Brexit bill: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

Again I feel motivated to write this blog through some of what I feel is the unmitigated tosh that I have read and heard over yesterday’s vote on the Brexit bill and particularly the comments from certain sectors condemning Jeremy Corbyn’s three line whip on Parliamentary Labour Party members to vote in support of the bill.

Now let me get one thing clear at the start of this blog; I am a committed and ardent remainer.  In my opinion the simple in/ out referendum should never have been held, in many ways in itself it was an affront to democracy. The issue of whether the UK should or shouldn’t remain a member of the European Union is an extremely complex and nuanced one and one that simply could not have been effectively addressed by a simple in/ out referendum and certainly not by a referendum which in the end, let’s be honest here, was not about the EU but became about immigration and feelings of alienation from the political class. Again don’t get me wrong here, I do have serious misgivings about the EU, Just look at my earlier blogpost from June 2013 “A Blue Flag With Yellow Stars” and I am fully cognisant of the “Lexit” argument as to why we should leave the cosy, neo Liberal Capitalist club. Ultimately however the reason that I am an ardent remainer is that when you take all the pro and con arguments into consideration a Tory engineered Brexit, I am convinced, will leave the poorer people of the UK and Wales in particular worse off and I cannot see any benefit to the UK that will offset that.

OK so I have nailed my colours to the mast; I am a committed remainer, albeit a conflicted one. That said I am fully aware that we lost the vote and it is no good pretending otherwise which it seems to me some other remainers want to. This then brings me to the conundrum that Labour and Jeremy Corbyn are facing at the moment. To me it seems they are between a rock and a hard place. Labour campaigned for remain, don’t let anybody tell you different; but the vote was lost to the Leave camp. So now what are Labour to do? Ignore the views of the electorate of this country, many of whom are Labour voters and do all they can to block the Brexit process. It seems to be in doing this the Party will stimulate a political backlash from people who feel that their views, which they believe in passionately, are being discounted as unimportant. The other option which Labour seem to be pursuing and which seems far more pragmatic to me is to accept the vote has been lost and to put in process an approach which seeks to negotiate the best possible outcome to Brexit for the majority of people in this country.  

To be honest I despair when I see 47 Labour MPs have voted against the Party directive. Surely if the events of the past eighteen months for Labour have taught us anything is a disunited party is not appealing to the voters and that members of the Parliamentary Labour Party should show a bit more humility in respecting the views of their constituency members and supporters.  While I can maybe understand it for those MPs who represent areas that strongly voted remain but when you see the likes of Owen Smith and Chris Bryant who represent constituencies that voted strongly to leave vote against their Party and their constituents it beggars belief that they cannot see that this falls right into the hands of UKIP and their ilk who accuse Labour of becoming a party of the metropolitan elite that no longer represents the views of the working people of the UK.

OK these are not good times for Labour and I am not going to cast blame in any one direction other than to say that we all need to take a hard damn look at ourselves. Those that decry and blame Corbyn and accuse the party of selling out on the Brexit cause, rather than just moaning and complaining tell us your plans of how we move forward from this difficult situation and do what Labour says it will always do, take everyone with us and leave no one behind.

The maximum wage: Why it matters.

I have been moved to write this blog following some of the comments I have seen on Twitter and elsewhere following Jeremy Corbyn raising the prospect of a maximum wage and the Oxfam report on global inequality as some people seem to think that in a so called civilised society that vast inequality is somehow inevitable and even desirable and certainly not something that needs to be addressed.

In their ground-breaking book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009), the authors highlight the "pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption".

They, and other academics argue on the basis of strong evidence within and between countries, that health inequalities mirror income inequalities and that inequality is in itself a determinant of ill health. As a consequence some academics, such as Professor Danny Dorling, argue that we should be addressing maximum pay in private and public sectors and reducing the ratio between those on the lowest and highest pay. Such responses were recently mirrored by a suggestion by Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, that the UK should explore the possibility of introducing a maximum wage. The mere suggestion of this policy seemed to stimulate some to apoplectic rage as if entitlement to the wealth of Solomon was some sort of inalienable human right.

Since the early 1980s, economic inequality in the UK has grown astronomically. The richest 10 per cent of households now own 40 per cent of the UK’s wealth. This is 850 times the wealth of the bottom 10 per cent. If income distribution was the same as it was in 1977, the bottom fifth would get £2,000 a year more, the top fifth £8,000 less. Given this growth in economic inequality, it is perhaps unsurprising to see a similar growth in inequality in health outcomes. Although life expectancy is generally increasing in the UK, as it has done for the past 100 years, inequalities between the rich and poor is widening.

Analysis by The Equality Trust has found that in the last 20 years alone, the gap in life expectancy for those in different local authority areas has increased 41 per cent for men and 73 per cent for women. This most glaring of inequalities manifests itself in the most basic of inequalities i. e. that of living a long or short life. For instance male life expectancy in East Dorset is 8.9 years longer than those in Blackpool. The gap is just as dramatic for women where those in Purbeck live over 7 years longer than those in Manchester.

Even more alarming are the differences in healthy life expectancy (the number of years likely to be lived in good health) as these inequalities are even more marked. For instance there is now an 18 year difference between women living in Richmond (72 yrs) and those in Tower Hamlets (54 yrs): two communities that are only 15 miles away from each other.

These are just the inequalities in the UK I am sure that I don't need to do a detailed break down of   the inequalities that exist globally but suffice to say that the longest life expectancy in the world is Monaco on 89.52 years while the shortest is Sierra Leone at 50.1 years.  Inequality is killing us in droves and surely, as a species ingenious enough to put people on the moon, we can at least attempt to come up with a solution to this blight on the human race and not lambast those who raise the subject as "communists" that subscribe to the "politics of envy".

There is no more basic inequality than being alive or dead and if we are going to accept the frankly obscene inequality that sees eight  men being richer than the combined wealth of half the world then we must also accept that in doing so we are going to condemn vast swathes of humanity to unnecessary suffering, sickness and an early death. The choice is ours.

I say, I say, I say,when is a Trotskyite not a Trotskyite? When they are an ordinary Labour party supporter.

Following on from my blog last Friday this week I have heard the word Trotskyite all over the news and social media. Supposedly educated people have been using it as shorthand for the worst bogeyman of rampant left wing supporters of Corbyn determined to take the party and country in to oblivion.  On last night’s Channel 4 news Michael Crick and Cathy Newman were goading Corbyn supporters to say on air that they were real life “trots”, which to be honest was somewhat reminiscent of McCarthyite era witch hunts.  All this is part of the overall poor quality of debate that there is around the Labour party leadership hustings.  People on both sides are lazily entrenching themselves in over simplistic caricatures of those they disagree with and what should be lively and enriching political debate is descending in to smears and personal attacks.

 

Let us look at this term Trotskyite. What does it mean? Surely you don’t need a Ph.D in philosophy to understand that the word denotes someone who follows the ideas of Leon Trotsky  (1879 – 1940).  Now I won’t bore you here with an online treatise  as to the ideas of this important and influential political philosopher (who just for the record I don’t agree with but I am interested in what he had to say). However, at their most basic Trotsky believed in a one party state and the need for the global spread of communism.  Now putting it as simply as that is that what all these people who are being called “Trots” believe in? Are all those people who are attending public rallies which Owen Smith sought to characterise as “Momentum” rallies, do you think that is what they want to see in this country?

 

This is the man himself Trotsky whose name is often taken in vain

To return to the rally I attended in Swansea last week, which was the subject of my last blog.  Now I have been active in community and grass roots political organising in the South Wales area since the early 1970s.  During that time I have worked alongside anarchists, evangelical Christians, socialists, Labour party members, Catholics, Jews, Communists, Liberal Democrats and many many others of various other political and philosophical persuasions (Can’t honestly think of many Tories though, but there have been a few) I might not have agreed with their religious or political persuasion but they were good people who wanted to see an improvement in society and to be honest that is good enough for me.  When I attended the rally last Friday I knew many in the room and had known them for many years.  They were teachers, social workers, nurses, the unemployed, community development workers, the sick, office workers, steel workers, miners and business people. Over the years some of them might have been in various political or religious groupings as by the very fact they were at this rally they were proclaiming the were people who believed in something, whatever that might be.  I’ll tell you what they weren’t though, and that is “Trotskyite” and to characterise them as such is quite simply wrong.

Just WTF Corbynistas and Trots ???

Right I haven't blogged for a while as to be honest couldn't think of anything I particularly wanted to blog about but recent events have been winding me up a tad and there are a few things I would like to get off my chest.  As we all know the post #Brexit referendum fallout has precipitated a leadership election in the Labour party as indeed it did in the Tory Party before.  While the Tories managed to achieve this somewhat bloodlessly Labour seem intent on tearing themselves to pieces over it to the extent that it looks like it is becoming an existential threat.

As part of this leadership election process the respective candidates Owen Smith and Jeremy Corbyn have been taking part in debates, meetings and rallies as part of the hustings process.  All very well and good. If we must have a leadership election, which by the way I don't think that we should, then these are the sort of events the candidates should be having.

Last Friday Jeremy Corbyn organised events in Merthyr Tydfil and Swansea the town of my birth and where I still have lots of family and friends and the city where I currently reside. From my contacts on social media I could see that the Merthyr event had gone well with a carnival celebratory atmosphere.  With that information in mind I looked forward to attending the evening event in Swansea.

I was not disappointed. There was an excellent turnout and a great feeling to the event. Lots of old friends and comrades were there such as Phil White, Tyrone O'Sullivan and @llanelliriots so it was great to catch up with some really good people who for years gave been grassroots activists in the area. Both Tyrone and Jeremy Corbyn spoke at the event.  Both are leaders in their own way but they both talked about that this election and socialism in general is not about leaders but it is about mutualism and establishing a grassroots movement that takes everybody in the community along with it.

My mate Tyrone :-)

Unsurprisingly for such an event a number of us who were attending stared to Tweet and post on social media as to what a positive experience it was. Oh if we did !! As soon as our tweets and other postings went out they started to climb out of the social media woodwork. The doubters, the naysayers and the downright nasty and offensive, who mostly hide behind anonymous twitter accounts.  They had comments like "they are all just a bunch of commies and Trots" or they are a "cult" following their "great leader". At the very least they were saying "we had rallies like this with Michelle Foot in the 1980s and that didn't bring us electoral success."

 Now I am long enough in the tooth and thick skinned enough to expect such sneering from Tory supporters or those not sympathetic to Labour but many of these detractors claimed to be Labour??!! This is what was quite simply beyond me.  It was a good event where like minded people were able to come together and share ideas.  I heard some very good discussions going on on the night and it was great to have the opportunity to take part. I'm not saying that such events in themselves are going to win the general election for Labour and anyone that does is simply deluded but what planet of negativity are people on who simply decry such events and mock and deride those who attend? Anyway, it was not a general election focused event it was a Labour leadership event primarily aimed at those who are already Labour supporters.

If you ask me socialism is about, mutuality, fraternity and solidarity, it is about realising that the greatest strength of the human race is its ability to act as a society not just as a collection of individuals pursing their own interests. If people feel there is no value to us all coming together and sharing ideas and thoughts then I am sorry but in my eyes they are not socialists.