Socialism Meets Soccer

Your shoes, they were bought in Boohoos

Your dress is from Taiwan

Your bedding’s from Malaysia

Your ruck sack’s from Amazon

That skirt you wear comes from the Philippines

And the phone you use is a Lumia Grey

It was put together in Chengdu

By a girl making seven Yuan a day

 

Well, it’s sundown on the Goldstone

West Pier and the Corn Exchange

A train ride to the Amex

Where no-one thinks it’s strange

Thirty-six quid for a football match

You play their game and pay

Sure was a good idea

Until greed got in the way

 

Well, your dress is made in Suzhou

And all our cars are from Japan

Your silk scarf was bought in Primark

The Fat Face jeans from Pakistan

All the furniture, it says “Made in Brazil”

Where a woman, she slaved for sure

Bringing home 60 pence a day to a family of twelve

You know, that’s a lot of money to her

 

Well, it’s sundown on the Goldstone

West Pier and the Corn Exchange

A train ride to the Amex

Where no-one thinks it’s strange

Thirty-six quid for a football match

You play their game and pay

Sure was a good idea

Until greed got in the way

 

You know, capitalism is above the law

Because “It don’t count unless it sells”

When it costs too much to build it at home

You just build it cheaper somewhere else

Democracy doesn’t rule the world

That’s something you need to understand

This world is ruled by bankers

Who use politics as a sleight-of-hand

 

Well, it’s sundown on the Goldstone

West Pier and the Corn Exchange

A train ride to the Amex

Where no-one thinks it’s strange

Thirty-six quid for a football match

You play their game and pay

Sure was a good idea

Until greed got in the way

 

(With thanks to Bob Dylan for the original idea)

Fairness, Compassion and Equality can Finally Overturn the Scourge of Capitalist Greed

WHILE the political pundits in the Westminster village are twisted into knots over Jeremy Corbyn’s so-called ‘Revenge Reshuffle” and BBC duplicity over the resignation of one minor minister, it is time to reset our focus to something much more important.

Put simply, the ongoing scourge of ordinary people by the most arrogant, privileged and right wing government of my lifetime.

For decades our country – and most of Western Europe – has been sleep-walking into a world of personal greed, arrogance and self-importance with totems such as The X Factor, tanning studios, Top Gear, designer clothes labels and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Human kindness, gentleness, peace, society and social justice have been jettisoned for a ‘winner takes all’ mentality and a scapegoating of the homeless, those claiming benefits, Muslims, asylum seekers and the poor in general.

All of this is underpinned by our malicious right wing press who smear and pillory anyone who dares question the status quo or suggest alternatives.

The press barons and their big business buddies are terrified of those alternatives, because they threaten a smug status quo which means that the five richest families in the UK now own more wealth than the poorest 20% of the population.

The combined wealth of the 1,000 richest men and women in Britain has more than doubled in the last 10 years. The wealthiest 1,000 individuals and families now have a combined fortune of £547.126 billion, up from £249.615 billion in 2005, despite the world economy being gripped by a punishing recession over much of the last decade.

Meanwhile, thousands of families survive on the breadline, make weekly use of food banks or starve due to draconian benefits sanctions.

When Cameron’s far right Conservative Party was elected in May this year I genuinely feared for our collective futures.

Here we had the election of a UK government compiled of self-seeking rich elitists who care more about their mansions and banking friends than about people.

And their shopping list for change is truly terrifying as this is unshackled Conservative government promises to:

• Rip up the Human Rights Act, which underpins our legal system and protects all our basic freedoms and those of persecuted minorities.
• Spend £100 billion on replacing Trident with new nuclear weapons, which at the push of a button could wipe out millions of lives and pollute our planet for tens of thousands of years.
• Make £12.8 billion of cuts to welfare, leaving the poorest, the oldest and the weakest in our society facing the bleakest of futures.
• Begin a phased end to council housing, thus pushing up rents in the private sector and making families homeless. Once again – as under Thatcher – we will see a surge in rough sleeping and begging.
• Will enact tougher sanctions on migrants, involve the UK in further illegal wars in the Middle East and trigger an increase in racism, terrorism and Islamophobia.
• Extend zero hours contracts, thus massaging the unemployment figures and leaving thousands of the poorest people without any job security.
• Legislate for more private schools which will imbed the class system even deeper in our society, rather focus on improving our state schooling system.
• Escalate and accelerate the privatisation of the NHS, so medical care will depend on wealth rather than need.
• Redraw constituency boundaries so these same corrupt capitalist elitists stay in power for another 20 more years.

Following Cameron’s election victory I said the Left “must begin now to unify around a leader or leadership we can all trust, organise and start the fightback, or we wave farewell to any hope for a fairer and better future.”

Well the fightback has begun. And I must admit I never thought it possible.

But none of us expected Jeremy Corbyn!

Over last summer this gentle political firebrand packed out meetings and hustings the length and breadth of this country with his simple messages of an end to austerity, an end to nuclear weapons and an end to needless wars over oil in the Middle East and beyond.

His messages caught the hearts and minds of millions:

1. The UK’s financial deficit should be paid off – but not through spending cuts and not to an arbitrary deadline. Instead, a Corbyn government would fund its reduction via higher taxes for the rich and a crackdown on tax avoidance and evasion. “Quantitative easing for people” could be used to invest in housing, energy, transport and digital projects.
2. Britain’s railways should be renationalised. Energy companies should also be under public ownership. He is “totally opposed” to fracking. However, he says deep-mine coal pits in the north of England could be reopened.
3. Far more allotments would be good for the UK and councils and builders “should be doing their best to ensure that every new development includes some allotment space”.
4. Talking to militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah is necessary to win peace in the Middle East. And arms embargo should be imposed on Israel to give Palestinian refugees a “right of return”.
5. Replacing Trident would be a costly mistake. Jeremy Corbyn believes the project’s £100 billion price tag could be better spent “on our national well-being“.
6. A National Education Service modelled on the NHS should be established. Under Mr Corbyn, state-funded academies and free schools would be forced to return to local authority control while university tuition fees would be scrapped and replaced with grants. He would look at ending the charitable status of public schools, although he accepts this would be complicated and might not happen immediately.
7. The air strikes against ISIS in Syria are a crass mistake. Mr Corbyn wants to see “illegal wars” replaced with a “foreign policy that prioritises justice and assistance”. This would ameliorate refugee crises. In turn, the arms trade should be restricted.
8. Rent controls should be re-introduced, linking private rents to local earnings, and more council houses should be built. Mr Corbyn also believes that council tenants’ right to buy their homes should be extended to private sector renters.
9. Remaining in the European Union but with changes. Mr Corbyn wants to stay to fight for a “better Europe”. He also opposes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal.
10. Ireland should be united and returned to Irish rule. Mr Corbyn has long supported British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.
11. Protect trade unions in the face of Conservative plans to overturn almost 100 years of workers’ rights with new legislation.
12. A national maximum wage should be introduced to cap the salaries of high earners. He would also introduce a windfall tax on former state assets such as the Royal Bank of Scotland.
13. Every child should have the chance to learn a musical instrument or act on stage. Mr Corbyn’s arts policy also includes directing a greater proportion of funding to local projects, widening access and despite this weeks’ shenanigans, protecting the BBC.
14. Private Finance Initiative deals with the NHS should be ended by using government funds to buy them out.

All in all, a brave new world indeed and those Corbyn messages are forever true.

And at last we have a political leader who can offer a true progressive alternative and a way forward for us all. So let’s now all unite and spend 2016 fighting together for that better tomorrow.

Fairness, compassion and equality can finally overturn the scourge of capitalist greed.

 

In Search of Social Justice

LAST month’s General Election was a profound moment in British society and will change this country for a generation and beyond.

And I fear deeply for our collective futures.

On one hand I am delighted for my friends in Scotland, not for any reasons of independence but because they elected 56 MPs dedicated to social justice, welfare, investment and non-nuclear proliferation.

And the first indication are that under the leadership of Nicola Sturgeon these new MPs are the real thing ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxDTasNcc2A )

But, I was equally appalled by the election of a UK government compiled of self-seeking rich Tory elitists who care more about their mansions and banking friends than about people.

And their shopping list for change is truly terrifying.

Over the next few years this is unshackled Conservative government will:

• Rip up the Human Rights Act, which underpins our legal system and protects all our basic freedoms and those of persecuted minorities.
• Spend £100billion on replacing Trident with new nuclear weapons, which at the push of a button could wipe out millions of lives and pollute our planet for tens of thousands of years.
• Make £12.8billion of cuts to welfare, leaving the poorest, the oldest and the weakest in our society facing the bleakest of futures. In turn this will ensure the need for a food bank in every town and extend child poverty ensuring suffering and a loss of opportunity for millions.
• Begin a phased end to council housing, thus pushing up rents in the private sector and making families homeless. Once again – as under Thatcher – we will see a surge in rough sleeping and begging.
• Will enact tougher sanctions on migrants, involve the UK in further illegal wars in the Middle East and trigger an increase in racism and Islamophobia.
• Back a return of the barbaric blood sports of fox hunting and deer coursing. If pandering to pink gin swilling toffs allowing them to tear defenseless animals to pieces is a sign of our society, I am ashamed.
• Extend zero hours contracts, thus massaging the unemployment figures and leaving thousands of the poorest people without any job security.
• Legislate for more private schools which will imbed the class system even deeper in our society, rather focus on improving our state schooling system.
• Escalate and accelerate the privatisation of the NHS, so medical care will depend on wealth and power rather than need.
• Then redraw constituency boundaries so these same corrupt capitalist elitists stay in power for another 20 more years.

I can’t help but wonder what’s happening to my country, my world and my companions. The Labour Party, who should be standing and campaigning against all this, have failed again and again to do so and the electorate saw through Miliband and his Tory Lite manifesto.

New Labour (or whatever they like to be called these days) even joined in with attacking the poorest, instead of the real culprits: the rich and the bankers who ruined the economy while lining their own pockets. Now our trade unions are distancing themselves from Labour in disgust. No one should have to choose between heating and eating, no one should have to pay for their healthcare or education – and everyone should have a roof over their head. It’s that simple. And neither have we learned the lessons of Iraq or Afghanistan. Once again we are hanging onto the coat hem of the USA in taking an aggressive stance against Russian involvement in the Crimea, while supporting a fascist Ukraine. We don’t need thousands more deaths of innocent people by any military posturing or worse still involvement. https://seagullnic.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/all-he-believes-are-his-eyes-and-his-eyes-they-just-tell-him-lies-2/ and in another post: https://seagullnic.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/youre-the-one-that-reached-me-youre-the-one-that-i-admired/

I have lost confidence with any major political party in this country to provide social and just government and turn back the cruel tide of capitalist politics. Last year I sadly found myself agreeing with Russell Brand that either we need a bloodless revolution to change the status quo or I remain sitting on my backside and give in to nihilism. Or is there another option? Is there a realistic left wing alternative? Also last year I joined Left Unity in an attempt to change things, and 12 months later I don’t regret that decision.

But the Left is too splintered and divided to succeed electorally.

Class War, The Communist Party, TUSC, The Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Action, 38 Degrees, UK Uncut, Respect, The Alliance for Green Socialism, The Socialist Labour Party, The Workers Revolutionary Party and even the Greens and many Labour Party members spend far too much time attacking each other over Trotskyite revisionism, personalities or tactics rather than uniting to defeat the greed and corruption of capitalism.

The 500,000 people who spontaneously attended the mass demonstration in London last weekend is an indication of the shared anger about the Conservative election victory and their manifesto of horror.

People are crying out for an alternative and they need it now.

The true Left must begin now to unify around a leader or leadership we can all trust, organise and start the fightback, or we all wave farewell to hope for a fairer and better future.

I’ve learned to hate Russians all through my whole life

WHEN I was a much younger man, I was a rebel with a cause… so many causes in fact, I actually lost count.
Now in the so-called autumn of my years, my causes are few: to protect my family and fight against injustice.
But, perversely, my canvas is much wider now, because ‘injustice’ is a shopping bag of multiple sins: the machinations of capitalism and state imperialism, the nuclear industry, violence in all its forms and bigoted prejudice of race, creed and sexuality.
And it is the machinations of the capitalist west and its media propaganda which irritates me the most, especially when I look at the injustices and indifference to Israeli atrocities on the West Bank and in Gaza and balance that against the world’s zeal like attention on the Ukraine.
In the days since Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into the Crimea, it has been amateur hour in Washington and London while the western press seeks to set out an Us versus Them scenario in the crudest terms possible.
In the past 48 hours, Putin has been demonised as “a bully”, “a war monger” and “a dangerous dictator” for his actions in trying to protect Russian citizens living in Russia’s back garden.
When you compare seizing Crimea to the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, as Leonid Bershidsky did at Bloomberg View this week, you can see the frightening level to which this political punditry has already grown.
And, as in post 9/11, Britain is hanging on to the coat tails of US foreign policy and acting like a spoilt child because the bigger game of western influence is temporarily out of our control.
Only yesterday, Foreign Secretary William Hague announced that Britain is boycotting the next G8 summit, due to be held in Moscow, in protest at Russia’s activity in the Crimea.
The sea of foreign policy punditry – already shark-infested – has reached new lows in fear-mongering, exaggerated doom-saying and a stunning inability to place global events in any rational context.
Even the most soft-slippered of so-called democrats on both sides of the Atlantic have attacked Putin’s actions as aggressive and “typically Soviet”… pushing us to the brink of a new Cold War.
Do we forget so quickly US aggression in Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Guatemala, Grenada, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan and its special forces which undermined elected regimes in Chile, the Lebanon, Egypt and now Venezuala?
Putin is acting in Russia’s best interest, albeit in a heavy handed manner. The situation in Crimea is currently none of our concern.
Our interests lie in a stable Europe, and that’s why the US and its European allies created a containment structure that will ensure Russia’s territorial ambitions will remain limited… it’s called NATO. Even if the Russian military wasn’t a hollow shell of the once formidable Soviet Red Army, it’s not about to mess with a NATO country.
Any US problems with Russia are the concerns that affect actual US interests. Concerns like nuclear non-proliferation, or containing the Syrian civil war, or stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Those are all areas where Moscow has played an occasionally useful role.
The territorial integrity of Ukraine is not nothing, but it’s hardly in the top tier of US policy concerns. It is Russia’s back garden far more than Basra, Seoul or Saigon was ever a legitimate concern for the USA.
Putin has initiated a conflict that will, quite obviously, result in greater diplomatic and political isolation as well as the potential for economic sanction.
He’s compounded his loss of a key ally in Kiev by further enflaming Ukrainian nationalism, and his provocations could have a cascading effect in Europe by pushing countries that rely on Russia’s natural gas exports to look elsewhere for their energy needs.
Putin is the leader of a country with a weak military, an under-performing economy and a host of social, environmental and health-related challenges. Seizing the Crimea will only make the problems facing Russia that much greater.
You don’t have to listen to the “do something” western lynch mob. These are the same politicians and pundits convinced that every international problem is a vital interest of the US and the UK; that the maintenance of credibility and strength is essential, and that any demonstration of weakness is a slippery slope to global anarchy.
It’s all about control, and when every western leader from Nixon to Obama or Thatcher to Cameron felt they were losing control, they made it global… and if we haven’t learned anything from Afghanistan or Iraq, that is really frightening.

Now, he’s hell-bent for destruction, he’s afraid and confused
And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill
All he believes are his eyes
And his eyes, they just tell him lies
(Bob Dylan 1983)