Milllenialist Tendencies

The Labour Party, March 2019; a few observations....

I’m not a cinephile, to say the very least. It’s not that I hate films per se, because I don’t. What I find hard to deal with is the interminable sitting still and keeping quiet for two hours or so. In the 13 years Laura and I have been together, we’ve made 2 trips to the flicks; Control and The Damned United since you’re asking. I also went by myself to see Filth. It isn’t altogether surprising we don’t have another outing to the silver screen planned.

One consequence of my self-imposed disengagement from blockbuster films, similar to my avoidance of television and popular music, is that I haven’t a clue who are all these famous actors and directors that the gossip columns go on about. However, I was pleased to see Olivia Colman win an Oscar, mainly because I loved her performances in Peep Show and Rev, not to mention the Bev and Kev car insurance adverts. Reading up about reactions to the list of winners, Spike Lee appeared justifiably disgusted that Green Book won the award for Best Picture, as it perpetuates the “white saviour” trope and tells an improbable story of a racist’s redemption, fuelling the institutional racism of Hollywood by whitening any story involving African Americans, to appeal to middle class WASP audiences.

Now, I totally agree with Spike Lee as it goes, but what amazes me is the mealy-mouthed soft-pedalling Bohemian Rhapsody got from the critics, who focussed not on the significance of Queen’s abhorrent actions as a group, but on the sanitised biopic of Barry Bulsara’s cousin, Fred.  From the outset I’ll state I fucking despise Queen’s music. Like any right-minded human being, I find their bland, pompous, middle of the road, radio friendly soft rock to be an affront to all of those truly creative geniuses who have slaved away, writing and recording provocative, memorable, life-affirming music in any genre, bar the sickening AOR cesspool that Mercury and his pals inhabit. However, the main reason I thought there would have been a critical backlash against the hagiographic pile of horseshit Bohemian Rhapsody undoubtedly is, were the activities of Queen in October 1984, when they kicked off their The Works tour by scheduling a dozen sold-out dates in front of whites-only audiences during the apartheid era in South Africa at the Sun City Super Bowl. In the end, Mercury’s voice allegedly gave out and they only played 9 dates, but that’s 9 too many.

It may be 35 years ago now, but I remember vividly the hatred and scorn visited upon Queen’s heads for their unapologetic bathing in fistfuls of blood-soaked Krugerrands. That year, Thatcher’s Government, who had publicly denounced the ANC and Nelson Mandela as terrorists, took a few moments out of running the country as a fascist Police State during the Miners’ Strike, and hurried through Zola Budd’s application for British citizenship. Oh, how we laughed, in the lee of the Orgreave Atrocity, when the white trash poster girl of Soldiers of Fortune and the Whitehall elite finished last in the Olympic final, as a prelude to disqualification, after impeding US favourite Mary Decker Slaney. In the context of the times, it made Queen’s decision to prop up the murderous apartheid regime whose massacres from Sharpeville in 1960 to Soweto in 1977 were enough to make all civilised nations break off all contact with South Africa, even more repulsively amoral. Questions of conscience didn’t stop Queen, as there was money to be made. Unsurprisingly, Bohemian Rhapsody, a film described as a "terrible and self-indulgent piece of revisionist history, where the legend is always prioritized over the truth,” that does not even begin to address the fact Mercury was gay, despite his death from AIDS, has nothing to say about the moral stain on the band’s collective conscience, but I’ll never forgive, nor forget their treacherous, avaricious support for apartheid.

Then again, in the febrile atmosphere of the Orwellian Year Zero that was 1984, an awful lot of people were harbouring a whole load of crazy opinions. I’ve just read Michael Crick’s authoritative history of Militant, half in a state of amused detachment, reminiscing just how batshit crazy “The Organisation” were and half in a boiling rage of undiluted anger at the tactics and beliefs of the Leninist equivalent of Branch Davidian. Despite their slavish adherence to the dated and dangerous doctrine of democratic centralism, Militant were so obsessed with distancing themselves from ultra-left “sectarians” and non-Trotskyist “trendy” lefties, they were completely unconcerned that their tendency’s uniform attitudes to what they dismissively regarded as “single-issue” campaigns were as reactionary as any Daily Telegraph editorial. In their incessant veneration of workerist ethics, racism and chauvinistic misogyny were at least tolerated, if not actually embraced.  Their disastrous inability to grasp the concept of social privilege meant that Militant granted carte blanche to young, white, heterosexual, working class men; economic disenfranchisement trumped any other indicator of oppression. Being gay, black or female and middle class meant you were lumped in with the enemy; fair game for workerist abuse.

Remember, The Organisation were the group who made anti-Thatcher t-shirts demanding we “Ditch the Bitch” and whose publications were filled with ultra-masculine cartoons, with strong blokes and weak ladies, drawn by the tellingly named Alan Hardman. Additionally, the What We Stand For alphabet of transitional demands made reference to “housewives” being regarded as workers in future. Having scarcely believably called for a “socialist federation” with Argentina during the Malvinas War, their fetishisation of the Unionist working class in the Six Counties was par for the course. Worst of all, the belief that any non-heterosexual orientation was a “bourgeois lifestyle choice,” legitimised a particularly unpleasant streak of homophobia that still exists in the ossified beliefs of SPEW, Militant’s failed rebrand following the abolition of entrism, following Kim il Taaffe’s “Open Turn” in the early 90s.

How difficult it must be for Militant to understand that child sex abuse wasn’t the preserve of the upper classes, but the modus operandi of men who exuded a desire to express their power. It is the working man’s ballet football that appears to have been a particularly fertile field of dreams for working class nonces.

Back in the day, the nonsensical falsehood that the RSL and Militant were only a loose amalgam of newspaper readers and sellers, was as credible as the existence of the tooth fairy or claims that the moon was made of cream cheese. However, prior to the “Open Turn,” this lie was parroted endlessly, despite neither speaker nor listener ever believing the words uttered. Still, as Crick forecast when writing in 1986, in the squalid aftermath of the idiotic farce that was the disastrous destruction of Liverpool as a viable city by Militant, the minute they quit the Labour Party and stood on their own two feet, they’d fail spectacularly.

So, it has come to pass. Fair’s fair though; at least they kept it together while being a parasitic tapeworm in the lower bowels of the Labour Party, unlike Maomentum who have been as much use a glass eye in the bottom drawer. It’s not only slightly ironic, but also very amusing, that 75 Militant members have applied to rejoin the Labour Party. Sensibly, they’ve all been rejected, apart from the slippery, career bullshitter, Degsy the Horsebox Hatton, though by all accounts, 2 days after getting his party card, he’s been suspended following allegations of an anti-Semitic tweet from a few years back. Now, anti-Semitism is the single most divisive issue in the Labour Party these days; even more so than the failure to adequately articulate the need for a People’s Vote, as Rees Mogg and his acolytes open yet another window in their Brexit Advent Calendar, so we’ll discuss both issues.

Back in 1981, allegedly because of their unease at Labour’s leftward drift under Michael Foot, specifically the Wembley Conference in January of that year at which the party adopted policies such as unilateral nuclear disarmament and  withdrawal from the Common Market (I’m not making this up you know) the infamous Gang of Four, comprising Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams, made their Limehouse Declaration that ushered in the foundation of the Social Democratic Party. While only Owen and Rodgers were MPs at that time, 28 elected Labour members as well as 1 Tory performed their own “Open Turn,” though only 1, Bruce Douglas-Mann in Mitcham and Morden, resigned his seat, then subsequently lost the by-election. Despite going into the 1983 election with 31 sitting MPs, the SDP was reduced to 8 and then 5 after the 1987 election, at which point they fell into a marriage of convenience with the Liberal Party. One intriguing fact is that the last of the SDP founders to be elected to Parliament was Gateshead West defector John Horam, who represented the Tories in Orpington from 1992 to 2010.

Tom Watson, who some members on the left actually voted for as Deputy Leader, though not me as I’ve supported Stella Creasey as she’s a big fan of the Wedding Present, really ought to take note of history, when not playing the role of Witchfinder General. Indeed, perhaps Chuka Umunna and the other idiots who ditched Labour to form the Independent Group of allegedly principled pro Europeans and committed campaigners against anti-Semitism, should bear this in mind. I’m sure the trio of Tory turncoats have already factored that in to their career development plans.

With Britain in the kind of constitutional crisis I’ve not known in my lifetime, which puts Suez, Profumo and the Falklands in the shade, and may be as crucial as the events of 1909 that led to the 1911 Parliament Act, it is almost impossible to predict the eventual situation in Britain from 11pm on March 28^th onwards with any degree of reliable accuracy. I do still feel an extension of Article 50, followed by a fudged Norway Plus deal will be the eventual outcome, but there will be plenty of hot air, split milk and spilt blood before we get there.

Of course, Farage and his gang of gamine gammon Fucktards are planning their equivalent of Mao’s long march. Sustained only by fags, Bombardier and Melton Mowbray pork pies, the Campaign for an English Reich are pointing their brogues southerly and intend to march from Sunderland to London, demanding Brexit is delivered as the 52% demanded. Regardless of the motivation of those who voted to Leave, let’s just hope this gang of bastards in Barbours take their travelling circus right past the main entrance of Nissan on day one, so they can explain to an entire workforce who are about to be thrown on the scrapheap, quite how economic suicide is an effective way of taking back control.

Even if nasty Nigel was eviscerated on the A183, it still wouldn’t make the news. After all, the main story every day is how the Labour Party has transformed into Corbyn’s personal Hezbollah and how anti-Semitism runs rampant through the party, infecting everyone it touches. Unless, as the narrative goes, each and every person in the party makes a solemn oath never to support Palestinian rights and performs a public act of auto da fe to apologise for conscious or unconscious personal or institutional anti-Semitism, the Labour Party is finished. Even then, only the removal of Jeremy Corbyn, precisely the kind of principled person who attacked Militant’s reactionary politics and Queen’s support for South African National Party, will satisfy the dog whistle demagogues.

Now I am prepared to admit that Jeremy Corbyn, despite his calm, understated, charismatic conscience-based politics in the wider world, has been an absolutely hopeless leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party. I’ve long said Corbyn would be better as party president, in a ceremonial rather than executive role. However, that’s because his gentle style and sense of humanity has stopped him from wiping the floor with the Tories. His instinctive Euroscepticism has been a complete disaster as well, but I don’t believe he, or any significant number of Labour Party members, display any anti-Semitic attitudes.

In all my years of political and union activism, I have only twice heard unequivocal anti-Semitic attitudes from those on the left; once by an ancient Stalinist in the Communist Party bookshop at the top of Westgate Road in the early 80s and once by some raving RCP lunatic, frothing at the mouth at the Haymarket at the end of that decade. Considering The Next Step was partly funded by Mossad, we can safety discount that aberrant nonsense. I’ll admit I know little about the machinations of the parliamentary Labour Party, but those MPs I do know (Mearnsy, Chi, Mary G, Bridget and Laura for instance) don’t have an anti-Semitic fibre in their being. Similarly, the conduct of local Labour Party branches in recent years is beyond my experience, other than Newcastle East Dene Ward, but I would seriously doubt any such attitudes would be tolerated.

The mendacious lies of racists who claim that anti-racists like Corbyn are somehow racist, echo the deceit of Militant’s workerist persecution of the LGBT sector of the Labour movement or the mendacious hagiography of the spandex attired Sun City Boys who claimed to be Champions.