http://www.davidosler.com/ en Copyright 2010 Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:13:44 +0000 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss CHILE’S second city is under lockdown today, with the country’s post-Pinochet military offering an object lesson in what Marxists mean when they describe the state as the ultimate guarantor of property relations. Concepción was close to the epicentre of Saturday’s 8.8 magnitude earthquake, in which at least 723 people died. Food and water is running out, so the population has taken to self-service shopping in a bid way, gathering what they need to eat and drink from the ruins of fallen supermarkets. These scenes are by no means rare. We witnessed them in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and again in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince earlier this year. There can be little doubt that if disasters of similar scale struck Birmingham or Brussels or Barcelona, we would get a repeat performance. When it comes to securing the basic necessities of life, occurrences of this nature are clearly inevitable. What else are people going to do? True, some are helping themselves to plasma screen televisions while they are at it. This behaviour is hardly morally commendable. But in the wider scheme of things, heavy duty military mobilisation to prevent theft of consumer durables does not suggest itself as a natural first concern for the authorities. Yet this is what appears to be happening. Some 7,000 troops have occupied the city, and the local military commander has sent soldiers out with megaphones to warn Concepción’s 500,000 inhabitants that a dusk to dawn curfew has been imposed. ‘I would advise criminals not to mess with the armed forces. Our response will be severe, but within the context of the law,’ he added. One person learned ‘not to mess’ the hard way, and was shot and killed last night. Meanwhile, there are clear signs of class polarisation, with reports that property owners are organising groups to defend their property, or at least what is left of it. Whether these groups are armed or not is not specified. Chilean president Michelle Bachelet has weighed in with the obligatory condemnation of ‘pillage and criminality’. What would be rather more to the point would be for Ms Bachelet to condemn the incompetence that has left her government unable to cope with the proverbial ‘small earthquake in Chile, not many dead’. This was scarcely an unforeseeable event. An administration more concerned with saving lives than stopping the theft of televisions would be detailing the army to help people survive, rather than gunning them down. Either get some food in there or let the unfortunate earthquake victims use what might otherwise go to waste. And remember that when the massive bill for the damage comes in, the cost of a few poxy TVs is neither here nor there. http://www.davidosler.com/2010/03/chile_the_class_politics_of_lo.html http://www.davidosler.com/2010/03/chile_the_class_politics_of_lo.html International Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:13:44 +0000 joked in 2007, should not be in receipt of Arts Council grants. On what grounds they might be deemed intrinsically more or less deserving than heterosexual Estonian bipeds, he didn’t say. But clearly the Old Etonian element among leading Tories has got something of a downer on amputees. Hence Boris Johnson’s column in the Daily Telegraph this morning, in which he merrily compares Gordon Brown’s chances of winning the next election with the prospects enjoyed by a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest. Boom, boom. Still, at least the Nasty Party now no longer feels compelled to go in for autopilot gay-bashing and mockery of the disabled simultaneously. In their terms, that’s probably progress. Readers will know that I’m the last person to swoon like a crudely-propositioned Victorian maiden the moment I hear a mildly politically incorrect wisecrack. My only objection to BoJo’s gag is that it is not particularly funny. If you really want to learn how to sock it to the raspberry ripples properly, go and listen to Scottish stand-up Jerry Sadowitz do his Heather Mills routine. At least that has genuine satirical edge. Otherwise, the London mayor’s main contention still stands. Despite what looks like a rogue poll over the weekend, putting the gap between the two main parties at just two percentage points, few of the political betting public consider the chances of an outright Labour victory worth a flutter. That said, the lead enjoyed by the Conservative Party is falling fast, and the Tories damn well know it. Two years ago, especially after the loss of the Glasgow East by-election, I honestly believed that Labour was sleepwalking towards a defeat of 1931 proportions. Instead, we are looking at a common or garden election loss on a scale from which recovery will be possible in years rather than decades. That, under the circumstances, almost qualifies as a result. Meanwhile, might I just leave de Pfeffel with this 2003 headline from the BBC News website? It reads: Mt Cameroon tamed by one-legged man.]]> http://www.davidosler.com/2010/03/despite_all_the_amputations_la.html http://www.davidosler.com/2010/03/despite_all_the_amputations_la.html Politics Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:29:42 +0000 I REMEMBER how incredulous I felt when fighting broke out between Britain and Argentina over the Falklands back in 1982. War, to my 22-year-old mind, was somehow just not the sort of thing this country did. I knew that conflicts still happened in the third world, because I’d seen them on telly. I was even aware that members of family served as conscripts in world war one, world war two and Korea. But that was before I was born, which at that age basically equates to ‘so long ago it doesn’t count’. By this stage I was just starting to get involved politically, having joined the Labour Party Young Socialists the year before. But such activity hardly dominated my life, and I was still rather caught up in the hedonistic world of playing in rock bands, getting wasted, chasing skirt, attending all night parties in Hackney squats and other such activities proper to a good-looking young man with his own flat in London. And now a real live shooting match had broken out in the South Atlantic. People were dying, and everything. To use an expression that was current at the time, this was ‘total heavy shit, man’. I wasn’t sure why it was happening, but I was sure that I was against it. In as far as I analysed the causes at all, I put the whole thing down to the individual volition of Margaret Thatcher, whom I believed at the time to represent creeping fascism. Yet Labour leader Michael Foot gave his full support to the war effort. Naturally I went on the protest marches, motivated mainly by pacifism, without imagining then that this was an activity I would have to engage in repeatedly throughout my adult life. Some of my more seriously-minded mates had started to get into this Marxism malarkey, and naturally the far left was split all over the place. Kirk from the Revolutionary Communist Party rightly lambasted my reformism in not demanding the defeat of British imperialism and military victory for Argentina . Couldn’t I see that the Malvinas was rightly theirs? I think I’m right to recall that the Socialist Workers’ Party said more or less the same, albeit not quite so stridently. This was probably because they comrades knew fine well that open avowal of revolutionary defeatism would see the comrades get their faces filled in on the Saturday morning paper sale. My number one stoner buddy Mark was in the Militant Tendency, somewhat inexplicably giving its proscription on members skinning up. We got through many quarters of rocky and Leb as he tried to explain the virtues of a socialist federation of Britain, Argentina and the Falklands to me. It’s a transitional demand, innit. I never quite got my head around the idea, and not just because of the blow. How was that going to work, then? There was another lot called Socialist Organiser, known as colloquially as ‘the Soggies’. In as far as I understood their position, they didn’t want Britain to win. But they didn’t want Argentina to win, either. So they raised the slogan of ‘self-determination for the Falkland Islanders’. As most of those living on the archipelago were essentially super-patriotic Brits in exile, that equated to support for the status quo. There must have been political groups analogous to the ‘pro-war left’ of recent years, although I was not aware of them at the time. They would surely have stressed that Argentina was in the grip of a reactionary military junta, who staged the invasion to drum up patriotic sentiment. Moreover, the point that the Falkland Islanders did want to be ruled by them is not nugatory. So I didn’t really come to any conclusion, and spent my nights hanging around at Hanoi Rocks and Belle Stars gigs instead. Even retrospectively, I haven’t really worked out the correct proletarian political orientation on this one. Fast forward 28 years, and tensions between Britain and Argentina over that poxy little outcrop of rocks is once again on the rise. Hopefully there will be no shooting this time, but the economic stakes are far, far higher. It transpires that the area around the Falklands could hold more oil and gas than the North Sea. The case for the return the Malvinas to what is now a democratic Argentina is pretty much unanswerable. The very idea of a colony is untenable in the twenty-first century, and military expropriation in the distant past does not decree the right to occupation in perpetuity. Sure, the rights of those living on the Falklands have to be taken into full consideration. But this is a situation where something has to give; a negotiated settlement giving them their choice of continued right of residence, Argentinian citizenship or dual nationality with a generous cash bung, or resettlement elsewhere with an even more generous cash bung, would be the easiest thing all round. The trouble is the oil and gas. With the North Sea close to exhaustion, no government in London is going to concede to mere common sense. http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/the_left_and_the_falklands_isl.html http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/the_left_and_the_falklands_isl.html The left Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:34:42 +0000 Daily Telegraph this morning. No kid. In fairness to economics editor Edmund Conway, I suspect the subs were getting a little carried away. The piece at no point actively incites the bourgeoisie to stockpile automatic weaponry in anticipation of the need to gun down hordes of Jobseekers’ Allowance claimants on the rampage through the leafier parts of Richmond upon Thames. But the article does offer an insight into what sections of the right are thinking right now. Maybe that headline was more of a Freudian slip than a genuine gaffe? Conway buys into the double dip recession scenario. While the credit crunch and the banking collapse are more or less over, stage two will essentially be driven by a crisis of sovereign debt. Whoever wins the next election, unprecedented spending cuts will be introduced, although the Tories have more relish for the task. Conway – who heard Tory economics spokesman George Osborne deliver the Mais lecture earlier this week – implicitly predicts that there will be resistance: Osborne is terrified of imposing such deep and painful cuts. He privately despairs that he will end up as the most unpopular politician in modern history. Probably not while Thatch is still alive. But I digress. Which helps explain his plan, spelt out last night, to set up a three-man Office for Budget Responsibility to advise him on how far to cut spending. The hope is that the OBR will attract the opprobrium when state-sector workers are laid off or given pay cuts, when VAT is raised, when the retirement age is increased, and when public-sector pensions are finally tackled. But the question that Osborne largely ducked was the issue of inequality. The gap between rich and poor is the widest since the 1930s, and is getting bigger, not smaller. After nervous acknowledgement of the current rioting in Greece, Conway reaches his conclusion: Ed Balls's plan to pitch this election as a class war is, I'm afraid, on the button. Class, money and privilege will be unavoidable issues during the next parliamentary term. Rather than ignoring them, the Tories must take action. Better to start thinking about free-market reforms that share the wealth more equitably than to leave it to the Left to suggest that taxes on the wealthy are the only solution. Mmmm. Not sure about Conway’s attempt to paint the Tories as the unwilling victims of some kind of recidivist New Labour reversion to neo-Marxist type. On, and the idea that the Tories have ever, at any point in their long existence, ignored class, money or privilege is risible. Sure, the have rhetorically downplayed the defence of privilege when that has suited their purposes. But how many Old Etonians can you squeeze into one shadow cabinet before it becomes obvious which class dominates the Conservative front bench? I’m also not quite sure what is meant by ‘free market reforms that share the wealth more equitably’. Off hand, I can think of few free market mechanisms that tend to redistribute towards the poor, and most have quite the reverse effect. And of course, the left will be in opposition. It can suggest whatever tax hikes it likes; it won’t be able to implement them. Yet it is noticeable that Conway’s concern is not to introduce egalitarian policies because they are desirable, or because they benefit the majority of the population. His chief interest is to shield the ultra-rich from unwanted attentions of the Inland Revenue. Obviously, this column is Bleeding Heart Liberalism lite compared to the nasty Hayek porn purveyed by some of the Daily Telegraph’s other contributors, who would probably have few qualms about arming themselves for class war. But the contradiction here is that no government – either Conservative or Labour – can mount the sort of full-frontal assault on state spending that all mainstream parties contemplate without making the current level of inequality look like the living embodiment of Acts 2:44. This is a circle that Osborne cannot possibly square.]]> http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/class_money_and_privilege_the.html http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/class_money_and_privilege_the.html Conservative Party Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:18:55 +0000 here. Readers are invited to have a look and make suggestions. Personally I like the design. It’s clean, easy to read, and classier than a bunch of birds from Newham on their first hen night. But see what you think. ]]> http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/redesign_update.html http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/redesign_update.html Blogging Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:45:19 +0000 big problem with the genocidaire prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea is not so much his penchant for trivial workaday misdemeanours like the annihilation of a quarter of all living Cambodians, but rather that he tried to ‘impose fairness’. Just like Harriet Harman and her ‘mad Equality Bill’, in fact. Unfortunately, Simon doesn’t quite clinch the parallel by nailing Hattie on her policy on forced agrarian collectivisation. But let’s not quibble; all but fools will instantly identify the immediately obvious basic underlying continuity of the two politicians’ inherently socialist thought processes. All this and more can be found in the somewhat febrile if highly entertaining examination of Labour’s latest campaign slogan – ‘A future fair for all’ – to which Heffer devotes his column today. The basic pessimism of the rightwing mindset is on full display. ‘We are not equal. We cannot be made equal,’ Heffer intones. Life is not fair, nothing that governments can do can change or even substantially ameliorate that, so the plebs should live with it. [L]et us go back to that slogan, and its watchword: fairness. It is a word that radiates cynicism. It imputes the lowest of motives to its target audience: which is that they will want to be governed not by a party that gives them a fair crack of the whip, but by one that gives them a fairer crack than they truly deserve. They will get this fairer crack at the expense of others who, in a mirror-image of their own experience, must make do with less, often much less, than they deserve. What is fair about that? The assumption here is that the default setting in a class-divided society is the kind of limited fair crackdom that the hard right advocates. In Hefferworld, we all have an opportunity to excel, and to go as far as our talents will carry us. And this, very patently, is not the case. The mere existence of inherited wealth – whether one approves of it or not – nullifies any such pretence. Money buys privilege in a myriad of ways, from private education to better access to top universities, social connections, and even the ability to work for nothing as an intern in a fashion PR house. Any talent that can properly be described as inherent must, by definition, be distributed across rich and poor alike in a bell curve manner. If everyone could go as far as their talents could carry them, that would be reflected in the social composition of the political elite and the legal profession and national newspaper columnists and FTSE 100 chief executives. It most obviously is not. This works profoundly to society’s disbenefit, by allowing the mediocre to edge out those more able but still skint. Moreover, such a patent disconnect between effort and reward contributes to the alienation widely felt among the poorer sections of society. In plain English, that is 'not fair', and this is the problem that social democracy rightly exists to rectify. The remedy inevitably involves wealth redistribution, and I suspect this is the nub of the question for Heffer. But to put it in a way that he might be able to understand, must it not be right to remove the distortions to the unregulated free market in talent, thereby maximising overall social utility? The only people who should logically object to fairness are those that gain from the unfairness that has always characterised Britain.]]> http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/harriet_harman_isnt_pol_pot_re.html http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/harriet_harman_isnt_pol_pot_re.html Society Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:06:29 +0000 Matt Hanley is a thoroughly nice bloke, on the socialist wing of the Green Party, a former union rep who has organised low-paid retail workers, an active anti-fascist, and a full-time campaigner for human rights. So obviously I won’t be voting for him. I’m a Labour Party member, so I can’t; I will campaign for the Labour candidate instead. The point I am making here is that sometimes in politics, it is sometimes necessary to choose between good competing candidates for the same job. This is very much the case for lefties considering who to back in the coming contest for general secretary of Unison. Once again, the left vote will be split, this time between three rather than the customary two leftwing challengers. Those planning to run against £127,000-a-year incumbent Dave Prentis are Socialist Party member Roger Bannister, United Left and Labour Representation Committee man Paul Holmes, and little-known left independent Delroy Creary. The latter has garnered only minimal support, I gather. I cannot pretend that I follow every nuances of the ongoing sparring between contending political factions in Britain’s largest public sector union. But time was when part of my pay cheque as a journalist was derived from keeping tabs on what was going on in Unison’s predecessor NALGO, and ever since then I have held Bannister in good regard. He has a more than credible track record in past contests. Last time round, he secured 41,406 votes, easily trouncing the 18,000 or so secured by my sometime beer buddy Jon Rogers. [Note to Jon: pull your socks up, slacker.] That said, political considerations are decisive, and on the key political issue at stake in this election, Holmes is advancing the better position. The principle dividing line, of course, is the attitude the candidates take to Unison’s ties to the Labour Party. Bannister is openly campaigning for disaffiliation. Holmes argues for the union to affiliate in its entirety, not only in part as it does now, and wants to democratise the Labour Link structure so that Unison can use its political weight to full effect inside what is almost certainly the only party that will have socialist MPs in a few months time. But members will get an annual ballot on affiliation, which they don’t have now. The reality, of course, is that neither Bannister nor Holmes will win, and that Prentis will be returned for another term. Effectively, the are contesting the right to spend thousands of pounds to be the runner up. In that sense, any divisions on the left are neither here nor there, although clearly a single agreed candidate would have been preferable to a multiplicity. But if anyone in Unison is interested in the opinion from an admitted outsider, I reckon a vote for Holmes is the best way to signal support for greater political involvement by the base of the union. I’m happy to back him.]]> http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/roger_bannister_or_paul_holmes.html http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/roger_bannister_or_paul_holmes.html Trade Unions Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:21:39 +0000 some on the left to write off the story as a Tory-orchestrated personal smear, designed chiefly to deflect attention from Conservative policy shortcomings, themselves come across as entirely insincere, unconvincing, and therefore ultimately misguided. No amount of reflex Labour loyalism can get away from the essential point that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable in any modern workplace, from Ten Downing Street to the local fish and chip shop. If anyone else comported himself in such a manner, any on-the-case union rep would have a grievance lodged with HR in no time flat. Sure, it is legitimate to criticise the catchpenny way the Tories have tried to make political capital out of this through some two-bob front organisation charity, but that does not let Brown off the hook on the substance of the claim. Shouty Boss Syndrome was actually commonplace as late as the 1980s. It is perhaps one of the few triumphs of employment legislation in the intervening period that jumped up middle managers now know that they cannot start bawling people out the minute they get the keys to their first company car. The revelations, in and of themselves, are hardly likely to push any sizeable number of Labour voters into the Tory camp this late in the electoral cycle. But speaking as somebody who will be out on the knocker for Gordon Brown’s party, all I can say is that they will not make the sell any easier. Once more we are being let down by the men at the top.]]> http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/gordon_brown_the_bully_in_ten.html http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/gordon_brown_the_bully_in_ten.html New Labour Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:04:26 +0000 Dr Simon Singh - the man getting sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association after writing about their particular brand of 'alternative medicine' - will find himself in the Court of Appeal on Tuesday. The case will be heard by three of the most powerful legal figures in the UK, namely Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, Master of the Rolls Lord Neuberger and Lord Justice Sedley. Given my own impending appointment with Mr Justice Eady over a 2007 post concerning Baader-Meinhof suspect turned Tower Hamlets Tory activist Johanna Kaschke, I am extremely pleased to be one of the speakers at a solidarity meeting for Simon in London tomorrow night. Also on the bill is consultant cardiologist Dr Peter Wilmshurst, who faces a libel action after criticising research by US company NMT Medical, in what is a test case for the freedom of scientists to engage in academic debate. The other guest is Dr Ben Goldacre, author of the 'Bad Science' column in the Guardian, who successfully fought off a libel action from a vitamin manufacturer who promoted his pills to AIDS sufferers in South African townships. I have over the years shared platforms with many luminaries of the left and the labour movement, including Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, Peter Tatchell and Arthur Scargill. I have even addressed a 20,000-strong demo in Istanbul, made of up of angry Turkish ultraleftists raging at the state-directed murder of one of their comrades. But this gathering will be more daunting than even those rallies, not least because I will be the only bleedin' thicko without a PhD. The event kicks off on Monday night at 7.00pm, at the Monk Exchange pub in Strutton Ground, SW1. Nearest tube: Victoria. It's two quid to get in. I'd love it if any Dave's Part readers are able to get along. Wanna see four guys bricking it at the prospect of being homeless and bankrupt? This is the place to be.]]> http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/simon_singh_libel_case_public.html http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/simon_singh_libel_case_public.html Politics Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:14:41 +0000 THERE now seems little doubt that Mossad took out Hamas commander Mahmoud al Mabhouh, either with or without the complicity of other Palestinian elements. Yet astonishingly enough, the debate on the assassination somehow centres on alleged duplicitous use of British passports on the part of the Isrealis. Effectively, the Israeli ambassador to London has been summoned to the Foreign Office for a bollocking, at which David Miliband will tell him: ‘Look, no problems with you lot bumping off that dodgy Pally bloke. But it’s just not on for your country’s hit squads to travel on fake UK papers, old chap. Don’t let us catch you doing it again.’ What is being missed here is the question of whether premeditated extrajudicial murder of specific individuals at the behest of a state can ever be morally legitimate, and whether or not it was morally legitimate in this instance. Targeted killings – to use the currently fashionable euphemism – are by no means rare. States do it all the time. I’m certainly not ‘demonising Israel’ on this score. It’s always impossible to provide proof on such matters, but it remains a reasonable surmise that the Russian government had a hand in poisoning Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210. There’s ample evidence that Syria did for Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri, and that there was British Army involvement in the slaying of Irish republican solicitor Pat Finucane. But Israel unquestionably resorts to targeted killings with infelicitous alacrity. One recalls the 2004 guided missile attack on Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Yassin, a wheelchair-bound and almost blind cleric. Nine bystanders died as a result of the incident. I could cite many other cases. It does seem to me that the al Mabhouh murder breaches the principle of respect for human life. I sure that an excellent hypothetical moral case for targeted killings can be constructed in urgent situations where there are no other means to avoid given imminent harm. But the criteria do not appear to have been met on this occasion. It may well be that Mossad has successfully eliminated one of the enemies of the country it exists to serve. But where was the clear and present danger? What the Israeli secret service has perpetrated was reprehensible and deserving of international reproach. http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/mahmoud_al_mabhouh_the_ethics.html http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/mahmoud_al_mabhouh_the_ethics.html International Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:29:09 +0000 speech Tory frontbencher Nick Herbert will deliver in Washington today. If he was being entirely honest, he would add the words ‘but only after Labour actually delivered it and didn’t leave us any choice in the matter’. Of course nobody can credibly argue that David Cameron and his Notting Hill Set coterie personally harbour the type of crude homophobia that was dominant during the hey-day of Thatcherism. But it remains a fact that the Tories are the party of Section 28 and Labour are the party of equalised age of consent, civil partnership, gay adoption rights and a prohibition on anti-gay discrimination in the provision of goods and services. And don’t forget that it was Labour that decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults in private in the first place. In short, every single advance for gay rights in this country has occurred under a Labour government. Labour has set the agenda for decade after decade, often in the face of concerted opposition from the Tory right. Conservative motivation for catching up is rooted as much in opportunism as conviction. It is easy to ‘champion’ something now there is nothing of substance left to achieve. There is also the question of whether the gin and Jag belt golf club bigot tendency has truly been converted. Consider this revealing comment from rightwing columnist Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph this morning: We hear of constituency activists' anger that safe seats are given shortlists comprising ethnic minorities, women and homosexual men, as happened in a Surrey constituency last weekend. What’s with the white het blokes only stricture, Simon? Don’t they have queers in the Home Counties or something? And last time I checked, women made up about half the population of Guildford and Leatherhead. They even have black people living there now, I gather. Oh, and one last question for Mr Herbert. Given that Conservatives ‘champion’ gay equality, can we take it that your party will terminate its alliances with assorted east European homophobes in the European parliament? Sorry, speak up. Didn’t quite hear you.]]> http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/do_the_tories_champion_gay_equ.html http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/do_the_tories_champion_gay_equ.html Conservative Party Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:34:52 +0000 I’M NOT exactly certain when advocacy of workers’ self-management along the lines of 1950s Yugoslavia became official Conservative Party policy. But deliberate emulation of Josip Broz Tito is surely taking the notion of Red Toryism one step too far. Little wonder, then, that yesterday’s commitment to John Lewis-style co-operatives and social enterprise across the public sector left Labour thoroughly flummoxed. Shadow chancellor George Osborne bigged up the move as a “a transfer of power to working people” on a scale not seen since the introduction of the right to buy council houses during the hey-day of Thatcherism. Consciously or otherwise, the very language smacks of the Labour’s 1973 programmatic commitment to “bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families”. Only once you read the small print is it evident that we are not witnessing a desperate Tory ploy to cheat the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition out of the hardcore Trot vote. In the current political context, the Conservatives’ sudden conversion to workers’ control has to be read as part of the continued drive on the part of all major parties to privatise public services. After they are ostensibly mutualised, social enterprises will be subjected to competitive tendering, internal markets and divisive incentive structures. The economies of scale and low cost finance available to large public sector organisations will also be lost. As an added bonus to the right, a serious wedge will be driven into national pay bargaining and public sector trade unionism further weakened. In other words, forget all Cameron’s talk about ‘Conservative means to progressive ends’. The big idea here is to open up Jobcentres, schools and NHS trust to marketisation. Those guys remain as high on Hayek as they ever were. http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/conservatives_and_coops_vote_b.html http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/conservatives_and_coops_vote_b.html Conservative Party Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:03:42 +0000 deployed by leading philosopher John Gray among others – really a more accurate designation? Renegade Hizb ut Tahrir man Ed Husain, whose Quilliam Foundation is now widely feted as the last best hope for those who would defang British Muslim youth attracted to such positions, draws such an explicit parallel between Islamism and Trotskyism in an article in the last edition of New Statesman. Husain writes: The irony is that Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain owes a great deal to the Socialist Workers Party, through one of HuT's earliest and most energetic activists, Farid Kassim. He started his political life in the party, and introduced much of the SWP's organisation and doctrine into his new group. You can call activists such as Kassim "Muslim Trotskyites" … In my student days, I, too, was a Muslim Trot and believed that political Islam, or Islamism, was an ideology that would unite all Muslims. I was part of a vanguard, with a quasi-Marxist world-view. We replaced "workers" with "Muslims" and swapped "Islam" for the "social" in socialism. Thanks but no thanks for the elective affinity, Ed. Such a contention clearly merits a rejoinder from the far left, which has so far been noticeable by its absence. Should we accept the assertion in whole or part, either delightedly or with reluctance? Should we indignantly reject it out of hand? Can it be true that Islamism is simply a distorted expression of the revolutionary anti-imperialist mindset, with HuT playing the role of generic badass Swuppies who somehow got religion? I would argue no. The starting point for Marxists, as ever, is to think about the class interests political Islam promotes. The basic reason that it remains a doctrine of the right rather than a doctrine of the left is that it would leave ownership and control of the means of production in private hands, just as fascism does. True, Islamism’s economic programme would seek to destroy multinational capitalist companies. But rather than replace them with workers’ control, it would leave business in the hands of Muslim businessmen. I was going to say businessmen and women, but let’s not go there. In that sense, it is ironically as much an explicitly anti-communist justification of private property as liberalism in either its Lockean or Rawlsian variants. Some commentators point to Islamism’s plebeian mass base. Again, this is not decisive. Most sociological surveys of the rise of fascism are clear that such movements were dependent on popular support among the middle and working classes. That does not detract from their ultimately bourgeois class content. What about the implicit millenarianism in political Islam’s vision? Well, as Gray makes clear in his thought-provoking book Black Mass – an absolute must read for anybody interested in ideological politics – millenarianism is not the exclusive preserve of either left or right. Any number of doctrines, from Leninism through to neoconservatism and free market fundamentalism and onwards to fascism, are based on cadre organisation and can be accused of being premised on a notion of some historical process that ultimately leads to secular utopia. There is no denying that certain strains of Trotskyism display these characteristics in full. For instance, some groupings insist that the petty factional manoeuvres necessitated by ‘decisive leadership’ can be justified by ‘the actuality of the revolution’, and are thus judged not by the norms of democracy but rather on ‘the stage of history’. Underlying this is a mutant reading of Lukacs on the part of dialecticians congenitally incapable of settling accounts with Hegel. But in simpler terms, this debate boils down to the use of analogy in political analysis. Radical Islamism is neither Islamofascism nor Islamoleninism but a political development sui generis. Anyone can pick the authoritarian strand of thought they most despise and attach the prefix –Islamo. Husain’s analytical failure in this respect can only make for obfuscation and serves principally to provide another stick with which to beat the far left. It’s not as if there is a widely acknowledged lack of handy cudgels, either.]]> http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/islamoleninism_are_hizb_uttahr.html http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/islamoleninism_are_hizb_uttahr.html War on terror Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:30:00 +0000 endorsed by the Labour Representation Committee. For the sake of the wider left, the SP might like to bear that in mind when deciding whether to go ahead on this one.]]> http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/socialist_party_mulls_challeng.html http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/socialist_party_mulls_challeng.html Socialist Party Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:25:51 +0000 Daily Telegraph this morning. That alone points to a worrying lack of attention on the part of Britain’s security services. You kind of want to hope that the funny people manage to identify the right guys to keep tabs on and bust when necessary, at least most of the time. But Mr Evans – looking all calm and relaxed in his open neck Tattershall check shirt, sleeves rolled up to indicate readiness to get down to work – does make one very important and entirely correct assertion. The international Islamist far right will indeed extract maximum advantage from the Mohamed case, enabling them to undertake ‘propaganda and campaigns to undermine our will and ability to confront them’. So the pertinent question becomes: who provided them with this wonderful opportunity? Mr Evans seeks to persuade us that the only reason MI5 wished to keep what happened to Mr Mohamed in Morocco and in Cuba quiet was not a desire to cover up Britain’s complicity in torture of the most appalling nature, but the need not to compromise the UK’s intelligence sharing relationship with the US. He is not wholly convincing. The government could simply have asked Washington for exceptional permission to publish the seven paragraphs made available by Lord Neuberger earlier this week. That way, a year of legal wrangling could have been avoided, and suggestions of a cover up effectively defused. It does not follow that Binyam Mohamed is a nice bloke, or that his activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan did not merit investigation by the security services. That’s what the taxpayer funds them to do. But it remains the case that he was released without charge after seven years of detention, during which he was regularly beaten and scalded, deprived of sleep, and subjected to the mutilation of his penis with a scalpel. The idea that he was involved in some kind of dirty bomb plot alongside Jose Padilla is now seen as utterly discredited. Al Qa’eda is known to run a sophisticated public relations operation. What happened to Mr Mohamed will serve its purposes admirably. The events of this week constitute an own goal of monstrous proportions.]]> http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/binyam_mohamed_own_goal.html http://www.davidosler.com/2010/02/binyam_mohamed_own_goal.html War on terror Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:26:42 +0000