❑ Dumb Witness [1937] ❑ Death on the Nile [1937] ❑ Appointment with Death [1937] ❑ Hercule Poirot’s Christmas [1938] ❑ Sad Cypress [1940] ❑  One, Two Buckle My Shoe [1940] ❑ Evil Under the Sun [1941] ❑ Five Little Pigs [1942] ❑ The Hollow [1946] ❑  The Labours of Hercules (Short Story Collection) [1947] ❑ Taken at the Flood [1945] ❑ Mrs. McGinty’s Dead [1952] ❑ After the Funeral [1953] ❑ Hickory Dickory Dock [1955] ❑  Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly [2014] ❑ Dead Man’s Folly [1956] ❑ Cat Among the Pigeons [1959] ❑  Double Sin and Other Stories (US Short Story Collection) [1961] ❑  The Under Dog and Other Stories (US Short Story Collection) [1951] ❑  The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories (US Short Story Collection) [1997] ❑ The Clocks [1963] ❑ Third Girl [1966] ❑ Hallowe’en Party [1969] ❑ Elephants Can Remember [1972] ❑ Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case [1975]

While it may have been true at the end of the nineteenth century to describe the Anglican Church as the Tory Party at prayer, it would be more correct to say, of its leaders today, that they represent the Labour Party trying to remember how to pray, while not really understanding the point of it.

parties were also successful in getting candidates elected to the European Parliament and the new assemblies in the different parts of the United Kingdom. Indeed, so successful in fact that various parties—deemed minor at the level of competition for election to the House of Commons—have emerged in the twenty-first century as governing parties in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The Labour and Conservative parties dominate at the level of the U.K. Parliament but not at the level of the different semi-autonomous parts

We learn from Jesus’ example while on earth that He did not come to set up “Christian nations.” Jesus modeled being an underking. His kingdom was not married to any political party or country. We learn from this that we must continually go back to Jesus and His example of “subversive resistance” to all that is contrary to His way. We must study His teachings, look deeply at His example, and ask hard questions of ourselves and others about what it means to follow Jesus. This applies to Republicans and Democrats in the United States, Tories and Labour in the UK, any and all political parties and philosophies.

If Labour Party is only fighting for the daily bread, then how does it intend to convince the rich to join them?

All of this is more than history. The Owen critique of the Jenkins position remains a sharp one and directly relevant to Labour moderates. If they decided they could no longer stick Corbyn, what sort of party would they create? What is the electoral base of a straightforwardly liberal party? Labour voters least likely to be impressed by Corbyn are most likely to be hawkish on defence, tough on immigration and sympathetic to Brexit.

Ought one to remain in one’s country when under a tyrant? If one’s country is under a tyrant ought one to labour at all hazards for the abolition of the tyranny, even at the risk of the total destruction of the city? Or ought we to be on our guard against the man attempting the abolition, lest he should rise too high himself? Ought one to assist one’s country when under a tyrant by seizing opportunities and by argument rather than by war? Is it acting like a good citizen to quit one’s country when under a tyrant for any other land, and there to remain quiet, or ought one to face any and every danger for liberty’s sake? Ought one to wage war upon and besiege one’s native town, if it is under a tyrant? Even if one does not approve an abolition of a tyranny by war, ought one still to enroll oneself in the ranks of the loyalists? Ought one in politics to share the dangers of one’s benefactors and friends, even though one does not think their general policy to be wise? Should a man who has done conspicuous services to his country, and on that very account has been shamefully treated and exposed to envy, voluntarily place himself in danger for his country, or may he be permitted at length to take thought for himself and those nearest and dearest to him, giving up all political struggles against the stronger party?

Debs came to the conclusion that no strike or labor movement could ultimately be successful as long as the government was controlled by the capitalist class. Any advances made by an organized working class would later be reversed by the capitalists when they regained absolute power, often by temporarily mollifying workers with reforms. Working men and women had to achieve political power, a goal of Britain’s Labour Party at the time, or they would forever be at the mercy of the bosses.

What are you in for?’ said Winston. ‘Thoughtcrime!’ said Parsons, almost blubbering. The tone of his voice implied at once a complete admission of his guilt and a sort of incredulous horror that such a word could be applied to himself. He paused opposite Winston and began eagerly appealing to him: ‘You don’t think they’ll shoot me, do you, old chap? They don’t shoot you if you haven’t actually done anything — only thoughts, which you can’t help? I know they give you a fair hearing. Oh, I trust them for that! They’ll know my record, won’t they? YOU know what kind of chap I was. Not a bad chap in my way. Not brainy, of course, but keen. I tried to do my best for the Party, didn’t I? I’ll get off with five years, don’t you think? Or even ten years? A chap like me could make himself pretty useful in a labour-camp. They wouldn’t shoot me for going off the rails just once?

Emotional Labour: The f Word, by Jane Caro and Catherine Fox "Work inside the home is not always about chores. One of the most onerous roles is managing the dynamics of the home. The running of the schedule, the attention to details about band practice and sports training, the purchase of presents for next Saturday’s birthday party, the check up at the dentist, all usually fall on one person's shoulders. Woody Allen, in the much-publicised custody case for his children with Mia Farrow, eventually lost, in part because unlike Farrow, he could not name the children’s dentist or paediatrician. It’s a guardianship role and it is not only physically time consuming but demands enormous intellectual and emotional attention. Sociologists call it kin work. It involves: 'keeping in touch with relations, preparing holiday celebrations and remembering birthdays. Another aspect of family work is being attentive to the emotions within a family - what sociologists call ‘emotion work.’ This means being attentive to the emotional tone among family members, troubleshooting and facing problems in a constructive way. In our society, women do a disproportionate amount of this important work. If any one of these activities is performed outside the home, it is called work - management work, psychiatry, event planning, advance works - and often highly remunerated. The key point here is that most adults do two important kinds of work: market work and family work, and that both kinds of work are required to make the world go round.' (Interview with Joan Williams, mothersandmore.org, 2000) This pressure culminates at Christmas. Like many women, Jane remembers loving Christmas as a child and young woman. As a mother, she hates it. Suddenly on top of all the usual paid and unpaid labour, there is the additional mountain of shopping, cooking, cleaning, decorating, card writing, present wrapping, ritual phone calls, peacekeeping and emotional care taking. And then on bloody Boxing Day it all has to be cleaned up. If you want to give your mother a fabulous Christmas present just cancel the whole thing. Bah humbug!

Behind the scenes, in a smaller room provided with geysers for the making of tea and large sinks for washing-up dirty dishes, a band of earnest workers was toiling at cutting bread at high speed to refill the returned empties from the hall in which the locusts were at work. Pile after pile of bread-and-butter was tipped on the plates which arrived, swept clean, through the hatches. The ammunition was provided by a number of women, armed with fierce and flashing breadknives and who brandished them with machine-like skill and precision. Each lady had brought her own tools, the better to get on with the job. Others continually replenished the tea urns from the steaming, spluttering water-boilers. Now and then, as one of the party left the kitchen for some purpose or another, there would be a brief pause whilst the rest criticised, verbally or by appropriate looks and gestures, her dress, demeanour, speed of work, contribution to the communal labours, or style of headgear — all the women wore hats, by the way — behind her back. Then they would turn-to again.

they can claim that public order has broken down, and drastic measures are needed to restore the rule of law. Those emergency measures will include banning democratic political parties such as Labour, prohibiting trade union action, and jailing people without trial—people such as us, peaceful men and women whose only crime is to disagree with the government. Does this sound fantastic to you, unlikely, something that could never happen? Well, they used exactly those tactics in Germany—and it worked.

exaggerations, and outright lies about his accomplishments. He lied about nonexistent academic awards and scholarships. He plagiarized speeches willy-nilly, and in one infamous case, appropriated the personal life story of British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, pretending that he, too, was descended from coal miners and was the first in his family to get a college degree “in a thousand generations.

Britain’s post-War assessment, shared by the Labour Party, that a separated Pakistan would benefit the Western world in the context of the Middle East’s oil,

As any parrot owner will tell you, pet birds can give serious bites. The nut-cracking beak of the African gray parrot, for example, can sever fingers. In 1998, the Labour Party’s John Prescott, deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, was engaged in a publicity event for environmental issues when a captive macaw, clearly a Tory, fetched him a bruising bite on the finger.

Anti-Semitism has been a stain on our party. I have seen the grief that it’s brought to so many Jewish communities. On behalf of the Labour Party, I am sorry.

The boomers’ most consequential political legacy may be the biggest irony of all: for all their claims to be the most progressive generation ever, the main result of the boomers’ involvement in politics has been the destruction of the Left. In 1950, the Democratic party polled fifteen points better among those without college degrees, compared with those with them. By 2016, that advantage had flipped to a fifteen-point deficit. The Labour Party in the U.K. has undergone the same transformation, from the party of the working class to the party of the college-educated elite. But if a left-wing party is no longer the party of the working class, what good is it? What left is it?

The possession of property in a Capitalist society has given liberty to a fortunate minority who hardly realise how much its absence means enslavement.

In 2018 the British Labour Party found itself embroiled in controversy inside and outside the party when it attempted to amend the examples—not the working definition, it must be said—to ensure that legitimate criticism of Israel was not prevented by adopting the definition and all its examples. After lengthy debate the Labour Party has now accepted in full all the examples as well as the working definition.

An upset victory in 1972 by the Australian Labour Party and the election of Gough Whitlam as prime minister sent jitters through the CIA. The agency feared that a left-leaning government in Australia might reveal the function of the bases or, worse, abrogate the agreement and close down the facilities. Because of these fears and apprehension that the KGB might find it easy to penetrate a labor government, the CIA decided to limit the information it made available to the Australian Security and Intelligence Service, the Australian CIA. To the American CIA, there were high stakes involved in the bases, and not surprisingly, it meant to keep them. Despite professions of loyalty from Whitlam to the American-Australian alliance, apprehension about an anti-U.S. shift in Australian policy continued to grow within the Central Intelligence Agency. And in the minds of certain officials within the CIA, these fears were soon validated. One of Whitlam’s first acts after becoming prime minister was to tweak the United States by withdrawing Australian troops from Vietnam, and in 1973 he publicly denounced the American bombing of Hanoi, enraging President Nixon. Meanwhile, strident

Creagh also blamed much of what happened in 2019 and Brexit on her former Islington comrade Jeremy Corbyn. The day after the election, she confronted Corbyn in Portcullis House in the Palace of Westminster, enraged to see him taking selfies with young supporters after she and dozens of other Labour MPs had lost their seats. ‘I don’t think Jeremy did the cause any favours, he went to EU rallies without mentioning the European Union. He was lost in his own self-righteousness. The whole kind of movement and the momentum around his own personal political project, which I think, in retrospect, is probably not the same political project of the Labour Party’s historic mission, which is to get people elected to Parliament. I think Jeremy kind of lost sight of that.

Anyone growing up in northern England who has attended a christening or child’s birthday party would feel at home.

Socialist, Labour, and social-democratic parties have gradually come to be seen as increasingly favorable to the winners in the educational contest while they have lost the support they used to enjoy among less well-educated groups in the postwar period.113

There is nothing more difficult than to be a stepson of the time; there is no heavier fate than to live in an age that is not your own. Stepsons of the time are easily recognized: in personnel departments, Party district committees, army political sections, editorial offices, on the street . . . Time loves only those it has given birth to itself: its own children, its own heroes, its own labourers. Never can it come to love the children of a past age, any more than a woman can love the heroes of a past age, or a stepmother love the children of another woman.

The speaker was from the Socialist Party, but over the last few weeks he’d heard a Labour Party speaker, a Communist, trade unionists and various self-proclaimed revolutionary anarchists. They all banged on about the same things, with varying degrees of anger. Not that he disagreed with what they said, it was just cloud-cuckoo in his experience. What employer’s going to give the workers two weeks off a year? There’s plenty of people out of work who want in, Wiggins knew, and so the bosses always get to choose.

The Leckwiths were excited about the Beveridge Report, a government paper that had become a bestseller. “Commissioned under a Conservative prime minister and written by a Liberal economist,” said Bernie. “Yet it proposes what the Labour Party has always wanted! You know you’re winning, in politics, when your opponents steal your ideas.” Ethel said: “The idea is that everyone of working age should pay a weekly insurance premium, then get benefits when they are sick, unemployed, retired, or widowed.” “A simple proposal, but it will transform our country,” Bernie said enthusiastically. “Cradle to grave, no one will ever be destitute again.” Daisy said: “Has the government accepted it?” “No,” said Ethel. “Clem Attlee pressed Churchill very hard, but Churchill won’t endorse the report. The Treasury thinks it will cost too much.” Bernie said: “We’ll have to win an election before we can implement it.

No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as JOYCAMP (forced-labour camp) or MINIPAX Minis- try of Peace, i.e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean. Some words, on the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous un- derstanding of the real nature of Oceanic society. An example was PROLEFEED, meaning the rubbishy enter- tainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses.

One of those settlers was Normandy-born and ornately named J. Hector St John de Crevecoeur, who embarked for America in 1754, purchased an estate in Pennsylvania, and married the daughter of an American merchant. In his Letters from an American Farmer, first published in 1782 in English and translated soon after into French, Crevecoeur described his adoptive country and his countrymen in the most flattering terms: We are the most perfect society now existing in the world... Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world... Here a man is free as he ought to be... An American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence – this is an American. It was partly through such fervent testimonies from men like Crevecoeur, and from foreigners like the even more famous Frenchman de Tocqueville and the less famous German Francis Lieber, that America gained its reputation abroad, because third-party

As Sir Eric Williams wrote in From Columbus to Castro: The situation was more discouraging in Cuba, which was in every sense of the term an American colony. The Americans openly supported, in the interest of stability, the dictator Machado who raised no awkward questions of Cuban independence and who was concerned merely with the exile or assassination of hostile labour leaders and the reckless and enormous increase of the public debt, both public and private. America dominated the scene. One American writer has stated that no one could become President of Cuba without the endorsement of the United States. According to another, the American Ambassador in Havana was the most important man in Cuba. A third analyses United States policy as "putting a veto on revolution whatever the cause". The Platt Amendment dominated the relations between the United States and Cuba. On the occasion of a threatened rebellion by a Negro political party, the Independent Party of Colour, the United States sent troops to Cuba. In reply to Cuba's protests Secretary of State Knox stated: "The United States does not undertake first to consult the Cuban Government if a crisis arises requiring a temporary landing somewhere." In 1933 Ambassador Sumner Welles identified six desirable characteristics which a Cuban president should possess. These read in part: "First, his thorough acquaintance with the desires of this Government… Sixth, his amenability to suggestions or advice which might be made to him by the American Legation.

He was a Labour MP so I asked him if it was true the House of Commons was a form of poor relief for the otherwise unemployable...

See the man of business, as he pores over his ledger and account books, and runs his eye over the columns of figures. See the man of pleasure, as he tears over the country with his horses and dogs, or rushes after excitement at the races, the theatre, the card party, or the ball. See the poor thoughtless labourer, as he carries off his hard-earned wages to the public house, and wastes them in ruining both body and soul. See them all, how thoroughly they are in earnest! See them all, how they throw their hearts into what they are doing! And then mark them all at church next Sunday: listless, careless, yawning, sleepy, and indifferent, as if there were no God, and no devil, and no Christ, and no heaven, and no hell! Mark how evident it is that they have left their hearts outside the church! Mark how plain it is that they have no real interest in religion! And then say whether it be not true that many know nothing of the importance of having their sins cleansed away.O, take heed lest this be the case with you!

In Europe, demands for expanded popular participation came on the heels of war; the rise of the British Labour Party in the 1920s, for example, was in some ways a consequence of the sufferings of the working class in the trenches of World War I. In Latin America, by contrast, elites usually pulled back from interstate conflicts precisely to avoid having to turn to the masses for help.

To be quite honest I would rather have the current incompetent arse clenching pan drop sucking cross dressing incumbent hemorrhoids running the country rather than the two Eds – Silliband & DoughBall & their motley squad of coconuts, kebabs, cornish pasties and Waitrose shopping pretenders.

Sensitive Balls goes looking for love at Labour party conference

In 2005, when Congress still depended on Communist votes for a majority in Parliament, a National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was passed, assuring any household in the countryside a hundred days labour a year at the legal minimum wage on public works, with at least a third of these jobs for women. It is work for pay, rather than a direct cash transfer scheme as in Brazil, to minimize the danger of money going to those who are not actually the poor, and so ensure it reaches only those willing to do the work. Denounced by all right-thinking opinion as debilitating charity behind a façade of make-work, it was greeted by the middle-class like ‘a wet dog at a glamorous party’, in the words of one of its architects, the Belgian-Indian economist Jean Drèze. Unlike the Bolsa Família in Brazil, the application of NREGA was left to state governments rather than the centre, so its impact has been very uneven and incomplete, wages often paid lower than the legal minimum, for days many fewer than a hundred.75 Works performed are not always durable, and as with all other social programmes in India, funds are liable to local malversation. But in scale NREGA now represents the largest entitlement programme in the world, reaching some 40 million rural households, a quarter of the total in the country. Over half of these dalit or adivasi, and 48 per cent of its beneficiaries are women – double their share of casual labour in the private sector. Such is the demand for employment by NREGA in the countryside that it far outruns supply. A National Survey Sample for 2009–2010 has revealed that 45 per cent of all rural households wanted the work it offers, of whom only 56 per cent got it.76 What NREGA has started to do, in the formulation Drèze has taken from Ambedkar, is break the dictatorship of the private employer in the countryside, helping by its example to raise wages even of non-recipients. Since inception, its annual cost has risen from $2.5 to over $8 billion, a token of its popularity. This remains less than 1 per cent of GDP, and the great majority of rural labourers in the private sector are still not paid the minimum wage due them. Conceived outside the party system, and accepted by Congress only when it had little expectation of winning the elections of 2004, the Act eventually had such popular demand behind it that the Lok Sabha adopted it nem con. Three years later, with typical dishonesty, the Manmohan regime renamed it as ‘Gandhian’ to fool the masses that Congress inspired it.

Just because the educational work of the Anarcho-Syndicalists is directed toward the development of independent thought and action, they are outspoken opponents of all those centralizing tendencies which are so characteristic of political labour parties. But centralism, that artificial organization from above downward which turns over the affairs of everybody in a lump to a small minority, is always attended by barren official routine ; and this crushes individual conviction, kills all personal initiative by lifeless discipline and bureaucratic ossification, and permits no independent action. The organization of Anarcho-Syndicalism is based on the principles of Federalism, on free combination from below upward, putting the right of self-determination of every member above everything else and recognizing only the organic agreement of all on the basis of like interests and common convictions. It has often been ch

Why do the Fascists want violence?” Ethel asked rhetorically. “Those out there in Hills Road may be mere hooligans, but someone is directing them, and their tactics have a purpose. When there is fighting in the streets, they can claim that public order has broken down, and drastic measures are needed to restore the rule of law. Those emergency measures will include banning democratic political parties such as Labour, prohibiting trade union action, and jailing people without trial—people such as us, peaceful men and women whose only crime is to disagree with the government. Does this sound fantastic to you, unlikely, something that could never happen? Well, they used exactly those tactics in Germany—and it worked.

The polls are still showing the two parties running neck and neck. ‘Labour might actually make it,’ Henry says. ‘The Tories aren’t going to be able to command the confidence of the House.

But the alternative is the return to power of Labour. This is the party which did more than any other to wreck Britain with its obsession with borrowing and wasting our money on its public-sector paymasters; its policy of diluting our national identity by allowing uncontrolled immigration; its attempts to destroy the middle classes, which Labour loathed, by removing any excellence or aspiration from our education system while Labour politicians mostly sent their own children to private schools; and its pandering to the liberal elites through the introduction of human rights legislation which has made human rights lawyers wealthy, has protected criminals and has been used to persecute those who do try to obey the law.

A youth of such promise, especially if his body be on a par with his mind, will be at once foremost among all his fellows. His relatives and fellow-citizens, eager to make use of him for their own purposes, and anxious to appropriate to themselves his growing force, will besiege him betimes with solicitations and flatteries. Under these influences, if we assume him to be rich, well born, and in a powerful city, he will naturally become intoxicated with unlimited hopes and ambition; fancying himself competent to manage the affairs of all governments, and giving himself the empty airs of a lofty potentate. If there be any one to give him a quiet hint that he has not yet acquired intelligence, nor can acquire it without labour — he will turn a deaf ear. But suppose that such advice should by chance prevail, in one out of many cases, so that the youth alters his tendencies and devotes himself to philosophy — what will be the conduct of those who see, that they will thereby be deprived of his usefulness and party-service, towards their own views? They will leave no means untried to prevent him from following the advice, and even to ruin the adviser, by private conspiracy and judicial prosecution.

She assigned the shirt a number and turned to the next prize. This was a set of six fish knives and forks, made by Hamilton and Inches, and a very handsome prize for somebody. This would be popular at a Conservative function, but would be useless at a Labour Party event. They had no idea, she believed, of the use of fish knives and forks and used the same cutlery for everything. That was part of the problem. The Liberal Democrats, of course, knew what fish knives and forks were all about, but pretended they didn’t care! Liberal Hypocrites, thought Sasha.

I always regarded him as a One Nation Conservative who admired Margaret Thatcher and had somehow wound up in the Labour Party because his wife was a left-wing political activist and he had an innate distaste for the old Tory tradition.

When Palestinian gunmen shot dead twenty-two worshippers at the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul in 1986, its newsletter insisted that while the LMCP didn’t condone the attack, ‘it is Zionism that gains … So whatever Israel may feel about the massacre of the Turkish Jews, the truth is that the Zionist State actually benefits from such attacks.’ By this stage Livingstone had joined Corbyn as a LMCP sponsor, alongside around a dozen MPs and MEPs and a clutch of Constituency Labour Parties and student Labour Clubs.

After the publication of a report in 1967 by Bridget Plowden, an amateur educationalist, describing primary schooling, Britain’s education system had become an ideological battleground. Masked by a scattering of platitudes about improving schools, Plowden recommended the destruction of traditional education. Children, she wrote, should no longer sit in rows of desks but instead gather in groups around tables to encourage self-learning. She also recommended that the eleven-plus examination, a three-part test (English, maths and intelligence) taken in one day that irrevocably determined a child’s educational fate – either to blossom in a grammar school or be consigned to failure in a secondary modern school – should be abandoned. Grammar schools should be replaced by non-selective comprehensives that mixed children of all standards. With cross-party support, successive Labour and Conservative governments implemented her recommendations.

Guérin's leftist, class-based critique of Jacobinism thus had three related implications for contemporary debates about political tactics and strategy. First, it implied a rejection of "class collaboration" and therefore of any type of alliance with the bourgeois Left (Popular Frontism). Second, it implied that the revolutionary movement should be uncompromising, that it should push for more radical social change and not stop halfway (which, as Saint Just famously remarked, was to dig one's own grave), rejecting the Stalinist emphasis on the unavoidability of separate historical "stages" in the long-term revolutionary process. Third, it implied a rejection both of the Leninist model of a centralised, hierarchical party dominating the labour movement and of the "substitutism" (substitution of the party for the proletariat) which had come to characterize the Bolshevik dictatorship.

As has become evident in recent years, there are those on the far left who also engage in denial. During a BBC interview in September 2017 on leftist antisemitism within Britain’s Labour Party, Ken Loach was asked to comment on a session at the party’s annual conference where a participant called for a “yes or no” discussion of the Holocaust. Loach’s rather ambiguous response: “I think history is for us all to discuss, wouldn’t you?

On this account I feel always, on a Saturday night, as though I also were released from some yoke of labour, had some wages to receive, and some luxury of repose to enjoy. For the sake, therefore, of witnessing, upon as large a scale as possible, a spectacle with which my sympathy was so entire, I used after, on Saturday nights, after I had taken opium, to wander forth, without much regarding the direction or the sistance, to all the markets, and other parts of London, to which the poor resort on a Saturday night, for laying out their wages. Many a family party, consisting of a man, his wife, and sometimes one or two of his children, have I listened to, as they stood consulting on their ways and means, or the strength of their exchequer, or the price of household articles. Gradually I became familiar with their wishes, their difficulties, and their opinions. Sometimes there might be heard murmers of discontent: but far oftener expressions on the countenance, or uttered in words, of patience, hope, and tranquillity. And taken generally, I must say, that, in this point at least, the poor are far more philosophic than the rich - that they show a more ready and cheerful submission to what they consider as irremediable evils, or irreparable losses. Whenever I saw occasion, or could do it without appearing to be intrusive, I joined their parties; and gave my opinion upon the matter in discussion, which, if not always judicious, was always received indulgently. If wages were a little higher, or expected to be so, or the quartern loaf a little lower, or it was reported that onions and butter were expected to fall, I was glad: yet, if the contrary were true, I drew from opium some means of consoling myself. For opium (like the bee, that extracts its materials indiscriminately from roses and from the soot of chimneys) can overrule all feelings into a compliance with the master key. Some of these rambles lead me to great distances: for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time.

Para darse una idea del lugar que la cuestión israelí-palestina ocupa hoy en el imaginario de la izquierda, basta con volver un instante al caso del Reino Unido. Los representantes de los distritos laboristas británicos, nucleados en el Constituency Labour Party (CLP), votaron en 2018 sobre las prioridades del partido. El resultado de la consulta estableció la siguiente jerarquía por temas: Vivienda, 297.032 votos; Sistema Educativo, 233.883; Generación Windrush (decenas de miles de personas de origen caribeño amenazadas de expulsión del Reino Unido), 212.612; Palestina, 188.019; Brexit, 149.172; Sistema de Salud (NHS), 89.861; Protección Social, 89.861; Cambio Climático y Fracking, 72.890, y la lista sigue con financiación de gobiernos locales (68.473) y ayudas sociales para los más desprotegidos (64.569). En otras palabras, para la militancia de la izquierda británica, Palestina es una prioridad más relevante que el estado de su sistema sanitario, las condiciones de salida de la Unión Europea o el cambio climático, aunque estos aspectos tengan repercusiones graves, tangibles e inmediatas en la vida diaria de sus compatriotas.

Michael was the male partner in a dance, but he did not know how to lead. Or rather, he led by default, since Jill did not challenge his authority. He simply filled a vacuum. As a political man, he would have the same problem: he had a solid group of adherents, but he could not use that base to assert his authority. He was a sort of effigy of a great man and he seems to have known it, since he became leader of the Labour Party only after considerable prodding from Jill and others. It would have looked cowardly not to accept the leadership. But Michael was a sort of hollow man, as he acknowledged with self-deprecating humour during his 1983 campaign against Margaret Thatcher: “I’m here to impersonate the leader of the Labour Party. What have I been doing the rest of the week? You might well ask.

It was the time Tony Benn and Denis Healey were competing for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party. I was pretty leftwing, so was Jill Tweedie and there was this huge feeling that Tony Benn was the villain. Suddenly Michael got to his feet and made this extraordinary speech. Well, you think he’s going to have a heart attack. It’s so impassioned ... a pretty savage attack on Benn.

Then we got round to Michael’s health. “He’s reached a rather difficult stage,” Julie said and began to talk about Michael’s digressions, his seeming inability to get to the point or stay on it. It was so. But I added: “If you call him up and you say, ‘I want to ask you about this, this, and this and give him the night to think about it, he’ll come in the morning and for an hour or two he will do perfectly well.” Michael recognised the problem, I said. He called it “wandering.” “Well, that was his problem when he was leader of the Labour Party,” said Paul amid our laughter.

As early as 1975 she had come up with a wonderful line about the Labour Party: “They’ve got the usual Socialist disease — they’ve run out of other people’s money.

In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries. The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

Only by understanding that Blair and his New Labour Party were financed and controlled by Israeli interests can one understand how Blair was manipulated to support such a reckless and criminal scheme. Similar Zionist forces were at work on Bush.

Shortly before Corbyn became head of the party in 2015, Scottish columnist Stephen Daisley, who does not think Corbyn is an antisemite, observed, “How much easier it would make things” if he were. One could then simply attribute political developments in the Labour Party to the prejudices of one man. But, he continued, “this isn’t about Jeremy Corbyn; he’s just a symptom and a symbol. The Left, and not just the fringes, has an antisemitism problem.

The German designer Hugo Boss owned a small textile company in Metzingen, Germany. One of his early contracts was to manufacture brown shirts for the emerging Nazi Party. By 1938 the firm had become a key supplier of Nazi uniforms, including for the Army, Hitler Youth and the paramilitary SS. As the war progressed, Hugo Boss’s factories were staffed by forced labourers from France and Poland, most of whom were women.

In the Labour party, ‘too much will always be decided by those who do not know at all what they are talking about’ – and who were complacent about their ignorance. ‘The Labour Party will always be flanked by the Party of Catastrophe – Jacobins, Communists, Bolshevists … This is the party which hates or despises existing institutions and believes that great good will result merely from overthrowing them – or at least to overthrow them is the necessary preliminary to any great good.

the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats all took a pro-remain stance, and yet 40 per cent of Labour voters and 60 per cent of Conservative voters went against the leaders of the three parties to vote for Brexit.

Catesby may have wanted a revolution, but he knew it wasn’t going to happen. So he joined the Labour Party instead.

The year before, at an evening party, he had heard a piece of music played on the piano and violin. At first he had appreciated only the material quality of the sounds which those instruments secreted. And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the delicate line of the violin-part, slender but robust, compact and commanding, he had suddenly become aware of the mass of the piano-part beginning to surge upward in plashing waves of sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet restless, like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. But then at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to grasp the phrase or harmony—he did not know which—that had just been played and that had opened and expanded his soul, as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating one's nostrils. Perhaps it was owing to his own ignorance of music that he had received so confused an impression, one that are nonetheless the only purely musical impressions, limited in their extent, entirely original, and irreducible to any other kind. An impression of this order, vanishing in an instant, is, so to speak, an impression sine materia. Doubtless the notes which we hear at such moments tend to spread out before our eyes over surfaces of varying dimensions, to trace arabesques, to give us the sensation of breadth or tenuity, stability or caprice. But the notes themselves have vanished before these sensations have developed sufficiently to escape submersion under those which the succeeding or even simultaneous notes have already begun to awaken in us. And this impression would continue to envelop in its liquidity, its ceaseless overlapping, the motifs which from time to time emerge, barely discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown, recognised only by the particular kind of pleasure which they instill, impossible to describe, to recollect, to name, ineffable—did not our memory, like a labourer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of the waves, by fashioning for us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, did not enable us to compare and to contrast them with those that follow. And so, scarcely had the exquisite sensation which Swann had experienced died away, before his memory had furnished him with an immediate transcript, sketchy, it is true, and provisional, which he had been able to glance at while the piece continued, so that, when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no longer impossible to grasp. He could picture to himself its extent, its symmetrical arrangement, its notation, its expressive value; he had before him something that was no longer pure music, but rather design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished quite clearly a phrase which emerged for a few moments above the waves of sound. It had at once suggested to him a world of inexpressible delights, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which he felt that nothing else could initiate him; and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire.

But however determined this programme of domestic consolidation, following the Reichstag election results of May 1924, not even the votes of the SPD were sufficient to carry the constitutional amendments necessary to ratify the Dawes Plan, which included an international mortgage on the Reichsbahn. Over a quarter of the German electorate had voted for the far right - 19 per cent for the DNVP, almost 7 per cent for Hitler's NSDAP. Almost 13 per cent had opted for the Communists. The two-thirds majority would have to include at least some deputies from the DNVP, intransigent foes of the Versailles Treaty and the progenitors of the 'stab in the back' legend. So concerned were the foreign powers that the American ambassador Alanson Houghton intervened directly in German party politics, summoning leading figures in the DNVP to explain bluntly that if they rejected the Dawes Plan, it would be one hundred years before America ever assisted Germany again. Under huge pressure from their business backers, on 29 August 1924 enough DNVP members defected to the government side to ratify the plan. In exchange, the Reich government offered a sop to the nationalist community by formally renouncing its acceptance of the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty. Nevertheless, on 10 October 1924 Jack Morgan bit his tongue and signed the loan agreement that committed his bank along with major financial interests in London, Paris and even Brussels to the 800-million Goldmarks loan. The loan was to apply the salve of business common sense to the wounds left by the war. And it was certainly an attractive proposition. The issuers of the Dawes Loan paid only 87 cents on the dollar for their bonds. They were to be redeemed with a 5 per cent premium. For the 800 million Reichsmarks it received, Germany would service bonds with a face value of 1.027 billion. But if Morgan's were bewildered by the role they had been forced to play, this speaks to the eerie quality of the reconfiguration of international politics in 1924. The Labour government that hosted the final negotiations in London was the first socialist government elected to preside over the most important capitalist centre of the old world, supposedly committed by its party manifesto of 1919 to a radical platform of nationalization and social transformation. And yet in the name of 'peace' and 'prosperity' it was working hand in glove with an avowedly conservative adminstration in Washington and the Bank of England to satisfy the demands of American investors, in the process imposing a damaging financial settlement on a radical reforming government in France, to the benefit of a German Republic, which was at the time ruled by a coalition dominated by the once notorious annexationist, but now reformed Gustav Stresemann. 'Depoliticization' is a euphemistic way of describing this tableau of mutual evisceration. Certainly, it had been no plan of Wilson's New Freedom to raise Morgan's to such heights. In fact, even Morgan's did not want to own the terms of the Dawes Settlement. Whereas Wilson had invoked public opinion as the final authority, this was now represented by the 'investing' public, for whom the bankers, as financial advisors, were merely the spokesmen. But if a collective humbling of the European political class had been what lay behind Wilson's call for a 'peace without victory' eight years earlier, one can't help thinking that the Dawes Plan and the London Conference of 1924 must have had him chuckling in his freshly dug grave. It was a peace. There were certainly no European victors.

The real fun is working up hatred between those who say 'mass' and those who say 'holy communion' when neither party could possibly state the difference between, say, Hooker's doctrine and Thomas Aquinas', in any form which would hold water for five minutes. And all the purely indifferent things—candles and clothes and what not—are an admirable ground for our activities. We have quite removed from men's minds what that pestilent fellow Paul used to teach about food and other unessentials—namely, that the human without scruples should always give in to the human with scruples. You would think they could not fail to see the application. You would expect to find the 'low' churchman genuflecting and crossing himself lest the weak conscience of his 'high' brother should be moved to irreverence, and the 'high' one refraining from these exercises lest he should betray his 'low' brother into idolatry. And so it would have been but for our ceaseless labour. Without that, the variety of usage within the Church of England might have become a positive hotbed of charity and humility.

When we arrived in government, Labour party members both inside and outside the trade union movement were as ecstatic as everyone else. We could have captured and built on that feeling much more if the style had been more inclusive from the beginning. Being seen to do more to listen would have made us stronger, and helped us to move forward.

All this is merely internal Labour Party politics of course. And Labour Party politics in opposition at that. The real power of the state, as opposed to the skirmishing line of the establishment which is the Labour right, will be deployed later. We have not yet even seen the forces that were deployed to stop Scotland voting Yes in the referendum. There has been no public statement by the banks and the bosses of the supermarkets, no speech by the Governor of the Bank of England, no moment when the politically neutral Queen ‘lets her views be known’~all of which happened during the referendum campaign. Nor, since a Corbyn led Labour Party is still a long way from government, has there been the kind of moment where the governor of the Bank of England tells a Labour prime minister to dump his economic policy, as Lord Cromer instructed Harold Wilson in the 1960s, or where the IMF imposes austerity, as it did on an all too willing Denis Healy in the late 1976s. Anyone who wants an analysis of how this will all work can still do no better than read two books by Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism and The State in Capitalist Society. Or to read how the left wing rapture for former Nye Bevan supporter Harold Wilson turned to despair there is no better account than the one written by Paul Foot. For a contemporary example of the same disastrous process we need look no further than the defenestration of Tsipris’ Syriza in Greece. These are endgames, not the immediate prospect of the coming months. But they should warn us that we need to prepare alternatives now and not allow the excitement of current advance to blind us to the real dangers ahead. They should also serve to warn us that if we are to avoid these dangers it will be mass movements and political organisations outside the Labour Party which will play a decisive role.

Benjamin Croker. Don’t get many of your lot down here, you know.’ Whether he meant Prime Ministers, KGB agents or Labour Party members was unclear, but all three were equally true. Harold ploughed on.

The corollary of new crimes that only some people can commit is to exempt others from punishment for standard crimes—indeed, to pro vide a license to kill. Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the British Labour Party and Minister for Women, proposes allowing women to kill their “intimate partners” with impunity if they kill while “claiming past, or fear of future, abuse from male partners.” Murder would thus be condoned if a woman claimed to have suffered “conduct which caused the defendant to have a justifiable sense of being seriously wronged.” How the dead (and unproven) “abusers” could establish their innocence is not discussed in the proposal. “Effectively, what Harman and the ultra-feminist lobby want is a licence for women to kill,” writes Erin Pizzey, a long-time advocate for domestic violence victims, who has reacted in horror at the hijacking of the movement by ideological extremists. “Women can murder as long as their sense of victimhood is sufficiently powerful. . . . Rather than reducing violence, Harriet Harman’s proposals could become a charter for domestic chaos, as vengeful women believe they can butcher partners they come to loathe, inventing incidents of abuse or exaggerating fears of assault.” Robert Whelan of the Civitas think-tank accused the government of introducing “gang law” into the legal system. Lyn Costello of Mothers Against Murder and Aggression described the changes as “utter madness.” “We need clear laws, not more grey areas. . . . Unless there are really exceptional circumstances, such as self-defence or protecting yourself or family, then there is no excuse for killing someone, and it should be murder.

The political parties represented in my constituency are the Monster Raving Loony Party, the Conservative Monster Raving Loony Party, the Labour Monster Raving Loony Party, the Liberal Democrat Monster Raving Loony Party, the Green Monster Raving Loony Party, and the UKIP Monster Raving Especially Loony Party.

Although the Nazis portrayed themselves as a workers' party, they were predominantly middle-class citizens. The party was also strongest in rural protestant regions. Farmers, small businessmen, artisans & civil servants were the backbone of the Nazi party. They feared the loss of their incomes & status, were angry at big business & organized labour, and dreaded a communist revolution. Factors that made them vulnerable to the crude conspiracy theories promoted by the nazis.

garrison district is the Jamaican term for an urban or periurban “neighborhood whose members are armed by the leader of the community, and also a neighborhood that is loyal to and affiliated with one of the major Jamaican political parties … in the case of Tivoli Gardens, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).

Thatcher wanted to use Westminster Hall to stage a reception for a sitting U. S. president, Ronald Reagan. Since it would be a state event, she had to obtain the consent of the Labour Party leader, who then happened to be Michael Foot. He refused. Westminster Hall had received such figures as Charles DeGaulle. Thatcher said to Michael, “That’s very small-minded of you. Why are you opposing it?” Michael said, “Don’t you understand? He’s going to stand for election again.” It would be like electioneering for Reagan, Michael argued. “Our people don’t want him re-elected. It’s nothing like a nonparty event.” So Reagan had to deliver his speech in a room off of the House of Lords.

period (1981-83), when Michael was Labour Party leader, had been devastating: Some things helped me—the Byron Society—Byron helped me to recover from that. He never gave in. Just after the election, I was becoming quite active in it [the Society]. I read, by the way, Don Juan, in hospital after I had been elected leader of the Labour Party. I had slipped coming down the stairs and broken my ankle [and surgery was necessary to put it right]. The only way to read Don Juan is right through and that’s what I did. I spent the whole of Christmas doing so—leader of the Labour Party I was supposed to be [he laughed] ... it [Don Juan] put me in a good temper.

[CR] Do you think John Smith would have done as well as Blair? [MF] Yes—better in some ways. He had better links with the Labour Party. There are some things he [Blair] seems to be careless about.

Gladstone is remembered for putting the nation’s finances in good order, for establishing the chancellorship of the exchequer as the second post in the government, for his love of liberty and close sympathy for the peoples of subject nations (including the Irish), for his advocacy of international arbitration, and his preference for pursuing a peaceful, non-expansionist foreign policy. He became a hero to many people both inside and outside the Liberal Party, and proved an inspiration to generations of Liberal, and later Labour, politicians. Inevitably, however, with the passage of years his memory has faded, and there are nowadays perhaps only a few veterans of the Liberal Democratic Party who feel any personal affinity with him.

Second only to the royals in Michael’s gallery of good-for-nothings were, of course, the Tories. John Major occupied a special page in Michael’s book of bad ones. The trouble began when Suraj Paul, a staunch Labour Party backer and friend to Michael, invited him to the festivities celebrating his twenty-five years of doing business in Britain. Lord Paul had built a factory in Michael’s constituency and another one in John Major’s. A fortnight before the grand event, Lord Paul rang up Michael to say he had encountered a “terrible difficulty. I hate what I’m doing, but I’ve got to. I have to say to you that Major [then Prime Minister] had said that if you’re coming to the ceremony, he won’t come.” Michael was flabbergasted: “I hadn’t any great antagonism with Major or anything of the sort.” Of course, Michael relieved Lord Paul of his problem by not attending the event. “I’ve never told anyone. Nobody’s put it into print. But I see no reason why it shouldn’t go into the book. The pettiest thing I’ve ever heard of. Naturally I don’t think much of him on that account.

The Thatcher/Major years, as far as Michael was concerned, had wrecked the world that the 1945 Labour landslide had inaugurated. Shortly after the incident with Major, Michael traveled to Manchester from his constituency in Wales. The trip required a change of trains in Abergavenny: I used to go down there when I first got to that part of the world—1930s in the Monmouth constituency was the first place I fought a campaign. Abergavenny was a nice little busy railway town—the best supporters of the Labour Party—a thriving little market town. When I turned up [at the railway station] two days after I heard Mr. Major in London announce we were to have a classless society—the whole place was absolutely deserted. The ticket office was closed. Everything was closed except the lavatory. The only thing that was working was the bloody condom machine with some posh title called Empire—Elite! That’s it! The only thing working in the Major station was the Elite Condoms. I didn’t need one at the time, I may say, but there you are. That was my introduction to Major’s classless society.

I brought up Michael’s passionate support of Indira Gandhi. “I read The Asian Age every morning, you know,” Michael said by way of stressing his deep concern with Indian politics. Much to the outrage of Michael’s fellow Labour Party members and supporters, Michael went to India during the emergency Indira Gandhi had enforced.

An exchange is a transaction in which the two contracting parties both gain. Whenever I make an exchange freely, and without constraint, it is because I desire the thing I receive more than that I give; and, on the contrary, he with whom I bargain desires what I offer more than that which he renders me. When I give my labour for wages it is because I esteem the wages more than what I should have been able to produce by labouring for myself; and he who pays me prizes more the services I render him than what he gives me in return.

At lunch, Michael began to reminisce about his first election in Wales, when he was selected to occupy Nye Bevan’s seat. A brief kerfuffle had resulted when his name did not appear on the short list of Labour Party candidates for the seat. Evidently some locals preferred not to take on Michael in spite of his association with Nye. Jennie Lee, along with others, intervened and Michael not only made the list but also was selected and won his seat in the general election. He had a wonderful photograph of himself and Jill, with their dog Vanessa between them. The happy looking dog in the centre looked as if she had won the election, I told Michael. “It did, too,” he said.

asked Michael if he thought she could have become the Labour Party leader: “I don’t think so, really,” Michael answered decisively. “What stopped her?” I asked. “The business of understanding other people’s positions and working together—I don’t think she [Barbara] had much ... ” Michael did not complete his sentence but switched instead to saying Callaghan had a much better sense of the whole party. I observed to Michael that Castle’s diaries revealed that she often found Michael’s behaviour in cabinet difficult to understand. “You were responding to other people’s positions ... and therefore you would seem less focused than she was.” Quite right, Michael said.

Em answered the phone on the second ring. ‘Hello?’ ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘It’s me. What’s up?’ ‘That was Mark Tipene in your kitchen last night, wasn’t it?’ ‘It was.’ ‘Mark Tipene! The All Black!’ ‘Yep,’ I said. ‘Did you find him on the Weetbix box?’ But she was not to be diverted. ‘And just how, pray, do you know Mark Tipene?’ I sat down cross-legged on the bench in the lunch room. ‘I fell over his feet at a party a few weeks ago. His cousin’s share-milking just out of town, and he was down here visiting. And then he came in to work and asked me out.’ My stepmother was temporarily stricken dumb, but I heard the sounds of laboured breathing down the phone. ‘Em,’ I said gently, ‘you sound like a stalker.’ ‘You’re seeing Mark Tipene,’ she repeated. ‘Um. Yes. I think so,’ I said, looking across the lunch room at his picture and smiling wonderingly to myself. ‘Sweetie, he’s gorgeous.’ ‘I know.

There are over 1,200 species of bat in the world and not one of them is blind. There are 4,800 species of frog in the world but only one of them goes ‘ribbit’. Eight times as many people belong to the National Trust as to the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties combined. Every human being starts out life as an arsehole: it’s the first part of the body to form in the womb.

Jeremy Corbyns actions have led a significant percentage of his followers to believe that his words serve a higher purpose than the complete religious or social indoctrination of the British people. He deliberately disregards the historical fact that multiculturalism only works when both parties are willing to find a compromise they can live with. When multiculturalism becomes a matter of sacrificing your way of life to accommodate mass migration, it paves the way to genocide.

I hate tiny parties’, Jane also admitted, ‘they force one into constant exertion’. She had always been too introverted to make friends easily, and this grew more pronounced as she grew older. Her manner, Frank admitted, was ‘rather reserved to strangers so as to have been by some accused of haughtiness’. Jane described one heavy evening of socialising, which began at seven, as a ‘Labour’ from which the home team of female Austens were eventually ‘delivered’ at ‘past eleven’.

In 1992, 54% of the British public felt that the Labour Party was "good for one class" rather than for all classes, whereas only 14% held that view in in 1997.

I went to this party for Francis Wheen’s book [on Marx]. I went and sat on a chair—at these places I can’t stand up and so I sat there and a woman came up to me—I gather from the Telegraph. It was just the day before Princess Margaret had died ... The woman said something like, “What do you think about [Princess Margaret’s death] and I said, “I don’t give a bugger about such things. I’m not giving any interview to you and she printed it. I should have been more careful. But there’s some truth in that. The bloody Sunday Times reprinted it. But Jill was very shocked by Princess Margaret—when we went down to Windsor for a weekend when they had a do [when Callaghan’s government fell]. Jack Jones was there and Princess Margaret came out and said, “Who is Jack Jones?” He was the most prominent labour union leader in the country. She didn’t say, “Can you tell me who is Jack Jones?” Dreadful, you see. But I shouldn’t have said that.

in this country, who’s got the most guns—you and Lloyd and the Labour Party, or the Conservatives with the army and the police on their side?

We must regard as deeply blameworthy before history the conduct not only of the British National and mainly Conservative Government, but of the Labour-Socialist and Liberal Parties, both in and out of office, during this fatal period. Delight in smooth-sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the State, genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation, obvious lack of intellectual vigour in both leaders of the British Coalition Government, marked ignorance of Europe and aversion from its problems in Mr. Baldwin, the strong and violent pacifism which at this time dominated the Labour-Socialist Party, the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality, the failure and worse than failure of Mr. Lloyd George,

The image of Che Guevara adorn the walls of students’ bedrooms and T-shirts the world over. Looking out over the head of the viewer he cuts a Christ-like figure. In fact, he was a murdering racist psychopath. A direct descendent of the last viceroy of Peru, he hated Black people and American Indians almost as much as gringos. Only pure-blooded Spaniards were good enough for him – despite his Irish blood He happily shot his own men in the back of the head for minor infractions. In Havana he summarily executed so many allies as well as enemies in the football stadium, Taliban-style, Fidel Castro had to beg him to stop. He helped establish labour camps in Cuba. A Stalinist, he backed the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Uprising An Argentinian, he played host to dictator Juan Perón. A hardline Communist, he back-channelled with President Kennedy. During the Cuban missile crisis he urged a pre-emptive strike against the US, though America’s retaliation would have wiped Cuba from the map. “The Cuban people are willing to sacrifice themselves,” he said. Did anyone ask them? He alienated the Cubans, the Russians and the Chinese in turn. The people of the Congo are suffering from his bungled intervention to this day. The Communist Party in Bolivia did not want him there. Nor did any of the other Communist parties in the surrounding countries. When he was captured, the only people that tried to rescue him were the CIA. Still, he takes a great photograph.

A newly-released series of video documentaries — The Labour Files — based on material leaked from Britain’s Labour Party revealed how the right-wing within the party mortified the former party leader, the far-left Jeremy Corbyn, costing him his position. The documentary uncovers Israel’s role in orchestrating the departure of Corbyn who had been a vocal proponent of Palestinian rights. Evidence reveals that the Israel Lobby within the Labour Party — supported by other pro-Israel camps in Britain — campaigned against the left-wing Corbyn, accusing him of antisemitism. The right-wing party establishment manipulated these allegations to its own political advantage, which eventually led to the election of the pro-Israel Keir Starmer as party leader in 2020. While the future course of Labour’s left wing is uncertain, one thing is for sure — Israel is an apartheid regime. The Zionist lobby has been using hybrid warfare techniques to procure worldwide legitimacy for Israel’s illegal actions in Palestine. As the Labour Files reveal, Israel has waged a war of fabricating narratives and counter-narratives. In this sort of warfare with limitless bounds, the only positive that can be drawn is that everyone is a soldier. At a time when great powers have given in to the deceptive Israel lobby and no Muslim state is in any position to challenge Israeli advances in Palestine using conventional methods, we need to focus on building our capacity to effectively counter the Zionist narrative. With the right-wing ex-Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, set to return after elections next month, the plight of Palestinians will only exacerbate. It is high time we stopped blatantly labelling one another as ‘Yahoodi Agents’ and started educating ourselves. The least we can do for Palestinians is continue exposing the pro-Israel elements engaged in the widespread dissemination of Zionist propaganda.

It says something about the mood of the time that a New Labour government with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and nearly 11 million voters at the 2001 elections should nonetheless have been moved to respond in this way to the propaganda of a neo-Fascist clique which attracted the support of just 48,000 electors in the country at large: one-fifth of 1 percent of the vote and only 40,000 more votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party. France

When the Labour Party returned to office in 1974 and called a referendum on UK membership of the Community, the country approved by 17,300,000 to 8,400,000. But even Heath could not make the British—the English especially—‘feel’ European, and a significant share of voters on Right and Left alike continued to doubt the benefits of being ‘in Europe’.

The Labour Party was unable to impose industrial order because its paymasters in the industrial unions preferred nineteenth-century style confrontations on the shop floor—which they stood a good chance of winning—to negotiated contracts signed in Downing Street that would bind their hands for years ahead.

Margaret Thatcher may have destroyed the Conservative Party but she must be credited with the salvation and re-birth of Labour. In the short-run, of course, she crushed her Labour opponents—indeed, she could not have wrought the changes she did but for their stunning incompetence. While some Labour Party leaders in 1979 understood the problems they faced, they could carry neither conviction nor their supporters.

While Hizb made inroads in Nangarhar, it also exploited the rising discontent sweeping through rural areas close to Kabul. Since late 1978 ethnic Hazaras in the rugged central region around Bamiyan had been rising up against the government. The regime responded by forming a Pashtun militia in neighbouring Wardak province to deploy against the rebels. On 4 June 1979—as the communist sergeant was being executed in Nangahrar—a delegation of Pashtuns drove to the district centre of Chak to collect the government-issue weapons they were meant to use against the Hazaras. With thousands of brand new rifles in their possession, the Pashtuns then turned on the government. The double cross had been hatched by a local council of scholars, elders, farmers and labourers who did not claim fealty to any mujahideen party. Later that summer, Hizb made the most of the rebellion, sending one of its commanders to establish a unit of fighters inside Chak. The commander had been living in Peshawar but was from Chak and had known Hekmatyar for nearly a decade. Using the friendships he already enjoyed within the community and the help of former Muslim Youth members, he ensured that Hizb quickly picked up support in and around the district

Geoffrey Robertson concluded: 'It is imprecise, confusing and open to misinterpretation and even manipulation' (Robertson 2018)

In Sir Stephen Sedley's view, it 'fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite' (Sedley, 2017)

Sir Geoffrey Bindman wrote: 'Unfortunately, the definition and the examples are poorly drafted [and] misleading'. (Bindman 2018).

Hugh Tomlinson QC described it as 'unclear and confusing' and said it 'should be used with caution.' (Tomlinson 2017)

As noted earlier, the great wars of this century are extraordinary not so much in the unprecedented scale on which they permitted people to kill, as in the colossal numbers persuaded to lay down their lives. Is it not certain that the numbers of those killed vastly exceeded those who killed? The idea of the ultimate sacrifice comes only with an idea of purity, through fatality. Dying for one’s country, which usually one does not choose, assumes a moral grandeur which dying for the Labour Party, the American Medical Association, or perhaps even Amnesty International can not rival, for these are all bodies one can join or leave at easy will. Dying for the revolution also draws its grandeur from the degree to which it is felt to be something fundamentally pure.

The common people of that land of hope and glory adored their war leader, but they didn’t want him as a peace leader—a distinction that was clear to them but must have been confusing to Winnie. The Labour party obtained a majority of almost two to one; they got it upon the basis of a definite program calling for the nationalization of the five most important of the nation’s industries: coal, steel, transportation, communications, and finance.

Keynes rejected Labour’s anti-élitism. He felt that the intellectual elements in the Labour party will ‘[n]ever exercise adequate control; too much will always be decided by those who do not know at all what they are talking about’. The Conservatives were much better off in this respect, since ‘the inner ring of the party can almost dictate the details and the technique of policy’.

Labour Zionism, as distinct from the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl, arose out of the Jewish workers' movements of Central and Eastern Europe. Where political Zionism focused on appeals to the international community to support the creation of a Jewish state, Labour Zionists argued that the Jewish homeland could only emerge out of the efforts of a Jewish working class settling in Palestine and building the new state from the ground up. In North America, the Jewish National Workers' Alliance, or Farband, operated largely as mutual-aid societies alongside the political party Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) founded in 1905. The two Organizations later merged to become the Labour Zionist Alliance, which in turn became Ameinu in 2003.

Their idea of what it means to live a life in a female body is informed by the male gaze, gender stereotypes and porn. This is why their fantasy recreation of a woman hardly ever involves being paid less, doing unpaid domestic labour or being ignored. Instead they are drawn to the stereotype of beautiful bimbos whose lives are easy and filled with acceptance, slumber parties, gossiping in female toilets, colouring each other's hair and prancing around in sexy lingerie and fluffy slippers.

Before turning to Marx’s writings, we must note the radical divide that separates his position from orthodox Marxism. Marx never conceived of socialism or communism as state control of the economy. Nor did he ever endorse the notion of a single-party state that rules on behalf of the masses. His conception of the new society is thoroughly democratic, based on freely associated relations of production and in society as a whole. He was primarily concerned with freeing individuals from alienated and dehumanised social relations—not simply with increasing the productive forces so that developing societies can catch up with developed ones… [Marx] then turns to the future, writing: “Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free people, working with the means of production held in common” (Marx 1977: 171). This does not refer to a formal transfer of private property to collective or state entities. Transferring property deeds is a juridical relation, which does not end class domination. Marx refers to “free people” owning the means of production, which means they exert effective and not just nominal control over the labour process. And that is not possible unless the producers democratically control the labour process through their own self-activity. He then goes on to state that in this post-capitalist society, products are “directly objects of utility” and do not assume a value form. Exchange value and universalised commodity production come to an end. Producers decide how to make, distribute, and consume the total social product. One part is used to renew the means of production; the other “is consumed by members of the association as means of subsistence” (Marx 1977: 171–72). He invokes neither the market nor the state as the medium by which this is achieved. He instead envisions a planned distribution of labour time by individuals who are no longer subjected to socially necessary labour time. Abstract labour is abolished, since actual labour time—not socially necessary labour time—serves as a measure of social relations.

The prime minister can also determine the date of the general election (another prerogative power, where the sovereign takes the advice of her prime minister) and, if he leads his party to victory, has the added authority that derives from that victory. Credit tends to accrue to the person at the head of the winning campaign. Edward Heath was often seen as having won the 1970 general election for the Conservatives almost single-handedly, having led his party to an unexpected victory. A similar view was taken of Margaret Thatcher in her three consecutive election victories. By leading his party to its best-ever election victory in 1997, Tony Blair was claimed by commentators to be in an almost invincible position, many Labour members of parliament crediting their victory to his leadership

Immediately after the war the Labour party had put forward a programme: the socialisation of five basic industries—coal, electricity, transportation, steel, and the Bank of England. They promised socialised medicine, so that no sick person in Britain need go unattended, and they promised to regulate the prices of food so that no person in Britain need go hungry. They had printed that programme in pamphlet form and seen to its public distribution, and they had swept the elections on that basis.