Posts Tagged ‘Brexit’
George Galloway goes Red-Brown and backs Farage’s Brexit Party.
Galloway Goes Red-Brown.
The Red-Brown alliance develops, George Galloway is to back Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party for the Euro-elections.
Following the lead of former rivals, the ex-Revolutionary Communist Party/Spiked/Institute of Ideas now supporters of National Populism,..(1)
Yesterday Galloway has tweeted his backing for Farage added, (1)
The Herald had just reported,
Socialist George Galloway under fire for backing Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in EU elections
He also predicted that Farage’s party would win “at least 50% of the vote”, saying: “Count on it. The working class in the north are on the move.”
When being criticised for supporting Farage he told one critic: “So Farage is Hitler? How stupid can you get.”
In response to criticism Galloway has tweeted,
The seriousness of this much-welcomed support can be seen here:
We confidently predict that this red-brown alliance will receive more support.
As Jim says,
It appears he is not on his own. Chelley Ryan is a Corbyn cultist and a prolific tweeter and Facebook poster who has also posted for Red Labour and writes for the Morning Star. She has tweeted in support of the Brexit Party.
There have been others on social media.
Is this just Stalinist fraying at the edges or is there more to it?
UPDATE: from far-right Daily Express.
Brexit REBELLION: Left-wingers follow Galloway to back Nigel Farage’s surging Brexit Party
THE Labour EU elections list is so remain heavy left-wing Brexiteers are throwing their lot in with Nigel Farage, including George Galloway.
Fellow left-wing Brexiteers also promised to vote for their former political enemy Nigel Farage.
Simon Middleton said: “I totally agree with you Mr Galloway. Next month’s elections are about Brexit, pure and simple.
“I am from a Socialist background and I will be voting for Nigel Farage aand the new Brexit Party “
George Galloway Retweeted.
******
- Perhaps this tiff is forgiven now….”In an article in The Australian newspaper, 15th January 2009, ‘Critics of Israel giving voice to anti-Semitism’, I stated that George Galloway, British MP for the Respect party, had called for a boycott of ‘Israel’s shops’ and that this meant that he was calling in practice for a boycott of Jewish shops. This was incorrect and I now understand that he was calling for a boycott of ‘Israel’ shops which is a mobile retailer operating in shopping malls and who sell Israeli goods and was not referring to ‘Israel’s shops’. I apologise to Mr Galloway for the mistake, and I withdraw the suggestion made in my article that he was showing or encouraging anti-Semitism in calling for this boycott.
Frank Furedi, 9 February 2009″.
Euro Elections: An Opportunity for Labour to take an Internationalist Stand on Europe.
Labour Will not Win by Competing for the Brexit Vote.
The Tories are in steep decline, and the Brexit Party (Farage, Annunziata Rees-Mogg, Spiked – Revolutionary Communist Party oddball, Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert to name but their best known candidates), are slugging it out over ownership of the fear of god with UKIP.
UKIP has just distinguished itself with this:
I bet the chap below does not like rootless cosmopolitans:
Labour is a strong position to stand up for internationalism.
The anti-cosmopolitan Full Brexit crowd is still trying to drag the party into a competition with the three Brexit parties and adopt National Populist policies.
Skwawkbox, for it is he, says,
Labour’s leadership, following the party’s conference policy, tabled the option of a new referendum in Parliament – and it was decisively defeated, as it was when tabled separately.
But to those aware of working-class opinion, especially outside London, it’s always been clear that Labour had to see through Brexit or risk alienating huge tracts of its heartlands.
Labour’s current strong polling shows that the majority of its base understood that Jeremy Corbyn has played a difficult hand brilliantly. But if Labour wants to win power – as millions of suffering people in this country desperately need – it’s now time for the party to focus on delivering a Brexit that works as well as possible for everyone. Ultimately, that’s always been true.
Those who can’t see beyond a desire to ‘stop Brexit’ to the greater prize of a country governed by Labour for the many cannot be allowed to dictate the party’s agenda, tactics or message.
The time has come for the internationalist left to strike another note:
The Huffington Post publishes this:
Jeremy Corbyn Handed ‘Remain, Reform, Rebel’ Manifesto For European Elections
Calls for Jeremy Corbyn to back remain at the European elections have intensified as a strongly pro-EU manifesto penned by left-wingers was passed to the Labour leader.
Titled “Remain, Reform, Rebel”, the document was penned by Corbyn allies, including his ex-economic advisor Ann Pettifor, and has been endorsed by every sitting Labour MEP set to contest their seat should the Brexit deadlock trigger the May 23 poll.
It demands an EU-wide Green New Deal – similar to that advocated in the US by Democrat politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – to include a “European super-grid” and pledges to make the continent 100% served by renewables by 2050.
Labour’s official manifesto will be be decided separately by the party’s ruling National Executive Committee and the party has said it will consult with a range of stakeholders.
Talks between Corbyn and Theresa May were set to enter a third week on Monday as the pair attempt to thrash out a compromise after the prime minister’s withdrawal agreement was rejected three times.
While elections to the European Parliament are not yet certain, all parties have begun preparations to take part.
….
It comes as party insiders increasingly fear the European Parliament elections, which will be held almost three years after the 2016 vote, will inevitably morph into a proxy referendum on EU membership.
A Labour source told HuffPost UK MEPs see the Remain vote will split between the new Change UK party, the Lib Dems and Greens, handing Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party a path to victory.
Turning to the Commission’s draft manifesto, they said: “These talks are like a death dance with the first who stops accused of collapsing.
“This is the left’s bid to show that we aren’t afraid of fighting on an overtly pro-European election.
“We want to come out fighting and to be able to say we are part of a pro-European alliance that wants to push things in the direction of a socialist Europe.
“We are saying to Labour as a commission: bite the bullet, get behind where the membership are and the majority of Labour voters are.
Former Revolutionary Communist Party’s Spiked: Alka Sehgal Cuthbert Candidate for Farage’s Brexit Party.
Prominent Spiked Contributor Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert stands for Farage’s Party.
Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, another of the party’s new candidates, is a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
“My son still finds it very difficult to countenance this,” she told The Daily Beast.
“It’s widely recognized that Left and Right have lost their meaning so we need new principles to base our politics on, and for me the question of democracy is the key—I’m not doing this for Nigel Farage.”
This received the seal of approval from Spiked: Joanna Williams @jowilliams293
Head of Education and Culture @Policy_Exchange. Associate editor @spikedonline.
Articles by ALKA SEHGAL CUTHBERT on Spiked.
Article by Joanna Williams.
Link to the ‘left’ Full Brexit front:
Defending Eddie Dempsey she re-tweeted this.
More to follow…..
Dodgy Geezer.
Movement for Brexit Blackout Takes off as Aldi Blockaded and People Turn off the Telly.
Brexit Campaign to Stop buying EU products Takes Wing, “there’s no need for the Alice in Wonderland politics emanating from both the Another Europe is Possible camp and some trade union officials.”
The Socialist Workers Party and other Brexit Bolsheviks moan that there is no “mass movement” for Brexit.
As Paul Embery’s Trade Unionists Against the EU says,
For the metropolitan liberal elite, far removed from such concerns, the prospect of a people’s Brexit simply violates their sense of entitlement and jeopardises the prospect of middle-class benefits that the working class will never see.
Out-of-touch Labour MPs and councillors, door stepping for Remain, are shocked at what their constituents are saying.
Labour councillor Ed Murphy added insult to injury by claiming only the thick will vote to leave.
There is a blind refusal to see that a people’s Brexit provides a genuine opportunity for workers to gain confidence, challenge a weak and divided Tory government …..
A window of opportunity seem now to be growing!
Britain’s very own Brexit Gilets Jaunes are leading a new movement.
The call, in the Brexit Protest and Direct Action Group on Facebook, comes after EU leaders agreed to an extension to Brexit until October 31 – although the UK could leave quicker if a deal can be agreed.
There have previously been calls for people to stop buying EU products in supermarkets, a nationwide blackout where pro-Brexit supporters switch their phones and TVs and not go shopping for the day and plans to blockade every major roundabout and junction in Britain.
Other planned protests by Brexiteers include cancelling TV licences, refusing to pay Council Tax and protests outside German supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl in a bid to get Prime Minister Theresa May to listen to their demands.
This is Brexit at its best’ claim five protesters who blocked off an Aldi
Echo. Liverpool.
The group of around five people parked their vehicles across the road so delivery trucks could not pass.
The group of around five supporters came in cars and camper vans and blocked Chester High Road, in Neston , last night.
In a video taken by a passerby members of the group can be seen brandishing placards and wearing British flags around themselves.
Meanwhile a man with a microphone shouts ‘this is Brexit at its best’ as another woman, with a flag wrapped around her head, shouts ‘we are here’.
“The tiny demonstration soon became a laughing stock on social media as some pointed out that one of their camper vans was German-made. One man wrote on Twitter: ‘They have blocked the road to a German supermarket distribution centre because they ‘don’t want German they want Brexit…. with a German motorhome.’”
Brexit supporters say they will turn off TVs and stay off work for ‘blackout’ protest tomorrow
Staffordshire live.
People enraged about the slow path to Brexit are planning to switch off their phones and TVs, stay off work and spend no money tomorrow.
A Facebook group called “Brexit Blackout! 12th of April”, which so far has more than 3,000 members, is organising a day of no driving, no spending and no using electricity to “get across the message to the powers that be that people demand their government adhere to 2016 referendum result”.
..
And among protests that have been suggested for tomorrow – the day we were supposed to leave the EU – are blockades of ports, roads and airports.
Will we see this lot join them?
Bye Bye Assange: George Galloway (Hard Brexit Candidate for the North West England in Euro Elections), Cries “Shame!”
We’re all tears.
2012.
“Woman A met Julian Assange, invited him back to her flat, gave him dinner, went to bed with him, had consensual sex with him, claims that she woke up to him having sex with her again. This is something which can happen, you know. I mean, not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion.”
Lawyers and anti-rape campaigners said Galloway was wrong and the law is clear that consent is required every time someone has sex.
Galloway said he was speaking out because “a reign of intellectual terror has descended in Britain” on this issue and he believed the sexual assault claims were part of a “setup” intended to deliver Assange into the hands of the US authorities angered at his publication of state secrets.
“It is staggering just how ignorant, factually and morally incorrect George Galloway can be,” said Katie Russell, spokeswoman for Rape Crisis England and Wales. “It is very concerning that an elected MP should display such ignorance of the law for all the women and men he represents. It sends a negative message to all the women and girls who have experienced sexual violence and a disturbing message to perpetrators. He says he doesn’t believe these women or these allegations and that is a very powerful statement because every woman or girl who has made an allegation of sexual violence deserves to have that treated fairly.”
Let not this overshadow the following historic announcement.
Who is backing Galloway, what alliances has he made?
We also ask for any leakers to tell us…
Meanwhile Assange gets more support:
Shambling Towards Shambles: Brexit, Alex Callinicos and the Socialist Workers Party.
“If a breakthrough to the left occurs in a particular country, this would indeed require a left government defying the EU and introducing a programme of controls over the economy.”
Alex Callinicos.
Shambling towards the precipice Alex Callinicos.
International Socialism Issue 162. April the 8th.
Counterfire, John Rees, So-called Marxists and Brexit.
“Genuine Marxists” with their one-time Best Friend.
Amongst many other things Brexit has divided the left.
The Parliamentary Labour Party, and the large number of people in Britain who have left-wing politics, from social democratic ideas, left liberalism, green politics, and all the varieties of democratic socialism have seen different views on the European Union become the burning political issue of our time.
The Marxist left has also been split.
What seemed like the majority view of both the non-Labour Leninist left and – it was assumed – the Labour left was a position extremely hostile to the EU. Tony Benn had even described the UK as a “colony” of the EU, and this flight of fancy was not his alone.
The Referendum showed that there was a strong section of the radical left, including those who identify with the Marxist tradition, who stood for a Remain Vote. Today many are organised in the campaign, Another Europe is Possible, whose support goes from the Labour grass-roots group, Open Labour not far from the Party’s centre, the Green Party, to the Party’s Left, the democratic socialist Chartist, supporters of Momentum, to more radical groups, such as Socialist Resistance and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Left Unity has also given its backing to Another Europe. From Another Europe there is equally Labour for a Socialist Europe, which produces valuable material relating to Party debate. The allied initiative, Love Socialism Hate Brexit, has attracted Labour MPs, like Clive Lewis and Lloyd Russell-Moyle.
The Lexit, pro-Brexit, Left, has grouped around The Full Brexit, an alliance of Family Faith and Flag Blue Labour, sovereigntists, The Communist Party of Britain, Spiked contributors , the odd maverick Green, and supporters of the Revolutionary Socialist Counterfire. The Full Brexit’s recent troubles over Eddie Dempsey, and, now Paul Embery, opponents of “rootless cosmopolitans” illustrate the difficulties many on the left would have in working with this body, let alone its anti-EU politics.
Now, from the above Counterfire, ignoring such mundane issues, John Rees offers the left a masterclass on Marxism.
Marxists, so-called Marxists, and parliamentary socialists
He begins by citing this,
The only sensible reaction to the accusation by the Tory right that Jeremy Corbyn is “a Marxist“ is the one that Karl Marx himself gave. In response to some of his own would-be followers in France he said: “all that I know, is that I am not a Marxist”.
Marx was referring to Jules Guesde the leader of the French ‘Marxist’ tendency which became the Parti Ouvrier, and, after another name change, eventually became, in 1905, part of the first substantial french socialist party, the : Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière, SFIO.
A little further down Rees gives another “famous quotation” from Engels, on French socialism to support his politics,
“We have never called you anything but ‘the so-called Marxists’ and I would not know how else to describe you. Should you have some other, equally succinct name, let us know and we shall duly and gladly apply it to you.”
He states of this (Engels To Paul Lafargue At Le Perreux. London, 11 May 1889)
What was it that produced such a scathing remark from Engels? It was the idea, current among Marx and Engels’ French supporters, that support for reforms was just a trick meant to lure workers into more radical politics once they had seen such demands fail.
Marx and Engels would have none of it. They took seriously the demands for reform that arose from the working-class movement and inscribed them as basic demands in their own programme. They wanted them achieved because they knew that both the struggle to attain them, and any successes that were achieved, would strengthen the working class movement in practice and ideologically.
Rees, to put it simply, is misleading. The exchange had a meaning only within its time of writing and does not refer to “reforms” in general.
Engels’ letter was in the context of one of the divisions that marked, and still mark, French socialism, and international socialism. That is between those who stand for internationalism, what would now be called universal human rights, and those tempted by National Populism.
This arose during the “Boulangist Movement” and the letter is about the ambiguous attitude of Marx’s son-in-law, who had expressed sympathy for this nationalist upsurge.
Mitchell Abidor offers and excellent introduction to this episode, a mass movement around Georges Boulanger, a former general in the French army, General Boulanger and the Boulangist Movement.
The movement that had grown around Boulanger’s name was perhaps the first of its kind, a combination of royalists, Bonapartists, Republicans, socialists, and Blanquists. If it resembles any movement in this strange mix of followers it is Peronism, which was also able to attract followers from all ends of the political spectrum around the figure of a general. And like Peronism, Boulangism was able to do this because it can justly be said of the man at the heart of it that, like Gertrude Stein’s Oakland, there was no there there.
It is hard not to see some modern parallels,
Populism, nationalism, defense of the rights of workers; everything was in place for the birth of the movement that would bear the general’s name.
And,
From 1888-1889 Boulanger went from victory to victory, winning elections in seven different districts. Blanquists, the most intransigent of revolutionaries (but who were not immune to the temptations of nationalism and anti-Semitism) , were to say that with Boulanger “the revolution has begun,” and that Boulangism is “a labor of clearing away, of disorganizing the bourgeois parties.” So close were the ties between the extreme left and Boulangism that the police were convinced that secret accords had been drawn up between the two forces. And though the official Blanquist bodies were split as to how far they’d go in following Boulanger, it is a fact that the Boulangist movement’s strongest electoral showing was in the Blanquist strongholds in Paris. Indeed, throughout France, it was in working class centers that Boulanger garnered his greatest successes.
The Engels text in full reads,
We have never called you anything but ‘the so-called Marxists’ and I would not know how else to describe you. Should you have some other, equally succinct name, let us know and we shall duly and gladly apply it to you. But we cannot say ‘aggregate’, which no one here would understand, or anti-Possibilists, which you would find just as objectionable and which would not be accurate, being too all-embracing.
It continues,
What we need are letters from Paris, sent direct to the Star, bearing the Paris postmark and refuting the Possibilist calumnies which appeared in Saturday’s and Tuesday’s editions, namely, that Boulé’s election campaign was run on Boulangist money, that Vaillant had acted as an ally of the Boulangists, etc. I should say that you could do this perfectly well without ruffling your newly-found dignity as the one and only Catholic Church in matters connected with French Socialism.
Apart from Engels notably not criticising Lafargue’s misguided enthusiasm for Boulanger, what else does this refer to?
It is first of all, about the Guesdist tendency’s war with the “possibilitists” of Paul Brousse leader of the Fédération des travailleurs socialistes de France and with Édouard Vaillant a former Commmard, and ‘Blanquist’ elected a Municipal Councillor in 1884 in Paris
Engels backed the desire of his friend for an independent workers’ party – unlike the Possibilistes, and by extension municipal socialists of all stripes, who turned from intransigent socialism and were ready to compromise with the Parliamentary (and Municipal) Republican left in order to achieve reforms.
But this leaves open the issue of what position should have been taken to Boulangism, a view, which Lafargue was, unfortunately, to clarify further in a far from progressive direction.
As Abidor says,
We can multiply the number of quotations from those on the left who either supported Boulangism or refused to openly or uncompromisingly oppose it. Paul Lafargue, the great socialist leader and theoretician, who in 1887 wrote a bitingly mocking article on Boulangism, also wrote to Engels that “Boulangism is a popular movement that is in many ways justifiable.” The followers of the other great Marxist if the generation, Jules Guesde, wrote that “the Ferryist danger being as much to be feared as the Boulangist peril, revolutionaries should favor neither the one nor the other, and shouldn’t play the bourgeoisie’s game by helping it combat the man who at present is its most redoubtable adversary.”
He continues,
But not everyone on the left was willing to go along with or refuse to block the Boulangist juggernaut. Jean Jaurès wrote that Boulangism is “a great movement of socialism gone astray,” and the Communard and historian of the Commune P-O Lissagaray was a motive force behind the Société des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, which was formed to combat Boulangism and defend democracy, uniting in the group socialists, republicans, students and Freemasons.
This episode is described in greater detail in Les Hommes Révoltés. Les Origines Intellectuelles du réformisme en France (19721 – 1917) Emmanuel Jousse. 2017. Pages 150 – 152.
The campaign against Boulanger “« empêcher la réaction césarienne. » (halt the Caesarist Reaction!) attracted the support not only Paul Brousse and Vailliant but the radical left ‘Allemanists” of Jean Allemane a trade unionist, and veteran of the Paris Commune exiled to hard labour in New Caledonia, and Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, the author of the still valuable History of the Paris Commune of 1871, an event in which he participated.
In other words, the salt of the earth.
After Boulangism dispersed, left supporters of Boulangism were still churning out books justifying their alliance.
Pàtil-Emile Laviron claimed that the anti-Boulangist campaign has meant an alliance with the parliamentary establishment and neglect of the class struggle (“Oubliant leur principe de la lutte des classes, ils entrèrent dans la coalition parlementaire des radicaux et des opportunistes. Boulangisme et Parlementarisme.” 1888)
In Les antisémites en France : notice sur un fait contemporain 1892 Mermeix (Gabriel Terrail) claimed that right-wingers and anti-semites were merely ‘infiltrators” in the movement. The General had popularised the ideas of socialism, (“Le général Boulanger a donc puissamment aidé l’esprit public à évoluer vers le socialisme”).
This may not help sort out the ‘genuine’ Marxist sheep from the reformist Goats, but it does raise some contemporary issues about national populism and anti-antisemitism…
In some respects one can that an alliance against a serious hard-right nationalist project, Brexit, springs to mind….means marching with, though not supporting, a variety of groups with this goal, though not others, in common.
It is hard to tell, but one could ask if more than one section of the Full Brexit would have had some sympathy with General Boulanger. who stood for the “real” France, the “real” workers” against the cosmopolitans.
What would Galloway have done…..?
