This week I am getting a chance to see the country for myself, thanks to a programme for international journalists sponsored by a local television station. There are a lot of heavyweight hacks along for the ride, including a Pulitzer Prize winner, who turns out to be a surprisingly down-to-earth guy with which to have a beer.

Obviously, the scheme is in place for ideological reasons. This is a place where the Cold War lives on, and tomorrow’s visit to the Demilitarized Zone is likely to prove the highlight of the trip. But all of this remains by way of obvious subtext and – so far, anyway – our hosts are not hammering home the point.

Then again, they don’t have to. We all know that on the other side of the DMZ lies a country that officially advocates Juche, or  self-reliance, and yet cannot feed its population, even with a considerable amount of foreign food aid. Ironically, much of the assistance was provided by the US, at least until it was withdrawn recently following Pyongyang’s unsuccessful long-range missile launch.

This peninsula highlights a number of questions of socialist theory: are property relations in North Korea in any sense ‘post capitalist’, and therefore some sort of gain that should be defended by the left?; does the recent history of South Korea put paid to the idea that countries can no longer undergo bourgeois revolutions in the classic sense? But common sense alone gives some idea of the answers.

There is a danger that the undeniably lavish hospitality we are enjoying here will compromise the judgement of participants, including me. But I’d like to think I can withstand the bribery element and remain objective in my assessments, of which I hope to provide a few more in the days ahead.

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So crazed are his assailants that they seemingly accord no weight to such achievements as the completion of the necessary spadework for the privatisation of the NHS, the end of universal child benefit and the implementation of the deepest cuts in public spending since the early 1920s.

Were I a frothing at the mouth Friedmanite, I would sign off his school report with ’10 out of 10 for effort’, and gleefully look forward to the Coalition sealing the various aforementioned deals. What I would not be doing is start plotting a palace coup over the question of gay marriage.

Cameron told last year’s party conference that he supports gay marriage not despite being a Conservative, but because he is a Conservative. I rather suspect he does not particularly care about the matrimonial standing on same sex couples, either way. His purported stance gives every appearance of being driven by perceived electoral advantage rather than principle.

The prime minister’s words were rather designed as progressive window dressing for the serious game plan the Coalition is on the cusp of delivering, and rightwingers seeking to rock the boat at this moment are being ‘unhelpful’, in the full-on Alastair Campbell sense of the word.

But as anyone who has picked up a rightwing newspaper in recent days will be aware, the boatrocking season is in full swing: the front page splash in last Friday’s Daily Mail – ‘Now stand up for Tory values’ – may yet prove one of the most politically significant tabloid headlines for many years.

The proposition that the electorate is crying out for a greater degree of rightist radicalism does not look as obvious to me as it does to numerous serious rightist commentators, or even Nadine Dorries. It is, after all, Labour that is the primary beneficiary of disaffection with this administration.

But such is the degree of disconnect between Westminster and the rest of Britain that the argument that the Tory core vote is revolting through abstention is not logically impossible. Conservative Poujadists are clearly concerned that UKIP is salami slicing the base from the rightmost end of the sausage.

Unfortunately, the best critique they can offer is incoherent at an intellectual level. The reality is that the Conservative Party stopped being Conservative – at least in the sense that term was previously employed in British political thought – at some point in the late 1970s. Its policies since that point have born no more recognisable a resemblance to Burke than New Labour policies bear towards the social democratic tradition.

In truth, Cameron is probably the closest approximation to a proper Tory leader since the last time an Old Etonian stood at the helm. The thing is, ‘proper Toryism’ is the last thing this fight is about.

Motivating factors are dominated by unreasoning impatience, with perhaps just a little admixture of personal ambition thrown into what is looking like an increasingly poisonous mix. Cometh the hour, cometh the Boris.

Although it hardly becomes me to proffer tactical advice to the other side, the words of Tammy Wynette’s most famous ditty come irresistibly to mind at this juncture. Then again, if the right wants to rip itself to shreds in the run up to the next election, politeness alone dictates that the left should be the last people to object.

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It is of course true that some of those in the dock do have form. Even so, I must direct any fair minded jury to acquit the bulk of the defendants.

This volume is largely written backwards from the final chapter, which documents the peculiarly British – and not, to my knowledge anyway, Europe-wide – alliance between some socialist traditions and offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK, which has often been accompanied by anti-semitic rhetorical flourishes.

Shindler’s essential contention is that, at some level, ‘twas ever thus. The troubled history of the relationship between Marxism and Zionism since the inception of both creeds is accordingly given a thorough airing.

But his definition of ‘delegitimization’ is never spelt out. At one level, any criticism of anything can be portrayed as delegitimizing its target. And there are many things that the state of Israel does that are surely worthy of moral opprobrium.

There are the illegal settlements on the West Bank, the blockade of the Gaza Strip, the war crimes witnessed during Operation Cast Lead and the ‘separation fence’, to name just a few of the ignominies perpetrated by successive administrations. Professor Shindler seemingly doesn’t like to mention these things: for the left to leave them out of the equation would be an unforgiveable dereliction of duty.

Nor does it ‘delegitimize’ Israel to insist that the specific circumstances of its birth necessitate its reconstitution as a binational secular state. Israel exists and has the right to exist: what it does not have is the right comprehensively to dispossess Palestine.

Such was the position of much of the early Zionist left, as well as such luminaries as Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber. It remains the only basis for a just and durable settlement of the Israel’s manifest oppression of another nation.

This continues to be a coherent stance for democratic socialists. To use a quotation from Richard Crossman that Shindler highlights, there is no requirement for us to be ‘emotionally pro-Jew’ but rather ‘rationally anti anti-semitic’.

The Stalinist tradition, of course, could save the court’s time by at once entering a guilty plea. The evidence against it, from the Slansky Trial and the Doctors’ Plot on to the purges that swept Poland in the late 1960s, will be all too familiar to anyone who has read, say, Paul Lendvai’s instructive ‘Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe’.

That the Workers’ Revolutionary Party whored itself for the petrodollars necessary to sustain a daily newspaper is also a matter of record. But while it was a leading sect in its day, it was a sect, limited in influence beyond its few thousand adherents.

Nor do I care for some of the formulations in some of the literature published by the Socialist Workers’ Party since it discovered Islamism as a revolutionary force, somewhere around the time the WRP gave Healy the boot.

But let us not exaggerate the influence of an organisation that, in cahoots with wider forces, secured just 0.8% in the recent London assembly vote, and would get less than that nationwide were it even remotely capable of fielding a full slate in a general election.

Shindler’s work is obviously one of polemic rather than scholarship. This can be seen by its regular lapses into downright sloppiness: the dictatorial head of East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s was not Walter ‘Ulbrecht’, and the Indian National Conference went out of business long before 1940. There are also numerous grammatical infelicities that sometimes leave meaning unclear.

Sweeping assertions are made on the basis of secondary sources. I do not pretend special expertise on the political thought of early twentieth century Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer, but I would need substantiation before accepting that a sophisticated intellectual ‘understood Jewishness only in the imagery of the non-productive Jew and believer in religious supernaturalism in the poverty-stricken shtetl’.

But most of all I object to the obviously silly claim that Britain’s revolutionary socialists would have collaborated with Nazism had Britain been conquered by Germany in 1940. This nonsense is advanced in the very opening sentences of the foreword, presumably to set out the idea that these people were irredeemably tainted by anti-semitism.

The track record of Communists and Trotskyists in this regards compares favourably with that of the Stern Gang, which actually did propose alliance with the Nazis, and Rudolf Kastner, who came to terms with Hitler’s representatives, albeit under duress.

Let us not forget that the left led the resistance to fascism in occupied Europe, and many comrades bravely laid down their lives to that end. Frankly, they do not deserve to have the likes of Shindler spit on their graves for the sake of catchpenny advantage in British Zionism’s contemporary bust up with the SWP.

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Nor can I promise much in the weeks to come. I have trips to South Korea, Greece and Turkey lined up in short order, although I will attempt to blog observations from my travels. Anybody who has contacts worth meeting in these countries is invited to get in touch via my public email address.

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So while the latest estimates from the local central bank suggest that Greek GDP will fall 5% in 2012, marking a cumulative drop of 13% since 2008, it remains true that the Asian financial crisis of 15 years or so ago was far worse. GDP plunged 13% in Indonesia in 1998 alone, with reductions of 11% in Thailand and 7% in South Korea and Malaysia.

Yet Asia recovered relatively rapidly, and the official line from the European Central Bank is that Greece will see stagnation next year, followed by the resumption of growth in 2014.

But given the sharp reductions in wages and public spending, collapsing consumer confidence, capital flight, an investment strike and – most importantly of all – the absence of export-oriented manufacturing industries, many observers regard that outcome as unlikely.

Meanwhile, unemployment in Spain has hit 24.4%, and twice that for young people. That puts a developed first world economy in the same ball park as Belize, Gabon and Bosnia Herzegovina. Indeed, Spain now has a higher proportion of joblessness than the most recent figure I have been able to find for Iraq, or Britain in 1932, come to that.

Marxist economists are divided in their assessment of the causes of all this, broadly between those who attribute explanatory primacy to a 40-year secular decline in the rate of profit and those who – more convincingly, in my view – regard what is happening as the unravelling of the contradictions inherent in neoliberalism.

But what we clearly do have here is an immanent critique of the free market orthodoxy; textbook Friedmanite theory doesn’t work, even by its own lights. Far from being self-regulating, in the manner that the political right has maintained for the last three decades, capitalism has shown itself utterly dependent on state intervention for its survival.

The clearest recent demonstration of this is the so-called long term refinancing operation mounted by the European Central Bank, which pumped one trillion euros worth of ultra-cheap three year loans into the European banking system. Despite the name, the measure is likely to prove only a short term fix.

Ever since I first became politically active, and before even that, revolutionary socialists have shown themselves all too prone to describe whatever state the economy happens to find itself in as ‘a crisis ’, and to link that analysis to a perspective of rapid radicalisation of the working class, on a scale that could catapult their particular sect to mass party standing more or less overnight.

Sometimes matters it really has been stated as crudely as that, as those of us old enough to remember the Workers’ Revolutionary Party will recall. Rather more often, the assumption has been unvoiced but obviously implicit.

We need to be that bit more nuanced. An occasional recession, tough as it is on those who find themselves on the dole queue, is no biggie in the wider scheme of things. Then again, what we are facing right now is shaping up to be rather more than yet another easily shrugged off downturn.

The prospect of some sort of rerun of the Great Depression is higher than any sane person would like them to be. Yet projects for socialist transformation have not so far enjoyed any breakthrough in either Greece or Spain, any more than they did in Asia in the late 1990s.

Protests, while sometimes violent, have so far not in political terms transcended social democracy or its eurocommunist or latter day Stalinist variants.

It is also worth highlighting that overt fascist forces are now polling well above the 3% threshold needed to secure parliamentary representation in Greece, while the anti-capitalist left Antarsya remains below it.

In short, if socialists are going to make any progress, it will be by our own efforts in popularising our ideas, rather than sitting back and expecting things to fall into our laps.

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One of the big stories this week has been the revelation that a Labour-controlled council on the eastern extremities of the capital has been seeking to rehouse a fair chunk of the local homeless way outside its patch.

Indeed, it has even asked a housing association 160 miles away in Stoke if it could come up with accommodation for 500 people.

Housing minister Grant Shapps instantly accused it of ‘playing politics’. Oddly enough, he has not ventured the same observation about Tory-run Westminster, which has been following a similar policy for some time.

But some readers outside London do not fully appreciate what is happening here. Newham, it needs to be stressed, is one of the poorest places in Britain.

It is isolated despite its location, being farther away from the City and the West End in terms of travel time than many affluent parts of the commuter belt.

Distance acts as a force multiplier; this is outer London with inner London social problems, exacerbated by the collapse of such major employers as the docks and Ford in nearby Dagenham.

Historically it is one of the cradles of Labourism. Beckton gas works was in 1889 the birthplace of what we today know as the GMB, while West Ham South was in 1892 the first constituency anywhere in Britain to return a Labour MP, prior even to the formation of the Labour Party itself.

Now the last place in London many of us would have thought capable of gentrification is having to ship out its poor, prompting accusations of social cleansing.

There is a sense in which this process is nothing new. My own family moved out of Tower Hamlets to the Midlands in the early 1960s, under what was then known as the Greater London Council’s ‘overspill policy’.

That, at least, was a nationally-agreed scheme. It was entirely optional, and well-paid blue collar jobs in nationalised industries and decent purpose-built social housing awaited at the other end.

By the time I got back to the capital as a young student in the early Thatcher period, things were starting to get into gear, with the unelected London Docklands Development Corporation pushing settled communities out of Wapping and the Isle of Dogs.

Now the process is reaching a turning point, with the Coalition’s decision to cap housing benefit putting even neighbourhoods as frankly unglamorous as Canning Town beyond the reach of many.

Labour local authorities, some of them perhaps reluctantly, are complicit in the process, while the Labour leadership seems to have nothing to offer the victims except handwringing.

Even the sections of the left that once might have encouraged squatting, a movement that dates back to the immediate post-war period, are strangely silent.

So it is that London is heading down the road that Manhattan and Paris have already  travelled, and my side of the political spectrum has absolutely nothing radical to say. We live in thoroughly depressing times.

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Fortunately for the rest of the world, Barack Obama has not only shown no inclination to ‘bomb bomb Iran’, but has so far actively restrained Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu from following Mr McCain’s advice. Had he not done so, the likelihood is that Israel would already have acted.

That is to Obama’s credit, and might give some of his more simpleminded leftwing critics cause for reflection. Washington foreign policy may still not be an untrammeled force for planet-wide benevolence, but at least it has moved on since 2003.

So there are reasonable hopes that the P5+1 talks – which enter into a second round in Baghdad next month – point the way to some sort of settlement of the question on which peace in the Middle East now hangs.

EU foreign minister Catherine Ashton has stated that the West accepts Iran’s right, as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to a peaceful nuclear programme, which is surely beyond dispute.

No one need take the sincerity of the fatwa against the acquisition of nuclear weapons offered by Ayatollah Ali Khameni, Iran’s supreme leader, at face value; regular intrusive inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities, in return for the gradual suspension of sanctions, form an obvious basis for a deal.

The known unknown in all this is, of course, Israel. This very day, the country’s chief of staff has given a newspaper interview stressing his preparedness to undertake military action should the politicians decide to do so.

Meanwhile, a prominent guest speaker has told an Israeli Labor Party conference that ‘a little paranoia can’t hurt’ when dealing with Iran. Most of us would prefer that decisions be taken by a government in full possession of its mental faculties.

Should an Israeli strike come to pass in the next few months, Iran is certain to retaliate. That will ramp up the pressure on Obama exponentially, with the combined weight of the Israel lobby, what remains of the neocons, the bomb bomb Iran brigade in the GOP, conservative commentators, ‘fair and balanced’ Fox News and evangelical Christians demanding that the US throw its weight behind the aggressor.

Obama may not be strong enough to resist such a line up. But consequences of even a ‘small war’ would be disastrous, even on best case scenarios.

True, the US would emerge on top in the event of any conflict. It already has 40,000 troops in the Gulf, equipped with strike aircraft, two aircraft carrier groups, two ballistic missile defence ships and multiple anti-missiles systems. There are a further 90,000 combatants in Afghanistan and thousands more in central Asia.

But as detailed in an article by former Obama defence staffer Colin Kahl in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, Iran will not be a pushover. Tehran possesses extensive so-called ‘area denial capabilities’ sufficient to prevent other navies operating efficiently in the Persian Gulf.

These include coastal air defences, shore-based long-range artillery, anti-ship cruise missiles, midget submarines, remote-controlled boats and unmanned aircraft. It also has at its disposal over 1,000 small attack craft kitted out with machine guns, multiple-launch rockets, missiles, torpedos and mine laying capability.

As well as the immediate cost in human lives, the impact on oil prices at a time of fragility for world economy, and on the politics of a region already aflame, also need to form part of any rational calculation.

And if Mitt Romney should emerge the victor this November, let us pray that he is not a Beach Boys fan.

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Even so, nostalgia alone makes it likely that many comrades will find their hearts gladdened by news that Argentina has brought oil company Repsol-YPF into government hands.

Moves like this have been extremely rare since the failure of the Mitterand experiment three decades ago. After neoliberal orthodoxy went global in the 1980s, public ownership has been derided as unthinkable.

The principle exception, of course, is when state takeovers have taken the form of bailouts. Even though New Labour’s free market credentials were sadly not in doubt, it felt itself reluctantly compelled to save Railtrack and a clutch of financial institutions when expediency so dictated.

But blue collar workers at Rover were notably not deemed worthy of the same salvation extended to pinstriped bankers.

Received wisdom has it that Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s move will blow up in her face. No savvy foreign capitalist will be willing to invest in Argentina for at least a generation, the Financial Times fulminates this morning.

Don’t bet on it. Repsol will be generously paid off. The Spanish conglomerate is reportedly demanding $10bn for assets probably worth about half that. While it will no doubt bluster about the hideous unfairness of it all, a settlement of, say, $7bn should be enough to buy their silence and overcome any inconvenient attachment to principle.

So long as the Argentines cough up, few multinationals will turn their nose up at a slice of any lucrative propositions going, especially in the energy sector. If US and west European firms get sniffy, China and Russia will bite Kirchner’s hand off.

I was among those who in the 1980s advocated what was then called the Alternative Economic Strategy, which entailed the nationalisation of around two dozen concerns in key sectors, thus giving a state planning body some leverage in British economy. I still think such ideas are worth re-exploring.

But even for old times’ sake, I am not getting worked up over what Kirchner has done. There is no indication that the YPF takeover is the first tranche of a left reformist strategy to transform Argentine capitalism; this is an act of pure state capitalism, with perhaps a dash of nationalism thrown in by way of secondary justification.

In Marxist terms, Ms Kirchner heads a bourgeois government that – despite its Peronist traditions of sometimes radical-sounding populism – will never act in a way that will challenge the country’s class relations. Nobody on the left should delude themselves otherwise.

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Remember that Labour has a consolidated lead in national voting intentions, and that the capital is one of the party’s strongholds. If the mayoral and assembly contests are thought of as one big by-election, with the attendant scope for protest voting, the Tories ought to be in for a drubbing.

Instead, Johnson leads the latest polls by five percentage points on first preferences and six percentage points after reallocation of second preferences.

Boris will be Boris, as the saying goes, and there is still time for him to do something monumentally stupid. But clearly it would be foolish to build an entire campaign strategy on such an eventuality.

It’s not as if the voters are unaware of the class dimensions in this contest. Eight out of ten Londoners tell YouGov that they regard Johnson as a mayor for the rich. Yet substantial numbers of those who see him in such a light are apparently ready to re-elect him.

Livingstone is ahead in the 18-24, 25-39 and 40-59 age brackets, but that advantage is wiped out by his unpopularity among the over 60s, who prefer Johnson by an astonishing two to one.

Even in class terms, the two are almost neck and neck among C2DEs. Johnson pulls in 44% in this category, even though only 30% identify as Tories at the national level. Livingstone, who is backed by 45% of them, seems to have alienated a tranche of the core vote.

The other striking finding is Livingstone’s huge lead among non-white voters, where he is on 63%, compared to his rival’s 27%, which seemingly vindicates his overtures to the Muslim community.

Livingstone is, of course, perceived as a standard bearer for the entire Labour left. But there is little evidence that he would do better were he to play up on his past.

The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition is currently polling zero, which seems to refute TUSC’s contention that George Galloway’s success in Bradford West was a symptom of rising popular support for Old Labour-style politics.

The Greens, by the way, are on just 3%, a performance that would see them lose their existing two London Assembly seats. UKIP is getting 5%, which is just enough for a place.

As I have written earlier, I will be canvassing for the Labour Party, despite my personal reservations about Livingstone’s politics on a range of issues. But the memories of his last tenure in the job and the more recent revelations about his taxation affairs have taken their toll.

What is clear is that in mayoral races, the candidate is just as important as the party, and Livingstone is proving less attractive than a man widely regarded as a cartoon character posh boy. The party is going to have to come up with somebody rather more impressive in 2016.

In the meantime, fingers crossed.

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The UKIP leader spoke after a recent survey put his outfit on 11%, the same degree of backing as the Liberal Democrats now enjoy. That result may or may not represent at rogue poll.

But what can be said for certain is that UKIP secured over 900,000 votes in 2010. By way of comparison, remember that in the 15 years that the far left has been challenging the Labour Party, through one vehicle or another, it has not reached six figure territory.

The arrival of a substantial force to the right of the Conservatives – and one that is credibly able to threaten to contest every seat at the next general election – is a completely new departure in British politics.

For over a century, the Tories have hegemonised the entire political space from where Liberalism leaves off to the old school authoritarian imperialist right, leaving only marginalised overtly fascist forces outside the tent.

Now, for the first time ever, they are having to fight for some of that turf. In so far as the casual outside observer can judge, that struggle is causing internal tension, with some activists advocating a return to Nasty Party ways in order to retain this slice of the core vote.

It is tempting for the left to sit back and watch the show. After all, anything that damages the Conservative Party just has to be good for our side, right? It’s a pity they can’t both lose.

But spare a thought for where a battle that will inevitably be fought on the terrain of Europe, immigration, small government and selective education might drag the centre of gravity in British political debate.

It is not as if Labour has a leadership that can be depended upon to hold the line on social democratic basics, and it may even be inclined to join a Dutch auction on some of these issues if it is perceived that the median voter is shifting to the right.

Not every exasperated Daily Mail reader can sensibly be portrayed as another Nigel Farage, of course. But there is a particle of Nigel Farage lodged in every exasperated Daily Mail reader.

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