The Guardian: Apologist for nuclear war

By Laura Tiernan of WSWS

Last week, Britain’s parliament voted 472-117 to renew the Trident nuclear submarine programme.

Amid jeering and abuse heaped by members of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) on their leader Jeremy Corbyn, 140 Labour MPs voted with the Conservatives in defence of Britain’s “nuclear deterrent.” The Trident vote revealed that there is a single party of war, cutting across party lines.

The media campaign surrounding the vote exposed the central aim of the attempted coup against Corbyn. Its aim is to install the Blairite forces who will ensure Labour continues to serve as the direct and pliant instrument of British imperialism.

As with every aspect of this campaign, the Guardian has played a key role.

On the eve of the vote, it provided a platform for Labour MPs demanding support for Trident, as well as those calling for an abstention—reserving its vitriol for Corbyn’s anti-nuclear stance.

The first of these sorties was launched by Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson. He spoke for the vast majority of PLP members in a July 17 article headlined, “Economically and militarily, we must renew Trident.”

Emphasising Labour’s history as a party of war, Watson declared, “[N]ow is not the time to step away from our historic role as a nuclear power. When [Labour Prime Minister Clement] Attlee built Britain’s bomb, he did so because he knew our role in the world would be shaped by our capacity to defend ourselves and our allies; the logic of that Labour party position holds even truer today.”

He made clear the predatory interests behind the Trident debate, calling on Britain to step up its involvement in the NATO build-up against Russia: “I am pleased that the UK is committed to deploying our troops as part of NATO’s Baltic forces. Putin’s Russia looms, a mafia state built on chauvinism. Britain must play its part in holding it at bay.”

Labour MPs Clive Lewis and Emily Thornberry, who are nominally Corbyn supporters, contributed their own article, “This Trident vote is a contemptible trick. That’s why we are abstaining.”

Justifying their refusal to oppose the government motion, the pair wrote that Monday’s debate would be nothing more than “a political game … There is nothing new in this debate—a vote in principle was agreed in 2007. It is being held simply to sow further divisions inside the Labour party.”

To portray the vote on Britain’s nuclear program as merely a cynical political manoeuvre by the Tories is politically criminal. Both MPs are well aware of the context in which the Trident vote is being held—a growing arms race by all the major imperialist powers that threatens a third world war. Thornberry is heading up Labour’s Defence Review, while Lewis, a graduate from Sandhurst military academy who served in Afghanistan, is currently Labour’s shadow defence minister. Both are privy to high-level military briefings, especially in relation to the current NATO build-up against Russia.

While claiming to offer a third way between outright rejection and acceptance of the government’s motion, they made clear that any concerns they have over the Trident programme are of a militarist character. Budget outlays on Trident “will matter if our already highly stretched conventional defence capabilities must be cut to pay for it,” Lewis and Thornberry wrote. “If we choose to retain a nuclear capability, there are many cheaper alternatives than building the full complement of replacement submarines.”

The next day, just hours before the Trident debate, Guardian commissioning editor Archie Bland weighed in with an extraordinary opinion piece: “Banging on about Trident—it’s Corbynism to a T.”

Bland’s objective was to portray Corbyn’s planned opposition to Trident as irrelevant, because the issue lacked “salience” with the broader public.

“Do you prefer your potatoes mashed or roasted?” he asked his readers. “Which are better, cats or dogs? Is it reasonable for your aunt’s next-door neighbours to play loud music after 11pm? If pressed, you will have a view about all of these things. … But a view isn’t usually the same thing as a deep concern. Political scientists call this salience: the idea that, as well as what you think about something, it is worth asking whether you think about it.”

According to Bland, the attitude of millions of people to the danger of nuclear war is on par with the minor inconvenience of rowdy neighbours.

“They don’t care whether Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the Labour party,” he continued. “They no longer care about the invasion of Iraq, which remains a shibboleth for a huge segment of Labour activists, even though it began more than a decade ago and all of the key players have departed from the stage. And they certainly don’t care about the particulars of Trident.”

The Tories would “breeze through” the vote on Trident “in a spirit of complete unity,” he concluded, while “Labour appears hopelessly divided on something that most people don’t care about.”

Bland’s article provoked hundreds of objections on the Guardian’s comment thread.

Undeterred, Guardian journalist Owen Jones took up Bland’s theme in his own column the next day, concluding: “Those of us who believe Britain could set an example by disposing of its nuclear weapons should have the humility to accept we have not convinced the majority of people in this country, including those whose jobs currently depend on Trident and who have not been persuaded about an alternative economic plan. We have to at least start from there.”

The picture painted by Bland and Jones of an apathetic populace is an outright lie. Their aim is to delegitimise opposition to Trident—and to block any challenge to the imperialist war drive.

When Bland writes that the public “no longer cares about the invasion of Iraq” he is confusing the indifference of his fellow columnists, such as Jones, who speak for the most privileged layers of the upper middle class, with the egalitarian and oppositional sentiments of millions of workers and young people.

A critical aspect of the Guardian ’s coverage is its determination to downplay the threat of nuclear war. But Prime Minister Theresa May’s unprecedented and ominous declaration, made in the Trident debate, that she would not hesitate to authorise a nuclear strike killing 100,000 innocent men, women and children, shows what is at stake.

Her chilling admission was passed over in silence by Labour MPs and the Guardian duly stepped in to cover their tracks. The result was a comment by Giles Fraser, “Theresa May is lying over Trident. At least I hope she is.”

Fraser, a former canon chancellor of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and therefore in the professional business of granting benedictions, claimed that “parliament has just committed well over £100bn on a weapons system that we won’t use, that we mustn’t use, and that even the Russians know we won’t use. They know this because the only situation in which we would think about pressing the button would be precisely the situation in which there was no longer any point in pressing the button.”

His imaginary schema was based on the premise that the British ruling class would not initiate a nuclear attack. In his entire column, the words Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not appear. But the bombs dropped on both Japanese cities in August 1945, killing over 200,000 people, were nuclear first strikes by the United States. Declassified papers made public in 2013 revealed that British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill personally endorsed these atrocities.

On February 15, 2003, more than 1 million people in the UK joined global protests to oppose the impending invasion of Iraq— the largest anti-war protests in history. This opposition has not gone away. According to a YouGov poll published last June, opposition to the Iraq War has in fact increased over the past 13 years. Polls conducted over the past decade have also consistently registered majority opposition to Trident.

The Guardian is not merely a newspaper. It is an organising centre of the nominally liberal bourgeoisie. Claiming to stand for progressive opinion, its role is to police public discourse, upholding at all times the strategic imperatives of imperialism.

The problem is not apathy, as the Guardian claims, but the absence of a revolutionary leadership, programme and perspective. The instinctive opposition of working people has been deliberately confined to the parties and institutions of capitalism—the very system responsible for war, austerity and the growing assault on democratic rights.

In 2003, the Stop the War Coalition—led by figures such as Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, Tariq Ali and Jeremy Corbyn—channelled mass protests behind impotent appeals to the Labour Party, the United Nations and imperialist powers such as France and Germany, to oppose the US-led invasion of Iraq. Corbyn addressed the mass rally in London’s Hyde Park, calling on Blair to hold a parliamentary vote on the war. Blair did so four weeks later. A pro-war vote by Labour and the Tories resulted, with British military action commencing the next day.

Corbyn’s record since becoming Labour leader in September 2015 has been one of abject capitulation to the Blairite warmongers on every critical issue. In the name of “party unity” he has: (1) refused to challenge Labour policy on Trident at the party’s National Conference; (2) allowed a free vote on British military action in Syria that resulted in bombing raids; and (3) opposed war crimes charges against Tony Blair and his accomplices, helping to sweep the findings of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War under the mat.

Despite addressing rallies of thousands of supporters over the weekend, including a campaign launch in Salford on Saturday, Corbyn made no mention of Trident or the threat of war.

Catastrophic Identity Crisis

Theresa May Part 1

Because the first scene published yesterday of Liam Shakehands' new play Theresa May Part 1 was so popular he has given me unprecedented access to the second scene.

ACT 1 SCENE 2  A room in the Palace of Westminster

Enter Hilary Benn woad painted and packing many shooting irons. Behind follow Owen Smith and Paddy Ashdown with his pants up. They are woad painted also and on the warpath.

Benn:     [Taking out two pistols and cocking them]

                These two firearms which I see before me,
                With itchy fingers on their triggers poised,
                Can, in an instant, send our foe to hell.
                Two loud reports as both I squeeze at once,
                Then, as the smoke retreats, behold the view;
                Corbyn lying crumpled and deceased.

Smith:     Fine!
                These guns of yours are practical I'm sure,
                But did we not agree to stay our hand,
                Until the leader's ballot is resolved ?
                I might well win.

Benn:       How goes your bid in that?

Smith:     Uphill in truth.
                New membership has complicated things.
         
Benn:        Ah well,the C.I.A will topple him
                  At once, if all else fails. Hurrah the Yanks.

Ashdown:  Look friends, while we endeavour to depose
                   This left-wing fool, if just by happenchance
                   I get to drop my pants and blissfully
                   Begin to roger to my heart's delight,
                   I trust you will not spill the beans.

Benn:        Forsooth!
                  We might partake as well. Why not?

Exeunt all with a skip in their step

Pussyfooting With The Blairites

I make no apology for publishing other people's articles. I can't write it all.

Corbyn and McDonnell plead with UK Labour Party right wing for “unity”

From WSWS

Labour Party Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell made an extraordinary plea for unity with the very MPs seeking to depose his closest ally, Jeremy Corbyn, in a coup.

Speaking Sunday to the BBC’s "Andrew Marr Show," McDonnell broke from the interview and, speaking directly to the camera, said, “Let me say to Labour Party supporters, Labour members, members of the Parliamentary Labour Party [PLP], we have got to stop this now. There is a small group out there that are willing to destroy our party just to remove Jeremy Corbyn. We have got to stop them. We’ve got to unite.”

McDonnell was responding to the latest provocative move by the Blairite coup plotters, who claimed via accusations from Labour MP Seema Malhotra that “members of staff working for John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn” gained unauthorised entry to an office she had used in Parliament. The Observer, the sister paper of the Guardian, which supports the efforts to oust Corbyn, splashed this on its front page—even though its article included a statement from Corbyn’s office directly opposing the claims.

A spokesman for Corbyn said, “As an office manager on the leader of the opposition’s floor, Karie [Murphy] has a key to open all offices. She accessed the office in question to confirm when it would be vacated. It is a month since Seema Malhotra resigned as shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, and the office is intended for the person holding that position.”

This latest manufactured incident followed yet more pleas for unity by Corbyn as he launched his leadership campaign Saturday in Salford.

The previous day, Labour MP Owen Smith, who is challenging Corbyn for the leadership, spoke at a meeting in nearby central Manchester. The events could not have been more sharply contrasted. In a city with a population of over half a million, Smith spoke in Manchester’s Friends Meeting House to just 300 people. Corbyn spoke to a capacity audience of 2,000 in Salford’s Lowry Theatre. The event was streamed live on Facebook with over 100,000 people logging in to watch and close to 200,000 having viewed it by Sunday evening. Ten simultaneous launch events across the country were held at the same time.

For weeks, Corbyn has been denounced by the right-wing acolytes of former Labour leader Tony Blair as being “unelectable” and “out of touch” with Labour voters, particularly in Labour’s “heartlands.” Using this to justify their coup against Corbyn, 172 MPs backed a motion of no-confidence in him. After trying to prevent a leadership contest taking place, Smith was chosen as the “unity candidate” who could supposedly combine a left feint with that mysterious “electability” of an inveterate opportunist.

The problem is that anyone who is fielded by the PLP is viewed with hostility by the broad mass of party members and seen as a pliant tool of those who have overseen Labour’s transformation into an openly big business, pro-war party and who are now intent on subverting Corbyn because he is pledged to oppose austerity, militarism and war.

On Saturday, the Guardian published a poll commissioned by Opinium and the Observer, which found that Corbyn is set to trounce Smith in the September 24 contest. Some 54 percent of Labour supporters said they support Corbyn, with Smith having the backing of just 22 percent.

Just 10 months ago, Corbyn crushed his three Blairite opponents, winning the support of more than 250,000 Labour members and registered supporters—more than all his opponents put together. All indications are that Corbyn’s support among Labour’s members has grown since then as a direct result of opposition to the attempted coup against him.

After failing to keep Corbyn off the ballot, the Blairites attempted to cut off 130,000 Labour members and supporters who had joined in the last six months from voting in the leadership contest. They were given just two days to register and pay a prohibitive £25 fee. Nevertheless, 180,000 people signed up. Labour’s membership under Corbyn’s leadership is now well over half a million.

The aim of the Blairites is not merely to depose Corbyn, but to thwart growing anti-capitalist sentiment and yearning for fundamental social change among millions of people. However, every manoeuvre attempted so far by the coup plotters has backfired. Indeed, their attempt to package Smith as the new rising star “in touch” with voters has not even survived a week of contact with the real world, to the point that Smith felt it necessary to declare in Manchester, “I’m as radical as Jeremy.”

The support for Corbyn is only an initial manifestation of far more profound political developments, rooted in the deep social polarisation between the classes in the UK. Nearly a decade of savage cuts carried out by successive Labour and Conservative-led governments since the 2008 global financial crash has resulted in millions of working people being pauperised. Young people, who make up much of Corbyn’s support, have no future, with the avenue of a decent free education and secure employment now denied them.

But far from offering their supporters a programme of struggle against the Blairites, Corbyn and McDonnell have capitulated to them at every turn in the name of preserving “party unity.”

McDonnell speaks of a “small group” opposing Corbyn, but this small group consists of the vast bulk of the PLP to whom he made his unity appeal. These MPs ignore all such pathetic appeals and instead join enthusiastically in the campaign, slandering Corbyn’s supporters as “violent thugs,” “anti-Semites” and “misogynists.”

In Salford, Corbyn too urged his supporters to seek unity with the coup plotters, saying, “I know some people are angry at the actions of some MPs, but where we have disagreement in the Labour Party we settle it through democratic means—no coups, no intimidation, no abuse... Whatever the result on the 24th of September, we’re going be a united movement to take on the Tories…”

No coups? No abuse? Democratic means? What does this have to do with the reality of the vicious right-wing offensive mounted against those Corbyn now urges to turn the other cheek?

Corbyn acts as a block on the aspirations of those who support him. He is all that stands between the party’s right wing and a political reckoning. Under conditions of mass revulsion felt by millions towards all the institutions of the ruling elite, including Parliament and its parties, he insists that any change can be accomplished only via a Labour government and Parliament. "Many of us have sought office in Parliament," he declared, "in order to effect those changes—but changes come because people want those changes to come and Parliament has to influence how those changes come about.”

To claim that Labour can be made to implement anti-austerity and anti-war measures, as does Corbyn, means to lie to the working class.

In the previous week, three quarters of Labour MPs voted to retain the UK’s nuclear missile arsenal, with many advocating its use in future conflicts. Prior to this, the Chilcot report into the Iraq War was released, providing devastating confirmation of the illegal character of the war and the criminal role of those—Blair and his supporters—who organized and led it in support of US imperialism. Corbyn, despite his professed opposition to both the Iraq War and Trident renewal, said nothing about either issue in Salford—also, one must assume, to further the cause of party unity.

To take a single step forward, those presently looking towards Corbyn for leadership must consciously reject the limitations he and his supporters place on them and adopt a genuinely revolutionary socialist perspective and leadership.

Theresa May Part 1

A friend of mine, who is an extremely good poet, has set his mind to writing a play in a typically Elizabethan sort of way. I don't pretend to understand the intricacies of blank verse but he showed me his first draft and it left me salivating for more. Liam, my friend, has also given me permission to publish the opening scene on my blog for everyone to enjoy.

Frontispiece

Theresa May  Part 1

 by Liam Shakehands

ACT 1 SCENE 1 -The Cabinet Room

Enter Theresa May, Phillip Hammond and Boris Johnson.
They gather in secret conclave to refashion the world.

May:                Like our departed sister Margaret,

                        I, too, hold saintly Francis in esteem,

                        But hugging lepers and stripping off my kit

                        To wander naked round the seats of power,

                        I find distasteful and obscene.

Boris:             Yes Tess indeed! [Aside] Not a sight for sore eyes!

May:               Why harmony at all I ask myself,

                       When pleasing discord seeks the light of day

                       In this our craven world.

Hammond:     Aye Mistress May.

                       Dentures and teeth will likely gnash and wails

                       Shall sound in Wales and screams in Scotland too,

                       When I unleash austerity anew.

Johnson:         St. Francis of Assisi's for the chop.

                        F*ck him I say!

May:              Tut Boris no expletives!

                      We must pretend that Francis is our friend,

                      in order to mislead.

Johnson:       Crudeness, alas, I like.

                      Besides, few can utter f*ck in five tongues.

                      Like me.

Hammond:  You are a wizard with the words.

Johnson:       And with the deed. Five times nightly Boris

                     Don't you know. [He takes a bow]

Exeunt all

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

The Security Services Are Attempting To Thwart Democracy

From RT

Union boss Len McCluskey has accused British intelligence agencies of using agents provocateurs to undermine Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The Unite general secretary said he believed spies were using “dark practices” in an attempt to “stir up trouble” and suggested they could be behind the abuse of MPs on social media.

McCluskey told the Guardian he thought the truth would come out in 30 years, when classified government documents are released into the public domain.

Asked if he believed online abuse of Corbyn’s critics was posted by people trying to discredit his supporters, he said: “Of course, of course. Do people believe for one second that the security forces are not involved in dark practices?

“We found out just a couple of years ago that the chair of my union then, the Transport and General Workers Union, was an MI5 informant at the time that there was a strike taking place that I personally as a worker was involved in. [In] 1972, I was on strike for six weeks. And 30 years later it comes out that the chair of my union at that time was an MI5 informant.”

When asked again if he believed classified documents would reveal the involvement of British intelligence agents in Corbyn’s leadership strife, McCluskey said: “Well I tell you what, anybody who thinks that that isn’t happening doesn’t live in the same world that I live in.

“Do you think that there’s not all kinds of rightwingers who are not secretly able to disguise themselves and stir up trouble? I find it amazing if people think that isn’t happening.”

American Exceptionalism

The murky world of the UK’s Blairite anti-Corbyn coup plotters

From WSWS

The attempt to remove UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is being spearheaded by right-wing supporters of former Labour leader Tony Blair. These forces, who aim to either take over or destroy the Labour Party and set up a new right-wing party, are working in intimate collusion with the security services in Britain and the United States.

The plot was enacted immediately after the June 23 referendum vote for Britain to leave the EU. The organisers of the putsch seek to reverse the referendum result and re-fashion the Labour Party as the central tool to carry this out.

Among those playing a leading role against Corbyn is Labour MP Ruth Smeeth. She was elected as a Labour MP at the 2015 general election, after working in public relations at multinational food and facilities management company, Sodexo. She later worked in public relations for Nestlé. In between, she held a post with the pro-Israel lobby group, Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM).

On June 27, Smeeth resigned her position in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet as Parliamentary Private Secretary for the shadow Northern Ireland and Scotland teams. This was part of more than 60 coordinated resignations from Corbyn’s shadow cabinet organised by the plotters, with the aim of precipitating a no- confidence vote and forcing his resignation.

Corbyn refused to resign.

On June 30, Smeeth staged a stunt at a press conference where Corbyn was launching a report into the manufactured claims from Labour’s right wing that the party under his leadership was anti-Semitic. Smeeth stormed out of the meeting, with her office later claiming she had been reduced to tears. She made an official complaint to the party after claiming, “a Jeremy Corbyn supporter” had “used traditional anti-Semitic slurs to attack me for being part of a ‘media conspiracy’”—a reference to a statement that she was working with the Daily Telegraph.

Smeeth claimed that under Corbyn, Labour was not a “safe space for British Jews”. She called on Corbyn to stand down as leader “immediately and make way for someone with the backbone to confront racism and anti-Semitism in our party and in the country.”

Smeeth describes herself as “a lifelong Labour Party campaigner,” a former trade union officer and activist.

What is generally not known is that she was identified by WikiLeaks, via a US embassy diplomatic cable, as a “strictly protect” US informant.

The cable, dated April 24, 2009, was one of more than 251,287 made public by WikiLeaks and is headed “UK POLITICAL SNAPSHOT”. It notes, “Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Burton [the seat she contested and lost, prior to winning another in 2015] Ruth Smeeth (strictly protect) told us April 20 that [former Labour Prime Minister Gordon] Brown had intended to announce the elections on May 12, and hold them after a very short (matter of weeks) campaign season.”

The cable ends: “(Note: This information has not been reported in the press.)”

The cable testifies to the intimate connections that Labour’s plotters have to the US state and intelligence agencies. However, it is just the tip of the iceberg.

Ruth Smeeth is married to Michael Smeeth, a member of the executive body of the British-American Project (BAP). The BAP describes itself as a “transatlantic fellowship of over 1,000 leaders, rising stars and opinion formers from a broad spectrum of occupations, backgrounds and political views.”

A November 2004 Guardian article noted that the BAP, which was essential in the formation of Blair’s New Labour, “has been described as a Trojan horse for US foreign policy.”

The article reported that following Blair’s first election victory in 1997, BAP released a private circular headlined, “Big Swing To BAP.” The circular stated, “No less than four British-American Project fellows and one advisory board member have been appointed to ministerial posts in the new Labour government.”

These included Mo Mowlam, Chris Smith, Peter Mandelson, Baroness Symons, George Robertson, Jonathan Powell, Geoff Mulgan, and Matthew Taylor.”

Mandelson was Blair’s closest adviser. Powell was Blair’s chief of staff and was previously posted at the British Embassy in Washington in 1991. Robertson, now a life peer as Baron Robertson of Port Ellen, was Blair’s Defence Secretary. He became NATO Secretary General from October 1999 to January 2004. Symons was Blair’s Minister for the Middle East, International Security, Consular and Personal Affairs in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The Guardian named another Blairite, Douglas Alexander, then Foreign Office and Trade Minister, as a BAP member. David Miliband, the brother of Ed Miliband, Corbyn’s predecessor as Labour leader, was another BAP member.

The BAP includes a number of prominent UK and US journalists and broadcasters among its membership. A UK journalist, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, told the Guardian of one BAP conference: “The amount of drink, the way you were treated, the dinners with everyone who was anyone. ... Jonathan Powell [Tony Blair’s chief of staff] used to come a lot. I remember having many an argument with him beside swimming pools in white towelling dressing gowns. ... It was money that I’d never seen at any conference before. We [the participants] used to joke, ‘This is obviously funded by the CIA.’”

The BAP is certainly well financed. Journalist John Pilger wrote in a December 2007 article published in the New Statesman, “Since 1985, BAP ‘alumni’ and ‘fellows’ have been brought together courtesy of Coca-Cola, Monsanto, Saatchi & Saatchi, Philip Morris and British Airways, among other multinationals.”

The BAP was established in 1985 under the US Republican administration of Ronald Reagan with a mission “to perpetuate the close relationship between the United States and Britain.” Reagan said, “A special concern” being addressed by the BAP was cultivating the “successor generations, as these younger people are the ones who will have to work together in the future on defence and security issues.”

Pilger notes, “Attending this ceremony [where Reagan spoke] in the White House Situation Room were the ideologues [media oligarch] Rupert Murdoch and the late James Goldsmith.”

Labourite Nick Butler was central to the BAP’s formation. The Guardian article states that he “was treasurer of the influential left-leaning pressure group the Fabian Society and a promising junior player in the Labour party.” It cites Butler as saying, “The UK was in a bad state. ... America seemed much more dynamic, full of ideas, open”.

He continued, “My perspective then was that my generation—I would have been described as ‘rightwing’ in the 1982 Labour party—were totally stifled here. No prospect of being in power.”

Between 1982 and the BAP’s first conference in 1985, Butler secured the support of Sir Charles Villiers, a liberal Tory businessman; the US embassy in London, “which gave Butler a grant to go to Washington to test reactions to the BAP idea; and the Pew Charitable Trusts, a very large and wealthy American foundation.”

Butler spent 29 years with the BP, including five years as Group Vice President for Policy and Strategy Development from 2002 to 2006. The Guardian notes that such was the “warmth of its relations with Downing Street” that “during his time as BP”, it “become known as ‘Blair Petroleum’.”

Efforts to depose Corbyn were ramped up this week, with three quarters of Labour MPs voting for the renewal of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons system. In the debate, various Blairites lined up to make clear that Labour is an unswerving ally of US imperialism and an advocate of nuclear war.

Smeeth stated that Britain had to embrace “our responsibilities as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and as a founder member of the NATO alliance. ... From Major [Clement] Attlee’s support for Churchill in our country’s darkest hour to the founding of NATO under Ernest Bevin, our party has always stood up first and foremost for the security of our nation—we do now, and we always will.”

Hold Blair Accountable For War Crimes

Sign The Parliamentary Petition

A Charlatan Takes Centre Stage

Here's what the Morning Star newspaper had to say about Owen Smith's Labour leadership challenge:-

Mr Smith claims to be a “credible and radical” alternative to Mr Corbyn, and has said he would rewrite clause four of Labour’s constitution — stripped of socialist content by Tony Blair — to “put tackling inequality right at the heart of everything we do.”

But the Pontypridd MP has faced yet more questions about his past as an £80,000-a-year lobbyist for trans­national drugs giant Pfizer.

Mr Smith insisted yesterday that he has “never advocated privatisation of the NHS” — a claim at odds with what he told the South Wales Echo in 2006, in which he said privateers could bring “good ideas” and “valuable services” to the NHS.

May and BoJo

Military faction attempts coup in Turkey

By James Cogan of WSWS

A faction of the Turkish military is attempting to carry out an overnight coup and oust the government headed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Fighting between rival military and police units has been reported in both Istanbul, the country’s economic centre, and Ankara, the political capital. At least 42 people are dead and an estimated 1,000 wounded. State news agencies are reporting that more than 750 people have been arrested.

The coup instigators, who appear to represent a wing of the military and state apparatus that has been sidelined by Erdogan and fears being marginalised even further, declared in a statement that their actions were seeking to “reinstate constitutional order, human rights and freedoms, the rule of law and the general security that was damaged.” Erdogan, who was on holiday at a Black Sea resort, used a FaceTime video call to a live news broadcast on CNN Turkey to denounce the putsch and call for “people to gather in squares and airports” to defend his government.

A WSWS correspondent reported that, in the working class suburbs of Istanbul, “thousands of people are in the streets” in opposition to the coup and that he could hear jets in the air and gunfire nearby. Near Ankara, Turkish air force F-16 jet fighters shot down a helicopter operating in support of the attempted putsch. The Turkish parliament building in Ankara has been bombed by the rebels.

It appears, at this point, that the coup is failing. It has been opposed by a large section of the armed forces, the main Turkish business federation, and, most significantly, by the Obama administration, which issued a statement in Washington in support of the Erdogan government. Army units backing the coup are reportedly withdrawing from the streets, while pro-government forces have retaken control of the main state television broadcaster, TRT.

Regardless of whether the coup is crushed quickly, or Turkey is plunged into a more protracted civil war, the unfolding events are testimony to the generalised breakdown taking place internationally in the political institutions and mechanisms of bourgeois rule. Country after country is descending into turmoil under the impact of the intractable global economic crisis, historic levels of social inequality and the devastating consequences of the military agenda of US imperialism and its allies to dominate the oil-rich Middle East and undermine Russian and Chinese influence in every part of the world.

The coup in Turkey is taking place in the context of the fall-out from the “Leave” vote in the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and a political crisis in the United States over police killings and the possibility of Donald Trump winning the Republican Party's presidential nomination. It follows the extension of emergency rule in France, an accelerating drive by NATO toward military confrontation with Russia and immense tensions in Asia, after an international court ruling that China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea are invalid. There is no question that the uncertainty produced by global instability plays a major role in what appear to be the reckless, even desperate, actions being taken in ruling circles around the world—including the calculation by a faction of the Turkish military that the only way to stabilise bourgeois rule in the country was to overthrow Erdogan’s regime.

Erdogan’s Islamist-based Justice and Development Party (AKP) has held government since 2002. It has presided over a massive economic expansion based on the deregulation and opening up of the country and its labour force as a base for low-cost production for transnational corporations. The capitalist elite has enriched itself enormously, with the top 1 percent of the population increasing its share of national wealth from 39 percent in 2002 to 54 percent by 2015. The working-class and rural poor, however, have seen their living standards decimated. Even official statistics show that 22.4 percent of Turkish households earn less than the poverty line of $1,626 a month. Unemployment stands at 10.8 percent, or some three million people, while another three million workers have left the country to seek jobs in other areas of Europe.

At the same time as social contradictions have grown, Turkey has been profoundly destabilised by the collaboration of Erdogan and the AKP with the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and their central role in supporting the US-led civil war in Syria against the Baathist regime of President Bashar al-Assad by Islamist militias, including Al Qaeda and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). 

The Syrian war has become a debacle for the Turkish ruling elite. Thousands of Islamist militants have used the country as a transit point to join the fighting against Assad, while millions of people displaced by the carnage have flooded over the borders from Syria seeking refuge. In neighbouring Iraq, ISIS used the manpower and weaponry it gained with Turkish assistance to attack the pro-US government in 2014, prompting Washington to launch a war against the very Islamists it had been arming and to demand Turkish support. Russia’s intervention to shore up the Assad regime has led to open military clashes, with the Turkish air force shooting down a Russian aircraft, posing the prospect of all-out war between Ankara and Moscow.

From Ankara’s standpoint, the greatest concern about developments in Iraq has been that the Kurdish regional authorities have utilised the crisis to vastly expand their territory, occupying the oil-rich Kirkuk region and giving aid to Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, who have carved out a de-facto autonomous region on Turkey’s border.

To divert internal social tensions and pre-empt renewed unrest among Turkey’s Kurds, Erdogan has carried out a brutal crackdown on Kurdish-based political parties and the Kurdish population as a whole. Adding to the instability, ISIS, which had legitimately viewed Erdogan as a tacit ally, has retaliated against what it views as a betrayal, by calling on its supporters to conduct terrorist attacks inside Turkey. Economic growth in the country has slowed dramatically, under the impact of the global slump and political uncertainty, and is expected to decline even further over the coming year.

The attempted overnight coup by sections of the Turkish military will only raise the intensity of already explosive social and class antagonisms to fever-pitch. The critical question, amid the crises and bloody infighting within the capitalist class, is the intervention of the working class to assert its own independent interests. In Turkey, as in every country around the world, what is paramount is the unity of workers of all ethnic and religious backgrounds in the fight for a socialist and internationalist solution to the failure of capitalism.

Bourgeois Democracy Stinks in Turkey Too

Watching Turkish capitalist cliques tearing each other apart warms the cockles of my heart.

How on earth Turkey can remain in NATO and still be awarded membership of the EU is beyond me.

From shooting down a Russian jet, to the incarceration of journalists critical of the Turkish state and to buying ISIL oil this man Erdogan has proved himself to be one of the most corrupt politicians on the planet. This is not to mention his savage treatment of the Kurds.

We should rejoice that Britain has voted to leave the EU. We need to leave NATO now.

New UK Prime Minister Theresa May to head austerity government - World Socialist Web Site

 UK Prime Minister Theresa May to head austerity government - World Socialist Web Site

Claptrap!

The predictable and pathetic end of Sanders’ “political revolution”

From the World Socialist Web Site

Bernie Sanders ended his presidential campaign Tuesday, not with a bang but a whimper. The Vermont senator formally endorsed his rival in an undignified prostration before the Democratic Party establishment and Wall Street’s favoured presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The unity rally featuring Sanders and Clinton in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, had all the spontaneity and enthusiasm of a going-out-of-business sale. The funereal atmosphere was perhaps fitting, because with the demise of the Sanders campaign, the Democratic Party has demonstrated, for the thousandth time, its historical role as the graveyard of progressive movements and efforts to achieve reform through the capitalist two-party system.

The Sanders campaign has provided a major lesson in politics to millions of young people and workers who rallied to support the Vermont senator because he called himself a “democratic socialist” and because he denounced Wall Street and the domination of US politics by “millionaires and billionaires.”

The mass support for a self-proclaimed socialist shocked the US ruling elite, the Democratic Party establishment, and, no doubt, Sanders himself. It demonstrated that, despite decades of incessant media propaganda against socialism and communism, the experiences of masses of working people and youth are driving them to the left.

This was particularly true among the younger generation. Sanders won by huge margins—70, 80, even 90 percent—among primary and caucus voters under 30 years of age. More than 1.5 million people attended his rallies, with college students and youth of college age predominating.

The Sanders campaign did not create the broad radicalization demonstrated in these figures. The Vermont senator’s bid for the Democratic Party nomination rather served to uncover what was already developing, the product of decades of deepening economic inequality, ceaseless war, attacks on democratic rights and the growing realization that the profit system is leading mankind toward catastrophe.

Once the Democratic primary campaign was fully engaged, however, Sanders’ political task—in the eyes of the US ruling elite—became clear. It was his responsibility to put the genie back into the bottle. He had to deliver his millions of supporters, particularly the youth, to the candidate chosen by the Democratic Party establishment.

In the beginning was the end. From the start of his campaign, Sanders understood the role assigned to him. He abandoned his longstanding pretense to being a political “independent,” and pledged to remain within the framework of the Democratic Party regardless of the outcome of the contest for the nomination.

Throughout the Sanders campaign, the Socialist Equality Party has welcomed the broad shift to the left that it revealed in the thinking of millions of working people and youth, while warning that the Vermont senator would inevitably disappoint his supporters.

We drew attention to two key aspects of the Sanders campaign: his silence on foreign policy and the growing danger of war, and his refusal to criticize the Obama administration for bailing out Wall Street and spearheading the corporate attack on the jobs and living standards of working people, beginning with the 50 percent wage cut imposed on new hires in the auto industry at the insistence of the White House.

Tuesday’s “unity” rally with Hillary Clinton demonstrated both these tendencies. Sanders spoke for 30 minutes without ever mentioning foreign policy, only days after Obama announced an extension of the US military intervention in Afghanistan and approved the dispatch of another 560 US troops to Iraq.

In his tribute to Clinton, Sanders never referred to her four-year tenure as secretary of state, where she was consistently the most hawkish member of the Obama cabinet, instigating the US-NATO war with Libya and advocating even greater US intervention in the Syrian civil war.

As for the Democratic Party’s domestic record, Sanders praised Obama’s actions during the 2008-2009 Wall Street crash. “I thank President Obama and Vice President Biden for their leadership in pulling us out of that terrible recession,” he said, although Obama and Biden saved the bankers and billionaires at the expense of the working class.

Similarly, Sanders hailed Clinton’s agreement on several minor and meaningless changes in the Democratic Party platform, on health care, student debt and the minimum wage, claiming that the result was “the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party.”

Clinton’s own remarks at the rally were equally demagogic and deceptive. She denounced “trickle-down supply-side economics” which were responsible for “30 years of a disastrous Republican philosophy that gave the huge breaks to those at the top.” She conveniently left out that those “30 years” included the eight-year administration of her own husband, who followed the dictates of the financial markets no less slavishly than the Republicans.

She pledged to “open the doors to everyone who shares our progressive values,” although the political careers of both Bill and Hillary Clinton have been based on moving the Democratic Party ever further to the right—abolishing welfare, promoting harsh policing and mass imprisonment, deregulating the banks, and generally distancing the Democrats from any association with policies of liberal reform.

In his remarks Tuesday in New Hampshire, Sanders declared that his campaign would continue, in the form of an all-out effort to elect Hillary Clinton president and elect Democratic majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives. To call such an outcome a “political revolution” is, to say the least, a cynical fraud.

The Democratic Party is, like the Republican Party, an instrument of the financial aristocracy that rules America. While the Republican Party generally expresses the ruling class’s appetite for wealth and power in its most unrestrained form, the Democratic Party has long served as the principal vehicle for neutralizing any challenge to the corporate elite from below.

Despite the best efforts of the media, the Democratic Party and the political establishment as a whole, including Sanders himself, the social and economic opposition that found an initial expression in support for his campaign will not disappear. Whoever wins in November will oversee a society riven by social conflict and will implement deeply unpopular policies, including a sharp expansion of war abroad and the attack on the working class at home.

Workers and young people attracted to the Sanders campaign must draw the necessary conclusions. The Democratic Party cannot be transformed and capitalism cannot be reformed. A leadership must be built to unite the developing struggles of the working class in a revolutionary movement against the corporate and financial elite and the profit system they defend.

Armageddon

"Everyone who f*cked up has f*cked off!"

Angela Eagle - A Vicious Raptor

Anointed Not Elected

You Just Can't Trust The Bourgeois Establishment

Will Pistorius and Blair be let off on the same day? If it's anything to do with the bourgeois establishment then the likelihood is yes.

Jonathan Pie has his say

Thus perish all warmongers

My father saw the body of Mussolini hanging upside down from a lamp-post with his throat slit in the dying days of WWII. I was just a little boy and it appalled me.

Right now however, a few hours before the publication of the long awaited Chilcot enquiry I just wish a similar fate for Blair.

Sign This Petition

Invoke Article 50 of The Lisbon Treaty immediately.

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Very, very sore losers

From a WSWS contributor

I love the way that the US/UK elite are always passionately affirming democracy until the vote goes against them at which point it becomes a case of "mob rule".

The anti-Corbyn coup and calls for a second referendum on Brexit

1 July 2016 From WWWS

The attempted putsch against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is being mounted by a right-wing cabal, working in intimate collusion with the security services in Britain and the United States. Its main propaganda organ is the Guardian newspaper. The aim is to overturn the result of the June 23 referendum and ensure British membership of the European Union (EU) through the election of a suitably refashioned Labour Party, or its incorporation into a coalition government.

Almost every key figure in the moves against Corbyn that began following the Leave campaign’s victory is associated with the party’s Blairite wing. This involves not only the current crop of Labour MPs and shadow ministers, but the inner circle around former Prime Minister Tony Blair—Alastair Campbell, David Blunkett, Jack Straw and others. Vetted and approved by MI5 and MI6, and taking their instructions from the CIA, these unindicted war criminals have been activated to purge not only Corbyn but his support base from the party.

Corbyn’s declared opposition to austerity and militarism is viewed as an intolerable affront by the Blairites. From the 1980s onwards, culminating in the election of “New Labour,” they transformed the party into an instrument for implementing Thatcherite economic policies and pledged to an unconditional alliance with the United States in its wars of colonial conquest in Afghanistan and then Iraq.

They have long viewed his election last year as the illegitimate consequence of the flawed decision to change Labour’s constitution and allow a popular vote for leader by members and supporters. But removing Corbyn became imperative after the referendum vote. The strategic interests of the ruling elite in Britain and the United States—especially as regards NATO and its military provocations against Russia—require that the result be rescinded. With Brexit forces now dominant inside the Conservative Party, Labour is the chosen instrument for this reactionary project.

Washington’s demands were made clear by US Secretary of State John Kerry, who informed reporters Wednesday that the referendum result could be reversed. “I think there are a number of ways” to do this, he said, although he didn’t “want to throw them out today.”

The next day, the Guardian published an op-ed piece by Robert Hunter. Its readers were not informed that Hunter is a high-level US state operative. The former president of the Atlantic Treaty Association, and US ambassador to NATO—amongst numerous other key US military appointments—he is described on Wikipedia as “helping to ‘recreate’ NATO, and breaking down barriers between NATO and the European Union.”

Hunter insists that the referendum vote is an example of “mob rule” that should be ignored and that parliament should overturn the result through elections for a “new leadership and a new government.”

The Blairites have translated this instruction into political action. It is they who engineered the vote of no confidence in Corbyn—based on the charge that the Labour leader “betrayed” the pro-EU aspirations of the younger generation. The same edition of the Guardian features an article by Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff. He declares that Labour must now “speak for the 48% of the country who want to Remain in the EU.” Corbyn “clearly can’t be that person”, so a new leader is needed “to run in the general election on an explicit promise to negotiate with our partners to salvage our position in Europe...” If elected, Labour’s first task would be to hold a second referendum, he writes.

Yesterday, Labour’s Geraint Davies and Jonathan Edwards of Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales) presented a motion to parliament calling for a second referendum on whatever terms are agreed for a British exit from the EU.

The Socialist Equality Party condemns these manoeuvres. They recall nothing more than the actions of the Syriza government in Greece, which last year called a referendum on whether to accept a further round of EU austerity measures in the expectation that they would be agreed. When a massive no vote was returned, Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras repudiated the result and carried on regardless.

Tremendous confusion has been created around the Brexit vote, above all by the right-wing and xenophobic forces leading the Leave campaign. This has been reinforced by concerns over the economic impact of leaving the EU—so that Davies and Edwards were able to cite a petition calling for a second referendum that has now secured upwards of four million signatures.

However, any attempt to overturn or bypass the vote is antidemocratic and aimed at creating the conditions for a deepening offensive against the working class. That is why it is accompanied by the cultivation of a vile political narrative, denouncing the millions of working people who voted Leave as “stupid,” “ignorant” and “racist.” This torrent of abuse expresses the social outlook of a layer of the upper-middle class who view the EU as a guarantor of their privileged lifestyles and in many cases a direct source of personal wealth.

The contrasting hostility of working people to the EU, which functions as an instrument of the major powers and big business for imposing austerity and pursuing trade and military war, is entirely legitimate.

In the referendum in which the Leave campaign was led by a right-wing faction of the Tory Party and the UK Independence Party and centred on nationalism and anti-immigrant rhetoric, such anti-EU sentiment could find no progressive expression. This was reinforced by the fact that the Remain campaign—led by a government hated by millions for its savage austerity measures—was supported by the Labour Party under Corbyn.

What is now taking place is a systematic attempt at manipulating public opinion to lend legitimacy to a drive by the dominant sections of the bourgeoisie to maintain UK membership in the EU. Above all, this demands that Labour assume the role of the primary pro-EU, anti-Brexit party around which a supposedly “progressive” and “globally oriented” alliance can be formed with the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, sections of the Tories and others.

The professional purveyors of identity politics and postmodernism employed by the Guardian will be rolled out to attack any opposition to this project in the working class as an expression of “backward, insular nationalism,” while the frontal assault on jobs, wages and essential services is stepped up. But this is a project with support extending across the official political spectrum. Phillip Stephens, in yesterday’s Financial Times, wrote, “Many centrist Tories have more in common with their counterparts on the Labour side than with English nationalist Brexiters; and, likewise, middle-of-the-road Labourites are closer to pro-European Tories than to Mr Corbyn’s brand of 1970s state socialism... the space may be opening up for a new, pro-European, economically liberal and socially compassionate alternative to pinched nationalism and hard-left socialism.”

Making clear what the “compassionate alternative” means for the working class, Stephens continued, “The wait, of course, would be infuriating for Britain’s erstwhile partners. Europe cannot afford a year of uncertainty. But at least Berlin, Paris and the rest have had the experience of dealing with Greece.”

The SEP urged an active boycott of the referendum because, in the absence of any significant force expressing a progressive opposition to the EU, a Leave vote could only strengthen the right wing. We warn now that efforts to overturn the result of the referendum not only spread dangerous illusions in the EU, but will strengthen far right forces by allowing them to pose as defenders of the “popular will” against “the elites.”

What is necessary is to advance a perspective that cuts across all attempts to dragoon workers behind rival sections of the capitalist class—based upon the development of a mass movement across Europe against austerity, militarism and war. Genuine European unity must come from below, not above—through the overthrow of the EU and all its constituent governments and establishing the United Socialist States of Europe.