Labouring under an illusion

I have to say that I have an intense dislike of the Labour party - not because I'm a Tory, but because I don't believe that it has defended the rights of the majority of people, the ones we used to call the working class, for years. There's a leadership contest going on at the moment and some people in the left are getting all worked up because one of the nominally left MPs is standing. 

So what? If he wins lots of the old left will come out of the closet and say we should rally around the party and get it elected again, if he loses then the Blairite neoconservatives will carry on bleating about aspirations some more. This is code for wanting to be a middle class house owning family, which is becoming ever further out of reach if you live South of Birmingham.

I've said it before ... flogging a dead horse, and the horse is so dead and has been so long that the flogger can't even find a stain on the pavement where it used to be because the rain of decades has washed it away. They just keep getting a new whip and whipping the road.

Labour Left are part of the imperialist machine that keeps us all back by spreading the delusion that the people who hold the power in the party aren't war mongering neocons or that someone "nice" can hold the reins of power instead. But it's never worked out that way. I acknowledge  individuals who take a stand and can maybe see some hope but to me the whole project is a waste of time. We should be working with the folks on the receiving end of the neocon murder project, defending their rights and working on democratic alternatives, not lending our radical credibility to a non-existent horse.

They have always been a pro-empire party asking our betters for a few more crumbs - read Ralph Milliband's history, or more recently, Rob Clough's book.

I don't need the party of the atomic bomb and 500,000 dead Iraqi children (and don't mention Northern Ireland either) to tell me what to think, and I couldn't care less who leads them. They are in the way of any kind of progress and culpable for a lot of disgusting crimes. Being "left" doesn't let you off the hook unless you called them for it at the time and keep calling them on it. Voting for them is voting for the status quo, and how's that working out for you?

If you start saying "but how does this get rid of the tories"? Nah - how does this defend the working class against neocon lunacy, across the whole world, not just little old parochial chauvinist England. Not even a little bit. It's an irrelevant sideshow stopping us working on being the real opposition.

Labour in power in London are part of the drive to rid the place of the poor and cover the whole place with bijoux flats for aspirational middle management types who have to rent because even they can't afford to buy anything there. It's the party that bailed out the incompetent mortgage lenders and saddled the rest of us with the debt. It's the party of the old-style centralised "we know best" approach to problems like housing and social care, instead of working through the needs of the people who rely on those services.

I'm also not arguing for "purity" - I am arguing for calling a spade a spade and not attaching yourself to a bunch of folk who are literally drowning in other people's blood for cynical reasons of trying to do some kind of silly putch later - you will lose, just like Militant did, and you lend them a credibility they don't deserve.

A mass movement grounded in a decent understanding of how things actually work is needed, and you can't even begin to do that while you wait for some kind of socialist jesus to rescue you from within the ranks of the Labour MPs. It's short termism, dreaming, "if only the world was better, maybe we can pray a better world into existence". Please more doing, less praying. More testing things with people who need our help and less skipping through the forest with some kind of socialist pied piper. And remember the piper may have stolen the children but he drowned the rats.

While this diversion's going on the Tories are doing their 100 day rape the poor campaign - where are the opposition? Maybe the SNP (hollow laugh) - Labour are completely compromised by agreeing with almost everything except the bedroom tax.

Move on, please, there are vulnerable people out there who need your commitment and energy while we argue about what colour to paint the bike shed. It's embarrassing.

If you want change you need to stop wasting your time with it and get involved in the local campaigns that have sprung up against the bedroom tax and other vicious policies - forget the siren song of Parliament, and the old left's obsession with Labour.

Move on.

When they come they come for you, when they ban they ban you

People often appeal to the government to ban things. Or change things.

It comes from a fundamental misunderstanding. The government are not your friend. It doesn't have morals, or care about them.

Historically enough people became free enough to find their own way out from under the thumb of the establishment and create what we now call a modern economy. Countries where your rights are arbitrary are always last on the list, where arbitrary power can take the thing you want to make or build away from you, always lag behind everywhere else.

If you start banning things then you make it harder to do something useful. You make it ok to imprison people because you don't agree with them.

Problem is, who is making the noise? Who is being difficult? People like you? People like me?

Who do you think they will shut up first because they want a quiet life? The offensive racists or the people who chase after them?

When they come they come for you, when they ban they ban you. This is a lesson from Hitler's Germany that needs to be remembered more often.