Hell Comes to Paris, by John Wight

Years spent depicting head chopping fanatics as rebels, moderates, and revolutionaries in an effort to effect the toppling of another secular government in the Middle East.

Years spent cultivating Saudi Arabia as an ally against extremism and fanaticism rather than treating it as a country where extremism and fanaticism resides.

Years spent treating the Assad government, Iran, and Russia as enemies rather than allies in the struggle against this fanaticism.

And years spent denying any connection between a foreign policy underpinned by hubris and its inevitable blowback.

All this together has succeeded in opening the gates of hell.

The aforementioned hubris was on display just hours prior to the horrific events in Paris, when British Prime Minister David Cameron elevated the killing of Mohammed Emwazi by US drone strike in Raqqa, Syria, to the status of a major military victory in the war against ISIS.

Out came the podium from Number 10, and out he came to proclaim that the killing of Emwazi (aka Jihadi John) had “struck at the heart of the terrorist organization [ISIS].” 

That Cameron could venture such a fatuous boast the very day after an ISIS suicide bomb attack in southern Beirut killed 43 and wounded over 200 people was yet more evidence of the extent to which Western governments are detached from the reality of the Frankenstein’s monster their foreign policy has helped create and let loose upon the world. 

There is also the truth that in the minds of people whose worldview is grievously impaired by a Western prism, the deaths of Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians, and Kurds – in other words those engaged in the struggle against ISIS on the ground – constitute a statistic, while the deaths of Europeans and Americans to the same barbarism are an unspeakable tragedy.

In years to come historians will prepare such a scathing indictment against this generation’s leaders of the so-called free world, it will make the indictment prior generations of historians have leveled against the authors of the Sykes Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration, the Treaty of Versailles, the Munich Agreement, and the Suez Crisis seem like a playful tap on the wrist in comparison.

In fact, the only issue of debate in the course of preparing it will be where it should begin and where it should end.

As things stand, it is on track to be open-ended. In response to 9/11 the decision by the Bush administration, ably assisted by the Blair government, to crash first into Afghanistan without an exit strategy, followed by Iraq in the mistaken belief coalition troops would be greeted as liberators rather than occupiers, marked the day not when a new dawn of democracy and freedom was about to break across the Arab and Muslim world, but the day the hand of the West first reached for that rusty bolt securing in place the gates of hell, and slowly started to pull it back.

Over the succeeding decade back ever-further the bolt came, inch by inch, until in 2011 the gates finally, and inevitably, flew open with the West’s ill-fated intervention in an Arab Spring in Libya that by then had arrived at the end of its reach.

NATO airstrikes succeeded in dragging the Libyan ‘revolution’ from Benghazi all the way to Tripoli and victorious completion, whereupon the aforementioned David Cameron and his French counterpart at the time, Nikolas Sarkozy, descended to hail the Libyan people for “choosing democracy.” 

The hubris of those words, the military intervention which preceded them, have sent thousands of men, women, and children to the bottom of the Mediterranean in the years following, marking a tragic end to a desperate attempt to escape the democratic paradise the British Prime Minister described. 

Regardless, on we continued, driven by a myopic and fatal rendering of the brutal conflict in Syria as a revolution, even as legions of religious fanatics poured into the country, most of them across the border of our Turkish ally while Erdogan looked the other way. 

In the course of the long years of total war that has engulfed the country since, the world has witnessed every conceivable variety of bestiality, carried out under the black flag of ISIS.

But wait a minute, the barrel bombs, you say. Assad is killing his own people. He is the cause of all of this mayhem and carnage. 

Allowing for a moment the idea that the Assad government was the main cause of the Syrian conflict when it began in 2011, in 2015 the same government is without any shadow a necessary part of it ending with Syria’s survival. 

Barrel bombs are an atrociously indiscriminate weapon, for sure, and their use rightly comes under the category of war crime.

However just as the war crime of the allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945 did not invalidate the war against European fascism then, neither does the atrocity of Syrian barrel bombs invalidate the war against its Middle East equivalent today. 

When the survival of a country and its culture and history is at stake, war can never be anything else but ugly, which is why the sooner it is brought to a conclusion in Syria the better. 

This is where we come to Russia’s intervention, which came at the point where the Syrian government was slipping towards the abyss. 

President Putin’s forensic accounting of the perfidious calamity of events leading up to Russia’s arrival, in his address to the UN General Assembly, should have heralded the glaringly and obviously necessary volte face required to turn a Western policy responsible for disaster into one approximating to coherence. 

But, no, instead a moral equivalence has continued to be drawn between a secular and sovereign government under which the rights of minorities were and are protected, and a medieval death cult intent on turning the country into a mass grave of said minorities, along with others deemed superfluous to the requirements of the Caliphate. 

This shorthand history of the elemental conflict currently raging across Syria, and also northern Iraq, and which has now come knocking on our door, places the crassness of David Cameron’s boast of ‘striking at the heart’ in its rightful context. 

We – i.e. the West – are in truth striking at the heart of nothing when it comes to the struggle against ISIS. Russia on the other hand is striking them, along with the Syrian Arab Army, the Kurds, and Iran. 

The extent to which their efforts are succeeding can be measured in this shocking series of attacks that have been carried out beyond Syria’s borders – starting with the downing of the Russian passenger aircraft over the Sinai, followed by the recent suicide bombing in southern Beirut, and now with this latest grisly episode in the heart of Europe. 

They reflect the desperation of a group that has suffered significant reverses in Syria and Iraq in recent days and weeks.

No matter, if terror was the aim of the Paris attack, it has undeniably succeeded, leaving the French, British, and US government with a dilemma over how to respond, both in terms of security measures at home and their ongoing role in the conflict in Syria. 

Responding to this latest atrocity in the French capital, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev expressed Russia’s condolences and said: “The tragedy in Paris demands that we all unite in our fight against extremism.” 

These are no mere empty words. The longer Russia’s call for unity in this struggle goes unheeded and ignored, the longer it will take for the gates of hell to be bolted shut again – assuming, of course, they ever can be.

This article originally appeared here, and is reproduced at the kind suggestion of the author.

Ordeals of Whistleblowers in a “Democracy”, by Victor Wallis

The more extreme the crimes of state, the more the state seeks to shroud them in secrecy. The greater the secrecy and the accompanying lies, the more vital becomes the role of whistleblowers – and the more vindictive becomes the state in its pursuit of them.

Whistleblowers are people who start out as loyal servants of the state. Their illusions about the state’s supposed moral agenda – and the wholeheartedness of their own patriotic commitment – make them all the more shocked when they discover evidence of the state’s wrongdoing.

Given the extreme concentration of weaponry (as well as surveillance capabilities) in the hands of the state, and given the disposition of the state to apply such resources even against nonviolent mass movements, the type of defection practiced by whistleblowers – an option available to military and intelligence operatives at all levels – is crucial to any eventual triumph of popular forces over the ruling class.

Whistleblowers thus not only embarrass the government, disrupt its policies, and (assuming adequate diffusion) educate the citizenry; they also are harbingers of a broader crumbling of the capitalist state and the order it defends.

Acting largely in isolation and at great risk to themselves, they embody the conviction – or at least the hope – that basic decency has a more universal grounding than does any possible scheme of oppression.

Whistle-blowing’s principal near-term function is educational. It demonstrates the undemocratic character of the regime whose secrets it lets out; it is thus an essential ingredient of investigative journalism.

The documents it brings to light reach the public through those who practice such journalism, whom the government then threatens with prosecution unless they disclose their sources.

The novelty of Wikileaks is that it provided a new form of protection for the anonymity of sources. This, together with the facility of electronic transmission, has made the potential for disclosure greater than ever before.

It accounts for the extraordinary fact that the US government has been pursuing draconian charges against someone who not merely is only the recipient rather than the “leaker” of sensitive information, but someone who is not even a citizen or resident of the United States – Julian Assange.

Disclosure is particularly embarrassing when it documents the fact that government officials have lied.

The Director of Central Intelligence lied under oath to the US Congress – a felony for which he was never prosecuted – when he denied that the National Security Agency monitors the communications of the entire US population.

This lie was the culminating event in Edward Snowden’s decision to blow the whistle. As we all know, of course, it is Snowden who was then criminalized by the government.

This parallels the experience of John Kiriakou, who publicly confirmed, on the basis of his first-hand knowledge, that the CIA practiced torture by waterboarding. Kiriakou then became the only government official to be prosecuted and imprisoned in connection with CIA and military practices of torture.

The debate over whistleblowers reached tens of millions of viewers when the presidential candidates of the Democratic Party were asked (on Oct. 13) their views about Snowden.

Hillary Clinton falsely asserted that he could have used established channels to transmit his disclosures of excessive surveillance, presumably at no risk to himself. This claim is refuted by the experience of previous whistleblowers who had taken just that approach.

One of them, Thomas Drake, retold his story two days later, at a news conference ignored by most of the corporate media (video), which was organized on behalf of yet another whistleblower, Jeffrey Sterling, who recently began a 42-month prison term on a conviction of “espionage.”

What Sterling had done was report to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about a counterproductive CIA attempt (in 2000) to feed misleading technological data to Iranian scientists.

What he was prosecuted for was his subsequent conversations with New York Times journalist James Risen, although no evidence was available as to the content of those conversations, since Risen refused to testify.

Sterling’s story is recounted in a letter from his wife, seeking presidential clemency from Obama. Sterling had been fired from the CIA in 2002 after filing a complaint against the agency for racial discrimination (an episode on which Risen wrote a news story).

After Risen’s book State of War (2006) came out, the FBI raided Sterling’s home, but it was not until more than four years later – under Obama – that he was arrested (2011).

The latest whistleblower, who documents the “normalization of assassination” via drone warfare, is wisely seeking to remain anonymous. The US government will surely take all possible steps to track him down.

The work of whistleblowers, as well as their personal safety, is obviously an issue that cuts across national borders. Support for US whistleblowers will need to be as global as the reach of the policies and the weapons that they expose.

This is the original text of a column written on 20th October and posted on the Norwegian website radikalportal.no. It is reproduced here at the kind suggestion of Norman Solomon, the editor of  RootsAction.org, where it has already appeared. Victor Wallis is managing editor of the journal Socialism and Democracy.

Labour Holds the Future of Surveillance in its Hands, by Loz Kaye

Even with operations ongoing, attention has started to turn to what the political response to the horrific Paris attacks should be. Already the pressure has been to push through new surveillance laws in the Investigatory Powers Bill.

Some like Lord Carlile, with ghoulish speed exploited the tragedy to push their own pro-surveillance agenda. This is despite France's having passed measures similar to the Bill. There is no hard evidence that encrypted communications were used, despite media claims.

The Home Secretary resisted calls to fast-track the bill. She can after all afford to be measured; as things stand, its passage is a done deal. That is, unless Labour has a significant change of heart.

Bluntly, since the General Election, that is the only prospect that civil liberties campaigners have of a law that properly balances liberty and security.

With the new parliamentary mathematics, the future of surveillance really does lie in Labour's hands. Going by recent history, it is fair to say a dramatic change of heart seems like something of a long shot.

One of the legacies of the Blair-Brown era is a well entrenched view in a section of the electorate that Labour is authoritarian, that it is still the party of ID cards, of 90-day detention, of former Home Secretaries who queue up to support ever more intrusive intercept powers.

So far it has been business as usual from Andy Burnham, who was keen to underline that the Investigatory Powers Bill isn't a “Snoopers' Charter” in his eyes, and even pressed for its passage to be speeded up due to the Paris attacks. 

This is despite some new signals coming out of the party, not least with digital rights champion Tom Watson being voted in as Deputy Leader. 

The recent thrust of the Labour Party has been much more pro-civil liberties, opposing scrapping the Human Rights Act, defending freedom of information, highlighting Tory threats to trade unionism.

Addressing the legitimate concerns about the bill would make complete sense in this context, not least as it relies on the Human Rights Act for its operation.

The Labour Party should reflect on the reality of what is being proposed.

It would keep the records of the councillor emailing residents about potholes, scoop up details of the activist planning by-election leafleting on social media. It would keep visits to trade union or cooperative society websites.

Without proper checks on how the security services use the immense amount of information generated by our on-line lives, it could build up a frighteningly accurate picture of any of us; of our political affiliations, for example.

Andy Burnham may not think this is mass surveillance, but it is clearly surveillance en masse. 

There is currently a genuine political opportunity for Labour on the issue.

The Liberal Democrats have been the most high profile and best informed of mainstream parties challenging the rush to blanket surveillance. But they are now tainted by being in government during the Snowden revelations scandal.

Their most high profile parliamentarian with relevant experience on the intelligence agencies is Lord Carlile, who is defiantly in favour of the Snoopers' Charter agenda. 

The possibility is there for Labour to demonstrate a break with the past which has seen the party, both apparently uninterested in contemporary digital politics, and unwilling to engage with the tech community's concerns on subjects ranging from intercept to the digital economy.

What ought to make an impression is that the people who have been most vocal about their concerns on the Investigatory Powers Bill are the very people who are supposed to carry it out – communications service providers and digital business.

The current turmoil in the party is a significant danger for campaigners who want to see an Investigatory Powers Act that is fit for purpose, and that does not hand away freedoms that were so hard won by the Labour Movement.

The number one narrative on Corbyn's leadership is that the party is weak on security, and even his most ardent supporters will surely concede the Leadership have done themselves no favours. 

We run the risk that arguing for the right measures on intercept powers will be sucked in to the vortex of tabloid hysteria. 

That is why the argument on surveillance must be made just as much on security grounds as on grounds of citizens' rights.

Does this look like a government that cares much for civil liberties? Weakening encryption, even by signalling we want communications to be able to decrypted by service providers, lays us open to devastating cyber attack.

The lack of focus and targeting in the bulk approach have left our country vulnerable by an inability to concentrate on the real present threats.

The government is considering spending an estimated £2.5 billion over a decade on storing information that all acknowledge will be mostly useless in protecting us, when £2.3 billion has been cut from policing.

When it comes to armed response units, it is Theresa May, not Corbyn, who is the immediate threat to them. She is happy make cuts to them while pouring money in to the bottomless pit which is blanket surveillance.

After all, being critical of the Investigatory Powers Bill could unite both sides in Labour right now, a radical new vision and strength on protecting the nation.

For all our sakes, it must.

The Digital Dog Ate Our Civil-Liberties Homework: “It’s Just the Way It Is”, by Norman Solomon

Of all the excuses ladled out for the Obama administration's shredding of the Fourth Amendment while assaulting press freedom and prosecuting “national security” whistleblowers, none is more pernicious than the claim that technology is responsible.

At first glance, the explanation might seem to make sense. After all, the capacities of digital tech have become truly awesome. It’s easy to finger “technology” as the driver of government policies, as if the president at the wheel has little choice but to follow the technological routes that have opened up for Big Brother.

Now comes New York Times reporter Charlie Savage, telling listeners and viewers of a Democracy Now interview interview that the surveillance state is largely a matter of technology: “It’s just the way it is in the 21st century.”

That’s a great way to depoliticize a crucial subject -- downplaying the major dynamics of the political economy, anti-democratic power and top-down choices -- letting leaders off the hook, as if sophistication calls for understanding that government is to be regulated by high-tech forces rather than the other way around.

In effect, the message is that -- if you don’t like mass surveillance and draconian measures to intimidate whistleblowers as well as journalists -- your beef is really with technology, and good luck with pushing back against that. Get it? The fault, dear citizen, is not in our political stars but in digital tech.

When Amy Goodman asked Savage about the Obama administration’s record-high prosecutions of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, he summed up this way:

“Because of technology, it’s impossible to hide who’s in contact with whom anymore, and cases are viable to investigate now that weren’t before. That’s not something Obama did or Bush did. It’s just the way it is in the 21st century, and investigative journalism is still grappling with the implications of that.” 

A more astute and candid assessment of such matters can be found in “Through the Looking-Glass," where Lewis Carroll wrote this dialogue:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
"The question is," Alice replied, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," Humpty Dumpty responded, "which is to be master -- that's all."

The surveillance state is not the default setting of digital technology. The surveillance state is a failure and suppressor of democracy. A surveillance state or a democratic system -- which is to be master?

______________________________

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org  and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill, The Old Vic, London; reviewed by Ian Oakley

This is the play of a young playwright experimenting with form and finding his artistic feet. That the playwright is Eugene O’Neill is why the play still has power and resonance 90 years after it was written.

The story opens in the bowels of an Ocean Liner and we are introduced to the central character, Yank, the strongest stoker on the ship.

He is immune to his shipmates’ complaints and socialism, until an encounter with the ship’s owner’s daughter, who wanted to slum it in the depths of the ship (I suppose the modern equivalent is Samantha Cameron and her awful tattoo), sends Yank on a journey through 1920s American society.

The scenes of Yank being beaten up by the New York police show how little certain things have changed in American society.

Some critics, mainly from the right wing papers, have objected that the piece is somehow left-wing propaganda, thereby proving that media bias is not just a left-wing phenomena and the review pages are not immune from it.

It is a much more interesting piece than a form of propaganda, in that O’Neill’s natural scepticism shows through in Yank’s rejection of a political solution to his situation and his embrace of violence and anger.

You can feel the shadow of the Russian Revolution over the piece; the fact that O’Neill refuses to endorse a political solution to Yank’s situation is measure of his understanding of the human condition and of the fact that he never embraced the Revolution in the way that many of his friends and associates did.

The production is excellent, the burden of the play falls on the actor playing Yank, and Bertie Carvel is more than equal to the task.

It is a measure of his abilities as an actor that I last watched him playing Nick Clegg in the Channel 4 drama Coalition. The thought of Nick Clegg working as a stoker in an Ocean Liner is appealing, but somehow I don’t think Cleggy would last an hour, let alone a full shift.

The Foreign Policy of Montenegro and the Question of Military Neutrality, by Filip Kovacevic

I begin with what I believe should be three defining characteristics of the Montenegrin foreign policy.

First, it should be humane. This means that it must value the human dignity of each individual, respect the right of every human being to a serene and prosperous life, and articulate the commitment to the tolerant and peaceful coexistence of all the differences in the world.

Secondly, it should be rational. It should promote the values of scientific development, technological progress, and global solidarity in the distribution of material resources.

It should demand global disarmament and the establishment of the international mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of disputes.

And, thirdly, it should be intellectually honest in its deconstruction of the prevailing rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and human rights which most often hides the geopolitical interests of major world powers and the oligarchic elites which direct them.

I believe that these three defining characteristic of the Montenegrin foreign policy can best be expressed through the commitment to the military neutrality of Montenegro. Here I will note at least three reasons.

First, can anybody seriously dispute the humaneness of the non-participation in violence and war and the promotion of the peaceful resolution of disputes?

That this is not possible is also understood by those in Montenegro who oppose military neutrality. This is why they claim that by entering NATO, Montenegro would never again participate in wars.

However, this claim is false. In the last twenty years, NATO participated in at least three wars and its most powerful members logistically supported several more.

This means that NATO membership requires that the Montenegrin tax payers bear the burden of financial participation in war operations.

Instead of being invested in education and retirement benefits, in health and disability insurance, the taxpayers' money would go into purchasing machine guns, bombs, and armoured car vehicles.

Montenegrin soldiers would be put in danger of getting wounded or killed far away from their families and homes, in the deserts of Asia and Africa.

The vast majority of Montenegrins would be subjected to emotional, psychological traumas, while the spoils of war would be split between the global capitalist oligarchies and their corrupted puppets in the Montenegrin government.

And, as it always happens, the children of the poor would be sent to the frontlines, while the children of the rich would be able to get away. Do we want that? Is that humane? 

Secondly, if, so far, we have concluded that neutrality is essentially humane, we still have to check whether it is rational given the existing economic constraints.

The opponents claim that NATO membership costs less than military neutrality. Is their claim true?

One look at the military budgets of the militarily neutral European countries is enough to show that all of them spend on defense less than the NATO standard of  2 % of the GDP.

According to publicly available information, Ireland spends 0.7%, Austria 0.8%, Switzerland 0.9%, Finland 1.4-1.6%, Sweden 1.5% and Malta 1.7%

And not only that. It is important to note that the vast majority of citizens in these countries, which are all, except Switzerland, also the members of the European Union, strongly supports the policy of military neutrality.

It is evident that for these citizens, military neutrality is not only a humane, but also a rational, choice.

The interplay of humaneness and rationality is the ideal of all political communities. The policy of military neutrality enables the attainment of at least one dimension of that ideal.

However, the question remains as to what extent this policy is intellectually feasible and pragmatic in the current Montenegrin political context.

Does this mean that if Montenegro does not enter NATO, it will somehow remain outside the community of democratic countries, left at the mercy of the corrupt, authoritarian regime embodied in the rule of the prime minister Milo Djukanovic, who has been in power for the last 25 years?

The answer to this question makes necessary the honest appraisal of the fact that those countries which are democratic in their domestic political order often do not behave particularly democratically in the sphere of international relations. They generally have one standard for their citizens and another for the rest of the world.

If one carefully examines the conduct of the foreign policy of the United States, one can find many instances in which the US has broken international agreements, including the Charter of the United Nations.

The documents made public by Edward Snowden, for instance, show that the institutions of the US government in a shocking manner violated the right to privacy of tens of millions of people around the planet.

Can we therefore have a great deal of confidence that the activities of the US government, or the government of any NATO country for that matter, can be taken as the model of democratic behaviour and respect for international law?

On the other hand, neither the socialist Yugoslavia, nor many of the countries in the Non-Aligned Movement, were democracies by the standards of the official Washington, but did they not give an immeasurable contribution to the improvement of the quality of life on Earth as well as to the prevention of the nuclear Armageddon between the two superpowers?

Today, for instance, the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) play a more positive role in the search for the more just distribution of global resources and the fight against poverty than the countries which founded NATO.

This is why it is intellectually disingenuous to claim that by not entering NATO, the democratic development and economic growth of Montenegro will be in any way slowed down or stopped.

Military neutrality means open and friendly cooperation with all countries, while respecting mutual interests and reflecting universal values.

In my opinion, it is the only authentic road to the prosperity of Montenegrin citizens and the respected status of Montenegro in international affairs.

It would make Montenegro into the place of reconciliation and credible cooperation between the West and the East. It is therefore a humane and rational and wise foreign policy choice. 

Filip Kovacevic, PhD; Chair, Board of Directors, Movement for Neutrality of Montenegro; Visiting Adjunct Professor, University of San Francisco; Associate Professor, University of Montenegro (on leave).

David Lindsay Interviews Andrew Jordan

Andrew Jordan recently resigned as President of the Socialist Labour Party that was founded by Arthur Scargill in 1996, and joined the Labour Party. David Lindsay is the Editor of The Lanchester Review.

DL: You joined the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) at 17. What motivated you to join? 

AJ: Having grown up in County Durham I understood at an early age that there was only one political party that could represent the interests and concerns of the vast majority of people.

I could also see the extent to which the support of local people at that time was being taken for granted, not withstanding of course that the then Prime Minister was a County Durham MP.

By the time I was 17 the Iraq War had taken place and young ambitious people who wanted to achieve were about to see a big increase in tuition fees, a real barrier to any social mobility and self improvement, especially in areas like the area I grew up in.

I felt that the only basis for challenge was from the left of those policies and therefore I joined the SLP.

Did you ever think about joining the Labour Party in the past? If not, what was it that prevented you from considering Labour?

No because I never saw a Labour Leadership that was bold enough to tackle the sorts of issues I have already mentioned and implement a truly socialist manifesto.

Prior to your decision to join the Labour Party, what was your view of that party?

I have always had a great deal of respect for the Labour Party members and activists that I know. Nevertheless, until now it has been my view that the Labour Party was unlikely to be the best mechanism to achieve implementation of the policies and principles that I support and that the vast majority of Labour Party members believe in.

Please outline your recent decision to join the Labour Paty. What was it that persuaded you to leave the SLP? Was it a tough decision? What did you have to take into consideration?

It was a tough decision and I have a great deal of affection and respect for SLP members, but I do not believe division between smaller parties is the way to take the trade union and labour movement as well as country forward any longer.

I believe we have a real opportunity for change and a real opportunity to build a strong, inclusive and more representative Labour Party.

Do you consider the Left to be too fractured at present with parties such as Left Unity, TUSC, the Socialist Party, Respect, the SWP, and so on, splintering the Left vote? How do you think that this situation can be rectified?

Yes. After more than ten years of being an SLP member and more than four years of being President, I have decided to step aside from it.

I hope that my example will encourage many from across the left to leave their baggage at the door and to constructively engage in unity by joining the Labour Party.

It is perhaps easier to be sentimental or to stay in your own personal comfort zone in a smaller party, but that really is no longer the best way forward and will be of no help to communities and people across Britain that need help today and hope for tomorrow.

Many on the Left are describing the rise in the popularity of Jeremy Corbyn as a 'once in a generation' chance for the Left after decades of varying forms of Thatcherism. Would you agree?

Yes, absolutely.

Have you been inspired by the surge in support for a figure of the Left? How did you feel watching Corbyn's success from the viewpoint of membership of another political party?

I think that Jeremy Corbyn's election brings new hope and an opportunity for the Left. That also means other parties of the Left should, in my opinion, react as I intend to do personally.

We need to bring down the old barriers to unity within the movement and as individuals constructively engage in the policy debates that will now take place within the Labour Party.

What do you think the future holds for the Labour Party with Corbyn as its Leader?

I think it will be a challenging journey but there is a real desire for new approaches and solutions to bring about social change and improvement.

It is my hope that a strong, inclusive and more representative Labour Party will have the strength to meet these challenges.

Do you hope to play an active role in your new Party?

I do very much hope so. I hope to put the skills I have developed over the years, both in my political and trade union capacities, to good use to whatever extent I am able to do within the Labour Party.

What would you say to those people in other Left parties who may feel tempted to leave and join Labour?

I have set out my thinking and if other people can identify with it then I hope that they will reach the same conclusion and act upon it.

How do you respond to Labour Party members who might be suspicious of those who were now joining from smaller Left parties and from other Left activism?

I can only make it clear that from in my own case I am leaving my baggage at the door prior to joining the Labour Party. I hope that my example will encourage many from across the left to leave their baggage at the door and to constructively engage in unity by joining the Labour Party.

I think that whether people are long-term Labour Party members or, like me, are new to the party, what we should all be striving for is a strong, inclusive and more representative Labour Party.

French Police Destroy Refugee Camps In Calais, by Thomas Bailey

Police brutality in Calais serves as a harsh reminder of the plight of refugees.

At around 8 a.m. on Monday morning, International World Peace Day, a large group of Gendarmes, Police Nationale and BAC armed with batons and pepper-spray destroyed a Syrian refugee camp situated in central Calais, France.

With no warning, vans pulled up and rushed up to 300 refugees off to the so-called ‘Jungle’, a large refugee camp 2.5 miles from the town.

We offered to drive the families with little children, but the police continually refused, leaving them to trudge down the busy road minutes after being violently awoken.

Tents were destroyed, possessions were lost, and the place that these people called home was turned into a deserted wasteland.

Grown men wept and screamed as the police brutally forced them away, blinding them with pepper-spray and preventing them from collecting their money, their passports, and their immigration papers.

Photos and details of dead or missing family members, along with other possessions, were thrown into trucks for the municipal dump.

Despite the attempts of volunteers to salvage important belongings, the majority was lost, and all efforts to negotiate were met with stony glares from the antagonistic and intimidating men in riot gear.

Two similar evictions were carried out later that morning, with police marching refugees into the cramped and flooded Jungle.

Meanwhile, authorities pushed back the boundaries of the main camp using rubber bullets and bulldozers, making the small amount of land, on which approximately 4,000 people live, all the more crowded with tents and insufficient shelter.

They also blocked the roads, preventing volunteers from giving vital aid to those displaced.

The brutality of the police evictions came as a shock to everyone – although the camps were set up illegally, this by no means justifies the cruel and inhuman behaviour exercised in moving the camps.

It was because of this brutality that hundreds of refugees are now sleeping without shelter, and that, ironically, those who lost their documents could be stranded in Northern France for even longer, precisely what the government was trying to avoid.

If the refugees had been given some warning, or if volunteers had been told in advance so that they could help to transfer belongings into a designated area within the Jungle, then much of this hardship could have been avoided.

All diplomatic process was circumvented.

“Wherever we go,” one man told me with tears in his eyes, “we Syrians suffer. In Syria we are suffering, in Europe we are suffering, and now here we are suffering…”

These men and women have fled a civil war and the brutality of Assad’s rule, only to be exposed to more and more inhumane persecution and injuries.

There is no solace for these people – wherever they go, there is nothing but anguish.

Every few days we hear stories of men dying while attempting to reach the UK; even within the camp, men and women are dying from hunger, cold, and despair.

Many have lost their families, and now they are losing their friends.

This is what we must remember. It doesn’t matter whether these people are refugees or economic migrants (as many in Calais are) – call them what you will, you can never deny the fact that these people are human, just like you and me.

They deserve respect, care, support, and most importantly, humanity. No one should suffer like they have suffered: perilous journeys across the Mediterranean, nights in prison cells or sleeping rough, and months without contacting family members to tell them they are alive.

They have rights too, and those rights were put in jeopardy yesterday morning, as they have been for a long, long time.

“The Jungle is not a place to live. This is not a life,” said one man, reflecting the sentiments of all those in the camp. No one should live like they are forced to, sleeping in puddles and surrounded by discarded rubbish.

It will take time and it will take perseverance, but one day we will realise that, no matter where someone comes from, no matter what the colour of their skin, we are all equal – the French government seems to have forgotten the importance of liberté, egalité, fraternité in their democracy.

Only then will these people be treated with the respect they deserve, and only then will we understand the power of their dreams and ambitions.

These are doctors, lawyers, scientists and civil engineers, many of whom have University degrees and once lived affluent lives.

In a sense, they are all refugees, fleeing not just war, but also shackles for their hopes. To suggest that they are all scroungers, a myth perpetuated by the right-wing press, is simply false.

An open border policy would be impractical (as has been shown by Germany’s introduction of border controls), but the least we could do is to treat these people with love in our hearts – that is all they need.

“I don’t want anything, only your good will,” one Syrian man told me a few days before his camp was ransacked.

They have suffered enough, and they may suffer in the future – refugees and migrants always have been the victims of persecution and cruelty, wherever they go.

But let’s learn a lesson from the violence of the past few days: it doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s make sure it never happens again.

This article originally appeared here, and is reproduced at the author’s request.

Donald Trump: Plutocrat Unbound, by Ian Oakley

One of the great joys of the summer of 2015 has been Donald Trump’s domination of the American political scene.

While President Obama has been getting on with the difficult job of trying to govern, whether it is with his openings to Iran or Cuba, or with grappling with the Republicans in Congress, Trump has been providing the entertainment with his bid for the Republican nomination for President in 2016.

The great thing about ‘The Donald’ is that he is exactly the candidate that the modern Republican Party deserves.

The Republican Party is a party that was smashed by George W Bush’s Presidency and rebuilt on the back of Tea Party outrage. It is now a collection of warring interest groups.

The big business wing wants free trade and mass immigration to keep profits up and wages down. The Tea Party insurgents what protection and no immigration to keep jobs from being exported and wages up.

The one thing that unites them is a hatred for President Obama, with his attempts to give poorer people healthcare and with his support for tackling climate change.

Along with a Republican Party that enjoys fighting itself, almost as much as it enjoys denouncing Obama and Hillary Clinton, you have a media market that is polarised with partisan cable news channels and websites, and a political culture where everyone takes offence at everything.

So if a candidate for any major office makes a joke about something, or seeks to engage on difficult issues like race or religion, they are denounced by a Twitter ‘victim’ group, and that is then picked up by the partisan cable media.

This produces candidates as bland as beige cardigans. It fuels both the phoney media outrage, and a public distrust of do-nothing politicians.

Into this mess comes Donald Trump. The billionaire property developer and reality TV star who says exactly what he wants, when he wants, and about what he wants.

The first thing he did was show up most American political commentators as talking nonsense.

Many of them said he would not run; he ran. Most said that his comments on Mexicans would destroy his campaign; his poll numbers went up.Most said that his comments on John McCain would definitely destroy his campaign; his poll numbers went up. Most said his fight with Fox news was suicide; Fox News backed down (they need him for the ratings, and he delivers).

The American public is so tired of a political class that won’t say boo to a goose, that they are loving Trump’s crazed version of straight talking.

Donald Trump is the Republican Party’s own worst nightmare, because he is the living embodiment of what that party has become. 

The Republican Establishment worships the rich, and Trump is a billionaire. The Tea Party hates illegal immigration, and Trump will build a wall.

In truth the Republican Establishment would love to get rid of Trump, as they want a candidate such as  Jeb Bush, who will pretend to care about Latinos and the poor, who will get elected, and who will then get on with cutting taxes, with reducing regulation, and with keeping the illegal immigrants coming.

Unfortunately for them, the normal way to get rid of a candidate – cut off their rich donors – won’t work with Trump, as he can fund his own campaign.

The more that Establishment types attack Trump, the more that it feeds his support among the Tea Party wing.

The Trump campaign will probably come to a sticky end at some point next year.

But in his exposure of the uselessness of the commentator class, in his exposure of the awfulness of today’s Republican Party, and in his highlighting the issue of illegal immigration – a major concern of ordinary Americans – he has done the United States body politic a favour.

Assange and the Value of WikiLeaks: Subverting Illusions, by Norman Solomon

Three years after Ecuador’s government granted political asylum to Julian Assange in its small ground-floor London embassy, the founder of WikiLeaks is still there -- beyond the reach of the government whose vice president, Joe Biden, has labeled him “a digital terrorist."

The Obama administration wants Assange in a U.S. prison, so that the only mouse he might ever see would be scurrying across the floor of a solitary-confinement cell.

Above and beyond Assange’s personal freedom, what’s at stake includes the impunity of the United States and its allies to relegate transparency to a mythical concept, with democracy more rhetoric than reality.

From the Vietnam War era to today -- from aerial bombing and torture to ecological disasters and financial scams moving billions of dollars into private pockets -- the high-up secrecy hiding key realities from the public has done vast damage.

No wonder economic and political elites despise WikiLeaks for its disclosures.

During the last five years, since the release of the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, the world has changed in major ways for democratic possibilities, with WikiLeaks as a catalyst.

It’s sadly appropriate that Assange is so deplored and reviled by so many in the upper reaches of governments, huge corporations and mass media.

For such powerful entities, truly informative leaks to the public are plagues that should be eradicated as much as possible.

Notably, in the U.S. mass media, Assange is often grouped together with whistleblowers. He is in fact a journalistic editor and publisher.

In acute contrast to so many at the top of the corporate media and governmental food chains, Assange insists that democracy requires the “consent of the governed” to be informed consent.

While powerful elites work 24/7 to continually gain the uninformed consent of the governed, WikiLeaks has opposite concerns.

Genuine journalistic liberty exists only to the extent that overt or internalized censorship is absent.

Especially in a society such as the United States with enduring press freedoms (the First Amendment is bruised and battered but still on its feet), the ultimate propaganda war zone is between people's ears.

So much has been surrendered, often unwittingly and unknowingly. Waving the white flag at dominant propaganda onslaughts can only help democracy to expire.

Julian Assange has effectively insisted that another media world is possible and the corporate warfare state is unacceptable.

Not coincidentally, the U.S. government wants to capture Assange and put him away, incommunicado, in a prison cell.

*****

Last week, in Sweden, most but not all of the sexual-assault allegations against Assange expired. Still, Assange notes, “I haven't even been charged.”

And Sweden’s government -- while claiming that it is strictly concerned about adhering to its laws -- has refused to limit the legal scope to its own judicial process.

As the BBC reports, “Assange sought asylum three years ago to avoid extradition to Sweden, fearing he would then be sent to the U.S. and put on trial for releasing secret American documents.”

Closely aligned with Washington, the Swedish government refuses to promise that it would not turn Assange over to the U.S. government for extradition.

“Julian Assange has spent more time incarcerated in the small rooms of the embassy, with no access to fresh air or exercise and contrary to international law, than he could ever spend in a Swedish prison on these allegations,” says one of his lawyers, Helena Kennedy.

*****

While government leaders have ample reasons to want to impale his image on a media spike and put him in prison for decades, many corporate titans -- including venerated innovator billionaires of Silicon Valley -- are not much more kindly disposed.

The extent of their relentless commitments to anti-democratic greed has been brilliantly deconstructed in Assange's 2014 book “When Google Met WikiLeaks.”

“Google's geopolitical aspirations are firmly enmeshed within the foreign-policy agenda of the world’s largest superpower,” Assange wrote.

“As Google's search and internet service monopoly grows, and as it enlarges its industrial surveillance cone to cover the majority of the world’s population, rapidly dominating the mobile phone market and racing to extend internet access in the global south, Google is steadily becoming the internet for many people.

“Its influence on the choices and behavior of the totality of individual human beings translates to real power to influence the course of history.”

As for courage -- which too often is the stuff of mystifying legends about heroes on pedestals -- Assange’s observations might help us to grasp how it can gradually be summoned from within ourselves.

Worth pondering:

“Courage is not the absence of fear. Only fools have no fear. Rather, courage is the intellectual mastery of fear by understanding the true risks and opportunities of the situation and keeping those things in balance.”

Assange added:

“It is not simply having prejudice about what the risks are, but actually testing them.

“There are all sorts of myths that go around about what can be done and what cannot be done. It’s important to test. You don’t test by jumping off a bridge.

“You test by jumping off a footstool, and then jumping off something a bit higher, and a bit higher.”

While visiting him last fall and a couple of months ago, I found Assange no less insightful during informal conversations.

This is a dangerous person, in words and deeds -- dangerous to the overlapping agendas of large corporations and governments in service to each other -- dangerous to those who constantly make a killing from war, vast inequities and plunder of the planet.

Norman Solomon is the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and the author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He is a co-founder of RootsAction.org.

Re-legalising Caste-based Discrimination, by Meena Varma

Caste remains a sticky subject. In the UK, Caste discrimination is experienced amongst the South Asian diaspora – whether they are Sikh, Hindu, Muslim or Christian.

To people outside of those societies the discrimination is not obvious – only by looking at behaviour closely is it discernible. But to those who are the victims of caste discrimination it is a blight on their lives.

Be it the sudden block to promotion at work, the arbitrary refusal of a care worker to bathe your elderly relative, or your child at school bullied and taunted for being a Dalit – and ‘untouchable’.

Dalits, whether they live in South Asia or here in the UK are still seen as ‘lesser humans’.

UK Dalit organisations, including the Dalit Solidarity Network UK, have campaigned since 2007 for the inclusion of ‘caste’ as a discriminatory factor in what was then the UK’s Single Equalities Bill – now the Equality Act 2010 – where huge gains were, momentarily, made.

As a result of a meeting in February 2010 in the House of Lords, where national, regional and local Dalit organisations came together with one voice, an amendment was included in the Equality Act 2010 allowing for the introduction of secondary legislation as soon as evidence of caste discrimination comes to light.

Consequently, research into caste discrimination in the UK was commissioned by the then Labour Government from the National Institute for Economic and Social research.

Their report was published in December of that year, confirming the existence of caste-based discrimination in the UK.

The report recommended “extending the definition of race to include caste would provide further, explicit protection.”

Indeed, in 2012 the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination recommended to the United Kingdom in its review:  “that the Minister responsible in the State party invoke section 9(5)(a) of order to provide remedies for victims of this form of discrimination.”

In April 2013 the Government tabled an extraordinary last minute amendment in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill to convert the existing power in Clause 9(5)(a) of the Equality Act into a duty to include caste as an aspect of race for the purposes of the Equality Act.

Gains were being made to finally legislate against caste-based discrimination here in the UK.

In July 2013 the Government introduced a timetable which set out a series of steps including a public consultation leading to the commencement of caste legislation in the summer 2015.

While an initial stage of research was conducted by the Equality and Human Rights Commission that included a socio-legal review and a stakeholders consultation (published in February 2014), the next scheduled stage of the process, to issue a formal public consultation in spring 2014, was never conducted, resulting in the reforms being made to the bill stagnating.

There are two likely reasons this consultation was not issued.

First, the Equality and Human Rights Commission [EHRC] withdrew from its second phase of research to establish a baseline data into the extent of caste discrimination due to concerns it might be difficult to commission successfully and that “people could find [collecting data on caste] intrusive and it could have a detrimental effect on good relations in affected communities if not conducted with appropriate sensitivity.”

However Ministers then approved a feasibility study to be conducted into if, and how, it might be possible to estimate the extent of caste-based discrimination in Britain.

The report was due in November 2014. It has yet to be published.

Secondly, the employment tribunal case, Tirkey v Chandok. In this case, the Claimant was a woman whose caste was described as Adivasi (or Scheduled Tribe).

The Claimant claimed that her employers had treated her badly and in a demeaning manner, in part, because of her caste.

The employer sought to strike out the part of her claim related to discrimination by reason of her caste on the basis that caste is not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act.

The ET decision was appealed to the Employment Appeal Tribunal.

Its judgement in December 2014 concluded that, depending on the specific circumstances of an individual case, caste-based discrimination could already be unlawful under existing discrimination law, namely the ‘ethnic origin’ limb of the EA’s race provision, but not necessarily so.

Caste remains a contentious issue. So much so, that caste was appropriated for party gains in the final run ups to the General Elections.

Much to the delight of the pro-legislation lobby the LibDems included a pledge to implement the much delayed caste legislation in their Election Manifesto:

To tackle the racial discrimination faced by Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people we will…… Outlaw caste discrimination.

When asked for its position on the issue, the Labour Party stated:

In 2013 Labour voted for Cross-bench amendments in the House of Lords clarifying the law in relation to caste discrimination… We did so because we believe individuals have the right to protection against discrimination on the basis of their caste or perceived caste, in the same way that they do on the basis of race or gender.

Playing the Caste Card: Anti-caste Legislation Manoeuvres in Harrow East

Harrow East is one of the most economically and culturally diverse in the capital, with around a third of the electorate Gujarati Hindus and a large Jewish population. Caste is therefore an important political issue in this area.

Conservative Bob Blackman stood against Labour rival Uma Kumaran and Liberal Democrat candidate Ross Barlow for the position of local MP.

With a turnout of just under 70% to the poles, Tory Bob Blackman managed to double his majority, taking 50% of the vote to cement a majority of 4,757.

His unprecedented support may have been related to the controversial leaflets produced by multi-faith group Dharma Sewa Purvapaksha, claiming to speak for Hindus, Jains and Sikhs.

They urged people to vote for Bob Blackman over Ms Kumaran (Labour) and Ross Barlow (Liberal Democrat) due to their party’s support of laws banning caste discrimination.

Bob Blackman, while distancing himself from the leaflets, voted against legislation to criminalise caste-based discrimination in the Commons.

Uma Kumaran condemned the leaflet as “gutter politics”, adding:

“It saddens me that my faith is being used against me.

“In Harrow we’re proud of our diversity and this divisive leaflet seeks to tarnish what we’ve all worked so hard to build. I will represent the whole of Harrow East.

“It needs an MP who will unite our community rather than divide it.”

Yet Dharma Sewa Purvapaksha is not alone in its appropriation of caste as a means to sway voters.

The Hindu Forum of Great Britain, the National Council of Hindu Temples (NCHTUK) has published letters and articles clearly urging its members to vote Conservative.

An NCHTUK letter said: “British Hindus, Sikhs & Jains voting for Labour is now like Turkeys voting for Christmas”.

They were reported to the Charity Commission and after initiating an investigation, the organisations removed the letters and documents from their websites and the investigation was dropped.

According to the Dharma Sewa Purvapaksha, Patrick Forbes, a member of the Conservatives’ policy unit, told the DSP that his party was against discrimination of any kind.

But he said the party would “not take any further action to include caste within the provisions of the Equality Act” because it believes there are sufficient legal solutions to caste discrimination already in place.

Subsequent correspondence from the Conservative Party stated that Patrick Forbes never issued an official statement and was misquoted.

Since Parliament resumed, Bob Blackman MP wasted no time in calling for repeal of the legislation – despite denying any knowledge of the ‘Hindu’ call to arms in his constituency.

His question to the Minister on June 11th:

“In the last Parliament, the other place passed unwanted, ill-thought-out laws on caste discrimination, causing a great deal of concern in the Hindu community. The Government have said that they do not intend to enact those unwanted laws. May we have a statement on when the Government will repeal them?”

For the Government, Chris Grayling MP responded:

“I understand my hon. Friend’s concern, and I know that the matter has greatly concerned the community in his constituency. I will ensure that those concerns are drawn to the attention of the Department for Communities and Local Government, and I will ask the Department to respond to him.”

So where does that leave us?

It appears that the efforts to stall the caste legislation have indeed come from the very top of the Conservative Party.

Whether that is due to a word from a funder or the fear of upsetting Mr Modi’s India where the motto of ‘Make in India’ is a rallying cry to many UK and other international businesses.

Nonetheless, Her Majesty’s Government is under a statutory duty to introduce caste as an aspect of race into the Equality Act.

Ministers need to complete their stated programme of consultation with a view to the commencement of the Act as a matter of urgency.

It is two years since Parliament made its view clear on this issue. This was a provision that was voted for by MPs and Peers of all parties and of no parties.

Recent case law developments have ruled that, dependent on the facts of any individual case, in some circumstances claims of caste-based discrimination can be made through the existing ethnic origins element.

On one hand it is argued that the ruling means that ‘caste’ can be subsumed under race and ethnic origins; on the other the ruling was clear that each case must be decided on the individual circumstances - determined by whether the Claimant’s descent can fall within the definition of “ethnic or national origin”.

The uncertainty of case law on this issue makes it imperative for clarity to be given by incorporating caste as an aspect of race in the 2010 Equality Act, as Parliament agreed in 2013.

So as it stands, caste-based discrimination is yet to be outlawed in the UK. Victims and potential victims of this form of discrimination still have no recourse to justice.

And even if the government decides to go down the case law route, it can only do so by going to the Supreme Court, at a cost of many hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Of course, if the Dalit Solidarity Network’s Honorary Chair, Jeremy Corbyn, is elected Labour Leader on September 12th, then we shall finally have a champion at the highest level, to be the voice that Dalits so desperately need in order to protect them from one of the most hidden forms of discrimination in the world today.

Meena Varma is the Director of Dalit Solidarity Network UK.

Jeremy Corbyn and the Revival of the Labour Right, by David Lindsay

I had wanted to support Andy Burnham. But I am disabled, and he did not think me worth voting for. So, Jeremy Corbyn it is, then. The personal is political. What is more, the score between New Labour and the Conservatives now stands at a mere 3-2. The last New Labour victory was 10 years ago, or 15 years before the next General Election. It is time to try something new.

On the scale of public ownership and on the extent of trade union power, Corbyn is well to the right of Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home. That is not hyperbole. It is fact. As it is that Margaret Thatcher presided over publicly owned railways, and over a 60p top rate of income tax well above that proposed by Corbyn. And as it is that Tony Blair promised to renationalise the railways in the 1997 manifesto and in several speeches leading up to that General Election.

Why would Corbyn’s position not be the centre ground? You can have all the private health insurance that you like. But if you were hit by a car, or if you collapsed in the street with a heart attack, then someone would call 999, and an NHS ambulance would take you to an NHS hospital.

That that call would certainly be made, even by a perfect stranger, is testament to the definition of the United Kingdom’s culture by the social democratic legacy of previous Labour Governments, supremely that which was elected in 1945. Everyone benefits, of all classes and in all areas. Such was always the intention behind it. This is the only British identity that almost anyone alive can remember, or that almost any of the rest would wish to have.

Today, however, it is under threat as never before. Even in the 1980s, nothing came close to the scale of the attack, not merely since the recent General Election, but since that of 2010; under the Liberal Democrats, who never moderated a thing, as much as under the Conservatives. The election of Tim Farron augurs well, as does the vote of all eight Liberal Democrat MPs against the Welfare Reform Bill. But we must not let that recent party of government off the hook for its numerous offences.

Labour grew from many and various roots. Trade union and co-operative. Radical Liberal and Tory populist. Christian Socialist and Social Catholic. Fabian and even, in the space both on Labour’s fringes and on Marxism’s fringes, Marxist, subject to the balancing and moderating influences of the others. Giving the wrong answers does not preclude asking the right questions. Much of the Fabian tradition also gives the wrong answers.

We need a broad alliance between the urban and the rural, the metropolitan and the provincial, the secular and the religious, the socially liberal and the socially conservative. An alliance including all ethnic groups, all social classes, and all parts of the country: One Nation.

Labour has always had a right wing. It always will have. It always should have. People who would prefer the purity of a Stalinist, Trotskyist or Maoist groupuscule have never been short of options. The point is to have a right wing of the Labour Party, and not merely a right wing in the Labour Party. The Leadership of Jeremy Corbyn will achieve that.

Who are the hundreds of thousands who have signed up in order to vote for him? Are there that many Stalinists, Trotskyists and Maoists in Britain, collectively more numerous than the entire membership of the Conservative Party? Are there that many sad acts who do whatever Toby Young tells them? Of course not.

And if they are not already, then most of these mainstream, moderate centrists will become full members of the Labour Party once the mainstream, moderate and centrist Corbyn is Leader, involving themselves fully in local party activity even where they have to organise it entirely from scratch.

By Christmas, every Constituency Labour Party will contain a majority that had joined specifically because of Jeremy Corbyn. Abstentionist MPs who had thought that you had meal tickets for life, you need to start looking for jobs. Although good luck to most of you with that. Tony Blair used to talk about “literally a new party”, but it is Corbyn who has already created one.

From the Trade Union Bill, to public ownership, to the proper centrality of rail and coal, to foreign policy and wars, to Trident, to civil liberties, to the case against the EU from the very start, Corbyn’s views are the views of Peter Hitchens. Many of them are also shared by Peter Oborne and by several other commentators who could hardly be described as “Loony Left”.

Furthermore, they are popular. For example, the renationalisation of the railways is consistently supported by between 65 and 70 per cent of the population, stable across all parts of the country and across the electoral bases of all parties. There is strong public support for rent controls, and for a mandatory Living Wage properly so called. Defending the NHS is massively popular.

But even if none of those things were the case, a political party does not exist purely in order to follow public opinion. What would be the point of the Labour Party if it did not campaign for such policies as these? Or if it did not vote to defend the best legacy of Blair, his drastic reduction in child poverty?

Figures of such Olympian self-regard as to profess that they “would not serve under Corbyn”, as if they would have been asked, need to be made aware that plenty of people without a Marxist bone in their bodies would be more than happy to do so, and would merrily relieve them of the parliamentary seats that they obviously would not be needing. Any seat that was Labour in 2015 will always be Labour.

Corbyn’s position on Northern Ireland has been that of the Conservative Party since 1993 in principle, and since well before that in practice. There are people in Northern Ireland who dissent from it, but for whom do they vote? With their Confederate, apartheid and Nazi flags, they identify publicly as one Lost Cause among many.

Whereas Corbyn will soon speak at a Sinn Féin-associated cultural festival alongside a Democratic Unionist MP and former Lord Mayor of Belfast who was 13 at the time of the Good Friday Agreement. The most controversial thing about the entire week is the question of whether or not Frankie Boyle will appear.

On the Falkland Islands, I am as fierce as Michael Foot was on the right of the inhabitants to self-determination. But I doubt that much of the British population would share that view in practice if this tiny community a very long way away were to take this country to war for the second time in 40 years.

I was born in St Helena, but the employment of St Helenians on the Falklands is not necessarily conditional on British sovereignty. Believing that having once been invaded qualifies them for every conceivable goodie, the Falkland Islanders are the kind of entitled lot whom Thatcherites would ordinarily despise. Even with the impending airport, St Helena makes do with much less for more people. The treatment of the British community on Ascension Island is a national disgrace. The only strategic interest in the Falkland Islands is in the defence of the Falkland Islands.

Corbyn, Parliament’s doughtiest battler for the Chagossians and a scourge of the tax havens beloved of the Conservative Party’s paymasters, will take a more rounded and balanced view of the Overseas Territories. The Falkland Islanders, among others, will need to up their game from “Because we’re worth it”, never mind “Good old Maggie Thatcher”.

Corbyn once hosted Hamas, with which the Israeli Government negotiates all the time, and Hezbollah, alongside which our Armed Forces are now at war, a war that Corbyn was one of very few MPs to vote against. It was not he who lowered the flag over the Palace of Westminster when King Abdullah died.

Corbyn is in favour of the abolition of the monarchy in Britain, but it is inconceivable that he would ever press that issue. There would simply be rather more immediate calls on his time, and his side would be guaranteed a crushing defeat in any referendum. This question is never asked of those who identify with either or both of Thatcherism and Blairism. Yet the Thatcher and Blair Projects were both incompatible with the monarchy in principle, and, using and used by the Murdoch media, they were both extremely hostile in practice to the Queen and to the Royal Family.

What of the SNP, that collection of former Tory candidates, youthful Tory-Nationalist dynasts, and erstwhile speechwriters for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, none of whom is ever asked when he or she mysteriously became a figure of the radical Left? It has done as well as it ever possibly could, and it is therefore no longer any kind of threat to Labour.

Labour is bound to regain a few seats in Scotland, and probably quite a few, because the only way for the SNP is down. For differing but not unconnected reasons, the factually baseless existence of some special relationship between Labour and Scotland has long been a staple of Scottish Labourites, Scottish Nationalists and English Tories.

But Scotland now returns exactly as many Labour MPs as Conservatives or Liberal Democrats, while the Labour Whip is at least informally accepted by three times as many MPs from Northern Ireland, where Labour does not even stand candidates, as from Scotland, with a fourth Northern Irish MP also a kind of Labour supporter. Labour has barely noticed this “loss” of Scotland.

The SNP would only have mattered anywhere outside its increasingly curious fiefdom if there had been a hung Parliament. But there is not. Moreover, it has already proved wholly incapable of dealing with the media scrutiny to which it is unused. It is time to turn that on its disastrous record of running Scotland’s health and education, and on its downright corrupt relationship with Brian Souter over transport policy.

Speaking of transport, if recall elections are introduced, then the rail unions, affiliated and otherwise, need to fund Labour’s petitioning for them, and then winning them, across all 44 Conservative seats in the North of England, three in North Wales, and one, precisely one, in the South of Scotland.

The pre-Blairite right-wing faction Labour First professes to believe that “The unions are an integral part of our party” and to favour “More power for local councillors, not unaccountable community groups and quangos”. Yet it is campaigning for tactical voting against the only candidate who shares those views. Its unbending support for Trident, ostensibly in order to protect vastly fewer jobs than have been allowed to go to the wall elsewhere, now makes it more belligerent than Michael Portillo. Like its hardline neoconservatism, that stance alienates it from at least one MP who is a veteran of the traditional Labour Right.

Even before he becomes Leader, Corbyn needs to announce a bank of independent policy advisors including all MPs who nominated him, all MPs who signed the uncalled Goodman Amendment to the Welfare Reform Bill, all Labour MPs who voted against Second Reading of that Bill, all signatories to this, all signatories to this, all contributors of essays or commendations to this, all non-Labour MPs who voted against war in Syria in 2013, all MPs who voted against war in Iraq in 2014, and all seat-taking MPs from Northern Ireland.

Although not affiliated to the Labour Party since the High Blair Period, the RMT and the FBU remain affiliated to the Labour Representation Committee, which is constitutionally committed to the election of a Labour Government. They ought to undertake to pay all election costs of Labour MPs or candidates in any of those categories, as well as of candidates selected in place of prima donnas who thought that they were indispensable.