Weather in Brum Where The Sun Always Shines On The Blues.

Monday 8 September 2014

WHy the Labourt Party Must TURN LEFT -> -> ->

Portrait Picture of Tony Benn
Portrait Picture of Tony Benn (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Portrait photo of Barbara Castle
Portrait photo of Barbara Castle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
James Keir Hardie was an early democratic soci...
James Keir Hardie was an early democratic socialist, who founded the Independent Labour Party in Great Britain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
    I was a foot soldier for the Labour Party from 1961 until Blair invaded Iraq   My sole but, miserable, compensation for not having left a distressing legacy behind me is that I DID NOT vote for any of the three candidates for the leadership, when sadly John Smith did and the hopes of returning a Socialist government died with him. In did not feel that either of the three candidates (Becket, Blair and Prescott) would give a fig for what the, then, members of the party were looking for. I did however cast a vote for Prescott as the Deputy Leader as he personally helped my colleagues and myself when we were going through the courts over the banning of Trade Unions at GCHQ in 1984. I always repay a favour.
 With the three major parties offering only the same shades of neo-liberal politics to the electorate many millions are totally disenfranchised and are seeking something new, such as Scottish Independence (how about independence for Kernow as well, now that the E.U. has officially recognised it as an  official minority within  the U.K.). Neo- liberalism was defined as follows by Shamus Cook who, lamenting the lot of working class people in the Western World brilliantly defined defined it as follows:-
  “The essence of neoliberalism can be reduced to the following: government should be used exclusively to help big business and the wealthy with tax cuts, subsidies, privatizations, anti-labour laws, etc., while all government programs that help working and poor people should be eliminated. It’s really that simple.”  
 Ed Milliband is now confronted with offering more of the same, at the next election, surrounded as he his by advisers who, like the other parties seek to appeal to the middle ground. Well I have news for you Ed, the middle ground is a tiny minority controlled by the establishment and the lies of its media whilst the rest of us are yearning for something different.
 After over fifty years in politics I have only ever met two whom I respect both for their intellects and their refusal to compromise on socialist policies (sadly Both Barbara Castle and Tony Benn are dead). I have met many of the rest of them from ministers to MP's  and was even sadly a misguided foot soldier for some of them ( I exclude Terry penny from this list, as he was a proper socialst who fought,  Tidley Ridley or Old Nick, in a huge Tory swathe in the Cotswolds. I met Ridley when he was destroying the miners at Thathcher's behest and I can honestly say that he had the handshake and the demeanour of a wet fish).
 Well, dear reader, as ever I digress, so back to the subject. I am convinced that there is a sea change about to occur in British politics, regardless of what happens in Scotland, UKIP is going to split the Tory vote and many of my racist Tory colleagues at GCHQ like millions of other conservatives will be rooting for them. Milliband should therefore show the boldness and vision to offer a leftist alternative (just 10% to the left will do) by sacking  his advisers and he would sweep the country if he stood on a platform of taking the railways and energy back into public ownership whilst retaining LLoyds and RSB (on which us taxpayers have spent more than 80 billion pounds and merging them together as a state bank independently run and controlled but responsible to the commons. It was they and their chums in the city and America who ruined the economy of the Western World and the Greeks, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Italians and the Irish, amongst others are still suffering from the consequences of crooked bankers with their criminal risk taking and blind robbery.  It is in his hands otherwise British politics will fracture and I fear the right wing are waiting and that W.B Yates terrible prediction will happen:-


William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
       THE SECOND COMING
    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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