A London for All, by Nick Richardson

As a Labour Party member, and therefore writing under a pseudonym, I shall be giving my first preference vote for Mayor of London to George Galloway.

Sadiq Khan will receive any second preference that I might express on the day. But I am disgusted at his disloyalty to Jeremy Corbyn, his support for the disastrous neoconservative wars in the Middle East and North Africa, his ties to the anti-working-class property developers who are bankrolling his campaign, and his shocking connections to allies of the literally fascistic Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi.

More Experience Than All The Others Put Together

George Galloway has been right about every military intervention of the present century, and his is now a lone voice in British politics for, if anything, a real war against Daesh in alliance with the Syrian, Russian, Iranian and Lebanese forces that are already in the field, not the Turkish, Saudi and other funders, suppliers and supporters of the enemy.

His role in the Scottish independence referendum was pivotal, reminding left-wing voters of the Old Labour case for the Union and of the Thatcherite neoliberalism of the "Tartan Tory" SNP, as well as of that party's fairly recent history as a vehicle for sectarianism.

He is the leading political figure in support of fathers' rights, and he is a prominent opponent of the drug use, fixed odds betting terminals, supercasinos, lap-dancing clubs, and hardcore pornography that became so ubiquitous during the New Labour years and which have remained so under David Cameron.

He is now, with Nigel Farage, one of the two main public faces of the campaign to leave the anti-democratic European Union, taking up the mantle of the late, great Tony Benn. Already, the media are having to peddle ridiculous lies, such as that hundreds of people walked out of a recent Grassroots Out rally when he appeared on stage at it.

He is a breathtakingly brilliant orator, with a vast vocabulary and range of knowledge as perhaps the last of the great working-class autodidacts. His world famous appearance before the United States Senate in 2005 made that clear. His unmissable Sputnik programme on RT is a vital counterweight to the British State and corporate media that are blacking out his Mayoral campaign.

He was elected the Labour Member of Parliament for Glasgow Hillhead in 1987 at the age of 32, defeating Roy Jenkins, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, President of the European Commision, and Leader of the media's beloved SDP.

Gallloway's leadership role against the war in Iraq in 2003 saw him expelled from Labour by the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair. But Galloway continued his political mission, twice defeating Labour in its strongholds of Bethnal Green and Bow in London in 2005, and Bradford West in 2012.

He was born in a one-room attic, with an outside toilet that was shared with five other families. When he was four, his family moved into a council flat. He went to the local school. His father and mother were factory workers, and both were active in Labour and trade union struggles. He was educated at the University of Life, starting work as a teenager in Michelin tyres and working non-stop ever since.

He joined the Labour Party at the age of 13, and he joined the then Transport and General Workers' Union at the age of 19. He was active in both for nearly 40 years, including as the youngest ever Chairman of the Labour Party in Scotland at the age of 26.

He moved to London in 1983. From his election in 1987, he remained in Parliament, with a two-year break, until 2015, representing Glasgow, the East End of London, and Bradford West. In his decades in Parliament for four constituencies and in two countries, and with six election victories, he has been vocal and effective in vital national issues.

From housing to health, railways to race, cinema to music, education to the environment, he has brought more issues before the House of Commons than anyone else in politics today. He has more political experience than all his London Mayoral opponents put together, and many times over.

His prodigious constituency work in more than a quarter of a century has been often praised. Nobody who came to him for help was ever turned away. Nobody ever said that he failed to press their case, win or lose, with all his legendary vigour.

As is very well-known, George Galloway has long been active in international affairs. Reading Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, he became enthralled with the struggle against fascism in Spain and Portugal. As a 14-year-old, he marched in the famous Grosvenor Square demonstration against the Vietnam War and was active against the Greek military junta.

He adopted the cause of the Chilean exiles, and became an activist against apartheid in South Africa, even travelling at the behest of the ANC inside the country. There, he witnessed first hand the atrocities and absurdities of racial segregation.

In 1975, he became involved in the struggle for the Palestinian people. He has now been prominent within it for 40 years. He was awarded Pakistan's two highest civil awards, for his work for the restoration of democracy in Pakistan, and for his work for self-determination for the people of Occupied Kashmir.

For many decades, he has fought poverty and underdevelopment, oppression and occupation, dictatorship and war, all around the world. His record was summed up by Unite's leading figure Andrew Murray, the Chair of the Stop the War Coalition, thus: "George Galloway has been for many years Britain's leading anti-imperialist."

It is for Iraq, and for his long stand against sanctions and war, that Galloway's political life will be most remembered. He opposed the war on Iraq longest, most eloquently, and most bravely. For this he was slandered, he was smeared, and he was expelled from the Labour Party in which he had spent his life.

His vindication came more quickly and completely than anyone could have imagined. No one now thinks that the Iraq War was right. The Al Qaeda-Daesh mutation that it has spawned is today rightly considered one of the world's gravest dangers.

George Galloway predicted it all. Galloway was right and Tony Blair was wrong. Everyone can now see that. As they will soon see Galloway's blockbuster film The Killing of Tony Blair, which is now in post-production and coming soon to a cinema near you.

In Parliament, on public platforms, on radio, on television, and in print, Galloway's oratory is legendary. Even his enemies cannot and do not deny him that. In his term as Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow, George worked on numerous causes for the capital, and achieved many.

George Galloway defended local people against Crossrail disruption, preventing a huge hole from being dug in Brick Lane. He warned of the cost of the PFI project to rebuild the Royal London Hospital, and the terrible effects that it would have on the local health economy, predictions that have come true entirely.

George Galloway campaigned against academies and free schools, and to preserve the successful model Tower Hamlets school family that has produced such great results. He campaigned against gentrification, and for increasing the amount of social housing in building projects. He fought for the victims of the First Solution money transfer scandal.

George Galloway fought to save the Lighthouse pub against the encroachment of more City Slicker offices. He opposed the spread of sleazy lap-dancing clubs spewing out of the City into the East End, including one almost opposite a mosque. He defended East End boxing at York Hall, working closely with the Repton and other local boxing clubs.

George Galloway fought in defence of local traders in the face of the Whitechapel station development, as part of his commitment to small and medium sized enterprises. He himself is a businessman, being a director of Monchique Films Ltd, of Spice Island Food Ltd, and of Molucca Media Ltd, as well as being about to make his return to commercial radio.

George Galloway defended local residents from being decanted from Robin Hood Gardens, and against Robin Hood Gardens' being knocked down and redeveloped as part of social cleansing and gentrification. He fought against overcrowding and poor housing throughout the East End, and for action to reduce the tens of thousands on housing waiting lists. 

George Galloway campaigned for the Decent Homes initiative, including investment in refurbishment, and including a programme of home insulation, both to lower energy costs for poor families, and for a greener London.

George Galloway fought the Labour Council's cuts to Youth Services. Against the Government's witch hunt and grant cuts, he defended London Metropolitan University, which is not only the birthplace of Blue Labour, but also the alma mater of Sadiq Khan. 

George Galloway fought for prayer facilities at Queen Mary University. He fought against the Labour Government's cuts to the teaching of English as a second language. He fought to defend Tower Hamlets College.

George Galloway played a leading role in the campaign to stop stock transfer of council houses to private landlords in Tower Hamlets, winning 15 out of 35 ballots during his parliamentary term, which led to the abandonment of the privatisation of council housing by the Labour Council. 

George Galloway campaigned to save the iconic East End George Tavern in Commercial Road. He took the lead, in alliance with the Fire Brigades Union, in saving fire services at Bethnal Green Fire Station, and against the madness of cutting fire services in an area of high-density, high-rise residential buildings.

George Galloway filibustered through the night in Parliament against Margaret Thatcher's attacks on the Dock Labour Scheme. He picketed outside Wapping in defence of London's print workers, when he was kicked by a police horse and treated in an ambulance.

George Galloway campaigned against bendy buses, and for the return and revamping of the Routemaster. He campaigned for the Stairway to Heaven war memorial, honouring those who perished there from German bombing in the Tube station in 1943.

George Galloway campaigned against the victimisation of disabled people through Atos vetting. He campaigned for women who were victims of domestic violence, and in opposition to forced marriage and to Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

George Galloway visited Aldgate East and the Royal London in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist mass murder on 7/7, before going in to the House of Commons to place that atrocity in the context of the Bush and Blair wars. 

In 2005, George Galloway led the Respect campaign in East London, winning the constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow, and coming second in Poplar and Canning Town and Newham East and Newham West. 

George Galloway helped thousands of constituents in a weekly constituency surgery with "no appointment necessary". He maintained a high parliamentary profile on matters of war and peace, public services, opposition to tuition fees, and opposition to racism and Islamophobia.

George Galloway kept his promise to step down after one term as an East End MP so that he might be succeeded by an MP of Bangladeshi origin in an area with the world's largest Bangladeshi community outside Bangladesh. 

In August 2014, while serving as the elected Member of Parliament for Bradford West, George Galloway was viciously attacked on a London street, on account of his political views. He spent the night in hospital, as well as walking on crutches for some time thereafter. Neither the Prime Minister, nor the Speaker of the House of Commons, expressed the slightest sympathy, and most of the media treated it as a joke.

But then, on Galloway's first day back in the House after his election at Bradford West, David Cameron had referred to him from the Despatch Box by his name instead of as the Honourable Member for that constituency, and John Bercow had offered no rebuke.

Maybe It's Because He's A Londoner

George Galloway has lived in London for almost 35 years, in Blackheath, Streatham, Battersea, Ladbroke Grove, and the East End. Three of his four children were born in London, and all four grew up in London. His first child is now a mother of four, all born in London.

London is his home, and he considers it the greatest city in the world. High praise from a man who has been everywhere. He was a London Member of Parliament for five years, for Bethnal Green and Bow. In 2004, he stood for the European Parliament in London, when Respect was just 20 weeks old yet achieved almost 100,000 votes.

Having been elected to the British Parliament six times, and having served there for the best part of 30 years, he wants to bring the political experience of four decades to bear in fighting for us and for London.

It Is Time For A London For All

Though London is a great city, life is not great for all Londoners. It is run by and for the metropolitan elite. That elite does very well, while the majority struggles with the high cost of living, shortage of affordable housing, cramped and expensive transport, and savage cuts to our public services.

It is time for a London for all.

George Galloway will fight for your interests wherever you came from, whatever colour you are, however you pray. He is against all racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, and he for unity amongst all Londoners irrespective of age, gender or orientation.

Financial services are an important part of London's economy. But the City and other corporate interests in London will have to do much more in the exercise of their social responsibilities to Londoners, who live and work around them and who provide the whole environment in which their businesses are thriving.

For with great wealth comes great responsibilities. As Mayor, George Galloway will campaign relentlessly for the London Living Wage and for a higher London minimum wage to take account of the higher cost of living in the capital.

Neither can we allow the continuing social cleansing of poor and ordinary working people from London. Virtually no social housing is built, while London property has become a safety deposit box for rich, sometimes dubious players, to lock up their assets far from their own countries.

As Mayor, George Galloway will tackle the housing crisis as his Number One priority. He will work to make London the pre-eminent world city, seeking out investments, business and tourism from all over the world including the parts he knows best, which are Latin America, China, Russia, and the Arab world.

He will bring financial transparency to the £18 billion of the annual London Mayor's budget through the revolutionary Mayorchain, blockchain technology that has been developed by London's young and brilliant FinTech sector. Max Kaiser will be his Finance and Economics Czar.

No Developments Without Social Housing

Under this Government and under Boris Johnson's Tory Mayoralty, ordinary Londoners are being priced out of their city like never before, by skyrocketing house prices and rents.

The average house in London costs almost £500,000, and the average rent is £1,600, with no sign of this spiral abating as wages remain stagnant. The working people, who keep London running, are forced to pay an ever-greater proportion of their income in rent, to live in inadequate living spaces, or to move out of the capital altogether.

Or even worse, in the case of housing estates such as Sweets Way in Barnet, whole communities are torn apart by forced relocations, with households moved across the city or away from it altogether; away from their neighbours, friends, family, and workplaces.

At the same time, whole streets in the wealthiest areas of the city lie empty, as speculators from around the globe buy up land and housing as an investment, i.e., as a means to conserve the value of their money, speculating on an ever-increasing house price bubble, and on soft touch British Governments' not daring to tax their wealth or to take back idle properties.

Not only does this mean that the money that we are told flows into our economy from non-resident investors has little positive impact on the economy, as it is swallowed up in speculation and rent-seeking, but it means that in fact the impact becomes negative, as prices of scarce land and housing are inflated beyond the wildest dreams of ordinary working people.

Mayor Johnson has done nothing to enforce the policy, introduced by Ken Livingstone, that 50 per cent of housing on all new projects must be dedicated to affordable housing.

For example, the development currently under completion on the site of the old Battersea Power Station has offered only eight per cent of properties over to affordable housing. And where this policy has been more or less followed, such as the Beaufort Park development in Collindale, Barnet, this has been demanded by the local council, not City Hall.

Likewise, the definition of affordable housing shows how out of touch our political elite is, with the limit being set at 80 per cent of average rent in a given area, which in much of London puts this out of reach for middle-class professionals, never mind working class Londoners.

This situation is not just immoral, since it is a transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest, but it is a drain on our economy: the more of people's income that is taken up by rent (or by transport, for those forced out of the city), the less that can be spent in businesses that actually produce goods and services to sell here.

A recent CBI and KPMG study concluded that 14 per cent of London businesses viewed the cost of housing as London's biggest weakness as a location for their business.

The decision is clear: either we take action to benefit working people, consumers, and productive businesses, or we allow London to continue to be a casino for speculators, buying up scarce land and housing and pricing everyone else out of the market.

Therefore, if you elect George Galloway as Mayor of London, he will ensure and enforce that any housing project submitted for his approval must be comprised of 50 per cent affordable housing. He will define affordable housing as 50 per cent of average rents, not the 80 per cent that is currently the case.

He will fight to introduce legislation to take back idle properties and developments, which are not lived in, rented, or used for business purposes by the owner.

And he will be a voice on the national stage to bring this issue to the centre of our political debate, seeking allies in all parties and all parts of the country to crack down on the speculators, and to make sure that our national priority becomes providing affordable and decent housing for all.

Saving Lives, Limbs and Lungs

London's transport system is a symbol of this great city; the Tube, the red buses, the black cabs. But too often, it feels the strain of a growing capital.

Boris Johnson has displayed Tory contempt towards the Tube's workforce throughout his entire spell as Mayor of London, refusing to meet union leaders to discuss proposals to close ticket offices and bring in 24-hour Tube services.

George Galloway is in favour of an all-night tube service in a 24-hour capital like London. But he will be making sure that workers are properly consulted on the process, are properly recompensed, and are not forced into working long, unsociable, and potentially dangerous hours.

London's transport system is the most expensive in the world. Galloway understands the difficulties faced in upgrading an antiquated network. But transport is what keeps London moving, and we need a network that is fit for a twenty-first century capital like London.

He is in favour of retaining the Congestion Charge. London is already too polluted and too congested. We do not want to encourage more cars onto the roads when we can encourage other forms of transport. Additionally, he is proposing to ban HGV vehicles from Central London during daytime hours, in a bid to reduce fuel emissions during those hours.

He want to invest in more cycle lanes and initiatives that make it safer to cycle around London. Far too many people are losing their lives this way. We need to be encouraging more people to leave their cars and travel on two wheels.

He is in favour of expanding London's airport capacity. London needs to be able to manage the needs of business and ensure business comes to London instead of going elsewhere. But he is against a third runway at Heathrow when Gatwick offers a better alternative.

Pollution levels are already too high at Heathrow without a third runway, and adding a second runway at Gatwick would cause far less disruption than adding the third at Heathrow. He believes that London can still thrive with two separate airport hubs.

He supports the moves to renationalise the rail network that brings millions into our city to work every day. Commuters are faced with astronomical fares that keep outstripping inflation. It is time to be the network back into public ownership. After all, we have already paid for it.

Standing Up For The Iconic Black Cab and Protecting The Customers

Uber represents everything that is wrong with the zero-hour, tax-dodging, deregulated economy promoted by our political elite. The company has been defended by Tory Mayor Boris Johnson, who has condemned its opponents as Luddites.

In contrast, if we elect George Galloway as our Mayor, then he will crack down on Uber, and protect the interests and safety of London's consumers, taxi drivers and small minicab firms.

What is it?

Uber functions as an app which drivers can register with, allowing customers to view and hail them electronically. It argues that is is a market place which brings together consumers and suppliers quickly and affordably, and therefore should not be taxed on its revenues or forced to recognise its drivers as employees.

So what's the problem?

In fact, a better question would be, where to start? Uber's drivers are not classed as employees, but as users of the app, who in return for being listed must pay  percentage of each fare to the company.

This means that they have no employment rights, such as the minimum wage, collective bargaining, severance pay, annual leave, or maximum or minimum working hours. These practices are typical of the low wage economy championed by the Tory Government, and by its cheerleaders or collaborators on the Labour Right.

The most immediate victims are Uber's own drivers, who are forced to work long hours with no rights, while the company takes the lion's share of profits an inevitable results when you have a huge multinational and an unorganised, casual workforce.

However, in the long-run, all working and middle-class people will suffer the consequences. London's taxi and minicab drivers will be increasingly forced to lower their own pay and conditions in order to compete. As this race to the bottom is replicated across the economy, we all become worse off.  Uber is just one very high-profile example, and this is why it is so important for the Mayor of London to take a stand.

Uber is also practising tax avoidance on an industrial scale, according to the London Private Hire Car Association (LPHCA). The San Francisco-based multinational processes its UK operations through Uber BV, a subsidiary registered in the Netherlands, allowing it to avoid UK Corporation Tax on its revenues. The company also uses this as an excuse to not charge VAT, taking advantage of Dutch legislation.

The result of this is that, in a time of austerity, Britain is shamefully allowing Uber to opt out of tax on its profits and revenues. At the same time, the company has an unfair cost advantage over UK registered minicab and car-hire firms, and taxi drivers, who do pay their fair share of tax.

Uber has been criticised for its lack of appropriate checks on drivers, which is made easier by the fact that it presents itself as a marketplace simply connecting buyers and sellers of a service.

This is in contrast to conventional minicab firms or taxi drivers, who have to register all their operations in the local areas where they operate, and are subject to strictly enforced quality and safety standards by TfL and local authorities.

As a result, there are many reported cases of dangerous driving and overcharging on agreed fares, with no telephone number listed on the company's UK and Ireland website. Even worse, many cases of violence or sexual assault have been reported around the world, and serious doubts raised about the safety of passengers placing their trust in the app.

Uber also practises surging, which means that the app uses algorithms to detect when there are fewer drivers on the road and raise fares accordingly. Imagine the outcry if London's cabbies would get together and agree such a practice! Perhaps this is an indication of what we can expect if Uber ever corners the market as it intends to.

What can be done? Countries such as Australia have already taken measures, such as ordering Uber to pay Goods and Services Tax, its equivalent of VAT, on revenue in that country. The French and Canadian Governments are also looking into similar measures, after protests from taxi drivers in those countries.

Transport for London has belatedly followed suit, after a long and hard-fought campaign from the London Taxi Drivers Association (LTDA) and the LPCHA. But so far, we have seen no results.

That is hardly surprising, given Boris Johnson's instinctive Tory support for tight-fisted corporations. In contrast to Johnson, as Mayor Galloway will work together with taxi drivers, minicab firms, private car-hire firms, and consumers groups, to do everything within his power to ban Uber from London.

Transport for London has already looked at enforced waiting time and banning the listing of available cars for hire on a mobile application, and he will pursue this vigorously, as well as all other available channels. If this is not possible, he will force Uber to comply with the same quality, customer care, employment and safety standards as all other minicab firms operating in London.

This great city must offer the highest standards of quality and safety to tourists, and we cannot build that on deregulation, cutting corners, and precarious working conditions.

Mayor Galloway will be a leading voice on a national level for our Government, MPs and local authorities, to take this problem seriously. We should not only follow Australia's example of forcing Uber to pay VAT, but we should take the international lead in requiring Uber to pays its fair share of corporation tax.

A Friend of the Police Force, With Fair Policing Everywhere

Policing in London needs a complete overhaul.

We cannot continue to have a two-tier system in our capital. If you pick someone's pocket in Liverpool Street station, then you can be pretty sure that the Police will be onto you like a flash. Yet our law enforcement has turned a blind eye to gigantic crimes involving the theft of millions of pounds in the same Square Mile.

There are many fantastic Police Officers out there. George Galloway has needed them on many occasions. But the Metropolitan Police is not working for everyone in London. Too many people are unable to trust our Police Forces. There are undoubtedly deep problems of racism and discrimination in parts of the Police. We need a Force that will treat everyone in London equally, whether they have a black face or a white collar.

London's Police also needs to look like the city that it is protecting. The number of black and ethnic minority Officers is still unacceptably low. George Galloway will be making sure that London's Police starts to look a lot more like London itself.

He is proposing to merge the existing forces of the Metropolitan Police and the City of London Police. A substantial increase in the recruitment of BME police officers. A zero-tolerance attitude to racism within London's Police Force.

An end to the scandal of stop and search, which has marginalised our minority communities. Greater powers for the police in dealing with hate crime. And greater spending to ensure the protection of places of worship such as mosques, synagogues and churches.

The World Will Be Your Oyster Card

The use of the Oyster Card will be massively expanded under George Galloway. It will become an interest free debit card used in shops and restaurants, and for other services, and for the transfer of money abroad, either in family remittances or just mums getting emergency money to their kids abroad. In that sense, City Hall will become a publicly owned People's Bank.

The £18bn annual City Hall budget will be online in real time, absolutely transparently. Every expenditure, by every department and official, including the Mayor, will be visible to the public, and will be able to be criticised instantly. To achieve this, Galloway will use the BlockChain technology developed by London's red hot FinTech industry, currently based in the Shoreditch Corridor.

Fire Brigade Policies

The Fire Brigade is an essential part of London's public services and has suffered terribly under severe cuts and closures from Tory austerity. As Mayor of London, George Galloway will end immediately all fire station closures, and all cuts to London's fire services.

He will reverse the cuts already made to this lifesaving and vital public service. He will further endeavour to use his close working relationship with the London Fire Brigades Union to ensure that Londoners get the world class fire service that we deserve.

NHS Policy 

London is unique within the UK in terms of both its contribution and requirements. George Galloway will therefore campaign to have a "London NHS", with its own budget run directly by City Hall. That will allow him as Mayor to ensure Londoners have access to a healthcare service suited to the unique pressures and challenges faced by a global city in the twenty-first century.

How To Win

The success of the campaign to elect Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party demonstrates what is possible against all the odds and media scorn, as did George Galloway's elections to Parliament in 2005 and 2012.

Furthermore, all Labour and at least most Green first preference voters ought obviously to give their second preferences to George Galloway. It is now highly likely that most UKIP voters will do likewise; they certainly should.

The LDTA and LPCHA have pretty much endorsed Galloway. The RMT, which remains unaffiliated to the Labour Party, ought to do so, bringing with it the coalition that it assembled as the No2EU list at the last two European Elections, as well as the letter calling for withdrawal from the EU that was published in The Guardian last Thursday.

No2EU was endorsed by the Morning Star, the Editor of which signed that letter. So should Galloway be. Unite, ASLEF and the TSSA are affiliated to Labour, but there are still things that can and should be done. The same is true of the FBU.

As an anti-war and anti-imperialist opponent of the EU, opponent of Scottish separatism, defender of Julian Assange, critic of global warming policy, victim of physical assault for his exercise of free speech, and walking advertisement for working-class self-improvement, Galloway deserves the support of spiked, with its considerable reach into the right-wing papers, the BBC (especially Radio Four), and Channel 4 News.

And several of those causes, among other aspects of Galloway's work, ought also to commend him to a number of traditionally conservative commentators such as Peter Oborne, who has appeared on Sputnik and who alone distinguished himself when Galloway was assaulted, and Peter Hitchens, who has spoken and written many times of his admiration for Galloway.

There are many who wish to open up the political process itself, and not only comment on it, to voices from outside the Liberal Establishment. They should all consider that, even more than the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party, that cause would be furthered by the election of George Galloway as Mayor of London.

Further Measures to Assert the Sovereignty of Parliament, by David Lindsay

Jeremy Corbyn was voting against the Single European Act when David Cameron was still at university. He sounded scarcely keener when responding to Cameron’s statement today. He needs to propose several interrelated measures to be enacted regardless of the outcome of the referendum, and if at all possible prior to it.

The economic, social, cultural and political power of the British working class, whether broadly or narrowly defined, cannot exactly be said to have increased since 1973. Any more than Britain has fought no further wars since joining a body as successful as NATO or nuclear weapons when it comes to keeping the peace. 

We had full employment before we joined the EU. We have never had it since. No job in the real economy is dependent on our membership. Or were trade with, and travel to, the Continent unheard of, because impossible, before our accession to the EU?

Not for nothing did Margaret Thatcher support that accession, oppose withdrawal in the 1975 referendum, and go on, as Prime Minister, to sign an act of integration so large that it could never be equalled, a position from which she never wavered until the tragically public playing out of the early stages of her dementia. “No! No! No!” was not part of any planned speech. 

In anticipation of Cameron’s Single European Act on speed, Labour needs to get its retaliation in first. Corbyn needs to demand immediate legislation. 

First, restoring the supremacy of United Kingdom over European Union law, using that provision to repatriate industrial and regional policy as Labour has advocated for some time, using it to repatriate agricultural policy (farm subsidies go back to the War, 30 years before we joined the EU, and they are a good idea in themselves, whereas the Common Agricultural Policy most certainly is not), and using it to restore the United Kingdom’s historic fishing rights of 200 miles or to the median line.

Secondly, requiring that all EU legislation, in order to have any effect in this country, be enacted by both Houses of Parliament as if it had originated in one or the other of them. Thirdly, requiring that British Ministers adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until such time as the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard. 

Fourthly, disapplying in the United Kingdom any ruling of the European Court of Justice or of the European Court of Human Rights unless confirmed by a resolution of the House of Commons, the High Court of Parliament. That would also deal with whatever the problem was supposed to be with the Human Rights Act. 

Fifthly, disapplying in the United Kingdom anything passed by the European Parliament but not by the majority of those MEPs who had been certified as politically acceptable by one or more seat-taking members of the House of Commons. Thus, we should no longer be subject to the legislative will of Stalinists and Trotskyists, of neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, of members of Eastern Europe’s kleptomaniac nomenklatura, of people who believed the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, and of Dutch ultra-Calvinists who would not have women candidates. 

Sixthly, reducing in real terms the British contribution to the EU Budget; that is another longstanding Labour policy. And seventhly, pre-emptively disapplying in the United Kingdom any Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, thus making any such Agreement impossible in practice. Outside the EU, would Cameron just negotiate something even worse with the United States? Not before 2020, when he would need to be replaced with Corbyn. 

All regardless of the outcome of the referendum. 

After all, which privatisation did the EU prevent? Which dock, factory, shipyard, steelworks or mine did it save? If we needed the EU for the employment law that, since we do not have it, the EU is obviously powerless to deliver, then there would be no point or purpose to the British Labour Movement. Or have the trade unions disbanded, their job done?

Far from preventing wars, the EU has done nothing to prevent numerous on the part of, at some point, most of its member-states, and not least this member-state. It was a key player in, and it has been a major beneficiary of, the destruction of Yugoslavia. It is now a key player in, and it seeks to be a major beneficiary of, the war in Ukraine, which is the worst on the European Continent since 1945, and which is a direct consequence of the EU’s expansionist desire to prise a vital buffer state out of neutrality and into the NATO from which the EU has become practically indistinguishable.

The Leader of the Labour Party has been saying all of this all along, since even before he voted against the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty.

The Bernie Campaign: The Democratic Party’s Biggest Insurrection in Decades, by Norman Solomon

Forty-eight years ago, a serious insurrection jeopardized the power structure of the national Democratic Party for the first time in memory.

Propelled by the movement against the Vietnam War, that grassroots uprising cast a big electoral shadow soon after Senator Eugene McCarthy dared to challenge the incumbent for the Democratic presidential nomination. 

When 1968 got underway, the news media were scoffing at McCarthy’s antiwar campaign as quixotic and doomed.

But in the nation’s leadoff New Hampshire primary, McCarthy received 42 percent of the vote while President Lyndon B. Johnson couldn’t quite get to 50 percent -- results that were shattering for LBJ. 

Suddenly emboldened, Senator Robert Kennedy quickly entered the race. Two weeks later, Johnson announced that he wouldn’t seek re-election. 

Although the nomination eventually went to Johnson’s vice president Hubert Humphrey -- a supporter of the war who was the choice of Democratic power brokers -- the unmasking of the party’s undemocratic process led to internal reforms that aided the Democratic Party’s second modern insurrection. 

It came four years later, when Senator George McGovern won the presidential nomination, thanks to grassroots movements involving young people and activists of color.

But any sense of triumph disappeared in the wake of President Nixon’s landslide re-election in November 1972.

The third major insurrection came in 1988, when Jesse Jackson led a dynamic, multiracial “rainbow” campaign for president that had major impacts on the national stage. (His previous campaign, in ’84, had been relatively weak.) 

The 1988 primaries and caucuses were hard-fought, state by state, with rainbow activists working shoulder-to-shoulder, whether focused on issues of class, race or gender.

Back then, Jackson was a gutsy voice for social justice, for human rights and against war -- much more willing to confront the Democratic Party establishment than he is now.

At the contentious Democratic National Convention that summer in Atlanta, where Jackson delegates were highly visible as 30 percent of the total, the old guard closed ranks behind nominee Michael Dukakis.

Now, as February 2016 gets underway, we’re in the midst of the first major insurrection against the Democratic Party power structure in 28 years.

The millions of us who support the Bernie Sanders campaign -- whatever our important criticisms -- should aim to fully grasp the huge opportunities and obstacles that await us.

Of the three previous insurrections, only one gained the nomination, and none won the presidency. 

Corporate capitalism -- wielding its muscular appendage, mass media -- can be depended upon to take off the gloves and pummel the insurrection’s candidate to the extent that the campaign has gained momentum. 

That happened to McCarthy, McGovern and Jackson. It’s now happening to Sanders. 

The last days of January brought one big-daily newspaper editorial after another after another attacking Bernie with vehemence and vitriol.

The less unlikely his winning of the nomination gets, the more that mega-media assaults promoting absurdities will intensify.

Meanwhile -- at least as long as her nomination is threatened from the left -- Hillary Clinton will benefit from corporate biases that wallpaper the mass-media echo chambers.

The Sunday New York Times editorial endorsing Clinton could hardly be more fanciful and hagiographic if written by her campaign.

Many of the same media outlets and overall corporate forces that denounced Eugene McCarthy in 1968, George McGovern in 1972 and Jesse Jackson in 1988 are gunning for Bernie Sanders in 2016. 

We shouldn’t be surprised. But we should be ready, willing and able to do our own messaging -- widely and intensely -- in communities across the country.

At the same time, we should not confuse electoral campaigns with long-term political organizing.

Campaigns for office are quite different matters than the more transformative task of building progressive infrastructure -- and vibrant coalitions -- that can endure and grow, year after year. 

Genuinely progressive candidates can inspire and galvanize -- and sometimes they can even win. But election campaigns, especially national ones, are almost always boom/bust.

Sometimes they can help to fuel movement momentum, but they aren’t the engine.

Election campaigns are distinct from movements even if they converge for a while, no matter what pundits and campaign spinners say. 

Candidates often want to harness social movements for their campaigns. But our best approach is to view electoral campaigns as -- at best -- subsets of movements, not the other way around.

The Bernie campaign could be a watershed for progressive organizing through the rest of this decade and beyond.

That will largely depend on what activists do -- in the next weeks, months and years.

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

Spin Shift on Bernie: The Escalating Media Assault, by Norman Solomon

For a long time, as he campaigned for president, a wide spectrum of establishment media insisted that Bernie Sanders couldn’t win. Now they’re sounding the alarm that he might.

And, just in case you haven’t gotten the media message yet -- Sanders is “angry,” kind of like Donald Trump.

Elite media often blur distinctions between right-wing populism and progressive populism -- as though there’s not all that much difference between appealing to xenophobia and racism on the one hand and appealing for social justice and humanistic solidarity on the other.

Many journalists can’t resist lumping Trump and Sanders together as rabble-rousing outliers. But in the real world, the differences are vast. Donald Trump is to Bernie Sanders as Archie Bunker is to Jon Stewart. 

Among regular New York Times columnists, aversion to Bernie Sanders has become more pronounced in recent days at both ends of the newspaper’s ideological spectrum, such as it is. 

Republican Party aficionado David Brooks (whose idea of a good political time is Marco Rubio) has been freaking out in print, most recently with a Tuesday column headlined “Stay Sane America, Please!” 

Brooks warned that his current nightmare for the nation is in triplicate -- President Trump, President Cruz or President Sanders. 

For Brooks, all three contenders appear to be about equally awful; Trump is “one of the most loathed men in American public life,” while “America has never elected a candidate maximally extreme from the political center, the way Sanders and Cruz are.” 

That “political center” of power sustains huge income inequality, perpetual war, scant action on climate change and reflexive support for the latest unhinged escalation of the nuclear arms race.

In other words, what C. Wright Mills called “crackpot realism.”

Meanwhile, liberal Times columnist Paul Krugman (whose idea of a good political time is Hillary Clinton) keeps propounding a stand-on-head formula for social change -- a kind of trickle-down theory of political power, in which “happy dreams” must yield to “hard thinking,” a euphemism for crackpot realism. 

An excellent rejoinder has come from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “Krugman doesn’t get it,” Reich wrote. 

“I’ve been in and around Washington for almost fifty years, including a stint in the cabinet, and I’ve learned that real change happens only when a substantial share of the American public is mobilized, organized, energized, and determined to make it happen.” 

And Reich added: “Political ‘pragmatism’ may require accepting ‘half loaves’ -- but the full loaf has to be large and bold enough in the first place to make the half loaf meaningful. 

“That’s why the movement must aim high -- toward a single-payer universal health, free public higher education, and busting up the biggest banks, for example.” 

But for mainline media, exploring such substance is low priority, much lower than facile labeling and horseracing… and riffing on how Bernie Sanders sounds “angry.” 

On “Morning Edition,” this week began with NPR political reporter Mara Liasson telling listeners that “Bernie Sanders’ angry tirades against Wall Street have found a receptive audience.” 

(Meanwhile, without anger or tirades, “Hillary Clinton often talks about the fears and insecurities of ordinary voters.”) 

The momentum of the Sanders campaign will soon provoke a lot more corporate media attacks along the lines of a Chicago Tribune editorial that appeared in print on Monday. 

The newspaper editorialized that nomination of Trump, Cruz or Sanders “could be politically disastrous,” and it declared: “Wise heads in both parties are verging on panic.”

The Tribune editorial warned that as a “self-declared democratic socialist,” Sanders “brandishes a label that, a Gallup poll found, would automatically make him unacceptable to nearly half the public.”

A strong critique of such commentaries has come from the media watch group FAIR, where Jim Naureckas pointed out that “voters would not be asked to vote for ‘a socialist’ -- they’d be asked to vote for Bernie Sanders.

“And while pollsters don’t include Sanders in general election matchups as often as they do Hillary Clinton, they have asked how the Vermont senator would do against various Republicans -- and he generally does pretty well.

“In particular, against the candidate the Tribune says is ‘best positioned’ to ‘capture the broad, sensible center’ -- Jeb Bush -- Sanders leads in polls by an average of 3.0 percentage points, based on polling analysis by the website Real Clear Politics.”

In mass media, the conventional sensibilities of pundits like Brooks and Krugman, reporters like Liasson, and outlets like the Chicago Tribune routinely get the first and last words.

Here, the last ones are from Naureckas: “When pollsters match Sanders against the four top-polling Republican hopefuls, on average he does better than Clinton does against each of them -- even though she, like Bush, is supposed to be ‘best positioned’ to ‘capture the broad, sensible center,’ according to the Tribune. 

“Actually, the elements of Sanders’ platform that elite media are most likely to associate with ‘socialism’ -- things like universal, publicly funded healthcare and eliminating tuition at public colleges -- are quite popular with the public, and go a long way to explain his favorable poll numbers. 

“But they are also the sort of proposals that make Sanders unacceptable to the nation’s wealthy elite -- and to establishment media outlets.”

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

It Is Time to Exercise the United Kingdom's Right to Self-Determination, by David Lindsay

Did Tony Blair want to give Gibraltar to Spain in order to ease what was always his own fanciful progress to the Presidency of the European Union? Perhaps he did. After all, in May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, among several other places, to Mussolini.

The territories that the so-called “Greatest Briton” had been prepared to cede to the man whom he had called “the greatest living legislator” had also included the ones inhabited by the white settlers in Kenya and Uganda.

Fascist rule might have suited the Happy Valley set down to the ground. But whether or not it would have done so was of no interest to Churchill. Not very long afterwards, Britain did simply walk out on them. Under a Conservative Government, of course.

The “kith and kin” populations that Britain has at some point just upped and left behind, almost (if almost) always after having very recently fought wars in order to hold onto them, are collectively larger than the No vote in the Scottish independence referendum.

Those populations are much larger than the Unionist vote in Northern Ireland, and enormously larger than the population of the Falkland Islands, which pretends for British television that it is all-white when it no longer is.

It is common for a colonial possession to be far larger and more populous than its colonial possessor. Such is now the relationship between the United Kingdom and the Falkland Islands.

They are the colonial power, and we are the colony.

The question is how long we are prepared to put up with that, before we exercise our right of self-determination and assert our independence from somewhere that has never been part of the United Kingdom, any more than The Gambia has ever been part of the United Kingdom. 

Great swaths of the earth fought for Britain in the two World Wars, and a huge proportion of the global population is anything up to nine generations removed from these Islands.

What the Falkland Islanders currently have is not self-determination. It is other-determination. The rest of us have to expend our blood, potentially, and our treasure, very much more than potentially, merely because they say so.

Thus, we have the most expensive empire in history.

The cost of defending one of the British Overseas Territories, the only one that needs it and the tenth most populous of the 11 that have permanent populations, is greater than would be the cost of declaring them all independent, including the restored Chagos Islanders, each with a permanent annual grant of one billion pounds.

Why not do that? There would be no need to ask them. Like teenagers, they would get to be consulted when they started putting money in the pot.

St Helena, where I was born and from which the whole of my mother’s family originates, would have had its airport, and a great deal more besides, a very long time ago under that arrangement.

Further south, if a billion a year did not include enough to provide for the defence of 4,700 square miles, then the 2,932 inhabitants of those square miles would not deserve to be defended.

We left India a mere two years, to the day, after VJ Day. That had nothing to do with whether or not the people there wanted us.

It was because we could no longer afford both an empire abroad and the progressive measures for which our people were crying out at home.

We left people behind in India, and almost everywhere else that we left for the same reason. That never bothered us for one second.

There is no question of forcing places or their inhabitants into Spain or Argentina. But there is absolutely no obligation on Britain to keep them merely because they wish to be kept. That obligation simply does not exist.

If Gibraltar did not want to be part of Spain, or the Falkland Islands did not want to be part of Argentina, then it would be Gibraltar’s responsibility to keep itself out of Spain, or the Falkland Islands’ responsibility to keep themselves out of Argentina.

No one in the United Kingdom had a vote in the referendum in Gibraltar in 2002, or in the referendum in the Falkland Islands in 2013.

Yet that latter, at least, was deemed to keep the taxpayers of the United Kingdom under an enormous obligation, up to and including the loss of life if necessary. On the votes of 1,513 people. 

But even the 1,517 people who voted are not the only people with rights, although they alone enjoy their rights without the concomitant responsibilities.

Instead, declare all of the British Overseas Territories independent, including the restored Chagos Islanders, each with a permanent annual grant of one billion pounds.

Exercise our right to self-determination.

Will There Be Much EU Left to Brexit From?, by Loz Kaye

With a new year, the prospect of the “Brexit” referendum draws ever closer. With Cameron's negotiations set to push forward in February, a date this summer starts to look increasingly likely, possibly as soon as six weeks after the May elections.

In any case both campaign groups have continued to gear up. What's noticeable as 2016 has begun is how oddly insular the Yes/In campaign's line of attack has been.

It's been about British jobs, British influence, British farming, even the British space industry. All of this is based on the notion that the EU is a stable unifying force both politically and financially.

However well-intentioned the progressive hopes for Europe are, it makes for a selfish yes that's about trying to show what's in it for us, rather than trying to address the challenges we face together as an international community.

And there are plenty of challenges. The Yes campaign view of what the EU offers is bizarrely divorced from what is actually happening on the mainland right now. The EU is in deep crisis, unable to deal with threats to freedom of movement, financial stability and progressive values.

If anything has shown this, it is the turmoil unleashed by the humanitarian disaster of people fleeing conflict zones and oppression. Even the half-hearted attempts to respond have not been honoured. At the beginning of this year only 0.17% of the pledged target of relocations had been met, just 272 Syrians and Eritreans.

Besides, if your frame for dealing with refugees is Europe, you have to draw a not-Europe line somewhere. Whether that is Calais, Siklos, or the Syrian border. Whether that line is a discrete blue sign with stars or with barbed wire.

Since the waves of sympathy generated by pictures of Alan Kurdi's body on the beach, the European establishment has been focusing on keeping refugees out, not helping them.

There are border controls in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, fences have been rolled out in Hungary. The Schengen agreement is in real terms dead, if it can be suspended so easily.

The most obvious symbol of European cooperation on the ground is being undermined with each ID check on a Scandinavian train. The EU has been entirely unable to handle the situation once it has arisen.

It is all very well for Commissioner Avramopoulos to call in ministers for a meeting and insist freedom of movement must stand.

It is all very well for commentators to suggest that the Danish government is not abiding by EU law. The reality is that ministers are clearly indifferent to what Commissioners think or what EU law is.

Perhaps the In/Yes camp just think this is member states not living up to the ideal. But whether it's in the Baltic or in the Balkans the fundamentals of how the EU is supposed work are simply being ignored. 

Cameron's objection to “ever closer union” is beginning to look increasingly moot.

Poland is under investigation by the commission for its media laws, with Guy Verhofstadt suggesting that the country might not have been admitted to the EU had they been in place.

Denmark voted against ditching its justice area opt-out in a recent referendum. Despite a forced Greek return to the drachma being avoided, the Eurozone's woes can hardly be described as over. The fiscal pact is causing inevitable political as well as financial tensions.

The formation of a Portuguese government after elections was held up, with the President having reservations about left-leaning Eurosceptic support, despite the coalition's being able to command the necessary mandate.

While the President's actions fell well short of being the “coup” that was claimed by many on social media, the political stand-off underlined being part of the fiscal pact is far from a guarantee of stability.

The chief art of European politics has been how elegantly problems can be kicked further down the road. But this does not make for the promises of unity and reliability held out by the Yes campaign.

None of the crises that the EU has faced has been dealt with satisfactorily, and that is becoming more and more apparent across the continent.

By the time we get to the referendum, there may well be not much EU left to Brexit from.

Referendum: The British People Deserves Better Than Cameron, by Dirk Hazell

Cameron more like Baldwin than Macmillan

Cameron may have brought Macmillan’s portrait into Number 10 but, apart from his covert “grouse moor” lifestyle and indulging an Etonian clique, he is no Macmillan.

Macmillan’s strategic insight and genuine One Nation solidarity of all British people was formed by the Great War and the following Depression.

He would have deplored as the act of a charlatan shabbily playing off English nationalists against Scottish nationalists to win a General Election.

His manners were too good to have allowed, for example, the least well off to be exposed to the real fear of the tax credits fiasco.

And Macmillan had an incomparably more insightful and intuitive grasp of the UK’s place in the world. 

While some on the hard right were indulging themselves in the League of Empire Loyalists, as now they do within UKIP and the Conservative Party, Macmillan unlike Cameron did not indulge.

He told the 1961 Conservative Party Conference of our hope that Britain may become more closely associated with Europe, economically and politically and the 1962 Conference that the Governments of the Six are anxious to move forward from an economic to some form of political union, and we want to play our part in devising these new arrangements.

Such strategic insight and courage eludes Cameron. Some rise to the duties of the office of Prime Minister. 

Historians may say Cameron dragged down his office. At best Cameron can now - as was always predictable - leave both the Conservative Party and the UK in worse overall condition than he found it. 

Lose the European referendum with a Brexit vote and he is guaranteed to succeed Lord North with the moniker of Britain’s worst ever Prime Minister. 

Baldwin is a closer precedent than Macmillan for Cameron. Again, though, manners would have prevented Baldwin commissioning a private jet while slashing welfare.

That said, there are similarities between the phoney Zinoviev letter of 1924 on Baldwin’s watch and Cameron’s contrived 2015 scare campaign in England against Nicola Sturgeon.

And Baldwin left the UK chronically misaligned for the European challenges of the 1930s, contributing to the further World War that his generation had so much wished to avoid.

A true heir to Blair would, as Blair did with the Labour Party, analyse in Opposition what was most problematic about his party and deal with it.

A true heir to Blair would, as Leader of the Opposition, have followed Macmillan’s lead and boldly declared the Tories to be a pro-EU party.

He would have taken the hit on the relatively few MPs, MEPs and Peers who might then have walked to UKIP (the problem now is far more acute), and in the process been more likely to win the 2010 General Election.

And he would have been more Tory than Trot by working from within the EPP - Europe’s mainstream centre-right powerhouse - and not flouncing out into malign and marginal hard-right political alliances across Europe.

Anyone really serious about European reform would have treasured the gold dust of close internal party alliance with Europe’s best statesmen like Enda Kenny and Angela Merkel, not allied with the likes of Waffen SS commemorators.

Cameron’s agenda 

So what of Cameron’s four-point agenda for change?

Competitiveness

In terms of practical benefit to all Europeans including the British, the most important is what he calls “competitiveness”. 

Yet, if Cameron really wanted to complete the internal market, secure more trade agreements between the EU and the rest of the World and modernise the EU’s approach to regulation, then he really should have stayed in the EPP. 

He and his party should have pushed hard from inside the EPP family for prompt and practical implementation of policies that, with no prompting from Cameron, already formed the basis of the EPP’s 2014 European election platform and the work programme of the 2014-19 Juncker Commission. 

Is it really credible to claim that the outcome of a referendum is going to be assisted by Cameron’s pretending that this is a British agenda imposed on recalcitrant aliens rather than a shared agenda with like-minded democrats and reformers?

Immigration 

Next to no practical benefit is secured by the campaign, of at best the most dubious legality, to discriminate against non-British EU nationals by denying them in-work benefits for four years. 

A less bad formulation than Cameron’s was that trailed by Sir John Major in Berlin on 13 November 2014 of a time-limited emergency limitation on immigration. 

The simple truth is that most of the UK’s problems, real or imagined, are home grown. 

The prospect of work - and often work that British people are disinclined to do - rather than the specifically British characteristics of our welfare system is the demand-pull for non-British EU nationals to come to the UK. 

Responsibility for the poor state of the infrastructure of British public services lies with the British Government not with those who come to contribute to Britain’s economy and, often, those very public services.

Sovereignty 

Mr Cameron’s demands on sovereignty also point to the wrong target. 

There is always scope to enhance coordination between Member States’ parliaments and the EU Institutions but as Lord Boswell has correctly noted, the Lisbon Treaty is “the treaty for national parliaments”. 

Germany’s Bundestag has an office in Brussels with 70 staff, while Denmark’s Folketing has been a pioneer of holding a national government to account on its dealings in Europe and the Netherland’s second chamber has mainstreamed EU policy in all its committees. 

The British problem is much less Brussels than an over-centralising and chronically under-reformed Westminster: MPs should devolve far more, becoming less social case workers and more analytical interrogators of what the British Government plans to do and has done in Brussels. 

This might require a different type of MP - frankly, a reversal of changes that have occurred under Cameron - but if MPs are not on top of what is happening in the EU Institutions they have mostly themselves to blame. 

Economic governance

This heading of Cameron’s demands is principally about avoiding caucusing against the City.

However, if he wanted to safeguard the UK’s continental-scale financial service sector which depends on British membership of the EU, it might have been wiser instead not to play Russian roulette with the UK’s future inside the world’s single largest economy, ours in Europe, than to chase phantoms. 

The Referendum

Such civil disorder as there is within Britain is generally directed against Cameron’s government: despite decades of negative misrepresentation about Europe by those whose duty it was to know better, there is no genuine mass British uprising against Europe. 

Indeed, one of the principal risks with the referendum is the low salience of Europe as a domestic political issue and any resulting perception that voting Brexit might be a cost-free protest against the British Establishment. 

The structural problem in British politics is not Europe itself but the Conservative Party which in the absence of good leadership has degenerated, since Cameron’s Black Wednesday days as a special adviser, into being essentially a Brexit rump. 

It is too often as though, more than half a century earlier, the League of Empire Loyalists had been allowed control of the Conservative Party’s machinery. 

The British electorate is the world’s most sophisticated. Cameron may need the fig leaf of a Brussels deal to master a mess almost entirely of his own making and to muster belated courage in supporting British membership of the EU, but as John Major has recently affirmed, Britain’s overwhelming interest is to remain in the EU, deal or no deal: as he rightly says, we are safer, better off and more influential inside the EU. 

As Churchill promised in 1940, despite existential threats Europe is freed, and in so many ways we have moved forward into broad, sunlit uplands. 

The European Deal, based on the Social Market economy, improved beyond recognition Europeans’ working conditions, creating social solidarity within an enterprise economy. 

The European Deal made Europe a world leader in environmental protection. 

The European Deal has transformed our part of the world from the destruction of fascism and communism and created instead the world’s largest economy, effectively defining issues like consumer safety across the world and massively enhancing prosperity. 

And the European Deal gives us all a shared identity based on freedom and equality under the law. 

We must hope that, when the referendum comes, Britons will spurn the snake oil of a fake past for the hope and pragmatism of our best hope for the future: much more pro-active and positive British participation in building the EU for generations to come. 

Life is demonstrably better for the British inside the EU and the EU is demonstrably better with the British. 

Yes Europe needs reform but in 2015 Britain needs it even more. 

And it is high time we had a Prime Minister who spoke such truth to the British People.

Britain Turns Its Back on Australia, by Philip Benwell

Just because British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has been outmanoeuvred by Angela Merkel, François Hollande and other European Union leaders from introducing reforms on migration from Europe into Britain, it shouldn’t mean that he can now take it out on Commonwealth countries like Australia.

Despite having to go through the ‘Aliens’ channel upon arrival, Australians have hitherto always found a friendly welcome in what used to be termed ‘the mother country’, but no longer.

Whilst the British government blathers on about establishing closer trade ties with Commonwealth countries, and particularly Australia, it seems to be extraordinary that it is to impose stricter visa requirements upon our citizens working in the United Kingdom.

According to journalist Simon Kent: “Australians fear new “discriminatory” UK working visa and migration policies will see thousands of workers forced home with little hope of return.

At the same time Britain is welcoming record numbers of European Union (EU) arrivals who face no restrictions on starting a new life in this country.” 

It doesn’t make sense, unless the true nature of the beast is not to build up Commonwealth trade to replace its current pacts with the European Union but, in a Machiavellian manner, to annoy Commonwealth countries and thus hamper ties so that the only alternative left is for Britain to continue to be within Europe. 

However, I very much fear that the British people will revolt against this. They feel much closer to countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada than they do to Eastern European countries from which most migrants are now arriving. 

There is also the great fear of the huge wave of refugees from Muslim countries moving across into the United Kingdom. That alone would probably be the greatest incentive for the British people to leave the Union and barricade their borders with Europe. 

Of course, our republicans will point to the British visa restrictions and say that this means that we should be a republic.

That is because they do not understand that Australia is a free and sovereign nation with no legal ties or constitutional links whatsoever to the British government or parliament.

According to a High Court decision in 1999, Britain is considered to be a ‘foreign power’. Whilst we share the Queen with sixteen other Commonwealth Realms, this does not mean to say that we are not our own country, for we are.

That is why it was necessary for the people themselves - and not our politicians and certainly not the British, had to vote at the 1999 republic referendum.

A referendum in which the electorate nation-wide and in all six States voted overwhelmingly to reject a republic and retain the Crown.

Obama’s Speech, Translated into Candor, by Norman Solomon

Here is a condensed version of President Obama's speech from the Oval Office on Sunday night, unofficially translated into plain English:

I kind of realize we can’t kill our way out of this conflict with ISIL, but in the short term hopefully we can kill our way out of the danger of a Republican victory in the presidential race next year.

As a practical matter, the current hysteria needs guidance, not a sense of proportion along the lines of what the New York Times just mentioned in passing:

“The death toll from jihadist terrorism on American soil since the Sept. 11 attacks -- 45 people -- is about the same as the 48 killed in terrorist attacks motivated by white supremacist and other right-wing extremist ideologies.... And both tolls are tiny compared with the tally of conventional murders, more than 200,000 over the same period.” 

 While I’m urging some gun control, that certainly doesn’t apply to the Pentagon.

The Joint Chiefs and their underlings have passed all the background checks they need by virtue of getting to put on a uniform of the United States Armed Forces.

As much as we must denounce the use of any guns that point at us, we must continue to laud the brave men and women who point guns for us -- and who fire missiles at terrorists and possible terrorists and sometimes unfortunately at wedding parties or misidentified vehicles or teenagers posthumously classified as “militants” after signature strikes or children who get in the way.

We can’t see ourselves in the folks we kill. But I know that we see ourselves with friends and co­workers at a holiday party like the one in San Bernardino. I know we see our kids in the faces of the young people killed in Paris.

Also I know we don’t see ourselves in the blameless individuals who have been beheaded by our ally Saudi Arabia, which has executed 150 people this year mostly by cutting off their heads with swords.

Nor should we bother to see ourselves in the people the Saudi government is slaughtering with airstrikes in Yemen on a daily basis.

We sell the Saudis many billions of dollars worth of weapons that make the killings in San Bernardino look smaller than puny. But that’s the way it goes sometimes.

I gave a lofty major speech a couple of years ago about how a democratic society can’t have perpetual war. I like to talk about such sugary ideals; a spoonful helps the doublethink medicine go down.

Let me now say a word about what we should not do.

We should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria. The United States of America has colossal air power -- and we’re going to use it.

No muss, little fuss: except for people under the bombs, now being utilized at such a fast pace that the warhead supply chain is stretched thin.

Yes, we’re escalating a bit on the ground too, with hundreds of special operations forces going into Syria despite my numerous public statements -- adding up to more than a dozen since August 2013 -- that American troops would not be sent to Syria.

Likewise we’ve got several thousand soldiers in Iraq, five years after I solemnly announced that “the American combat mission in Iraq has ended.” 

But here’s the main thing: In the Middle East, the USA will be number one in dropping bombs and firing missiles. Lots of them! 

It’s true that we keep making enemies faster than we can possibly kill them, but that’s the nature of the beast. In Afghanistan too.

At the end of last year I ceremoniously proclaimed that “the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion” and the United States “will maintain a limited military presence in Afghanistan.” 

But within 10 months I changed course and declared that 5,500 U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan into 2017.

Midway through this fall -- even before the terrorist attacks in Paris -- the United States had launched an average of about 50 airstrikes per week in Syria during the previous year, and the New York Times reported that the U.S. military was preparing “to intensify airstrikes against the Islamic State” on Syrian territory.

And according to official Pentagon figures, the U.S.-led aerial bombing in Iraq has topped 4,500 airstrikes in the last year -- approaching an average rate of 100 per week.

Our military will hunt down terrorist plotters where they are plotting against us. In Iraq and Syria, airstrikes are taking out some of the latest ISIL leaders, heavy weapons, oil tankers, infrastructure.

I’ve got to tell you that these actions will defeat ISIL, but I’ve got to not tell you that the airstrikes will kill a lot of civilians while launching new cycles of what gave rise to ISIL in the first place -- inflaming rage and grief while serving as a powerful recruitment tool for people to take up arms against us.

In the name of defeating terrorist forces, our air war has the effect of recruiting for them.

Meanwhile, in Syria, our obsession with regime change has propelled us into closely aligning with extremist jihadi fighters. They sure appreciate the large quantities of our weapons that end up in their arsenals.

You don’t expect this policy to make a lot of sense, do you?

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