The Putin Paradox

 

1948 marked the Nakba, the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes by the new Israeli state, driving them into the small wedge of land that is Gaza, where the population is now 2,200,000 - half of them children. It has been under blockade for 20 years and now there are fears that the Netanyahu government's objective is to expel the Palestinians completely.

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin waded into the appalling carnage visited by the IDF on Gaza, the West Bank and south Lebanon, supposedly promoting peace. His hypocrisy however sadly matches Biden's and Netanyahu's.   

Putin of course is currently waging his own bloody war, including bombing Ukrainian hospitals, partly over the Crimean peninsula. He has put about a myth that this historically is a Russian land. But it is not. 

Just four years before the Palestinian Nakba, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin ordered the Sürgünlik - the deportation of the entire population of the Crimean Tatars. This was a Muslim community that had lived on the peninsula for several centuries before the Russian Empire conquered it in 1773, annexing it a decade later. Stalin falsely claimed that the entire population were Nazis (sound familiar?), but in truth this was one of several forced mass deportations to make way for the Russification of the Soviet Republics. 

As well as the Tatars, around 40,000 Estonians, the vast majority of them women and children, were moved to Siberia in 1941 and 1949, with other big forced transfers of Latvians, Lithuanians, Turkomens, ethnic Germans and Armenians around the same time. In all cases, large numbers of Russian settlers replaced the deportees.

And so, pictured above, in May 1944 up to 423,000 Tatar people - literally the entire population - were deported from their historical homeland of Crimea and sent to Central Asia and Siberia. Uzbekistan was the main destination.

According to the files of the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB, around 10% of the deportees died in transit or in forced labour camps over the next five years.  Meanwhile, as the Tatars were removed, in 1944 alone, 51,000 Russians moved into collective farms vacated by deportees. More than a quarter of a million acres of land was forcibly transferred.

This was how Russian settlers achieved an overall majority in the population of the peninsula. 

Yet while Stalin's successors condemned the policy, they did not allow the Muslim Tatar deportees to return home and those who tried were quickly removed again. 

It wasn't until 1989 that the ban was lifted by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russo-Ukrainian who was the final leader of the Soviet Union. The Supreme Soviet declared the deportations illegal. Initially a small number of Tatars finally made the journey back to the Crimea but faced violent riots against their return by Russian nationalists, particularly in Yalta where the Soviet army had to intervene to stop escalation. 

In 1954, the peninsula had been brought under the Ukrainian Republic within the Soviet Union. Although on a low turnout, in spite of the Russian majority, 54% of Crimean voters backed Ukrainian independence in the 1991 referendum.  

In 1999, the small Tatar population was accorded a level of self-governing status via the Mejlis, an elected council, by the independent Ukrainian constitution, which also granted automatic Ukrainian citizenship to around 150,000 exiled Tatars across the former USSR. Over 100,000 gradually returned to the Crimea - not without some bureaucratic opposition from Ukrainian officials - and by 2004, they had regrown to around an eighth of the population of the peninsula.

However, the Mejlis was turned into an appointed body by pro-Russian President of the Ukraine Viktor Yanukovitch in 2010 and following the Russian occupation of the Crimea in 2014, many Tatars complained about renewed persecution. According to the UN Human Rights agency they have often faced harassment and disproportionate levels of arrest. Most of the 10,000 people who left the Crimea in the subsequent year after the Russian occupation were Tatars. 

Putin's slaughter of some 8,000 Muslim civilians in Grozny at the turn of the millennium and his fostering of Russian Christian nationalism doubtless did little to reassure them. Similarly, the approving description of him as "the key to white survival" by former KKK leader David Duke and other supportive white supremacists inside and outside Russia may not have helped.

The Russian authorities banned the Mejlis in 2016, declaring it an extremist organisation.

One of the Tatars elected leaders, Rustem Umierov, is now Ukrainian Minister of Defence, organising resistance to the imperialist Islamophobe Putin, a man who should be in the dock in the Hague. 

He should of course be there alongside, among others, fellow pseudo-Middle East "peace envoy" Tony Blair and his criminal confederate George Bush. As the old anarchist saying goes - neither Washington nor Moscow.

The Sürgünlik,1944

Suits You, Sir Keir!

Behind You! - The allegedly scruffy Jeremy Corbyn followed by Man in an Empty Suit

Reeling from a 7% swing to the Tories in the latest opinion poll, haemorrhaging members and money and struggling to be heard even in the silence of the depleted Covid Commons, Labour's leader Sir Keir Starmer has taken a leaf not so much from the Biden as the Trump Playbook to try to revive his flagging fortunes.

In the true spirit of neoliberalism and new Nu-Labour, a leaked report recommends the party needs to "make use of the (union) flag, veterans and dress smartly". 

In an unsurprising triumph of form over content, the report from the party's Research team has found that after nearly a year of the startled Starmer regime, the vast majority of voters have no idea what the party is about or what it stands for. Possibly seeking to consolidate this vacuum, the proposal seems that the party should become even more indistinguishable from the Conservative Government, to whom Sir Keir has repeatedly leant his support or, failing that, his abstention on issue after issue through their dreadful mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Supposedly intending to hold Boris Johnson to account via his lawyerly "forensic questioning", he has rarely landed so much as a light smack on the fingers to the Old Etonian prefect as now over 106,000 citizens have died. The supposedly lame Ed Miliband has been the only Labour frontbencher to come anywhere near embarrassing this laziest of Prime Ministers during these historic days, only to have to hand back in time for Starmer to try to outdo the Tories in demanding schools stay open in the face of union fears - until of course he heard Johnson was going to close them and so rushed out a closure demand just ahead of the PM's announcement.

Similarly, he has singularly failed to challenge the appalling nepotism and pork-barrel politics of this most corrupt of government and he has backslid on a raft of legislation. The latter has included notably supporting the Brexit Deal in spite of doggedly insisting on opposing the almost identical Theresa May deal two years ago and later dragging his party to supporting a second referendum - this latter step was a fatal move that drove millions of Labour voters over to the Tories and Brexit Party, shearing the party of dozens of seats. More recently and even more shockingly Starmer failed to oppose new powers granted to the espionage services including the right to torture and kill, in spite of his past fairly good record as a challenger for human rights in the courts. 

His time as Director of Public Prosecutions though perhaps pressaged his true or maybe changed self.  Quite aside from the failure to prosecute Jimmy Saville (not his direct decision, but on his watch), his tightening of the criteria for viable prosecutions for sexual assault led to a marked and immediate decline in rape prosecutions which remains the case today, a decade later.

But of course, the one thing that does seem to set the wooden knight aflame is attacking the Labour Left and in particular Jeremy Corbyn, now expelled from the Parliamentary Party (though readmitted to wider party membership by the National Executive Committee). In spite of campaigning for the leadership election on a promise of keeping the socialist, transformational policies of the Corbyn era, he and his Shadow Cabinet have now backed away from tax reform, from ending student fees and have even signalled a move away from the radical Green New Deal. Once the pandemic crisis is over, it seems only a matter of time before his Shadow Chancellor Annaliese Dodds will be out-austeritying the Tories on balancing the budget after the months of furloughing employees (a policy adopted by Sunak and Johnson after their one and only meeting with Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell in the early stages of the crisis).

So as he waves his flag and patronises veterans in his best pinstripe, Starmer seems unlikely to see the truths staring him in his seemongly ever-startled face: that when Labour previously embraced this Tory-lite strategy under Tony Blair, it was in the backwash of the collapse of the USSR and the "end of history", where voters were however uncertainly willing to accept neoliberalism and the benign guidance of the liberal "Political Class" in return for some meagre share of the Dream. 

But we are twenty years on now and Cool Britannia is buried under thick icy sheets of  personal debt, broken promises and shattered lives. The Tories have successfully played the new landscape by setting neighbours against neighbours and sharpening conflict everywhere. Even their ludicrous, vicious predatory purchase at above-the-odds prices of over seven times the quantity of covid vaccines needed to innoculate all of the UK has been driven by an attempt to stymmie other countries' efforts to vaccinate and save the lives of their citizens. 

Yet from Starmer, there is nothing. Some level of complaint that some things haven't been done well enough, or soon enough; or a bizarre notion that he can bring down Boris by pointing out some time or other that the PM muddled his figures - when anyone knows he can't even count his children properly but his voters don't care.

Just as Biden needs Bernie Sanders, AOC and others in the USA to drive him hard if the grievances that Trump leeched off are ever to be resolved, so here we need more than a Man in a Suit - especially this particular man (after all, even Corbyn managed to wear a suit with "for the many, not the few" pinstripes during the last General Election). Voters will not be won back by some well-scrubbed liberal with excess hair gel oozing his support for the incumbent. Rather, they want the transformational politics skewered in December 2019 by the vitriol of the billionaire press, the bias of the BBC and the rampage against their own party by the Labour Right - quietly among them, perhaps, Starmer himself with the more than obviously suicidal strategy of his insistence on Corbyn backing a second Brexit referendum.

Like the rest of the world, we are at a historic crossroads. The death and devastation of the pandemic demand something better than the "business-as-yesterday" Blairite revanchists. We do well to remember that the last time Labour lauded veterans in this way, it ended with scores of sons and daughters of some of the poorest communities in the UK lying dead or maimed in Iraqi deserts or on Afghan hills. True love of country, or of community, involves challenging its wrongs and making it into something better. It isn't about the flim-flam of waving flags and putting on a tie.

Above all, it isn't about being another Tory Party. We've already got one. And that's already more than enough.

Into The Void

Perpetually worried - Keir Starmer stares into the centrist void...

Who remembers Bill Rogers?

He was the quiet one, modestly titling his long lost autobiography Fourth Among Equals - no Caesar Augustus he, one of the joint leaders of the Social Democratic Party, the breakaway from the Labour Party in 1981.

Headed by heavyweight former Cabinet Ministers Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and Dr David Owen, Rodgers, a former Transport Secretary, was the final member of the "Gang of Four" and was seen as the organiser of the SDP, which boasted new fangled initiatives like letting members join using credit cards and phone banks.

Under its collective leadership, the party initially pitched itself as a left of centre alternative to the overtly socialist leadership of Labour under Michael Foot from 1980 to 1983. Later, however, it  shifted during the sole leadership of Owen to a more rightwards "tough but tender" approach where the emphasis was much more technocratic, with the Doctor loftily holding forth his diagnoses of rampant incompetence on the part of the increasingly creaky Thatcher administrations. Often causing ructions among his Liberal Allies, Owen's pitch was firmly on the Tories' own terms - his "social market" was a conscious decision to operate on their ground, implying, ultimately, that he could be a better Conservative than the slavering followers of the wild-eyed Thatcher as she moved into full Caligula mode.

Ultimately, of course, the Liberal-SDP Alliance ended in utter rancour. After a disappointing result in the 1987 election left the SDP with just 5 MPs, a majority of the membership voted to merge with the Liberals. Owen refused to have anything to do with it and briefly created a "continuing SDP" which was wound up after polling behind the Monster Raving Looney party in a Merseyside by-election in early 1990. The Doctor exited elected politics and ended up aptly as a cross-bencher in the Lords, while Rodgers followed his other Gang members into what became the Liberal Democrats, leading them in the Lords for several years and happily backing the 2010 to 2015 coalition of austerity with the Conservatives.

His relevance today stems from his comments on a BBC "reunion" programme a little while before the European referendum in 2016. Interviewed with Williams and Owen about their reasons for their 1981 adventure (which had been dramatised as a successful London stage play) the now Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank opined that British politics had been "broken" then as it was again but, crucially, in spite of the surging UKIP and previous upswings for the BNP and street demos by the EDL, "politics will get back to normal soon enough."

His Lordship was perhaps expressing hope as much as prediction, but his complacency is readily explicable and not without some merit. For, while the SDP itself collapsed after barely six years' existence, its purpose - to stop an overtly socialist Labour Party being elected to office, was powerfully and successfully achieved.

First under the former leftwing firebrand Neil Kinnock and ultimately under the narcissism of the Blair leadership, Labour reacted to the SDP's brief but damaging insurgency and the accompanying four terms of Conservative governments by shedding its socialism, jettisoning commitments to large scale public ownership and wealth redistribution. In their place came an almost fervent advocacy of market economics, public services outsourced to the supposedly efficient private sector and a relentless focus on courting centrist voters.

By the late 90s "New Labour" Chancellor Gordon Brown was making a virtue of following Tory spending plans and deregulating the financial sector, while Peter Mandelson smooched with the rich and not-so-beautiful, whispering seductively that he was "intensely relaxed" about their being filthy rich. Unions were cowed into partnership agreements with no strike clauses while academics like Anthony Giddens lauded Blair's "Third Way", a faux centrist philosophy of a supposedly conflict-free society.

It was the emergence of inequality on a scale unknown in a century as well as Labour's strategy of taking working class voters for granted during these years that led to a slow but steady leakage of support away from the party and directly into the arms of far right populists like the neofascist BNP and later the revanchist UKIP. For the truth was that it was under these conditions that the working class became detatched from the Labour Party.

Many may have switched to not voting at all, but, alienated from the economic boom sucked up by the wealthy through the first decade of the 21st century and forced to compete with immigrant labour, the lure of xenophobic memes well and truly nurtured by the media was to lead in time to the Brexit vote. "Taking back control" wasn't only about asserting British independence from the EU; it was, perhaps ironically given some of the Leave leadership, a full-on rebuke to the liberal Establishment - which, too late, semi-awoke to the patronsingly labelled "left behind".

Yet the period that saw British politics slide into chaos from the Expenses scandal of 2008, the recession of the same year and the austerity of the following years, fostered not only a revolt on the right of politics - the Left was on the march too, a process that culminated in the breathtaking rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership in the autumn of 2015. Simultaneously the party saw its membership rocket to well over half a million members, becoming the largest political organisation in Europe. In spite of two attempts to remove him by recalcitrant rightwing Labour MPs, who remained the majority of the parliamentary group, Corbyn endured through the now-revealed sabotage of party staffers in the 2017 general election to deliver the party's best result in almost two decades, depriving the Tories of their majority at the same time.

Lord Rodgers' hope of a return to normal seemed remote indeed. But, facing the rise of  powerfully ideological forces on both their flanks, the Political Class rallied around a protracted campaign undermining Corbyn again and again, while ceding the Tory Party to the rightist populism of Boris Johnson, which ultimately saw off UKIP and its briefly popular successor, the Brexit Party. That Labour still turned in a 32% vote share last December - higher than Brown or Miliband achieved during their leaderships and, in vote terms, better than Blair himself achieved when he won in 2005 - is little short of a miracle, and proof perhaps that, however devastating the outcome was in terms of seats (a relatively moot point given that our electoral system is as rational as a turn on the roulette wheel), a large movement remains for genuine socialism.

But, just as they made the anti-Corbyn narrative before the election, the Labour right have happily fashioned a new one post-polls. In this, Brexit had nothing to do with the sharp decline in the party's showing after their Brexit speaker, Keir Starmer, persuaded the NEC to over-rule Corbyn and campaign for a second vote on EU membership. In spite of the clear evidence on the doorsteps and in the results that Farage's Brexit Party drew enough support from Labour to deliver dozens of seats to Johnson, especially along the so-called Red Wall, the outcome is blamed entirely on Corbyn. Anything from anti-Semitism to "having too much in the manifesto" (Starmer's argument) has been deployed to explain the outcome. Almost surreally, former leader Ed Miliband has been commissioned to analyse and report on why Labour lost, in spite of the party polling almost a million more votes and a larger vote share than it achieved under his tenure.

In spite of his relatively comfortable victory in the leadership contest, three months in Starmer appears to have lost none of the Labour right's long-brewed vitriol. While his challenges to Boris Johnson during the covid crisis have hit home a few times over the chaotic handling of initiatives like track and trace and the late care homes lockdown, such passion as he has managed to muster has seemed far more focussed on the Left of the party and on Corbyn's legacy in particular.

Still light on any detail, Starmer has backslid on Labour's promises of wealth redistribution, signalled a likley retreat on the groundbreaking Green New Deal and proclaimed the party to be under new management. His Corbynite leadership rival, Rebecca Long Bailey, was ostensibly sacked from her Shadow Education role over an allegedly anti-Semitic tweet (in which she disseminated an Independent newspaper's interview with actor Maxine Peak). But by many accounts the real rift was over her wish to support the teachers' unions opposition to Government attempts to force them back into the classroom while the pandemic was still raging - Starmer, fearful of not being "constructive" wanted to support the government instead.

This week has seen the purge of Corbynism reach new depths with a legal settlement the party's lawyers advised against and now rumours that Starmer plans to expel the former leader himself from the parliamentary party.

Lord Rodgers may yet, it seems, have his wish of a return to "normal". Two parties, two sides of the same capitalist coin, endlessly rotating around a status quo, shoving it first a little one way and then the other to contain and neutralise those on both sides of the divide they straddle.

Containment - but for how long?

The notion that some centrist settlement - the polite comfortable certainties of the Major and Blair years - can be brought back and that, somehow, as if by magic, the very policies and even some of the people who fostered the crises of Britain will yet provide the solution - is beyond risible. Indeed, it is insulting to the victims of a decade of austerity and poverty, lost life-chances and premature death.

The risk of course is this - if there is no vehicle like the Labour Party to provide hope for a fairer society, for a tomorrow that achieves social justice and effectively tackles the environmental crisis, the currents of disillusion will not dissipate: like any tide, they will still gather and push until they find a new direction, one which, as past flirtations with the hard right have shown, will decidely not provide in any way a happy outcome.

Many on the Left fear Keir Starmer is a reincarnation of Tony Blair. Yet in truth he is far more akin the SDP's Dr Owen - almost delighting in a lack of any underpinning vision or ideology, but instead "forensically" scoring points over the contents of Government briefings - as if, this time, the modern Social Democrats rather than breaking away, have stayed and seized control of the Labour machine. An almost Stockholm syndrome-like atmosphere prevails - don't challenge this appalling Government's sociopathic behaviour over covid, its nepotistic dishing out of public contracts to its mates and shameless lack of values. Instead, tell Johnson and Co how you welcome what they're trying to do - just show them how to do it a bit better.

Where is the anger at tens of thousands of needless deaths and the failure to plan for the economic catastrophe that seems to loom ahead? How can we mobilise to campaign for public services when the Leader of the Opposition can't even rouse himself to condemn Tory legislation that, as Corbyn predicted, has now opened the NHS up to overseas ownership and control? Where is the will to fight racism when Starmer's immediate reaction to the toppling of the Bristol slaver's statue was to castigate demonstrators for being inappropriate? What is there to get out on the doorsteps about when the promise is of a pruning of "too many" policies seeking justice in a country where "normal" means 25,000 rough sleepers on the streets each and every night?

Little wonder that the party is reportedly losing many of its members, particularly among the crucial younger and BME demographics - where it overwhelmingly led the Tories last December. Many others seem to be following suit and Labour languishes 4% behind the Tories in recent polls - the mirror image of Corbyn's lead at the equivalent stage in the last parliament.

Starmer has been gushingly praised by the liberal press for his technocratic Question Time inquisitions of the increasingly truculent and lazily out-of-his-depth Johnson. Maybe so, yet as he stares with his seemingly perpetual look of worry across the despatch box, this strangely bloodless Labour leader would do well to check that he is not in truth simply gazing into a great big, gaping centrist void.

Contemplating Normal - Bill Rodgers (left) breakfasts with David Owen and Roy Jenkins.

Bernie Sanders and the Revolution to Come

Passing the Progressive Torch: Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders

And so democratic socialist standard-bearer Senator Bernie Sanders has suspended his campaign for the Democratic Party nomination for US President.

With around half the primaries contested, he trailed former Vice-President Joe Biden by over 300 delegates and with surveys giving Biden a roughly 2:1 advantage in forthcoming contests, Sanders could not see a realistic way to win. Coupled with the hobbling of his campaign, which had thrived on mass rallies and town hall events, by the coronavirus crisis, the institutional barriers thrown up by the Democratic Party establishment in the form of the Democrat National Committee have yet again stopped any progressive traction within the party.

There is some evidence of ballot tampering - notably, on Super Tuesday, when Biden's campaign decisively pulled ahead after a dreadful start, data indicated something amiss in states where Sanders won the exit polls but lost the actual vote, but with extraordinary differences well beyond the normal margin of error. And from the outset the mess in Iowa stymied Sanders' momentum, although it did get moving afterwards for a short period until the sudden turnaround in favour of the previously badly flailing Biden in South Carolina. The withdrawal of all the centrist candidates in favour of the clearly ailing former VP, coupled with Elizabeth Warren's refusal to back Sanders when she withdrew, effectively handed the nomination to Biden and his vague, liberal platform.

And so, just as Corbyn was crucified by a range of tactical manoeuvring by his centrist opponents and their corporate media paymasters in the UK, so in the USA once again the Establishment has spiked and neutralised a major challenge. They may be popping the champagne in the DNC tonight, but in truth the path ahead for them is infinitely harder than the typically pompously naive centrists can imagine.

Joe Biden - confused

For Joe Biden has to be arguably one of the worst, if not the worst, candidates the Democrats have ever nominated. Aside from his self-evident health issues, which appear to be some form of dementia or Alzheimers, his provenance is poisonous.

While faced with the mercurial Trump some may still fondly remember the Obama years, when Biden served as the President's loyal deputy, many aspects of his career raise serious questions - his civil rights record, contrary to his propaganda, is poor going back decades, as has been his approval of wars and welfare cuts. A rape allegation from a Democrat activist and former staffer of Biden has gone uninvestigated alongside a myriad of other issues about his invasion of women's personal space and unwelcome touching. And while Democrats may have invoked legal process to try to impeach Trump as ineffectually as Don Quixote tilting at windmills, the incumbent President was in fact worrying a very real sore when he tried to induce the Ukrainians to investigate Biden's son Hunter over his lucrative involvement in the energy sector in their country.

Senior Democrats seem to acknowledge this and blatantly, having rid themselves of Sanders' challenge, rumour is rife that Biden will, in fact, not become their final candidate for President. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose profile has been substantially boosted by his very visible leadership of the state's response to the Covid-19 epidemic, or even former 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton, are both touted as possible replacements, in spite of neither having won a single delegate to the Democrat Convention. Taking the democracy, such as it is, finally and irrevocably out of the Democratic Party.

So what now for the progressive and socialist movement? Sanders' relentless advocacy for fully-funded public health has been completely and dreadfully validated as tens of thousands of US lives succumb to coronavirus, with poorer and ethnic minority communities disproportionately affected. His huge movement, which has effectively mobilised tens of thousands of younger people and others towards a socialist or at least social democratic platform, remains intact and vibrant, hungering for change and social justice. And with the pandemic set to utterly transform politics around the globe, the USA will be no exception.

All the inequality, the underinvestment in crisis preparation and lack of effective public health facilities and staff, as well as the low level of welfare in the USA, has never been more poignantly and powerfully evident than now. While President Trump has enjoyed, inevitably, a miniature boost in the polls as he heads up the government response to the national crisis, his veering backwards and forwards around how to respond to a threat he ignored for weeks, then played down for weeks and for which even now he declares all manner of wild and unproven solutions that never turn out leave him vulnerable to attack.

Just as Cameron and Osborne's prominent involvement in the Remain campaign handed the UK Euro-referendum to the Brexiteers, so the DNC's eagerness to put up Biden or Clinton or even Cuomo against Trump plays directly into his hands in the November poll. It is unsurprising that a leaked recording showed that he feared Sanders above all other potential Democrats - for Sanders' stance on issues like opposing free trade deals like the job-thieving NAFTA, or on tackling the influence of political lobbying in "the swamp" posed a direct threat to Trump's tried and tested card, even as the incumbent, of being in Washington but not of it. While centrists fantastically claim that Biden can reach out to supposed "moderate" Republicans who nevertheless backed Trump in 2016, in truth, it is Sanders' agenda of radical change that is far more likely to cut into the President's base of the alienated and oppressed working class and turn their anger into something more positive.

By contrast, Biden or Clinton could not appeal to such voters in a century of trying - it is precisely because of them and their betrayal of the decades' old New Deal Coalition that Trump and other populists have been able to rise and harness voters' disillusion into racism and xenophobia rather than challenging the gross wealth of the tiny elite.

With a clearly misplaced loyalty, Sanders has already lauded Biden in a show of unity, while stating he will stay on the remaining primary ballots, though inactively, in order to influence the final party policy platform in the autumn. But that is almost certainly a forlorn hope. Biden and his ringmasters have made clear that they will stick with the same unimaginative, business-as-usual Democrat agenda that left Trump catapulted into the Oval Office four years ago.

Sanders' socialist torch will now pass on, skipping a generation from him to much younger politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and their colleagues in the Progressive Caucus within Congress and others outside the legislature. The Green New Deal, central to Sanders' movement, will continue to inspire and attract millions of younger voters as the climate crisis eclipses by far the current virus pandemic, but it will also increasingly raise the question of how long, and why, they should persist with the institutionally totalitarian, pro-corporate, corrupt Democratic Party - or go their own way. With socialism as popular as capitalism among young US adults even before the current crisis, new routes to change will inevitably be mapped out and taken. If ever there was a time for a third party/ independent run by a credible progressive candidate, it is now.

Third parties are effectively barred from competing in the USA, a fact missed by much of a world  still dazzled by the propaganda that it is supposedly the "land of the free". While not formally banned, they frequently have to find much higher, often prohibitive thresholds of sometimes tens of thousands of electors to nominate their candidates while Democrats and Republicans enjoy automatic ballot access and even then remain excluded from the public funds handed over to the two main parties. With the media stitched up to advocate the status quo, like much of the rest of the world, voters are powerfully corralled into voting for the "right" candidates, who, contrary to myth, are distinctly not the best of the USA.

Yet the Republicans themselves once replaced the Whigs almost overnight, and strong third candidate Presidential runs have occurred as recently as 1992 when Ross Perot polled nearly one in five votes running as an independent on an anti-free trade platform. With Biden or any replacement distinctly flaky and Trump vulnerable over the Covid-19 crisis and the economic one to follow, could there be a better time? Wouldn't a Sanders-Cortez ticket, perhaps in conjunction with existing radical third parties such as the Greens, have a uniquely powerful chance of delivering the revolution he and his supporters have worked so hard to prepare for?

It sadly remains an unlikely outcome, but in a world of social lockdown, viral pandemic and economic dislocation, this may be the best and possibly last chance to effect real change to the USA, and the rest of the world, before the gathering storms of global warming, resource depletion and societal collapse hit our fragile Earth.

And while an independent candidacy is remote, the challenge will endure - the ideas and the movement Bernie Sanders shaped, harnessed and energised will go on. As the crises facing the planet and our species become clearer, its cry will become sharper, and as the vested interests threatening our survival are ultimately forced break cover, its demands will become ever more radical.
 "Not me. Us."

Not The Brexit Election

Sick and tired of Brexit?

Sticking to the Tory script, Sky News is running every single new bulletin with a "Brexit Election" tagline, even when the subject doesn't feature on the news for a rare change. Similarly, the one-trick ponies that are the Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats feature their respective demands on Europe prominently, if not in their actual name then at least on the side of their bus.

Yet, after almost four years of relentless debate about our EU membership, are the public really aflame and up for another five weeks of intensive debate about it? As Jo Swinson hypes her mission to save us from ourselves, Johnson bumbles about unleashing creative forces not even his grandiose imagination can comprehend and Farage drinks for England, they need to hope that everyone else is ready to squeeze into their Brexit Bubble, where nothing matters more than whether we are outside a trade block pissing in or inside pissing out.

The Green Party co-leader Sian Berry yesterday argued that "some things are even bigger than Brexit" as she declared this to be the Climate Election and outlined ambitious plans to tackle the global warming crisis with £900 billions of investment over ten years to make the UK carbon neutral by 2030. It is perhaps surprising that just a day later her party has made a deal with the Lib Dems, who, as well as accepting funding from frackers, take a much more leisurely approach to the climate crisis with a net zero target put well back to 2045. This is just a mere five years ahead of their former Tory partners' mid-century "objective". Nevertheless the Greens' core point is well-made and the urgency palpable.

Her words echoed the declaration a few days earlier by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, that "This election is our last chance to tackle the climate emergency with a Green Industrial Revolution at the heart of Labour's plan to transform Britain." Backing this up was a pledge to insulate every house in the UK to cut energy costs and carbon emissions, as well as massive investment in clean public transport and bringing the energy companies back into public control. Labour have also dwelt heavily on a range of other issues including ending austerity, redistributing wealth, ending student fees and investing in the health service.

It might be argued of course that Labour wouldn't want to talk about Brexit given their complex history on the issue. Yet Corbyn has devoted a speech to this too - reflecting on the need to talk to "the 99" rather than "the 48%" or "the 52%" he accused the other parties of focusing on to the exclusion of roughly half the UK. But it is clear that his strategy is to campaign on a much wider range of issues - the General Election should be just that, a general election on a variety of policies and initiatives stretching across the next 4 or 5 years. It should plainly not be a substitute referendum - Corbyn has made clear that Labour will hold a real one if they become the government.

So are Labour ignoring reality by moving on from Brexit to other issues?

Possibly, but probably not. Already several polls show that the NHS is seen as a bigger issue than Brexit by most voters, and this is an area where Labour remain more trusted than any other party and where the Tories and Lib Dems are vulnerable given their opening up of front line services to private providers from 2012 onwards. And while it doesn't register as the highest concern, there is little doubt that climate change is a much higher priority for many voters than previously - and 56% of voters back the Green and Labour 2030 date as the zero carbon deadline. Even 47% of Tories support that compared to 16% for the official 2050 one. A YouGov survey shows that 25% of voters view the environment as one of the top three issues compared to just 8% at the 2017 election.

Similarly, crime has risen substantially as a concern with 26% rating it compared to 11% previously, and the Tory/Lib Dem slashing of police numbers back in the Coalition days make them vulnerable. So too the fallout from the initial Grenfall report has highlighted a range of concerns from cuts to fire services from austerity through slum housing, underhand contract deals and Tory elitism to the rampant inequality that stains our country.

Faced with this battery of critical issues, although it remains a key issue for now, it seems that a public that is palpably sick to death of Brexit is less than likely to want to think of nothing but Brexit for the next month and a bit. Given this, Labour have everything to play for and their slow but steady trend upwards in the polls, matched by a slow but evident decline for the Lib Dems, is evidence for this.

Heath's winter election gamble

Boris Johnson claims to be a historian. So he might want to dust down the archives from winter 1973 when one of his predecessor Tory Prime Ministers, Ted Heath (ironically the man who took us into Europe), faced a crisis when a national miners' strike left electricity power plants short of coal. Simultaneously, after the Yom Kippur war between Israel and the Arab states, oil and petrol prices were rising sharply, offering little in the way of any affordable or practical alternative to coal for much of Britain's energy.

Heath dramatically declared a State of Emergency.  His Chancellor, Anthony Barber, implemented a crisis budget just before Christmas. A three-day working week was introduced, TV stations were compelled to stop broadcasting at 1030 pm each night to reduce energy consumption and regular power cuts were implemented with householders huddling round candles to keep warm. All in the middle of winter.

In spite of the crisis, the Tories' poll ratings were generally favourable and a much-trumpeted "Liberal surge" seemed to damage Harold Wilson's Labour Party most. Enjoying as much as an 11% lead, Heath was convinced that because of Labour's close relationship with the trade unions, he would be able to sweep to victory.

So far, so familiar.

And so he went to the country in our last winter election (February 1974) believing that he could triumph on the single question he pompously put to the nation in a Prime Ministerial broadcast: "Who Governs Britain?"

The voters' answer, when it came?
"Not you."

March 1974 - Labour's Harold Wilson began his third term as Prime Minister

The Magical Mathematics of Jo Swinson

If he could talk to the Liberals...

Back in the 1980s, the mythical two-headed psuhmi-pull-u creature from Doctor Doolittle was used as an allegory to lampoon the "Two Davids" leadership of the Liberal-SDP Alliance, referencing the not rare instances when Owen and Steel contradicted each other over the centrist parties' policies.

Times change, and this morning on Radio 4 Today, the now long-merged Liberal Democrats have only one head in charge, but several different faces on show.

Party leader Jo Swinson, walking, talking proof that there is nothing more irksome than an incompetent narcissist, held forth, chuntering on her party's latest "bold" decision - to cancel the UK's withdrawal from the European Union without even bothering with the fig-leaf of holding a referendum.

After all, she hubristically declared, if the country elects a majority Liberal Democrat government with cancelling Brexit as its major (some might say only) policy, "then that's what they'll get." PM Swinson would have a mandate to cancel.

It may seem a fanciful scenario, to say the least, but nonetheless galling coming as it does from the party that has spent decades decrying how our first-past-the-post voting system routinely returns parliaments that do not represent the views of voters. As she well knows, and must be banking on in her delusions of grandeur, if the other parties' votes split fairly evenly, a lead party can win outright power with as little as one in three of the votes cast - Tony Bliar achieved his third and final win in 2005 with just 35% of the poll.

So Ms Swinson has somehow executed a mathematical miracle whereby something slightly less that 35% could conceivably count for more than the 52% vote to Leave in the 2016 referendum.

Not so democratic Democrats, it would seem to most rational observers, though with Swinson somehow squaring this with her party supposedly championing liberalism against authoritarianism, reason may not be a word to lightly associate with this band of chancers.

Swinson was not finished though. As the BBC's Justin Webb asked her to confirm in that case that she was now against a so-called People's Vote rerun of the referendum, she changed tack. Not at all - it is party policy after all the have a new vote (perhaps with only one box to tick to approve Remain) before any General Election. It would only be different afterwards and meantime, shame on Jeremy Corbyn, just because... well, shame on him!

So, if you don't want a second referendum, vote Lib Dem.
And if you do want a second referendum, vote Lib Dem.

Ok, said Webb - his eyes rolling even on the radio - what about Scotland? Why is she against a second referendum on Scottish independence but apparently in favour of a second one on Brexit?

Ah, totally different, she opined. The best way forward for Britain was to be united but in the European Union.

Fine, so if she wins power at Westminster and that is a mandate to cancel Brexit without a referendum, presumably if the SNP win at Holyrood, that is a mandate for them to declare independence without a referendum.

Of course, you already know her answer was "No."
Essentially, a referendum is only a good thing if you promise to agree with Jo.

And so what we are left with is what we have always known - liberals are not democratic. Their idea of democracy is that the great unwashed turn up every few years and confirm their right to govern at their patronising best. Public votes are fine as long as they go the right way. If they don't, well, time for some of Jo's incredible, liberally illiberal Magical Mathematics.

These are testing times for our society. It was the market-liberal consensus, developed on from Thatcherite monetarism in Nu-Labour and accepted by the wider Political Class, that created the conditions for the Leave vote: the inequality, the competition between marginalised domestic labour and vulnerable migrant workers, the plundering of the state through PFI and financial deregulation that triggered the 2008 recession. The evident self-entitlement of so many MPs in the expenses scandal at the same time did nothing to reconcile growing numbers of disaffected voters with our political leaders. Not the worst by far, Swinson still didn't forget to keep her receipts for a 29p pack of dusters and 78p for a can of Mr Sheen: Lib Dems are nothing if not shiny.

And it was the continuation of this disaster capitalism by the Coalition Government that Swinson was a fairly senior member of that sealed it. And of course the referendum itself was a response by David Cameron to divisions in his own party, one backed by Swinson's party when it was voted on in the Commons in 2015 (she herself to be fair had lost her seat and wasn't in parliament at the time)  - our liberal masters assumed of course a comfortable victory would ensue.

That it didn't, as we know, has been met by furious rebuttals that Leave voters didn't know what they were doing and should effectively be disenfranchised. While some Remainers and People's Voters would protest, the Lib Dems' enthusiastic adoption of Swinson's pledge to scrap Article 50 without a vote confirms that people who claim to be democrats and who have campaigned repeatedly for equal votes are in truth not democrats and are in fact perfectly happy for their own votes to count somewhat more heavily than those of their opponents.

As so many times in history, liberals (of all party hues) proclaim their superior knowledge of the facts and through that assert an informed knowing that eludes ordinary punters but entitles them to govern. The recent resort to the Courts over both the referendum and more recently the proroguing of Parliament betrays an almost naive if arrogant take that they can prove their opponents wrong and if so, everything will go back to meritocratic normality. In doing so, whatever their technical skills level may well be, what is clearly absent is any degree of emotional intelligence.

As we saw with the tick-boxing of Lib Dem policies through the austerity of the Coalition, these people will trumpet getting a deal on introducing a plastic bag tax in exchange for agreeing benefits cuts to the poorest and most vulnerable in society. They will claim that getting some extra funding for mental health counselling somehow makes up for all the suicides caused by introducing arduous tests for disability that were designed to fail vulnerable claimants. They are either clueless or callous, or both.

They will even try to excuse the most execrable decisions by promising to review their procedures to get it right next time, as Chief Whip Alastair Carmichael assured conference doubters over worries about the influx of expelled Tory MPs into their parliamentary ranks. Apparently, each of them was subjected to a 90 minute "grilling" by him to see if they shared the party's values. In spite of this undoubted Ordeal, perhaps via trial-by-lunch, former Tory MP Philip Lee, who opposed gay marriage and introduced legislation to ban migrants with HIV, ticked the relevant boxes.
So illiberal, but so job done...

They are of course playing with fire and are dreadfully ill-equipped to do so. Their actions do nothing to reconcile the deep division in our country, quite the contrary. And with their latest wheeze, they may well have already overplayed a hand they are viewing through a centrist magnifying glass.

The polls suggest that they have already plateaued and started to fall back from their May upsurge in the local and European elections. Swinson's smug style and twisted logic are unlikely to yield many more votes from rival parties. Yet what the polls do show is that her relentless focus on misrepresenting Labour and denouncing Jeremy Corbyn opens up the path to a potentially overwhelming victory for Johnson's Tories, especially if as is not entirely unlikely, they do come to some accommodation with Farage's Brexit Party. Combined, the Tory-BP vote in the current rolling average of polls is 46% to 25% Labour, 18% Lib Dem, 5% Green and 5% Nationalists. Repeated at a General Election, this would produce a Commons with somewhere over 470 hard right MPs out of a total of 650.

Now by Jo Swinson's logic that would be quite a mandate. Even although it might still be the choice of less than half the voters, No Deal would be a dead cert. But perhaps by then Jo will have defaulted to wanting a referendum.

Or maybe not. Maybe she'll be down at the ranch looking for a new pushmi-pull-u.

Illiberal and undemocratic - Swinson and Carmichael

SHORT STORY: Election '22 - Or, Be Careful What You Wish For

It was a lovely day, that June morning all these years ago in 2022. The sun was up. The sky a crystal clear blue from the very first glow of golden dawn. But down here on Earth, it was as if the solar rays playing across the rooftops of the capital were mocking them as Britain was plunged into a great darkness. It was just the first day, the first of many days of despair that now, as he clutched his drenched jacket around him and tasted the salt in the cold flecks of spray, he remembered so well. So bitterly, terribly well...

"Mr Farage is expected at the Palace in the next twenty minutes to kiss the Queens' hand and accept appointment as Prime Minister... Afterwards, he and his likely Deputy Prime Minister, his coalition partner and leader of the UKIP, Gerard Batten will meet with their MPs to begin the process of forming a new government. The Brexit Party's Foreign Affairs spokesman, Katie Hopkins, has announced that the new PM has already spoken by skype to President Le Pen, herself a recent newcomer to office, to discuss their planned Budapest Compact for a New Europe. Viktor Orban of Hungary and Matteo Salvini of Italy are expected to join them as they prepare to radically overhaul the European Union into their planned Europe of the Nations confederation..."


Hard to believe, he thought, but it was there. Staring us in the eyes. In the f*cking face, in fact.

But of course, just as they'd never anticipated it, the liberals even now denied it. Someone must have stuffed the ballot boxes. The media told lies. The great unwashed had fallen for the Facebook ads and the Twitter memes yet again. Didn't they see it...??

But this was one vote they couldn't rerun and a process they couldn't drag out.

Sure, they had won the second referendum. Back in September 2019, the ChUKs champagne corks had popped and the Lib Dems shook in exotic spresms when, pushed from pillar to post, Theresa May had caved in and agreed a second referendum. Her deal, her precious deal, or... Remain. "No deal" wasn't an option because it apparently made no sense. "Anyone who wants to vote for that, is too stupid to be allowed to vote!" declared one Nu-Labour peer as the ballot bill was rushed through a somnolent Lords.

And so they won: three and a half years' after the first referendum, Remain on 54% of the vote carried the day.  After 6 weeks of ever more vicious and divisive argument, somehow even worse than the first plebiscite, 16.9 million backed staying in the EU. Article 50 was revoked and, tail between its legs, Britain sheepishly returned to the Eurofold. Bereft of her majority already and with Rees-Mogg's ERGers in open, permanent revolt, Theresa May retired to a wheatfield in the Home Counties. A National Government under Sajid Javid was forged between the rump of 220 Tory loyalists and the ChangeUK contingent, now swollen to 80 as Blairites fled the Labour Party en mass. The SNP provided "confidence and supply" in return for its own second indy referendum being agreed for 2025, ten years after the first.

No one could remember when the term zombie parliament first entered common parlance. It was probably before the referendum, but at any rate by early 2020 it was seared in permanent place. In the crumbling gothic ruins of Westminster, the patchwork of neoliberals and chancers kept things turning a little bit less each day. But outside, something was happening.

The Brexiteers had lost the referendum. But amidst sarcastic jokes of "best of three", and repeated expositions on how the winning Remain vote this time was numerically lower than the Leave vote last time, Squire Farage donned his finest tweeds and, harrumphing like a latter day Toad, proclaimed war on the Weasels of Westminster. And just as the SNP had hoovered up the YES vote after they lost the Scottish referendum in 2014, so the Brexit Party and, to a lesser degree, UKIP, found their stock rising in spite of the referendum result as they radiated and consolidated the seething anger of millions of Leave voters.

Or, as he pondered things now, perhaps because of it. For people who had switched back to the Tories and Labour in 2017 after both pledged to honour the first referendum turned away again. The shenanigans that had stretched all the way through 2019 had poisoned most citizens' views of the political system. The self-identifying Political Class never seemed so detached from reality as it did that year and, feeling no loyalty from their MPs, similarly millions of voters offered none in return.

Birthed in their successful 2019 campaign for the Euroelections they claimed should never have happened, the Brexit Party had faced something of a quandry about what to do after the second vote, but the formal defection of 40 ERG MPs from the Tories to Farage in early 2020 gave it a significant parliamentary presence for the first time. By late 2021, the rightwing collaborators stood at 29% in the polls, behind Labour's 32% but 13% clear of the Change UK party and 15% ahead of Javid's doomed Tories. Sensing its ultimate fate at the polls, the Government of the Undead stumbled on blindly with only Nick Clegg's Fixed Term Parliaments Act keeping them clinging on constitutionally to the aptly-named deadline for fresh elections in spirng 2022.

The General Election campaign was bitter indeed. The Leaders' debate between Javid, Farage and Corbyn oused with recriminations and accusations of treason, racism and corruption. Farage and Corbyn were seen as joint winners by the polls, with Javid sinking. But still, on polling day, Labour clung to a 3% lead - 35 to 32 - over the Faragists. The received wisdom was that  as UKIP had polled 14% in 2015 but won no MPs, then even with a much swollen vote, they might hope at best for "a Brexit dozen" as Ken Clarke scathingly predicted from behind a large cigar.

"Farage finished" proclaimed the Guardian, while the Independent favoured "Brexit's Last Gasp" and even The Sun cautioned "Nigel Nowhere?".

Polling was brisk, but in Leave-voting areas from the referenda, it was mobbed. Angry queues formed from early morning as Britain enjoyed the first days of a warm summer. Police fought with groups of right wingers who moved through London parks attacking black people, tourists and anyone - indeed, anything - they deemed foreign.

He spat as he remembered sitting with some Green and Lib Dem friends in a tapas bar in Limehouse. They had all been in high spirits as they traded tales of ignorant Brexit supporters on the doorsteps. As the sonorous election programme theme sounded and the red and blue graphics sparked and sparkled in the dim light of dusk, they had watched in jubilant anticipation.

"And our prediction is - Brexit-UKIP take 35% of the national vote and win with 312 MPs for the BP and 36 for UKIP. An overall majority for the alliance of 46 seats.  Labour remain the official Opposition with 201 and the SNP follow up with a much increased 49. The Tories polled 17% of the vote, better than expected, but held on to just 19 seats..."

"First-past-the-post," he heard himself mutter. "First-past-the-f*cking-post..."
They somehow hadn't reckoned on that, had they. 46% of the vote lost the Brexiteers the referendum; but just 35% won them an outright majority in the Commons, as it had done for Blair way back in 2005. 65% opposed them, but there was Farage in Downing Street and Tommy Robinson on his way to his new desk at the Home Office.

But of course, at least Britain was still in the EU. That would protect them, wouldn't it?

Wouldn't it?

As he sat now on the side of the raft on this grey day, his gaze switching from the lapping water to the distant Gallic shore, its haze-covered beaches traced with barbed wire and lookout towers, he knew better.

The distant hum grew louder and through the faint mist he watched the Border Protection Force frigate HMS Enoch Powell bearing down on the flotsam and jetsam of liberalism as it bobbed in the cold waters around him. He closed his eyes. And as the guns strafed the sea, he grew angry, his face contorting with pain.

Yet it was not from piercing bullets that his agony came, but from his seething disappointment. For in these, his final fleeting seconds, all he could think of, all that he could visualise, was David Cameron, his porcine chops grinning and puffing pretentiously, his condom-quiff wobbling and his porcelain-perfect teeth flashing with customary contempt.

A snoot laughing in the face of humanity forever...

Green Fades - a fond farewell to the party I love

(Written on 14 March)
This is, for a change, a personal piece - I rarely write here in the first person or about my own life or experiences, but today I make a possibly self-indulgent exception. Because this week, for the first time since either May 1977 or possibly 1978 - it's a while ago either way! - I am not a member of a political party, a state that, after all these years, seems mildly odd (when in truth, set against the population as a whole, it is membership of a party that is odd - fewer than one in ten people join one in their entire lifetimes).

After nearly 14 years, I have said goodbye to the Green Party of England & Wales. It may seem to some of my former colleagues and comrades a strange time to take such a step - after all, when have politics been as fascinatingly volatile as this frenetic week of Brexititis at Westminster? A hung Parliament has figuratively hung a Prime Minister, hoist on her own hubris and peculiar school-prefect-like mix of duty and disdain for lesser mortals. And of course the Opposition is little better - fracturing parties, policy changes by the day, while Brexiteers warn ominously of treason and Remainers of apocalypse. An election could be weeks away, or a referendum - or just a meltdown.

Great days for active politicos of any and all stripes in any and all capacities.

And as historic days pass by and our electorate scan the horizon for some hope, this could have been the time for Greens to have offered a new way forward - while still open to the world we care so much about, we could have been majoring on our core policies of fostering local economies and bringing manufacturing closer to home to create a fairer, more sustainable way of doing things. But instead we have been enthusiastically adding to the centrist narrative of almost any form of Brexit being the reality version of The Walking Dead.

I voted and campaigned for Remain, but the Greens' drive for a second vote from as soon as the results of the first one were declared completely ignored the reasons for the Leave victory - and fails to consider the possibly dire consequences to our politics if a second vote reversed the first by anything less than an overwhelming margin, something no polling evidence suggests even remotely likely. What better shot in the arm to Farage's Brexit Party than if say 47% still voted Leave and, as the centrists popped open the post-referendum champagne, his new party scooped up even just 35% of the vote at the next General Election? That same figure gave Tony Blair an outright majority in 2005.

But it is not only in Brexit that strange days have fallen on the Greens. After a record-breaking vote in 2015 under Natalie Bennett and a second-best ever result in 2017 in spite of fewer candidates and the Corbyn surge, a narrative took hold across the national echelons of the party that, in truth, these two amazing results were actually abject failures caused by the promotion of a far-left, almost bolshevist agenda. Apparently, there had been too much emphasis on the NHS, on renationalising the railways and energy sectors and tackling inequality. Time to turn back to talking simply about ecology and climate change - so now the strategy passed by the party last spring commits it to a path described in the document as "social liberalism".

What is "social liberalism"? Well, aside from it being the title of a vaguely social democratic group within the Lib Dems, it is usually used to describe a combination of mildly regulated free market economics with promotion of individual freedom. While it sees the role of government including ameliorating poverty and providing some level of social support, it does not fundamentally change capitalist economics nor challenge ownership of resources or concentration of wealth - at its heart is a policy of growth and managed/ prompted trickle down of wealth, a sort of kinder, gentler neoliberalism. How would ot could this ever provide the social and economic transformations needed so urgently to stop environmental catastrophe?

This is quite a contrast to the party I joined after hearing Caroline Lucas argue passionately on a panel about economic and social justice and about the ills of capitalism in 2005. It is a peculiar path to take and unnecessarily exclusionary for those of us who hold to ecosocialism or simply to breaking up capitalist monopolies to create new forms of economics focused on sustainable sharing of resources. The rest of the strategy explains why - social liberalism hopefully appeals to some voters from other parties, crucially including the apparent abundance of green-minded Tories who would have voted Green if only we hadn't been calling for a public NHS or for a fairer distribution of wealth.

So, sure, if you represent a party as a candidate, as I have done at local and parliamentary level, you need to be at least comfortable with what it is doing - though would the words "social liberalism" either win over or deter anyone on the doorsteps? Or for that matter, the party's current decision to abolish its formal trade union links? Nope, of course not. It is a case of activist-world problems, dear perhaps to me and others who fuss over such matters, but how crucial really in the wider scheme of things when our planet is burning up, literally, before our eyes?

Well, humans are social creatures. We affiliate to many communities and groups. Our friends, colleagues and comrades are our tribe. Like families, we might fall out, but in the end, we make up. Or do we?

British politics and society, just like pretty much everywhere else now, are divided and fractious beyond belief. The Greens are no exception.

I won't dwell over-much or break confidences here, but in 2017 I was co-chair of the Green Party Regional Council for 8 months. This is one of two bodies - the other being the Party Executive - that oversee the party's functioning. For me, previously working in my naivete with fairly harmonious and certainly positive, friendly local and regional parties, it was an unwelcome revelation: GPEW has a significant hinterland of caustic complaint, legal threats and mean-spirited, personalised dispute utterly astonishing in a party that claims - in the vast majority of cases, I believe, genuinely - to seek a better, happier world for all.

These disputes covered all manner of issues, many at core quite trivial until fermented in sometimes truly alarming vitriol. One repeating theme, mostly after my time on GPRC ended has been around transgender issues. There is certainly discussion to be had for many to understand transgender issues better - and there has also at times been some pretty harsh and inappropriate behaviour by individual transmen and transwomen in the party. But when have Greens of all people held that the actions of an individual justify pre-determined views of a whole group? And if some statements by some transactivists invite questions from others, why can't these questions be advanced in a culture of inquisitive acceptance as opposed to rejectionist hostility?

Those who complain about transactivists being overly hostile to others' viewpoints ignore the fact that these viewpoints often deny the validity of transmen and transwomen's identities, for some reason often presuming them to be lightly worn. Not rarely are these complaints themselves delivered with pretty full-on anger. Referencing the worst of US Republicans, sometimes lewd and often bizarre concerns are raised about men supposedly using women's toilets or the apparent indoctrination of children to transgenderism at school - how Clause 28 is that? It seems the history of fighting oppression has been somewhat set aside by some when it comes to transgender rights.

For me this came to a head with the posting on a party noticeboard of a lengthy diatribe in the form of a pantomime script filled with crude references to transpeople in the name of supposedly supporting feminism. Though written by a woman, it was posted by a man who described it as "hilarious" - sure, very funny if you like lots of references to f*cks and d*cks, but hardly conducive to either inviting serious discussion or fostering a culture of respect. It remained posted for several days, a veritable paean to a new sectarianism.

At the end of my time on GPRC, I organised some interviews for the chair of a commission the party conference had voted to set up to review its workings. An interviewee asked the panel what success would look like. A senior party member responded that, among other things, it would be good if Greens were kinder to each other.

So, my former Green colleagues, I hope you can learn not just to be kinder but even to love each other again. However, you will only succeed if you acquire that generosity of spirit where, even if you truly can't agree or understand, you can at least accept one another for who you are. Enquire, seek to understand, but no more exclusion, no more pejorative complaints forms or abusive social media tirades.

Because after this warmest of winters, as you well know, the world doesn't have the time any more.

Corbyn and the EU: the Clock is Ticking

The last week has seen the fissures in the Conservative Party rent open for all to see more clearly than ever. With Cabinet Ministers falling like nine-pins in what can only be assumed were well-rehearsed tantrums (even the man who wrote the deal was among those who denounced it and resigned!), Theresa May's Coalition of the Damned seemed on the brink of collapse. Opponents inside and outside ranks circled like vultures over an bloodied prairie dog, while the media salivated over a fresh delivery of meat for their 24 hour newsfeast. Even Labour's Jeremy Corbyn mused that he could muster a little sympathy for the Prime Minister on a personal level - though someone might remind Gentle Jezzer that she was of course the Home Secretary who led on inventing the "hostile environment" for migrants, so any empathy might be better directed elsewhere.

Yet, while May is on the ropes and anyone watching must wonder what she does get out of it for herself, the fact is that she will almost certainly still be PM in 6 months time (just) and the Tories will still be in Government with their DUP Orcs snapping loudly but loyal on the benches behind them. The Tories are masters of survival and this time is no exception - their incumbency entrenched by Nick Clegg's typically short-sighted Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, which means that over 100 Tory turkeys would need to vote for Christmas before there can be a new General Election this side of 2022.

We hear that five Government Ministers - yes, there are still that many left - led by the weasel-minded Michael Gove are sticking with Theresa May to persuade her to amend the deal. This would entail both May and the EU being prepared to renegotiate, which is unlikely in both camps. So that leaves two scenarios: either one where the Rees-Moggs and Boris Johnsons suddenly fall into line, which will simply not happen; or, more likely, the deal is scrapped and the Tories and DUP unite around a situation where May signs up to numerous piecemeal arrangements for things like customs checks and air travel before a"Hard Brexit" at the end of March 2019.

This will not be the apocalypse that so many Hard Remainers claim: we will not fall back to eating grass flavoured with the last packets of stockpiled bisto, though without question there will be many administrative problems and disruption especially to transport for several weeks or months.

What we will have is a Conservative regime though that will use the chaos to enact all manner of contingency legislation and regulations to dismantle a swathe of employment and consumer rights, privatise yet more or the state and possibly repress some of its opponents in the name of National Unity. May, her job done (she will say) will resign in May and Gove's hour will arrive.

Unless....

There is, in the next few weeks, a wide open chance for Jeremy Corbyn and Labour to drive not just a wedge between the Tories, but a stake into the heart of the Government. It would involve neither a General Election nor a second referendum.

What if Keir Starmer were to announce that, on reflection, while May's Deal doesn't meet Labour's six tests, the party recognises that, in the short time left, it is the best deal available and the only one that will both honour the referendum result and afford some protection to workers and consumers?

Doing this, rescuing May's deal, possibly with a few amendments, would leave the Prime Minister prisoner of Labour and drive Mogg and co out either to foment ceaseless rebellion within the Tories or alternatively to the netherworld of UKIP - whose own revival, now gaining some traction in the polls where they are back in third place though on just 8%, would also be spiked. May might linger on longer at Downing Street, but her government would be paralysed and the time would come when even she would know the game was up and support an early General Election. Labour would be in pole-position to dictate the terms of the ongoing negotiations for our new trading relationship with the EU (bear in mind that the current deal is only about how we leave, not the future arrangements) and by reaching out across the political divide would be seen a force for unity in this divisive time.

Politics is the art of the possible. And while all acts should always be guided by deep-rooted principle, much of the hot air of the last few days has not been for the sake of beliefs and ideals, but simply jostling for personal and/or party gain at what is one of the most critical moments for the UK since we joined the EEC back in 1973.

The electorate, on the other hand, seek simply a settlement: for now, none of the uncompromising politicians parading before the cameras this last week are likely to have infused anyone with what is needed above all - hope. Corbyn alone has the chance to do so, but the clock is ticking.

Brexit Reality

The Brexit process is nearing its climax. With the Green Party conference meeting in Bristol this weekend, some thoughts on their and other Remainers' campaign for a second referendum on British membership of the European Union. Is focusing on a new vote detracting from at least mitigating the reality of the now inevitable post-Brexit Britain being fashioned by the Tories?

June 2018, and by 17,410,742 - the largest vote for anything ever recorded in the UK - to 16,141,241 the decision is to exit the European Union.

Except, the Leavers lied. Their voters were misled, under-educated, and, well, just bitter about life. They didn’t know what was good for them. They were angry or racist or dead, or all three. (“Dead” is not sarcasm – one Lib Dem would-be actuary got out the mortality tables and, projecting from exit polls, declared that the Leave majority would be mouldering in the grave within 3 years - a line Nick Clegg later took in a BBC interview).

The most appalling, elitist smears have been called down on Leave voters, making it pretty clear that liberal democracy has in fact sparse room for actual democracy. Not unserious demands for people over 65 to be disenfranchised feel like a precursor to a return to the second business vote, or the reintroduction of University MPs. Some Remainer memes and arguments have sought to count non-voters and even babies as anti-Brexit votes.The People have spoken, damn them – time to get a new People.

Claiming to speak for the 10% perhaps rather than the 1%, a lobby of liberal professionals who benefit quite nicely from the opportunities afforded by the EU are irate. Extremely so. Why should their parade be rained on by an unholy alliance of Left Behinders on their grotty northern housing estates and ageing, Daily Mail-chewing Blue Rinse Zombies down in Brexiteer Bournemouth?

A second referendum must be held. One to put things right.

Except that it wouldn’t put things right at all. Aside from the fact that the polls do not show any significant overall movement either way since 2016, what would a rerun do? 

A narrow Leave vote would probably engender a revived UKIP, or worse, and a hard Brexit would turn into tungsten one. A narrow Remain win would face calls for yet a further plebiscite for a “best of three”- and again revive Ukip, or worse, as many among the 52% concluded that voting truly is pointless. 

But, aside from anything else, a second vote isn’t going to happen. The Tories will not concede one and, in spite of the hype, no one is going to make them. No one can. Not even JC at his most miraculously messianic. 

Greens are making a terrible strategic mistake in expending our limited political capital running with Cable, his Lib Desperadoes and a coterie of washed-up Blairite chancers. If the Leave campaign excelled in “fake news” such as Turkey’s imminent relocation from Anatolia to Croydon, it is now well-matched by dire warnings that by April Britain will run out of everything from cream soda to donated sperm. Much smacks of the panicked Scottish unionists during the independence referendum wildly warning YES voters that Doctor Who wouldn’t be on the telly any more, while Nicola Sturgeon would be waiting at Gretna to check your car boot for anyone smuggling Tories across the border. 

And no one made any distinction between so-called "hard" and "soft" Brexits until after the referendum result. Nor did anyone talk about any confirmatory referendum - neither Cameron when he called the vote, nor Clegg when he called for a "straight in/out" referendum in 2008, nor the Greens' Caroline Lucas when she proposed an amendment to a Eurosceptic backbench referendum bill in 2011.

Don’t get me wrong: I campaigned and voted Remain. I was as disappointed by the result as most Remainers. My support though was very much about countering the rise of racism and more positively to fostering internationalism – but that particular ship has sailed. We need to work out now how to heal divisions and address the outcome rather than try to wish it away. Just as impeaching Trump would be the biggest shot in the arm American populists could dream for, our apparent rejection of the referendum only confirms rather than challenges the beliefs that led to the outcome in the first place.

The environmental benefits of EU membership are significant, but they can be over-stated, because the economics of Europe have long been definitively anti-environmental. The EU is one of the biggest free trade blocs in the world. How can such an institution fit with the urgent need to develop localised green economies and sharply reduce the transportation of “things” across our crisis-stricken planet? All the more so when its trade policies are so harshly biased against poorer states outside the Union - it is a longstanding ally of the austerity and privatisation restructure programmes of the IMF and World Bank, disrupting the ecologies of many African and other Third World states in the process.

We are warned that apocalyptic queues of trucks will form at Dover post-Brexit. Kent will become a giant lorry park. Bad stuff - but consider what all these hordes of huge carbon waggons are doing day in day out right now as they carry their cargoes from Tallinn to Truro.

In terms of social benefits, contrary to myth, the corporatist EU does not guarantee employment rights. Apart from the discrimination directives (which notably did not stop the Coalition introducing tribunal fees for discrimination cases at triple the norm), our employment protection regulations are almost entirely set domestically. The same goes for holidays, established by UK law in the 1930s and driven by trade unions, not by international capitalists. By contrast, the EU was content to exempt Britain from key parts of the working time regulations. 

Greens talk of reforming Europe – but there is no blueprint for that in existence. Nowhere in our policies is there anything beyond a bigger say for the Parliament in the workings of the Commission. While the hard work of Green MEPs from both the UK and other EU states on social protections must be lauded, the bottom line is that zero hours contracts and the gig economy, the housing crisis, NHS privatisation and near unprecedented social inequality have all prospered inside the EU. There may be no Lexit under Theresa May, but there is no Lemain either.

We have a historic opportunity and an urgent need to portray a post-Brexit Green society: to promote wealth redistribution, sustainable agriculture, co-operative enterprises, public ownership of clean energy and transport, and the re-industrialisation of our economy using small-scale, local enterprises to manufacture infinitely more of the goods we use. In other words, to provide an alternative to the dark future being fashioned by the Tories right now. 

Green MEPs have recognised that, while unwelcome of itself, Brexit could provide "transformative opportunities" for the UK economy.

"…we recognise that Brexit does provide some opportunities for radical change in the UK economy, for example in trade relations and expenditure on agriculture. The economic challenge of Brexit has shocked the government out of the policy of austerity and offers us important opportunities in terms of making significant and timely investments in the transition to the greener economy that climate change demands." (Greening Brexit, Molly Scott Cato et al, November 2016)

This rather than pushing ceaselessly for a second vote should be the cri de coeur for Greens and their allies. This can be the springboard of creating at least an awareness of an alternative Brexit reality to the chaos of May, Mogg and Johnson.

Brexit will be a huge challenge, no doubt. There will be significant disruption, especially in the first few months. But much, much worse is coming very soon in any case as the environmental and resource crises deepen rapidly across the entire planet. The challenge for us is to engage with the majority who have no real stake in our society because so much of it is being accumulated by an ever smaller elite. 

All the liberal arguments in the world do not even begin to address the day to day lives of most people, and do nothing to resolve the barriers so many face in our current economy - a process stretching back to almost the very time we joined Europe and so not surprisingly, nor entirely inaccurately, associated with it by many. Fail to do this and, like the Russian Kadets and Mensheviks in March 1917 who fussed over the legal theories and niceties of drafting new constitutions while the Bolsheviks won the hearts and minds of the people with their demands of "Peace, Bread and Land", the momentum will stay with those who seek the harshest Brexit of all and a dystopian society for our country.

Greens and others on the Left can squander this precious time tilting at referendum windmills. Or we can focus furiously on advocating for the social justice, environmental sustainability and economic resilience we need for civilised society to survive and thrive. The choice is ours.

A slightly shorter version of this article appears in the conference edition of the Green Left's "Watermelon" journal. This can also be found on the Green Left website. Please note that this article is a personal view and not GL policy.