It was pretty damn obvious that the IWMA now lacked the ability to keep such an essentially irreconcilable range of forces together. Unsurprisingly, an opposition grouping was starting to coalesce around a charismatic maverick.

It had long been established that Mikhail Bakunin was a political shyster. He routinely exaggerated the numbers of IWMA members in branches sympathetic to him, for instance.

Moreover, this man was virulently anti-semitic, and although he professed to be on the left, that didn't stop him maintaining financial ties with shady bourgeois elements in some of the world's most reactionary regimes.

As IWMA secretary, Karl Marx had long been aware of all this, but had hitherto been prepared to overlook it. But now control of the organisation was at stake.

Marx and his supporters quickly decided to precipitate matters, and issued a pamphlet called 'The Fictitious Splits in the International'. The very title was designed to mislead. Divisions with the Bakuninites were very real indeed, as the first page of the document - now only of historical interest, of course - makes amply plain.

Bakunin responded with the demand that a congress should be held to settle matters once and for all. The gathering duly convened in Hague, in September of the year in question. According to what we know today, it immediately went into closed session. One account reveals:

'The arguments were both angry and prolonged; for three days the rival factions jostled for advantage by challenging the credentials of almost all of their opponents ...

'At the end of the three-day marathon it was clear that the anarchists were heavily outnumbered. Some delegates, unable to stay away from work any longer, then returned home without waiting for the actual debates and votes; others wandered off in search of more stimulating congress in the local brothels.

And a contemporary newspaper article speaks of:

'... applause and interruptions and pushing and jostling and tumultuous cries, and personal attacks and extremely radical but nevertheless extremely conflicting declarations of opinion, with recriminations, denunciations, protests, calls to order, and finally a closure of the session, if not of the discussion, which at past ten o'clock, in a tropical heat and amid inexpressible confusion, imposed itself by the force of things.'

Luckily, leftwing political conferences today no longer take place in such a patently intolerable atmosphere. How differently Marxists conduct their relations with other leftists 135 years later!

Marx - pictured above - then embarked on tactics expressly designed to wreck IWMA rather than allow anyone else any meaningful say in its internal affairs. His master stroke was to produce secret documents, indisputably proving financial impropriety that Bakunin had earlier denied. Finally, he successfully moved that the General Council of the association be relocated from London to New York.

Ostensibly, the Marxists had retained control. Yet the congress - designed as it was to bring about unity - proved to be the beginning of the end. History records that the IWMA went into rapid decline and formally dissolved in 1876.

Thought for the day: if you wait by the river long enough, you will see the corpses of your enemies float by - Sun Tzu

Respect national secretary John Rees, on the other hand, is not only not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy. He likes fighting in the playground. A lot.

Since the start of the bust-up in the coalition, the George Galloway faction has persistently shown willingness to compromise. By contrast, Rees - also a leading figure in the Socialist Workers' Party, of course - has purposely ramped up the differences, while asking the rest of the left to believe that big boy Georgie done it and ran away.

Rees' latest move has been to orchestrate a breakaway of four councillors from the Respect group on Tower Hamlets council, made up of two SWP members and two close fellow-travellers. He even pitched up at the press conference that announced the split to proclaim his support for the rebels, a move surely unprecedented for the secretary of what is supposed to be a serious political party.

Yesterday the East London Advertiser, the local newspaper in Tower Hamlets, reported that Gang of Four are in discussions with the local Liberal Democrats over a possible formal coalition. Read the story here.

This, for revolutionary socialists, would clearly constitute what is known in Trotspeak as 'crossing class lines'. The Lib Dems are, after all, an openly bourgeois party.

The first blogger to post on the Advertiser revelations was Andy at Socialist Unity. Reaction from SWPers in the comments box was comparable to what Lenin reportedly felt on reading that the German Social Democrats had voted for war credits in 1914. This is just shit-stirring by the local rag, they insisted.

But over 24 hours later, there still has been no formal denial. What's more, I've had an email from an extremely well-placed source in Tower Hamlets politics - and I do mean extremely well-placed - assuring me that the lash-up talks are happening. The informant, I should stress, is not in Respect and thus not a partisan of either side.

Meanwhile, the SWP's online petition against the 'witch-hunt' in Respect has secured only 1,000 signatures, surely confirming to all but the dimmest loyalist that the smallest mass party in the world's boast of having 6,000 members is wildly OTT.

Remember, also, that only 55 members turned up at an all-Scotland aggregate to discuss the Respect situation. Let's charitable and say that half the membership could not make it to the most important meeting of the year.

Well, Scotland has 10% of the UK population, and if anything, Scottish comrades usually make up a rather higher proportion than that of serious leftwing organisations. Again, this points to a real SWP membership of only around 1,000.

Worse still from the point of view of international supremo Alex Callinicos, surely the poshest posh boy on the entire British left, the New Zealand section of the Pomintern is showing worrying signs of independent life.

Even if it is notoriously the flakiest grouplet in the entire International Socialist Tendency, this time its position on what the mothership has been up to is very well argued.

If the central committee is lucky, the events of the last few weeks will cost the SWP hundreds of members, who will either decamp to Team Galloway or drop out of politics. These are numbers that an organisation currently the smallest it has been in 40 years can ill afford to lose. But what if the CC isn't lucky? In that case, implosion may well beckon.

Readers of middling years and above may well remember the last time a Trot sect crashed and burned, namely the disintegration of the Workers' Revolutionary Party in 1985. It all began with accusations of sexual misconduct against long-time guru Gerry Healy, who promptly got the boot.

The picture above shows the front page of the WRP daily paper following the expulsion, spelling out its stance on what it clearly considered the most important issue facing the British working class in the year of the miners' strike.

This is the kind of thing that a stable concern can generally survive. For instance, those huckstering 'churches' founded by dodgy televangelists in the US continue to extract money from those who can least afford it, even after the men of the cloth are caught out rogering the female faithful sexually as well as financially.

But when contradictions accumulate internally inside a political tendency, a crisis can unleash them all at once. It develops a dynamic of its own. That's what happened to the WRP; it had reconstituted into nine breakaway groups last time I could be bothered to count.

The risk now is that the SWP could follow suit. Remember, even with 1,000 members, it is the only British far left group which needs a four-figure print run for membership cards. It's demise would weaken what is left of the left in many towns, and should not be welcomed. If it happens, the stupidity of John Rees will be heavily to blame.

I've just had a second email from a source with an intimate knowledge of the ins and out of Tower Hamlets politics, containing further information about talks between the SWP-sponsored Continuity Respect group on Tower Hamlets council and the local Liberal Democrats. Like all journos, I like nothing more than a good tip-off, so many thanks to my informant.

Anyway, I'm told that the Lib Dems are disappointed that the Gang of Four seem so determined to hang on to the Respect name. Deep Throat adds that everybody's favourite centre party are more than up for a deal:

I can only think of a couple of occasions were the LD's and Respect voted differently on an issue ... A coalition for them would be pragmatic politics for both sides, and the Lib Dems are - it has to be said - masters of coalition deal-making.

Yeah, sounds like what we know about 'em, especially at local level. But I wonder if either Clegg or Huhne would approve of their East End co-thinkers jumping into bed with the Cliffites?

This just in from an SWPer with serious working class implantation, who tells me that the SWP actually did not want the Tower Hamlets Gang of Four councillors to resign the whip:

I’ve no reason to believe it was orchestrated ... SWP “Leninist discipline” is such that the two councillors who joined the SWP could not be instructed. I suspect that Rees has just been trying to make the best of it.

Meanwhile, still no denial of the East London Advertiser claim that the rebels are talking to the Lib Dems ...

At this rate, it cannot now be long before one of the Lib Dem leadership contenders reminds us that there is no black in the Union Jack. House!

Nigel Hastilow - pictured left - knew damn well what he was doing with his recent invocation of a 1968 speech from the Rt Hon J Enoch Powell MP. This was a straightforward attempt to find the Nasty Party’s clitoris.

This man, remember, is not some boy racer from Conservative Future, suddenly blurting out his true beliefs after six pints of pop on a Friday night at Romford Tory Club.

He is – or rather, was until he stepped down this morning – an adopted Conservative Party parliamentary candidate for a constituency near to Powell’s old Wolverhampton stomping grounds, and a former editor of one of Britain’s most influential regional newspapers.

And as Hastilow is well aware, Enoch was wrong. The River Tiber isn’t flowing with much blood. Britain hasn’t built its own funeral pyre. It is today a far more tolerant and less racist place than it was three or four decades ago.

But what was most offensive of all in Hastilow’s article was the subtext. Powell’s arguments were based on crude racist stereotyping, which linked the likelihood of people committing crime or being ‘feckless’ to the colour of their skin or their country of origin. Neither is a matter of choice for any of us.

There do exist political parties for people with views of this nature. Perhaps Mr Hastilow would be happier if he joined one of them.

Among the measures announced in the Queen’s Speech today is an Employment Bill that will reportedly enable trade unions to expel members on grounds of their allegiance to a political party.

It comes after the European Court of Human Rights earlier this year overruled British legislation, dating from 1992, that prevented train drivers’ union Aslef from kicking out a British National Party activist.

In principle, voluntary organisations in civil society have every right to decide who they wish to have on their books and who they don’t. Fascists clearly have no place in the labour movement.

But it strikes me that there are obvious dangers with the proposed new law from a civil liberties perspective. It all depends on the wording of the relevant clauses, I suppose.

Could we see a situation where general secretaries are allowed bureaucratically to exclude internal opponents who belong to Marxist groups, for instance? And if so, shouldn't we flatly oppose the Bill?

Brown bottled a November election not because he was scared of losing to the Tories, but because he needed more time to set out his ‘vision of change for Britain’. Well, that’s what he said at the time, anyway.

Yet the most damning criticism most commentators have come up with after yesterday’s Queen’s Speech – the first of Brown’s premiership, and therefore the one that sets the tone for future editions - is the lack of what George Bush senior famously dismissed as the Vision Thing.

Hence Cameron was led to remark rhetorically: ‘People are asking, “is that it?”’. Yes, Dave, that was it. For the Lib Dems, Cable waded in with the observation that ‘the anti-climax is deafening’. Isn’t it only climaxes that tend to be noisy, Vince?

Much as I would love to launch into a virulent full-throttle Marxist-inspired hatchet-job on the words Gordon put into the mouth of Her Maj, most of it was so pragmatic that it is difficult to disagree with, wherever one stands in the political spectrum. Welcome to the politics of competent New Labour managerialism.

The obvious exception the likelihood of a further extension of police powers of detention without trial in terrorism investigations. Yet this already stands at 28 days, so the mistaken underlying principle is established; the right of habeas corpus has in practice been scrapped for Muslims.

Pushing the time limit out to, say, 56 days only makes a bad law worse, but it is essentially an arbitrary step and its effect will be more symbolic than anything else.

Most of the rest of the QS contents were eminently sensible, and just to deaden their impact further, had in any case been trailed well in advance. They not only don’t frighten the horses, they are hardly likely even to generate mild heart palpitations among Daily Mail-reading floating voters in Kettering.

Post-ideological politics means pushing forward no ideas that would in any way alter the basic free-market tramlines along which Britain travels. The result is that the worst the Tories can find to say about a Labour legislative programme is that, well, it’s a little bit bland.

If the 1983 manifesto constituted the longest suicide note in history, the 2007 Queen’s Speech is the essentially an extended prescription for mogadon.

Take plans for the right to request family-friendly working hours, for instance. Not the right to be granted family-friendly working hours, you notice, but the right to request it. Who could object to that? Anybody in work should have the right to ask their boss anything, one would have thought.

The measures on climate change seem good as far as they go, which is nowhere near far enough. I can see practical difficulties with effectively raising the school leaving age to 18, but I’m not against it in principle. Building more housing is obviously necessary. Much of it should be social housing. But Britain clearly needs to renew and extend its housing stock.

I guess the measures for full employment, a higher minimum wage, expansion of the welfare state, repeal of the Tory anti-trade union laws, extended social ownership, redistribution of wealth and dramatic reduction of arms expenditure will just have to wait until next year, right?

Scribbling doggerel in praise of al Qa’eda on the back of WH Smith receipts will do no more to bring about the universal caliphate then a smartarse politics student with a Che Guevara poster in his bedroom does to further guerrilla struggle in South America.

Malik - pictured - is just one of many millions of kids in every country around the world wrapped up in a flirtation with any variety of anti-establishment symbolism that comes immediately to hand. Mostly it stops at posting message on online talk boards, as it did in her case.

Sometimes, tragically, it goes much, much further. Only yesterday, Pekka-Erik Auvinen – fascinated with both Nazism and Stalinism, it now emerges – went on a shotgun rampage through his high school in a small Finnish town, killing seven others and then himself in the name of social Darwinism.

Auvinen styled himself Sturmgeist89 on the worldwide web. Malik, for her part, wished to be known as the Lyrical Terrorist. The reason? Because, as she explained to the jury, 'it sounded cool'. At that age, what better reason can there possibly be?

I remember being an anarchist for approximately six months in 1977, after the first Sex Pistols single came out. Had the internet existed then, I might well have written up my urge to 'destroy the passer-by'.

Back in the early 1980s, I used to hang around the polytechnic bar clad in a Brigate Rosse T-shirt. These days, that might constitute prima facie evidence of the offence of glorifying terrorism.

Let’s keep a sense of proportion here. Yes, I am in favour of intelligence service surveillance against violent Jihadists. But what is needed is action against real terrorists, not lyrical ones.

Just imagine how counter-productive Malik’s conviction is going to prove in the struggle for the hearts and minds of alienated Muslim youth.

The paranoid determination to bust crazy mixed up kids is the first step on the road that leads to gunning down innocent Brazilian electricians at Stockwell tube station.

The Socialist Workers’ Party are only carrying on with the charade of running a ‘coalition’ that doesn’t actually include anybody else in order to save face.

John Rees is displaying the same mentality as Lenin did in branding his supporters the Bolsheviks - which roughly translates as ‘majority faction’ - when it was actually in a minority of the RSDLP. There any similarity between the two men ends.

Once the SWP has been through the motions of running an abortive ‘Lindsey for Mayor’ campaign - and collecting an embarrassing and demoralising vote in the process - it will quietly fold up its Potemkin village ‘united front of a special kind’.

The political price it will pay for the follies of the last few years will by huge. The experience of the Socialist Alliance, the Scottish Socialist Party and now the break-up of Respect has sharply shown up the SWP as a toxic ally. Even if it says it is really, really, really sorry and promises never to do it again, nobody on the left is going to trust it for at least a generation.

The future of the Galloway grouping doesn’t look much brighter. Like it or not, the SWP provided the activist backbone of Respect up and down the country. Now that the Russian Dolls have upped and outed, the infrastructure will collapse outside one or two small pockets.

The few remaining socialists had better watch out; the political weight of the Islamists inside Respect Renewal will be qualitatively greater and the social conservatism more pronounced. Once Galloway loses whatever seat he tries to fight at the next election, the new formation’s game is up.

Socialists involved in either side of this debilitating split ask themselves a few questions. Respect has was hatched in secret, behind the back of the Socialist Alliance, with no provision for internal democracy and no broad support in the labour movement. How were any of you ever daft enough to think that could possibly work?

There is no problem with attempting to appeal to religious individuals or groups on the basis of class politics. But it is an abandonment of basic socialist principle to appeal directly to religious sectarianism, as ‘the party for Muslims’ indubitably did. Why did you play ball with that? Will you continue to do so?

As long as the Marxist left in England continues to fluff the construction of a new left party - something that has been successfully done in every other major country in Europe - the social constituencies that it claims to speak for will continue either to abstain from politics or vote for New Labour.

Pic: George Galloway, John Rees and Lindsey German in happier times

It would have been a meeting between an old man and a young boy, at some point in the 1960s. He'd be dead by now, of course. But I might have met him in person. I might be carrying a memory of him based on something more substantial than a couple of sepia photographs.

What did he think about the cause for which he fought and ultimately died? Was he a conscript or a volunteer? Family history doesn't record.

There's nothing to suggest George had a political consciousness any more advanced than an average agricultural labourer caught up in the patriotic fervour that dominated the country at that time.

Star billing for World War One heroics goes instead to my grandfather Willis Osler, who came out of the conflict with some decorations, and in 1920 married a German woman. I presume some of her relatives must have been on the other side. Maybe some of them were killed too.

My mother's family are German-speaking Swiss nationals, and one aunt and one cousin also married Germans. One of the husbands - a Lutheran pastor by the time I knew him as a young lad - had been a Wehrmacht conscript in World War Two. A reluctant conscript, he always used to tell me in impeccable RP Queen's English. But it remains true that he fought for Hitlerism.

A second aunt married a Sudeten-German communist, who after a period in a concentration camp eventually found himself fighting with the Free Czech Forces in the UK. He became a British national, but he stayed a diehard Stalinist until his death a few years backs.

My father's half-brother did his national service in Korea. He is happy to boast of having killed 'communists', as he sees the matter. I suspect he regarded the fact that they were Asian communists rather white communists as, if anything, an added bonus. No reluctance there, then.

I'm sure all of the men mentioned above - irrespective of the army in which they found themselves lined up - were 'brave' as individuals. And all three of the ones I have discussed the issue with had political ideas about why they found themselves called on to kill other men.

Few families will not have been touched by the massive conflicts of the twentieth century. But in these times when more and more people living in Britain can trace their recent ancestry to multiple countries, some of the patriotic narritive surrounding Remembrance Sunday inevitably erodes.

I do respect the memory of George Osler. How do I feel about the uncle fought for Hitler? I'm not sure, really. Much as I hate fascism, ultimately I cannot disrespect him as a person. As a conscript, he didn't have a meaningful choice. Let's just say that me and Korea vet don't really speak to each other these days.

So even before I became a socialist, my feelings on Remembrance Sunday were always ambiguous. Because members of my family fought on both sides in both world wars, subjectively I have never wanted to 'glorify' the dead on one side alone. That is why I have only worn pacifist white poppies.

I think the far left needs to handle these issues with a delicacy with which it is not customarily associated. We shouldn't belittle the emotions people inevitably feel on these occasions.

What we need to stress is the class nature of war, and how only our brand of politics is capable of ensuring that there will not be repeat performances - again and again - across the rest of human history.

Originally posted November 12 2006

On page 230, Henwood makes this observation:

One of the reasons for the sorry state of Marxian theories of finance ... is the shadow cast by Rudolf Hilferding and his 'Finance Capital'. The book contains something obsolete, misleading, or wrong on almost every page, from minor offenses to major ...

But history has not turned out Hilferding's way ...

My first thought on reading this passage was 'damn right!' Financial capital and industrial capital remain very much separate categories. They simply have not fused with each other in any meaningful sense. Goldman Sachs remains Goldman Sachs, while General Motors remains General Motors.

The bank-centred German model Hilferding (pictured) discussed in his 1910 book has not only not become generalised, but is itself being eroded by US/British-style neoliberalism.

My second thought was that Hilferding's notion of finance capital has been central to Marxist thinking ever since, not least underpinning Bukharin and Lenin's work on imperialism, Cliff's conceptualisation of the USSR has state capitalist.and Kidron's permanent arms economy theory

If Hilferding was wrong, than all of these writers start from seriously mistaken premises and their conclusions surely fall. How many modern neoliberal states can be analytically reduced to state capitalist trusts?

Surely the scriptures cannot be wrong. Or can they? Can anybody offer theoretical clarification on this one?

There is something rather distasteful about New Labour’s attack on the Tories’ appointment of Jonathan Aitken as head of an inquiry into prison reform.

Yes, the former cabinet minister is a convicted perjurer. But his is a spent conviction within the meaning of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act.

Unnamed Labour sources claim that giving him this job is an example of the Nasty Party returning to its ‘disgraced, scandal-ridden past’. But it is pretty incongruous for Labour to attempt this seizure of the moral high ground after all that has happened over the last decade.

This government’s record in office is littered with private sector rip-offs, scams, dodgy deals, downright flops and standard issue sleaze.

After the cash for ash, cash for access, cash for passports, and cash for honours affairs – to name but a few instances - there are a number of Labour politicians who should by rights have spent some time as guests of Her Maj. One peer in particular somehow springs ineluctably to mind.

Who knows? A spell in the remand wing of a PFI jail might even give some Labour MPs grounds to reconsider their support for prison privatisation.

And who better to look into the urgent need for prison reform than an old lag like Aitken?

However, it is probably too much to hope that the Tories’ inquiry will lead to any break from the bang ‘em up mindset that has long dominated the outlook of both major parties.

It may have been Michael Howard who first patented the ‘prison works’ theme, but every New Labour home secretary since 1997 has been happy enough to vamp on the riff.

If Britain is stop short of an inmate population that reaches six figures, we need an assault on the inequality, job insecurity, low pay, bad housing and racism that lies behind the majority of crime

Money needs to be spent on prison education, health services, and drug rehabilitation, rather than lining the pockets of the fat cat proprietors of the Doncatraz Archipelago.

I’ll judge Aitken’s conclusions on whether or not he has the balls to say any of this, rather than stay lazily trapped in the comfort zone of Daily Mail editorial-speak.

Press release just in from Rifondazione Respectista: George Galloway has been declared the Respect candidate for Poplar and Limehouse at the next general election, being the only nomination. No shocks there, then.

But slightly more surprising is the statement that ‘[a]t the same meeting four candidates were shortlisted for selection for Bethnal Green and Bow - Councillor Shahed Ali, Mr Hasanat Hussain, Councillor Abjol Miah and Tower Hamlets Respect Vice Chair Ms Farhana Zaman.’

It had widely been assumed that Kumar Murshid – the former Livingstone race adviser who defected from New Labour to Respect earlier this year – was a shoo-in for this one. Has Murshid gone with the SWP, or is there some other explanation?

Update: I asked my source what happened to Murshid, and was told:

Again, all part of the split. He still wants to be PPC for BGB, but Galloway's backing Abjol Miah, so he's taken umbrage and joined the Rees/Rahman group. He then accuses Miah et al of "village politics".

The last time I heard that expression was when I was chatting to a Bangladeshi cab driver in downtown Riyadh. I asked him what he thought of the Saudis, and he told me in a tone of complete contempt: ‘They are all villagers, Sir. Villagers!’ So I take it the term is not a compliment.

However, this raises the prospect of rival Respect campaigns slugging it out on the streets of Bethnal Green and Bow come 2010. This is all getting beyond parody, isn’t it? To paraphrase Guevara, 'two, three, many Respect candidates!'

[Hat tip: email informant]

Gordon Brown likes to style the government’s various taxpayer-funded ‘listening events’ and ‘citizen’s juries’ as genuine consultation exercises, designed to give the public a real input into major policy decisions. Yeah, right.

What's more, this sort of thing does not come cheap. Some £2.9m has been spent on various events of this type so far this autumn. Getting on for half of that money - £1.3m, to be precise - went on a one-day public consultation on nuclear power, according to analysis by the Financial Times:

The price tag for the nuclear consultation - nine "citizen deliberative events" held on September 8 - will fuel controversy over the exercise and raise questions about Gordon Brown's "new type of politics".

The Ministry of Justice also declined to reveal costing for consultative events culminating in a "citizens’ summit" on British values and a bill of rights, expected to be launched later this month. "The public can be assured that the government will look for value for money in carrying out this programme," an official told the FT.

So, is all of this worth nearly three million quid? I’m not so sure. For a start, exactly how are these ‘panels of 20 people chosen to represent their communities’ selected? The operative word here is ‘chosen’. Chosen by whom? On what basis? What possible democratic value do their opinions have if they are not elected?

But what ultimately devalues this extended series of catchpenny PR stunts is the realisation that whatever these ‘panels of 20 people chosen to represent their communities’ have to say, it makes no difference one way or the other.

Or does anyone seriously doubt that the government has decided to go ahead with a new generation of nuclear power stations, whether the public likes it or not?

The Irish Republican Army’s bombing of two Birmingham pubs in 1974 – a horrible crime that took the lives of 21 people and injured 184 more – led directly to the Labour government of the period introducing the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act that same year.

Home secretary Roy Jenkins was well aware – apologetic, even – of exactly what was entailed by this legislation. ‘The powers ... are draconian,’ he admitted. ‘In combination they are unprecedented in peacetime.'

But as is clear from the full name, the PTA was never envisaged as a permanent clampdown on civil liberties. That is why it had to be renewed annually by a parliamentary vote. By the 1980s, the Labour Party had taken to abstaining.

That’s because, despite its sweeping provisions, the Act was singularly ineffective against terrorism. But it did a pretty good job of victimising Britain’s Irish community. Hence the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, Maguire Seven and Judith Ward cases.

Current legislation demonises Muslims in much the same way. Remember the arrest of a number of Muslims in 2002, on suspicion of planning to use ricin on the London Underground? All were released without charge, although their release did not secure a fraction of the tabloid headlines that the arrests did. It was a similar story with the ‘Old Trafford bombers’ in 2004.

Remember also the bungled Forest Gate police raid in search of chemical weapons last year, which lead to the shooting of Abul Kahar, an innocent man.

In making these points, I am not disputing the need for determined counter-terrorist measures. Indeed, let me explicitly distance myself from the vicarious Kalashnikov-wielder tendency of the far left.

Dancing slags are not freely expendable as collateral damage in what some still insist on painting as anti-imperialist struggle, any more than working-class Brummies having a pint were 34 years ago.

I’ll even repeat what I have said more than once before: if the secret state has any justification whatsoever, it is to monitor those planning the mass slaughter of ordinary people. Violent Islamist networks can and must be infiltrated and smashed, fresh atrocities prevented, erstwhile bombers persuaded to embrace democratic politics.

What I do not want to see is the Met gunning down innocent Brazilian electricians in South London tube stations, or the stigmatization of suburban shopgirls for posting bad poetry on the internet.

If terrorism is to be beaten, it is essential to maintain the moral high ground, preserve liberal democratic principles and avoid the erosion of civil liberties. Otherwise we embark on a course that will heighten racism and xenophobia and bathe the whole of public life in a reactionary atmosphere.

Seen in that light, Lord West was surely right to question the need for any extension of police powers to hold terror suspects for 28 days without charge, even if he was strong-armed into retracting such namby-pamby sentiments within the hour after a meeting with Gordon Brown himself.

A 56-day limit, which is what New Labour seems to want, would be tantamount to the reintroduction of interment without trial. That is one of the measures that Labour backbenchers of the early eighties – such as the MP for Dunfermline East at that time – used to abstain on, after all.

For my money, the simple sailor got it right first time round.

Former home secretary John Reid once famously remarked that those who insist on raising human rights considerations at times when New Labour wants to railroad through anti-terrorism legislation ‘still don’t get the point’.

The underlying contention here is that human rights are somehow like speed limits. They can be set high when the risks are minimal, but should be lowered for dangerous stretches of road.

This analogy fundamentally misunderstands the very concept under discussion. In reality, it is Radovan Karadzic’s drinking buddy and those who think like him that ‘still don’t get the point’.

Human rights are, by definition, universal. People enjoy them by virtue simply of being human beings. That makes them different from democratic rights or political rights, which people have if they are lucky enough to be citizens of democratic polities, but not otherwise.

The essential idea is that torture or slavery is always wrong, at all times and in all circumstances. So, too, is internment without trial. That is exactly what the current proposals to give the police the power to hold terror suspects without charge for 58 days, likely to be published on Friday, boil down to, however the government soft-soaps them for public consumption.

I hope this is the first and last time I ever have to quote Conservative home affairs spokesman David Davis – a former SAS reservist, and thus untainted by any suspicion of closet National Council for Civil Liberties sympathies - approvingly.

But when even the Tories’ in-house Andy McNab clone tells the world that there is not ‘an ounce of evidence’ of any need to extend the limit beyond the existing 28 days, then the case is made more effectively then I will ever be able to make it.

I just know that the two sentences I am about to type will invite showers of invective upon my little leftwing head, but here goes anyway. Human rights are a zero-sum game. Either terror suspects have them, or none of us do.

In case you missed them, here are two news in brief items, reported back-to-back on last night's edition of Radio Four's The World Tonight programme without further comment.

Two employees of Network Rail - the company that maintains Britain's network of railway tracks - have been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter in connection with the Grayrigg rail crash in February, in which an 84 year old woman died.

Meanwhile, the Health and Safety Executive has decided not to bring a criminal prosecution against the management of Stoke Mandeville NHS trust, despite two outbreaks of superbug clostridium difficile between October 2003 and June 2005, which killed 33 people.

The message here is quite obvious. Only manual workers have to account for the consequences of their negligence. Wear a decent suit and - nine times out of ten, anyway - you'll get away with it.

From Galloway's time as an operator behind the scenes in Dundee municipal Labour politics through his tenure as general secretary of War on Want and on to his current incarnation as the sole parliamentary representative of Respect, it's all here.

Morley plays with a straight bat, too. This is essentially a quick turnround journo cash-in book, and I don't mean that pejoratively. I do not disapprove of the genre on principle. It is most explicitly not the hatchet job it could have been; that would be another project altogether.

Little of the contents will come as a surprise to those who have observed Galloway's political fortunes since the late seventies. The allegations have all been had out before.

But it is interesting to read the impressions of an outsider concerning the culture of the British left.over the past period. Morley, obviously not being 'One of Us', sometimes seems bemused at our little world.

Why wouldn't Galloway have got his Dundee Standard newspaper printed by the Workers' Revolutionary Party presses? Yes the WRP were wingnuts in hoc to Tripoli, but a cheap printing deal is a cheap printing deal. That's how things operated on the left at the time. Ask Ken Livingstone.

In summary, if for some reason you haven't been paying attention to the tempests that inevitably surround his Gorgeousness, this is a quick crash course and is worth reading on that basis. The old hacks among us will know it all already.

Brown is the new green. Or at least that’s what New Labour wants us to believe. The prime minister is set to deliver his first major speech on the environment today, with the spin doctors flagging up the likelihood of tougher domestic targets on carbon emissions and probably a doubling of renewable energy targets to boot.

Far be it from me to belittle targets per se. Before dramatic changes can be brought about in any aspect of public policy, it is as well to plan for them first. But targets are one thing and delivery is another. Our experience of target culture in education, education, education surely underlines that.

Electoral expediency has forced Brown’s rivals – both Labour rivals such as Tony Blair and Tory rivals such as David Cameron - to talk a good game on green issues. In truth, Blair delivered little.

On a Monday he tell us that climate change is the most important issue facing the planet, and then on a Tuesday, call for three new runways in the south of England so we can double air travel over the next two decades.

Then again, mainstream politicians have failed to tackle inequality or stand up to the power of the media, the corporations and the bankers. So can we trust them over the environment?

Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period in human history. This has generated massive gains in human wellbeing and economic development, of course.

But there have been considerable negative consequences, including a substantial and irreversible loss of biodiversity, and wide-ranging environmental degradation.

The global poor bear the worst effects. The environment is often a principal factor in poverty and social conflict. So yes, it is a class issue.

Just as it used to be argued that there is no such thing as socialism in one country, the actions of one country alone cannot save the environment.

Work must start now on a much tougher Kyoto II, ready when present agreement expires in 2012. This time it must include China and India. If Brown is even remotely serious, Britain will be pushing for a serious mechanism to cap carbon emissions globally, and one that works rather better than the joke EU carbon permits scheme.

Again, if he wants to convince us of his environmental credentials, let’s have some real evidence in today’s speech that Brown is willing to do the green thing, even if it that includes steps that will earn him a rough ride from tabloid leader writers.

Sadly, I’m not expecting a halt to all road-building, the introduction of year-by-year targets to reduce car usage by boosting public transport and limitations on environmentally deleterious cheap flights – just to pluck a few badly-needed steps at random - to figure among the announcements in today’s speech.

An evangelical group has today launched a High Court bid for the chance to bring a private prosecution against the producers of satirical show ‘Jerry Springer – The Opera’.

Michael Gledhill QC - representing Christian Voice - made mention of the violent reaction seen after the publication of cartoons of Mohammed in the Danish press and the first and only performance of the play Bezhti, which depicted a rape in a Sikh temple. Yes, I think we understand your subtext here, Mr Gledhill.

‘This is not just about protecting the rights of a section of the Christian population’, he told Lord Justice Hughes and Mr Justice Collins. ‘It is about protecting the constitution of the nation which is built on the Christian faith.’

This is an historical point, at best. Last time I saw the statistics, only 48% of Britons regarded themselves as belonging to any religion at all - let alone Christianity. Some 14% said they did not know who Jesus Christ was, and a further 22% believe him to be 'just a story', according to a one poll.

There is an essential democratic point at stake in this case. Of course it is vital for the left strongly to support freedom of religion. But that cannot entail allowing any minority - including Christian, Muslim or Sikh minorities - to dictate to everyone else what can be performed on a stage. That way theocracy surely lies.

Logically, the line has to be drawn when freedom of expression is called into question. That’s because freedom of religion, as itself one aspect of freedom of expression, cannot meaningfully exist without it.

Taken in isolation, the CDgate affair should not inflict much damage on New Labour. At worst, it should entail no more than a few days of embarrassing headlines and the discrete rolling of heads at HM Revenue & Customs.

No more would then be said, and the whole incident would be forgotten quickly enough as the nation enters fully into the permanent alcoholic stupor that dominates the Christmas and New Year period for the majority of the population. Shit happens, right? Can I get you a top up?

But coming so soon after the October election stumble, the shambles over foreign worker statistics and the Northern Rock bail-out, CDgate isn’t being taken in isolation. George Osborne’s ‘just get a grip and deliver a basic level of competence’ jibe hit damagingly home. Why should that be?

One reason is that New Labour has, since its inception, prided itself on its managerial abilities, especially on economic questions. Vote for the party of the Platonic form of half-way capable middle management made flesh; we don’t cock things up.

So it was that for more then a decade, nobody was reduced to singing in the bathtub or snorting coke in the Treasury as sterling suffered humiliation at the hands of the financial markets.

As chancellor, Brown presided over uninterrupted growth averaging 2.8% between 1998 and 2006, with none of the wild gyrations witnessed under the Tories from 1979 to 1997.

But the success has been built on weak foundations, including huge recourse to public and private debt, over-reliance on the City, and stagnation in manufacturing that has created a trade deficit of record proportions.

If the housing market hits the buffers – and that is a very real possibility, even on the most optimistic prognoses – the perception of perpetual economic competence will be destroyed. As John Major soon discovered, once the perception changes, so do the opinion poll standings.

By the end of the first quarter of 2008, last month’s decision to bottle a contest might just be looking like a singularly bad call.

Football long ago stopped being primarily a sport and became just another branch of capitalism. Today it is a global $250bn-a-year industry.

No surprise, then, that players such as John Terry – salary: £130,000 a bleedin' week – are paid the same sort of whack as chief executives of FTSE 100 businesses. They are no more worth the money than the fat cats are.

On some estimates, the players who made up England team that crashed 3-2 to Croatia at Wembley can be valued at £200m or more; the Croatians were ‘only’ worth an aggregate £80m. Who seriously doubts Marxist notions of the commodification of labour power in this context?

Despite that, England could not manage even the draw that would have seen it qualify for the 2008 European championship. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland didn’t make the cut, either. This will be the first major tournament without a British team for over two decades.

I am sufficiently immune from either nationalism or sporting fanaticism not to particularly care. But the fate of footie is yet more evidence that the deregulation and neoliberalisation of absolutely everything does have its natural limits.

I would never go so far as to argue that the pre-Murdoch game I remember as a Georgie Best-idolising schoolboy in the 1960s and 1970s represents some kind of golden age.

It’s just that there is something to be said for locally-rooted clubs, based on working class support, that represent more than substitute trophy brides for dodgy Russian businessmen.

I remember being slightly shocked when, at one point during the many, many industrial defeats of the Thatcherite eighties, a union activist friend of mind told me that he and his workmates were frustrated with the usual negotiating channels.

They’d had enough sitting around the negotiating table and getting nowhere. So they were plotting to purchase balaclavas and baseball bats and administer a severe beating to a particularly unpleasant manager.

Nothing ever came of the threat. But it’s interesting that even a politically worked-out Marxist could be driven to consider thuggery as a tactic. The surprising thing is that this sort of stuff doesn’t happen rather frequently in the UK, a country where even union representation often means little in practice.

But sabotage is a feature of the current French rail dispute, according to many media reports, including this one in The Times:

Saboteurs raised the stakes in the stand-off over President Sarkozy’s reforms yesterday, staging a series of attacks on France's high-speed rail network that further disrupted services already crippled by a week-long transport strike.

Vandalism to signal systems around Paris, Lille and other cities delayed TGV express trains for up to three hours, adding to disruption from the strike on the SNCF railways and the RATP Paris transport authority …

Much of the French press blames the far left, which denies any involvement:

Christian Mahieux, boss of the Trotskyite Sud-Rail union, which is supported by 14 per cent of railway workers, insisted that no railwaymen would have committed the sabotage. France should ask: “Who profits from the crime?”, he said.

Guilty or not guilty? I’ve got no idea. But the situation does raise some interesting questions about the limits of direct action. Any effective rail sabotage presumably has to put the travelling public at risk.

So can it ever be justified? And what about lumping the boss? Your opinions, please.

On some credible estimates, the subprime crisis could lead to two million repossessions in the United States. Hopefully most of those affected will find somewhere else to stay, even if entire families have to cram into friends’ spare bedrooms; inevitably, many won’t.

Tens if not hundreds of thousands of working-class Americans will be out on the streets. If that happens – and it is difficult to see what might avert it – the impact can only be highly visible. Think Katrina aftermath on steroids.

We could even witness the return of the Hooverville, as US shanty towns were known in the 1930s, lampooning the particularly dumb Republican president of the day. Whatever they get called in popular slang this time round, the term is likely to include some reference to the incumbent sitting in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But such considerations haven’t stopped one subsection of the rentier class making a killing, the Financial Times reports today:

A Californian hedge fund has made more than 1,000 per cent return this year by betting against US subprime home loans, making it one of the world's best-performing funds of all time.

Lahde Capital, set up in Santa Monica last year by Andrew Lahde, last week passed the 1,000 per cent mark, after fees, following the latest leg of the credit market turmoil. The fall in the value of subprime-linked securities has boosted a group of funds which spotted the problems in advance.

According to the FT, a ‘select group’ of hedge funds – is there any other kind? – has profited to the tune of $20bn by shorting subprimes through derivatives. You do not have to be a Marxist to recognise that this activity is absolutely parasitic.

In theory, derivatives have the legitimate function of allowing mortgage lenders to hedge against adverse market outcomes. But what Mr Lahde and his pals have done is to bet borrowed money on a sharp rise in homelessness.

I’m sitting here with my Hayek hat on, trying to think what defences an intelligent and reasonably-minded free marketeer might put forward for this. I cannot come up with a single one, although obviously I might be missing something.

Meanwhile, Mr Lahde has written to his clients, predicting deep recession:

"Our entire banking system is a complete disaster," he wrote. "In my opinion, nearly every major bank would be insolvent if they marked their assets to market." He also said he would be putting some of his own profits into gold and other precious metals.

No chance of donating even a few of the tens of millions of dollars secured by your cynical bet on other people’s housing chances into an emergency housing construction programme, Mr Lahde? Thought not.

The David Abrahams affair marks the third instance in less than 15 years that the Labour has purposely devised a new mechanism for keeping the names of political donors out of the public prints. Anyone would think they had something to hide.

The first attempt was the blind trust system of the early 1990s. These were funding conduits that allowed people to give to politicians via independent trustees, so that in theory the politicians did not know who their backers were. As such gifts were not deemed donations to the Labour Party itself, there was no requirement for public disclosure.

The trouble is, the trusts were not so much blind as partially sighted. The politicians inevitably found out who was writing the cheques. And two of the four known donors to Tony Blair’s blind trust were given peerages. Such was the uproar, use of blind trusts was made illegal in 2000.

But New Labour fundraiser Lord Levy was determined to keep bungs and backhanders on the QT. Hence try number two, an elaborate system of non-declarable loans that had no logical purpose beyond straightforward obfuscation. Yet again, the high correlation between loans and honours nominations forced the Electoral Commission to close the loophole.

Take three – revealed over the weekend - came in the use of individuals to channel donations on behalf of Mr Abrahams. The scandal is currently unfolding.

But what is already clear is that every time the rules change to prevent abuse, Labour simply develops ever more ingenious means of circumventing them. If the letter of the law has been observed, the spirit hasn’t.

Mr Abrahams, it seems, supported at least two runners in Labour’s recent deputy leadership contest. Backing a second horse at longer odds in the same race as a first choice - a practice known in punter parlance as 'having a saver on' - is generally motivated by a desire to make sure you back the eventual winner.

Of course everybody should have the right to put their hands in their pockets for causes and politicians they support. I myself have made three-figure donations to the campaign funds of Labour parliamentary candidates.

But I have done so either because they have been personal friends of mine, or because I admire their politics. I certainly have never seen the slightest need for either secrecy or subterfuge; why would anyone else?

Israel and the Palestinians – or one faction of the Palestinians, at any rate – have agreed to talks with a view to a peace deal and the creation of a Palestinian state by the end of 2008.

But yesterday’s announcement in Annapolis takes up no further forward than we have for at least 15 years. This is simply Oslo for slow learners.

The outline of a two-state solution to the root of all Middle East evil has long been easily sketchable on the back of a beer mat; Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders and hands over one-third of Jerusalem, and everybody lives happily after. Simple, really.

Except a two-state solution necessarily will not work like that. All it amounts to is the establishment of an aid junkie Bantustan on Israel’s doorstep.

In particular, the Gaza Strip – currently outside Mahmoud Abbas’ control, anyway - will into a giant prison camp, cut off on all sides with no seaport or airport. No one will be able to enter or leave without passing through Israel. Israel will at will be able to cut off the supply of food, raw materials, water, fuel, gas and electricity at will.

This much should be elementary to anybody on the democratic left. Criticism of the state of Israel does not automatically align the critic with the ‘wipe the Zionist entity off the map/until victory! until Jerusalem!’ tendency.

It doesn’t take a crypto-irridentist to observe that the state of Israel’s brutal repression of the Palestinians is contrary to most widely accepted definitions of human rights, to international law, and to the principle of self-determination.

While touting itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel has purposefully excluded hundreds of thousands of Arab victims of ethnic cleansing for more than half a century. These actions weaken its political and moral standing, and by implication, the political and moral standing of its friends and supporters.

For every Israeli killed, Israel kills 3.4 Palestinians, many of them innocent bystanders. The ratio is even higher when it comes to children, where it runs to almost six to one. Pointing this out does not transform a writer into a vicarious Arab nationalist.

Denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights has not made Israel any more secure. In the final analysis, the killing and marginalization of generations of Palestinian Arabs has work only to prop up the corruption of Fatah and, more recently, generate the backlash that has won mass popular support for the reactionary fundamentalists of Hamas.

The only potential winner from a two-state solution is perhaps a layer of the nascent Palestinian Fatah crony bourgeoisie. In the fourth world refugee camps – some of which I saw on a trip to Jordan – nothing will change. Hamas will be gifted the opportunity to establish an Islamist theocracy governed by sharia, contiguous to Israel itself.

Ultimately, the only stable long-term solution is a democratic secular state, with full religious and political freedoms for all inhabitants, a notion that has respectable grounding in progressive Zionist thought.

As Hannah Arendt argued: ‘The real goal of the Jews in Palestine is the building up of a Jewish homeland. This goal must never be sacrificed to the pseudo-sovereignty of a Jewish state.’ Whatever else Arendt got wrong in political theory, on this much she is completely correct.

Paul (pictured) was kind enough to contribute a foreword to Labour Party plc, my book on how Labour became a party of business. Yes, it's the ideal Christmas present for the New Labourite in your life, and can probably be found in a remainder bin somewhere near you.

After the events of the last few days, I thought I’d post a few paragraphs that sum up his thoughts on its transformation ‘from a social democracy into a party that has dropped every vestige of commitment to socialism or democracy’:

Shortly before the 1997 general election I was chatting confidentially to a senior politician in the Labour Party, who told me the following story.

Where there is no difference between the two big political machines paid for by big business, ordinary people’s interests in and involvement in politics collapse. Fewer people vote and fewer people care. All politics becomes contemptible, and the way is open for the racist and the dictator.

The Abrahams affair underlines just how right Foot was.

Sources of financial support symbolise - perhaps more than anything else - the different class bases of what Labour once was, and what it has today become.

Historically, few wealthy individuals have donated to an ostensibly socialist party out of political conviction. True, there were always a handful of working class boys made good, and those intellectually converted to Fabianism.

But most business backers of Labour - from Kagan to Maxwell, from Ecclestone to Abrahams - can fairly be labelled spivs and shysters. They are parvenus and arrivistes; in the words of that withering Tory put down, these are the sort of people that have to buy their own furniture.

New Labour’s tawdry crack whore-style dependence on what gets creamed off from the proceeds of rack-renting Newcastle slums offers democratic socialists an open goal to argue for the highest standards in political life. Such a call should certainly constitute one of the central planks of any platform of a renewed left.

We could make this our political monopoly, and we damn well should. As far as winning the support of the general public goes, this is the closest it gets to a one-way bet.

Corruption - sometimes petty, often not so petty - is an issue across the entire political spectrum, of course. Those of us that remember the Major years will be well aware of that.

If relatively few Lib Dems have been found with their fingers in the till in recent decades, that is largely on account of their continued distance from office rather then evidence of superior moral fibre.

Even sections of the far left have sometimes been happy enough to pimp their politics in return for a fistful of dollars from sundry petro-kleptocracies.

But the democratic left is sufficiently unsullied to make the demand for political transparency a speciality. Here are some policy proposals that deserve at least debate.

Let’s start from the proposition that political parties should be funded - if not entirely, than very largely so - by their own members and openly-declared supporters.

Individuals should be signed-up members of political parties before being allowed to make donations on more than the most modest of scales. It is surely only acceptable for someone to write out a six-figure cheque - or even a seven figure cheque - to a party if they strongly support its policies. Otherwise, the suspicion has to be that they are seeking either simony or bespoke legislation.

Let the political affiliations of both trade union executive members and board members of companies that make political donations be contained in the relevant annual reports. Most trade unionists don't keep it a secret. Business people shouldn't either.

Members of unions that donate to the Labour Party consciously have to opt in to the political levy. So why shouldn’t corporate donations - which no longer go exclusively to the Tories, remember - should be subject to similar strictures. Let shareholders vote on the question, and have the right to ‘opt out’ by withholding their share.

It is also necessary to oppose any further extension of state funding, and to examine ways of scaling back of existing provisions. There is a basic democratic principle at stake here. It just is not the job of the taxpayer to foot the bills for political parties, especially ones they heartily oppose.

Finally, it’s worth noting that there are plenty of existing laws against allowing considerations of personal gain to influence the performance of public office. Yet in all the decades of Tory and New Labour sleaze, only Aitken and Archer have actually done time.

Let's just say that a fair chunk of those who have served in successive New Labour cabinets should at least be looking at 40 hours of community service, to put it mildly.