Hours of sectarian fun are to be had at Electoral Commission website, examining the financial accounts produced by all parties that stand in UK elections.

I haven’t had time to digest all the goodies yet. But even from a cursory glance, I can assure readers that this is a goldmine for leftist trainspotters.

Thus I can tell you that SPGB copped a legacy donation of £85,317 last year, and that membership of the CPB rose from 821 in 2004 to 923 in 2006.

Workers’ Liberty is nominally a profitable operation, while Respect have registered an outfit called Respect – the Unity Coalition (NI) to operate in Northern Ireland.

Oh, and Respect’s membership subscriptions last year fell from £126,660 to £48,708, confirming earlier reports that recruitment isn’t exactly going great guns.

I suspect that Arthur Scargill might be fibbing when he gives membership of the SLP as 3,000 affiliated and 2,958 individual, though. That’s because membership dues total just £9,075, and I’m sure the dwindling ranks of the party’s supporters are being asked to cough up rather more than three quid a head.

Scargill’s vanity project is £16,571 in deficit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And a contemporary newspaper article speaks of:

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

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

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

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

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

Back in the early seventies, a small number of anarchist activists initiated Britain’s first urban guerrilla group, styling themselves the Angry Brigade. They were responsible for around 25 bomb attacks between 1970 and 1972, at least according to the police.

Mainly they targeted property, including the home of a Tory cabinet minister, although in one case, one person was slightly injured.

Even though I was only ten at the start of this period, I still remember the television coverage rather vividly. As an adult, I have read many of the ‘communiqués’ the organisation issued to justify what it had done.

Many of them were calls to action; their impatience with what the Angry Brigade seemingly regarded as the quiescence of the British working class, even at one of the most militant phases in its history, often shines through.

‘Bogside, Clydeside, join the Angry Side,’ communiqué number eleven memorably implored. The implication here is neither that the Catholic community of Derry, in direct daily confrontation with the British Army, nor the shipyard workers that were shortly to lead the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders sit-in, were angry enough already.

I’m too young to remember whether any of this had a wider resonance, either on society as a whole or on the far left. Perhaps older readers could fill me in here?

But I presume that there will have trade unionists who didn’t feel that strike action was quite enough; that there were revolutionary socialist polytechnic lecturers who trotted out the ‘Marxists condemn individual terrorism’ line, but who were secretly quite elated with the idea that somebody somewhere was really, really sticking it to the man.

Some 35 years later, we are at a point where the struggle at the point of production is at a particularly low ebb, to the frustration of many.

Large organisations on the left ‘refuse to condemn’ atrocities such as 9/11, while the politicians that serve as their figureheads insist that it would be morally justified to assassinate Tony Blair.

They see themselves as somehow ‘all Hizbollah’, and earnestly argue that the only way to be consistently anti-imperialist is to demand ‘victory to the Iraqi resistance’.

The mental distance between getting a vicarious hard on thinking about the bomb attacks of others and going on to a bomb oneself is not unimaginably long. In the case of the Angry Brigade, it certainly wasn’t too long for middle class white leftists with a graduate education to travel.

Can any explicitly socialist publication in Britain credibly claim a five-figure circulation anymore? And does it matter if they can’t?

Let’s start from the premise that New Statesman doesn’t count for these purposes; it’s better described as left of centre rather than leftwing.

Last time I checked, the Morning Star and Socialist Worker were officially insisting that they shift more than 10,000 but less than 20,000 copies, per day and per week respectively.

Then again, I have heard sources close to both these fine organs frankly admit over a beer that quoted figures more accurately reflect print run than actual sales. I look forward to the outraged denials from CPB and SWP loyalists in the comments box.

I further understand, as a former contributor to the magazines, that Tribune and Red Pepper may also put an optimistic slant on these matters, shall we charitably say.

Weekly Worker does about 2,000 papers in hard copy format, but can of course boast a considerable online readership. I assume that the rest of the field – the Socialist, Solidarity, Respect, Socialist Resistance, Workers Power, Permanent Revolution – number paid sales in the hundreds.

It wasn’t always like this. I have seen estimates for the peak circulation of the Daily Worker at 94,000 and 115,000, and in the early 1970s, SW is said to have sold around 30,000.

Nowadays, the truth is that popular leftwing blogs such as Socialist Unity and Lenin’s Tomb outstrip what were once the big hitters, and even Dave’s Part gets more readers than the second and third rank print titles.

I guess this is just another one of the many pointers to a general decline in class consciousness in Britain in recent decades, and I also suspect the often mediocre quality of the journalism on offer is a factor as well. But I’d be interested to hear what others think.

Will we ever see another socialist magazine or newspaper that can impact on public political debate and act as a counterweight to today’s national press, which – to paraphrase Dorothy Parker – offer the whole gamut of political opinion from A to B?

Or is the future online? Will the existing Brit left blogs develop the kind of readership enjoyed by some left-liberal political blogs in the US?

Footnote: This train of thought was sparked by reading an article about Italian communist paper L'Unità in the Financial Times today:

L'Unità, the daily newspaper that rose and fell with the once-powerful Italian Communist party, has gone through such a revival that it is now facing an attractive takeover bid by the Angelucci family, industrialists who run a rightwing tabloid.

Just like the Italian left, L'Unità, which was founded by Antonio Gramsci in 1924, has gone through a reformist makeover. Today it sells 50,000 copies and has foreign bureaux only in Washington and Paris. It identifies itself with the new Democratic party, whose leader, Walter Veltroni, mayor of Rome, was once a communist and L'Unità editor.

Read the rest here.

I even knew some of the people in it; members included the husband of my mother’s best friend. The first of my pals to get politicised was a guy a couple of years older than me, who got a place to study at a redbrick and rapidly signed up with the Young Communist League.

I remember buying a copy of the YCL paper Challenge from him and talking a bit about why he had joined. As a young factory worker who realised from day one that there was something wrong with a society where people like me did all the graft while the owner of the company spent all day playing golf, I was by this time inching my way towards socialist politics.

I’d been on Rock Against Racism and Youth CND demos, where I had picked up copies of Socialist Worker and Socialist Challenge. But this being the hey day of the Sex Pistols, I was more sympathetic to anarchist ideas.

In short, I almost certainly would have got involved in something more organised, had there been anything to get involved with in Wellingborough, Northants. But the CPGB had all the appeal of root canal surgery while being forced to listen to Belgian techno.

The USSR, I told Rob, was a repressive dictatorship over the working class and the CPGB were basically its UK sales reps. He hit back with the contention that I had gullibly swallowed too much ruling class propaganda and that it wasn’t like that at all. Sadly, we now know for certain that the ruling class were bang on the money.

By the early 1980s, I had moved to London and become a student myself. Even at this stage, the Communist Party remained the largest organisation on the left, claiming about 20,000 in its ranks. While that dwarfed the SWP and the Millies, still on about 2,000 each, it seemed as nothing compared to the size of the Bennite current. What’s more, Communist Party politics didn’t seem that different from the Labour left, either. So I cut to the chase and joined the Labour Party Young Socialists.

Just ten years later, both the CPGB and the USSR had dissolved. One element of the party – the eurocommunist wing around the magazine Marxism Today - even set the pace for the drift rightwards experienced by the Labour Party and trade unions in the Thatcher period.

Several groups – ranging from very small to just plain small – claim its mantle, and with former members in positions of influence, it can perhaps be said to have an ideological afterlife. But most of its trade union fellow-travellers will retire soon enough.

For an organisation that was never a mass party – unlike its counterparts in several continental countries – there is an extensive literature on Communist Party history. The most recent addition is ‘The Kick Inside: Revolutionary Opposition in the CPGB, 1960-91’, which focuses on a number of internal and external left oppositions that arose inside the organisation.

This is probably one for the trainspotters; the material on the two original British Maoist currents, for instance, is of little immediate relevance. More information about what these grouplets actually did in the labour movement would have been useful, too.

One splinter, the uncritically pro-Soviet New Communist Party, apparently still functions. But the critique I offered as a gobby teenage punk still applies to these diehards, a fortiori given the disappearance of the workers’ fatherland.

Unlike the author, I don’t see any of the ‘hard Stalinist’ tendencies of the 1960s and 1970s as in any way saving graces. It is questionable even whether they could even objectively be described as ‘revolutionary’.

Ultimately, the snazzily-named Committee to Defeat Revisionism for Communist Unity, the still-extant-last-time-I-checked Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), the Appeal Group and Proletarian barely register as also rans.

That leaves the last of the outfits Parker details, which presently trades as the Communist Party of Great Britain. And why not? It’s a brand name with a certain cachet, even though I wouldn’t fancy taking on all the historical baggage it carries myself. Unlike most of its rivals, it has not only consolidated its existence but even managed a modest measure of growth in recent years.

As its founder-members are the first to admit, probably the main reason it has done so is its ideological evolution away from Stalinism toward many essentially Trot positions.

It also publishes the controversial – and therefore must-read – newspaper Weekly Worker, often unfairly derided as a gossip rag. That is absolute nonsense.

Sure, they’re a bunch of ultralefts going nowhere fast. But personally, I am bored witless with socialist publications that think it is enough to rehash Guardian articles and tack two or three transitional demands on the end. Weekly Worker is a grown-up Marxist paper that seems to be the only place to find the debates on strategy and tactics the far left badly needs to have.

It is currently faced with the need to find an extra £500 a month to meet increased printing bills. I’ve taken out a standing order, and I think anyone concerned with the future of the UK far left should also back the WW appeal.

Lawrence Parker, ‘The Kick Inside - Revolutionary Opposition in the CPGB 1960-1991’ may be ordered from the author at vorzedia@yahoo.co.uk, Payment - £5.15 including P&P - may be made by PayPal to the same email address.

Picture shows post-war CPGB recruitment poster

To put the same point another way, come up with a list of the most important living anglosphere intellectuals, from across the spectrum. Off the top of my head, I’d mention people such as David Harvey, Robert Brenner, Francis Fukuyama, Noam Chomsky, Samuel Huntingdon, Joseph Stiglitz, maybe Richard Dawkins.

You might select entirely different names, but hopefully you see where I am coming from on this. Whatever you think of their arguments, not to have these guys on your bookshelves is equivalent to falling asleep in class. But while most of this blog's readers know who they are, for most of the population, name recognition will range from limited to virtually non-existent.

Then think about the people who most shape popular political perceptions. True, some of the above have access to broadsheet op-ed pages. But in this context, the Guardian’s readership is too miniscule to count.

The mass audiences in Britain and the US go to those with broadcast and tabloid slots. The other common denominator is that they are usually effective humourists.

Any one column from Richard Littlejohn - pictured - will have more political impact than a dozen party conference speeches. Not having a comparable figure on our side is a loss for the left.

Littlejohn would probably like to think of himself as even-handed, and it is true that he directs plenty of venom towards ‘Call Me Dave’. Maybe his underlying message is closer to the UK Independence Party line than Compassionate Conservatism.

But the ability to write the soundbites his target audience of Sky viewers and Daily Mail readers later roll out as if they had thought them up themselves is a prime political asset for the British right in general.

On the other side of the Atlantic, US political satirist PJ O’Rourke is another case in point. The politics suck, but the gags are actually funny. That means the politics usually goes unnoticed.

But they are certainly there. I’ve just finished his book ‘Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism’. When writing about the Middle East, for instance, he quotes leading US rightwing academic experts on the region, including Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis. The man has obviously done his homework and builds it in to what he writes. He's good, damn it.

A handful of figures on the left can pull off the same trick. I watched a DVD of the Michael Moore flick Sicko a couple of nights back, and couldn’t help admiring how well it was all done.

I mean, it was dreadfully simplistic stuff. There are plenty of more sophisticated arguments for universal healthcare in the US than the ones he adduces, but that is entirely beside the point; reeling off country-by-country stats on proportion of GDP spent on health services is just plain dull.

In Britain we have Mark Steel, who can be extremely funny when he is on form, but lacklustre when he isn’t. Mark Thomas has built a young audience with an anti-arms trade stand-up routine. I’m not in a position to judge how effectively George Galloway utilises his TalkSport and cable television outlets as an anti-war platform, as I haven’t managed to listen to either. I’m sure readers will have their own opinions.

None of this is to decry the importance of theoretical clarity in politics. But we are not faced with an either/or choice here. Let me conclude with a plea for the left to transcend its frequently turgid literary output and at least try to couch its agitation in digestible terms. Until we do, few will listen. Sadly, we remain abso-bloody-lutely hopeless in this respect. Any ideas why?

The divisions underline a generalised lack of political seriousness, perhaps driven by some sense that the stakes are low. After all, the pumped up borough council that is the Greater Rubberstamp Assembly hardly represents Britain’s most puissant political body, is it? What does it matter that not a single socialist candidate has even a remote chance of success?

Well, it does matter, and this is why. The British National Party - logo above - is looking good to secure at least one and possibly even two seats. That will confer on it greater legitimacy and a better platform than it has ever previously enjoyed.

The truth is that the BNP has built itself – in the outer eastern suburbs of London, anyway – primarily by articulating real working class grievances. Socialists that still espouse class politics need to ask themselves why the far right is succeeding where the far left has so completely failed.

If you want a warning about where all this might be heading, look at continental Europe. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, parties of the populist right have in country after country both made real inroads into the voter base once enjoyed by social democracy and even the communist parties, and then gone on to consolidate them.

The earlier wave of British fascism peaked too early. The National Front enjoyed some degree of success – short of a real political breakthrough, thankfully - in the 1970s, but then lost ground after Thatcher’s Tories made a play for the anti-immigration vote. Cameron’s Conservatives are not going to do that a second time round.

What is more, today’s social conditions are far more propitious for the far right than the fag end years of the post-war consensus. The diminution of the welfare state, to the greater glory of neoliberalism, has created a terrifying mood of thorough-going despair not always fully visible from a north London winebar.

It would also be wrong for the left to duck the fact that immigration has created tensions within the working class, in a way that Marx and Engels would recognise from their analysis of the impact of the influx Irish labourers in the 1840s. Britain is not the great big happy multicultural family most of us would like it to be.

These are some of the reasons why the BNP vote has increased from 35,832 in the 1997 general election to 192,746 last time round, and from 102,000 in the 1999 Euro-election to 808,200 in the 2004. Labour has lost 4m votes over this period.

There are many explanations for why this has happened. By far the largest proportion of the blame accrues to a Thatcherised Labour Party, which long ago abandoned the people it once purported to represent.

But that doesn’t let the existing leadership of the left entirely off the hook; its decades-long failure to cohere a political organisation with any implantation in the social class it purports to represent has essentially given the BNP a free run.

Does it really take the election of two fascists to the Greater London Assembly to shock the Marxist left out of such damnable sectarian complacency? There really should be easier ways to learn this lesson, comrades.

ONE MINUTE French students were getting all uppity because of a ban on visitors of the opposite sex in university dorms; the next thing you know, ten million workers had taken over the factories and de Gaulle's semi-authoritarian state was visibly teetering.

Sadly, I was only eight at the time, and May 1968 will for me personally always be more about Lego then les événements. But for the soixante huitard generation, what happened in France that year was a defining political moment.

It is probably impossible to underestimate the subsequent psychological significance of these protests for the contemporary far left. Its pervasive role as a symbol is perhaps second only to that of Russia 1917.

What happened is frequently invoked to counter the commonsense argument that revolutions simply don't happen in advanced capitalist countries. May 1968 proves they can, we are told. Well, almost, anyway. But how valid is this case?

Prompted by the 40th anniversary media coverage that will presumably grow to a crescendo this month, I have been rereading some of the leftist literature put out to mark the 20th anniversary in 1988. Much of it, extravagently celebratory in tone, seems dramatically to overstate results and prospects.

Crucially, many writers fail to grasp that what occured was not a revolution. To say that is not to downplay the importance of developments that genuinely do deserve the much overused adjective 'earth-shaking'.

France in 1968 was a textbook example of dual power, in the sense that Lenin used the term. But it was - again in the jargon - a prerevolutionary situation, not a revolution proper. Perhaps it would have possible to secure a relatively peaceful transition to socialism; the means of production were in the hands of the working class and, given the correct approach, a largely conscript army might have been split on class lines.

On the other hand, there were 70,000 professional troops on the other side of the Rhine, and de Gaulle's cross-border chopper trip proves he would have been prepared to use them if the crunch had come. Nor would other capitalist countries have stood idly by and watched one of their number succumb to workers' control. They too would likely have committed armed support.

What is more, the forces of indigenous reaction could undoubtedly have mobilised support from millions of people on the right. It would be lightminded to insist that extensive bloodshed could have been ruled out in advance.

Several writers slam the cowardice of the Parti Communiste Français, and maintain that 'correct Marxist leadership' of their precise and pure ideological stripe was the only missing magic ingredient.

But to postulate this is to fail to ask why neither the Trotskyists nor the anarchists secured a mass base, either through their work in the preceding decades, or in the course of the struggle itself. Why do far leftist historians think their outfit, transported to that time and place, would necessarily have done any better? There is more to politics than retrospective transitional demands.

All of this leads me to what I think is the most pernicious effect of the May 1968 myth, namely the idea that there is a serious chance that a small group of revolutionaries can suddenly be catapulted to the bigtime, almost on the random caprice of history.

The 1988 literature on 1968 was full of confident predictions that revolutions were on the agenda, in France and even in Britain too, before the end of the twentieth century. This perspective, to say the least, hasn't panned out.

This post is not intended to say that we will never see new May Days, or even new Octobers; what I am arguing is that France 1968 was an exceptional historic conjuncture that even four decades on has yet to be repeated.

It is essential for the revolutionary left to dream, of course. But given a reality that could see two fascists elected to the London Assembly today, remember that dreams can be debilitating.

Happy May Day comrades. Sous les pavés la plage.

If the voters want to go back to a social democratic future, how come they are showing it by turning to the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives or even the British National Party?

And if there really is any support for full-on socialism, why can’t any of the numerous far left electoral outfits save their deposits, let alone secure electoral representation at any level beyond a handful of council chambers?

The paradox is indeed real. On issue after issue, the policies touted by the left - both inside and outside the Labour Party - are probably close to the public mood.

Yes, there is popular distaste for rocketing inequality, support for affordable public transport, opposition to further privatisation of the NHS and other services, and a growing realisation that market mechanisms alone cannot offer enough affordable housing.

Yet the parties that are gaining from New Labour’s failure to deliver on these points are parties of the centre, the centre right, and the far right, which broadly offer more of the same, at even faster velocity.

Some of this is down to low levels of political awareness; we live in an era where the differences between the major parties are not habitually boiled down to easily-presentable ideological outlooks, so most people do not share the reference points so widely used by political activists.

That is why the Socialist Workers’ Party is probably mistaken in branding their electoral intervention as the Left List; for millions of voters, especially younger ones, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are meaningless. This is a presentational nuance, granted, but perhaps not an unimportant one. You cannot appeal to a class consciousness that is no longer there.

Another reason that new political formations often find it hard to get a look in is the traditional instinct for alternation between the big two; ‘that lot’ have had a go for 11 years and messed up, so it must be the turn of ‘the other lot’ to show us of what they are capable. But that barrier should not be insuperable, as the BNP are increasingly proving. New political forces can and do emerge.

Another factor is that for every left policy that is popular, there is at least an unpopular one not too far behind. Opposition to immigration controls is a case in point. While it is the only principled position the far left can take, it must be bloody difficult arguing for that one on the doorsteps of Barking and Dagenham.

Some groups go further still and include demands for the abolition of the age of consent and for the formation of workers’ militias on the leaflets they churn out for council by-elections.

Whatever the merits of such policies, they are entirely beyond local authority remits. That’s probably why council subcommittees stick to the allocation of allotments rather than setting budgets to train up council tax collectors in the art of stripping down AK-47s, guys.

Yet none of the factors listed above really explains why the BNP have got a seat on the London Assembly – on the back of a largely working class vote, too - while neither the SWP or Respect Renewal can say the same.

The truth is that the far left remains dominated by inveterate sectarian hacks who have repeatedly revealed themselves incapable of co-operating with others inside a pluralist and democratic formation that they cannot control.

I had all too much of an inside track on the petty factionalism that wrecked both the Socialist Labour Party and the Socialist Alliance. Fortunately I was able to enjoy watching the disintegration of Respect from a distance.

But it is interesting that neither side of the split has been able to come up with a convincing political explanation for the break-up. It still appears to outsiders as largely a question of personality clashes between two men with egos the size of a 1930s transatlantic Zeppelin, only with an added tendency to crash and burn. Hint: that’s them in the picture.

Amateurism, childishness and an inability to transcend the inevitable frictions involved in common projects of all stripes continues to condemn an entire political milieu to the status of permanent losers, squandering tens of thousands of pounds in order to secure fractions of a percentage point of the popular vote, and then arguing afterwards that the central committee’s thinking was of course correct in every detail.

I had half kind of hoped that the raw shock of finding a fascist sitting inside a London City Hall under rightwing Tory control would bring recognition of such basic realities to the more thoughtful elements on the far left, but there has been precious little sign of that. And we all know what happens to life forms that prove incapable of evolution.

During his campaign for the deputy leadership in 1982, Tony Benn – pictured - regularly attracted larger audiences to public meetings than any politician would be capable of today, promoting a platform that combined nationalisation and planning with workers’ control and the extension of democracy.

These were – to a young man radicalised by the experience of long-term unemployment in the early Thatcher period and becoming involved politics for the first time – exciting ideas.

A quarter of a century later, my thinking has evolved in a direction both more Marxist and more libertarian, but I still consider Tony Benn something of an inspiration. So I was rather disappointed to read this in the Independent:

Mr Davis won the support today of veteran Labour left-winger Tony Benn.

Mr Benn said he was "totally opposed" to the anti-terror measure and urged Gordon Brown to ditch it if Mr Davis was re-elected in Haltemprice and Howden.

Mr Benn, father of Environment Secretary Hilary Benn, wrote to Labour chairman Harriet Harman saying he felt free to offer his backing to the Tory former shadow home secretary since Labour was refusing to enter a candidate in the contest.

OK, I can see where Benn is coming from on this one. The introduction of what amounts to internment without trial has even had me reconsidering my 2006 decision to rejoin the Labour Party.

In so far as what Davis is doing serves to keep the issue in the headlines and thus maintain pressure on the government, his gesture might even be a good thing.

But opposition to 42-day detention is not best advanced by backing a crude PR stunt from a pro-death penalty SAS hobbyist Tory, running for re-election in a safe Tory seat he is hardly unlikely to lose, partly at least in order to bolster the factional position of the Tory hard right.

Davis’s game is designed to fit in with the narrative that the Conservatives have somehow transmogrified into ‘progressives’. For Britain’s best-known socialist to back his candidacy can only lend credibility to this patent charade. Sorry, Tony, you’ve got this one badly wrong; please think again.

Meanwhile, this whole issue has completely exposed the inadequacy of the far left, despite the bluster from SWP/Left List and Respect Renewal to the effect that they are serious electoral players.

Literature produced by both these organisations regularly stress their commitment to defending the Muslim community. Well, if 42-day detention – a measure that will in practice be aimed almost exclusively against Muslims – doesn’t constitute clear-cut Islamophobia, what does?

If either of these groupings – or any other section of the left, for that matter – had even minimal tactical savvy, they would be drawing up plans to stand a candidate on a consistent civil libertarian platform. Not to do so is an admission of irrelevance.

That only a miniscule vote could be expected is beside the point; it is imperative to highlight Davis’s hypocrisy. But no, the central committee and national council prefer to leave the electoral field to politicians of higher calibre, such as declared or potential runners Mad Cow-Girl, Miss Great Britain, a pub landlord from Blackpool and a two-time Eurovision song contest loser. Says it all, really.

It is a minor historical irony that the financial markets crash of 2008 comes about at a time when there is no dissent from the neoliberal consensus at any point on the spectrum of establishment politics.

For three decades now, people have been told - by politicians of all parties - that there is no alternative. Understandably, most of them have come to believe it. Young people, in particular, haven’t heard any narrative other than free market ideology.

That much has been brought home to me by my recent experiences as a mature student. Last year, I sat what Americans would refer to as ‘economics 101’ for the second time in my life. It’s not that I particularly needed a refresher on the essentials of supply and demand curves, but the course was deemed a prerequisite for the more advanced modules I’m taking this year.

In a classroom full of people mostly a generation younger than myself, I was struck by the differences between the students of 1981 and the students of today. Fittingly for kids keen to get a well-paid job in the financial services sector, they are a lot more smartly dressed, for a start.

And they take things rather more seriously, too; they don’t tend to skip classes, because they have paid for them after all, and I somehow don’t get the impression they too spend much time hanging around in the college coffee lounge rolling spliffs. That’s probably because they are busy with part-time, or even full-time, jobs.

But most striking of all was that most of them tended to think capitalism is great. Where in the Thatcher period we were angry because the Tories had put three million people on the dole, the consensus - in 2007, anyway - was in praise for a system seen as virtually guaranteeing 42-inch screen plasma televisions and two weeks’ annual holiday in Thailand to all but a few unfortunates.

In the first week, the lecturer explained about the differences between free market capitalism and Keynesian demand management, and asked students to vote on which they favoured. When I replied that I was a socialist who didn’t favour either, the derision towards the old git in the corner was almost palpable.

Put simply, anti-capitalist ideas clearly no longer have the resonance they did when variants of Marxism influenced a sizeable minority in the Labour Party, with substantial parliamentary and local government representation, and when a network of shop stewards was able to popularise such notions in many workplaces.

Nor does the left advance a systematic diagnosis of what is wrong with capitalism as it is now, and what can be done about it. Books outlining an Alternative Economic Strategy no longer feature prominently on university library shelves.

That brings me back to the current crash. There have been plenty of predictions that meltdown on Wall Street and in the City will generate a revival socialist fortunes. Interestingly, many of them have come from the right, featuring prominently in quality newspaper opinion slots.

There’s also renewed optimism from some on the left. Alex Callinicos of the Socialist Workers' Party, for instance, reportedly told a recent public meeting in Tower Hamlets that the crisis represents a ‘moment of opportunity’ for rebuilding the left.

He's not necessarily wrong. But the important thing to stress is that any upturn in our fortunes isn’t going to happen automatically. For a start, the first thing we have to do is to articulate a coherent set of counterproposals, and as far as I can make out, work on that task hasn’t even begun.

Then we have to popularise our ideas, and that will require a political vehicle to give them organised expression. I’d like to think the British left is capable of doing that, but after the experience of the last period, I’ve got this horrible suspicion that another moment of opportunity is going to just walk on by.

SIX out of ten young Britons say they have never even heard of Auschwitz, according to one opinion poll a few years ago. So it presumably follows that serious discussion of the holocaust is never going to replace football, music and the one night stand that middle manager had with the leggy Irish bird in marketing as the mainstays of after work pub session banter.

Yet just because any given issue does not figure in the conversational staples of ordinary people, it does not follow that politicians therefore are under no obligation to take a stance.

The rise of fascism is one of the great themes of twentieth century history, and to affect ‘neutrality’ on the topic would be not only intellectually and morally untenable, but would be - in effect - to take the wrong side.

Similarly, nuances of analysis on the Spanish civil war should of course not debar anybody from joining a leftist political organisation. But it would be strange kind of socialist party that would extend membership to those who felt that the good guys came out on top in that one.

Yet somehow there seems to be something of a blind spot when it comes to Stalinism. Thankfully for the British left, there remain only a few out and out deranged nostalgists for the man responsible for a death toll that – while disputed – certainly does by any yardstick number millions.

But more than a few activists, thanks in large part to their political upbringing in and around the Communist Party of Great Britain, find it necessary to prevaricate and cavil.

You see, you have to understand that objectively Stalin represents a historically progressive figure, comrade. He defended and even extended proletarian property relations and won the Great Patriotic War, didn’t he?

The weakest argument of all is the proposition that 'you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs', thereby effortlessly conflating Stalin's enormities with the preparation of a quickly cooked but nevertheless tasty light lunch.

The trouble is, what happened in the Soviet Union between 1924 and 1953, and the subsequent evolution of the system Stalin put in place, still remains one of the principle ideological weapons in the hands of those who insist that the alternatives are free market capitalism or the gulag, with nothing in between. Marxism - or any kind of socialism, come to that - in power must inevitably culminate in a remake of Darkness at Noon, they cry.

Not to repudiate Stalinism explicitly, then, at best leaves the left open to accusations of double standards, of picking and choosing inconsistently between good and bad totalitarianism. At worst, it is active advocacy of repression.

The upshot is that even in 2008, it is necessary to come down in support of the man who more than any other led the fight against everything Stalinism represented. That man is a dead Russian by the name of Leon Trotsky.

That is what worried me about reports of George Galloway’s speech at last week’s Respect conference, as summarised by blogger Liam MacUaid, himself openly and proudly a Trotskyist:

Are most working class people interested in arguments about the differences between dead Russians? “No” was George’s answer. It’s a source of deep regret to me but he is probably right. In our public activity and press we have to use language that makes sense in working class communities. It’s a radical idea but it might be worth giving it a spin.

Yes and no, Liam. I would be the first to agree that one of the main reasons the left perpetually fails to get its message across because of its inability to use the same English spoken by the rest of the country.

Nor would I fill a popular agitational paper with four-page chunks of unbroken text devoted to a cut out and keep exegesis on the ins and outs of the Scissors Crisis. The Trotsky versus Stalin debate is not the first thing on the agenda after a new recruit signs up.

It’s not that I think Trotskyism itself is still a relevant brand of Marxism for the very changed world we live in today, especially in its more cultish and dogmatic variants; any system of thought that necessarily leads to the conclusion that North Korea is somehow a degenerate workers’ state that should be defended from capitalist restoration has clearly lost a lot of purchase on reality.

It’s not even that I hold up the Old Man as a some sort of exemplary libertarian alternative in the Russia of the 1920s. I know that he called for the militarisation of labour, and was responsible for the brutal repression of dissent at the time it could have made a difference. This is all on the historical record.

But it cannot be forgotten that from the late twenties until his assassination in Mexico by Stalin’s agents in 1940, Leon Trotsky was the figurehead of those fighting to democratise the USSR on a socialist basis.

For anyone even attempting to outline a vision of a future socialist society that stands any chance of having widespread appeal, in the long run there is no alternative to backing one dead Russian over another. The left can no more be neutral on the fate of the Russian revolution than it can on the abolition of slavery. After all, some differences really are too important to split.

DIRECT action against housing evictions is a tactic last adopted by the far left in London in the 1930s. You can read the inspiring details in Phil Piratin's biography Our Flag Stays Red, an excellent book that I once owned but have somehow mislaid over the years.

Piratin, later Communist MP for Stepney, tells how Communist Party members mobilised mass blockades outside the apartments of working class families threatened with losing their homes, so preventing the bailiffs from gaining access.

Famously, in June 1937 they even suceeded in keeping the roof over the heads of two British Union of Fascists-supporting families at a block called Paragon Mansions in Mile End; those they assisted soon turned their back on the Mosleyites.

North of the border, of course, Scottish Militant Labour organised in similar fashion to prevent poindings and warrant sales during the struggle against the poll tax in the late 1980s, and good on 'em.

So I was intrigued to come across a poorly-produced computer printout flyer without any graphics, sellotaped to a phone booth in Stoke Newington last night. Here it is, with grammatical errors intact:

ARE YOU/SOMEONE YOU KNOW FACING REPOSSESSION?
0207 819 1170/1172 www.swp.org.uk
- We have 100s of people ready to stop bailiffs evicting.
- Public gatherings in public streets are OFF property - let innocent repo victims of dodgy banker's playing an accumulator bet know this.
- Resist new Govt powers bailiffs, bailout baniks and repo courts have to pindown family/friends/neighbours in own home and get hands on wives/daughters/sisters.
- If you tolerate this then your children will be next.

While there is no mention of who is behind the initiative - and I entirely approve of it, let me stress - your starter for ten is that the telephone numbers and the website listed are those of the Socialist Workers' Party.

With repossessions set to skyrocket in 2009, this is the sort of effort that is clearly worth a shot. But the obvious question is whether this is a new policy officially sanctioned by the centre, a project by the local branch, an unauthorised move by one or more off-message member, or simply a hoax. If it does have the blessing of the central committee, one would expect rather better publicity material.

And assuming the leaflet is genuine, can the SWP really get hundreds of people out at relatively short notice? That is a tall order, even in Hackney North, the closest the party gets to calling anywhere a traditional powerbase. And what's all this stuff about wives, daughters and sisters? Odd wording.

As ever, I'd be grateful for further information and any comments. Is this turn being adopted elsewhere in the country? Are any other leftwing organisations planning something like this? Do you think it is a good idea in principle? Would you join in such actions yourself?

I HAVE in the past worked for Tribune and Red Pepper, and written for New Statesman and the Morning Star. For the sake of sentiment alone, I naturally wish all of these fine publications well.

But in truth, these days not even nostalgia combined with a vague sense of duty can motivate me to read any of them regularly. And if such titles cannot get people like me to fork out for a subscription, it is little wonder that they are - without exception - struggling to survive.

Unfortunately there is no nice way of putting this to the many friends of mine, including an ex-wife, who do their valiant best to keep the left press from complete collapse. But the basic problem here is that almost all the content of the above is tailor-made to fit the description ‘worthy but dull’. Sorry, but there you have it.

The irony is that, in a climate where capitalism is increasingly under question, and even New Labour is being forced involuntarily to discuss issues such as nationalisation and class, there should be an obvious market for punchy and well-written leftwing writing.

There is a clear need for something more than what is on offer from the national press and broadcast media, which restrict themselves – to paraphrase Dorothy Parker – to the whole gamut of political opinion from A to B, and even the biggest leftie blogs are not yet capable of plugging the gap.

Yet look at what is happening out there. Red Pepper could not sustain monthly publication, and has been forced to half its frequency. Trib came close to closure last year, and only managed to avoid going under after an unnamed Labour Party figure promised to put up £40,000 a year and the unions agreed to write off existing debts.

The word is that the new boss – anybody know who he or she is, by the way? - is keen on extended coverage of EU affairs, which is unlikely to make for the kind of riveting journalism that will bring back the paying punters.

Things do seem to be looking up for the Morning Star, which has recently relaunched with higher pagination, and finally made its website free. Yet this has only been achieved thanks to financial support from Anita Halpin, a veteran communist who became an overnight multimillionaire in 2006, after selling an inherited painting.

The newspaper shows no sign of being able to pay its way, and Ms Halpin is said to want to be a hands-on proprietor, enforcing a pro-Labour editorial line that will put paid to earlier flirtation with the idea of some kind of new left party.

Meanwhile, the Guardian media supplement this morning carries an extensive feature on the travails of the Staggers, now owned by a squabbling diumvirate of Geoffrey Robinson and millionaire businessman Mike Danson.

All the signs are looking bad. The magazine is refusing to recognise the National Union of Journalists, has made a number of long-time staffers redundant, and has apparently ditched star columnist John Pilger, still one of my journalistic heroes.

Circulation is falling fast. Recently-appointed editor Jason Cowley is said to want to ‘remake the title as a mainstream magazine with broad appeal … running more big reads on subjects ranging from food to sport’.

Well, he’s in the editor’s chair and it’s his call, but I cannot see how the strategy can possibly work. The field is already crowded. Who is going to pay a hefty cover charge for the kind of material that comes free in endless national newspaper supplements every weekend?

Such an editorial direction is far cry from what the New Statesman represented in the 1980s, when it regularly broke investigative journalism scoops and carried some coruscating critiques of Thatcherism.

The reality is the leftwing public deserves a better media diet than an endless succession of badly-ghosted opinion pieces published under the by-line of a trade union general secretary. Interspersed with first-person accounts of time spent on work brigades in Cuba. Either the left press starts to provide it, or it is not much longer for this world.

I AM constantly amazed at how popular journalism remains as the career of choice for many young graduates. Do yourself a favour, kids, get into chartered accountancy or something sensible instead.

OK, it might still be fun for a handful of big name columnists, who get ego-boosting photo bylines and six-figure salaries simply for expressing their opinions twice a week. But for 99% of the trade, it’s a job like any other. The days of plentiful freebies and three-hour ‘contact building’ liquid lunches - which did exist, and in living memory at that - are gone for good.

For a minority of old lags with a bit of seniority, a category that thankfully includes me these days, the remuneration is still reasonable to good, I guess. But for most newcomers, the wedge truly sucks, especially on local rags. There is a real problem holding onto young reporters and subs.

I’ve just been knocking out my regular slot on industry pay levels for Journalist, the member magazine of the National Union of Journalists, and the picture is grim indeed. Pay freezes are in place at Guardian Media Group, the Financial Times and Newsquest. Thomson Reuters is offering a below-inflation 1.25%, while Independent News and Media is pushing through pay cuts on some titles. Express Newspapers has ‘postponed its January pay review’. Incidentally, I had a quick bevvy with an Express staffer last week, and the shop floor is decidedly less than chuffed.

Against that backdrop, what should the rest of the left make of the decision by Morning Star journos to stage a one-day stoppage a week tomorrow - and possibly hold a subsequent one-week strike - after rejecting an offer pitched at inflation plus a non-consolidated 4% bonus?

Now, no one works on the left press for the money. Without wanting to sound too much like one of Monty Python’s four Yorkshiremen, when I wrote for Trot papers and for Tribune, I used positively to envy Star journo wages. But the fact remains that the £18,000 or so they are on these days is nowhere near enough to live on in London.

Moreover, as the NUJ points out, the publication has received a donation variously reported at £500,000 or £600,000. While the money officially flows from the generosity of an ‘anonymous consortium’ , most of the dosh is likely to be coming from the bank account of Anita Halpin, a long time Communist Party member and NUJ activist, who came into £20m after selling an inherited painting a couple of years back.

Management’s line is that the windfall is ring-fenced for the purpose of raising quality and thus circulation, and cannot be spent on boosting wages. This strikes me as a false dichotomy. Even if many publishers refuse to admit it, Ms Halpin will be well aware that one of the key material factor in the quality of any newspaper is staff morale.

All this has been extensively debated on Socialist Unity, with claims from some Star supporters that a prolonged walkout will result in the publication shutting up shop. Now, as I admitted in a recent post, I do not regularly buy the Morning Star. For some of the commenters at SU, non-readers are by definition sectarians who wish the title ill, and thus not entitled to an opinion on this issue.

This is unduly dismissive; thousands more socialists would strongly support a leftwing daily that was worth the cover price, especially if it reported on the full range of socialist activity and opinion in Britain and abroad.

The Morning Star does not fulfil that function. Granted, it has in recent years broadened significantly the range of writers it is prepared to put into print, to include not just representatives of the Labour Left and the CP but also Respect, the Scottish Socialist Party and even the Socialist Workers Party. But any think pieces ranging beyond what is now a de facto consensus between these forces, let alone constructive criticism of friendly trade union leaderships, is still out of the question.

As an NUJ member, I will of course be supporting the strike, not for any political reason, but simply because that is the elementary duty of a trade unionist. But let me put this question to everyone that works at the Star; why not give us a genuine broad left newspaper, not afraid of serious debate on contentious issue? That way, you might just find you solve your circulation problem overnight.

AN EX-MAOIST take on the fortunes of Europe’s main centre-left and hard left parties is probably of marginal concern to the core readership of the Financial Times, which is generally more exercised with Nymex May RBOB unleaded gasoline prices and the minutiae of the Columbian coffee wholesale market.

But this blog’s audience will doubtless find it a question of intrinsic fascination, so let me flag up John Lloyd’s round-up of what’s going on across the continent, which bizarrely enough has found its way onto the television section of the paper’s website.

Lloyd - once a leading member of the British & Irish Communist Organisation, a Maoist splinter group - points out that capitalism is under question to an extent unparalleled since at least the 1960s, and you would expect political alternatives to be gaining ground. But it is not at all clear that this is happening.

I have this morning seen one piece of evidence that he does not consider. It seems that 30% of young Americans recently told pollsters they prefer socialism to capitalism. Given that few US residents can have any real idea of what ‘socialism’ is, that finding may be more indicative of political ignorance then any authentic swing left, but is intriguing nevertheless.

Otherwise, the pointers from Europe are rather mixed. In France, Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste leader Olivier Besancenot is getting approval ratings as high as 47%, outstripping all other politicians, including president Sarkozy and the mainstream Parti Socialiste. PSOE in Spain appears to be broadly holding its own against the right, but only in the negative sense that the PP is even more unpopular than Zapatero’s outfit.

Germany’s Die Linke has consolidated the backing of around one in ten of the electorate, and the Social Democrats are still the choice of one in four. But the right still has the edge, with the free market-oriented FDP rapidly moving up in the polls.

The Social Democrats are in the lead in Denmark, but Sweden’s once-dominant party of the same name have lost the advantage they until recently held over the centre-right government, with some analysts arguing that this is explicitly because of an alliance with the Left Party.

In Britain, the Tories are on course for a landslide win in the next general election. Italy? Don’t even ask. The left is in tatters.

Lloyd’s conclusion – and it is difficult to disagree – is that leftists of all stripes have failed to convince the electorate that it has the political answers for the economic downturn. Where social democrats have been in power, they are copping the blame for the mess we are in. With the glaring exception of France, there is widespread distrust of Marxist-influenced formations.

What is clear is that caution has nowhere resulted in socialist advance, and even if France’s political culture makes it impossible to generalise, radicalism certainly hasn’t hurt the NPA.

HAYEK, von Mises and Popper presumably never did get around to reading Gramsci. But in retrospect, the political movement these men – together with others - famously launched at Mont Pelerin some 62 years ago represents the most successful counterhegemonic bloc ever yet constructed.

Even though the brand of classical liberalism they advocated seemed a hopeless anachronism in 1947, with Keynesianism so utterly in the ascendant, the free market right was clearly in it for the long haul.

When Keynesianism entered crisis three decades later, it was properly intellectually prepared with both an alternative prospectus and the populist policies necessary to sell it to electorates weaned on social democracy, conscripting the C2s in this country and their hard-hat Democrat equivalents in the US. Within a few years, free market ideas had swept the planet, to become the orthodoxy of our day.

A further three decades up the road, the wheels have finally come off the neoliberal model. If the left had a blueprint ready to enact, we would now have a once in a generation opportunity to modify the dominant ideology in a manner conducive to socialism.

Instead, what we are likely to get is two or more terms of Conservative government. Worse, we are too enfeebled even to put up a fight. How did we reach this astonishing impasse?

New Labour has from the start been gulled into intellectual stupor by its own self-delusional rhetoric. Convinced that it was indeed ‘the political wing of the British people as a whole’, it neglected even to renew the bases of Labourism itself.

Old Labour, by contrast, pulled up the drawbridge and refused to acknowledge that the last three decades were happening. As a combined result, the Labour Party is now so hollowed out that it could collapse at the slightest push.

The Marxist left, which prides itself on being the brains of the operation, for the most part retreated back to fundamentalism. There has been no attempt to come to terms with the need to put Marxist philosophy on a footing devoid of dialectics, for instance, or even to operationalise fully the essential concepts of Marxist economics.

Most socialist groups became sects in the full sociological meaning of the term, and to question a closed belief system was automatically equated to heresy. Tendencies that once – and quite rightly so – derided student vanguardism and guerillaism as ‘substitutionist’ fell foul to analoguous elephant traps, relating primarily to anti-capitalist youth and the bourgeois and clerical layers of religious minorities rather than the organised working class.

In short, all sections of the left failed to come up with a politics relevant for this country in the early twenty-first century rather than early twentieth century Russia or postwar Britain.

Hence an economic climate that should have been so conducive to socialism will see a decade in which British politics will be dominant by revivified Thatcherism and perhaps even the growth of the far right.

The consequences our intellectual failure to regenerate – as Hayek and his pals were able to do during their decades in the wilderness - will certainly prove painful.

YES, it will be a chore. But whatever you do on June 4th, make sure you vote in the European elections. If nothing else, the higher the turnout, the lower the chances of the British National Party securing a clutch of seats in Strasbourg.

Sadly, the momentum behind the British far right now looks unstoppable, and that tragedy is compounded by the reality that many of its supporters are working class people that would formerly have numbered among the Labour heartland vote.

Labour MPs such as Denis MacShine, Phil Woolas, Michael Meacher and Peter Hain have all expressed concern at this turn of events. Without exception, their words conspicuously overlook the part that each of them individually played in instantiating this state of affairs.

For New Labour, it is payback time for a decade and more during which its tiny cadre organisation managed to alienate a base of mass support that took generations to build. If it was any party other than the BNP that got to administer the kicking, there would even be an element of vicarious pleasure to be gleaned.

As a Labour Party member, I am constrained to urge a Labour vote next month. I’m sorry that I cannot find many reasons beyond simple loyalty so to do, and I can sympathise with those on the left who will be placing their cross elsewhere.

In Scotland, the party of choice for socialists is obviously the Scottish Socialist Party, standing as part of a Europe-wide slate along France’s Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste.

Elsewhere in Britain, both the Greens and the No2E slate, backed by transport union RMT, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party of Britain and others, will come into consideration for many radicals. Much will depend on where one lives.

Many of those running on the No2EU ticket are people I have a lot of time for politically, and in some cases, personal friends. Its platform has been criticised in some quarters as nationalist. That may or may not be true; either way, it is irrelevant.

No2EU is a sure-fire deposit loser and seemingly set to make the 0.68% garnered by Left Whatchamacallit in the London elections last year look good. The only real reason to back it is as a symbolic means of registering support for just the kind of new workers’ party that it conspicuously refuses to become.

There is nothing wrong with doing just that if that corresponds to your political outlook, and in most regions, the slate will be the most left wing on the ballot paper.

But in London, I would like to see lead Green candidate Jean Lambert retain her seat. Whatever one thinks of the politics of her party overall, Ms Lambert has consistently been among the best British MEPs, not least on issues of workers’ rights. It would be a shame to see her ousted.

If I were not in the Labour Party, she would have my critical support. If I were not in the Labour Party and didn't live in London, I would endorse No2EU or the SSP.

AMONG the three – count ‘em, three – far left choices for Londoners in the European elections is the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Do not, whatever you do, mix this lot up with the Socialist Party in England and Wales; the SPGB gets very irate if its distinctiveness is so traduced.

The editorial line of this blog is to call for a Labour vote next month. What follows is published in the interests of discussion. If you are by any chance won over, the SPGB website is here.

We don't want your vote. We don't want your vote if you think socialism means nationalisation, higher taxation, welfare state, council estates, national liberation, legalising marijuana or anything of that sort. In short, we don't want your vote if you think we need to keep and act within existing capitalism.

On the other hand, if you do want a sociaty of common ownership and democratic control; a worldwide co-operative commonwealth; the emancipation of labour from the chains of capital; then we're your people, because that's all we stand for.

Well, there's a further catch, because all we're doing is holding the banner aloft. If you want to make socialism happen you've got to prepared to do the work yourself - we're not leaders, and don't want to be. If you need someone to lead you into the promised land, some other bugger'll lead you straight back out again.

That's the choice in this election in a nutshell. A choice between confusing the issue, like whether it's better to be dominated by British capitalists or European ones; whether it's better to only allow capitalists to exploit us for a third of our waking hours, rather than a half; whether the state is the one that extracts profits from our labour, or private employers; or, making our demands crystal clear.

If you call yourself a socialist, why do you want to waste time trying to figure out how to make capitalism run better, anyway? The power to change the world lies in your hands, you don't need to be bound by accepting things as they are – the point is to change them. If a majority decided to remake the world, no force on Earth could stop them.

A vote for the Socialist Party is a vote that says you are ready to act to make this change. A signal to your fellow socialists that they are not alone. A signal to your fellow workers that some people take the actual idea of socialism seriously, rather than relegating it to some bedtime fairytale never-never for after the work of running capitalism is done.

Let's end on William Morris: “One man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman: two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act, a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why only a hundred thousand? Why not a hundred million and peace upon the Earth? You and I who agree together, it is we who have to answer that question.”

Some time ago, I invited Stoke-based blogger PhilBC – who trades as A Very Public Sociologist, and who is a member of the Socialist Party – to provide a guest post making the case for the RMT-backed No2EU coalition in the euroelections. Little did I realise that the cheeky bugger would leave it to the eve of the poll.

What follows is published purely in the interests of debate; scroll down for a similar piece in support of the SPGB. The editorial line of this blog is to call for a Labour vote. Why? Because daddy said so. Sorry, but that is about the best reason I can come up with right now.

No2EU might not have made a big media splash, but in nine short weeks it has probably run the most dynamic and energetic campaign of any of the contenders at this Thursday's European election. Around 10.5 million leaflets have been distributed - not counting local literature produced by No2EU backers. Somewhere in the region of 150 public meetings have taken place. If the elections were won on effort alone No2EU would be returning MEPs by the dozen.

No2EU came late to the race to Brussels and not without some controversy. It is unfortunate that despite fielding candidate lists packed with trade unionists and backed by the most militant union in the land, a large number of socialists will be lending their vote to other parties for a variety of reasons. I've tried to deal with some of the objections here.

But as far as I'm concerned, No2EU's positives outweigh the cons. These last 14 years have seen many false dawns on the road to refounding working class political representation. And yet after the failure of each we get up, dust ourselves off and try again.

No2EU is more significant because this time a trade union is in the mix. Because the RMT backs No2EU, large numbers of trade union activists and officials will be watching the result.

The greater the vote we manage to pull in, the more likely disaffiliationists in Labour-loyal unions and in those without a political home will fight this disintegrating government at the polls.

Already Mark Serwotka of the PCS has announced he will be seeking the support of his membership to back trade union candidates at the general election. A decent result could encourage more to take the plunge.

In short, a vote for No2EU is something more than a vote for its platform. It's a vote for the assertion of the independent political interests of our class now and in a year's time.

SHEDLOADS of Trots and tankies will be getting a ticket to Strasbourg tonight. According to the Financial Times, the far left may pick up four and perhaps five of the 22 European parliament seats allocated to Portugal, with up to 20% of the vote:

Nine recent polls give the Bloc Esquerda (BE), a party formed 10 years ago from a coalition of small Trotskyite, Maoist and other radical movements, an average of more than 10 per cent in Sunday’s election for the European Parliament.

Portugal’s Communist party (PCP), which has never converted to “Euro-communism”, remaining faithful to its Stalinist roots, is polling more than 8 per cent. Each is forecast to elect two of Portugal’s total of 22 European MPs and the BE is aiming for three.

The example of BE illustrates what can achieved when revolutionary socialists come together in a united organisation that that does not change its political orientation every few years and its name even more frequently than that.

Meanwhile, last I heard the Noveau Parti Anticapitalist in France and Die Linke in Germany are both polling around 10%, and also likely to secure representation in Strasbourg. I look forward to reading the British left's devastating critique of where the European comrades have gone wrong after the results are in tonight, presumably starting with Callinicos in the next ISJ.

North East:
No2EU - 8,066 (1.37%)
SLP - 10,238 (1.74%)
Total - 18,304 (3.11%)

So the Scargillites - a party that exists only on paper - beat Crow, the CPB and the Millies, which collectively have at least a minimal activist base. Presumably this result is attributable to name recognition alone. But even so, the combined vote would not have saved the deposit. The BNP got 8.9%, enough to secure a seat in a larger euroconstituency.

Eastern:
No2EU - 13,939 (0.87%)
SLP - 13,599 (0.85%)
Total - 27,538 (1.72%)

Almost a dead heat. But less than 1% apiece. Meanwhile, Greens missed out on getting a seat by around 1%. Food for thought. Good news: the BNP didn't make the cut, either.

Yorkshire & Humber:
No2EU - 15,614 (1.27%)
SLP - 19,380 (1.58%)
Total - 34,994 (2.85%)

Scargill heartlands; probably as good as it gets for SLP. And cadre Nazi Andrew Brons becomes Britain's first fascist MEP.

Wales
No2EU - 8,600 (1.25%)
SLP - 12,402 (1.81%)
Total - 20,002 (3.06%)

Another ex mining area. The real news here is that Labour has failed to win a nationwide electoral contest for the first time since the coupon election of 1918.

UPDATE: No2EU on 4.3% in Coventry, apparently. That'll include a personal vote for Dave Nellist, a local councillor and former Labour MP in the city.

London
No2EU - 17,758 (1.01%)
SLP - 15,306 (0.87%)
SPGB - 4,050 (0.23%)
Total - 37,114 (2.11%)

Somebody remind me how this compares with Left Thingummybob and the other splinter groups in last year's mayoral/London Assembly contest?

Hat tips: AVPS, BBC, Politicshome.

IT’S ONE thing being roundly twatted by the Christian Party – ‘Proclaiming Christ’s Lordship’, to give that outfit its full title. But to poll even less than the Socialist Labour Party – ‘Proclaiming Scargill’s Lordship’ must surely leave many No2EU supporters wondering what the point of standing in the euroelections truly was.

The SLP, after all, has no meaningful existence. As far as I am aware, it is not even able to sustain a newspaper, and its conferences are few and far between.

No2EU, on the other hand, attracted a layer of trade union activists and the official support of the CPB and the Socialist Party, both of them organisations able to deploy a few hundred activists. Yet it picked up just 153,236 votes to the 173,115 secured by the SLP on name recognition alone.

Andy Newman at Socialist Unity effectively holds No2EU responsible for the fascist wins last Thursday, berating the leading lights in the projects for their ‘unaccountable, opaque and indefensible decision to recklessly engage in an election in constituencies where it was foreseeable that it might tilt the result the way of the BNP’.

This is, I think, unfair. In a democratic contest, political parties fail to win for one reason and one reason only, which is that they cannot convince enough voters to back them. To have ago at smaller parties who exercise their right to stand in elections strikes me as an exercise in scapegoating.

My criticism of No2EU is rather simpler. The campaign must have cost a lot of money – a six figure sum, presumably – and taken up a lot of person-hours. And for what?

Nor am I particularly taken by the boasts of some participants, who argue:

Around 10.5 million leaflets have been distributed - not counting local literature produced by No2EU backers. Somewhere in the region of 150 public meetings have taken place. If the elections were won on effort alone No2EU would be returning MEPs by the dozen.

That’s not how politics works these days. It might be possible to convince some junk food addicts to patronise a given home delivery pizza parlour on the basis of an endless succession of glossy flyers through the letterbox, but few people are going to vote for a party they have never heard of on the basis of a leaflet thrust at them outside a tube station.

And getting a couple of dozen already persuaded Trots and tankies into a room above a pub to listen to a couple of motivational ra-ra speeches is electorally speaking an entirely wasted effort.

While No2EU was obviously not lavishly funded, it undeniably enjoyed greater resources than most far left electoral blocs. Yet it did not even manage a regularly updated website or a dedicated YouTube channel.

I know it complains about being the victim of a media blackout. But I’d be interested to know how much effort it put into getting articles ghosted in the name of its star turns into the press, and how persistently it badgered local radio and cable telly stations to get some airtime. It can be done, you know.

The Socialist Party in particular fervently hopes that No2EU will form the basis for the eventual emergence of a new workers’ party, and the word is that those involved will shortly discuss what steps to take next.

But after the experiences of the SLP, the Socialist Alliance, Respect, Left List, Left Alternative, the Scottish Socialist Party and Solidarity, it should politely be pointed out that the debut cannot be considered auspicious.

THE Socialist Workers' Party routinely fibs about its membership figures, even to those who actually join it, as former leading member Mark Steel revealed in his recent autobiography. Nevertheless, it remains the largest organisation on the British left.

As a result, the SWP leadership tends automatically to assume that it has a right to a seat at the top table in all political initiatives launched from within this milieu. So the shock of express exclusion from No2EU - the euroelection slate led by the RMT union and the Communist Party of Britain, and supported by the Socialist Party in a licensed auxilliary capacity - must have been quite considerable.

As we saw the week before last, No2EU tanked with the electorate. But still, the amour propre of the SWP has clearly taken a knock. One result has been a 'dear comrade' open letter to the left, in which the same people who scuppered the Socialist Alliance, Respect, Scottish Socialist Party, Left Alternative and Left List unity initiatives proposed ... guess what, another unity initiative. But what exactly do they have in mind?

Naturally, several microsects responded with all the lovestruck alacrity of a homely schoolgirl unexpectedly asked on a date by the dishiest boy in the sixth form. The Alliance for Workers' Liberty, the Communist Party of Great Britain, Workers' Power and Permanent Revolution all instantly announced that they wanted to play ball.

But the control freaks of the SWP central committee are congentially incapable of co-operating with other revolutionary socialists inside a common democratic framework, especially with people who share mostly the same formal politics.

Moreover, they are now convinced that as a result of the initial success of the Stop the War Coalition that they are somehow players in the big league. It was obvious from the get-go that the collective membership of the smaller Trot groups - which total only a few hundred - was not the real target of the SWP missive.

So when a left unity liasion committee met on Saturday, in a dreary room above the same north London pub in which the far left have been concocting lash-ups for at least half a century, the SWP predictably did not attend. You can read a depressing account of what went on here.

The SWP's call for unity stands exposed for the cynical manoeuvre it was surely designed to be. Sod principled unity with other far left forces; all the letter signifies is a crass attempt to gatecrash the No2EU roadshow, which now seems set to mount some sort of intervention at the next general election.

For the benefit of any SWPers reading this, the fact is that your organisation's tactics over the last decade have pissed off the wider left to the extent that it will take a political generation before its main constituents will be ready to work in formal alliance with you again.

Sure, you can write off Bob Crow as a trade union bureaucrat. But the reason his doesn't want you guys on board is entirely understandable. This is the price you pay for the multiple car crashes you have presided over in the last ten years, while still arrogantly incapable of admitting error.

I'm not suggesting that it is desirable for a sizeable revolutionary current effectively to be locked out of participation in any new union-based left formation. But it is your own damn fault that things have come to this.

Hegemony within the Marxist left has passed by default to what are arguably its most conservative elements, namely the half-hearted apologists for Stalinism that make up the CPB, and the trade union layers that take political direction from them. The SP, for its own advantage, will happily play the role of bag carrier.

If 'Son of No2EU' does have an electoral future, the CPB will act as a brake on radicalism, ensuring that it will have no appeal to most young people radicalised around the ideas of anti-capitalism. That rules out the sort of dynamic regroupment seen around the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste in France.

Given the state of play out there, the net impact of all this will be limited to the far left securing votes of around 1% instead of 2%. Big deal. But even so, think what the Socialist Alliance project could now be achieving if it had stabilised and began to build serious roots in the labour movement and the working class. Those who knocked it on the head bear a serious responsibility. And yes, I am talking to you, John Rees.

IRISH Left Review has produced an eleven-point checklist for those who aspire to produce coruscating leftist polemic online. As a long-time exponent of the genre myself – I used to knock out copy for Trot rags long before the internet had properly taken off, remember – I can wholeheartedly endorse most of the techniques espoused. This one is especially handy, I always find:

7. Your opponents are dogmatic and sectarian, unless they are not, in which case they are opportunists. Accuse them of creating illusions in whatever it is they are creating illusions in.

Make no mistake, what is being offered in this post is a virtual masterclass. It should be illegal to give away the trade secrets that some of us have honed for decades like that. Read it all here.

TOM Paulin - the sixtysomething ex-Trot poet who features regularly on late night arty-farty telly slots - reportedly charged Newsnight Review £90 for having his hair dyed, on the grounds that a boy just has to look good for the camera. The BBC allowed the claim.

I’ll spare the Marxist component of my readership the obvious in jokes about how such behaviour has its objective roots [geddit?] in the Healyite degeneration of the International Committee tradition, and simply note that that on the sporadic occasions I am on the box, all I get is a courtesy cab and a modest appearance fee.

Actually, I did find myself in the Newsnight Review green room one Friday evening a few years back, immediately prior to doing a live piece on some news story - the death of over 1,000 people after an Egyptian ferry capsized, nothing remotely important really - before the programme moved swiftly on to matters rather more highbrow.

Luckily, I was able to make small talk with Ian Hislop, swapping anecdotes about the late Paul Foot. Meanwhile an immaculately-quiffed Mark Lamarr understandably ignored me and concentrated on chatting up two stick-thin identikit long-haired blondes that I probably should have recognised but didn‘t.

But anyway, back to the former Socialist Labour League rhymester with whom I started this post. For Liz Hoggard in the Independent, Paulin’s resort to artificial means of banishing grey hair is indicative of something she calls ‘the male beauty crisis'.

Fellas, on this line of reckoning, are becoming as hung up about their looks as women have traditionally been, thanks to the rise of pretty boys in movies and on magazine covers. Well, I was arguably a pretty boy myself, back in my glam rock days of three decades ago. I confess to the use of Grecian 2000 and Clinique for Men even now. By bloke standards, that makes me something of a metrosexual, I guess.

But a ‘male beauty crisis’? Really? Oh well, it’s a safe bet that it will never reach the far left. This is a milieu where 1990s Marxism T-shirts, faded from hundreds of washes, still constitute a fashion statement, a decently-sized beer gut is not considered anything of which to be ashamed, and facial hair is de rigeur after 50.

Until we get substantiated reports of leading male comrades trying on alternative outfits before meetings and then asking their partner whether or not their bum looks big in them, we will still be a long way away from the birth of Botox Bolshevism for boys.

ON THE face of it, the very need to ask ‘what it means to be on the left’ is a pretty certain indication that the questioner is not much of a leftie. Obviously, I know precisely what I think the term entails when I use it in a political context, and where I stand on any right-left scale. I have no doubt that most readers of this blog can say pretty much the same kind of thing.

Presumably the bloke that sat opposite to you on the bus this morning or the woman three desks down from you at work - if they are interested in politics at all, that is – have their own ideas, too.

Now elements in New Labour are attempting to theorise the question. James Purnell – a man who has never given any indication of being anything other than a goodthinkful citizen of Blairstrip One – has been appointed director of Open Left, a Demos-backed project said to be about about ‘rediscovering the Left’s idealism, pluralism and appetite for radical ideas’.

The website adds: ‘We are starting by asking an essential but contested question: what does it mean to be on the Left today?’ Purnell elucidates further here. Parts of the piece ostentatiously reek of positioning for a possible future leadership challenge.

How should those of us who are, shall we say, a little more self-confident or perhaps self-righteous in our leftism respond? OK, let’s get one red herring out of the way right at the start. Yes, the terms right and left – arising as they do from an accident in the seating arrangements in the French legislative assembly in 1791 – have no significant intrinsic connotation.

The argument of the Marxist and/or broadly marxisante tradition is that there is some state of affairs called socialism, such that it qualitatively overcomes the inequalities inhering in a market economy, thereby bringing about a broadly egalitarian society. Individuals are on the left if and only if they advocate socialism as desirable, and propose some means of moving from capitalism to socialism.

This position at least has clarity going for it. Communists, Trots, anarchists, syndicalists or whatever obviously make the cut. So does the left wing of the Labour Party, under whatever name it happens to be trading at any given time.

Some who self-identify as leftists will challenge this conclusion. The social democratic wing of the Labour Party, for instance, offers an internally coherent set of ideas fundamentally premised on greater egalitarianism made possible by ever-higher living standards born of capitalism. Certain radical Liberals in practice believe much the same thing. Many adherents to these schools would see themselves as a non-socialist left, or perhaps 'centre left', if you prefer the designation.

Conceding the point is largely a matter of taste. You say tomato, I say bog standard centrist politician. But frankly, the trouble I have with Purnell and his New Labour ilk is that they qualify under neither rubric.

They have very obviously abandoned any notion of socialism, and not just on grounds of ‘window dressing’, if I can employ the Flintism. Not only do Purnell and his co-thinkers not recognise any such thing as an unacceptable face of capitalism; they have never seen any visage of the free market that they do not instinctively like.

Thus they have been ‘intensely relaxed’ about people getting ‘filthy rich’, even as inequality has actually increased on any econometric measure, and equally intensely relaxed about cutting benefits to single mums and scrapping student grants. They have, in other words, knowingly devised and pursued policies with the express purpose of exacerbating inequality.

I can therefore see no ideological sense in which they can be described as ‘on the left’, even if they do predict a backlash against New Labourism after Labour 's impending electoral annihilation, and want to appear a bit more Cruddas-friendly should what remains of the membership demand a reversion to identifiable social democracy.

In short, Purnell is pledged to spend the next three years trying to define himself as something that he is not and never has been, for purposes largely of self-promotion. I naturally wish him luck.

AS A former staff journalist on Socialist Worker, Peter Hitchens really should think twice before repeatedly banging on about the one-time Trotskyist affiliations of a fair few New Labour cabinet ministers.

Does the expression ‘spent conviction within the meaning of the rehabilitation of offenders act’ really have no meaning to him?

Yes, yes. We all know by now that Alistair Darling sold Black Dwarf outside Edinburgh Waverley station, Alan Milburn worked in a Tyneside leftie bookshop nicknamed Haze of Dope, and Stephen Byers spent a stint as a Millie.

The question is, does the brand of politics these people identified with decades ago connect in any way to their current praxis? Hitchens Minor simply asserts this to be the case:

None of them, in my view, has given up the radicalism of the past. They have simply discovered that they can use Parliament to achieve a revolution they once thought would need barricades and red flags.

Evidence?

And these, I stress, are only the ones we know about. Who knows how many others – MPs, Ministers, civil servants, judges, BBC executives, even Bishops – still treasure revolutionary aims?

OK Peter, name three policies outlined in the Transitional Progamme – and don’t you dare tell me they didn’t make you read in when you were in the International Socialists – that have been enacted by New Labour in office since 1997? Nationalising a couple of banks to bail out capitalism doesn’t count.

Where exactly does Trotsky advocate cuts in corporation tax financed by scrapping student grants and reductions in benefits for single mothers and the disabled?

Did I miss the pamphlet in which the Old Man demanded the maintenance of Tory anti-union laws and Tory privatisation policies, draconian measures against asylum seekers, increased income inequality, compulsory ID cards in a capitalist state and the renewal of Trident?

Not only did New Labour fail to institute the New Jerusalem, it hasn't even brought us to the outter suburbs of the greater Tel Aviv conurbation.

Never mind. It did give me quite a chuckle to read that new defence secretary Bob Ainsworth was a candidate member of the Coventry branch of the International Marxist Group in the early 1980s, at a time when I was a fully paid up cadre IMGer.

Technically, the IMG no longer existed at this point. Internally we were known as the Socialist League; externally, we were supporters of the newspaper Socialist Action. But such small print is for Trot trainspotters only, I guess. But let Peter continue:

I can recall members of the International Marxist Group yelling ‘Victory to the IRA!’ on student demonstrations. So I was interested to see stories that the latest Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth, was a ‘candidate member’ (they didn’t let just anyone in) of the IMG in 1982 and 1983, when he was 30 years old, not a student.

No, we didn’t just let anyone in. It was a standing joke on the far left that you actually had to pass an exam in Marxist theory before you were allowed to sign up, although this may be an urban myth. The stipulation was certainly not in place at the time I joined.

Nevertheless, the candidate system operated for a purpose, which was to determine an applicant’s degree of political commitment and suitability for membership of a revolutionary organisation.

To become a candidate member was in itself a conscious decision, and the term had specific meaning. To use the phrase we used at the time, candidate membership conferred ‘all of the duties but none of the rights’ enjoyed by full members.

Yes, you had to sell the paper. Yes, you had to pay a fair chunk of your income in dues. And yes, you had to go to endless bloody meetings, even though you got only an indicative vote.

Now, I wasn’t based in Coventry and do not recall meeting Ainsworth at the time. I have no idea of the extent of his involvement. But the insistence on the part of his office that he simply attended a couple of IMG meetings at the invitation of a mate does not ring true. That would have made him at best a close contact, and would not even have qualified him as a sympathiser.

I guess it is even possible that we failed him after his spell as a candidate. We were an organisation with a certain rigour and panache, and neither are qualities that Ainsworth exudes in bucketloads.

The question is, does a tangential brush with the British section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International disqualify someone from being defence secretary? There are any number of reasons to doubt his suitability for the post, as the man himself admits, but having been a bit of a leftie a quarter of a century ago does not strike me as one of them. There are no indications whatsoever that Ainsworth still clings to one iota of whatever he once may or may not have believed in.

Hitchens' own progression from Cliffite to Conservative parliamentary wannabe and from there to the further shores of rightism beyond the Tory Party illustrate quite clearly that there is no correlation whatsoever between a youthful paper seller and a mature reactionary, even if they are biologically speaking one and the same person.

I NOTICE that Nick Kollerstrom’s book ‘Terror on the Tube’ enjoys a highly positive review on the Morning Star website. Here, we are told, is a work that ‘tears the official explanation for the July 7 Tube and bus bombings to shreds’.

The research effort is highly commended, resulting as it does in ‘a detailed analysis based on a wealth of information’. The ‘government story’ is ‘completely demolished’. Morning Star reviewer Geoff Simons is entirely persuaded:

Times, photographs, official statements - all are subject to a careful scrutiny that leaves nothing standing.

So what is the reality behind 7/7, then?

US analyst Webster Tarpley said in 2005: "Last week's London explosions carry the characteristic features of state-sponsored, synthetic provocation by networks within the British intelligence services MI5, MI6, the Home Office and the Metropolitan Special Branch who are favourable to a wider Anglo-American aggressive war in the Middle East."

US analyst Webster Tarpley? The former Lyndon LaRouche associate who thinks that the first world war stemmed from a British plot to transform the empire into a single world government, and that Barack Obama is a secret frontman for a far right faction around Zbigniew Brzezinski? You mean that US analyst Webster Tarpley? Riiiiiii-ght, Geoff. Slam dunk, innit.

The false-flag argument is extended to other much-publicised terrorist atrocities - September 11 2001, Bali, Madrid, Istanbul and Mumbai.

Can a publication that bills itself ‘the daily paper of the left’ really be giving credence to the notion that all of the above were essentially neoconservative/secret state put up jobs? So it seems.

Is there anything intrinsically implausible in the rather simpler case that these acts were indeed authored by those Islamist forces who were proud to claim responsibility for them?

OK, I haven’t read the book, so I cannot pass judgement on the quality of the reasoning. All I can say is that given its underlying contention, the justification had better be bloody persuasive. But I do note that just because Nick Kollerstrom insists something did not happen, that does not necessarily mean something did not happen.

In his paper ‘The Auschwitz “Gas Chamber” Illusion’ - I won’t link to it, but it is readily google-able if you really must - Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom PhD maintains that ‘gas chambers operated for purposes of hygiene and disinfection, in order to save lives and not take them’.

Indeed, Auschwitz is portrayed as a holiday camp in rural Poland, in which inmates ‘would sunbathe there on Saturday and Sunday afternoons while watching the water polo matches’. Both 9/11 and 7/7, he avers, were carried out on the instructions of ‘Zionist masters’. Those rootless cosmopolitans get everywhere.

Kollerstrom’s research fellowship at University College London was terminated as a result of the document, and quite rightly so. This incident only took place last year, and was widely publicised at the time.

Let us try to apply strict logic here. Because Kollerstrom is an odious holocaust denier, it does not therefore logically follow that his views on other topics are also wrong. Perhaps Simons is correct, and Doc K does make mincemeat of the official line.

On the other hand, shouldn’t a book on 7/7 written by a man notorious for the belief that multiple atrocities were ordered by ‘Zionist masters’ to further their dastardly clandestine ends be subject to rather closer scrutiny in a labour movement journal such as the Morning Star?

Somebody please tell me this was a horrendous error of judgement and not an implicit endorsement.

UPDATE: In much the same way that Trotsky got airbrushed out of all those post-revolution pictures of him with Lenin, the Morning Star has now taken the article down, without any explanation as to why. I trutst a full political statement will be forthcoming.

[Hat tip: Rory in the comments box, post below]

I WAS extremely flattered to get an email in this blog’s inbox last week from a young man of 19, asking my advice on getting involved with leftwing politics for the first time. He tells me that while he finds the SWP impressive in many respects, he is aware of its well-deserved reputation for sectarianism and control freakery.

Consequently, he is considering involvement with the Labour Party, in the hope that it it will evolve in a more progressive and internally democratic direction in the coming period. I’m sure many regular readers will recollect facing a similar quandary at a comparable age:

I recently went with a friend to the Marxism 2009 festival organised by the SWP. He joined. I haven't yet. The festival was an amazing experience, I learned a lot, discovered class analysis as a means of exploring issues close to me such as racism, sexism and LGBT rights.

So what do I do? Do I join the SWP and add myself to the largest organisation on the British far-Left. Do I join a socialist party with more internal democracy and contribute to the factionalism typical of Trots? Do I join Labour and try to do my bit to help her find her old Social Democratic roots, whether or not they win the election? Can I join the SWP and Labour? What is your advice for a young leftist, hoping to do the most good possible?

This is what I wrote back:

Well, you seem to have the situation pretty much sussed out. I agree with your analysis of both the SWP and Labour. Basically, I think British politics is pretty much on hold until the next election. We'll see over the next couple of years whether the far left is capable of regroupment, and what shape the Labour Party will take after the demise of New Labourism.

All I would suggest is, go with your gut instincts. Join either and see how you get on. At your age, it will be easy enough to change your mind if the party you choose does not live up to your expectations. Don't rule out the smaller groups. Try attending some of their events.

So … did I say the right thing? Answers/opinions in the comments box, please.

HERE’S a political conundrum for you; an economic climate that should be profoundly conducive to socialism instead seems set to herald a decade in which British politics is dominated by reanimated Thatcherism and the menacing growth of the fascist right.

Writing in the Guardian’s G2 supplement this morning, Andy Beckett considers the outlook for what might broadly be defined as socialism, with soundbites garnered from a spectrum ranging from Jon Cruddas and Geoff Mulgan through Hilary Wainwright and Paul Ormerod to Alex Callinicos and Martin Smith of the SWP.

It’s not particularly an incisive or well-written piece, but the conclusion is broadly that the left is all out of fresh thinking, and has subsisted for decades on rehashed truisms, available in either Marxist or Keynesian flavourings according to choice.

This isn’t the whole story. Beckett accords too much weight to ideological factors, and not enough to the industrial relations defeats of the 1980s, the changes in the British class structure seen since the advent of Thatcherism, and the Blairites’ deliberate use of the Labour Party machine to destroy the Labour left.

There is also the question of the culture of the left, which has for long periods allowed it to deny that anything important was changing and that the old nostrums surely still had to work, if only activists agitated for them hard enough.

On the far left, small organisations have been complacently content to be small. That is unfortunately an inherent by-product of the whacky idea that a microsect can be a revolutionary party ‘in embryo’.

So long as it has ‘the right politics’ in place, it can depend on being catapulted into the big time by impending crisis, just like the Bolsheviks in 1917. Mass membership? Why would anybody want that? It would only make it harder to ram through the next 180 degree change of line.

Attempts at regroupment have now been a work in progress since the launch of the Socialist Labour Party in 1996. It is not worth enumerating just how many new party vehicles have since been launched and then lightmindedly cast aside.

The result is that capitalism can find itself in the worst spot of bother it has seen since the 1930s, and yet a flagship project involving a major industrial union, the Communist Party of Britain and the Socialist Party secures just 1% of the votes in a low turnout proportional representation electoral contest. Ludicrously, boosterists talk even that up as a triumph.

But Beckett is completely correct to point to a paucity of fresh thinking, and a lack of any attempt to make socialism relevant to a new generation that has only the faintest idea of what the word entails.

New Labour has from the start been gulled into intellectual stupor by its own self-delusional rhetoric. Convinced that its own brand of softer neoliberalism was enough to make it ‘the political wing of the British people as a whole’, if only by self-proclamation, it neglected even to renew the bases of Labourism itself.

Old Labour, by contrast, pulled up the drawbridge and refused to acknowledge that the society that created it was disappearing before its eyes. As a combined result, the Labour Party is now so hollowed out that it could collapse at the slightest push.

Intellectually, the Stalinist tradition ran out of road in 1989. The leading figure on the Marxism Today wing has dissolved his politics into soft Sinophilia, shocked and awed by a society that is even more inegalitarian than either Britain or the US.

The Morning Star side of the CPB – which constituted the brains of the No2EU operation - still cannot get its head round the reality of what the USSR represented in history. Constrained by their origin, neither element is capable of forging an attractive new left politics.

Most Trotskyist groups have become sects in the full sociological meaning of the term, with any criticism of a closed belief system automatically equated to heresy. Tendencies that once quite rightly derided student vanguardism and guerillaism as ‘substitutionism’ fell foul to analoguous elephant traps, relating primarily to anti-capitalist youth and the bourgeois and clerical layers of religious minorities rather than the organised working class.

In short, through a collective failure of the imagination, the left has failed to come up with a politics relevant for this country in the early twenty-first century rather than early twentieth century Russia or postwar Britain. Now we are living with the consequences.

THE Communist Party of Britain has pulled out of talks aimed at putting up a far left challenge to New Labour at the next election. Or that’s what is claimed here, anyway. Some leadership figures may have quit the organisation as a result.

The way Phil BC tells it, tensions between the pro-Labour traditionalists in the CPB and those who wanted to line up with Respect a couple of years back have scuppered the possibility of it signing up to the so called ‘son of No2EU’ coalition.

No2EU, of course, is to the far left slate that stood in the European Parliament elections earlier this year. The RMT union contributed its members’ cash, with the CPB, the Socialist Party and some smaller groups providing the footsoldiers.

If I remember correctly, No2EU secured the backing of one point something percent of those that bothered to vote. This is less than the tally for Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, which didn’t even pretend to mount a campaign.

That was in a proportional representation contest; general elections operate on a first past the post basis. The best any ad hoc grouping, thrown together just months before the poll, can hope to attain is a truckload of lost deposits.

Maybe it will cost Labour three or four marginals. Or maybe it won’t even manage that. And for what? Oh well, maybe they will pick up some recruits.

Broadly speaking, British far left groups have now spent 13 years trying to establish a united electoral alternative. Result? We now have more left sects than at the start of the process.

I regularly get asked how come someone with my politics can be a member of the Labour Party. But let me offer one good reason; the British far left are too sectarian and too stupid to engage in serious politics. Good luck, comrades.

REDMOND O’Neill - a man I knew relatively well during my membership of the International Marxist Group in the 1980s, but with whom I have had no dealings whatsoever since - died earlier this month at the young age of 55.

The following is entirely unedited. If you don’t like it, shoot Bob; I’m only the messenger.

I KNOW it's not done to speak ill of the dead, but in the case of Redmond O'Neill, who played a prominent role in the London mayor’s office during the eight years that Ken Livingstone held power, I feel an exception should be made. Particularly so, in view of the gushing and entirely uncritical tributes to him that have appeared since his demise.

Having had some experience of working with him in the mayor’s office during 2004-8, I saw another side to O’Neill, namely the abuse and bullying of staff for which he became notorious at City Hall. It was the kind of behaviour you would expect from the worst sort of manager in the worst private sector company. Yet it took place under an administration that was supposed to be pursuing a progressive agenda and the individual responsible for this behaviour claimed to be a socialist.

This went on for years. Back in 2002 the chair of the London Assembly received an email from a member of staff stating: "Some of the mayor's advisers have demonstrated an abysmal grasp of even basic management techniques, frequently bullying and threatening officers to obtain results." With the backing of UNISON, the editor of The Londoner newspaper was pursuing a grievance against O'Neill on those grounds at the time Ken was voted out of office.

This was why many staff at City Hall had mixed feelings about Ken's defeat. They were sorry for Ken that he lost the election, and understood that it was a big setback for progressive politics in London, but they really didn't want people like O'Neill coming back for another four years.

As its programme of job cuts has shown, the current regime at City Hall is hardly a friend of the workers. Nevertheless, there are not a few PAs, portering staff and other non-political employees who actually find it pleasanter working under Boris Johnson’s administration than under Ken’s. On a one-to-one basis they are at least treated with some basic respect and civility, which is more than they got from O’Neill and those around him.

O'Neill's methods not only alienated staff but also helped to bring down Ken's administration. The reason why Atma Singh, the mayor's former policy adviser on Asian affairs, turned against Ken and collaborated in the witch-hunt led by Andrew Gilligan and Martin Bright was because of his anger and bitterness over being bullied into a nervous breakdown by O'Neill. You have to ask – what sort of “socialism” is it that produces results like that?

Some would attribute it all to the corrupting influence of power, and there is an element of truth to this. Having long regarded himself as a central figure in the leadership of the British revolution, O’Neill certainly held an exaggerated view of his own political importance and, after he got his hands on a little bit of actual state power, the delusions of grandeur could only be magnified.

But a more fundamental explanation, I think, lies in the form of organisation that characterises most Leninoid sects – a “democratic centralism” in which the overwhelming emphasis is placed on the centralist component, providing a justification for unaccountable rule by domineering leadership cliques.

The problem was that O’Neill and other individuals who had spent decades running a small Trotskyist group on that basis suddenly found themselves at the head of a much bigger and broader organisation, where they antagonised and repelled people by importing the arrogant, top-down, authoritarian culture that characterises the internal life of the far-left sect. There is a striking parallel here with the behaviour of the SWP leaders in Respect.

The irony is that when I worked in the mayor’s office I was enthusiastic supporter of the administration’s political agenda – its transport and environmental policies, defence of multiculturalism, anti-racist campaigning, opposition to Islamophobia, promotion of LGBT rights, support for the anti-war movement and solidarity with Venezuela. It was just a shame that this progressive programme was soured by the organisational methods employed by some of the people charged with implementing it.

IS THE historical materialist analysis of women’s oppression necessarily counterposed to patriarchy theory? That – once upon a time, anyway – was a frequently successful chat up line, especially when aimed at chicks on the Hackney squatter circuit, circa 1981.

This was on account of a then-popular doctrine known as ‘feminism’, to which many leftie women strongly subscribed, and understandably so, as far as I and most male socialists were concerned. When you are young and rebellious, it makes sense to direct your immediate anger against the bastards most visibly grinding you down.

Even as I first began to check out the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, I realised that had I been born female, I would inevitably also have looked into the texts of Greer, Dworkin - not to mention a certain Bea Campbell - before making my mind up on political basics.

For decades I have been promising myself that I would get around to reading those books, and I don’t suppose it speaks at all well of me that I have yet to make that effort. I mean, I even have instant access to the main works; I could simply borrow them from Stroppybird, who has bookshelves full of the relevant titles.

But somehow it has always seemed more pressing to read the latest primer on Russian foreign policy or some new academic tome on behavourial macroeconomics. So it is that I largely have to busk when discussing feminist questions, on the back of only having read the ‘Feminism for Beginners’ comic book and ‘Women and the Family’ by Leon T.

In the interim, it looks to my outside eyes that the organised womens’ movement has all but collapsed. As this blog frequently laments, the British far left is in a bad way. But at least it is still just about visible. Feminism seems to have gone entirely subterranean.

What can have happened to all those deeply earnest young women, clad in black leggings and DMs, who once drunkenly argued that penetrative sex is inherently oppressive and that all men are rapists, sometimes only an hour or prior to an entirely voluntary temporary suspension of their political lesbianism? Or to put it another way, when was the last time any town in Britain staged a ‘reclaim the night’ march?

These days, feminism – if it means anything at all – seems to mean raunch culture on the one hand and the right of women to compete on equal terms on City trading desks. Progress? Maybe, but this is not the way my generation thought it was going to turn out.

Which brings me back to Bea Campbell, or Beatrix Campbell OBE, as she is more properly known. A heroine to some and derided by spikier proto-Riot Grrrl types, especially after denouncing male violence in the miners’ strike, the erstwhile eurocommunist has now been adopted as the Green candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn. She explains her evolution here.

How far this is a good thing, I suppose I am not best qualified to say. But Campbell’s life story nicely encapsulates the trajectory of a whole layer of women, who started out angry and ended up somewhere on the soft left, stopping only to pick up a gong from the Queen on the way.

The following article was commissioned by the Alliance for Workers' Liberty paper Solidarity. Normally I wait until such pieces appear in print before publishing them on this website, but I am seriously short of blogging time in Hong Kong, so I hope they forgive me just this once.

Meanwhile, what you are about to read means that I am breaking my new year's resolution no longer to write stuff on such topics and stick to matters of political consequence instead. Sorry, couldn't help myself. And besides, it's been ages since we've had a far left bunfight.

URBAN legend has it that George Best - by this point a rich but has-been alky rather than a footballer of genius - once ordered champagne to be delivered to the five-star hotel room in which he was gallivanting with a half-naked Miss World.

The bellboy arrived with the bubbly, only to find thousands of pounds of casino winnings strewn over the bed. The waiter calmly turned round to the the one-time Manchester United legend and pointedly asked him: ‘So, Mr Best. Where did it all go wrong?’

That’s a question the far left would do well to ponder as it gears up for the impending general election in a condition weaker than any in which it has found itself for perhaps a century.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, I was an enthusiastic advocate of initiatives like the Socialist Labour Party and the Socialist Alliance. But experience has taught me that a project of this type is impossible to realise in this country.

After 15 years of trying, we are actually further away from that target than we were to begin with. If you want to know why in six short words, the left is too bleeding stupid.

The period that opened up with the birth of New Labour offered it a real chance to build some kind of viable leftwing electoral formation, even if the AWL mistakenly clung to entrism.

Social democracy wilfully cast away the working class it once dominated ideologically, and launched into repeated wars that generated genuine mass opposition. Meanwhile, Stalinism appeared finished once and for all, and there was even a partial youth radicalisation.

It was utterly obvious what the situation demanded of us; unity in a single party and the hard slog of putting down meaningful roots in the labour movement and in working class communities. But we totally fluffed it.

The British left managed to shoot itself in the foot so many times that the ends of both its legs now terminate in bleeding stumps. I guess we got the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce and the third time as something that cannot be described in a family newspaper.

Much of the blame rests with the SWP, which has proven itself so entirely incapable of working with other forces inside a common democratic framework. That has to make the question of alliances with this group problematical.

Its central committee arrogantly assumes that the left cannot put together a meaningful electoral challenge without SWP participation. Much of the rest of the left – even if it diplomatically does not say it aloud - feels that it cannot put together a meaningful electoral challenge with the SWP on board.

Meanwhile, the very SWPers that preach ‘flair, determination and decisive leadership’ – qualities that Georgie Best amply displayed on the football pitch, I seem to remember – are reduced to provoking apolitical beauty contest faction fights by hyping up spurious non-differences. Hey guys, notice the fascists in Brussels?

Once, the Scottish Socialist Party demonstrated what could be achieved with a little nous. But all it took was one overblown male ego to squander that.

The Socialist Party in England and Wales deserves some credit for the years of patient local work legwork it has put in, at least in Coventry and a few other places. But the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition it is sponsoring this time round is clearly on the parliamentary road to lost deposits.

There is little point in putting together ad hoc coalitions just weeks before election campaigns begin, not even bothering to stand under the same name twice in succession.

At the time of writing, the SWP was in talks about joining up with TUSC. I’m frankly surprised that idea was not rejected as a non-starter. We’ll see what happens.

But even if it comes off, any shotgun marriage between Trots and the left of the trade union bureaucracy will prove a semi-tankie nightmare, with a rigid internal regime premised on the deterrence of microsect infiltration. That won’t stop the crackpots sneakily tabling transitional demands in the hope that no-one else will notice, of course.

There will be no prospect whatsoever of leadership accountability or control by the rank and file. That alone will prevent such a formation making headway in the working class.

The mosque bloc vote might see Respect fare slightly better than TUSC in percentage terms, but it has no realistic chance of securing any MPs either. It’s saddening to see activists desperately trying to kid themselves otherwise.

And I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already when I remind you that the solitary AWL candidacy may well struggle to poll a three-figure vote. Haven’t you lot got better things to do?

In short, the only socialist MPs that will get to Westminster this year will be the handful that get elected as Labour candidates. I’ll be concentrating my political efforts on securing the return of John McDonnell in Hayes and Harlington, and then participating in the debate that will be had after Labour’s imminent crushing defeat.

IF A bunch of squabbling Marxist groups can arm-twist the trade unions into setting up a broad based working class party once, there is no reason why they cannot pull off the trick a second time.

That seems to be the history lesson taken to heart by sections of the British left. The Socialist Party, for instance, launched the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party four years ago. CNWP has done little since, other than hold an obligatory annual conference.

Workers’ Power - for reasons best known to its puissant central committee – has already flounced out in a huff over some outrage or other and issued its Call for a New Anticapitalist Party in Britain, which seems to thrive. At least on Facebook, anyway.

The Communist Party of Britain periodically flirts with the notion of a new ‘party of labour’, although on this issue it seemingly suffers from commitment phobia worthy of the male lead in a Bridget Jones flick.

Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Great Britain damns all such schemes as ‘halfway houses’. For the benefit of mainstream readers, I must stress here that the Communist Party of Britain should not under any circumstance be confused with the Communist Party of Great Britain. Got that?

In an attempt to clarify my thoughts on all this, I have just started rereading Henry Pelling’s ‘Origins of the Labour Party’, a book I last picked up circa 1983 when taking an undergraduate course in British political history.

Somehow I seem to remember finding the volume distinctly dull a quarter of a century ago. It’s actually well-written by the standards of the genre, and rightly still regarded as the mutt’s nuts on the topic it covers.

But the truly horrible thing is to discover that most of the problems that plagued the British far left 130 years ago are exactly the same as the problems it faces today.

Consider, for instance, the founder of the first-ever explicitly Marxist current in Britain. HM Hyndman was the prototype of that breed of alpha male who puff themselves up as revolutionary leaders on the basis of a half-arsed grasp of Marx’s philosophy. Remind you of anybody?

Hyndman - public school and Oxbridge, needless to say – was a failed Conservative parliamentary candidate. Prior to setting up the Social Democratic Federation in 1884, he organised a meeting with former prime minister Disraeli, during which he argued that the Tories should adopt a communist programme. Great game plan, or what?

Needless to say, the SDF split within a year of its foundation, largely because of the inevitable personality clashes. The leader of the breakaway Socialist League, the artist William Morris, was soon spouting an environment-based catastrophist perspective that would be considered quite fashionable in 2010.

But Morris was not much of what we would now call a theoretician. A Hyndmanite heckler at a public meeting asked him if he accepted Marx’s theory of value. Morris replied:

To speak frankly, I do not know what Marx’s theory of value is, and I’m damned if I want to know. Truth to say, my friends, I have not tried to understand Marx’s theory, but political economy is not my line, and much of it appears to me to be dreary rubbish.

OK, I’ve only gone through the first two chapters of Pelling. But my initial feeling is that the difference between the 1880s and the 2010s are sufficient to preclude history repeating itself, even the second time as farce.

Salient changes include the depoliticisation and atomisation of the working class, the incorporation of the trade union leadership into many of the mechanisms of the state and the hardening of separate traditions within the left to an unbridgeable extent.

Finally, an abstract notion of ‘socialism’ cannot be advanced as the political basis for a new party in the same way it was at the time of Labour’s birth, when it could mean whatever anybody wanted it to mean. The brute realities of twentieth century history have seen to that.

It is also worth pointing out that the sects of 1884 – the SDF, the SL and the Fabian Society – had more or less got the Labour Party off the ground by 1900, a period of just 16 years.

It is now 14 years since the establishment of Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, the first of the manifold left regroupment initiatives, and the refoundation of anything like a serious working class party is no closer. The suspicion has to be that it will never happen.

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.