The occasion for the outburst came in an appearance on the World at One yesterday, in which the former foreign secretary discussed the current prime minister’s suggestion that elements within the Pakistani state are complicit in terrorist attacks in Afghanistan and India.

That this is the case is not in doubt to anyone who reads international relations journals, or even serious newspapers. The involvement of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence with the Taliban is not something that has only just come to light thanks to the classified material published on WikiLeaks earlier this week. Nor will the idea that the ISI covertly backs Kashmiri militants shock many observers of south Asian affairs.

The spluttered denials from sources in Islamabad lack even a semblance of conviction. To hear a senior official of Jamaat-i-Islami – a party of clerical authoritarian war criminals – warn Cameron that his words might foment ‘anti-American, anti-West’ sentiment only compounds the irony.

There are many grounds on which it is right for Labour politicians to criticise Cameron and the administration he leads. But simply stating commonly-known facts in plain English in response to a question at a press conference does not strike me as one of them.

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But I can’t help noticing that of the two contenders for the leftwing vote, onetime Liverpool docker Len McCluskey seems well ahead of his rival Jerry Hicks. Indeed, even sections of the far left are opting for the Labourite over the former Trot.

According to reports, McCluskey’s leftwing rhetoric button seems permanently lodged in the ‘on’ position. He’s using phrases like ‘class war’ and ‘capitalist crisis’ on the stump, he’s promising greater democracy in a union that could certainly do with a dose of it, and he is even talking about taking the Labour Party back from the Blairites and Brownites.

Good stuff. The question is, just how much of that package will he deliver if he gets the job?

Hicks, a member of George Galloway’s Respect party and before that the SWP, undeniably has a credible record as a rank and file militant at Rolls Royce in Bristol, an employer that sacked him in 2005.

I must admit to having formed an unfavourable impression of the man after watching an extraordinary performance in which he addressed a meeting of around 200 people as if it was a mass rally, including the bodily gestures appropriate to a far larger gathering.

It is odd, too, that even prominent Respect-affiliated bloggers have conspicuously been bigging up McCluskey in preference to their own colleague.

Obviously I am in no position to endorse either man, and my doing so would have an impact of precisely zero, anyway. But to this outsider, McCluskey looks by far the more serious choice.

As ever, the comments box is open for all relevant opinions.

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Now we read that the third most successful recording artist of all time has teamed up with the guy who wrote Billy Elliot to work on a musical version of Animal Farm. Whatever next? The Saturdays do Grundrisse? Atlas Shrugged, soundtrack courtesy of Meatloaf?

The news comes just weeks after George Galloway – a man whose gifts with song were long unsuspected by many – unveiled plans for a similar treatment of the life of noted lesbian songstress Dusty Springfield.

Some may detect a certain incongruity here, at least in so far as it must be presumed that Dusty would have been immune to the cigar smoking charms of the former Respect MP, although that dimension may simply add to the charm of the project.

Musicals, I must admit, are a genre around which I have never quite gotten my head. For me, the thought of sitting through a performance of anything ever penned by Andrew Lloyd Webber has an intrinsic appeal roughly on a par with being force fed asbestos.

I suppose there must be takers for such entertainment, otherwise the big West End productions would not be booked up for months ahead.

But after that maudlin display at the Diana funeral, Sir Elton surely forfeits any minimal claim he might every have had to be allowed anywhere near the Orwell oeuvre. After all, there are some things that should remain inviolate from the wanton attentions of Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths.

Animal Farm is a brilliant modern day political parable of Swiftian greatness, without peer in the canon of twentieth century allegorical literature. Essentially, it puts the Trotskyist analysis of the Soviet Union in story form. Despite its adoption by reactionaries as an ideological weapon in the Cold War, the message is not ‘revolution undesirable’ but very much revolution betrayed.

Elton John, on the other hand, is all about hopping and bopping to the crocodile rock and seeing Daniel waving goodbye. Don’t go breaking my heart? If this show goes ahead, I’m afraid mine will be shattered.

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Still I can recall watching the demonstrations on the television news, the ‘get out of Vietnam’ slogan hand painted in white on the walls of a local solicitor’s office, and the muttered vocal opposition evident among my older hippy cousins.

All this, even though Britain was not directly involved. So why is it that opposition to the invasion of Iraq seems not to have achieved anywhere near the same degree of resonance, despite the massive demonstrations of just seven years ago?

This train of thought occurs to me after reading Anthony Arnove’s good and useful book ‘Iraq: the Logic of Withdrawal’. Although written in 2006, its solid arguments for an end to the occupation have dated little, and it represents a worthwhile purchase if you come across a secondhand copy.

Arnove – a member of the International Socialist Organization, a breakaway Cliffite grouping in the US – believes that the antiwar movement should look to the tactics that worked in the Vietnam instance. Such a contention seems intuitively reasonable to me.

Here’s an extract from pp.89-90

The U.S. war on Vietnam ended because of a combination of five factors:

 (i) The mass resistance of the Vietnamese people to U.S. intervention.

 (ii) The resistance of U.S. soldiers and veterans, who sparked a rebellion against the war, provoking one military analyst to write, “The morale, discipline and battle-worthiness of the U.S. armed forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.”

 (iii) Domestic opposition on a scale that forced elites in the United States to recognize that they had lost the war at home, as well as in Vietnam.

 (iv) International protest and opposition that isolated the United States politically and raised the costs of the war even further.

 (v) The growing economic consequences of the war, which led to inflation and deficits that undermined the position of the U.S. economy.

The chapter is available online here if you are interested.

Again, that looks good as a checklist. So how many points can we tick off? Well, the resistance to the US and Britain in Iraq is clearly widespread; the question is whether or not it has achieved a mass character.

As far as the situation can be read from this distance, the answer looks negative. Although Sunni elements continue their armed struggle against both the Iraqi government and Shia Muslims, al Maliki enjoys a degree of popular support well in excess of the social base on which the Saigon administration rested.

So long as the resistance feeds off religious sectarianism – in other words, for the foreseeable future - it will remain minority property and thus fail to achieve the critical mass required of a fully-fledged national liberation movement.

Similarly, while an element of rebellion among GIs and squaddies is obviously present, it has not reached the point where officers are being frag bombed in any number. Remember that both armies are volunteer based rather than conscripted.

Opposition to the war, in the US and Europe, is an article of the liberal faith. But it is mostly taken as read, rather than expressed by explicit protest. Where the liberals live, the game to play is compromise solution.

It is fashionable in some quarters to blame the Stop the War Coalition for the inability to mobilise activists in any number. That is probably unfair; give or take this or that piece of blatant but nevertheless minor anti-democratic jiggery-pokery, I am not sure that I would have done that much differently had I been in Lindsey German’s shoes.

Finally, while the war is costing the US dearly in economic terms, the tab has yet to prove too big to pick up. Washington can even afford to run a parallel occupation in Afghanistan, bail out the banks and the motor industry, and still not find itself in the straits that forced Nixon to scrap Bretton Woods.

The result is deadlock. Given the amount of oil at stake, there is no structural dynamic within the situation that will force the US to withdraw even on single day before it is ready to do so. That might not be a message that StWC supporters want to hear, but it is sadly not too far off the truth.

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The Khmer Rouge cadre – otherwise known as Duch – has been sentenced to 35 years for his crimes, and is likely to serve 19 of them. He might just live long enough ultimately to be released, although he will be a very old man if he ever does emerge from prison.

It will be interesting to see if the same writers that argued that Saddam and Milosevic were hapless victims of victor’s justice will hastily concoct reasons why Duch and others of his ilk, who will be standing trial in the coming period, merit qualified support.

Yet the verdict of the United Nations-backed war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh will ultimately prove a mere footnote in the story of Democratic Kampuchea, a saga that decades later retains a special capacity to shock, even for those of us well versed in the history of twentieth century totalitarianisms.

Estimates of the death toll during the four years in which Pol Pot and his gang were at the helm vary enormously. But when even apologists open the batting by talking down the killings to a mere 740,000, you get some idea of the enormity of what occurred.

The usually cited figure is around 2,000,000, roughly equating to 20% of the population. Among the victims were many people considered to be intellectuals, a definition that could include being a teacher, or even wearing reading glasses.

The dilemma for the left is that the government we are talking about was headed by a communist party, and constitutionally proclaimed itself a ‘state of the people, workers, peasants, and all other Kampuchean labourer.’

Nothing about the Communist Party of Kampuchea at the time it seized power seemed to make it stand out from similar political formations elsewhere in the region during this period. Many CPK leaders had been schooled in Paris, capital of the former colonial power, under the auspices of the Parti Communiste Français. Its strategy of protracted people’s war was pretty much textbook Maoist orthodoxy.

A case could be made – and some have indeed made it – that the atrocities perpetrated by Pol Pot are not qualitatively different from the horrors seen in Russia during the hey-day of the Gulag or China at the time of the worst excesses of the cultural revolution.

Even now, some far left groups reject the name ‘Khmer Rouge’, on the grounds that it is ‘actually an anti-communist term of abuse’, and utilise instead the more cumbersome designation of the People’s National Liberation Armed Forces of Kampuchea.

They also stress that the anti-imperialist credentials of the CPK, and in the concrete context of US involvement in Indo-China in the years in question, that is difficult to dispute.

Moreover, great store is also laid on the introduction of planned property relations. Kampuchea, we are told, was scientifically speaking a workers’ state. ‘Despite its disgusting nature this was the terror of a bureaucracy based on post-capitalist property forms,’ recent analysis from one Trotskyist outfit proclaims.

The logic is that the CPK was to some extent worthy of backing, because of its anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist aspects, in the same way that mainstream Trotskyism argued for defence of the Soviet Union in world war two and in various conflicts throughout the cold war on these very grounds.

Yes, I understand and appreciate the internal coherence of the argument. Once upon a time, I would have delivered similar rhetoric myself. Given that what came about could not have been foretold, there might even have been an excuse for confusion at the time.

But if this is the conclusion to which a theory leads, the obvious rejoinder is that there has to be something wrong with the theory. Not to repudiate such errors would be a major mistake.

UPDATE: As Captain Swing points out in the comments box, the political right also has a case to answer, and one more serious than the mere extention of ineffective verbal support at that.

Nixon’s decision to bomb neutral Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 claimed 500,000 lives, and created the preconditions for the CPK takeover. After the ouster of Pol Pot following Vietnamese intervention in 1978, the US and the UK continued to back the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government.

It is thanks to Reagan and Thatcher that this ghastly group retained control of the Cambodian seat at the United Nations. As late as the late 1980s, Britain provided military training in Thailand for Khmer Rouge operatives.

By not taking these important factors into consideration, my hastily-written post above offers less than half the picture. I’ll try to do better next time.

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The prime minister ain’t going, largely because he can’t be arsed. Sure, Sam is due to drop a sprog around that time, but everybody knows that this is simply the polite pretext on which Number Ten has turned down the offer.

Some on the left are trying to dress all this up as a victory for the awkward squad. RMT leader Bob Crow threatened to lead a walkout if Cameron spoke on the day, and there is little doubt that it would have been widely supported.

But Cameron could scarcely have minded that; Crow is something of a bogeyman to the home county commuter vote, and a symbolic confrontation of this variety would probably have played well with straphangers from Surbiton.

The disquieting reality is that the TUC is no longer deemed sufficiently important to be worth a day of the big man’s time. So the posh boy had no trouble whatsoever in flashing the Vs to the plebs.

Long gone are the years when TUC conference was an event of first rank political importance, with television cameras there to fill daytime television schedules now devoted to Jeremy Kyle with pictures of overweight men pledging defiance of government pay norms.

Nowadays, it is reduced to a talking shop of little apparent purpose. Large numbers of delegates gather together to pass resolutions that nobody takes remotely seriously, in the full knowledge that they will have not the slightest impact outside the conference chamber.

The theoretical case for what is known in labour movement jargon as ‘a national trade union centre’, such as the TUC, is that it co-ordinates the action of separate unions in the struggle against the boss class. Unity is strength, and all that.

The trouble is that trade unions nowadays do little that requires co-ordination to any degree than an ad hoc committee meeting cannot comfortably handle.  That leaves the TUC’s purpose as … what, exactly?

This is a terrible thing for a leftie to have to say, but the truth is that in the current industrial climate, TUC conference deliberations are of no relevance whatsoever to workplace-based union members, even those that are activists or reps.

Now is not the time to rattle off the standard Marxist critique of the trade union bureaucracy. Of course union officials negotiate; that’s what they do. Those that represent workers employed by the state will negotiate with the government, and rightly so.

Yet not even the most spurious notion of social partnership could have justified proffering a platform to a man who plans to put millions of working people on the dole. The inevitable slap down simply shows up Brendan Barber as a prize chump.

Just a suggestion, guys. Terribly old fashioned of me, I know. But sod the love-in and start organising some resistance. That’s what you are supposed to be there for, after all.

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But the Afghan president’s apparent grandstanding speaks not so much of growing confidence in his capacity to keep the lid on the insurgency as the fact that Washington and London have been defeated in a war of attrition, as was the Red Army before them, and the British Empire at the height of its powers three times prior to that. Asymmetric warfare 5, imperialism of various stripes 0.

Foreign secretary Liam Fox has already made plain that he wants British troops out of the country within four years, and Obama is planning to commence withdrawal in July 2011.  It only remains for their placeman to publicly endorse the timetable.

Continuation of an unwinnable struggle is not a realistic option from either a military or political standpoint. The troops have been reduced to sitting ducks – or more accurately, walking ducks – for the benefit of roadside IEDs. Even if the word ‘victory’ had any meaning in the local context, it would serve no worthwhile purpose.

While it is true that Afghanistan was once an operational base for Al Qa’eda, Osama Bin Laden retains many other strategic options. The west cannot occupy every failed state or every province beyond government control, everywhere throughout the Muslim world.

Nor is it possible to buy the argument that the fight must be taken Helmand to prevent terror coming to the streets of Britain. The perpetrators of Islamist attacks on London and Glasgow hailed from Leeds and Aylesbury, not Kandahar or Mazar-e Sharif.

Meanwhile, the Guardian claims that Karzai has finally secured the tacit consent of Washington to enter back channel talks with some elements within the Taliban, a policy he himself has long wished to adopt, and which is endorsed by the British and Pakistani governments.

Nine years after the NATO invasion, which I opposed at the time and continue to oppose now, these developments constitute the definitive refutation of the mindset that insisted liberal democracy can become an export commodity.

The entirely predictable outcome we get instead is accommodation with the very medievalist reactionaries the occupation was supposed to depose, with an abysmally corrupt election-rigger stepping in as a suitably convenient face-saving figurehead. If this is not a case of going back to square one, it looks awfully like it.

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The former prime minister’s children are reportedly ‘appalled’ at what they have learned about the script, which will paint their mother as a bewildered old biddy who talks to herself, apparently in the belief that her late husband Sir Denis Thatcher is still alive. It represents, they argue, ‘a leftwing fantasy’.

I am not, of course, an unqualified admirer of the subject of this particular biopic. Indeed, I will find it difficult to share fully in the centrally orchestrated mourning that we will no doubt see when the time for her state funeral ultimately arrives.

But what I need to stress here is that I detest her not because of any qualities she may or may not have possessed as an individual, but because of the brand of politics she once exemplified, and still embodies as an icon.

The deleterious impact of Thatcherism represents the root cause of every single major social problem currently facing this country, from the entrenched pockets of unemployment and social deprivation to the failures of the education health systems.

She is not solely to blame; New Labour had 13 years in office, and succeeded only in partially rectifying the worst shortcomings, largely because it felt constrained not to step too far outside the ideological parameters Thatcherism set. But it was under her administrations that the rot set in.

The ‘no such thing as society’ 1980s saw all too little ‘appropriate sensitivity’ on offer when it came to millions of long-term unemployed, or to mining communities, or gay people, or local government democracy.

I also notice that Carol Thatcher – in a brief respite from referring to black tennis players as golliwogs – was happy enough to sell serialisation rights to her memoirs to the Mail on Sunday in 2008, and perfectly ready to provide titillating details of mum’s deteriorating mental state.

Carol’s own account shows that, far from being ‘a leftwing fantasy’, the film has a solid basis in reality. For her to object to an accurate and unsensationalised portrayal of this state of affairs, by a woman who can fairly be described as one of the most outstanding living thespians, is surely hypocritical, given her own patent readiness to cash in.

As someone who has seen an older member of his own family suffer from Alzheimer’s, I am entirely aware of how heartbreaking the transformation it brings about can be to the loved ones of the victim. So even though I remain very much on the left, I find the idea that I would ‘fantasise’ about a political opponent falling into its clutches somewhat insulting.  It would clearly be bad taste for Streep to play this one for cheap laughs.

But there is no indication that she will. Provided we get  the serious stab at fictionalised contemporary history promised by Pathé managing director Cameron McCracken, the project is entirely legitimate.

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On those considerations alone, the move should be resolutely opposed in France, and certainly not be emulated elsewhere. But for leftists simply to leave the matter at that – as most British radical commentators have – surely smacks of what comrades used to call an undialectical approach.

It remains the case that both the niqab and a fortiori the burqa are deeply objectionable from any rational, feminist or libertarian point of view. They represent the oppression of women through the symbolic medium of black textiles.

Whether Muslim women don these garments through free choice, through coercion, or because they have internalised their long-term subjugation does not change this underlying reality.

Often the justification is advanced that women have to be covered, for fear that they will otherwise arouse men. In other words, they must be penalised for my gender’s ostensible lack of self control. It is essentially a variation on the old ‘she was asking for it, your honour’ defence once popular with rapists.

In one novel twist on the theme, Iranian cleric Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi has even warned that chicks brazenly flashing their hair all over the shop leads to dangerous extramarital nooky, and thereby increases the risk of earthquakes.

Once rare in Europe, the practice of veiling has only become common as the result of the efforts of the Saudi state in recent decades to proselytise for its ultra-puritanical brand of wahhabism.

In many countries, the wearing of the burqa is imposed by fear. In Iran, women can be arrested for failure to comply with dress codes. In Pakistan, Kashmir and Afghanistan, hundreds of women have gone blind after having acid thrown in their faces for going about unveiled.

An Iraqi feminist organisation claimed in 2007 that on average, 15 women a month were murdered in Basra for the same offence. Let me run that one past you slowly: 15 women a month. Murdered. In just one city.

There have been accounts of sanctions short of these extremes in Muslim communities in this country. Giving the missus or the daughter a good lumping for getting stroppy is no more acceptable.

It needs to be stressed here that Islam imposes no religious requirement for either the burqa or the niqab, or even the headscarf, for that matter. Traditional Islamic texts simply instruct women to dress modestly.

As I have said, it does boil down to a matter of choice and of course women have the right to select their wardrobe without the intervention of governments, parents or partners. That goes for the burqa, ripped fishnets and slutty red lipstick, or flowery frocks from Laura Ashley alike.

But I’d be somewhat more impressed if some of those who have made clear how appalled they are with the French decision would explicitly state their solidarity with the acid victims. Have they really nothing to say on the topic?

The correct approach is the one advanced by the Belgian far left in last month’s election contest:

non aux lois d’interdiction du port du foulard à l’école ou du niqab dans l’espace public: ni obligation, ni interdiction!

No ban, but no obligation either. Sounds just about right to me.

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Four years ago, United Nations human rights investigators called for the immediate closure of the notorious US concentration camp on Cuban soil.

On the evening the report was published, one of the audience on Question Time pressed the panel for their opinions. Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain tentatively ventured the idea that it might not entirely be a good thing.

That gave the press pack the chance to push the prime minister at a press conference in Berlin the following day. ‘I have always said it is an anomaly, and sooner or later has to be dealt with,’ Blair responded. Thanks for making that so wonderfully clear, PM.

Maybe the hacks were feeling unusually idle, or perhaps they were not allowed follow-up questions. But such a statement is essentially meaningless. It represents neither praise nor condemnation, nor indeed any discernable moral or ethical stance whatsoever.

The reason for such studious ambiguity comes into sharper focus today, following the Guardian’s publication of previously classified documents that highlight the extent to which New Labour was complicit in the Guantanamo operation.

Even as I write, a team of around 80 lawyers is sifting through 500,000 documents relating to this affair. It may take them a decade to work through them all. No doubt, then, other revelations are ahead of us. But the outline of what occurred is already entirely clear.

To cut to the chase on this one, the suggestion is that Blair expressly ordered Jack Straw, the foreign secretary of the day, to break the law by refusing to assist British nationals detained by the US.

Moreover, Blair explicitly sanctioned the rendition of British citizens to Guantanamo, where some of them were held for years without ever being charged with any wrongdoing.

Certainly, the interrogation techniques that were practiced there can be described as ‘robust’, as the euphemism of choice would have it. Bush administration officials have only recently admitted – albeit after repeated denials – that sometimes they met the legal definition of torture. The British government can reasonably have been expected to be aware of this.

In the post 9/11 climate, it was clearly legitimate to make a judgement call on what needed to be done to protect Britain from the prospect of a re-run of the attacks on New York and Washington.  There were prima facie grounds for suspicion that some of the men at the centre of this case were involved in terrorist activity, to an extent undoubtedly of sufficient gravity to merit remand in custody in this country.

But the decision illegally to hand British citizens and residents over to the US, and thus to put them at risk of systematic ill-treatment, was clearly anomalous, and will have to be dealt with sooner or later. The simple expedient of contracting out the dirty work does not remove the taint of complicity.

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