Leading nowhere / Fountains of folly

Leading nowhere

As a kid travelling in the back of a Ford Cortina Estate on the way to visit my relatives, I’d watch the tame Cheshire pasture fall away as we crossed the A6 and headed into wilder terrain where the Peak District gave way to the more prominent peaks of the Pennines.

My aunts, uncles and my half cousins twice removed - one by under-age ‘marriage’, one by being sectioned under the Mental Health Act - would scrape a living doing things like running petrol stations equipped with pumps from the pre-war period or working with bobbins in mills undertaking tasks that are now just the preserve of re-enactors in National Trust Industrial Heritage Centres. I remember always feeling rather glad that I was adopted.

These places where they lived, from near Hyde to near Glossop and then further north by Saddleworth Moor, are locations that do attract a few day-trippers from the big city. But that’s not because of the view, it’s because it’s as far as their Greater Manchester pensioner travelcards will get them without paying any extra. This area is bleak but boring. It’s at the edge of the mighty Manchester metropolis but without even a murmur of edginess.

Us children would especially look forward to visiting our relatives there during Winter. It was guaranteed that we’d be able to sledge, although there was always the concern that we’d get snowed in again. It’s hard to predict who’d have been the survivors - us or the relatives - if we’d been snowed in for longer than a day or two as cannibalism would've been sure to have quickly broken out. The Moors Murderers and Dr. Harold Shipman both operated nearby.

And sometimes, when the conversation got just too bizarre with those who are now dead - or at least last seen in their coffins - I’d absent myself from their lounge and head down the hill from Charlesworth and the like to places like Mottram-in-Longdendale.

Village life

I’ve read that a new bronze plaque has just been installed by the council - Tameside MBC - in Mottram to serve inquisitive intruders ignorant enough to actually be seeking out local ‘tourist attractions’. It’s good to know that this plaque, which is a map of the village showing all the local sites of interest, is pressed out as little images in the metal. That’ll help illiterate locals to either simply look at the pretty pictures or even just run their fingers over the burnished bronze if they're incapable of computing shapes.

I can’t imagine that there can be much that could figure on this map. The highlight must be the former cottage of the artist Lowry. Other places reported as being listed include a former (supposedly historical) post office.

But there’s also another local feature that’s been pressed into the bronze undulations. It depicts a little lane and the house that is at No. 8. No, it’s not the site of yet some other terrible murder or even a house whose front room was where sheep were first crossbred with different species. This ‘tourist attraction’ is no less than the home of the Leader of the Council, Councillor Roy Oldham CBE.

You’d think that the councillor might have proved a little shy when the local paper asked for a comment about his entry on the bronze plaque. Maybe one of those ‘the councillor wasn’t available for comment’ responses. But you don’t get to rule a Metropolitan Borough continuously for 27 years - and earn an allowance of £50,000 a year (along with a good car) - through being coy.

The confusingly named Councillor Oldham (if he is that dedicated, you’d think that he’d change his name to something more appropriate - Councillor Ashton under Lyne maybe or, better still, Councillor Broadbottom) replied, "It’s like when a carpenter works in a church and carves a little church mouse on the bottom for an emblem. I don’t see why anyone should make a problem but there are sad people in all walks of life."

Leading in the wrong direction

I’ve met many council leaders, not a few of whom got to take their apolitical mediocrity all the way from chairing an Allotments Sub Committee to membership of parliamentary select committees. I’ve never had time for any of them.

I do however remember a period when you could tell the difference between leading councillors and leading council officers. For a start, they’d look different. Could Councillor Oldham then have been distinguishable from his council's chief executive through the former sporting a few stickers supporting some cause, or perhaps he may have worn a CND badge when he first took political control of that local authority in those early Thatcher years? I remember a London council leader who shaved her head, leaving just a star covering the top part of her skull that she then dyed red, before she attended an important council budget meeting.

The brief flowering of the Labour Left - of which she was part - was always anaemic and with short life prospects. The dye ran out and she grew her hair back quick.

Just a few years later I was present when a scruffily attired Labour councillor stood up at full council meeting at mayor making time and argued for the process to be abandoned. He proposed some radical sounding alternative measures including installing a ‘peoples mayor’ and the distribution of the mayoral hospitality budget to better causes.

When that councillor had finished speaking, he discovered that no-one would second his motion. He looked round to see that all of his many fellow Labour councillors were either closely examining their hands for possible calluses or taking an interest in the design of the very plain council chamber ceiling above their heads.

Another council leader of my acquaintance started his working life flogging seafood on a stall. He was well known for both his stentorian fund raising efforts in the local market for miners on strike in 1984/5 and his always shambolic appearance. The guy had also amassed a large collection of labour movement badges over the years. He was well known to his fellow train-spotters or 'collectors of Labour and TU movement ephemera' - who were the sort of blokes who’d sell Tribune and wear a red shirt and red tie to go with their ginger beard if they were ever to speak at Labour Party conference - for the breadth and depth of his collection.

But that was long before. When I last saw him he was now a suited and expensively shod council leader. I passed him in the Town Hall corridor as I was leaving for a lunch hour visit to the nearby picket line of a large strike that had just broken out.

Almost in jest, I asked him whether I could pass on the support of the council leader to the strikers. I did think I saw a short flash of the old spark on his face until the rigour set in and he shook head dismissively - either from the very notion of the idea or my impertinence in making such a request.

I walked a few paces down the corridor but he then called me back. "Yes?" I asked. "Do you think you could see if you could get hold of any of their strike badges?" he replied.

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Fountains of folly

It’s hot. So if I’m out locally and I want a drink, what’s on offer? In the Spar, Londis or similar owner-managed shops located within easy walking distance of where I live, the range on sale there is poor. Their soft drinks are usually simply sugar solutions with added flavourings or there is expensive tap water that was bottled on Huddersfield trading estates.

Our market economy clearly isn’t going to deliver cheap and good quality drinks for sale in local shops. So what measures could be used to protect kids’ teeth and stop us either being obliged to lug around bottles of water filled at home or pay through the nose for H2O. Or will retailers continue to coin cash from increasingly porky punters paying hand over fist for corporation pop? Why can’t drinking fountains be provided?

I remember seeing many working public drinking fountains in Italy. A measure that maybe helps contribute to the noticeable sveltness of Italians? I was told that the fascists installed them. Can we just have the drinking water but without a Duce?

Occasionally when a new park is built, or refurbished, a drinking fountain will be installed. But when you return six months later you find that it’s no longer functioning - petty vandalism has been allowed to wreck the facility and no attempt has been made to either undertake routine maintenance or repair any damage.

Planning gain

Councils are sometimes partially paid for their awarding of planning permission by the developer of the land providing ‘planning gain’. Maybe a housebuilder will be allowed to build properties on parkland as long as they contribute a pittance to a new community centre. These fountains can also be ‘planning gain’.

The benefits of planning gain are often no more than a line in a planning officers report or a quickly taken photo (before the facility is removed or falls apart) in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) section of a company’s annual report.

(The CSR section in an annual report is the part that stretches across more pages than the details of the company’s biggest division but is reporting on just an exceedingly small fraction of the company’s annual expenditure.)

I’ve never worked out whether the poor and often temporary nature of much planning gain is because of local authority incompetence, their legal powerlessness or simple corruption.

When a new Safeways supermarket was built in Stratford in east London, a sizeable area at the front of the new store was devoted to a crèche. This facility lasted about a year. The store now uses that area to sell newspapers, magazines and confectionery.

If you look around some supermarkets that have been built in the last few years you may still see the words ‘Bus Stop’ painted on the road where the taxis pick up. But quite possibly the only sign you will see of a bus service will be the remnants of a broken timetable holder.

When these supermarkets opened the company provided a free bus service - to local hard to reach estates, or to the locality where they shut a predecessor store - as part of the planning gain for the new site. But six months later, or a year perhaps, these bus service were quietly dropped in much the same way the fountains fall into disuse.

Free and clean

But it wasn’t always so. You can still become acquainted with the priorities of some of the Victorian industrialist philanthropists (and I suspect that these priorities haven’t changed in the values of their descendants) when you look at their funding of charities that ensured the availability of free drinking water in the streets.

You can still rarely see the remnants of the installations that performed this task. There are just a few left and nearly all are abandoned and derelict. They all seem to have the name of the charity lettered on their side in those distinctive fonts from a century or more ago and which you now only generally see on graves from that period.

Unlike other Victorian and Edwardian structures, such as railway stations which are still in use and so hide their age well, these fountains are one of the last remnants of something that no longer exists. A relic from a different life not unlike those Edwardian style ‘pointing finger’ signs that have been recently removed from use at polling stations.

But these fountains weren’t built at the normal height. They are just troughs resting on the ground, no higher than a person's knee. All that Victorian era charity wasn’t spent to enable a passing street urchin or costermonger to refresh themselves. They were there to provide water to those with more value - the horses - in much the same way rich widows dying in Prestatyn still leave all their fortune to the RSPCA rather than to relieve any human suffering.

Eight criminals / Who said this? / Web names / Fade to Barot / Ex Lefts / For later use?

Eight criminals

Eight confessions. Eight criminals. No arrests.

Eight members of the Cabinet have recently admitted that they've taken cannabis in the past. They've put their hands up to having, in the main, so indulged when they were students. These miscreants include Jacqui Smith - as Home Secretary, she's in charge of the cops. No criminal action is going to ensue against any of them for this law breaking.

But there’s no statute of limitations in the UK. When the police find a mummified child’s body from the 50s, hidden in a loft, they launch a murder enquiry. When Ronnie Biggs returned after thirty-five years on the run he was put back inside to start serving the rest of his sentence. So why haven’t the cops arrested these MPs?

Not long ago, a young bloke in Manchester made a ‘shooting a gun’ sign with his hands behind the back of David Cameron. This guy then boasted about his actions on TV and also admitted to using cannabis.

Sure enough, the Manchester filth went straight round to his flat and found a fiver’s worth of the drug. When he came to court for this offence even the magistrate was prompted to say "He has been kept in custody while robbers and dwelling house burglars are at large - for £5 worth of cannabis. If you make a silly gesture behind Mr Cameron’s back then you are remanded in custody."

In India, there’s a practice whereby Jasprit or Jitender Public is able to apply to a court to have someone, usually a public figure, charge-sheeted. Members of the public will use the system to maybe seek the prosecution of a film star for showing too much leg - contrary to obscenity laws - or perhaps try and get the Prime Minister arrested for acting contrary to treason laws by not nuking Pakistan.

I regret that there’s no such provision in Britain, otherwise maybe I’d be down the High Court trying to get a lot of the Cabinet put away. I mean ‘the law is the law’, isn’t it and it must be obeyed to the letter, as Inspector Javert said? I wonder what would happen if I go along to the local cop shop, march up to the front desk and tell that I want to report some crimes?

Or do some - from Cabinet Ministers to BAE Systems - receive ‘Get out of Jail Free’ cards to go with their job?

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Who said this?

“We favour competitive public enterprise, co-operative ventures and profit-sharing. There must be more decentralisation of decision-making in industry and government, together with an effective and practical system of democracy at work.

The quality of our public and community services must be improved and they must be made more responsive to people’s needs."

Maybe you’d like to guess from where I copied the above?

Respect’s manifesto?

No.

Some more from the text -

“Our economy needs a healthy public sector and a healthy private sector without frequent frontier changes.

We want to eliminate poverty and promote greater equality without stifling enterprise or imposing bureaucracy from the centre. We need the innovating strength of a competitive economy with a fair distribution of rewards.

We want to create an open, classless and more equal society, one which rejects ugly prejudices based upon sex, race or religion.”

Is it an extract from John McDonnell’s manifesto for his bid to stand for the leadership of the Labour Party?

No.

A bit more. This will also give a clue as to when it was formulated -

“We do not accept that mass unemployment is inevitable. We seek to reverse Britain's economic decline.”

Tony Benn’s manifesto from when he stood for election as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 1981?

No, not quite, but it’s from the same year.

The above passages are all taken from the ‘Limehouse Declaration’ - the founding statement of the SDP.

The SDP were the last significant split from a major British political party. Their founders, the rightwing ‘Gang of Four’, walked out of Labour. The Labour Left were pleased to see them go.

This new party flowered briefly, especially I think with those who agreed with the Tories but thought that they were too unstable a star onto which to hitch - the government was then very unpopular and could have only lasted one term. The SDP were swallowed, pretty much whole, by the Liberals a few years later.

I remember quite a few clapping me but the large majority of the audience booing, or even shouting abuse, as I used my then tender years to get myself called by Shirley Williams (one of the Gang of Four) - and then asking her an ambush question about private schools - at a SDP lovefest that they organised in their early days at Bramhall High School, Stockport.

School assemblies, at my previous public school in Croydon, had sometimes featured raging polemics by the Headmaster against ‘Socialist Shirley’ and the reforms that she had half promoted as Education Secretary. But now, just a few years later, Williams was being taken into the bosom of bourgeois Bramhall, as the sensible face of social democracy and the State.

Maybe the Labour Left got the SDP wrong. If only they’d hitched their wagon to them they wouldn’t now be in a party that is, in some respects, more rightwing than that Tory government. Thatcher didn’t introduce ID cards. Thatcher allowed councils to tender only a small selection of their services.

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Web Names

Just like in the commercial world, there was also an Internet address name grab for Left names in the early days of the web.

www.marxism.com is in the hands of a capitalist speculator. I doubt he'll even recover the cost of his registration fee.

www.communist.org is likewise. For sale at $1500.

www.marxists.org is the very fine 'Marxists Internet Archive'.

www.socialism.com belongs to the (US) Freedom Socialist Party.

http://socialism.org tells us that project/socialism will be re-opening soon. Which is good news.

But what about that which we need to get from here to there. Who has the blueprint for the UK? Have a look at the following - it’s worth a click.

http://www.revolution.org.uk/
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Fade to Barot

Dhiren Barot is currently doing a 30 year stretch. He was convicted in London for planning to bomb and use radioactive and other weapons in the UK and USA as part of an Islamist campaign - or not.

His original 40 year sentence was reduced as it was reported that this would be appropriate for a terrorist who planned murder by a "viable" means and that Barot's plot did not amount to an actual attempt and it was uncertain whether it would have succeeded and what the consequences might have been. He’s likely to spend most of the rest of his life in the prison netherworld.

He's just spent five days in Newcastle's Royal Victoria Infirmary after being badly assaulted in prison. But we didn’t get to hear about this until after he was retuned to his cell. The media was instructed? advised? agreed? not to mention the story. So, of course, they didn’t.

In these circumstances maybe the press could get a ‘News Content Approved by the Cops’ logo that they could put on their front page in much the same way a select few shops are awarded a coveted ‘By Appointment to Her Majesty’ label.

And if any of the media didn’t know about the attack on Barot, they surely would've done once the hobnailed boots of the cops arrived on their doormat to tell them to keep schtum.

A police spokeswoman said the news blackout was aimed at protecting the safety of patients, hospital staff, prison staff and members of the public. In fact the suppression of this news was for their own operational convenience. Who attacked Barot - prisoners, prison officers? What were his injuries?

The current capacity of Islamists in the UK seems to be at the level of starting a car fire at an airport. I suppose, in theory, if they knew were Barot was, they could try and free him. But if you used that as a reason to cover up the news, then why mention the trial - after all, the IRA did free prisoners on trial and they also bombed the Old Bailey.

Perhaps they won’t mention these trials at all in future - for ‘security reasons’. Perhaps they already don’t.

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Ex Lefts

I was rather surprised to be informed that Norman Geras was once a member of the ‘United Secretariat of the Fourth International’, or the ‘Fourth International’ as they now wrongly call themselves - as if Castro admirer Besancenot is a present day Bolshevik and Respect is the road to revolution in Britain.

Geras, the originator of the Euston Manifesto, laughably claims on his blog that he’s a Marxist.

It’s hard ploughing his academic over-writing but the whole rationale of his blog is how craven you can become to ruling ideologies whilst still pretending to hold a candle for radicalism.

I’m still wondering whether it can be true that he was a Trot. The USFI have a lot better record than, for example, the AWL, in not providing so many people to the ranks of political capitalism.

Of course size is a factor in the number of renegades produced by an organisation although I’m not aware of many former members of Militant who've made that jump. I wonder which UK Left organisation has provided the most personnel, on a proportional basis, to capitalist politics?

Someone did tell me that he saw a New Labour MP who he was sure was an ex-Millie. He said they were smoothing out all the usual Blairite platitudes but in that very distinctive style of the former Grantites.

Derek Hatton, back in the Labour Party, was said, in a mad sounding recent intervention (if reported accurately) to have been seeking selection as by-election candidate, early in 2007, so as to stand for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party. But he was at least reported to have wanted to stand as the most Left candidate in that election.

But who did he think would both select and nominate him? I remember listening to someone, who later became a Labour MP, exclaiming, ‘Let’s hope they fix the trial so that that Trot fucker goes down this time’ when it was announced that Hatton was to prosecuted for a second time as part of the ruling class’s revenge on him for the half-cocked defiance of them by Liverpool City Council’s ruling group.

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For later use?

I remember reading that the CPGB (no, the real one - and it’s annoying to have to explain that every time you mention them) were punctilious about immediately recording the details of all new members at their headquarters.

This would stop anyone, like Graham Greene, denying years later that they’d ever signed up to push for the dictatorship of the proletariat. They’d instead have to dismiss their temporary Communist party membership as an Oxford jolly jape, on par with debagging an uppity townie.

But it’s now come to pass that a history of activism in Trotskyism, or other far Leftism, is no bar to achieving the highest levels of political office in the West - such as being a French Prime Minister, a British cabinet member or a German Foreign Minister. There’s really no greater measure of how paltry is our power than it now matters not that the ‘Right Honourable’ was once a ‘revolutionary hardliner’.

I think we should improve upon the practice of the CPGB and also hold a hostage to fortune that could thwart the later rightwing careers of those who are but passing through our ranks.

I think some embarrassing photos and film of them engaging in illegal behaviour should be taken of all new members of Left organisations. It’d be made clear to comrades, that if they do later turn right, this footage will be released to the media.

It’d obviously need to be something that’d make them unelectable, or will mean they’re ineligible to be on the Board, but it can’t be anything that breaches communist morality.

You may want to pass by on the next few paragraphs if you’re of a sensitive disposition.

Now we could film new members throwing a brick through a cop car window or skedaddling out of Sainsbury’s without paying for several bottles of Scotch but such footage could backfire - the public standing of these miscreants could rise when they are known to have carried out these activities.

My interest in animal rights is near zero. There’ll be steak for tea every night in a communist Britain.

I’m sorry if this seems a bit unseemly but I think recording comrades engaging in an act of bestiality would best serve our purposes. Once Jane and Jasprit Public have seen a video of someone masturbating a pony they’re not going to elect that person to be their Member of Parliament.

I’m sorry for that comment readers, but needs must. I’m also sure it would only be a few dilettantes amongst putative pinkos who would demur from providing the party with such pictures.

Free Speech and expensive speech / Their laws and ours / Site survey and Prize Draw

Free Speech and expensive speech

Four Islamists have been convicted for saying what they think about Britain’s current imperialist wars - and for choosing the rebel side. They committed their 'crimes' when attending an Islamist protest in London against the Danish publication of the Mohammed cartoons.

Mizanur Rahman, on the microphone at the rally, was found guilty of inciting both murder and racial hatred. He was reporting as saying "We want to see them coming home in body bags. We want to see their blood running in the streets of Baghdad...We want to see the Mujahideen shoot down their planes the way we shoot down birds. We want to see their tanks burn in the way we burn their flags."

Rahman adopted a novel sounding defence at his trial. He said he was just repeating the chants that he could hear around him but also stated that he didn't think anyone would take him seriously.

I can see how the State considers him guilty of incitement to 'murder'. But how he incited ‘racial hatred’ - through calling for the death of those, possibly fellow Muslims or Asians, who insult Islam - is something that you clearly need to be a highly intelligent barrister or judge to understand. Unless, of course, it was the other issue he addressed and it’s ‘racist’ to kill enemy soldiers.

His three co-defendants were convicted a few months ago. All four will be sentenced later.

Umran Javed, shouted: "Bomb, bomb Denmark. Bomb, bomb USA." He was found guilty of soliciting murder and stirring up racial hatred.

Abdul Saleem was convicted of stirring up racial hatred. He chanted "7/7 on its way" and "Europe, you will pay with your blood".

Abdul Muhid, was found guilty of two charges of soliciting murder. He said "Bomb, bomb the UK" and had a placard saying "Annihilate those who insult Islam".

When you can incite murder

Any day of the week you can read a British newspaper, or hear a British politician, espousing a mirror image of what caused these men to be convicted. You can say what you like about Iraqi or Afghani ‘terrorists’ without any fear of having your collar felt for ‘inciting murder’.

The way that you call for the ‘terrorists’ to be killed is likely to be determined only by the medium in which you transmit your message. Maybe ‘Better equipped British troops could bring hope’ in ‘The Times’ or ‘Give our boys the tools to terminate the Taliban' in 'The Sun'.

These four Islamists are clearly small-minded bigots with their unpleasant religious frenzy. But they’re also political prisoners who were convicted for taking an anti-imperialist line on the wars. They’ve been locked up because they stand opposed to the murderous frenzy of ‘their’ country. They should be freed, although I’m sure you’d wait forever for Amnesty International to take up their cases.

In a fully totalitarian society, I suppose that everyone would be obliged to express public support for whatever murderous military adventure their rulers were currently undertaking. Such a regime would need to be very well organised to ensure this - so it’s a lot more probable that whilst every opportunity would be given for you to express your gung-ho patriotism, you wouldn't often have to take part. But if you ever argued for the other side, a fascist or similar regime would doubtless deal with you in a terminal manner.

White Rose

The White Rose movement was a brave group of students in wartime Germany who distributed leaflets attacking the Nazis. They weren’t the pacifists that is popularly supposed - "Support the resistance movement!…it must be the sole and first duty, the holiest duty of every German to destroy these beasts…The dead of Stalingrad implore us to take action. Up, up, my people, let smoke and flame be our sign!”

The leaders were caught. Four days later they were sentenced to death and immediately beheaded. Britain is a long way from being such a totalitarian country. People aren’t executed for supporting the other side - they’re just locked up for a few years instead.

Provocations

As an aside, there’s also a lesson in the above. There’s an organisation called ‘Vigil.’ who are an unpleasant group of state touts who get a lot of media coverage through setting up agent provocateur websites with which to entrap Islamists into making illegal remarks and for their other 'amateur spy’ work. They boast about their supposed links with hardened reactionaries, from the FBI to the Saudi government.

It’s clear that it doesn’t take much for someone to break British censorship laws. Over in Left blogland there are several people who expend a lot of effort trying to provoke people into saying something illegal.

It can be tempting to argue the full detail of what you think. You don’t wish to not be forthright and indeed there are occasions when it's necessary to hold nothing back. But save such events, I do urge comrades to consider that it may well be Vigil or some other similar group trying to provoke you. I see no reason to walk into any trap that they may have set.

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Their laws, not ours

It’s been reported to me that a Labour Party branch - a unit that’ll include quite a few prominent councillors - has recently started holding its monthly meetings at a local restaurant and all those attending are fed for free.

The restaurateur, a well-known local entrepreneur with his fingers in many a pie, has a history of having some of his controversial planning applications turned down by the council.

Looking to undertake a bit of reporting for this column, I’ve been trying to investigate further. I thought maybe I could find out the right day and go along and order a Lamb Bhuna whilst hoping to do a bit of earwigging. But I might be recognised by a few of the Labourites with whom I’ve previously crossed swords.

I’d also need to break my rule of never eating in an Indian restaurant where the food is made for whites in the same way that I’d never set foot in a Chinatown restaurant unless at least 75% of the clients are Oriental.

(I did have a rule about never entering a Pie’n’Mash shop unless I saw both Chas’n’Dave and Mike Read inside slurping down jellied eels. If I’d kept to that promise, I’d never have had to enjoy having green ‘liquor’ sprayed over lumpy mashed potato alongside the smallest ‘meat’ pie I’ve ever eaten.)

I suppose I could just give all that I know to the local paper - but why should I support that rubbishy rag? And besides, I’m sure there’s nothing illegal in giving away free meals to whomever you chose. I’ve no evidence to suggest that this guy isn’t just doing this out of the goodness of his heart - a course of conduct that I’m sure capitalists, big and small, constantly undertake.

So I decided to approach the restaurant owner to ask him some questions. After failing to get the guy on the phone three times, I emailed him. There was no reply, so I tried emailing again.

Harassment and hidebound laws

The response from the restaurant owner was interesting. He threatened to report me to the police for breaching the 'Protection from Harassment Act 1997'. He (correctly) pointed out that that this law says it’s illegal ‘on at least two occasions (to subject a person) to behaviour causing harassment, alarm or distress outside existing civil and criminal law’. I’m sure being asked a difficult question does cause ‘alarm’ or ‘distress’.

This law was introduced to combat stalkers and sees thousands convicted each year for behaviour that ranges from the sinister and dangerous to doubtless sad attempts to stay in touch by the lovelorn. It only takes two forms of contact, after someone has told you to desist, to break this law and be subject to up to six months inside.

So I suppose my friend, for making six drunken and pleading phone calls to his g/f after she had dumped him (yet again), and each time having put the phone down on him, is now a ‘stalker’, or at least was until they got back together again the following night.

In fact, like all laws it's a class law that will be interpreted and implemented in ways that suit our rulers. I can’t see those ‘harassing’ me - though repeated junk phone calls, or cops wasting my time - are ever going to be done under such legislation.

Instead laws like this will often be used in such a way as to protect the interests of the powerful. Adrian Arbib, a freelance photographer, received a High Court injunction under the Protection from Harassment Act. Two solicitors and four black clad security guards, all working for Npower, served this injunction on Arib to stop his press photography work that was covering the energy company’s controversial activities at an Oxfordshire beauty spot.

Laws will also sometimes fail to protect those who aren’t powerful. Despite being convicted of offences under this Act, Michael Pech shot dead Clare Bernal - the victim of his harassment - whilst awaiting sentence.

Protesting and complaining

Working at public meetings or on statutory consultations, I’ve seen quite a difference in the ways that different classes of people can act when something’s been done that they don’t like.

At meetings on council estates, or in other poor areas, you can get threats made directly towards you at (or after) a meeting. ‘You just try and get this Channel Tunnel Link through here and you’ll be sorry. I’m not threatening anything but it’s just a warning, let's calls it that mate, you understand.’

The person making such threats knows his options are limited and sees his only hope as a bit of 'direct action' although only has the bottle to indulge in a bit of ridiculous bluster.

The middle classes, however, will often express their disagreement by means of a lot of pompous sounding legalese in reply to the most minor 'encroachments' on their ‘rights’. So I've seen them claim that proposals, such as to build sheltered housing for people with learning disabilities nearby, are against the ‘European Convention on Human Rights’ as it apparently disrupts ‘their right to family life’, or have heard them shout that 'they have been advised by their friend', a QC, that such housing is in direct breach of the Magna Carta.'

If they are upper middle class or wealthy (or are representing some organisations) they may actually be able to afford a lawyer to take up their complaints.

The more sophisticated type of complainer will also sometimes try and disguise their naked intolerance with a manufactured concern for those who would benefit from the proposals they’re opposing. ‘I want the very best for asylum seekers. This country rightly has a proud history of providing refuge for those unfortunate enough not to British. But they wouldn’t be happy here in our very traditional village. We’d be quite unable to cater for their cosmopolitan tastes in food and women.’

(It really is the Guardian types that we need to shoot first. Damn - is that ‘incitement to murder’?)

Laws and legalese

Laws like the Protection from Harassment Act also appear to have sometimes become a refuge for those who should maybe just get on with their lives and rise about petty unpleasantness.

Rachel North is a well-known blogger. She was on one of the tube trains that was blown up on the 7 July 2007 and has became known for her writing about that incident and the call for a Public Inquiry. She’s also revealed in her blog that she's been raped.

She suffered a year long campaign of unpleasant emails, blog posts and phone calls to her by Felicity Jane Lowde. The emails, etc. to North were undoubtedly nasty - ‘I fully believe you are capable of lying about being raped.’ But neither woman covers herself in glory. Both reported the other to the cops - North’s replies to Lowde are full of ‘my partner is a lawyer, I’m very important and I warn you that you are breaching this and that legislation.’

Lowde also asked difficult, if not unpleasant, questions of her nemesis ‘Why did you not stay to help the dying (on the tube train)’. There’s doubtless a thousand good answers to that question - because there was nothing I could do, I was scared, I was injured and reckoned I needed to get help for myself - as well as more difficult responses.

Madeleine McCann’s parents were recently asked a question by a journalist at a German news conference that implied they might be responsible for ‘disappearing’ their daughter. The following day’s Daily Mirror attacked that journalist for daring to ask such an ‘impertinent’ question as though a newspaper is completely unfamiliar with any obligation to breach difficult subjects. This possibly is beyond the Mirror’s idea of news investigation but no question should ever be off limits, no matter how baseless and so needlessly offensive it may be, as this query doubtless was.

North comes across as rather precious on her site. She makes the ludicrous claim that it’s illegal to quote from her blog without her permission and that, as a rape victim, it’s also against the law to report her personal details despite her waiving her anonymity in revealing the attack.

She describes her contact with Lowde as “psychological war, and in some ways it was worse than the rape and the bomb.” Amongst the comments that she says made her feel harassed was Lowde’s claim that she is “making a living on the backs of the dead”.

North says this in her new persona as a writer, and that after she claimed a few weeks ago that she wanted to put the Lowde matter completely behind her. She now has her first book out - about the bomb - an extract of which (including her relating the Lowde incidents) was published as a double page spread in Saturday's Daily Mail.

Lowde, meanwhile, is serving a six month sentence because of her actions and North's complaint.

Rape and rapists

Some laws just don't deliver. The conviction rate for rapists is shocking. Just 5.6% of those making a rape allegation to the police see a conviction result. Sure, a few allegations will be malicious, but that leaves many women suffering rape without any comeback.

Whilst communists don’t think locking people up is an answer to crime - we need to address why crimes happen and why violence against women is so prevalent - I certainly think rapists should be imprisoned for lack of any present day alternative.

So the government wants to make it easier to convict accused rapists - such as restricting the way that an alleged victim can be cross examined. Surely communists will support such moves? 'I mean, you're not in favour of rape, are you?' I could hear them asking.

The answer is no. Take the case of Clifford Francombe. He was jailed in 2006 for 8 years for a rape committed 21 years previously. From all that I've read about this case there was no forensic evidence - the woman says he did, he says he didn’t - and I can find no mention of any circumstantial evidence. Any case that is just someone’s word against someone else’s, for whatever crime, should never come to court.

Whose laws?

Laws aren’t neutral. They're there to be used to maintain the domination of the ruling class. Even progressive laws, such as those for the protection of women from violence, can be worthwhile reforms but unless they're implemented by a socialist regime, they can also be misused to protect the powerful or to indiscriminately oppress the innocent or the insignificant.

You should be careful what laws you wish for.

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Brown and Blue / Bang Bang - or not / Royal inbreeding / Bloggers gone bad

Brown and Blue

The ‘Line to Take’ (LTT) was ‘Brown, our new Prime Minister - he’s dispensed with the spin’.

It’s hard to say whether that LTT was decided by the Prime Minister’s office, in the upper echelons of the BBC or in the boardrooms of the media barons. It doesn’t matter who promoted that tack, they all went along.

But then last week there was an interesting peek through the curtain at the real Gordon Brown. The BBC news programme, Panorama, released some footage of our new Prime Minister that had been taken shortly after Labour came to power in 1997. The euphoria, or more likely the then amateurishness of Labour’s administration, had seen them allow the filming of some unguarded moments.

That hapless buffoon of a press officer, Charlie Whelan, was recorded nervously on the phone leaking the news to the BBC that his boss Brown was about to remove the Bank of England from its role as regulator of banking insurance and pensions.

"I shouldn't really have told you this. They'll go mental if they've found out that I've told you." whined Whelan on the phone. "You won’t say it was me, will you" warbled that right Charlie - and all in front of a camera.

There’s a myth that New Labour were the master of the rebuttal and the soundbite - and that this helped get them elected. Knowing not a few of the nomarks who actually did these jobs, I can state that many were jobbing jokers who were simply in the right place at an opportune moment. Not that this stopped many of them then selling themselves to the gullible as ‘insider people’ that you needed to write your newspaper column or work for your Public Affairs agency. Any boss with wits would have walked a press officer like Whelan out the door.

Then there was Brown himself, caught on camera at the same time, paying very little interest to financial issues but instead engrossed in a discussion about how to ensure that tomorrow’s news was dominated by his point of view - and not that of the Bank of England complaining about its reduced role.

And then later in the programme you saw the Chancellor being quizzed by MPs who were annoyed that this news had been leaked without them being told first. ‘Did you leak this news - yes or no?’ A slimy politician to his socks and shoes, Brown replied in a smart aleck reply - ‘I understand there is no proof that the news was leaked.’

All said with him knowing it was all recorded on film. But that was footage that the Treasury later tried to stop the BBC from using and this was only after the government had also managed to squash it for a decade.

Brown - all front

Brown goes though the motions. There’s an image to maintain - the serious and solemn Scotsman quietly committed to socialism and a place in the sun for all. He’s beyond fripperies - like influencing news coverage - they'd have you think.

‘I don’t like to talk about my religious beliefs’, he sternly intoned which his team just happened to make sure was filmed with a backdrop of the kirk where his father was a priest.

His cabinet says it all. The preponderance of Oxbridge ogres. The nascent nepotism with two brothers as well as a husband and wife - or are some families just naturally blessed with more intellect than others in our egalitarian world?

Or the sheer right wing politics of them all. Really, it makes precious little difference if the PM is Blair, Cameron or Brown.

And the appointments of new ‘talent’ to the ministerial benches. One is the appropriately named Shriti Vadera. She's got a just fabulous track record -

- involvement in flogging off the state’s Defence and Evaluation and Research Agency, now QinetiQ, for but a small fraction of its value.

- being a prime mover in the forced privatisation of a large part of the London tube network - a process that has seen its programme of work slip years behind timetable and that's likely to see either the company responsible going bust (with farepayers picking up the engorged tab) or a lot more farepayers money being given to those parasites to keep them in the pink.

Vadera is now the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for International Development. Perhaps she can arrange the sale of the whole of an African country to one of the merchant banks?

It’s unclear whether she is in the Labour Party. But then, what’s £30 (?) if you want to get on?

However someone with just a smidgen of principle is another new minister, the also unelected Sir Digby Jones. His previous work included heading the bosses’ organisation, the CBI.

Jones has insisted he won’t be joining the Labour Party - so I suppose that makes it a coalition government without coalition parties. It’ll be interesting - well maybe just a little - to see at what point all the ExTrots and other Lefts in this Uniparty realise that their organisation is consistently to the right of the Liberal Democrats.

Maybe they never will.

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Bang Bang - or not

Already the failed car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow have led to many an excited editorial and ministerial musing calling for eternal vigilance as well as a ramping up of the war on terror.

Internment may well be extended to ninety days. Asians heading to Heathrow are finding themselves forced from their car on approach roads and subjected to a once-over by grim faced, machine-gun toting paramilitary pigs.

But it’s clear that in the six years since 9/11 the threat from Islamists undertaking operations in the West is a lot less deadly than that from influenza or ingrowing toenails.

The Islamist 'spectaculars' in the West since 2001 were Madrid in 2005 (191 dead) and London in 2004 (52 dead). There have been claims of some foiled attacks, such as those supposed to have plotted by Dhiren Barot, but most of these superhyped arrests have either involved people who seemed to have been dreamers who were simply fantasising about doing something, or were incidents that ended with the accused being quietly released for lack of any substance to the allegations about them.

Consider the level of sophistication the IRA had developed over a similar time frame.

I’ve little time for conspiracy theories - ‘it was all done by the state to pass legislation X, etc.’ The state can do this with very little opposition anyway. The mad conspiracy theories about 9/11 are just a diversion.

Having said that, the ineptitude on display was interesting. I don’t know whether the car bombs contained detonators but it was common for the British forces to interfere with the materiel of the IRA so that bombs didn’t go off and I suppose it’s possible that the same may have happened here. Why did the bombers not attempt something in the hours between them abandoning their cars and the discovery of the vehicles - why wait to detonate? Perhaps they tried but were unable to make them work.

I think incompetence is a more likely explanation. Parking your car bomb illegally, so that it ends up being towed away, sounds like the mark of the disorganised.

But none of the above means that the State won’t make full use of these opportunities to push forward what it wants to achieve.

‘How can you be opposed to new 'security' measures,' they'll ask, ‘are you are in favour of the murder of innocent civilians?'

It may only be developing technology that'll prevent the spreading of current widespread, but lowish-tech solutions, that could assist them in better monitoring and controlling the population.

I’d be interested to see how my PR ‘colleagues’ would react to a brief calling for ideas for a campaign to raise the level of public acceptance of any such new methods of control.

‘Celebs have gone for pinks as well as for highlighted yellows and blues on their forehead barcodes as seen outside Café de Clubb last night as many of them turned out for the launch of the new range - Monitor by Moss.'

'An exclusive line of insertable barcode strips are also available that react to your moods (as measured by the precipitation rate at your hairline) by changing colour.'

“Fashion has always led” said Sophia de Soichamps “and it’s only right we now show how you can have security with style.”

Or, for the masses, how about ‘Combine your forehead barcode with a branded Tesco Clubcard and receive an extra 15% off acne treatments and moisturising creams.’

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Royal inbreeding

‘Just 62p a year they cost us’, doubtless said the news release attached when the annual accounts of the Windsor family were distributed last week. So ‘just 62p a year they cost us’ faithfully reported the craven British media.

To be fair, the press is at least evolving slightly from their time-honoured reporting of this item. It always used to be ‘they cost us no more than the price of a cup of tea.’ Personally I’d settle for just a 1p a year from each Brit and would wallow in the £600,000 annual salary that this would entail.

I recall when the first Rich Lists were produced. I thought it very considerate of the media to draw up these execution tables, although the big flaw remains that while you may be able to value shares held in traded companies, there’s no way of knowing what has been squirreled away in banks, never mind hidden from the taxman.

The Queen and the Duke of Westminster were always named as the two richest Brits in these early lists. But the Queen has fallen right down the rankings and is now probably somewhere between Jamie Olivier and Sharon Osbourne.

So what happened? Has Her Maj been giving away her millions? No, as part of the fix there's been a large rewriting of what Elizabeth Windsor owns and what's only hers ‘on behalf of the nation.’

So we own Buckingham Palace, apparently. I wonder how much rent we charge her? And I realise that it must be quite a burden for her to care for all those priceless works of art on our behalf. I’d be happy to help out and hang a Holbein or a Hogarth in my hallway.

I’m hoping that when she is done with grasping from us (which may be decades yet - as her mother showed, a lifetime without work lasts a long time) the prospect of the Tampon Twitterer himself, King Charles III, ascending to the throne will be a tad too much for the residents of both Tunbridge Wells and Tottenham. Although they will proclaim him king before Liz is cold, the coronation would take a while - enough for us to push for their removal.

But then maybe the world is more monarchist than we think. The Royal family of the French Socialist Party has split apart and will fight each over for the crown. The wife of a former king may well succeed the House of Bush in the United States. North Korean socialism goes on through the house of Kim.

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Bloggers gone bad

There’s yet another ‘Southpawpunch’ site. Well sort of. I see it as a homage. Its authors will see it differently. ‘Southpawpunch is a fucking wanker’ is this sad - rather than satirical - blog.

It’s usual in satire to make fun of the point that your target is making. Perhaps use the same methodology as they do in a different case to show how ludicrous something they say may be, or point up some unintended consequences of their views.

But just making stuff up is a lot different. It’s a lesson from the Stalin school of falsification. It’s simply smearing or in plain language - lying.

So this blog posts on my supposed support for the Red Army Faction (aka the Baader-Meinhof Group or the Rote Armee Fraktion). That’s complete bollocks, as well they know from looking at the comments on that organisation that I recently reposted at Southpawpunch Comments.

And it’s just malicious to put links on their blog to suggest that I have any interest or agreement with reactionary stuff such as the philosophy of the North Korean monarchy.

But then the method of these besmirchers is that of hypocrisy. They make a lot of my frank comments on the unfortunate necessity of violence. That's the view of communists but also happens to be the view of capitalist politicians as well - Brown and Bush are clear that they also support force.

And in fact it’s also the view of these jerks. They may seek to ridicule and exaggerate what I write about violence, and mock my support for the relatively ineffective efforts of those fighting imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan, but those behind that blog - Hak Mao and Will - are both signatories to the 'Euston Manifesto'!

That’s big-time hypocrisy. They support this manifesto - full of ‘intellectual’ ‘Left’ excuses for the imperialist warmongers - whilst criticising those who call them out. But they also hide their support for this imperialist violence or ‘B52s good, AK47s bad’ as they would proclaim, if they'd any guts. I’ve wasted enough words on these wastrels. Contempt is too thin a word for them.

There is, however, one redeeming feature on their blog - a single sublime article, (reproduced below). There's also a fine picture with this - a cat with a rifle - that you can see on the lower righthand side of my site.

My cat and the so called 'left'

“Even my cat Cheka is more revolutionary than the so called left that inhabit the blogs and attack me. They are rightly the subject of my disdain, beyond dead for all revolutionary purposes, incapable of acting politically. They are but apolitical detritus.”

That’d be ace. ‘Officer, it wasn’t me, it was the cat. She even hid the bullets in her litter tray.’ I’d like a cat like that.
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New in Southpawpunch Comments - click through for more.

“there is both that level of (off-key) intellectualism of an overeducated lumpen”

“Imagine if a paper’s gossip column just published every titbit that each PR person whispered to them… So to allow such rubbish on your site is just crap journalism that allows you to be used to spread lies and will turn your blog into a joke."

“I was at a party last night at which there were several LP types who, like social inadequates, put on the News at 10 and either fluttered approvingly or turned up their noses and twittered disdain when news of each member of the cabinet was announced. One bloke did a sort of mini pirouette to release tension as he learnt his hero had not been selected.”

“in other words she acted in exactly the same undemocratic way that they did. Maybe we all have a little Stalin inside us.”

“Irish peasants, during what is wrongly called the Irish Famine and what was a deep as a Depression as can be, didn't turn Left and combine to force the end to the exporting food but instead were atomised into just trying to keep their own family alive.”

“probably best of all, the defeat of the strongest imperial power in Vietnam. These showed the ongoing benefits, despite their non- socialist nature, of the deformed and degenerated workers states. You all stick with your comfortable bourgeois democracies.”