At last! It's the final crisis of capitalism! That's according to the publishers of Revolte Jeune - Toute la Verite, a badly-produced French Trot journal I picked up from a seller outside a metro station on Saturday.

It seems that the subprime crisis is about to usher in a period of military dictatorship and fascism, culminating in a third world war fought with nuclear weapons, which will destroy humanity.

Fortunately, the world has one last chance. The new generation has seen through the lies of the leaders of the mainstream left, the false Trotskyism of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, Lutte Ouvrière and the Parti des Travailleurs, and the idle chat of the anarchists, and is rallying to the action programme of the Comite des Jeunes de Banlieue et de Paris. Thank fuck for that.

Yep, this is vintage foaming at the mouth stuff, at a level of sophistication beneath even the most crazed ultraleftist element in this blog's comment box. But sadly - unlike Ian Donovan's legendary Revolution and Truth - it is not a one-person effort.

According to the studenty-looking vendeuse, the CJBP has about 15 members, gathered around a bloke who was expelled from the Lambertistes in the 1980s. That's 15 activists, most of them presumably young, who could be doing something a damn sight more politically constructive with their energies.

But French Trotskyism does have it's more serious side. Later on Saturday I visited the LCR bookshop and picked up some fine reading material, including Serge Cosseron's Dictionnaire de l’Extrême Gauche, Christophe Bourseiller's Histoire Générale de l’Ultra-gauche and Histoire de l'Extrême Gauche Trotskiste, de 1929 à Nos Jours by Frédéric Charpier.

I've started the last-named volume, and it makes for depressing reading. Even before Trotsky commenced his exile in France in 1933, his French followers were polarised between two competing cliques divided more by personality than politics. Is there something in the movement's political DNA that renders it uniquely vulnerable to this kind of thing, to a degree perhaps matched only by a certain strand of religious sect? Surely there must be some materialist explanation?

I will shortly be boarding the Eurostar back to London, having been out of touch with British politics and business news for over a week. Do me a favour, readers. List the main stories and tell me what I should think about them.

The phrase ‘landslide victory’ is one of those tired clichés the journalistic style books advise hacks not to use. But one Daily Telegraph writer yesterday neatly turned it on its head, by proffering the opinion that Cameron’s Conservatives – 11% behind in the polls – face ‘landslide defeat’ at the next election.

After an initial surge in the polls after DC took charge, support has now fallen back to the point where he has no more backing than any of his string of ineffectual predecessors. His personal approval rating is just 21%.

If it wasn’t for my overwhelming political animosity to all Tories - all the time - I’d almost be tempted to feel sorry for the multimillionaire Old Etonian reformed cokehead. Is there actually anything he can do to restore Conservative fortunes?

Whether Cameron really and truly wants to change the Tory Party, or simply to pretend to the wider public that he has changed it, I’ll leave to better-placed observers. But after a decade out of office, it seems pretty clear that the activist base is irreformably locked in a Maastricht-era ‘bastard’ mindset.

The rank and file want euroscepticism, they want law and order, they want tougher immigration controls and they want lower taxes. And they want them now. That is about the sum total of the political ideas that they express. Or express in public, anyway. The crude ‘nigger minstrel’ racism stuff perforce remains sotto voce.

Compare this to the situation in the Labour Party circa 1989, when it too had not seen the inside of Ten Downing Street for ten long years. The long march to the right was already well advanced.

Sure, there was plenty more to come in the early 1990s. But the streets surrounding Walworth Road were already so littered with dumped socialist principles – from unilateral disarmament to the extension of public ownership – that there was barely room to swing a red flag.

The dilemma for Cameron is that are votes in comfort zone Tory politics. Not enough to win an election, of course. But enough to provide the world’s oldest political party with goodly representation in parliament and plenty of jobs for both MPs and bag-carriers. Burning a copy of the New Labour CD risks losing all that.

However much Cameron wants to donate the Nasty Party’s filthy Thatcherite hand-me-downs to Oxfam, there is no guarantee that new boots and panties will generate greater returns. Whatever he says in his speech this afternoon, a new conservative party with new priorities probably isn’t a runner.

Something is badly wrong with Britain’s postal services. That much dawned on me when I moved to a new flat in inner London last year, and Royal Mail lost three packages destined for the address in just four months.

Any number of visits to the local sorting office, which I could only fit in on Saturday mornings thanks to the inconvenient opening hours, were to no avail. It was quite clear that the staff – both the guys at the counter and the supervisory people supposedly put on the case – couldn’t care less about my missing packages.

I now have any mail order goods I buy sent directly to my workplace. It’s the only way I can be sure of receiving them.

Meanwhile, I assume that other people are getting letters addressed to me in roughly similar proportion to the number of times that I get letters addressed to other people. That's at least once or twice a week.

As a socialist, I naturally want to argue that Royal Mail should remain in the public sector. Performance that sucks as badly as that doesn’t make it any easier. But I'm going to do so anyway.

It's little wonder that a workforce putting in long hours for lousy pay and conditions - while watching chief executive Adam Crozier, chairman and Labour Party member Allan Leighton and the rest of the incompetent top brass pocket City salaries - is utterly demoralised and apathetic.

Of course they don’t take the notion of ‘customer service’ seriously. On their money, few of us would.

The latest Royal Mail ‘pay offer’ might as well be designed to make them even more unhappy. Not only does it amount to a real terms pay-cut, but look at some of the strings attached.

For instance, management are seeking to introduce ‘annualised hours’, which will see staff working less in the summer but more at busy periods such as Christmas.

The number of hours worked each day would be increased or cut according the work available, with only seven days notice given for changes. Try planning a social life or family commitments around a timetable like that.

The bosses also want to cut weekend working and stop night shifts, two moves that could together cost some employees up to £200 a week. ‘Door to doors’ - mass junk mailings, basically - are to be increased from three to five per week, with no extra payment or possibly even no payments at all.

Additionally, there are plans to reduce redundancy payouts and pension provisions, raise the retirement age to 65 after 2010, and exclude new employees from the final salary scheme.

To top it all, up to 40,000 jobs are at risk, even as the way is paved for widespread casualisation on the back of cheap agency labour.

Hence today’s strike action. Many will deride it as a throwback to the 1970s. In these days of email and txt msgng, for many of us it won’t make much odds one way or the other. All that ever comes through my letterbox these days are bills, offers of yet more credit cards, and endless sodding pizza flyers.

On the other hand, it will clearly have an effect on business. Royal Mail is circulating this memo to companies in my part of London:

This action will severely limit our ability to provide any services for the coming period. You should expect severe disruption to all postal services during the strikes and for a significant period afterwards.

Please accept my sincere apologies for the disruption this will cause you.

So if any CWU members get to read this, congratulations on taking a stand. And good luck with the campaign. Now ... can any of you find out what happened to those bloody parcels last year, please?

General elections are the apogee of the liberal democratic political process. These are the occasions – once every four years or so – that the ordinary subjects of Her Majesty, as a collectivity, are theoretically in the driving seat.

For weeks now, the media has been full of speculation over whether or not Gordon Brown is planning to ‘go to the country’, as the euphemism has it. Will he or won’t he ‘seek a renewed mandate’?

We are likely to know shortly. If the answer is yes, the vast majority of the electorate will engage with politics and politicians to an extent seen only two or three times a decade. Yet somehow, the words 'general election fever' do not seem to sum up the mood of the nation.

Some sections of the far left have long been dismissive of ‘bourgeois democracy’. Like Lenin said, it’s just a sham, right? Parliament is nothing but the executive committee of the ruling class. Voting is just another way for the bosses to sell the pass.

Well, yes. But there is another side to the story too. Winning the vote in Britain took hundreds of years of class struggle, from the Levellers to the Chartists and the suffragettes. We are only three generations into universal suffrage, remember.

Around the world, all revolutions in recent decades have been revolutions for plain vanilla liberal democracy. These revolutions have been velvet, orange, cedar, rose or saffron aux choix. Any colour you like, so long as it isn’t red.

The monks being killed on the streets of Rangoon as I write these words are being butchered by the Burmese junta because they are demanding freedom for Aung San Suu Kyi, who draws her legitimacy principally from her landslide victory in Burma’s 1990 election. They want the right to vote, and are prepared to die for it.

Compare and contrast the attitude in Britain. Many people forego putting their names on the electoral register simply to get out of paying council tax. It’s not that millions of people have suddenly bought into the Leninist critique of what goes on at Westminster; it’s just that they can’t be arsed to go to the ballot box.

A few days ago, Tory leader David Cameron even remarked on the phenomenon in his party conference speech:

[W]hat about the 40% of our fellow citizens who have given up on voting? They are just fed up with the whole rat-race of politics, the whole merry-go-round. We have got to inspire them that we can bring real change and deal with the things that people care about. People want the politics of belief and that means politics they can really believe in.

His comments both get the point and miss it by a wide margin. In the early 1980s, the differences between Labour and the Conservatives were sharply defined; Bennism and Thatcherism offered competing visions of society. Which side were you on?

Maybe there are still policy differences between Labour and the Conservatives. If I sat down for half an hour and thought about it really hard, I may even be able to name some of them. But none spring instantly to mind.

Today, all major parties subscribe completely to the free market consensus. British politics is reduced to a permanent state of small c conservative politics; vote for us, we’re more competent/nicer guys than that other lot.

Sorry Mr Cameron. Few people are going to get inspired about that.

Incidentally, the turn out from the left was minimal. What's the matter? Buddhism the wrong religion or something, comrades?

I listened to all of the speeches in Trafalgar Square. By far the most eloquent and crowd-pleasing of the lot was delivered by Tory MP John Bercow, who heads the all-party Burma group.

If you shut your eyes and pretended not to know anything about his Monday Club 'repatriate coloureds now' background, it was reminiscent of the sort of rhetoric routinely delivered by Labour left MPs in the past. That speaks volumes about today's politics, I guess.

(2) November 5th marks Stand Up for Journalism day, with a series of events organised by working hacks across Europe. Britain's contribution will see the National Union of Journalists lobby of the Society of Editors conference at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester.

If you fancy going along, assemble outside the offices of the Manchester Evening News on Hardman Street, off Deansgate at 12.30pm.

Speakers at the event will include NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear and president Michelle Stanistreet. Michelle - who works for the Sunday Express - notes:

'The media is owned by a smaller and smaller group of extremely wealthy corporations.

'They are meeting on a site that was developed to commemorate the Peterloo massacre. We hope they will take courage from history and seize the moment.'

(3) There's an interesting debate on the age old question of whether socialists should be in the Labour Party, over at the Red Pepper website. Oh, and a slightly more unusual discussion on the ins and outs of paid-for sex as well, in case you are interested in such a comparatively dull topic.

Remember the derision in which posh Tory Chris Patten was once widely held for his resort to such demotic expressions as ‘gobsmacked’ and ‘porkies’?

Now things have got to the point where even posher Tory David Cameron can argue that Gordon Brown ‘bottled it’ in not calling an election, and nobody deems that worthy of comment.

Well, I do. As someone who really was born within the sound of Bow Bells, I have to register my objection to an Old Etonian worth £30m talking like he's rehearsing for a bit part in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Gordon Bennett, that geezer does me crust in sometimes. Leave it aht, mate.

Sadly, there are few working-class East London MPs left on the Labour benches capable of convincingly proffering the obvious Cockney proletarian response, delivered in a loud aggressive tone while clutching a broken beer glass: ‘Cameron, you bleedin' slag. D’you want some? D’you want some, eh?’ [Female noises off: ‘Leave ‘im, ‘e ain’t wurf it …].

In the USA, Democrat presidential contender John Edwards has been on a United Auto Workers picket line in Detroit. Every Democrat runner is backing the dispute, That's him pictured left, glad-handing AFL-CIO trade union activists in Seattle.

As the Financial Times argues in a feature today:

In between hobnobbing with billionaires and raising record-breaking amounts of campaign finance, the 2008 Democratic hopefuls are rolling up their proverbial sleeves and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with America's blue-collar classes.

Of the three leading candidates, Mr Edwards, who is trailing in third place, is the most populist. But the millionaire trial lawyer's anti-corporatist rhetoric has dragged both Hillary Clinton, who leads in the polls, and Barack Obama, the freshman senator from Illinois, to the left.

On the same page, it notes that all the top Republican hopefuls are united around 'small government' ideas, and hints at a growing polarisation in US society. Not having been on the other side of the pond for three years, I would welcome comments from US readers and more recent visitors.

The very terms 'right' and 'left' are used very differently in Europe and North America, of course. But if anything, the Democrats now appear to stand formally to the left of New Labour.

That raises a small problem for those British Marxists who continue to argue that New Labour is a 'bourgeois workers' party' and therefore call for a 'class vote for Labour', while at the same time insisting that the Democrats - to whom many US unions extend financial backing - are a straightforward bosses' party that no socialist can back.

It is yet another symptom of the changing politics of our times that these two stances are logically inconsistent. A vote for the one is surely just as defensible as a vote for the other. Or just as indefensible, if you prefer.

Meanwhile, on another page, the FT notes that in Germany, Franz Müntefering - the Social Democrat vice-chancellor in Angela Merkel's Christian Democrat-led coalition government - is facing a serious rebellion from a faction around Kurt Beck, which is seeking to scrap unpopular labour market reforms introduced the last time the SPD were in office. Maybe the threat of losing support to Die Linke has something to do with all this..

In both cases, bourgeois politicians seem plainly canny enough to realise that their parties are in danger of suffering a disconnect from their traditional base.

Even though they are motivated by populism rather than by class politics, they are right to do so. Brown should be careful not to underestimate 'these people', also known as the labour movement that created the Labour Party. Workers and their families do have votes.

[Pic credit: AFL-CIO Now Blog]

Leona Helmsley - the billionaire New York City hotel operator and real estate investor who died in August this year – once loftily pronounced to her housekeeper: ‘We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes’.

She came to wish she never said that, when in 1989 her former maid quoted the two short sentences in a courtroom as her erstwhile boss stood in the dock on a federal tax evasion rap. Honestly, you just can’t get the staff these days.

So the woman they called ‘the Queen of Mean’ received an initial sentence of 16 years. She only served 19 months, mind you. One can only hope she had a miserable time.

Listening to the deafening volume of whingeing from private equity executives the in the wake of Alistair Darling’s pre-budget report yesterday, it is clear that the spirit of the late Ms H lives on.

Until now, the Kings of Mean have gotten away with paying proportionately less tax than their cleaning ladies, as some in their ranks have openly admitted.

Darling’s milquetoast move to scrap taper relief will indeed ensure that ‘those working in private equity pay a fairer share’. Then again, almost any change would. Capital gains tax of 18% is not fair enough, by far.

Meanwhile, there is also to be a levy of £30,000 on ‘non-doms’ – wealthy people who live tax-free in Britain – after seven years of residence. The idea is a response to Tory pressure.

You could almost describe it as ‘Tory pressure from the left’, were not £4,286 a year such a nugatory figure for people worth tens, or hundreds, or even thousands of millions of pounds.

The ultra-rich do not live on another planet from the rest of society. They benefit extensively from the way the whole of British politics and society is currently shaped around the needs of finance capital.

Hint, guys. If you use, directly or indirectly, publically funded services – the air traffic controllers that make sure your private helicopter flies in safety, for instance, or the educational system that provides you with clerical workers capable of doing their jobs – then you have to foot your share of the bill. Just like the rest of us have to.

There is a convincing case to be made for higher taxes on the rich, even if no politican today dares make it. It could easily be sold to the public, including Middle England. It all depends on how the money raised is spent.

Britain suffers from the irrational myth that public investment is by definition squandering money. The fact that Sweden and France have superior healthcare is regarded as unrelated to their higher levels of public spending.

Rightwing newspapers often campaign for such things as higher pay for nurses, but are against the tax rises that would be needed to pay for them.

The CBI moans about taxation ‘burdens’ on business, then in the next breath calls for better road and rail infrastructure. And it stays strangely silent when anyone suggests that tax credits amount to a massive taxpayer subsidy for low pay.

Darling’s pre-budget report yesterday will have little real impact on Britain’s new polyglot plutocracy. Maybe Leona Helmsley is looking up from Hell and smiling after all.

Hardly likely. But that’s what happened in the case of Lionel Jospin (pictured left) in France, the socialist who headed that country’s government from 1997 until 2002. His longstanding links to the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste current around Pierre Lambert did not become public knowledge until 2001.

Only then was Jospin forced to admit that he had been a secret member of the OCI until one year before he became minister of education in 1988. Lambert maintains that Jospin was still a member right up until that point.

Intriguingly, as a new biography from Yves Bertrand, former head of the French intelligence service Renseignements Généraux confirms, the spooks were well aware of all this right from the start.

Bertrand started his career with the funny people in 1973, and was assigned to a unit charged with surveillance of the far left. Jospin’s past form was no secret to him.

‘There was with him [Jospin] a coldness, a capacity for calculation and even duplicity, that I have rarely seen,’ Bertrand tells Le Journal du Dimanche [in French, here.] ‘He hated me because I knew he was [an ex-Trot].’

Nevertheless, Bertrand insists he was not the source of the eventual media revelations. ‘But I would be lying to you if I said that I dissuaded the journalists who were inquiring into the subject from doing their work by explaining to them, for example, that there was nothing to find.’

That’s an interesting choice of words.

Indeed, his priority so far seems to have been to present himself as the partial negation of Blairism on the basis of Blairism itself. So 1000 troops are coming home from Iraq, the spindoctors have been reined in, and some typically British froideur has thankfully been injected into the ‘we both use Colgate toothpaste’ familiarity of the Downing Street-White House relationship.

But differences such as these are differences of tone rather than differences of substance. I’m not aware of any pollsters having asked the public what policies they automatically associate with Britain’s new prime minister. However, my guess would be that few voters could name even one. In that kind of ideological vacuum, the Tories are handed a free run for their ‘Bottler Brown’ playground name calling.

Part of Brown’s problem is that he was one of the two principal architects of New Labourism has she has been practiced since 1994. And as a body of ideas, that ideology has proven remarkably poor at conceptualizing such intellectual content as it may have.

For over a decade, we were repeatedly told that there was something called ‘Blairism’. What it constituted, exactly, was harder to say. But – in the words of the US Supreme Court judge asked to define hard-core pornography – you knew it when you saw it.

‘Stakeholder capitalism’ became a buzzword for a few brief weeks. Then there was all that talk about ‘communitarianism’, as the name Amitai Etzioni sent newspaper spellcheckers across Britain haywire. Finally, we were offered some sort of inchoate 'third way'.

But ultimately, Blairism couldn’t define itself in such high-falutin’ terms because its unique selling proposition was brutally simple; Thatcherism lite with a bit more dosh for the NHS.

Now the Tories have hit on a similar formula. If Gordon Brown is to invent a distinct Brownism - as he must - he will need to differentiate himself from Cameronism first. If he is unable to do so, British politics will slowly elide into one undifferentiated Bameronite mush.

Time was when building societies gave the English language the expression 'safe as houses'. It was only during the Thatcher period, when the conscious decision was taken that most people were going to become homeowners whether they wanted to be or not, that housing became politically dangerous.

Even though council housing was flogged off en masse at hefty discounts, somebody still had to fund the asking price. Meanwhile, more people needed to finance 'starter homes' and then hopefully work their way up to more desirable properties.

Hence the 1986 Building Societies Act, a classic piece of Thatcherite deregulation that enabled first Abbey National and then most of the rest of the big players to convert into banks.

Building societies started out in Victorian times as locally-rooted mutual organisations, enabling people to get together to fund the purchase of their properties. And although their formation flowed from the self-help ethos of Samuel Smiles, mutuality is an ideal of non-statist socialism too.

This all worked well enough. In the 1960s, for instance, my father was able to pay for the purchase of a two-up two-down terrace on a blue collar railway worker's wage.

Building societies were not profit maximisers and did not have to pay shareholders dividents. Instead, they balanced a desire to pay savers as much as possible while keeping interest rates as low as possible for borrowers.

It goes without saying that this didn't entirely please the monetarist wingnuts. How dare these people behave so irrationally?

What's more, the building societies operated a de facto cartel, leaving the more inefficient no incentive to cut costs. Moreover, none of them faced the discipline of the constant possibility of hostile takeover.

Worse still from the avaricious stance of Thatcherism, the funds they had available to lend were limited. Loans were effectively rationed,through low loan:income or loan:value ratios. If home ownership was to be maximised, Malcolm X style, by whatever means necessary, the only thing for it was to let the market rip.

Building society managers spotted the opportunity to get rich quick by become PLCs. And if at first savers and borrowers could see little point in altering arrangements so palpably beneficial to them, such opposition was easily enough overcome by the offer of tempting 'conversion bonuses'. Nobody ever says no to free money, do they?

Fast forward 20 years, and the outcome is some of the structural problems the British economy now faces, from absurdly over-inflated house prices to the heavy dependence of consumer spending on equity withdrawal.

If the housing market slumps over the next year - as it well might - Gordon Brown is surely going to regret his bottling ways.

When socialists discuss housing policy, the dominant demand is for more and better high-quality social housing. I'm all in favour of that, of course. But owned dwellings will still make up the bulk of the housing stock. In order to facilitate their sale and purchase, the revival of mutual building societies should be encouraged.

I am currently paying a fair chunk of my income to one of the major mortgage banks, because that was the best deal on the table at a time I needed to put a roof over my head, But I am aware that a small number of remaining building societies are committed to mutual status, and it is to them I will be looking when I come to refinance.

Read details of the expulsions of Nick Wrack, Rob Hoveman and Kevin Ovenden - three prominent SWPers who have made it plain that their primary loyalty is now to Respect rather than the self-styled revolutionary party - here.

It is now clear that Respect is heading towards a messy split, at the latest by the time of its conference next month, and perhaps before. So what happens to the SWP's 'united front of a special kind' after the departure of the main ostensibly revolutionary Marxist element?

Several activists I have a great deal of time for - Andy Newman, Mark Perryman and Liam Mac Uaid, to name just a few - are presumably hoping that Respect can now reconstitute itself as a genuinely broad-based democratic left alternative to the Labour Party. Comrades, I think you are tragically wrong.

If the SWP ups sticks, the Islamist pole in Respect will become absolutely dominant. And make no mistake, the Islamist pole in Respect is not made up of essentially naive Muslim proletarians, radicalised by the war in Iraq and open to socialist positions.

Its leading layer - men such as Abjol Miah and Anas Altikriti - are conscious political Islamists, aligned with reactionary currents mortally opposed to everything socialism from below stands for. And these are the guys that deliver the votes to Galloway.

Of course the basis of Respect's popular appeal is essentially communalist, as the SWP tops now openly proclaim. But no more and no less communalist than it was when Respect was first launched four years ago.

The job of providing 'left ' organisational cover now falls to the International Socialist Group, a current of which I was a member in the late 1980s and early 1990s, at one stage working full-time as a journalist for its paper. Suffice to say, I have never felt further from its political line.

I guess Galloway's eyes are on what he regards as the prize of the winning the Communist Party of Britain. But whatever the value of the CPB's role in the unions, the adhesion of the UK's chief Stalinist tendency is only likely to add to the toxicity of the broth.

What now for the SWP? Its most likely next move - after the loss of several hundred members at a minimum - is a return to the splendid 'building the party' isolationism of 25 years ago. After the brutal way it fucked over the Socialist Alliance, no one else on the far left will want to work with it anyway. Those scars will take years to heal.

In short, nothing good will come of this split. Just when I didn't think it was possible, the already hopeless position of the British far left suddently got more hopeless still.

The need for an organised expression of libertarian Marxist politics in this country has never been more pressing.

Democratic centralism in Britain has always operated on a hammer and anvil culture; the three men expelled from the Socialist Workers’ Party this weekend are only the latest victims.

The number of serious socialists in Britain kicked out of small political parties they have loyally devoted themselves to building - simply for their temerity of disagreeing with the dominant line - must surely number tens of thousands since the model was first introduced into this country.

It is difficult to think of any voluntary organisation in all of civil society under the sway of a leadership more secretive and with less democratic legitimacy than that of the SWP.

Many party members do not even know the names of those who sit on the body, far less get any say in the matter. Even the United Grand Lodge of England publishes a list of its top brass these days.

It is one thing to submit to the ‘party discipline’ of an elected leadership with a proven track record of actual leadership in the class struggle and/or as serious Marxist thinkers. It is quite another to have to obey the every whim of this particular crop of fourth-rate British Lenin wannabes.

In any case, to function properly, a democratic centralist party also needs a specific mass, giving it a size sufficient to be able to generalise from the experiences of the class, not just the one or two pockets were a given current may have some degree of implantation.

The treatment of Wrack, Hoveman and Ovenden underlines once again that democratic centralism is not an appropriate model for socialist organisation in the current period. It’s not as if we are working under illegality or something, is it?

Respect itself is not based on democratic centralist, of course. But it still bears obvious traces of the modus operandi. It was hatched in secret, its internal democracy is purely formal in nature, and since its inception it has had no broad support in the labour movement, even from the awkward squad or the Labour left.

It’s difficult to conceive of anything that could fairly be described as a step backwards from the Socialist Alliance. But Respect has proved that, and more.

This is how the central committee is justifying the expulsions of Rob Hoveman, Kevin Ovenden and Nick Wrack to the wider membership in this week’s ‘Party Notes’ bulletin:

Party discipline

Last weekend 3 SWP members - Rob Hoveman, Kevin Ovenden and Nick Wrack were expelled from the SWP.

Kevin and Rob

Kevin and Rob are SWP members working for George Galloway. However, recently this situation has become increasingly difficult. The party leadership has come to believe that it was impossible to have two comrades working for someone who has openly attacked the SWP in recent months. This was a position several leading members of the SWP articulated at the recent Party Council. Also over the last year there have been a number of meetings between the CC and Rob and Kevin.

Two members of the CC met with Kevin and Rob last week, they were asked to resign their posts in George Galloway’s office. Kevin and Rob have subsequently written to the CC refusing to stop working for George Galloway despite the party’s concerns.

Nick

The recent Respect NC voted to create a new position of National Officer. The SWP believed that the post was created to undermine Respect National Secretary John Rees. However, after some changes to the way the post was defined, the SWP agreed to setting up of the post. George Galloway then suggested that Nick did the job. Nick said he would seek various people’s opinions.

Expelling comrades is not something the CC does lightly, but in all three cases we felt we had no choice.

Hat tip: Weekly Worker website

The Liberal Democrats have long been a few inches to the left of New Labour. Or to perhaps express the matter more exactly, New Labour has long been a few inches to the right of the Lib Dems.

These differences are largely nuances, of course. There are no disagreements of substance sufficient to rule out a coalition government in the event of a hung parliament.

But such contrasts as there are work without exception in the Lib Dems’ favour. They are more egalitarian and redistribution on taxation and student financial support, more libertarian on asylum policy, more consistently bourgeois democratic on electoral reform and the House of Lords and more pacifist on Iraq.

As a result, they have won a degree of support among people who should rightly constitue the natural base for the democratic socialist party Britain so conspicuously doesn’t have right now.

I remember watching the 2005 general election results come in on television at a gathering of utterly stereotypical North London middle-class media types, theatre directors and quangocrats. As the effects of the copious Rioja and the homegrown took hold, people rather shyly confessed how they had voted.

All seven of us had backed Labour in 1997. This time round, only four had done so, all with greater or lesser reservations. Two had gone for the Lib Dems and one for Respect, largely on anti-war grounds. Yet there was no reason that all of us could not have supported the same pluralist left of centre party.

As readers not obsessed with the current round of SWP expulsions will have noticed, the attentions of the mainstream political world are currently centred on the resignation of Ming Campbell, leaving the Lib Dem top job open for the second time this parliament.

The two leading contenders are Chris Clegg and Nick Huhne. Sorry, I meant to type Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne. Easy mistake to make, I’m afraid.

After all, both are middle-aged middle-class white blokes who went to the same public school, spent time in Brussels as euro-MPs before entering parliament in 2005, and are leading members of the Lib Dems’ Orange Book neoliberal faction.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I am unaware of any statement ever to proceed from the mouths of either of these two guys that places them even marginally outside the centre-right Bameronite space in which the government and opposition parties respectively stand as bookends.

The meaningful choices for British voters are just about to shrink that little bit further.

Yet even on that basis, Blair’s attempt to draw an analogy between today and the ‘rising fascism’ of the 1920s and 1930s is no more than self-serving, politically illiterate, histrionic attempt to soften up public opinion for any future military strike on the Middle East’s premier pariah.

Fascism, as I have remarked before, is the most widely-misused term in the entire political lexicon. Everybody from the state of Israel to health and safety reps are routinely branded the Nazis de nos jours. But not every run-of-the-mill military dictatorship or two-bob theocracy makes the cut.

In Dictatorland, only the real Big Swinging Dicks get to be fascists, properly so called. Your Pinochets and your Milosevics are second-raters, schoolboys that dreamt of being a strikers for Manchester United but ended up in the Northampton Town back four. Sure, they made it as professional footballers; it’s just that they are in a different league.

As a bare minimum, fascist regimes must – as a matter of definition - be totalitarian. Iran cannot properly be so described. The simple fact that independent working class organisations openly exist, for instance, is of itself almost enough to make the point. The picture above shows this year's May Day demonstration. It is clearly an occasion marked with more gusto than in London.

Brave union leaders such as Mansour Osanloo are the direct target of state and employer repression. But that happens in many times and places, from the USA in the hey-day of the Pinkerton Detectives to contemporary Guatemala, without rendering those countries fascist.

Similarly, there is some political space in Iran. Constricted and limited political space, but political space nevertheless. Elections take place, with voters offered the choice between full-strength shia theocracy and shia theocracy lite. These are genuinely opposed political factions, which routinely knock seven shades out of each other by means of bitter polemics in the Iranian press.

For the avoidance of doubt, neither of these points confers one iota of legitimacy on the dictatorship. I merely make them for the sake of clarification. The government of Iran deserves the odium of every democrat on the planet. But to call it ‘fascist’ strips the term of any descriptive value; it is almost as stupid as branding women activists ‘feminazis’.

What about Blair’s accusation that Iran supplies weapons to insurgents in other countries? This is undisputedly true. But again, that’s not enough to qualify Iran as fascist. Consider one incident that is well within Blair’s political lifetime.

In the mid-1980s, the executive branch of the Reagan administration armed the rightwing Contra rebels in Nicaragua, despite that being prohibited by domestic legislation. To get round the law, it financed the exercise from the proceeds of arms sales to the Iranian government, which has not undergone any qualitative changes in the last two decades. If it is fascist now, it was fascist then.

Lastly, there is the question of the Iranian nuclear programme. The issue of which countries have ‘the right’ to possess the bomb is too extended to be had out in this post, although my short answer is ‘none’.

But at this stage, Iran has done nothing that is forbidden under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Clearly, military action against a country for sticking to what it is clearly permitted to do under international law would be something of a first, even by Dubya's standards.

Let's conclude by going back to the idea of the idea of ‘nasty scores’ for dictatorships. Easily the most abhorrent regime in the Middle East – and perhaps the entire world – has to be Saudi Arabia. The private fiefdom of the House of Saud – exports: crude oil, wahhabism, and very little else - is an obvious Perfect Ten.

Yet less than a year ago, our brave neo-Churchillian Cassandra scuppered the Serious Fraud Office investigation into BAE Systems kickbacks to the Saudi state, paid in return for massive arms contracts.

Before Blair brands anybody else as Chamberlains redux for appeasing Middle East dictatorships, he should mull the morality of that action.

UPDATE: A number of other blogs have responded to this post with some points of their own. Read thoughtful contributions from Paulie here, from John Angliss here, and from Jim Denham here.

Of course the left in Britain should favour a referendum on the European Union reform treaty, an issue that will dominate official politics for months to come. But it needs to make absolutely certain it doesn’t line up with UKIP and the Daily Mail in the process.

A referendum is the only politically honest course for Labour, after having promised such a vote on proposals for an EU constitution.

The only reason for the prime minister to pretend that the reform treaty is not essentially a repackaging of the document rejected by the Dutch and the French is the certain knowledge that the chances of securing assent are slimmer than a bulimic supermodel on amphetamine sulphate.

Resort to such a flat-out lie that will both bolster distrust in the political process and feed the Tories’ ‘Bottler Brown’ meme.

On the other hand, old-style left calls to pull out of the ‘bosses’ club’ because it is ‘not socialist’ end up pandering to nationalism in much the same way as promises of ‘British jobs for British workers’. The EU clearly has many progressive aspects.

It has secured some major achievements over the last two decades, including the single market, the single currency, a common foreign policy and an increase from 12 members to 27.

In today’s Europe, it is inconceivable that France and Germany could go to war. And that is a good thing. The 2004 enlargement marks the definitive end of the cold war division of the continent, and is another step towards a united Europe

However much it suits some politicians in Britain and Scandinavia to deny it, it is quite clear the EU’s founders explicitly envisaged it as a federation in the making. The very least that can be said is that the EU seeks to transcend the notion of exclusive national sovereignty. It is already a federal system. A weak federal system, perhaps, but a federal system nevertheless.

That shouldn’t be a problem for us in principle. Socialists favour the closest possible voluntary unity of peoples, in the biggest possible state units. After all, we have traditionally demanded a United States of Europe.

Nevertheless, there is plenty to oppose in the EU as presently constituted: the lack of democracy, the neoliberal economic agenda, the ‘Fortess Europe’ mentality.

The Common Agricultural Policy - which takes up 40% of the EU budget – remains an abomination. How individual countries wish to support farm incomes is a matter solely for their governments and electorates. One size doesn’t fit all.

It’s quite clear that any serious social democratic government, of the Attlee or Mitterand stripe, elected in any European country, would at the very least have to radically renegotiate its terms of membership, and in all likelihood would have to withdraw. However, we are a long way from needing to have that sort of tactical discussion.

In the mean time, instead of lining up with eurosceptic front organisations such as Better Off Out, parties of the left should be advancing positive demands for democratisation: a European parliament with real powers in place of the unaccountable bureaucracy, and a levelling up of social wages, union rights and working hours across the EU.

Like almost all commentators these days, I strictly observe the distinction between Islam the religion and Islamism as a set of political ideas. But helpful as such differentiation is, it is still insufficient.

That’s why I have recently made an unwanted debut on Islamaphobia Watch, with Martin Sullivan offering the following comment on an earlier post on this blog:

Outlining his proposals for combating the threat of further terrorist attacks, Osler writes that "Islamist networks can and must be infiltrated and smashed" – which would mean infiltrating and smashing Hizb ut-Tahrir, presumably. Since when did socialists support the right of the state to infiltrate and smash legal and non-violent political organisations? In fact, on the generally accepted definition of "Islamism" as a politicised version of the faith, organisations like the British Muslim Initiative would also fall victim to Osler's "anti-terrorism" strategy.

I can see how my phraseology was open to that interpretation, but clearly this isn’t what I meant to say. My intention was to argue that it is legitimate for the state to infiltrate and smash Islamist cells planning terrorist attacks.

Radical Islamist parties - including Hizb ut Tahrir and al Mujahiroun - should remain legal organisations. In a liberal pluralist society, that is not a cost of freedom; that is the nature of freedom. I hope that makes things clearer.

The problem is that ‘Islamism’ as a catch-all term takes in political formations of a sweeping range of orientations. No one word can possible properly cover such a range of thought.

Turkey’s AK Party is widely considered to be either functional equivalent to a west European-style Christian democrat outfit, or at least on the way to becoming so.

Iran in the 1970s threw up currents that considered themselves both Muslims and Marxist-Leninists. Whether or not one thinks such a synthesis possible, the attempt to bring it about is not more illegitimate than Latin American liberation theology.

So help me out, readers, and stop me being branded a racist again. What terminology should be adopted more correctly to describe the heterogeneity of contemporary Islamism?

The continuing collapse of Respect has reached the point at which not even the Socialist Workers’ Party can maintain its traditional aloofness in such matters and is forced to put its position publically. Hence an editorial in this week’s Socialist Worker:

Socialist Worker has never been one of those papers obsessed with the manoeuvres of left groups. But the present division in Respect is so important it demands comment.

Curious. Why conflate what is supposed to be broad coalition with a mere rival Trot sect? The article goes on to bemoan just how much political and organisation support the SWP has provided to Galloway over the last four years. Now the ungrateful wretch has turned on his strongest supporters:

Now, in a concerted push which should appal those who want to see a radical alternative to Labour, Galloway has begun to attack the core of the left in Respect. He has decided that the political vision which has sustained the project no longer fits.

He denounces members of the SWP as unthinking “Leninists” who listen to nobody but their shadowy and unaccountable leadership – a classic right wing stereotype of revolutionaries. Inside Respect a campaign has been launched against the SWP in an attempt to drive us out.

It ends with confirmation that the SWP is going to fight this one down to the wire, even if that means taking the entire project down with them:

The SWP is not going to be driven out of Respect. We played an important part in creating Respect and have done as much as anyone to make the project work. We are also going to continue to stand up for Respect as a coalition that defends all working class people and tries to meet the urgent need for a left alternative to Labour.

We urge everyone to support our position that we need to defend Respect as a project that has socialism as a central part, that will not make endless concessions in order to win votes, and that stands up for democracy.

Responses from other far left organisations have been rapid. Workers’ Liberty makes some telling points:

Missing from the editorial is any suggestion why Galloway should want to do such bad things. In fact Galloway has never been anything better than a Stalinist-minded one-time Labour "soft left" with dodgy connections (admitted) to the Saudi and Emirates monarchies and successive Pakistani governments and to Saddam Hussein's hideous regime in Iraq.

Some SWP members will remember how the SWP trashed the Socialist Alliance, ditched socialist approaches in elections in favour of the claim that Respect were the best "fighters for Muslims", and steamrollered the rejection of mildly-worded pro-secularist motions at Respect conference with the allegation that they were "Islamophobic", all with the excuse that this was going to get the SWP into the political "big time".

The Socialist Party also sticks the boot in, in an oh-so-reasonable way, of course:

Some have argued that Respect the Unity Coalition – the political initiative launched by George Galloway MP and the Socialist Workers' Party in 2004 – could be a positive step towards a new mass workers' party. We would support any positive step on the road to a new party and for this reason discussed with the leadership of Respect at the time of its launch, and again in 2006.

However, while we welcomed the election of George Galloway as a Respect MP in 2005, we concluded that we could not join Respect because we believed that Respect's mistaken organisational and political approach meant it would not develop as a positive step towards a new mass workers' party but, on the contrary, could form an obstacle to the development of such a party.

Finally, Harry’s Place has a round robin from the Galloway faction that will make depressing reading for partisans of the Respect project here.

I’ll post some thoughts on where all this leaves the idea of a new left party - once the debris clears - later today.

Hey, you. Yes you, George Galloway. And you, Arthur Scargill. Not to mention comrades Tommy Sheridan, John Rees and Lindsey German, with Alan Thornett picking up a special Oscar for best supporting actor.

Thanks to you guys, the prospect of a viable party to the left of New Labour emerging in Britain is now deader even than that embalmed corpse still on display in Red Square.

The socialist left will be more isolated and enjoy less influence than has been the case for almost a century. Meanwhile, New Labour will have a complete political blank cheque in the major unions.

And responsibility for all this lies wholly and exclusively with the arrogant, pettifogging, incompetent, narrow-minded, unprincipled, conniving, anti-democratic, catchpenny boneheaded sectarian control freaks that make up what we sadly still have to refer to the ‘leadership’ of the British left.

Collectively, they bear about as much resemblance to serious socialist politicians as bad Elvis impersonators do to The King. But sometimes putting on big shades and a rhinestone-spangled white jumpsuit and mouthing the lyrics to Jailhouse Rock won’t do. Your baby well and truly left you.

What should have been a process of political regroupment started 12 years ago, with the launch of the talks that led to the formation of the Socialist Labour Party in 1995.

Since then, the initiatives have come along more quickly than the average single twentysomething gets through new lovers, with initiatives including the Scottish Socialist Alliance, the Scottish Socialist Party, the Socialist Alliance, Respect, Forward Wales and the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party.

All of them have come to nothing. Even now, there is talk of building some sort of formation around the RMT transport union, the Communist Party of Britain and deselected Labour tankie MP Bob Wareing.

What a horrible organisation that would almost certainly be; unapologetically Stalinist in ideology, with the trade union bureaucrat playing the bad cops in order to keep control of the organisation well and truly out of the hands of ‘the Trots’. Luckily, it seems unlikely to happen.

It’s not as if the simple idea of a united, democratic leftwing party is more difficult to get your head around than Materialism and empirio-criticism, is it? Or am I missing something?

In the nineteenth century, the country became the focus of what Arthur Connolly called ‘the Great Game’ between the Russia and Britain for dominance in Central Asia.

More recently, the USSR first sponsored a puppet government and then, in 1979, invaded Afghanistan to prop it up. In response, the west threw arms at jihadists both domestic and external throughout the 1980s. The unsurprising end result is that the Taliban and Al Qa’eda ended up running the show.

After 9/11, the US - which had effectively put them in power in the first place - could no longer allow that situation to obtain. The result was the Operation Enduring Freedom invasion of 2001 and a second puppet government, this time aligned with Washington rather than Moscow.

Fighting with the Taliban continues, and Lord Ashdown - former United Nations High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina - is in no doubt about the outcome. The Taliban is going to win, and the results could be world-historic:

"I believe losing in Afghanistan is worse than losing in Iraq. It will mean that Pakistan will fall and it will have serious implications internally for the security of our own countries and will instigate a wider Shiite [Shia], Sunni regional war on a grand scale.

"Some people refer to the First and Second World Wars as European civil wars and I think a similar regional civil war could be initiated by this [failure] to match this magnitude."

That’s consciously Palmerstonian language, of course. The nations of Asia are not ‘ours’ to win or lose in the first place. I did not support the invasion. I cannot see how the continued presence of foreigmilitary n forces will resolve Afghanistan's manifold contradictions; it can only exacerbate them.

But within his own frame of reference, Ashdown is probably right. The situation has full potential to proceed from the disaster it is now to whatever infernal degree comes next on the scale of catastrophy.

Sadly there is no hope of a progressive outcome from this mess. In a country that is chronologically in the twenty-first century rather than in any real sense of the twenty-first century, the working class is tiny and without any social weight.

Arguments from the likes of Workers’ Power - a small British orthodox Trotskyist outfit - that 'the working class organisations could create a militia, if they only had the will' would ring of black humour and deliberate satire, if it was not for the certainty that these people never write in anything but deadly earnest.

I suppose there is a purely formal sense in which the soon to be victorious Taliban could be described as a 'national liberation movement'. They lead a military fightback against armies of occupation.

It's just that nobody in the right minds would expect what is perhaps the most obscurantist trend within the entire camp of reactionary political Islamism to deliver much by way of liberation.

Sections of the ultra-left will doubtless cheer them on. They will chatter excitedly about the ‘bloody nose’ the Taliban's triumph will supposedly dish out to imperialism, and disregard the executions of homosexuals and the Afghan women who get acid thrown in their faces for the temerity of trying to offer girls an education that will come about as a result.

The Marxist left loves nothing more than to come up with 'the correct line' on everything, everywhere in the world. It's in our political DNA. But just sometimes it is as well to admit that we do not have a preferred option. Afghanistan is a case in point. We don't know for sure what will happen; but we do know it will be bad.

I had promised myself not to post on Respect today and to pick a ‘real world’ subject instead. But developments are coming thick and fast and deserve some comment.

A meeting seeking a compromise conference delegation slate for Tower Hamlets fell to pieces in acrimony last night. Meanwhile, the Tower Hamlets council group has split into 'Provisional Respect' and 'Continuity Respect' factions. Read all about it over at Liam’s if you really want the gory details in slo-mo.

I’ll restrict myself to a brief comment on the politics of the Respect split: there aren’t any.

Correct me if I’m wrong – the comments box is open - but this entire crisis seems to have stemmed entirely from a breakdown in the personal relationships between John Rees on the one hand and George Galloway and Salma Yaqoob on the other.

Having had the experience of working politically with Mr Rees in the Socialist Alliance, I can vouch for his possession a certain penchant for duplicity and a willingness to resort to the old stiletto between the shoulder blades routine for those with the temerity to deviate from Marxism-Leninism-John Rees thought.

I’ve not campaigned with either the Gorgeous One or Ms Yaqoob and so have no knowledge of their political modus operandi. It may be that they are not above criticism in the events of recent weeks.

But it is utterly disingenuous for the SWP to try to dress up a personality clash as a left versus right issue. Moreover, it is utterly ludicrous for them to dress themselves up as upholders of democratic functioning in working class organisations.

Yes, it is perfectly true to say that Galloway is pandering to a communalist agenda. But there one is reminded of the immortal words of American crim “Slick Willie” Sutton. Asked why he robbed banks, he replied: “Because that’s where the money is.”

Galloway will prefer accommodation to populism over socialist principles every time, because that’s where the votes are. Sadly, he has convinced a layer of erstwhile ‘revolutionary Marxists’ that this is the way to go.

Respect is no more and no less communalist now than when it was launched four years ago, and the SWP leadership damn well knows that.

The central committee will no doubt be hoping that the de facto split will cauterise the situation. But anybody who has had the excitement of living through a faction fight in a Trot organisation – wotcha, Liam! – will be well aware these things can develop a dynamic of their own. The story may not yet be over.

But if an intelligent, rational, humanist Marxist current were to exist - and it very plainly doesn't - what would it look like? Here are a few thoughts.

Ideologically, it would need to base itself on the realisation that answers to the political questions facing us do not come gift-wrapped in the classical theoretical works of the tradition.

Marx's dissection of Victorian capitalism and Trotsky's exploration of the political situation in 1930s, for instance, remain unparalleled analyses of these topics. But both were marred by the expectation of 'revolution round the corner', and in any case, no political literature can be expected to transcend its times, at least not indefinitely.

In a world that has changed in so many ways in my adult lifetime - globalisation, the demise of Stalinism, the dramatic resurgence of religion and nationalism, global warming, the communications revolution - it really is necessary to sit down and think things through, rearticulating the categories of Marxism for the present day.

Luxemburg's insistence on democracy and Gramsci's take on hegemony are probably more relevant to Marxists drawing up tactics for use in western Europe right now than anything that proceeded from the pen of Lenin.

Discussion and debate should be completely public, and take full advantage of the possibilities opened up by the internet, as well as more traditional forms of getting our ideas across, such as journals.

Rather than scorn anarchism, feminism, ecology and other schools of radical thought, we should take on board their genuine insights.

Organisationally, the toytown Bolshevism that the forerunners of the SWP once rightly derided should be junked immediately. A modern Marxist grouping needs to be loose, libertarian and Luxemburgist; there is no need for Elvis impersonator Lenin wannabes handing down 'the line' from on high.

Such a current's orientation should of course be towards promoting basic socialist ideas in the organisations of the working class, including the community organisations of the working class. Members may belong to the Labour or Green parties, leftwing parties or no party at all, to whatever extent holding a card facilitates such tasks.

Sadly, I guess sanity is rather too much to ask for right now. And hey, it wouldn't be half as much fun as petty bickering over minor sectarian quiddities, would it?

Five years ago I spent several weeks on a journalistic assignment in Saudi Arabia. The vile nature of the theocratic dictatorship was readily apparent. With King Abdullah currently on a state visit to Britain, I’m reproducing an article I wrote on country for the leftwing newspaper Workers’ Liberty.

Let me just add that acting Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable – an oil industry economist by trade – deserves credit for his decision to boycott ceremonial events surrounding the visit.

George Orwell himself probably could not have thought up a name as archetypically Orwellian as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. But that is the name the police go by in Saudi Arabia, and their control of public space is almost total. Riyadh is what the fictional 1984 looks like in the actual 2002.

Punishment for the slightest criticism of the system is harsh. Torture, amputations and executions are routine. There are no political parties, no elections, no independent judiciary, and no independent human rights organisations. Welcome to a country described by Tony Blair as "a good and dependable friend to the civilised world".

It is a good and dependable friend to the US in particular, which has based around 20,000 troops their since 1991. Saudi Arabia deserves the description of imperialist client state every bit as much as Israel. And it is no secret why the west sponsors this particular client. It is home to 25% of proven world oil reserves.

But how should socialists understand Saudi politics? It is probably more useful to consider Saudi Arabia as a capitalist dictatorship that exploits religion to secure legitimation rather than a genuine theocracy. True, the monarchy justifies its rule by King Fahd's formal title of "custodian of the two holy mosques".

But for the royal family and its hangers-on - a milieu saturated with Johnny Walker Black and imported prostitutes - the pretence of Islamic conviction is a mere flag of convenience. If devout they be at all, their devotion is to the oil wealth that has made them the contemporary personification of Mammon.

Muslim radicals see the House of Saud in the same light as Trotskyists regarded the ruling class in the former USSR, misruling in the name of their highest ideals. They would consider it, so to speak, a "degenerate Islamic state". And on some accounts, the country may now be close to Islamic "political revolution".

Leading commentators have argued that such is the distaste for the decadent ruling elite, a single inflammatory speech from a radical cleric is all it would take to bring the regime's collapse. In the homeland of Osama bin Laden and almost all of the September 11 hi-jackers, that could come at any time, without the slightest warning. What would emerge would truly be an ideologically-driven Islamic fundamentalist state, with incalculable consequences across the Middle East.

Earlier this year I spent several weeks on a journalistic assignment in Saudi Arabia, visiting Jeddah, Riyadh and the oil-dominated Eastern Province, a virtual state within a state controlled by Saudi Aramco.

The first challenge was getting in at all. Visa applications from journalists are routinely refused, so I was forced to lie about my occupation. The next difficulty came in even arranging interviews. I wasn't looking for controversy, but rather for information on the oil and tanker shipping sectors, with a view to the sort of routine analysis that fills the pages of the western business press.

But such is the fear of even accidentally falling foul of the state that several people halted appointments after a few minutes, once it became clear that I was a reporter. Others spoke only on condition of anonymity. Nor was the local media much of a source of information. The English language press reported little beyond the latest Israeli atrocities in Palestine and the speeches of prominent mosque leaders, while many internet destinations were blocked.

There was no question of getting out and talking to ordinary people. Although there isn't a curfew, there might as well be. No public entertainment is available whatsoever. Saudi Arabia is one of only two countries in the world that forbids cinemas. Western films circulate legally in video format, although strict censorship sees even kissing scenes scissored out. With public consumption of alcohol strictly prohibited, there are no bars. The few coffee shops are inhabited exclusively by men, and closed by evening.

The position of women remains worse than the position of blacks under apartheid. In South Africa, blacks could at least wear what they liked, drive cars and trucks, or eat in black sections of restaurants without white accompaniment. In Saudi Arabia, the veil is strictly enforced, while women are denied driving licenses and can only eat out if accompanied by a male family member, in specially segregated 'family sections' of restaurants.

Saudi Arabia's social structure is unique. The royal family is absolutely parasitic on the country's oil wealth, which enables it sustain a bloated state bureaucracy that - until around a decade ago - was able to guarantee employment to all Saudi men . Most productive work is undertaken by the 5 million or more non-nationals in a population of 23 million.

A relatively small layer of mainly European or middle class Indian expatriates dominate professional and managerial jobs. Most Britons I spoke to were earning around the same as they would in a similar job at home. But because salaries are tax free, and accommodation on one of the so-called "compounds" for westerners part of the package, in real terms they were about twice as well off.

Many were younger people intending to work five or ten years and save what they could. Others were typically older men seeking a new start after collapsed marriages. Ex-pat life is made more bearable by compound parties thrown almost every night of the week, fuelled by home-brewed hooch and casual sex, and largely tolerated by the authorities. Such behaviour is probably more a reflection of their alienation than the desire for a good time.

There are in addition millions of immigrant workers - Filipinos, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis - doing the manual jobs, working the waterfront, driving the taxis and cleaning the hotel rooms. They are again there for the money, and most will freely tell you that they hate the place.

Until the immediate past, the native Saudi proletariat was almost non-existent. But with mass unemployment in recent years - perhaps reaching 20%, although the government sits on the statistics - there has been a policy known as "saudisation". Private companies are faced with the requirement to fill an increasing proportion of jobs with Saudi nationals each year.

In a bid to diversify away from oil, the state has also sought industrialisation, constructing purpose-built cities such as Jubail, with its huge petrochemical plants. For the first time, there is now a layer of Saudis in blue collar work.

But as far as anyone is aware, there are not even the first stirrings of trade unionism, let alone socialist organisation. Normally one of the first things I do when visiting a country on assignment is to seek out local leftists and arrange face-to-face discussions. But Saudi Arabia is one of the few large countries in the world to lack a known socialist current of any description, even in exile.

Yet there is said to be massive discontent just below the surface. While normal methods of socialist agitation are almost impossible, one possibility of revolutionary contagion did occur to me. Most guest workers earn enough to make annual visits to the families left behind in their countries of origin. Pakistan and the Philippines have both seen growth of Trotskyist trends in recent years. But the likelihood must be that Islamic fundamentalism will fill any vacuum long before socialists ever could. What attitude should we take to insurrection, if and when it comes?

"Left" and "right" are meaningless adjectives applied to official politics in Saudi Arabia. Of course we have no truck with the monstrous regime in Riyadh. But to argue that socialists therefore should back clerical uprising as somehow an "objectively anti-imperialist" progressive alternative to the existing government fails to convince me at all. Tragically, that is a mistake which much of the British left - unable to grasp the ideas of Third Camp politics - could shortly make.

Two New Labour cabinet ministers have been wrong-footed after there turned out to be 300,000 more foreign nationals working in the UK than official figures had earlier suggested. The total is 1.1m, and not the 800,000 previously reported.

Officially, home secretary Jacqui Smith and Peter Hain, her counterpart at the Department of Work and Pensions, are simply waxing apologetic because of the statistical cock-up. And of course, if we are going to have official statistics at all, they should be reliable statistics.

But the reality is that there is a backstory at work here, and that backstory is the increasing level of soft focus racism in official British political discourse.

With most immigrants now white rather than black, the tone is thankfully not as crude as it was in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet is no less unmistakable for all that.

The most obvious example is the quasi-BNP sloganeering qualities of recent speeches from the New Labour top brass.

David Cameron has taken that as the green light to commence a coquettish flirtation with what is still a hot button issue for the Tory faithful. Let the Financial Times supply the context:

The Conservative leader's first big speech on immigration marks a shift in the political battle over the issue. Mr Cameron has been wary of echoing his predecessors' calls for quotas on migrants, for fear of reviving voter perceptions of the Tories as the "nasty party".

But Tory strategists believe that Gordon Brown's patriotic rhetoric as prime minister - such as his call for "British jobs for British workers" - has opened a window for the opposition party to debate the issue without appearing racist.

As ever, there is a class dimension in all this. Brown didn’t demand British boardroom posts for British senior managers, or call for employment at City investment banks to be restricted to UK national investment bankers. The rich have an unquestioned right to residence in this Other Eden.

Millionaires are allowed automatic entry into Britain, whatever their passport. Indeed, many of them are given tax breaks to encourage them to base themselves here.

New Labour’s forthcoming immigration points system – and an immigration points system is supported in principle by the Respect party’s only MP – welcome 25-year-old computer nerds and 30-year-old entrepreneurs.

But there is a lot of dirty work to do in Britain. Those who want to do it should be allowed to live here legally and not be criminalized for their willingness to get their hands dirty. Even if they are Romanians.

Politicians should have the courage of their neoliberal convictions. Either liberalisation maximises economic welfare or it doesn’t. If it does, governments should dismantle immigration controls with the same conviction with which they once scrapped capital controls.

A decade of New Labour in office has transformed Britain’s education system from "below average to above average", Gordon Brown said today in his first major speech on education policy since becoming prime minister.

Up to a point. You can get chapter and verse on how the UK compares to other developed countries by downloading these statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development here.

On some yardsticks, Britain does top the OECD average. Just. But our relative performance has clearly been slipping and then slipping some more for decades on end. Here’s one fairly representative fact-bite:

In the adult population, a comparatively large share of individuals in the UK did not complete upper secondary education and face considerable and increasing penalties in the labour market …

So, while upper secondary attainment rates have increased in the UK, the increase has been greater in many other countries.

So much for a decade’s worth of Blairite education, education, education. Two years ago, the National Audit Office reported that over a million children receive substandard education at poorly performing schools. That’s one pupil in eight. Not I performance I would chose to boast about if I were Brown.

Earlier this year, it was revealed that 11 years of compulsory schooling has left some 7m adults functionally illiterate, while 11m cannot add two three-figure numbers. The blame for that attaches not just to New Labour but to successive governments of all parties, of course. However, it is up to New Labour to put things right.

British jobs for British workers? Fat chance, if employers can take on well-educated Poles, entirely capable of elementary mental arithmetic and much else besides, on lower salaries.

Brown’s remedies seem to be largely based on target culture, target culture, target culture. Schools will either have to meet centrally-imposed goals or face closure.

I have no specialist knowledge of education policy and would be interested in the opinions of teacher readers in the comments box. But the way I read these proposals, they look more or less like shifting existing policy up a couple of gears, even though they have not been an obvious success.

Surely the key to raising education attainment is to recognise it as a class issue. The best-performing LEAs include Richmond Upon Thames and Surrey. The worst include Newham, Tower Hamlets and Hackney. Spot the pattern, anybody?

Last time I saw the stats, the top 50 schools ranked by A level perfromance are all private. Only 20 of the top 200 are in the state sector. Private schools educate one child in 15, but account for one in four university students, and half of Oxbridge students.

The only way that working class kids will ever get an even break is through a wider democratic socialist political agenda designed to bring about a more egalitarian society.