I thought I'd tackle some comments left on a previous blog post so I can get more into detail. This left from Anthony: My point is simple. How could 1 person make such outragous promises. Say in theory you make valid points. That doesnt mean you would be able to enact anything. Obviously one would need a majority within parliament and an organised working people ready to defend themselves from any counter attack....
I am disappointed that they have not yet announced who should stand to represent the left within the Labour Party. John McDonnell in my opinion clearly has the upper hand and has worked tireless over the past year to get support. Micheal Meacher should give his full support to McDonnell on this issue, the fact this is still going on is disgraceful, come on Micheal. John McDonnell touches on privatisation, and public money filling the pockets of the private sector....
No real surprise. He'll meet the Queen on June the 27th to hand over his resignation as Prime Minister and will stay on as Labour leader until the Labour Party elects a successor. For the fools that voted for the Tories at the recent elections, just think how worse off we'd be if the Tories were in power the last 10 years. The public services would be gone; the NHS would have been dismantled instead of having record levels of investment....
With the election results looking grim, surely it is clear to all that the New Labour project is dead. There is only one thing that can save the party from a potential general election defeat now, and that is the election of John McDonnell as leader and the breaking of the party from the ghouls of capital that have been haunting it for a generation. Along with that we need an expansion of democracy within the party, the rank and files members need to control it from the bottom up, to prevent bureaucratic build up and a bourgeois infestation....
I was going to write something up about this myself, but time conspired against me. Instead I'll re-produce part of an article written by Terry McPartlan, published on Marxist.com: May Day, international workers' day. On every continent the advanced layers of workers and youth celebrate internationalist ideas and the struggle of the Labour movement. No surprise that the Tories in Britain tried to eradicate the holiday. No surprise either that workers' demonstrations are the focus of state repression around the world....
An utter disgrace, after protests about the Estonian government's plans to remove a Red Army war memorial in Tallinn, they went ahead and moved it to a secret location last night. One of the comments on the BBC News website was from Maria from Tartu. The Eestonians wouldn`t have anything against the statue, if it wouldn´t have been altered into a place where to wave red flags and chant "the landlords have returned"...
Below is a 16 minute interview with John McDonnell, who is standing for the leadership of the Labour Party. John McDonnell has huge support with rank and file Labour Party and Trade Union members, however, he requires 44 nominations from Labour Party MPs to be put on the ballot paper. As you can imagine a lot of Labour Party MPs do feel intimidated by the existing Labour Party leadership to not nominate John McDonnell....
I noticed on the CPGB website they had a little clip from a Radio 4 interview with their national organiser Mark Fischer, who I met a couple of years back, I don't agree with everything he says, I think the Trotskyist remarks are somewhat unfounded. But its good for people wanting to get a overview of some of the insults (and adjectives) that are used on the revolutionary left, people do ask me whats the difference between a Stalinist and a Leninist quite often hopefully this will help answer....
It has just came to my attention that Marxists.org will be offline for a couple of weeks. A statement from the website: In early November we came under sustained denial of service attack from Internet hosts in China attempting to exploit a misconfiguration in our server's operating system. The nature and origin of the attack, our previous history with the PRC, and the experience of others suggest that this maybe politically motivated and directed by the Chinese government....
Today is the 300th anniversary of the ratification of the Act of Union of 1707; the acts were passed in both the English parliament and the Scottish Parliament, in both cases with large majorities. This basically did two things: 1) Create a new state, the Kingdom of Great Britain. 2) Dissolve both parliaments and create a new parliament of Great Britain. Gordon Brown a few days ago used this to launch a counter-attack on the nationalists (like this guy), and rightfully so....