POLICE corruption might not appear to have much in common with guitar-based rock bands. But what is beyond dispute is that both were so much better in the 1970s.

Plods on the take four decades ago did things in style. Look at the Met’s Obscene Publications Squad, for instance. Those guys would not have stooped to fit up whatever back then constituted the equivalent of a website designer for a few hundred poxy quid. Why bother with stuff like that, when they were busy trousering millions in bribes from criminals like Jimmy Humphreys, the porn king of Soho?

When Commander Ken Drury went down for eight years in 1977, Mr Justice Mars-Jones was clear that he had headed a regime of ‘corruption on a scale which beggars description’, and the judge was not wrong on this one.

But Ali Dizaei is to his predecessors what the Noisettes are to the Pistols or Zep. His efforts to frame Waad al Baghdadi obviously brand him a boorish alpha male little bully. But the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad in its paddy-bashing hey-day would have laughed him off as an obvious lightweight.

Even if Dizaei did do the odd line of charlie, fiddle his exes or indulge in a spot of extramarital with the full permission of the missus – none of which is proven - that hardly makes him the contemporary incarnation of evil.

What does mark the case out is inevitable suggestion racism. Dizaei is closely linked with the National Black Police Association, and has openly insisted that he has been targeted by Met chiefs on grounds of race.

Sections of the left, for the best of motives, might be tempted to agree. The extent of racial prejudice in the Met is shocking. Several members of my family have served in the force, and I can testify that at least until recently, ‘sootie’ was standard London copper slang for black people.

Even now, black officers are less likely to secure promotion, discrimination cases are commonplace, and black recruits leave more rapidly than their white counterparts. You only need to walk around the capital with your eyes open to know which kids get the most street hassle.

Just because a huckster like Dizaei says the Met are racist, it does not follow that the Met is not racist. But that does not imply we should take the lead in organising the defence campaign.

This whole business must have been difficult for Met bosses, who have been scrupulously sensitive to accusations of racial bias ever since the Stephen Lawrence murder. They must have known the tactics Dizaei would employ, but went ahead with the prosecution anyway.

A bent copper is a bent copper, no matter what the colour of his skin. Dizaei deserves his spell in the slammer.

IF A bunch of squabbling Marxist groups can arm-twist the trade unions into setting up a broad based working class party once, there is no reason why they cannot pull off the trick a second time.

That seems to be the history lesson taken to heart by sections of the British left. The Socialist Party, for instance, launched the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party four years ago. CNWP has done little since, other than hold an obligatory annual conference.

Workers’ Power - for reasons best known to its puissant central committee – has already flounced out in a huff over some outrage or other and issued its Call for a New Anticapitalist Party in Britain, which seems to thrive. At least on Facebook, anyway.

The Communist Party of Britain periodically flirts with the notion of a new ‘party of labour’, although on this issue it seemingly suffers from commitment phobia worthy of the male lead in a Bridget Jones flick.

Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Great Britain damns all such schemes as ‘halfway houses’. For the benefit of mainstream readers, I must stress here that the Communist Party of Britain should not under any circumstance be confused with the Communist Party of Great Britain. Got that?

In an attempt to clarify my thoughts on all this, I have just started rereading Henry Pelling’s ‘Origins of the Labour Party’, a book I last picked up circa 1983 when taking an undergraduate course in British political history.

Somehow I seem to remember finding the volume distinctly dull a quarter of a century ago. It’s actually well-written by the standards of the genre, and rightly still regarded as the mutt’s nuts on the topic it covers.

But the truly horrible thing is to discover that most of the problems that plagued the British far left 130 years ago are exactly the same as the problems it faces today.

Consider, for instance, the founder of the first-ever explicitly Marxist current in Britain. HM Hyndman was the prototype of that breed of alpha male who puff themselves up as revolutionary leaders on the basis of a half-arsed grasp of Marx’s philosophy. Remind you of anybody?

Hyndman - public school and Oxbridge, needless to say – was a failed Conservative parliamentary candidate. Prior to setting up the Social Democratic Federation in 1884, he organised a meeting with former prime minister Disraeli, during which he argued that the Tories should adopt a communist programme. Great game plan, or what?

Needless to say, the SDF split within a year of its foundation, largely because of the inevitable personality clashes. The leader of the breakaway Socialist League, the artist William Morris, was soon spouting an environment-based catastrophist perspective that would be considered quite fashionable in 2010.

But Morris was not much of what we would now call a theoretician. A Hyndmanite heckler at a public meeting asked him if he accepted Marx’s theory of value. Morris replied:

To speak frankly, I do not know what Marx’s theory of value is, and I’m damned if I want to know. Truth to say, my friends, I have not tried to understand Marx’s theory, but political economy is not my line, and much of it appears to me to be dreary rubbish.

OK, I’ve only gone through the first two chapters of Pelling. But my initial feeling is that the difference between the 1880s and the 2010s are sufficient to preclude history repeating itself, even the second time as farce.

Salient changes include the depoliticisation and atomisation of the working class, the incorporation of the trade union leadership into many of the mechanisms of the state and the hardening of separate traditions within the left to an unbridgeable extent.

Finally, an abstract notion of ‘socialism’ cannot be advanced as the political basis for a new party in the same way it was at the time of Labour’s birth, when it could mean whatever anybody wanted it to mean. The brute realities of twentieth century history have seen to that.

It is also worth pointing out that the sects of 1884 – the SDF, the SL and the Fabian Society – had more or less got the Labour Party off the ground by 1900, a period of just 16 years.

It is now 14 years since the establishment of Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, the first of the manifold left regroupment initiatives, and the refoundation of anything like a serious working class party is no closer. The suspicion has to be that it will never happen.

ANY RELIGIOUS tradition sufficiently Froot Loop to ordain Sinead O’Connor as a Bishop just has to be a couple of beads short of a full rosary. Nothing compares 2 that, you could say.

Nevertheless, I have to admit that the former Trotskyist in me retains a certain voyeuristic fascination for what is known as Traditionalist Catholicism. When it comes to sterile factionalist denunciation of mainstream sell-out merchants in the name of orthodoxy, these guys make the far left look like amateurs.

Even the designations they use for two-bob mini-organisations are heavily redolent of the grandiose monikers adopted by the more embarrassing microsect claimants to the heritage of Lev Davidovich Brontstein.

Calling yourself the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter, the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest or the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer surely evinces a mentality not too far removed from the chutzpah needed to set up shop as the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International or the International Trotskyist Committee for the Political Regeneration of the Fourth International.

Then there are the deviations. Where we compare and contrast Shactmanism, Pabloism and the International Committee tradition, Traditionalist Catholics get to denounce each other as sedevacantists or conclavists. Splitters!

The clincher is the irresistible appeal both doctrines hold for crap thesps. We’ve got Vanessa Redgrave, they’ve got Mel Gibson. And I am well aware that Gibson does far better box office these days.

So much for the preamble. From my Hong Kong redoubt, I have been reading the Daily Telegraph website, which details the case of Bishop Richard Williamson, who is to stand trial in Germany in April on charges of Holocaust denial:

The notorious English bishop also allegedly told colleagues from his ultraconservative brotherhood that "a completely new world order" had been built on the "fact" that Jews were systematically gassed in concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor.

In a separate email, he is said to have written that "1.3 million deported people" were not gassed in the Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec and Sobibor concentration camps as historians claim, but were rather transported to the Soviet Union.

Googling up the guy’s history, I notice that he was excommunicated from Rome in 1988 for a technical breach of the rules, rather than any ideological disagreement. A bit like the kids that have just been flung out of the SWP for aligning themselves with John Rees, I guess.

But here’s the good bit. In January last year, the excommunication was rescinded. And on the very day Williamson was effectively readmitted, he gave a Holocaust denial interview to Swedish telly. Hence the impending court case.

Earlier this week, I defended Benedict XVI’s appeal for the Catholicism to be exempted from employment legislation granting equal rights to homosexuals. I was delighted to win bouquets from bloggers as diverse as Fr Tim Finigan, parish priest of Our Lady of the Rosary, Blackfen, to Irish ex-SWPer Splintered Sunrise.

I would not resile from that earlier post; ultimately, the Catholic church alone should be the arbiter of whom it decides to put on its payroll or admit into membership. But it's a year since Williamson's comments, which have not been denied, and I am unaware that he faces any disciplinary procedure.

So just how is it that homosexuality is a barrier to the priesthood, and Holocaust denial seemingly is not? Or am I missing something? Oh, and what does Bishop O'Connor have to say on this one?

THERE’S an old joke about the Pope’s attitude to contraception, attributed variously to Irish comedian Dave Allen or the Italian-American community at large. The punchline runs: ‘If he doesn’t play the game, he shouldn’t try to make the rules.’

I am inescapably reminded of the quip after reading about the intervention of the world’s most prominent former Hitler Youth into current UK debates about equality.

Benedict XVI believes that British legislation runs contrary to natural law, placing ‘limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs’. This is widely taken as a reference to the ban on adoption agencies, including Catholic adoption agencies, discriminating against gay adoptive parents.

It may also be a sideswipe the current equality bill, which narrows the existing exemptions enjoyed by religious groups, permitting them to insist that employees abide by their doctrines.

Well, New Labour in office has been adamant about its wish for ‘dialogue’ with ‘faith communities’, so it can hardly feign surprise when a religion with over 4m adherents takes it up on the idea.

It’s worth noting here that well into the 1970s, many inner city Catholic priests in England wielded a de facto block vote, and this remains the case today in parts of Scotland. The faithful have traditionally been advised to ‘vote Labour with no illusions’, to borrow a catchphrase.

Benedict XVI’s appeal to Lex Naturalis instantly makes me uneasy. It’s an elastic concept that indisputably forms part of the western liberal tradition, but does have a certain protean quality.

Catholicism endows the term with a very specific Thomist understanding. As I understand it, natural law is the philosophical basis of the Romanist job lot rejection of rubber johnnies, birth control pills, inappropriate self-stimulation of one’s pudenda and homosexuality.

Conception is the natural end of sex, and therefore procreation must be open to the possibility, even if that means large numbers of Africans coming down with HIV.

What of the issues at hand? I’ve heard it said that Catholic adoption agencies do good work, frequently finding homes for severely handicapped kids that are the hardest to place. Religious believers are seemingly more motivated to take on this difficult task, and the rest of us should be thankful for that.

But why have specifically Catholic adoption agencies in the first place? Aren’t they a throwback to the days when knocked-up Catholic schoolgirls needed somewhere to dump the unfortunate sprog before getting carted off to the nearest Magdalene Laundry?

Given the change in social mores, adoption nowadays is more properly the job of local government. The interests of the children involved are the only real priority, and to deny them loving care on the grounds of an adopter’s sexuality is not the best way to advance them. Catholicism needs either to get with the programme. If it feels it cannot do so, it should butt out of the field.

But on the matter of employment, the Pope has a rather stronger case, albeit on strictly secular grounds. It is not the province of government to rule on whom any voluntary association may or may not accept into membership or put on its payroll. For the sake of a healthy relationship between state and civil society, this point really has to prevail.

Perhaps the first significant erosion of this principle came with the Tory anti-union laws of the 1980s, which withdrew from trade unions the ability to exclude strike-breakers, and forced them to accept applications from active fascists.

We will see if the rightwing commentators who will no doubt speak up in favour of Benedict XVI in the days ahead possess sufficient logical consistency to accept this elementary point.

And writing as a leftwing commentator, yes, precisely the same consideration applies to the nonsensical decision that the British National Party should be forced to accept black members. Isn’t hating black people the very point of being in the BNP?

If the same yardstick was applied universally, Hizb ut Tahrir would be debarred from turning down evangelical Christians, for instance. I’m looking forward to the test case already.

Common sense alone dictates that the League Against Cruel Sports has no duty to be an equal opportunities employer in respect of illegal cock fighting aficionados. If you apply to be a Conservative parliamentary candidate and then inform the selection meeting that you are an anarcho-syndicalist, you do not have grounds subsequently to bring a discrimination case.

Peter Tatchell – a man with whom I usually agree on much – has been widely quoted taking the Pope to task on this one. But my guess is that he wouldn’t hire an overt homophobe for an admin job at OutRage!

By the same token, if you want to work for the Catholic Church, your potential bosses might reasonably expect you to uphold the teachings of Catholicism. If you are gay, it will presumably not have escaped your notice that the Vatican has a longstanding downer on hot man-on-man legover action.

And why would a self-respecting gay man or woman want to be a member of an organisation that teaches them that same-sex personal relationships are sinful, anyway? There are plenty of wussy denominations that take a more inclusive line, not least the Church of England.

A substantial wing of the CoE even lays theological claim to a brand of camper than a row of tents Catholicity, and will happily do you all the smells and bells you can handle. What’s not to like?

IT MUST take a considerable degree of doublethink simultaneously to oppose the US-led occupation of Iraq and support the Chinese occupation of Tibet. That doesn’t stop some on the left giving it a go, of course.

The idea of a right to self-determination is common coinage for liberals and socialists alike. If Iraq deserves that privilege – and I think that it does – then Tibet surely merits it as well.

After all, it was Karl Marx himself who suggested that ‘a nation that oppresses another will never itself be free’, and the force of that observation is not diminished simply because the oppressor nation makes some sort of claim to adhere to socialism.

The business of the left is to oppose all occupations, and if we are to be consistent, that stance should not be conditional on who is doing the occupying.

I have been thinking about this question as a result of reading programme here in Hong Kong, which over the last couple of weeks had taken in many aspects of China’s politics. A number of books have left me yet clearer than I was before that the country can be characterised as imperialist, at least in the pre-Leninist usage of the term.

The Tibetans are clearly distinct in religious, linguistic and ethnic terms, and Tibet must be classified as a nation on any standard theoretical basis. Any argument that it has been ‘part of China’ for centuries is patently historical nonsense. In short, China shouldn’t be there.

Beijing – and therefore its fellow travellers – make much of the notion that Tibet was for centuries nominally a tributary state. But then so was the Vatican, as far as Han supremacists are concerned. The designation is effectively meaningless.

Nor can too much store be set by the 1950 ‘liberation’ of Tibet by Maoist armed forces. This was simply a de facto handover of an independent country to foreign rule by Quisling elements in the ruling theocracy over the heads of the population.

China has since then systematically exploited Tibet’s natural resources, and has resettled Han Chinese colonists there to the point where Tibetans are at risk of becoming a minority in their own homeland.

Yet the literature – even the most anti-communist of it – concedes that Chinese rule has meant social advance, most notably the eradication of serfdom and extensive land reform.

An argument can be constructed that the occupation has been historically progressive, in the sense that Marx used the term to apply to British imperialism in India. While Marx was absolutely clear that this contention should not be adduced to justify continuing British presence, the impact is worthy of dispassionate note.

Yes, I know. The catchphrase ‘but it was historically progressive, comrade’ long formed a favourite construct in the lexicon of apologists for Stalinism. Seemingly there was nothing that the USSR did that could not somehow be excused with reference to the notion. Heaven help those who got in the way.

Which brings me back to Iraq. I don’t resile from the idea that the invasion was wrong, and still want to see withdrawal in short order.

But is it entirely heretical to suggest that in the long-run, the overthrow of a wicked dictatorship and the re-emergence of a legal political left and an organised working class will prove to have been, well, historically progressive, comrade?

IMAGINE a scale that runs from one to ten and measures every independent polity in the world in terms of niceness and nastiness.

At one we have Sweden and Norway, because they are permanently cuddly and welfare statey and social democratic, even when the centre-right gets in.

Singapore occupies the half way point with a score of five, because it is authoritarian while desperately trying to pretend to be a semi-democracy. Trade unionism isn’t exactly encouraged, for instance. But trade union activists are not routinely executed, either.

At ten I have placed Saudi Arabia and Burma, both utterly execrable totalitarian regimes with manifold sins that need no reiteration here.

This scale is not designed as a yardstick of democracy as such, but rather an indefinable property that might be described as a ‘bastardness quotient’. You must know what I mean.

The game is this: commenters are invited to place Cuba, Iran, Israel, Britain and the US at points of their choosing along this continuum, giving reasons for doing so.

When evaluating Cuba, for instance, you have to decide whether the combination of a one-party state, a ban on independent unions, free universal healthcare and the eradication of illiteracy makes the place better or worse than Lee Hsien Loong’s Asian city-state.

Ditto Iran, which some leftwing blogs apparently consider ‘a mature democracy’, despite its repression of peaceful demonstrations by opposition supporters. Does it rank above or below five in your book?

Arab citizens of Israel have all the rights associated with liberal democracies. Yet at the same time, Tel Aviv’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians has rightly attracted the condemnation of liberals and socialists everywhere. What should we conclude?

How about the US and the UK? How far do the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq make them international bastards of the first water? Do you cut them any slack for adherence to broadly free elections and human rights at home?

Over to you. I’ll join the discussion in the comments box.

The following article was commissioned by the Alliance for Workers' Liberty paper Solidarity. Normally I wait until such pieces appear in print before publishing them on this website, but I am seriously short of blogging time in Hong Kong, so I hope they forgive me just this once.

Meanwhile, what you are about to read means that I am breaking my new year's resolution no longer to write stuff on such topics and stick to matters of political consequence instead. Sorry, couldn't help myself. And besides, it's been ages since we've had a far left bunfight.

URBAN legend has it that George Best - by this point a rich but has-been alky rather than a footballer of genius - once ordered champagne to be delivered to the five-star hotel room in which he was gallivanting with a half-naked Miss World.

The bellboy arrived with the bubbly, only to find thousands of pounds of casino winnings strewn over the bed. The waiter calmly turned round to the the one-time Manchester United legend and pointedly asked him: ‘So, Mr Best. Where did it all go wrong?’

That’s a question the far left would do well to ponder as it gears up for the impending general election in a condition weaker than any in which it has found itself for perhaps a century.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, I was an enthusiastic advocate of initiatives like the Socialist Labour Party and the Socialist Alliance. But experience has taught me that a project of this type is impossible to realise in this country.

After 15 years of trying, we are actually further away from that target than we were to begin with. If you want to know why in six short words, the left is too bleeding stupid.

The period that opened up with the birth of New Labour offered it a real chance to build some kind of viable leftwing electoral formation, even if the AWL mistakenly clung to entrism.

Social democracy wilfully cast away the working class it once dominated ideologically, and launched into repeated wars that generated genuine mass opposition. Meanwhile, Stalinism appeared finished once and for all, and there was even a partial youth radicalisation.

It was utterly obvious what the situation demanded of us; unity in a single party and the hard slog of putting down meaningful roots in the labour movement and in working class communities. But we totally fluffed it.

The British left managed to shoot itself in the foot so many times that the ends of both its legs now terminate in bleeding stumps. I guess we got the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce and the third time as something that cannot be described in a family newspaper.

Much of the blame rests with the SWP, which has proven itself so entirely incapable of working with other forces inside a common democratic framework. That has to make the question of alliances with this group problematical.

Its central committee arrogantly assumes that the left cannot put together a meaningful electoral challenge without SWP participation. Much of the rest of the left – even if it diplomatically does not say it aloud - feels that it cannot put together a meaningful electoral challenge with the SWP on board.

Meanwhile, the very SWPers that preach ‘flair, determination and decisive leadership’ – qualities that Georgie Best amply displayed on the football pitch, I seem to remember – are reduced to provoking apolitical beauty contest faction fights by hyping up spurious non-differences. Hey guys, notice the fascists in Brussels?

Once, the Scottish Socialist Party demonstrated what could be achieved with a little nous. But all it took was one overblown male ego to squander that.

The Socialist Party in England and Wales deserves some credit for the years of patient local work legwork it has put in, at least in Coventry and a few other places. But the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition it is sponsoring this time round is clearly on the parliamentary road to lost deposits.

There is little point in putting together ad hoc coalitions just weeks before election campaigns begin, not even bothering to stand under the same name twice in succession.

At the time of writing, the SWP was in talks about joining up with TUSC. I’m frankly surprised that idea was not rejected as a non-starter. We’ll see what happens.

But even if it comes off, any shotgun marriage between Trots and the left of the trade union bureaucracy will prove a semi-tankie nightmare, with a rigid internal regime premised on the deterrence of microsect infiltration. That won’t stop the crackpots sneakily tabling transitional demands in the hope that no-one else will notice, of course.

There will be no prospect whatsoever of leadership accountability or control by the rank and file. That alone will prevent such a formation making headway in the working class.

The mosque bloc vote might see Respect fare slightly better than TUSC in percentage terms, but it has no realistic chance of securing any MPs either. It’s saddening to see activists desperately trying to kid themselves otherwise.

And I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already when I remind you that the solitary AWL candidacy may well struggle to poll a three-figure vote. Haven’t you lot got better things to do?

In short, the only socialist MPs that will get to Westminster this year will be the handful that get elected as Labour candidates. I’ll be concentrating my political efforts on securing the return of John McDonnell in Hayes and Harlington, and then participating in the debate that will be had after Labour’s imminent crushing defeat.