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Addendum 34
Trump’s ‘Democratic’ Despotism/ Shame on May/ Corbyn’s ‘Brexit’ Solecism
The Recusant stands with most of the free, sane world in passionately opposing and condemning Donald Trump’s absurd, vindictive and persecutory ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority nations –Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
This is not only a deeply prejudiced policy, it is also fascistic and has uncanny echoes of the attitudes of the Thirties; attitudes and consequences which we’d all hoped, in the Western world, never to have to witness again. But certainly the manner in which Muslims are now being treated in the customs orbit of the United States isn’t a million miles away from the treatment of the Jews in Thirties and Forties Germany.
(In spite of our being a republican webzine, we commend Prince Charles for his impassioned reminder of the dark chapter of our European recent-past which incomprehensibly seems to be being rapidly forgotten or airbrushed out of collective memory by certain political factions and their followers in the West only 70 odd years on).
The Recusant is an internationalist webzine, something of which we are very proud, as evidenced by our list of nations from which we have drawn contributors over our first ten years of online publishing (and yes 2017 is, incidentally, the tenth anniversary of The Recusant). The Recusant stands shoulder to shoulder at this time with those Arabic nations currently being scapegoated and offended against by Trump’s Islamophobic stance; and, more particularly, extend our solidarity to our many Arabic contributors.
Trump is of course modelling his presidency on the similarly pugilistic Putin, the two, of course, also being mutual admirers. The US Government’s unprecedented move to prosecute journalists for covering the anti-/Muslim ban protests is quite blatantly a signal of Trump’s anti-democratic, dictatorial intent as president; as is, of course, the almost daily shots of the new despot of the White House signing off his extreme ‘executive orders’ (a recent article somewhere quite convincingly likened Trump to some of the Roman Emperors).
Nestling uncomfortably between these two crypto-despotic, Thirties-esque ‘Strong Men’, is our increasingly ineffectual prime minister Theresa May, whose refusal in the last few days to openly condemn Trump’s reprehensible policy is nothing short of a national disgrace; as is her extension of the invitation for a state visit to Trump. We can now clearly see that May is every bit as unprincipled, unscrupulous, opportunistic and spineless as her predecessor.
May has also exemplified those qualities in her complete and utter capitulation to the extreme Right of the Tory Party by going for a “hard Brexit”. The one day debate begrudgingly given to the House of Commons on the back of the Supreme Court ruling was nothing short of a democratic insult and a complete mockery of parliamentary sovereignty.
The Recusant is also deeply unhappy to report that perhaps for the first time since Jeremy Corbyn became Leader of the Labour Party, we strongly disagree with his decision to pressurise his MPs with a three line whip to coerce them into voting in favour of triggering Article 50. We do not believe this was the right approach, but that Corbyn should have allowed his MPs to vote with their true beliefs on this singularly most important vote of our lifetime.
Bizarrely, we find ourselves agreeing with the Labour rebels in this instance (whose number included, ironically, former leadership challenger, Owen Smith), many of whom we promptly opposed at the time of the front bench rebellion. But the issue of our membership of the EU goes well beyond usual loyalties, and on this particular matter, The Recusant believes Corbyn was resoundingly wrong. We believe these Labour rebels, along with the highly principled Caroline Lucas of the Greens and, it pains us to add, the Liberal Democrats, were right and indeed brave to vote against the heavily whipped bill. Tim Farron is outspokenly pro-Europe and it seems the Lib Dems are now the party of 'Remain' and will no doubt continue to gain more supporters and members, including many pro-Europe Labourites.
The triggering of Article 50 is the single most catastrophic parliamentary move in generations; but tragically an almost inevitable outcome after the worst act of political cowardice in parliamentary history, which was the disastrous and spineless decision of the Cameron Government to throw open the monumentally complex and obfuscated choice as to whether to remain in the EU or leave it to a British public which is comprehensively oblivious, abjectly uneducated and tabloid-brainwashed on the nature of the EU and of our membership of it.
The Recusant, a pro-European webzine, believe that the UK needed to remain in a reformed EU in order to both sustain the continued peace of Europe and protect and improve human and employment rights in the UK. God knows what will happen to such protections and rights, not to mention the stability of peace in Europe, now that the UK is on course to cast itself adrift from the rest of the Continent.
On the domestic front, how refreshing it was to read a mainstream article on the hardly ever discussed scandal of claimant-vetting by letting agents and private landlords –an issue The Recusant campaigned about for years:
There are also fresh new welfare cuts on the way this April, as covered in the Morning Star this week:
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-ff3b-Welfare-slashing-leaves-disabled-unable-to-live#.WJR5lbOmldg
Coinciding with these latest welfare cuts, this editor/writer’s next poetry collection, which is themed around the last six years of remorseless welfare cuts under Iain Duncan Smith’s despotic reign at the DWP, Tan Raptures, is coming out with Smokestack Books on 1 April. The book can be pre-ordered here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/tan-raptures/alan-morrison/9780995563506
We shudder to think just how worse things will get for the future of our welfare state and NHS post-Brexit. These are indeed dark times but The Recusant sees a ray of light in continued cultural resistance.
A.M. 1-3/2/17
Addendum 33
Good Riddance to 2016 –The Most Catastrophic Year Since 1986
In many ways 2016 has been the most politically bleak year since 1986, which saw the catastrophic ‘Big Bang’ deregulation of the stock markets consolidating the final phase of the Thatcherite monetarist revolution, in the wake of the unions’ and debatably British socialism’s last ditch stand against the Thatcherite onslaught with the defeat of the miners (oh, and 1986 also stands out for many for marking the nadir of popular music which would take at least another two years to even start to recover from the drum-machine acrylic slickness, gloss and sheer commercialism that almost killed it off for good).
The catastrophic results of both the UK EU Referendum and the US Presidential Election are more than enough cause to consign 2016 to Room 101 several times over. Optimists might wish to celebrate seeing the back of such a horrendous year, but realists will remind them that 2017 promises to be even worse, with the full consequences of the tectonic shifts in political and economic spheres inescapably crashing down the line towards us the further we drag ourselves into the New Year. “Brexit”, the single most disastrous decision our nation has possibly ever made collectively, is threatening to kick into full throttle by the end of March, that is, if the Tory Government gets its way; and Trump’s presidency will be upon us by the end of January –there’s no escaping it! The new era of political ‘strong men’ playing brinkmanship with all of our hopes and fears –a blond-rinse orang-utan in Washington and an unchallenged poker-faced ex-KGB baboon in Moscow– is rapidly approaching as the world hurtles ever more explicitly into a repeat run of the apocalyptic 1930s.
Just to make things even more depressing, we must remind ourselves of those more gracious souls who have left us, a myriad of some of the more likeable and humane famous, many actors and musicians among them –and, just to add more sourness to the departing year and the start of its trepidatious successor, actor/writer Carrie Fisher and writer, poet and critic John Berger (whose superlative Collected Poems is reviewed elsewhere on this webzine). And, of course, the departure of admittedly a more ‘marmite’ persona, Fidel Castro, Communist revolutionary and President of the Republic of Cuba –one of the few socialist states left on the map– for over forty years in the face of continual embargos and sanctions imposed by capitalist America. Whatever one’s view on Castro, and certainly there have over the years been many rumours of autocracy, oppression and abuses of human rights, it is difficult for anyone to deny the accomplishments of this almost singular socialist state, which include the best health service and the highest rates of literacy in the world; not to mention, arguably, the most socially equal society in the world, with wages broadly the same across all types of job, from manual labourers to surgeons. The Recusant salutes Castro’s socialist accomplishments over the decades.
Castro’s death, very much the end of an era, comes darkly at a time when Far Right populism is on the march across Europe and America. Virtual antichrist Trump aside, in the UK we still have to contend with the ever-aggressively chauvinistic UKIP, now led by the rather ghastly, acid-tongued Paul Nuttel, while also having to put up with the continued unabashed outspokenness of its former leader and perpetual purple-faced mascot, Nigel Farage, who, following his insulting the widower of a victim of politicised violence fomented by UKIP-type propaganda and scaremongering during the EU Referendum campaigns, then decided to criticise the Archbishop of Canterbury for his “negative” Christmas message! This message imparted the fundamental principles of Christianity and highlighted how far Western societies are moving away from this and ever further into the swamp of Mammon, materialism and discriminatory politics. Evidently Farage sees the latter blights on humanity as things to celebrate –cue, perhaps, Virtual Antichrist Mark II?
Since our last editorial addendum, there have been further reports on how DWP sanctions are completely ineffective in terms of incentivising jobseekers to suddenly find non-existent work, even if they are still very effective at driving untold numbers of claimants to either starving to death or taking their own lives! In the meantime, we learn that the unconscionable mastermind of said DWP sanctions, e-Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, is now charging £500 per hour for corporate speeches on welfare cuts and benefit sanctions! But The Recusant feels very certain that IDS will get his comeuppance in due course, one way or another…
There have also been some vital reports in the newspapers on the scandalous explosion in street homelessness under the Tories, and the ‘growth sector’ of what is euphemised as ‘defensive architecture’, designed to ‘protect’ public buildings from the scourge of the homeless who might attempt to rest or sleep on or nearby them –features such as homeless spikes, benches with iron arm-rest partitions, and the growing prevalence of narrow plastic bum-perches at bus stops instead of proper benches, all designed to keep the street homeless away. This is how rotten our society has now become: buildings are being armed against homeless human beings, spiked and castellated to repel rough sleepers! During the Christmas period there were numerous stories of various street homeless persons dying in the cold. Here are some relevant links:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/dec/11/rough-sleepers-homeless-charity-architecture
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-e7ab-Our-foodbank-disgrace#.WE6MkrN75dg
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-e307-Homelessness-shames-us-all#.WFQYhrOmldg
The one and only single good policy which came in an otherwise desultory Tory Autumn Statement was the abolition of letting agent fees. This is a genuinely positive move forward and extremely surprising from a Tory Government; however, much more needs to be done in terms of reforming the private rental sector, such as more secure tenures for tenants, and, most vitally of all, the reintroduction of private rent controls! Until we have the latter, renters will still be perpetually tyrannised by unaffordable and unmitigated high and rising private rents. Abolition letting agent fees is a great first step but should not be the only step –though The Recusant is pretty certain that it will be, at least, as long as we have the Tories, political force of the landlord class, in power.
One brief ray of sunlight glinting through the otherwise fogbound political landscape was the Lib Dem bi-election victory in Richmond, which was resoundingly symbolic of the recalcitrance of the UK’s Remain camp, surely the most massive ‘minority’ in political history!? Long may such defiance continue…
On a final note, The Recusant feels sure that the late poet Philip Larkin would have approved of his investiture into Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Larkin was nothing if not an arch-traditionalist and patriot, and his frequently powerful, highly accomplished and occasionally profound poetry certainly in our view deserves such posthumous tribute, even if we have considerably less taste for his personal politics.
A.M. 31/12/16-3/1/17
Addendum 32
Trumped!
With the shock triumph of the modern day Citizen Kane, billionaire businessman Donald Trump, in the US elections, progressives the world over might justifiably now feel –excuse the pun– trumped. Now we have the deeply disturbing situation where the two world super powers are reigned over by demagogic ‘Strong Men’: the blonde-rinsed silverback primate Trump in the West, and the baboon-faced expansionist Putin in the East. And with the continued chaos in Syria, something of a vicarious war between the US and Russia, the trajectory of future international disputes and domestic stalemates will no doubt all come down to who sulks the loudest in the White House and the Kremlin. Well yippy! What a prospect for 2017 and beyond...
And well might the West go rather overboard as it has with this year’s Remembrance Day(s?) (like Halloween and Bonfire Night now seemingly lasting an entire week), since with the equally unexpected (the criminally inaccurate exit pollsters really need to be shown the door now!) Brexit vote in June’s catastrophic EU Referendum, now followed by America’s mass electoral self-harm in voting in the most right-wing, xenophobic and misogynistic presidential candidate in history, who vows protectionism, trade wars, a wall across the Mexican border and a mass purge of Mexicans and Moslems, world peace, let alone European, is at its most precarious since 1939.
But it is, more immediately, the precariousness of peace in Europe which The Recusant is particularly concerned about at this time; a peace which has lasted –bar the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s and some latter day infractions in Ukraine (the Balkans are, of course, historically fractious)– since 1945 and arguably has been in part maintained by the emergence and expansion of the European Union. The Recusant is the first to argue that the EU has not operated as fairly or harmoniously as it might, and certainly the Troika-blackmail of austerity-wracked Spain and Greece, and particularly its anti-democratic mishandling of the latter nation state, left much to be desired and rightly infuriated many, particularly the European Left.
However, ultimately we believed in remaining in the EU and reforming it towards a more social-democratic economic model, which was far more likely to achieve eventually than it will, tragically, be in the now post-Brexit UK, where patriotism, jingoism, racism and xenophobia are now well and truly ‘out of the bag’ and almost normalised by the outcome of the referendum. What’s more, Ukip’s Nigel Farage is still on the warpath, in spite of having finally got his blinkered little way and set Blighty adrift from the dastardly clutches of ‘Brussels bureaucrats’; the self-entitled Farage (French surname, German wife, O the irony!) now threatens a “march” on the Supreme Court following the perfectly legitimate and rational ruling that the UK Parliament must be involved in the Brexit process, and not simply have it cobbled together by a bunch of uber-right-wing Brexiteers at one dingy dog-end of the Executive.
This “march”, likely to come on 5th December when the verdict on the Government’s appeal is announced by said Court, is also likely to be peopled as much by members of the English Defence League and the British National Party, as it is by ordinary common or garden Brexiteers (just as Trump celebrations are likely to consist mostly of rednecks and the Ku Klux Klan -not hyperbole, as deeply disturbing footage of 'white supremacists' in suits giving Nazi-style salutes and chanting "Heil Trump" in Washington paid testament to this weekend).
Not content with having already stoked up the dormant flames of racism in some sort of homage to Enoch Powell and Oswald Mosley, with his inflammatory BREAKING POINT posters during the Referendum campaign (and generally help fuel a febrile climate which led, albeit convolutedly, to the political murder of pro-EU Labour MP Jo Cox in her constituency –her assailant, a self-proclaimed ‘political activist’, having shouted "BRITAIN FIRST" as he attacked her), Farage now wishes to whip up another hate-filled atmosphere while simultaneously publicly undermining the rule of law, foundation-stone of our very democracy.
The Recusant believes Farage has his sights set on future high office in the UK, and his very public visit to president elect Trump even before prime minister Theresa May has got round to meeting him, says everything, in terms of symbolism, we need to know about Ukip’s interim leader and his personal political ambitions. Certainly he will be buoyed on Trump’s victory in terms of envisioning how his own bogus ‘popular front’ or “people’s army” against an invisible and indeterminate “Establishment” might somehow one day mushroom into similar electoral triumph –though he would need Proportional Representation for that happen, as it’s not likely to ever come about through First Past the Post.
Both Brexit and Trump’s triumph -Trumpit...?- are now being openly cited by Far Right leaders in Europe as milestones in some sort of “global revolution” through the ballot box, but of course, it’s a ‘revolution’ which is entirely on the Right of politics; not to say, the Far Right of politics. So now we have to listen to the likes of the unnervingly Aryan-looking Geert Wilders of the ascendant anti-Islam Dutch Party for Freedom and the similarly Aryan-looking Marine Le Pen of Front National in France eulogising on the significations of these two recent vicissitudes pointing towards further national exits from the EU, most notably their two nations which have elections coming up in 2017, as does core EU player, Germany.
Then we only have to remind ourselves of Far Right ascendancies in Hungary (Jobbik), Greece (the dormant Golden Dawn), Germany (Alternative für Deutschland), and even in normally progressive Scandinavia, all fuelled by mass paranoia about the refugee crisis, Islam and immigration in general, to envision how sizeable parts of Europe generally might be heading in the near future. The very real prospect facing us at the moment is not only the possible disintegration of the European Union, but also the possible emergence of Dutch and even French neo-Fascist states. If this sounds hyperbolic then one only has to look to history –many thought it was hyperbolic in the mid Thirties to predict that Hitler would try and take over Europe.
It is certainly timely that the Left Book Club has recently been revived by Pluto Press, since its original incarnation was founded by Victor Gollancz in 1936 emphatically to publish polemic opposing the rise of Fascism in Europe. So now could not be a more fitting time for its return.
Of course, the sick, disabled, unemployed and poor of this nation have already been subjected to fascistic policies for the past six years in terms of benefit cuts, the bedroom tax, mandatory unpaid work placements, sanctions, penalties, work capability assessments and the ‘rough music’ “scrounger”-mongering culture of discrimination and hate promulgated by government and right-wing tabloids. Disability campaign groups have fought hard to keep the catastrophic human consequences of these inhumane policies in the mainstream spotlight, and have now been helped in this continuing crusade by the filmic intervention of Ken Loach with I, Daniel Blake. Another disability protest outside Parliament this week against the imminent further cuts to Employment and Support Allowance, the benefit which most sick and disabled claimants are on, which will see their incomes devastating to below subsistence levels, received little coverage in the mainstream media, but was at least covered by the Morning Star:
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-fb92-Disabled-campaign-keeps-up-pressure#.WC2nRrN75dg
The Daily Mail, ever a gentrified organ of hate, even decided to ‘name and shame’ our judiciary as ‘ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE’ –and pretty much got away with it: the Government barely batting an eyelid at this undermining of our law system which normally they are the first to champion. Then the likes of Farage and Duncan Smith hinting at future civil unrest if Article 50 isn’t triggered soon or is delayed in Parliament (you know, that old ‘democratic process’ which they should theoretically be the first to defend since that’s the main claim under which they campaigned to Leave the EU!). Then the threat by Farage to lead a march of the Far Right on the Supreme Court should it chuck out the Government’s undemocratic appeal against the High Court ruling.
Fascism, or at least, attitudinal fascism on certain fundamental political and constitutional issues, is coming home to roost now in the mainstream, which does rather remind one of Martin Niemöller’s famous speech: ‘First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist./ Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— /Because I was not a Trade Unionist./ Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— /Because I was not a Jew./ Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me’. One might easily readapt this –as Niemöller did so himself on different occasions:
First they came for the unemployed, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a unemployed.
Then they came for the sick and disabled, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not sick and disabled.
Then they came for the immigrants, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not an immigrant.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
THE DAILY MAIL, DAILY EXPRESS ET AL: ENEMIES OF DEMOCRACY
Now we can all see quite plainly the true reactionary and anti-democratic nature of the Daily Mail as it stamped its latest tantrum of a front page headline, ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE, under photos of the three judges who ruled that the UK Parliament had to have input in deciding on the nature of the Brexit process, as opposed to simply the Government, blackmailed by a cabal of Brexiteer right-wingers, in spite of an ostensible “wet” Remainer prime minister in Theresa May.
That May –let alone Justice Secretary Liz Truss– has failed to publicly condemn the Mail and other newspaper repeat offenders (including the usual suspects, The Express, The Sun and The Telegraph) from their reprehensible campaign of mob-fomenting contempt for the rule of law simply because they don’t agree with the verdict, betrays her instantly as an opportunist prime minister who is more concerned about keeping power and position than standing up for basic democratic principles against febrile populist posturing and, frankly, fascistic attitudes currently venting themselves through the popular press and social media.
Clearly May is petrified not only of the ultra right-wing cabal in her own Cabinet, but of the right-wing mainstream press, particularly those eurosceptic papers which could slip from supporting the Tories to supporting UKIP at the slightest provocation (the Express having jumped that ship a while ago). Even one senior Tory, Dominic Grieve, was quoted in The Guardian today as comparing the Mail’s stance as “smacking of the fascist state”. One wonders if that is indeed, deep down, the kind of state that Paul Dacre and the Daily Mail actually wants to have at the end of the day: a Fascist England. At the end of the day, most sane and right-thinking people in this nation will recognise the true ‘ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE’ in the likes of the Daily Mail.
Demagogue for Essex Man, Farage has of course wasted no time in attempting to whip up further pressure-cooker populism in response to the High Court ruling that Parliament must be involved with the Brexit process before Article 50 can be triggered by publicly planting the rhetorical seed of a ‘popular uprising’ if Parliament attempts to block or even simply frustrate the passage of Brexit. Is Farage waiting for the balloon to go up so he might unleash his “People’s Army” –his Purpleshirts?– on an unsuspecting British public? On Sunday Farage did more fomenting of Brexiteer 'fury' by suggesting if Brexit didn't happen then this nation would see a public backlash "the likes of which none of us have seen before in our lifetimes". This is rhetorical wish-fulfilment on Farage’s part of course, and his political threat that he will “be back” if Brexit hasn’t happened by 2019 speaks volumes for his still latent long-term ambitions; as it is wish-fulfilment when the contemptible Iain Duncan Smith half-smirked while warning of a “constitutional crisis” should Article 50 not be triggered. Despicable shit-stirring from two of the nation's most self-entitled shit stirrers. At least now we know the likes of Farage and IDS ultimately don't believe in the rule of law if it decides against their petty interests, but see it perfectly fit to stir up some kind of 'popular' revolt, a mass tantrum, just because they can't get their own way to the letter.
The Recusant commends their courage, and particularly that of Miss Miller, who has maintained an admirable composure in the face of frothing-mouthed (mostly right-wing) opposition. She has done our nation a vital service by pursuing this constitutionally complex matter to the Courts in order to arrest the irrationally speedy process put in place by May’s Government, not to say the bluntly undemocratic attempt to completely bypass Parliament on the single most important national matter since the Second World War, which demonstrated a complete contempt for the sovereignty of Parliament, for the integrity of parliamentary debate and accountability on most pressing matters of state, and is comparable only to the Daily Mail’s unmitigated contempt for the rule of law.
Toby Young's Drubbing of I, Daniel Blake
But for those who have been unfortunate enough to have been sick, disabled or mentally ill and claiming state assistance during the past six years, Britain has in many ways been a socially intolerant and discriminatory nation; not to say, in some respects, attitudinally fascistic, for quite some time now. But now that open prejudice against the unemployed, sick and disabled has spilt over into open prejudice and hate crime against immigrants, foreigners, and even some pro-Remain campaigners that more of the mainstream commentariat and political class –even many Tories!– are starting to sit up and take notice…
Except, of course, for the implacable Toby Young. Ever-scowling, dissenting son of late left-wing sociologist Michael Young, author of the seminal The Rise of the Meritocracy, right-wing ‘writer’ Toby Young wrote of Ken Loach’s Palm D’Or-winning exposé of the contemporary benefits system, I, Daniel Blake, in one of his columns for whichever interchangeably right-wing newspaper it is he writes columns for (the precise title escapes us) something along the lines that ‘only lefties can get all misty-eyed about Benefits Britain’, thus managing to insult both the Left and Loach while also further reinforcing the very blinkered ‘scroungerphobia’ promulgated by the red-tops, their readerships and the right-wing politicians they support, which the film addresses and challenges, and all in just one sentence! A sentence nevertheless reinforced with its own concrete-thick ignorance and flint-heartedness.
The Recusant is heartened that Loach’s post-retirement return to the Director’s chair has resulted in what we have long felt to be the elephant-in-the-room of our time, what we term the ‘welfare hate’, as opposed to welfare debate. No doubt I, Daniel Blake will continue to rattle the right-wing press –pace Young again– and political establishment, particularly as it is been announced this week that there will be yet further governmental carrot-and-stick initiatives to get more sick and disabled claimants “back into work”, as was discussed in an apposite piece in the Morning Star this week. Another apposite piece responded more directly to ongoing tabloid stigmatisation of the unemployed, sick and disabled, in the context of Ken Loach’s polemical-cinematic intervention on the issue:
Just as The Recusant was starting to think that, finally, after six years of lacerating cuts, sanctions and penalties, a new Work and Pensions Secretary in the relatively much less threatening aspect of Damien Green (much less hateable a figure than his reprehensible and unapologetic predecessor) announced promptly after taking office that there would be no more twice-yearly work capability reassessments of the long-term sick, at least, those with “chronic conditions” who are in the Support Group of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) (even if many of those in the Work-Related Activity Group (the notoriously abbreviate ‘WRAG’) also have chronic conditions!).
Satirically, one only wonders if and when Green’s spiky predecessor will put out his own filmic testament to his time as Work and Pensions Secretary by way of putting across ‘the other side of the story’, of how he was coerced into overseeing the welfare cuts and punitive sanction regime which he devised by bullyboy Chancellor Osborne (well, the latter is a bully, but so is IDS), but we don’t expect -nor wish- to see I, Duncan Smith anytime soon…
The Recusant congratulates Jeremy Corbyn for securing an even bigger mandate in his re-election as Labour Party Leader, trouncing Owen Smith by 61% to 32%. But this must not be a time of complacency for Corbyn and his team: having won the hearts and minds of the British Left, they must now win the hearts and minds of the PLP if we are to finally see an end to the interminable internecine conflict within the party.
The Recusant backs Corbyn’s policies, as it would back the policies of any socialist Labour leader, and it is important to remind ourselves, as Corbyn himself frequently does, that this Labour movement, inclusive of Momentum, is not about one single person, it is about socialism and its re-establishment as a mainstream political force. Corbyn would be the first to assert that as the first authentically left-wing Labour leader since Michael Foot, he is as much a symbol for socialism as an embodiment of its principles.
The Recusant iterates these points since at times we fear there is an element of demagoguery amongst some so-called ‘Corbynistas’ which could, if unchecked, obfuscate ease of succession when the time comes for another Labour politician of same politics to take up the socialist mantle so excellently cemented by Corbyn and his supporters, as will inescapably happen eventually.
The Recusant also wishes to assert that we firmly believe now in a Progressive/Rainbow Alliance between Labour, the Greens, the SNP and Plaid Cymru, and possibly Tim Farron’s Lib Dems, as probably the only realistic possibility of keeping the Tories from power in the next general election. Supporters of the Greens prior to Corbyn’s ascendancy, The Recusant, as with most left-wing organs, returned to the Labour Party on the advent of this new democratic socialist chapter in its history; but we are also supporters of the Green Party, since we do not subscribe to party tribalism, only to socialist politics, wherever they exist.
The Recusant wishes to express support for Labour’s besieged Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, a spirited and passionate socialist politician who has been known and still is known for speaking his mind in no uncertain terms. McDonnell might have gone a bit verbally overboard at times, but we certainly do not think his recently criticised epithet for palpably uncompassionate ex-disabilities minister Esther McVey, that she is “a stain of inhumanity”, in any way warrants the opprobrium presently being heaped on McDonnell.
Given that McVey oversaw some of the most vicious cuts to disability benefits of the Tory-DWP-Atos axis, which resulted in over 91,000 sick and disabled claimants dying prematurely and/or committing suicide between 2011-14, part of which was during her watch, some might argue that “a stain of inhumanity” is actually letting McVey off quite lightly... We presume McDonnell means the moral fabric of our current society on which McVey’s “inhumanity” is a “stain”?
Syntax aside, it is symbolic of our morally back-to-front culture of today, seemingly oblivious or simply indifferent to the mass suffering of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society, that rather than heaping opprobrium on the culprits of the most heinous fiscal culling of a voiceless minority in British political history –the McVeys, Millers, Graylings, and, of course, Duncan Smiths– people instead heap the opprobrium on the politician who has the basic moral courage to call them out for administrative manslaughter of legion claimants. If that sounds hyperbolic, then we remind readers of the fact that ours is the first government in Europe to be investigated and sharply berated for abuses of disability rights.
The Recusant also found it extremely ironic that McDonnell, a politician who has unstintingly argued on behalf of the poorest and most vulnerable in our society, was accused of being “a very, very nasty piece of work” by the Thatcher-esque Tory MP Anne Sourby on last week’s Question Time.
Twenty-First Century Socialism
Occupy-supporter Reverend Giles Fraser’s written a very apposite column in The Guardian on the irony that Jeremy Corbyn, an atheist, is more Christian in his social politics than most church-going politicians in parliament, particularly the Tories; Fraser touches on the inherent contradiction of being a ‘Christian Tory’, puts this down to a mental ‘compartmentalisation’ of principles and values (something this writer has formerly anatomised in terms of Cartesian Dualism e.g. a separating of belief and behaviour), and also asks the ringing question that, since Corbyn’s politics are indeed the closest to Christ’s teachings of any political leader, why then does the British mainstream write him off as “unelectable”? Clearly because ‘politics’ is compartmentalised and inhabits a very different compartment to spiritual beliefs…
By wholly negative contrast, The Recusant can’t help but mention the utter absurdity of the concluding sing-a-long at the UKIP party conference a week or so ago: a UKIP ‘choir’ made up mostly of septogenarains and octogenarians (no doubt the party’s average membership ages) performing the strange up-and-down bodily motion employed in the protracted flourish of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance as a lead up to the chorusing of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ more resembled a keep fit class for the over-80s than the Last Night at the Proms.
We’d like to draw attention to a very interesting and incisive article on the nature of literary publishing and its overt commercialisation in recent decades by Fiona O’Connor in the Morning Star of 26 September 2016: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-2c74-Will-creativity-be-written-off#.V-kFKi_rtdg
It is on the basis of such principles as those of US Commune Editions that The Recusant and Caparison were formed, and it is also of course a long-standing mission of the UK’s Smokestack Books.
Dialectical Backlash Against Disability Cuts
The Recusant is heartened that Ken Loach’s film about life at the sharp end of welfare reform, I, Daniel Blake, continues to provoke wider debate about the evils of benefits stigmatisation and the demonization of the welfare state under the Tories. We hope to furnish a review of the film once it is on general release. Good to know it's being given advanced screenings by the People's Assembly. It can only be hoped that it will come to influence wider public debate, and even government policy, as Loach's Cathy Come Home did in the Sixties, and Jim Allen and Roland Joffé's brilliant The Spongers in the late Seventies.
There does seem to be a belated dialectical backlash against Tory welfare reforms and associated red-top "scrounger" rhetoric in recent times, and by way of his own modest contribution to this polemical pincer movement will be this writer/editor's next poetry collection, which is particularly focused on the notorious DWP 'brown envelope' scourge and charts the various vicissitudes of the Tories' dismantlement of the welfare state from 2010 up to 2016, Tan Raptures, forthcoming from Smokestack Books early next year.
There seems to be a turning tide at the moment, which the Tory Government is detecting, as evidenced in a softening of its policies in relation to the disabled, with new DWP Secretary Damian Green’s announcement that there will be no more six- monthly reassessments of claimants with “chronic” conditions. The Recusant will, however, believe it when we see it; while we are also sceptical as to how precisely the Government will define “chronic”.
Curiously, the ‘chronic’ conditions cited are ‘severe Huntington’s, autism or a congenital heart condition’. While it is heartening to see the relatively little-known incurable degenerative neurological disease Huntington’s given a primary mention, the phraseology, ‘severe Huntington’s’, is disingenuous and misleading, since Huntington’s Disease is always ‘severe’, since its prognosis is of gradual but fairly rapid neuro-degeneration of cognitive and motor faculties, a remorseless descent through psychosis and diminishing physical mobility and coordination, culminating in premature death, most often through pneumonia, caused by food and liquids settling in the lungs due to problems swallowing. (This writer knows this disease only too well: his late mother passed away in 2013 after a 15 year battle with Huntington's, a condition which he himself has a 50/50 chance of inheriting, and which forms the main theme of his most recent poetry collection, Shadows Waltz Haltingly (Lapwing Publications, 2015).
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/oct/01/dwp-scraps-retesting-for-chronically-ill-sickness-benefits-claimants
The Recusant Archived at British Library
Finally, this editor is happy to share with readers and contributors that he was recently asked for permissions by the British Library to archive The Recusant “for posterity” in the British Library poetry webzine archive. This is a great honour and shows just how far we’ve come since our inception in 2007 in terms of readership and reach. Of course, The Recusant is itself an online archive rather than a conventional webzine, in that we don’t do ‘issues’ or ‘editions’ but just periodically update our pages as and when the editor has time to.
To which, the editor –who runs The Recusant without any assistance– would like to apologise to all those who have submitted work in the past year or so but who have yet to receive responses to their submissions but he is doing the best he can to plough through his Recusant email inbox in between numerous time-consuming projects and commissions of his own –so please bear with him.
The Recusant is fully behind any move towards a cross-party Progressive Alliance as proposed by the Green Party and is heartened to learn that Corbyn’s Labour are seriously considering it too.
The Recusant also extends its congratulations to Caroline Lucas (who in 2010 was the patron of our first anti-austerity anthology, Emergency Verse) for securing her second run as leader of the Green Party –in a rather novel job share with one Jonathan Bartley, as announced at the party’s conference in Birmingham yesterday. We also pay tribute to Natalie Bennet whose former leadership of the Greens saw their membership mushroom and their manifesto further radicalise.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2016/sep/02/green-party-conference-leader-lucas
It is indeed the case that the Greens have led the way with the most radical progressive ideas over the past several years –and up until Corbyn’s leadership– such as the urgent need for a reintroduction of private rent controls, and the introduction of a basic citizen’s income (both policies proposals The Recusant and its anthologies have campaigned for several years too). But now that Corbyn’s Labour have already championed the former proposal, are seriously considering the latter, are also re-arguing the case for nationalisation of the railways, and have adopted a comprehensive anti-austerity position to the Government, the Greens have hit a kind of hiatus in their own political momentum with the re-emergence of an authentically left-wing Labour Opposition.
Hence the rational proposal for a progressive alliance with Labour and one which The Recusant wholeheartedly supports. The Recusant –up until Corbyn’s election as Labour leader– supported the Green Party primarily as the only genuinely left-wing force in parliamentary politics during New/Blue/One Nation Labour’s long slumber of neoliberalism. The Recusant didn’t stop supporting the Greens since Corbyn’s Labour came about, but we felt it our duty as a socialist webzine to put our support behind the first authentic socialist leader of Labour since Michael Foot; and as long as Corbyn and McDonnell remain in their positions, The Recusant will continue to support Labour as the most viable diametric alternative to the Tories.
But since we have long recognised the imperative of the Green Party’s ecosocialist agenda and its robustly radical and transformative agenda for the future –most particularly the aforementioned rent controls and basic citizen’s income– allied to an incontrovertible conviction that anarcho-capitalism is rapidly destroying not only our societies but also our very eco-system, The Recusant would most prefer of all options for the future of British progressives and alliance between Labour and the Greens. Surely the time for something along the lines of Green Labour has now arrived?
The Recusant is also wary of tribalism in politics: our prime loyalty is to the politics of socialism above any specific party nomenclature –which is why we put our primary support behind the Green Party during the past few years, since its policies were far more left-wing than Labour’s were. It’s not the Labour name, not even Corbyn’s, which brought us back to supporting Labour again under the latter’s winning of the leadership: it’s the socialism which Corbyn symbolises, as does McDonnell, which brought us back to backing Labour.
On a final note The Recusant would state that we also passionately believe in the Greens’ proposal for Proportional Representation over the utterly ineffective and democratically obsolete First Past the Post system we still have. The defeat of the Alternative Vote –which would have been a reasonable compromise between the two systems and at least ensured smaller parties such as the Greens would have stood a much better start of getting a handful more MPs– was a disaster for our democracy; it was a demonstration that this nation will only ever seemingly vote for radical change if it is a regressive and backward-looking change, such as Brexit, but not if it is a genuinely progressive change being proposed, such as AV.
The Greens are absolutely right to bring up the issue of our democratically defunct and antediluvian voting system and PR would indeed be the much-preferred option of The Recusant, and a step up from the previously proposed compromise of AV. We await Corbyn’s endorsement of this Green policy/referendum proposal, as surely it is the most progressive and democratic way forward for our voting system.
Here’s to a new left-wing amalgamate: Green Labour!
The New Five Evils/ Left-Behind Britain/ Labour's Nervous Breakdown
The Recusant commends Labour’s new radical stance against Britain’s vicious anti-welfare culture as addressed in Corbyn and McDonnell’s new covenant with regards to reinventing the welfare state for the 21st century. Most striking is their updating of Beveridge’s vintage Five Giant Evils –Want, Squalor, Disease, Idleness, Ignorance – as defined in the 1940s for his eponymous Report which served as the blueprint for the post-1945 Attlee Settlement. Corbyn and McDonnell have industriously defined five new social ‘ills’ for today’s food bank-and-zero hours contract society: Inequality … Neglect … Insecurity … Prejudice … and Discrimination… We excerpt below the salient parts of this timely speech delivered by Corbyn in his bid for a re-election as party leader:
Over the next couple of months, our campaign will set out how we plan to defeat the Tories … and elect a Labour government that will act to tame the forces holding people back: … of Inequality … Neglect … Insecurity … Prejudice … and Discrimination …
The injustices that scar society today are not those of 1945 … Want, Squalor, Idleness, Disease and Ignorance …
… And they have changed since I first entered Parliament in 1983…
Today what is holding people back above all are … Inequality … Neglect … Insecurity … Prejudice … and Discrimination …
… in which no individual is held back … and no community left behind.
… If our economy is to thrive it needs to harness the talents of everyone …
But not every workplace is unionised … and these are often complex cases that can take years.
So we are also committing to fund the Equalities and Human Rights Commission …
Every single plank of George Osborne’s failed and destructive economic programme is being torn up …
Most people now believe that the government’s cuts are both unfair … and bad for our economy.
The Centre for Welfare Reform, cited in the above linked article, is a thinktank which is actually more of a watchdog of current so-called welfare reform, and which publishes papers on radical ideas for reinventing the welfare state along egalitarian and progressive lines (as opposed to the simple demolition job by the Tories), key to which is its espousal of a Basic Income for all British citizens, something The Recusant passionately supports, and which has hitherto been championed by the Green party and latterly Corbyn’s Labour. Theirs is a fascinating and quite uplifting site in the current climate of benefits-stigmatisation: http://www.centreforwelfarereform.org/projects/basic-income.htmlhttp://www.centreforwelfarereform.org/library/type/pdfs/lets-scrap-the-dwp.html
Is new prime minister Theresa May going to alleviate the generation-stunting effects of six years of rightwing Tory social policy and dismantlement of the welfare state, with a trail of “One Nation” platitudes enunciated with apparent sincerity outside No. 10? With so many rightwing Brexiteers in her Cabinet, one would presume emphatically not. The Recusant felt at the time that May demonstrated a detectable air of humility, empathy and sincerity not witnessed in a Tory leader, let alone a Tory PM, since –at a push– John Major, but failing that, Ted Heath, back in the Seventies. And yet her choice for her first Cabinet almost instantly belied her Downing Street promises as pretty much empty.
The Recusant also found the manner in which May conveyed her taunts to Jeremy Corbyn at her first PMQs unattractively catty and ominously reminiscent of the mock-theatrical dispatch box cat-and-mouse approach of Thatcher. So, all in all, not a good start for May, in spite of an unwontedly ‘compassionate’ and ‘progressive’ maiden speech for a Tory PM (at least, since Harold McMillan in the 1950s, that is).
But returning to the current Labour rift: as to the great Labour rebellion, the mass resignation of most of Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet, the vote of no confidence in Corbyn, the smears, threats and general verbal abuse of the custard-pie-slinging internecine party disputes, and the leadership challenge, The Recusant is quite at a loss to comment. That the Labour party is in possibly the worst mess it’s ever been in and at a time when they could have quite easily been united against the EU-split Tories and taken the battle to their parapets instead of imploding their own, hardly needs reiterating as it’s patently clear to all of us.
The Recusant condemns any sort of intimidation from either side in the Labour Party split; in the pursuit of democratic socialism, not simply the rhetoric but also the protocols and methods must be conducted with an impetus of compassion and comradeship –noble and high-minded ends do not justify intimidating means. While The Recusant still backs Corbyn as Labour leader, it is what Corbyn symbolises, the ideals he represents, which we believe in and follow, and so-labelled ‘Corbynistas’ (a patronising sobriquet at best) must beware blind demagoguery. At this moment in time it just so happens that British democratic socialism is embodied in Jeremy Corbyn because he is –against all odds– the first authentically leftwing leader of the Labour party since Michael Foot; but in the future, it will be embodied by someone else, by another figurehead. Socialism remains essentially the same, but its figureheads inevitably change.
Corbyn is as much a symbol as he is a flesh-and-blood embodiment of democratic socialism, as is the same for any such leaders. The Recusant, as mentioned, backs Corbyn, and supports Momentum, and gives the benefit of the doubt to the latter mass-mobilising ginger group in spite of accusations of Trotskyite entryism into the Labour party (and certainly its name and evangelical energy as a movement-within-a-movement does seem to be generating a kind of ‘permanent revolution’ atmosphere within the Labour party).
But at the end of the day, the behaviour of the PLP has been nothing short of utterly deplorable. Supported with brazen bias by The Guardian and elsewhere among the metropolitan centre-left cognoscenti, there appears to be an attempt at generating an anti-Corbyn ‘momentum’ which is, nonetheless, woefully failing, as did the risible PLP coup attempt, and Angela Eagle’s very ‘entitled’ but utterly uninspired brief bid for the Labour leadership.
Owen Smith is a Shadow Minister whom The Recusant has appreciated for his demonstrative leftwing zeal and Welsh passion at the dispatch box, for his being an admirer of the great Labour Welshman Nye Bevan, but he would have served much better as a future appointed successor to Corbyn rather than as his premature usurper. His talk of a “practical revolution” of socialism through parliament as opposed to a mere “evolution” is all well and good, but many would argue this already been at least half-achieved by the very fact that a leftwinger is currently leader of the party –the very leader he is standing against! What’s more, his corporate pharmaceutical associations of the past bespeak of a capacity for supreme compromise of his so-called ‘socialism’. We need Corbyn to remain Labour leader as much as for what he symbolises as what he personally offers (as the now similarly split Democrats in the US needed Bernie Sanders).
But both Corbyn and Smith’s proposals to scrap the punitive DWP and replace it with newly constituted Ministry of Labour and Social Security is one of the most genuinely progressive policy proposals from Labour in decades and is commended by The Recusant. Of course, much of the irony of this Labour leadership split is that we basically have two leftwing Labour MPs battling against each other, as opposed to what it would have been had Angela Eagle not dropped out but replaced Owen Smith as challenger. There was an extremely insightful piece in The Guardian last week on the deep complexities of the Labour civil war, as also paralleled currently in that of the Democrats in the US:
We might think we have been here before, and to some extent we have been: The Recusant recalls the similarly disrespectful depictions of equally leftwing Labour leader Michael Foot, as Leader of the Opposition, back in the early 1980s, particularly in how the rightwing red tops made fun of his slightly scruffy, professorial appearance, his duffle-coat at the Cenotaph etc. Then even his successor, the less radical Neil Kinnock, was continually mocked for the basic playground irrelevancies that he happened to be Welsh and had ginger hair!
Finally, Ed Miliband, who was still far more moderate than Corbyn in his political views, was nonetheless depicted as “Red Ed” simply because he was slightly to the left of the centre-right New Labour, and was of course compared disparagingly to Wallace from Wallace and Grommet (even though, ironically, he actually bore more resemblance to Grommet!), and also ignominiously probed through the prism of a poorly disguised anti-Semitism.
Of course, even Gordon Brown was often publicly mocked and verbally abused by rightwing tabloids and rightwing politicians and celebrities for being “one eyed” (Jeremy Clarkson), ‘mentally unstable’, “a squatter in Downing Street”, and also famously humiliated in Parliament by Lib Dem Vince Cable for being “less Stalin, more Mr. Bean” (The Recusant is no fan of Gordon Brown and his neoliberal brand of Labourism, however, we always found the way he was baited by the tabloids and other agencies deeply distasteful due to the very personalising nature of such baiting).
But in Corbyn’s case we really are entering a whole different stratosphere of public pillorying of a leftwing Opposition leader (and it’s pretty much always and only the leftwing or centre-left leaders who seem to get this treatment from the primarily rightwing press!), as the LSE have pointed out in their report. And if Corbyn ever did become prime minister, we would almost certainly be in the territory of A Very British Coup, with the establishment (the real establishment that is) dead set on covertly unseating any openly leftwing premiership as soon as it possibly can; though preferably, in their minds, preventing it happening altogether.
Lastly, on a different note, The Recusant has watched with circumspection the ubiquitous television advert for the upcoming Paralympics, in which a Sinatra-voiced man in a wheelchair sings ‘Yes I can’ to the backing of a physically disabled orchestra –the advert then ending with the almost crypto-Nietzschean phrase, ‘We are the superhumans’! It comes across almost like some kind of subliminal DWP propaganda emphasizing Paralympians’ “fitness for work”.
The Paralympics ditty might as well go along these lines:
BREAKING POINT: Rhetoric Has Consequences
It comes as no surprise to The Recusant that Ukip’s Nigel Farage should have revealed himself to be the modern day Enoch Powell-cum-Oswald Mosley when he revealed an appallingly xenophobic and racially profiling poster with BREAKING POINT writ large over hundreds of distinctly non-white refugees in his no-holds-barred contribution to the "Brexit" Campaign.
One Brendan Harkin quite correctly identified the inspiration behind Farage’s choice of image and rhetoric by posting on his Twitter account stills from footage of anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda, taken from a six-part documentary on Netflix, Auschwitz: The Nazis and ‘The Final Solution’, over which are the subtitles: ‘…who flooded Europe’s cities after the last war – parasites, undermining their host countries’, which is referring to European Jews of the Thirties.
And as for the right-wing gutter press, well, remorseless “scrounger”-baiting headlines of countless front page ‘scoops’ of the Express, Mail and Sun and frequent use of terms such as “feckless”, “workshy”, “parasites”, “spongers” etc. aside for a moment, just see how a column by one Janice Atkinson in the Daily Express of 8 March 2013 reads when compared to a speech by chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels –this editor underlines certain terms to show the near-identical tone and nomenclature employed by both reprehensible pieces of propaganda:
Goebbels on the Jews circa 1933:
One might well ask why are there any Jews in the world order? That would be exactly like asking why are there potato bugs? Nature is dominated by the law of struggle. There will always be parasites who will spur this struggle on and intensify the process of selection between the strong and the weak. The principle of struggle dominates also in human life. One must merely know the laws of this struggle to be able to face it. The intellectual does not have the natural means of resisting the Jewish peril because his instincts have been badly blunted. Because of this fact the nations with a high standard of civilization are exposed to this peril first and foremost. In nature life always takes measures against parasites; in the life of nations that is not always the case. From this fact the Jewish peril actually stems. There is therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to root out (auszurotten) the Jew…
…benefit vouchers to fund essentials such as food and fuel – not for those who have paid into the system all their lives and need help when they lose their jobs but for those who are drug users or alcoholics, those who have mental illness and those who have previously committed benefit fraud. …Neither should the state fund uncontrolled childbirth. …When the state funds feckless families there is no limit to the children they can have as they are guaranteed funding. Child benefit should be restricted to three children. A larger family is a lifestyle choice. …If you start to withdraw benefits and instead channel the money into schemes that directly benefit the children then that is a first step to weaning them off the taxpayer. …You cannot imagine many deadbeat parents using benefits to buy a book to help their children read before they start school. …Until it is made worthwhile for everyone to work, to contribute and to be decent neighbours there will be more parasites…
The Nazis not only stigmatised and persecuted the Jews, but also perceived “undesirable” members of the wider populace, including the incapacitated, disabled and mentally ill, millions of whom were deported to concentration camps and ultimately exterminated; and as well the Nazis singled out what they termed the “arbeitsscheu”, which essentially translates as “workshy” (a term used many times by Iain Duncan Smith as Work and Pensions Secretary), and “asocial”; and, indeed, this category swelled into a broader categorisation termed Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich (“work-shy Reich”), which comprised those deemed ‘fit for work’ but who had ‘refused’ jobs more than a couple of times, and whom the Gestapo finally ‘dealt with’. The so-called “arbeitsscheu” had black triangle badges sown onto their prison camp shirts. Is there really such a vast difference in terms of implicit stigmatization between stitching badges on the long-term unemployed, or issuing them with very visible and item-limiting vouchers? The Recusant doesn’t think so.
The Recusant only wishes, sincerely, that our politicians and newspapers would truly learn from the tragic murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, an outspoken champion of the poor and disadvantaged against the politics of hatred-incitement and division practised so routinely by them today. But in a society in which it is perceived to be ‘fair comment’ and entirely ‘acceptable’ for politicians and red-top journalists to habitually allude to the unemployed as “scroungers” and “spongers”, and attitudinally imply that the sick, disabled and mentally ill are simply burdens on the public purse, with only a handful of voices on the radical fringes of the Left to speak up in opposition to such ten-a-penny scapegoating while the mainstream media barely bats an eyelid, well, bluntly, there’s a very long way to go to morally retune our rhetorically very ‘uncivilised’ society of today…
The Recusant hopes that the growingly symbolic martyrdom of such an emphatically compassionate parliamentary voice of the voiceless will leave as its long-term legacy the gradual rehumanising of parliamentary and red-top discourse, not least on such toxic topics as unemployment and “welfare”… For surely Jo Cox would be one of the first people to speak up against the continued societal stigmatisation of the poor and unemployed, just as she would no doubt only echo those courageous enough in the past couple of days to make a link between the recent rhetorical incursions of “Brexit” and Ukip campaigns and associated poster propaganda and the toxic atmosphere which, at least in part, percolated into one individual’s primitive outburst of violence which snatched her life away…
Tories Cheated their Way to Electoral V
ictory Last May/ Republican Corbyn/
Panama Cameron/ Boris on Obama
Thanks to Channel 4 News we have now learned that the Conservative Party basically cheated its way to electoral victory by not declaring expenditure –in excess of legal spending limits– on local campaigning in around 18 key seats, the very seats which they subsequently won and which ensured their nationally disastrous victory last May. That certainly makes the bitter pill of their majority government even bitterer to swallow. We can only hope bi-elections will be called in all those key seats and the Tories lose their slender majority, forcing a general election.
If there was a general election tomorrow, The Recusant is confident Corbyn’s Labour would stand a strong chance of getting into power, in spite of the PLP and media’s best efforts to sink the new socialist leader of the party. And what a time this is for the Opposition –finally a true Opposition and True Labour, with the excellent John McDonnell providing a textbook example of Marxist economic policy. Even one lesser known front bench shadow minister in a debate a week or so ago quite emphatically stated that he was a “socialist” during his brilliant condemnation of Osborne’s diabolical budget. Would we ever have heard that word under Blair or Brown? Or even Miliband? No. Now it’s ‘respectable’ again to say you’re a ‘socialist’ (not that it should ever have been otherwise).
The Recusant is republican as well as socialist in sentiment and encourages those sympathetic to the notion of a monarchy-free democratic republic of the British Isles to join Republic: https://republic.org.uk/
The mark of just how dire a time this is was of course reinforced by the tens of thousands who protestors who marched through London last Saturday –tens of thousands and yet the only coverage of this mighty show of resistance to austerity was in The Guardian and the Morning Star, not a whisper on BBC News. But of course, when mere thousands throng in Windsor to celebrate the longevity of our monarch just a few days later, it’s wall-to-wall coverage on all channels from dawn to dusk (though we were heartened to see Channel 4 News put the Queen’s 90th birthday celebrations as its penultimate headline).
This is as much a time of radical ideas as it is of old repressive ones, as not only seen in the mass protests of the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, or in Corbyn’s Labour, but also in the once fringe notion of a basic citizen’s income (formerly only championed by the Green Party) now gathering currency throughout the community of mainstream economic theory. The Recusant directs readers to the official Citizen’s Income Trust website where the full details and arguments for this fundamentally radical idea are laid out –and it is an idea which The Recusant heartily supports: http://citizensincome.org/
The Recusant would also draw readers’ attentions to the following new polemical book, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso), reviewed on the CIT website: http://citizensincome.org/book-reviews/nick-srnicek-and-alex-williams-inventing-the-future-postcapitalism-and-a-world-without-work/ It seems this book offers a timely dialectic on the modern nature of work –the veritable ‘religion’ of secular Northern European societies (bar the more humanistic and holistic Scandinavia)– as defined solely in terms of employment i.e. jobs done almost entirely for the purpose of economic necessity while mostly lacking any of the meaningful qualities to be found in authentic human occupation (e.g. work employing one’s particular talents and interests), or vocation.
This book ambitiously and bravely argues for ‘full automation, the reduction of the working week, the provision of a basic [Citizen’s] income, the diminishment of the work ethic’. This is, after all, a ‘work ethic’ (and a particularly Protestant-Calvinistic ‘ethic’ as originally defined by Max Weber in his seminal polemic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904-5) which does not concern itself with occupational authenticity, nor with worrying at all about the chronic inbuilt obsolescence of occupational alienation, what Karl Marx termed entfremdung (German: estrangement from Gattungswesen, the “species-essence”). The Recusant believes the modern day atomistic definition of most ‘work’ or employment in capitalist society has become damagingly sacrosanct –just as, oppositely, the depiction of all those out of work or employment, no matter how justifiable the reasons (e.g. sickness, disability etc.), as uniformly “scroungers” is largely unquestioned in the mainstream and media (the very media which perpetuates such a myth).
This stunting of open-minded and objective debate on the subject of the perceived inalienability of the ‘work ethic’, coupled with its implicit denial of the reality that most people privately resent having to work, that is, those who have to do jobs purely for financial necessity and with no sense of intrinsic human reward or satisfaction from doing so, (hence why so much of the population passionately resent paying taxes, particularly if to –albeit very circuitously– part-subsidise benefits for those not in employment), is, symbiotically, every bit as stunting as the perfunctory notion of what constitutes “hard work” in contemporary capitalist society. To somehow ‘diminish’ this deeply entrenched, recidivistic ‘work ethic’ would be a Herculean accomplishment in itself; but The Recusant certainly agrees that there needs to be a radical, even revolutionary overhauling of how we define ‘work’, as something inherently useful, productive and meaningful to the person performing it, the wage for which is not the only incentive but, if anything, more of a bonus for the opportunity for persons to fulfil their natural talents and potentials through meaningful employment (or, more ideally, self-employment).
Like the Golgafrinchams in Douglas Adams’ classic Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, modern capitalist workforces are increasingly becoming more and more surplus to requirements of society by filling superfluous jobs such as call centres, sales, marketing, PR, baristas and the like. Most such jobs are ultimately pointless and, far from being useful to societies, if anything serve as impediments to smooth-functioning, efficiency and progress. In such a parlous context, the “zero hours contracts” are really the icing on the cake of capitalist model of occupation, or what we might term, ‘free market entfremdung’ –or rather, the ultimate capitalist piss take: zero hours to match zero purpose employment, almost a tacit admission that the position itself has no true worth.
The atomistic Tories don’t only ‘not get’ the notion of entfremdung, or at least don’t care about it because it mostly only affects the working classes, they don’t even show much respect towards society’s most necessitated workforce: the medical profession –and hence we see the unprecedented spectacle of a national junior doctors’ strike this week, plus a mooted permanent strike by the BMA…!
In the meantime, The Recusant continues to support the campaign for Britain to remain in a socially reformed Europe, primarily in order to retain our nation’s EU-facilitated employment, union and human rights protections which would otherwise likely be relinquished under unfettered Toryism following a “Brexit”. Again we would remind readers of the type of politicians who are arguing for an exit from the EU: Iain Duncan Smith, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Chris Grayling… need we go on…? Right-wing, chauvinistic, ‘macho’ mavericks to a man!
The Recusant is convinced that –necessity for radically reforming the reach of the Troika notwithstanding– a future in Europe is essential for both social and economic progress, and that if we were to cast ourselves adrift from the Continent politically, we could truly turn into a chronic, culturally stunted, perpetually right-wing tin-pot Ruritania and general irrelevance that bunting-strung days such as the Jubilee and the Queen’s Birthday so disturbingly adumbrate…
The Recusant is –as its contributor community demonstrates– internationalist in perspective, and believes in the collective sovereignty of Europeanism as something more than the sum of its parts, in which no one nation should have primary power or influence, and that the future of a socially reformed and just Europe is infinitely more likely than that of a socially just Britain outside of the EU, mainly because ‘social democracy’ is still very much alive on the Continent –in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France et al– but has, tragically, long receded in the UK since Thatcherism entrenched neoliberalism in our isles; what is more, even in economically near-bankrupt Spain and Greece, left-wing governments ensure that socialism is still a force to be reckoned with in Europe.
The Recusant aspires to a future democratic socialist Europe, and that is what we will play our part in campaigning for, should we remain in the EU. Remaining in the EU is the first hurdle; then will come the bigger battle for a Social Europe, or better still, a People’s Republic of Europe. Let’s not let the UK miss out on being a part of that future possibility.
Iain Duncan Smith’s Second ‘Damascus Moment’: A Post Mortem/ The Chancer of the Exchequer Has To Go
While many of us have been heartened by the government u-turn on the PIP cuts, we’ve overlooked an equally pernicious cut coming down the line in just a year’s time –but The Guardian, for one, have reminded us about it by way of advanced warning:
The Morning Star carried an important piece this week by way of insight into the terrible predicament of the disabled homeless –yet another cause for shame on the part of this atrocious government:
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-2f2b-Disabled-Homelessness-Risis-in-Tory-Britain#.VvP-oBbJ9dg
In this current climate a piece in The Guardian comes as no real surprise:
The Recusant noted Chancellor Osborne’s risible remark when squirming his way in Parliament this week when he said something to the effect that it is a classic socialist delusion to think you do not need savings. The Recusant would like to point out that it’s a classic Tory delusion to think you can relentlessly cut the incomes of the sick and disabled but still somehow be a “compassionate, one nation Tory government”. Moreover, the fact that Cameron has to keep asserting this is in itself emphasis that “compassion” isn’t normally something associated with the Tories.
The spectacle of Iain Duncan Smith attempting to destroy George Osborne’s reputation was comparable to Darth Vader throwing Emperor Palpatine down the centre of the Death Star in Return of the Jedi –only, sadly, IDS’ efforts weren’t enough to see the Chancellor hurtle all the way down his £4 billion budgetary black hole… Mores the pity… But Osborne’s time will come…
The Recusant is delighted to see that IDS’s resignation has triggered a Tory civil war, and at precisely the same time that tensions in the party are high already due to its split over Europe. This weekend has seen a triple-whammy in the resignation of the vindictive and dangerously ‘evangelical’ despot Duncan Smith; the subsequent serious undermining of the morally unfit Chancellor’s chances of becoming the next prime minister; and the indirect defeat of the Chancellor’s despicable policy suggestion that some of the most disabled people in the country would have their incomes savagely cut in order to fund tax breaks for the richest people in the nation.
The Recusant sincerely hopes that Osborne’s own position as Chancellor will soon prove untenable: if so, that would mean the two nastiest Tories of all would have politically neutralised each other.
As for the legacy of Iain Duncan Smith: such epithets given by his fellow Tories as “principled” and “honourable” must of course be taken with an enormous pinch of salt given IDS’s ‘previous’, but what The Recusant is almost inclined to concede is that perhaps, just perhaps this self-righteous, evangelically intransigent dogmatist genuinely perceived himself as an unlikeliest ‘champion of the poor’ of the nation, but simply didn’t have a clue what he was doing and couldn’t or wouldn’t see until it was far too late the absolute havoc his ‘reforms’ have wrought throughout the unemployed, sick and disabled communities of the UK.
But The Recusant does think it possible that, ultimately, Iain Duncan Smith’s most heinous crime has been his self-righteous intransigence and arrogance in believing himself to have some sort of ‘divine insight’ into solving intergenerational poverty and unemployment after his eight ‘quiet’ years at the so-called Institute for Social Justice. While George Osborne’s fiscal crimes are quite clearly just down to political expediency, cynicism, callousness, vindictiveness and just plain nastiness of narcissistic personality, Iain Duncan Smith’s crimes have been down more to hubris in thinking himself somehow “chosen” to solve the social insolvency of a massive section of the population and in the bluntest means he could find.
The Recusant sheds not one tear for the synthetically ‘principled’ resignation of universally detested Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith this evening (18/3/16), since, in spite of his last ditch attempt to portray himself as somehow “compassionate” by claiming in his resignation letter that he’s stepping down from office due to the disability cuts announced by Osborne in this week’s Budget, he has personally overseen the most brutalising, atomistic, inhumane and devastating welfare cuts and “reforms” since before the days of the welfare state and the similarly draconian treatment of the unemployed and incapacitated under Stanley Baldwin’s Tory Government of the 1930s.
The Recusant still hopes that IDS and his fellow Tory cohorts Chris Grayling, Maria Miller, Esther McVey and, let us not forget, despot of the Treasury, George Osborne, and David Cameron, will all eventually be impeached by the European Court of Human Rights and by the UN –who are currently investigating the DWP for abuses of disability rights, funnily enough– for administrative crimes against the unemployed, sick and disabled.
The Recusant sincerely hopes that Osborne’s ‘compromise too far’ (to quote from IDS’ resignation letter) of announcing swingeing disability cuts in the same Budget in which he also announced utterly unmitigated and unnecessary tax breaks for the richest people in the country, will prove his political bête noire and decisively dissolve his chances of becoming the next prime minister.
The Recusant also hopes –no doubt, unfortunately, in vain– that this latest budgetary shambles of Osborne’s might even prompt his own resignation as Chancellor, though we suspect a man who is so demonstrably cut from the cloth of narcissistic personality will never under any circumstances so much as think of falling on his sword.
One last word. As moist-eyed Tory backbenchers sing the praises of IDS, seriously expecting us to swallow their epithets that he is somehow a “principled” man who cares about social justice, let us all spare a thought for the 92,000+ deaths among sick and disabled claimants between 2011-14, never forget them, and never forget under whose watch they lost their lives… We will remember them...
A post-Budget article in The Guardian (17/3/16) goes into detail on the implications of the cuts to the PIP –as well as mentioning Jeremy Corbyn’s response, charity reactions and a possible Tory backbench revolt– here:
But The Recusant was heartened to see Jeremy Corbyn’s robust response to this despicable budget, quite rightly seizing on the cuts to PIP as of particular opprobrium, a point backed up equally robustly by the excellent John McDonnell in his Shadow Chancellor response to the Obscene Budget today, referring to the disability cuts as “morally reprehensible”.
STOP PRESS: The news has been taken up this evening with widespread outrage at the cuts to PIP, and on BBC News the Chair of Conservative Disability Group, Graham Ellis, a lifelong Tory voter, was interviewed during which he stated he would never vote Tory again after these cuts to the disabled, and had promptly taken down the CDG website this evening due to the announcement of the cuts. He said he would only ever vote Tory again if the party “morphed into a more caring and compassionate party that cares for its citizens” –which of course it never will, as he’s belatedly realised; while this is all good and only further heaps opprobrium on Osborne and in turn hopefully permanently damages his bid for the premiership, The Recusant wonders at the credulity of such Tory voters as the Chair of the CDG –where’s he been for the past five years, for instance? Did he think the atrocious cuts to disability benefits through the last Parliament was somehow down to the Lib Dem influence in the Coalition? Of course not, all of that was pure Tory policy and over 92,000 sick and disabled claimants lost their lives as a result of that. But still, better late than never… And this in The Guardian today (18 March) on the unusual spectacle of Tory backbenchers sticking up for the disabled poor against their own party’s heir apparent:
Great news that three disability charities asked for the immediate resignations of three Tory patrons who voted for the disability cuts –but what surprises The Recusant is that three charities had Tories as patrons in the first place! The topic is of course also covered with robust polemical tone in the Morning Star:
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-a684-Little-decency-among-Tories#.VuvXzxbJ9dh
As for the Tory proposal to turn all existing state schools into academies, thus effectively privatisation the entire state school sector –well, this really is extreme Thatcherite ideological policy in full throttle and The Recusant predicts will not only prove culturally disastrous in terms of any hopes left that this society might progress towards an equalised educational system entirely state/council-run and without the outdated “old school tie” doctrines and disparity of private schools giving the children of the rich and powerful head starts in life and career (we remain incredulous to any supposition that Osborne’s proposed policy is intended to achieve parity of opportunities across the classes by bringing every school up to the ‘standards’ of private and public schools), but also probably un-implementable in the long-run. Nevertheless, this is Thatcherite Osborne’s attempt at a recumbentibus to the state sector in yet further strides to smother this nation’s public institutions with the patchwork pillow of socially divisive privatisation…
The Elephant-in-the-Garret: Dire Need for the Reintroduction of Private Rent Controls
The urgent need for the basic fairness and sanity of private rent controls in the midst of the UK’s escalating housing shortage and continually spiralling private rents is becoming more and more newsworthy by the month, and to a point that even some notable MPs are starting to join housing campaigners in the call for the necessity of their reintroduction. This insightful article in today’s Guardian (15/3/16), in conjunction with research done by Generation Rent, which The Recusant supports:
The Recusant is pleasantly surprised by the usually counterintuitive Labour MP Frank Field being one of the first MPs (apart from Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Caroline Lucas) to call for the reintroduction of rent controls.
He added that the long-term solution lay in building more homes, particularly in the social sector.
But here’s Lambert’s real counterintuitive belter:
Only last night Chanel 4 Dispatches’ Housing Benefit Millionaires exposed the national racket of private landlords and letting agents milking millions from the housing benefit budget each year by partitioning two bedroom houses into up to four or five ‘studio’ flats (actually bedsits) in bids to make as much profit as possible out of powerless tenants’ abject misery of cramped living space and hazardous conditions in blatant breach of Health & Safety laws.
The whole topic is deeply paradoxical to say the least. But it’s an issue which simply won’t go away until something very comprehensive and fundamental is done about it –and the cause of reintroducing private rent controls is something The Recusant, alongside Generation Rent, will continue to champion until it comes about…
With fresh new assaults on disability benefits mooted in Chancellor Osborne’s budget on Wednesday, The Recusant takes note of a Change.org petition to the DWP by the sister of one of tens of thousands of late victims of ESA cuts and sanctions, David Clapson, which has been delivered to said offending government department this week –the full details are here:
The Recusant promoted this petition when it first started, via our front page, and, moreover, a poem specifically about the case of David Clapson will be included in this writer’s forthcoming political poetry collection, Tan Raptures, due out with Smokestack Books next February.
If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t “Brexit”? In Spite of Problems with the EU We Need to Put the Breaks on a “Brexit” and Campaign for a “Social Europe”
The Recusant and its anthologies have long campaigned for the reintroduction of private rent controls to stem the incessant tide of rising rents and static Local Housing Allowance rates which mean a relentless widening of rental shortfalls for the millions of private tenants throughout the country (particularly in the South-East); not to mention an underreported increase in landlord and letting agent discrimination against LHA tenants, even if in work. The Morning Star carried a pertinent article on Wednesday 17th February on this elephant-in-the-room which simply won’t go away –until something is done about it, though the only chance of that is under a Corbyn-led Labour government:
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-a859-Renters-rage-is-justified#.Vs2sgRYrFdg
There was also a quite fascinating article by Paul Mason in The Guardian on the same day on the almost-taboo subject of a possible future ‘post-work’ society in the wake of automation and how our modern day obsession with ‘work’ –something of a substitute secular religion– is arguably impeding humanity’s material and technological progress:
The thoroughly unlikeable Justice Secretary Chris Grayling was rightly pilloried in The Guardian last week as basically a political ‘thug’, and when we remind ourselves that it was he who banned books being brought in to prisons by relatives of inmates, not to mention his general attitudinal pugilism towards the unemployed while DWP Deputy, one couldn’t really think of a better way of summing him up. The Guardian took particular issue with a society in which someone as downright unpleasant and politically belligerent as ‘thuggish’ Grayling is lauded as some sort of poster boy for a post-EU, there’s something deeply wrong.
In spite of the capitalist brinkmanship of the Troika and the appalling economic treatment of Spain and Greece, The Recusant –alongside Corbyn’s Labour, the Greens, SNP and Left Unity– is for remaining in the EU, mostly because we have much greater chance of having workers’ rights protected if we remain under EU laws, not to mention human rights and protections for immigrants and the unemployed. We’ve never fathomed why the Morning Star –with which we agree on practically every other political issue– is so vehemently anti-EU. Do communists and those socialists who want to leave the EU seriously believe that anything will be improved in the UK by doing this? If anything, we will simply drift even further and faster backwards into a trough of perpetual right-wing dogma and political monopoly, with greater chance of continued Tory rule, playing into the hands of the worst of the right-wing press (the Express and Mail) and the worst elements among our political elites (IDS, Johnson, Farage et al).
Not to mention the very likely possibility that the EU might implode or disintegrate altogether and various nations fall prey to Far Right movements such as Front National in France, by way of just one example. There’s more chance of an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim Far Right “Fortress Europe” without the EU than there is within it. So The Recusant fully supports the campaign for a “Social Europe” and backs Jeremy Corbyn’s push for this, as well as standing shoulder to shoulder with our comrades at Left Unity. We fully understand the Communist Party’s opposition to the hyper-corporate aspects of the EU, but at the end of the day, many nations in the EU are still essentially social democracies, unlike the UK, which is a de facto liberal democracy, and will only likely become more so if it sets itself adrift from the Continent and immerses more in a protectionist island mentality.
The reasoning behind Left Unity’s campaign for a “Social Europe” can be read here:
http://leftunity.org/another-europe-is-possible-left-unity-and-the-eu-referendum/
As if things aren’t repressive enough at the moment for immigrants, and, most heinously, EU Nationals (who should have freedom of movement throughout the Continent without restrictions just as Brits on the Continent do), this monster of a Tory government is now pushing through so-called ‘Right to Rent’ legislation which will enable them to interrogate private sector rental tenants as to their right to residency in the UK. This despicable piece of legislation takes it name, of course, from Thatcher’s pernicious ‘Right to Buy’ scheme which resulted in the current dearth of council housing stock we face today in the eye of the storm that is the modern day housing crisis. And on this subject, The Recusant wishes to bring readers’ attention to the latest component of campaign group Generation Rent, which focuses on the underreported, ‘racket’ of fees heaped on private rental tenants by unregulated letting agents: http://lettingfees.co.uk/
Meantime, ‘mean’ being the operative word, Axeman of Caxton House, Iain Duncan Smith, is in the process of dragging some elderly victors against the Tory bedroom tax back into court; “nasty” really is an understatement for the Work and Pensions Secretary –what an irony that once termed “quiet man” of Tory politics should turn out to be the nastiest of the ‘Blue Meanies’. Not content with redefining what “poverty” is by removing from its definition the prime contributor of ‘income’, the Tories/DWP are now attempting to define unemployment, so often either a result of or contributor to mental health issues, as a form of mental illness in and of itself! You really couldn’t make it up but that’s the latest redefinition of reality being promulgated by this moral cancer of a government: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-a3e3-Joblessness-branded-a-mental-illness#.VtbwHxYrFdg It can’t be too long now until the Tories make unemployment a punishable ‘crime’ –although it’s already effectively treated as such through the despicable sanction regimen and the forced labour of ‘work placements’.
Duncan Smith the 'Sick Snatcher' Heckled Outside Jobcentre/ Red Doors in Middlesbrough
Axeman of Caxton House and architect of the administrative manslaughter of over 91,000 sick and disabled claimants (2011-14), Iain Duncan Smith, was justifiably heckled as a "murderer of the disabled" outside a jobcentre he was visiting yesterday: http://www.watsupeurope.com/news/uk-protesters-heckle-murderer-iain-duncan-smith-during-job-centre-visit/
Aptly, IDS hid behind a copy of the Daily Mailthusian as he skulked in the back of a ministerial limousine surrounded by angry protestors shouting "Nazi" (which no doubt IDS takes as a compliment).
Meanwhile, in our increasingly immigrant-hostile climate of Tory England, The Guardian has reported today on the deeply disturbing emergence of front doors to immigrant households in Middlesbrough painted red, as if to mark them out for stigmatisation and local discrimination: http://www.newsguardian.co.uk/news/local/red-doors-marked-out-asylum-seeker-homes-in-north-east-to-yobs-1-7685105
What next? Stars of David painted on the homes of the unemployed?
After a 10-and-a-half hour debate in Parliament yesterday, the Commons voted overwhelmingly in favour of supporting the Americans and French in a blitz over Syria. Apparently this is to target Isis redoubts, in part-response to the appalling Isis-facilitated massacre in Paris last week, by way of a 'show of solidarity' towards a nation and people most Tories, ironically, wish to disassociate from in most other respects, particularly via a mooted "Brexit".
Much as The Recusant was shocked and appalled by that barbaric and cowardly act of terrorism (and hence why we draped the tricolour on our front page for the subsequent week, as a show of solidarity to the French, our fellow Europeans), we do not think that chucking some bombs on Syria will solve anything at all, but, if anything, just foment yet more morally-blind inhumanity towards Europe and the West from the Isis camp -quite apart from the more urgent matter that the bombing will inevitably result in the maiming and killing of countless innocent civilian Syrians. The Recusant agreed with Jeremy Corbyn's principled humanitarian opposition to Cameron's knee-jerk and gung-ho motion.
Another Named Victim of DWP Malpractice
Meanwhile, to the lives and fates of those British citizens whom the Tories make no pretence of trying to 'keep safe' from harm, but who, oppositely, their policies continue pushing to the brink: the unemployed, disabled and mentally ill: the rapidly stacking human cost of the Malthusian benefit caps, sanctions and cuts. As we now know, over 90,000 sick and disabled claimants were driven to premature stress-accelerated deaths and/or suicides over the past four years of remorseless benefit culls, sanctions and Atos attrition. The latest case to put a name and back story to the victim/casualty/fatality of the Tories' mass administrative manslaughter of the sick, disabled and mentally ill is detailed in an item in today's Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/dec/03/dwp-apologise-linda-cooksey-tim-salter-benefits-cut.
England for the English/ Michael Meacher RIP
Hot on the heels of the woeful cuts to working tax credits (which we predict will significantly wound the Tories politically in the long-term), today saw the passing of the new 'English votes for English laws' or 'English veto' (funny how 'vote' and 'veto' are anagrams of one another) which will see Scots MPs potentially excluded from voting on England-specific policies in what is, nonetheless, still a British Parliament. The Tories think this is only "fair" -which is of course ipso facto evidence enough that it isn't. This is of course yet another of the Tories' deeply anti-democratic attempts to further strengthen the right-wing stranglehold on England, along with their other effort to disengage a large section of the population -significantly, mostly younger voters, who are more likely to vote for Labour or the Greens- from the electoral register. It seems the Tories are so unconfident about their hold on power that gerrymandering constituency boundaries -as is every Government's prerogative- oh, and having a still-unregulated 90% right-wing/pro-Tory media, isn't enough to make them feel electorally secure.
The Recusant pays tribute to left-wing Labour MP Michael Meacher who sadly passed away today after a short illness. Meacher was a stalwart Bennite, a highly competent politician and economist, and, along with Nye Bevan and Tony Benn, arguably one of the best long-standing contenders for the leadership of his party. But no doubt Meacher departed, at least, safe in the knowledge that the party he had served for decades is now at last 'true' Labour again. And Meacher more than played his part in this belated but timely reconstitution of the movement at its root. Meacher was also a regular and insightful columnist for the Morning Star. His compassionate politics and socialist integrity will be sorely missed, while we can feel confident that his peers and fellow socialists, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and Leader Jeremy Corbyn, will continue the fight to put the Left firmly back into mainstream politics.
Finally, please all readers, click on the War on Welfare link on the front page, or below, to sign the petition: 'Assess full impact of all cuts to support & social care for disabled people'.
Unprecedented U.N. Investigation into Tory Government's Disability Rights Abuses
There have been some important and incisive features in the Morning Star this week on the catalogue of disability rights abuse by the government's DWP-Atos axis, its statistically shocking repercussions, and the imminent U.N. investigation:
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-a0bd-DWPs-claimant-death-cover-up#.Vh4toxZdFdg
As well as an apposite piece on raising greater awareness about mental health issues:
1915/2015 Centenary of the Glasgow Rent Strike and the Introduction of Rent Controls
This year is also the centenary of the 1915 Glasgow Rent Strike -here is an informative website on the historic event: https://remembermarybarbour.wordpress.com/mary-barbour-rent-strike-1915/. The strike helped to bring about the first ever legislation introducing rent regulation, or private rent controls, in the same year, under the radical Liberal Government of the time. So 2015 is also the centenary of the introduction of rent controls. What a pity, then, that in 2015 such fair, reasonable and sane regulations no longer exist in the UK (though do still exist in much of Europe).
As Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is now arguing the case for a reintroduction of rent controls, this long-ignored 'elephant in the room' of today's housing crisis is once more on the debating agenda in mainstream politics. And not before time! The Recusant/Caparison still plan in the near future to produce a third e-anthology focusing on the issue of today's escalating rents and the glaringly grotesque absence of private rent controls, to be titled The Rent Book - Verse for the Evicted Generation. We will announce an open call for submissions at the appropriate time, but it will not be until into 2016, since this editor is currently concentrating his energies on Militant Thistles.
Cameron's '1 Per Cent Nation' Toryism
'Duplicity Cameron' struck once again with a sickeningly hypocritical speech at the Tory conference: it appeared to have been penned in a parallel world to the 'Big Foodbank Society' he has unleashed on us in just over five years as prime minister. Cameron had the temerity to talk at his podium as if he is somehow genuinely concerned about social inequality, which has skyrocketed during his premiership due directly to his government's remorseless attacks on the welfare state, and on disability and homeless rights.
His is emphatically a 'One Per Cent Nation' Toryism, which has seen the richest 1 per cent in the country increase their wealth several times over since the recession, while hundreds of thousands of the poorest people in the country have been pushed into abject poverty, and over 91,000 sick and disabled claimants hounded to premature deaths by his DWP-Atos axis -the most heinous fiscal holocaust in British history. While the bogus "national living wage" trumpeted by the Chancellor is undercut entirely by cuts to working age tax credits, even the Tories' 'Help to Buy' scheme purported to bring "affordable homes" within the reach of first time buyers will, by dint of its high mortgage benchmark, only be accessible to the top 1 per cent of wage earners.
And as for Iain Duncan Smith's tirade against the Mancunian protestors, calling them "vile" -well, all we can say is, it takes one to know one: 'IDS' is single-handedly responsible for the 'sickness cleansing' of over 91,000 disabled claimants in just four years. This insidious Orc of a Work and Pensions Secretary is so vile that he practically has the word tattooed on his domed head. We wait in anticipation for his future impeachment by the European Court of Human Rights following the U.N.'s special investigation into his crimes against disability rights.
A Speech Partly Written In the Eighties? If So, Then Fitting for Today's Return to Them
The right-wing press were leading with headlines today claiming that Jeremy Corbyn's impassioned inaugural socialist speech at the Labour Party conference yesterday -the best this writer has heard in his lifetime from a Labour leader!- was partly 'written in the Eighties'. To which one simply has to reply, if that is so, then what does that tell us about the parlous state of Britain in the Twenty-Teens? That precious little has changed since the Thatcherite Eighties. Moreover, under continued Tory rule, we're now seeing a rapid return to that deeply divisive decade: attacks on workers and union rights, help to buy of council housing stock, "scrounger"-mongering against the unemployed, escalating street homelessness, and so on... So it seems if part of Corbyn's speech was written in the Eighties, well, fair enough, because it still applies to today! That's how little British politics has moved on since Thatcherism and the neoliberalisation of 'New' Labour! We have not only Thatcher, but also Tony Blair, to thank for that. But let's all hope that this time round the politics of compassion and social justice win through against the mouldering neoliberal hegemonies stacked against them. All power to Corbyn's elbow!
Centenary of Keir Hardie's Death
An incisive and compendious feature in the Morning Star this weekend reminded The Recusant that Saturday 26 September was the centenary of the death of James Keir Hardie (15 August 1856 – 26 September 1915), Labour's first MP and first parliamentary leader, who is perhaps the closest any British socialist politician comes to 'secular sainthood' in the minds and hearts of the historical British Left (though Clement Attlee, Nye Bevan, and, to some extent, Tony Benn, aren't far off from such hagiography).
Hardie hailed from an impoverished Scottish coal-mining family and educated himself while working down the pits as a boy, teaching himself literacy and even shorthand; he then progressed onto being a correspondent for The Miner, and from there, moved into politics and ended up heading the Labour Representation Committee, later to be known as the Labour Party (the LRC still exists under the more than capable chairmanship of John McDonnell MP). Hardie was eventually elected Labour's first MP, and thereafter, its first leader. He retired prematurely from politics in pacifistic protest against the First World War.
This editor/writer furnished a long poem about the life and struggles of Keir Hardie in his 2010 Smokestack volume, Keir Hardie Street, which was also since recorded onto CD by acclaimed actor Michael Jayston -both book and CD can be borrowed from the Poetry Library, though attempts are afoot to try and get the recording uploaded for free download on this writer's personal website, in due course, prompted in part by the centenary. But by way of celebrating the life of Keir Hardie, more succinctly than Keir Hardie Street, a short acrostic poem about the great Labour leader is now up on this site as signposted on the front page -the poem is taken from the collection, A Tapestry of Absent Sitters (Waterloo Press, 2009).
It is certainly fitting that on Keir Hardie's centenary we can now safely say that we once again have a true socialist at the helm of the Labour Party, one who also hails from a fairly humble background, albeit not as starkly inauspicious as Hardie's. At this time, no doubt Jeremy Corbyn will have Hardie in mind as he takes to the podium at his first Labour Party Conference. We at The Recusant wish him well and will support his leadership every step of the way. As for Keir Hardie, his great legacy will never go away, this man who was a century ahead of his times in his advanced socialist politics, and whose politics might indeed in future come to some fruition in meeting the social imperatives of our austere times.
Barely a fortnight into Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Leadership and a General in the British Army has already said that if Corbyn ever became prime minister he and -by implication- his fellow Generals would "mutiny" against his government on a proleptic charge of 'threatened' "national security"! "Mutiny" is a slightly quaint euphemism for a coup de tat! This was diligently reported on in the Morning Star but -surprise, surprise- barely a whisper from the mainstream media about it! So much for our British sense of democracy -we can now plainly see that the right-wing press isn't the slightest bit interested in protecting it from neo-Francoist/Falangist-style military nutcases who would impose martial law on our nation just because of the prospect of a left-wing government! It beggars belief!
This sort of military-establishment collusion against left-wing governments is, however, sadly, nothing that new in Britain. In the mid-Seventies, we learned much later, there had been plans set in motion among the military and establishment elites to topple then-prime minister Harold Wilson due to suspicions that he was a Soviet agent/'mole' for Moscow! (This is partly where the late David Nobbs' Fairly Secret Army idea sprang from; and, not least, Chris Mullins' A Very British Coup). Tellingly, Wilson suddenly resigned halfway through his second term -which took people and pundits completely by surprise at the time- and handed over to the more centrist James Callaghan (and the rest, thereafter, is Thatcherite history...!). Decades later we learned why this happened: to avoid a coup of the elite against his government...!
Sunday Telegraph Impeaches A Poem Critical of the Queen
Equally ludicrously, this week's Sunday Telegraph had a front page diatribe/'story' somehow trying to link Jeremy Corbyn to a poem highly critical of the Queen and Royalty written by Heathcote Williams for the Stop the War Coalition, of which Corbyn had hitherto been patron. Corbyn stood down due to an understandably busy schedule as new Leader of the Opposition. The poem, 'Royal Babylon', is certainly a spirited and vitriolic verse-tirade against the monarchy for its perceived complicity with the arms trade, but makes some important polemical points -and in any case, what is the establishment going to do about it? Ban it? Charge the poem (or poet) with 'high treason'? Pathetic. But certainly Williams' poetic hero, Percy Bysshe Shelley, would have applauded the demonstrable efficacy of an antiestablishment poem. Williams -a former Robin Hood Book contributor- has also contributed some excerpts from a long poem, 'Revolution', to our new polemical-poetry sister-site, Militant Thistles.
For all those Recusant contributors reading this who would like to submit polemical/political poems touching on such common memes and themes as poor doors, homeless spikes, the bedroom tax, Atos, "gentrification" ("social cleansing") and other topical issues of Tory society, please email them in the body of the email with 'Militant Thistles' in the header, to: threcusant@yahoo.co.uk).
The Recusant is not only impressed by Labour's new left-wing Leader and his impeccable speeches so far, which have already marked out hitherto 'taboo' issues such as welfare 'reform' for deserved opprobrium (Corbyn's even invoked the phrase "social cleansing"); we are also highly impressed by the equally left-wing new Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. Slate-eyed McDonnell has something of the gentle flintiness of a Seventeenth Century Leveller (as Corbyn does the measured dignity of a Digger), an authenticity not seen on the Labour front bench for decades; in fact, one would have to go back to the Fifties or Sixties, or even to the late Forties, to find his natural antecedents. Who could have dared dream only months ago that we would now have at the head of the Labour Party the modern day equivalents of John Lilburne and Gerard Winstanley?
So inspired has this writer been by this New Model Labour that he has for the first time in his life actually joined the Labour Party, and as long as Corbyn and McDonnell lead Labour, The Recusant will back them all the way (while also maintaining ethical consanguinity with the equally left-wing Green Party). This writer was formerly a member of the left-wing Labour Representation Committee -the political source from which the Labour Party was grown- up until his membership lapsed. The LRC is Chaired by McDonnell himself, and this writer anticipates rejoining at some point. McDonnell has put a firm left foot forward as Shadow Chancellor by wasting no time in depicting Osborne's fiscal policies as "immoral". So far, so good!
Finally, revelations emerged today, via a new biography of David Cameron, that our pigeon-faced prime minister once 'put a "private part of his anatomy" into a dead pig's mouth... [that] was resting on the lap of a member of the Piers Gaveston Society – a dining club at Oxford... during a bizarre initiation ritual' (and that's from the Tory Express!). Porcine right-wing curmudgeon Toby Young (dissenting son of the brilliant left-wing sociologist, Michael Young, author of seminal Pelican primer, The Rise of the Meritocracy) was glimpsed on BBC News counterintuitively claiming that -to paraphrase- "if anything, this can only reflect well on the prime minister"!? Eh? Well goodness only knows then what even viler excesses the chaps of the Piers Gaveston Society got up to! Eating poor people perhaps? (No, they'd be too lean!).
So Corbyn staying respectfully silent during the national anthem is more evidence of 'not being fit to be prime minister' than Cameron having a former fetish for burning fifty pound notes in the faces of street beggars and dipping his member into the mouths of dead pigs!? Oh it'll all blow over, nothing would have been said of it at all if it had been a better news day, was the line trotted out by the BBC News presenter today on Cameron's debauched antics as a student... No one bats an eyelid it seems -Cameron is certainly as 'teflon-coated' as ever Tony was, since he even gets away with being literally 'caught with his trousers down'! But cameras just have to get a stray shot of Jeremy Corbyn not miming the national anthem alongside establishment sycophants and tropes such as "he isn't fit to be a prime minister" and "he's a threat to our national security" are hurled about left, right and centre across the red-tops. Pathetic, and yet more evidence of our thoroughly lop-sided and unscrupulously biased right-wing media.
UN to Investigate Disability Rights Abuses by the British Government
The Recusant is heartened to learn that the UN is about to send a rapporteur to investigate charges against the Tory Government and, more specifically, air-punching, disabled-snuffing Work and Pensions Secretary, Herr Iain Duncan Smith, of 'abuses of disability rights' in its remorseless pursuit of the medically illegitimate Atos Work Capability Assessments and other related administrative Mendelisms. Yet barely a whisper about this from the mainstream press! What a surprise! It's difficult to know which is the worser crime: that of a government committing mass administrative manslaughter against the most vulnerable people in society (remember, over 91,000 sick and disabled claimants have DIED between 2011 and 2014!) alongside a right-wing press egging it on and a general public largely complicit in said bureacratic holocaust, or the abject lack of any proper media coverage or public outcry in response to the shocking death statistics among disabled claimants and a subsequent UN investigation of possible governmental 'abuse of disability rights'...!?
This silent holocaust of sick and disabled claimants will be a permanent stain on the moral fabric of this nation for decades to come and we predict the stain will continue to blot and spread until its perpetrators are brought to justice. Until the likes of 'IDS' are dragged before the Hague, disability rights campaigners and families of relatives administratively liquidated by the DWP will not rest. And neither will The Recusant. But at least this investigation is a start along the road to future justice...
If now is a time to finally start seeing the beginning of the end of post-Thatcherite austerity narratives then it is with the historic victory of left-wing outsider candidate Jeremy Corbyn in the race to become Labour leader. Not only is Corbyn the first true socialist to be elected Labour leader since Michael Foot, but he is also the first Labour leader in a long while who hails from a fairly modest background, who was not educated at a top university (but dropped out from polytechnic), and so cuts a very different and more authentically radical cloth than most Oxbridge-educated political leaders of recent times.
And Corbyn's wasted no time at all: already his Labour Party's line on issues such as welfare are emphatically contra received mainstream narratives and re-emphasising the vitalness and fairness of a strong welfare state, while Corbyn is also arguing now for rent controls, the 'elephant in the room' that no mainstream party leader (save Caroline Lucas and then Nathalie Bennett of the Greens) up until now has even hinted at (and the re-introduction of rent controls has been something of a long-standing cause of The Recusant and Caparison's anthologies). This is all truly momentous in its adumbrating a final smashing of the Thatcherite-neoliberal 'consensus' which has blighted these isles for over 35 years! We do indeed now live in interesting times...
Indeed, 'warnings' have been issued from sources of vested interest in the neoliberal establishment that Corbyn's rise potentially 'risks' an end to the 'post-Thatcherite consensus'...! As if that's somehow a bad thing!! The 'consensus' -a kind of Satanic substitute to the social democratic 'post-War consensus' that it supplanted- which led us to the banking crisis and "Great Recession", and to Britain being one of the most socially unequal societies in Europe, with hundreds of thousands reliant on food banks to survive while the City continues to rake it in... The 'consensus' which has brought us to a grotesque 'Us' and 'Them' society where such abominations as "homeless spikes", "poor doors" and food banks are casually accepted by much of the public as just par for the course of capitalism... That 'consensus'? We think we're best rid of it!
The Recusant has been flabbergasted -though not entirely surprised- by the sheer viciousness of smears and attacks against Corbyn in the right-wing press, most scabrously the Daily Mailthusian, which headlined on Sunday with 'RED AND BURIED'! (They wish!). This is of course the same Mail which effectively won the May General Election for the Tories by its absolutely shameless, gutter-level scaremongering against a Labour-SNP Pact/Coalition 'threatening the stability of the nation'. It then only took unprincipled prime minister David Cameron hours to go from calling Corbyn to congratulate him on his victory, to going on Twitter and scaremongering against the new Labour Leader by claiming he is a 'threat to national security'!
But what we as supporters of the Corbyn Labour leadership and this new resurgence of the anti-austerity Left in mainstream politics must be cautious of and campaign against at every juncture is what is already blatantly going to be a kind of A Very British Coup-style political, rhetorical and journalistic witchhunt against Corbyn and everything he stands for.
Now the fight for the soul of this nation begins and we must all on the Left, of all factions and parties, unite behind this new hope for a more compassionate and equal society. The Recusant is fully behind Jeremy Corbyn and will now be supporting this timely reconstructed Labour Party and Movement. We echo Nathalie Bennett of the Green Party -which we have hitherto supported in the former absence of a true Labour Opposition and as the only left-wing option in mainstream politics- and will be behind Corbyn and everything he attempts to do to re-balance this nation's 'moral deficit'. We are also, of course, 100% behind him in his Opposition to both the Welfare and Trade Union Bills.
We hope and anticipate a new united front across the Left -Left Unity, the Greens and the SNP alongside Labour- to oppose and defeat the Tories every step of the way over the next five years. Just as the neoliberal establishment -politicians and newspapers all- have so promptly united against this new 'threat' stalking Parliament, we on the Left must be thoroughly united in determined opposition to the austerity narratives and right-wing hegemonies, and all do our bit to promote our daily mouthpiece, the Morning Star, which, in a very timely manner, had its first ever Sunday edition on 13 September (and it's biggest ever bumper issue the following day). Let's all work together now in our various avenues to fight -as the MS's strapline puts it- For Peace and Socialism!
The Tories of course haven’t wasted any time unleashing fresh new attacks on every one from underpaid workers and unions to their favourite victims of all, the unemployed, sick and disabled, with a new round of ‘sanctions’ planned for ESA claimants by the DWP’s resident Mendelist, Iain Duncan Smith. ‘IDS’, as he’s affectionately abbreviated (whereas we feel inclined to stretch his initials to ‘I-nsi-D-iou-S’), once more shows no contrition or shame whatsoever in the face of increasingly stark and shameful facts –which drove one Labour MP, Debbie Abrahams, in a Select Committee recently to call on him to resign (specifically for recent revelations that his department had fabricated testimonies of fictional -and apparently masochistic- ex-benefit claimants thanking the DWP for being sanctioned!) – such as the finally released –or rather, wrenched-out-from-fists– official “death stats” of all those who have died within six weeks of being declared “fit for work” by Atos-DWP, plus all those who died while either undergoing or awaiting assessment by Atos-DWP, and all those who died while in either the Support Group or Work-Related Activity Group (WRAG) of ESA; information which the DWP has continually wrestled to withhold from the public in spite of its’ legal requirement to publish them.
We pay tribute to the Change.org petition which kept this ‘taboo’ issue in the spotlight up to the point of the DWP’s capitulation (as well as to other long-standing anti-Atos campaigns such as the Black Triangle, Calum's List and the Spartacus Report) –and the figures really are staggering: 91,740 ESA claimants died between January 2011 and February 2014! This is even more than the 40,000+ The Recusant had reckoned on the basis of an already published/recorded 10,000+ deaths from –as we recall– 2011; it means the amount has massively accelerated since 2011, and this is surely the most damning indictment of Tory-driven austerity cuts on welfare and disability benefits to date.
It is quite simply a moral stain on the nation, made only worse by the fact that the nation inexplicably returned the Tories to office with a small majority back in May! What’s the bet no national newspaper –bar the Morning Star and possibly The Guardian– will have these figures on their front pages tomorrow? Here’s a link to one of the first online sites to source the facts and figures compendiously, Vox Political Online, which also incorporates editorial points against the DWP’s risible attempts to airbrush the figures or claim no responsibility, such as its’ deeply disingenuous/delusional comment that “any causal effect between benefits and mortality cannot be assumed from these statistics”.: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/08/27/known-number-of-deaths-while-claiming-incapacity-benefits-nears-100000/
The Recusant joins Debbie Abrahams and all those anti-Atos campaigners in calling on the Prime Minister and Government to sack Iain Duncan Smith, and also hopes that the insidious Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and all his cohorts be brought to justice before the European Court of Human Rights under the charge of ‘mass administrative manslaughter’. It is also hoped that in time Pope Francis will seriously consider various calls on him to excommunicate Duncan Smith from the Roman Catholic Church, his ‘membership’ of which tarnishes the faith. In terms of his strategies and protocols, IDS is without doubt a modern day social Mendelist (eugenicist). And the methods of propaganda employed by IDS throughout the past five years to cover up his mass culling and fiscal liquidating of tens of thousands of sick and disabled claimants have, bluntly, been comparable to the Nazis’ Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
A Change of Heart –The Great Labour Heart-Transplant
The Recusant, as mentioned previously, fully supports Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership and believes his victory will ensure a new alternative anti-austerity mainstream narrative which will offer the electorate in 2020 a very clear and vastly different choice for voters; it will also inevitably bring back many Labour apostates on the political Left to the Labour fold –those who voted either Green, Left Unity or for other socialist parties last May, this writer included– and thereby increase the Labour vote next time round. We were startled but not especially surprised to read this week that among the mainstream right-wing tabloid scaremongers against Corbyn’s political rise, the excremental, Malthusian Daily Express led the charge by sourcing the Jewish Chronicle’s allegations that Corbyn had attended pro-Palestinian liberation meetings which were also attended by a ‘holocaust denier’.
The risible implication that somehow, through ‘guilt-by-association’, Corbyn is some sort of ‘closet anti-Semite’ is not only desperate and reprehensible, but also deeply hypocritical for a newspaper (if it can really be called one) which routinely couches its ‘scrounger’ stories in eugenicist lexicon almost indistinguishable from that used in the 1930s by the Malthusian League, the Mendelists, and, indeed, the Nazis. One only has to take an average Express ‘story’ on so-called benefit ‘scroungers’ and substitute the term ‘Jew’ in its place to have an effective reproduction, almost verbatim, of speeches made by the likes of Joseph Goebbels in the Thirties (or indeed substituting ‘gypsies’ or ‘Roma’ for ‘illegal immigrants’ -the Express also of course being Ukip-supporting). And as for the Daily Mail, well, we all know that it was Britain’s leading supporter of the British Union of Fascists and, indeed, Hitler’s Nazis, during the 1930s. It seems Britain’s two nastiest right-wing tabloids are editorially and journalistically irony- and hypocrisy-proof (and, sadly, so are its readers, as the devastating election result –buoyed on the back of the Mail’s irrational scaremongering against ‘Red’ Ed and Nicola Sturgeon –i.e. ‘the most dangerous woman in Britain’– tragically proved in May).
Talking of hypocrisy, generally reviled ex-prime minister and “war criminal” Tony Blair quipped this week that those Labour supporters whose ‘hearts’ were for Corbyn should ‘have transplants’! This coming from a man who, as we all know well, metaphorically had his own ‘heart transplant’ some two decades ago, when, as Labour leader, he scrapped Clause IV of the Labour Constitution, thereby effectively performing a political heart transplant on the entire Labour movement, swung the party disastrously to the Right of politics, and, a little later, colluded in having ‘that dossier’ half-fabricated in order to justify the invasion –and incremental destruction–of Iraq. The Recusant applauds the spirited and defiant PCS firebrand Mark Serwotka, who is currently waiting for a heart transplant (while also fighting a rearguard action against the Tories’ latest anti-union attack on the basic human right to strike), for his recent riposte to having been prevented from voting in the Labour leadership context for Corbyn, which was, to paraphrase, that he would go into hospital with his heart for Corbyn, and would come out with his new heart for Corbyn.
On a final note, the campaign Generation Rent currently needs urgent donations to keep going and is only days away from running out of funds, so please do visit it and give what you can: http://www.generationrent.org/
Timely Return of The Left Book Club
The Recusant is delighted to learn from an article in the Morning Star this weekend that the legendary Left Book Club is returning through the auspices of radical Pluto Press. The LBC was founded in the 1930s by publisher Victor Gollancz in response to economic depression and the rise of fascism. It is therefore a most fitting time for the radical polemical publishing enterprise to reemerge in response to a sadly very similar period in our history to that of the Thirties. Among its legion titles were such seminal works as George Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier, Clement Attlee's The Labour Party In Perspective, Arthur Koestler's Spanish Testament, G.E.R. Gedye's Fallen Bastions, and Wal Hannington's incomparable The Problem of the Distressed Areas -and this writer is fortunate to have original copies of the last two titles, plus a few others, in his possession.
But to return to the more promising subject of the new LBC. Among the other forthcoming new LBC titles mooted is The Rent Trap which promises to be a thorough exposee of the parlous state of affairs in today's unregulated dog-eat-dog private rental market. Ever-rising private rents, and the continued -and frankly insane- absence of private rent controls is a subject which has very much been at the forefront of this webzine's own polemic for the past few years, not to mention Caparison's two anti-cuts anthologies (and if and when a third anthology surfaces, it will inescapably be forcused primarily on this subject and likely be called The Rent Book).
It can only be a matter of time until a new Images of Welfare-type title appears through the LBC, since such a polemic on today's culture of 'scroungerology' is even more urgently needed today than it was back in the early Eighties when Pete Golding published the aforementioned and indispensable work. It would also be an apt time given the recent passing of the scabrous and unconscionable Welfare Reform Bill through Parliament, which will see an entire generation of already impoverished children throughout the country brought to an even more decisive destitution. Shame on all those MPs who voted for that abomination of a Bill!
Meanwhile, eyes look left to Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership race, and The Recusant sincerely hopes his apparent popularity among Labour Party members proves decisive and puts the party back firmly on the left of the political spectrum.
Tory Policies Against the Poor Are 'Unchristian'
The Recusant commends Christians for Economic Justice (formerly Christianity Uncut) for condemning David Cameron and his scabrous Tory administration for 'unchristian' policies against the poor and vulnerable of this nation, as already announced prior to the next welfare-slashing 'emergency' budget due in July. This latest fiscal onslaught of flint-hearted George Osborne's certainly will prove to be an 'emergency' for the millions it will further impoverish in the Tories' psychopathic mission to materially wipe out the poorest of our society. CEJ rightly cite the totemic episode in the New Testament when Christ overturned the tables of the money-changers and lenders in the Temple as a resonant biblical symbol of Christianity's fundamental anti-greed/usury, or anti-capitalist, message. The Recusant, being essentially Christian Socialist in its ethics, fully supports CEJ, and will keep a link to its website on the front page from hence on.
The Recusant also salutes the 250,0000 (!) people who tramped the streets of London on Saturday rightly demanding an end to austerity. This has to be one of the largest marches to date against Tory austerity. The Tories might think with a flimsy little majority that they now have some sort of 'democratic mandate' to do what they will, but they'd be well advised on the sheer scale of the turnout on Saturday 20th June to take note of the growing opposition to their policies and all they stand for. It was heartening to hear spirited and defiant speeches by Caroline Lucas of the Greens and Labour leader candidate Jeremy Corbyn both publicly denouncing the "scrounger" rhetoric of the Tories and tabloids -Lucas making the valid point that -to paraphrase- 'it's not people on jobseekers' allowance who wrecked our economy'. Quite right too -but yet so many British people still swallow the "scrounger" rhetoric of the right-wing press, while completely forgetting about the true 'scroungers' of our society, those speculators continuing to cream off the nation's wealth in the City -a nation which they bankrupted in the first place.
The Peoples' Assembly -already organising for mass protests on the day of the 'emergency' budget- has rightly pointed out that this is a new movement of opposition to Tory austerity and will only keep growing and swelling in numbers the more the Tories continue their dismantlement of our welfare state. Now it's not only the poorest, the unemployed, sick and disabled who are bearing the brunt of the cuts, but also those on 'in-work benefits' -yes, the Tories are now targeting those they normally talk up as "hardworking taxpayers", the 'working poor', for more fiscal salami-slicing. The reason so many millions of workers are forced to claim some state assistance, mostly in the form of Local Housing Allowance (as well as working tax credits) is due to escalating private rents. The only real solution to this problem is to reintroduce the sanity of private rent controls -something The Recusant and its associated anti-cuts anthologies have been campaigning for for years.
The Recusant of course fully supports this Saturday’s March to End Austerity, which will see hundreds of thousands of British citizens from across the country head to the capital to make what promises to be perhaps the largest collective statement against Tory austerity to date.
We are heartened to learn that left-wing Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn has secured the 35 MP backers in the race for the Labour leadership. If Corbyn were successful, this would see a definitive return to a socialist Labour Party, not seen, arguably, since the days of Michael Foot. Corbyn’s trademark cloth cap in itself echoes the habit of Labour’s original leader, the great socialist Keir Hardie, who entered the House of Commons in a working man’s tweed cap. Mr Corbyn has The Recusant’s full backing.
The Recusant has long campaigned against the scabrous DWP-Atos Work Capability Assessment regime, and we note that the Morning Star is leading the way at the moment in attempting to bring the truth of the hundreds of thousands of deaths (inclusive of suicides) of sick and disabled claimants within six weeks of being declared “fit for work” and having their benefits stripped illegitimately by Atos, into the legal light. There are two very incisive and probing pieces at the following links:
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-3f2b-AT-WHAT-COST,-IDS#.VYKumrNFBdg
There is so much to march for, and against, this Saturday 20th June.
What is there to say about the disastrous general election result on 7 May but that the British capacity for political masochism is surely unrivalled? That and the fact that, as is almost always the case, the overwhelmingly right-wing British press ‘won it’ for the Tories through one of the most ghastly and hyperbolic negative press campaigns in living memory: a press coup comprising the Mail, Express, Sun, Times and Telegraph shamelessly scaremongering against so-called ‘Red Ed’ and what was presented as tantamount to a potential Scots takeover of England with regards to the rising SNP and their spirited leader being uniformly tarred as ‘the most dangerous woman in Britain’ (no, that was Margaret Thatcher!).
The Mail excelled itself with a last-ditch front page headline shouting ‘For sanity’s sake’ and warning that a possible Labour-SNP government would not only wreck our economy but even our country! And unfortunately for all of us, people vote through their paper preferences! The result: the Tories scraped a small majority and now have a slender mandate to wreck the lives of the poor and vulnerable in an even bigger way than they’ve already managed in the past five years. We can now expect to see more food banks opening on a regular basis, rising homelessness and probably tens of thousands further broken lives through the scabrous Atos-Maximus-DWP work capability assessment regime (40,000+ deaths due to bogus Atos assessments in the past five years clearly isn’t enough for the likes of Cameron, Osborne and IDS –they’re going to go for another 40,000+ no doubt, all in the name of sorting out ‘the deficit’ and ‘balancing the books’.
But the other key factors were a weak and ill-focused austerity-lite Labour campaign (far from the ‘left-wing’ direction the right-wing press claimed it to be), and, contrary to Blair’s claim it was a failure to keep to the political ‘centre’, a haemoraging of votes leftwards to the Greens (around 1 million!) and other left-wing parties across the country (particularly among the younger voters). This is all signifies that the way forward for progressive political parties now is leftwards and anti-austerity, not the opposite, and The Recusant will continue to support any parties that wish to create a broad left-leaning anti-austerity opposition to the Tories. After all, the main reason for Nicola Sturgeon’s popularity north of the border is chiefly down to her anti-austerity stance.
Resistance might seem futile at this juncture, but The Recusant will fully support the Peoples’ Assembly and Left Unity’s (et al) mass protest on 20 June, and of course the mass demonstration against the Queen’s Speech on 27 May. Given our current democratic deficit –i.e. that our right-wing press pretty much controls public opinion when it comes to politics– it is indeed timely that the National Theatre is staging Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, a play about the Levellers and Diggers of the mid-17th century, who tilled waste land in common only to be eventually evicted by Cromwell’s troops. This play has particular resonance too given the Occupy movement of recent years, and even the group calling themselves Diggers, who attempted a similar project on a university campus near Runnymede a couple of years ago (and in many senses, the Green Party represents today’s ethical Levellers). And by no small coincidence, its production has coincided with this year’s Levellers Day, just passed on 16 May. Also doing the theatrical rounds is a Strike a Light by Joyce Adcock, a musical based on the 1888 match-girls’ strike in London –both of these radically charged productions received notices in last weekend’s Morning Star.
Lastly, it’s been interesting to see some sort of resurgence of political poetry in the past couple of months, mostly in the Morning Star’s Well Versed columns (in which some younger poets much less known for their ‘political verse’ have recently contributed in the run up to the election). Even the creative writing course circuit put in a contribution with the Emma Press’s Campaign for Poetry anthology –even if, as Andy Croft writing in the Morning Star noted on its publication, to paraphrase, it was more an anthology pointing towards political apathy rather than true engagement. But still it was at least a tokenistic statement on behalf of a younger more mainstream authorship.
Major Hypocrite/ A Million British Citizens Dependent on Foodbanks
The Recusant awards ex-Tory prime minister John Major this year's Hypocrite of the Year Award fresh in the wake of his speech this week in which he accused Labour of being "a class-based divisive party". Talk about the pot calling the kettle blue!
This is the same week in which it's reported that now a staggering One Million British citizens are reliant on foodbanks [http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-6d00-Tory-recovery-one-million-rely-on-Trussell-foodbanks#.VTegxSdFBdg].
UK Uncut has come up with an ingenious campaign to counter austerity narratives in the run up to the general election, a series of anti-austerity posters put up throughout the capital which it terms 'subvertising' -as covered in the Morning Star of Thursday 9 April:
“This is a political choice, not a necessity.”
“No matter who’s elected in May, it’s up to all of us to cut austerity.”
Tuesday's (24th March's) Morning Star led with a no holds barred headline, KILLERS OF THE POOR, over a photo of DWP Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, with regards to the national scandal of bogus benefits sanctions and a shocking parliamentary report on the matter. This is the most robust headline to date of any newspaper on this particular issue: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-714f-KILLERS-OF-THE-POOR#.VRRyUyc5Bdg
Protests Against Benefits Sanctions/ Labour "not the party of the people on benefits"
Friday’s Morning Star included two contrasting pieces. A front page story on Thursday’s national protests at jobcentres against punitive benefit sanction regimes:
The Guardian asked her a typically Blairite question: “Is it a problem if Labour is seen as a party of the welfare state?”
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-5a7b-Keir-Hardie-betrayed#.VQ1kAVKzVdg
Finally, a brief mention that Left Unity has now launched its 2015 Manifesto which readers can access via the Left Unity Manifesto link on our front page. The Recusant fully concurs with Left Unity’s Manifesto.
CofE Pastoral Letter Promotes Spirit of Christian Socialism in all but name
Once again the Church of England has spoken up against today’s ‘Big Boot Society’ and a seemingly moribund democracy –as covered in The Guardian on Tuesday 17 February 2015:
While the bishops stress that their letter is not intended as “a shopping list of policies we would like to see”, they do advocate a number of specific steps, including a re-examination of the need for Trident, a retention of the commitment to funding overseas aid and a reassessment of areas where regulations fuel “the common perception of ‘health and safety gone mad’”. They also call for the promotion of the living wage to counter “the burgeoning of in-work poverty”.
Link to Bishops pastoral letter
There’s also been more coverage on the iniquitous anti-homelessness spikes/studs and a ‘suicide timebomb’ due to continued austerity, in this week’s Guardian, as well as news on the Tories’ announcement that all JSA claimants will be made to do community work in return for their benefits if the party returns to power after May, as covered in the Morning Star this week. All in all, pretty grim reading.
But The Recusant commends much (bar its' tacit endorsement of the 'big society' concept) that is in the bishops’ pastoral letter which, in specifically addressing the upcoming general election, has to be one of the most unprecedented interventions from the Church of England in our political culture to date. If only the actual (main) political parties would listen to them!
Victory for Renters/ Left Unity's Call for Anti-Austerity Alliance/
What do the amendments mean for renters?
Not for the first time The Recusant also commends MP Sarah Teather for her principled stance on behalf of the nation's 'un-propertied'.
Meanwhile, Left Unity is rightly calling for an anti-austerity electoral alliance with all left and centre-left parties, particularly the Greens, and left Labour candidates. The Recusant, which supports the Green Party, but also the aspirations of the broader Left Unity movement, agrees with this strategy and wholeheartedly supports it. Here is the gist of Left Unity's strategy:
We hope this will be a positive step towards the defeat of austerity in Britain and across Europe.
Hear hear. Go here to pledge your support to Left Unity's cause: http://leftunity.org/appeal-for-an-alliance-against-austerity/
Finally, The Recusant takes note of the 'red flags on the red carpet' as part of underpaid cleaners' protests at the BAFTA ceremonies, as reported on in the Morning Star this week.
Rent Freedom Day 4 February 2015
Just as the Tories announced their plans to lower the already iniquitous welfare cap from £26,000 to £23,000 should they be re-elected in May, and it's revealed through independent findings that the true rate of homelessness in the UK stands at a shocking 280,000 households (!), the Morning Star today (5 Feb) reported on the Rent Freedom Day of the day before -a much-needed initiative, if only the politicians were listening:
“Rent freedom day” was the brainchild of tenant lobbying group Generation Rent, homeless charity Shelter, public-service union Unison and several local groups fighting for renters’ rights.
“Housing is no longer a right, it’s an asset to make money out of,” said Mr Jones.
Mr Klier added there were three areas that MPs and councillors really needed to work on improving.
“We think there’s absolutely a need for rent control,” he said.
The Recusant has argued these past five years for a reintroduction of private rent controls, perhaps the most direly needed but chronically obfuscated policy demand of today. Together, Rent Freedom Day and March for Homes combine, in the same week, to voice the social crie de coeur of our times.
(and the Morning Star 31/1 - 1/2 Weekend Edition)
Today, 31 January 2015, is March for Homes, in which the tens of thousands of victims of the Tory gentrification of London have been marching in protest against the "social cleansing" of the capital. A massive banner was hung from Tower Bridge pleading for 'Social Housing Not Social Cleansing', an unprecedented sight and sign of a society in social and moral meltdown under Tory rule. Here is the Weekend Edition of the Morning Star's take on the day and events:
Support for the march comes from a range of campaigning groups, unions and MPs.
His analysis remains relevant today, as the Tories seek to put the clock back to the 1930s.
It is a public asset, providing decent, affordable and secure housing that pays its own way.
Council housing should be available to all on the basis of social need.
There’s plenty of surplus public land which could be used for this purpose.
He understood the need for local authorities to own the land and control the planning process.
Let’s end the hated bedroom tax, reintroduce proper rent controls and end the right to buy.
The Recusant applauds those who have organised and taken part in the March for Homes, as we also fully support The Peoples' Assembly Against Austerity's statement in the same edition of MS today calling on the reintroduction of private rent controls, increased social and council housing building, and an end to the welfare caps -demands The Recusant and Caparison anthologies have also been making since 2010.
Another pertinent piece in this weekend's MS by Luke James on the growing call among supporters and activists for Labour to take a sharp left turn and announce anti-austerity policies in the run up to the May General Election (no doubt to fall in deaf ears!), perhaps partly prompted by the Syriza victory in Greece last weekend:
“I think that proves that this is mainstream thinking.
Just 13 per cent of the 980 Labour List readers polled opposed the policies.
Again, in the same March for Homes edition of the MS, is further sour news of yet another housing estate in London going into gentrification:
The fate of the brutalist Balfron Tower, built in Poplar, east London in the late ’60s to a design by the famed architect Erno Goldfinger, seems just as insulting as the Shard’s rise. This Grade II-listed tower is a reminder that London’s most high-profile building projects were once for a very different purpose — to house its working-class citizens.
Fellow redevelopers “luxury residential property” company LondonNewcastle prefer to concentrate on the tower’s “edgy” appeal, pointing out that it has appeared in a gritty music video for Oasis and Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic zombie thriller 28 Days Later.
Those who once lived there are less happy.
“It has become an icon for privatisation,” says former resident Michael Newman.
Also symptomatic is who has been living in the block as it awaits its new rich owners. Alongside property guardians happy to give up tenancy security for cheap rents, the Bow Arts Trust brought in artists as residents to “celebrate” those who once lived there, provided the work remained vague enough not to feature the plight of the departing tenants.
This move backfired, with Oliver Wainwright summing up the process in the Guardian as a “live gentrification jamboree.” Not the coverage the developers would have been hoping for.
“The insidious creep to total privatisation over more than four years has precluded this.”
Today’s march would be a good place to start.
We need to focus not just on parties but challenging neoliberalism and all its
Nationalising rail should be supported, not just as a vote winner but because it’s a good policy that values social need rather than short-term profit.
Two Rainbows of Hope Amid the Gloom of Austerity
The Blue and the Green: A Green Light for the Greens
The Recusant is in the perplexing position of actually agreeing with the prime minister that there should be no leaders’ debates in the run up to the May general election which do not include Green Party leader Natalie Bennett, while of course being minded of Cameron’s possible opportunism in his somewhat implausible ‘stance’ (given the Greens represent the polar opposite politics of the Conservatives), and disagreeing with Ed Miliband’s hypocritical and counterintuitive accusation that said stance is ‘un-democratic’, when he and Nick Clegg are both apparently sanguine about the exclusion of the Green Party (and yet the toxic inclusion of UKIP!) from the televised debates; a stance which is itself implicitly un-democratic, in our opinion, especially given that the Greens have doubled their vote in the past year alone and have also had an MP in Parliament for several years longer than UKIP’s two recent Tory-turncoat MPs.
Suffice it to say The Recusant, which supports the Green Party, firmly believes it should be included in the televised leaders’ debates, and that its exclusion is tantamount to a pro-austerity media conspiracy.
What an irony it’s been that at the time of the 700th anniversary of British ‘democracy’, we have been facing a situation where the overwhelmingly right-wing British media has been actively preventing the inclusion of the leader of a democratically elected parliamentary party –the Green Party– in the televised general election leader debates, which just so happens to be both left-wing and anti-austerity, thus shutting down a truly ‘democratic debate’ on the pros and cons of capitalist austerity.
Here’s The Guardian’s recent coverage:
Roger Mosey, the BBC’s former editorial director, called on the broadcasters to run the debates without Cameron – and provide an empty lectern for him – if he pulled out. “Those who are willing to put themselves on the line should be allowed to do so,” he wrote in an article for the Guardian. “Those who don’t can watch at home and see what an empty chair looks like over 90 minutes of prime-time television.”
Ed Miliband accused the prime minister of making a 'pathetic excuse'.
But the absence of Cameron may be problematic, particularly for Channel 4 and Sky News, which, under proposals published by broadcasters last year, plan to host a head-to-head debate featuring only Cameron and Miliband.
Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage have sent a letter to Cameron over the debates row.
The BBC, under the same plans, would host a debate with Cameron, Miliband and Clegg, while on ITV the three of them would be joined by a fourth party leader, Ukip’s Farage. Separately, the Guardian, the Telegraph and YouTube have offered to host a digital debate with all five party leaders.
Former BBC controller of editorial policy Phil Harding told Radio 4’s PM programme he hoped the BBC would have the courage to “empty chair” David Cameron if it came to that. “I certainly hope the BBC would have the courage to do that if necessary. [BBC Director general] Tony Hall made a very strong speech in the light of charter renewal saying they might come under pressure but would resist that pressure and be politically independent.
“The voters are the most important people in this equation. The BBC should not be cowed in any way.”
Whatever his true motives, it pains The Recusant to have to say at this time that David Cameron actually –and for the first time ever– made the right call in arguing that if Ukip is represented at the leaders’ debates then so should be the Green Party. By contrast, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg were both found wanting in what appeared to be purely opportunistic stances prioritising attempts to (rightly or wrongly) discredit Cameron as being debate-shy over promoting full democratically representative Green-inclusive debates. Here both Miliband and Clegg (not to mention Farage) have put party electoral interest before those of representative democracy.
We can only speculate as to whether Cameron is privately pleased at this outcome, or as thrown by it as the other pro-austerity party leaders whom he sought to wrong foot. But certainly The Recusant is heartened by this latest turnaround. Now that the anti-austerity Greens and Plaid Cymru and the austerity-sceptic SNP are, belatedly, to be included, let’s just hope the leaders’ debates do actually go ahead now, as this will be the first proper opportunity for a full comprehensive public debate on the pros and cons of continued austerity.
Once again the emphatically EX-‘Tory party at prayer’ CofE has spoken out comprehensively against the Tories’ ‘Big Food Bank Society’, most particularly the eloquent, thoughtful and morally arresting Archbishop of York, Most Rev John Sentamu. Here’s British Bread and Circuses’ (BBC’s) coverage of the story:
The comments feature in a new book edited by the Archbishop of York.
The prime minister's spokesman said the government would continue to help families out of poverty.
In his essay collection, called On Rock or Sand? Firm Foundations for Britain's Future, the Most Rev John Sentamu says the country is facing "a new poverty".
Dr Sentamu writes: "The poor in this 'age of austerity' experience what I call a 'new poverty', where many of the 'new poor' are in work.
Speaking to the BBC Radio 4's The World at One, Dr Sentamu said: "Unless we address it, we're still going to find our people trapped, making these choices which I think are not really good for them, for their family, for everybody else."
Welfare should be nothing more than a "safety net", not a long-term solution, he added.
The living wage is set at £9.15 an hour in London and £7.85 an hour in the rest of the UK.
Prime Minister David Cameron has previously said he supports the idea in principle.
He said the prime minister was clear about the importance of raising living standards.
The Recusant has long argued that we have entered a pernicious period in our political history which uncannily echoes many of the twisted ideas of 1930s Mendelism, ‘Social Hygiene’ and eugenics theories (which were prevalent among the British intelligentsia of the Thirties almost as much as in the late Weimar Republic and Hitler’s Germany); it is interesting to have come across a comment piece in the Morning Star by left Labour MP Michael Meacher this week in which he impeaches modern-day Malthusian Toryism for its inculcation of eugenics-inflected attitudes into government and specifically DWP policy and rhetoric:
Tories revert to age old policy of stopping poor from breeding
Keith Joseph made a pitch for the Tory leadership in 1974 with this appeal: “A high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world…Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment….The balance of our human stock is threatened”. The message hasn’t changed in the last 40 years – control the lower orders, suppress their breeding, check their spending, moralise against their life-styles.
This Tory prejudice again has a long history. It underpinned the Poor Law for three centuries till it was challenged by Beatrice Webb and others in 1908, and was only finally overthrown by the national insurance and income support laws of the Attlee government in the 1940s. Now in the Cameron government this deeply embedded Tory instinct to vilify the poor as a degenerate class which needs to be punished to kick it out of its fecklessness has come to the fore again with a vengeance. Unprecedented cuts in public sector pay and in benefits, combined with ‘sanctioning’ (i.e. depriving claimants of their income for weeks on end and sometimes months even for the most trivial infringements), have been constantly spun on the canard of ‘shirkers/scroungers versus strivers/hard-working families’.
Generation Rent v Gentrification/ Rent Freedom Day
The Recusant has long argued that private rents and the necessity and sanity of private rent controls are perhaps the most urgent issue of our time in terms of disenfranchising whole sections of society and particularly the younger generation (i.e. “generation rent”), and dispossessing them for the long-term future of any hopes of ever being able to own their own homes but instead be lifelong tenants at the mercies of unscrupulous and unregulated private landlords.
Indeed, if there is to be a third Caparison anti-cuts anthology, it will be in the cause of petitioning for a reintroduction of private rent controls. It is heartening therefore to know that there is currently a campaign group well underway to keep these issues in the public spotlight, namely ‘Generation Rent’ who are holding a ‘Rent Freedom Day’ on 4th February http://www.rentfreedomday.org/schedule?utm_campaign=rfd22jan&utm_medium=email&utm_source=npto . We urge those reading this to engage with this campaign and event.
Here's a recent article from the Morning Star on this topic: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-e49e-Tenants-must-stick-together-to-beat-off-gentrification#.VMK3mVI5Bdg
Left Turn from Austerity in Greece
While the pro-austerity capitalist European media tries to paint it black on the momentous and absolutely necessary victory of the “far left” Syriza in Greece, The Recusant oppositely sees this as a moment to cautiously celebrate as Alexis Tsipras’s anti-austerity party ‘paint it red’ in Athens and promise to turn the tide of years of heinously draconian austerity policies in the world’s most ancient seat of democracy. This is a victory which couldn’t have happened too soon. It is a big bold red democratic two fingers foisted at the anti-democratic, markets-dictated Troika.
The anti-austerity stance of this Greek coalition government is already emphatically clear:
Syriza’s financial planning official, Giorgos Stathakis, said the new government had no plans to meet with negotiators from the “troika” of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the IMF, and would instead seek talks directly with governments.
Swingeing spending cuts and soaring unemployment have seen around 3.1 million people, or 33% of the population, lose their social security and health insurance, leaving the country on the brink of humanitarian crisis. Some 32% of Greece’s population now lives below the poverty line, while 18% are unable to afford basic food needs. (The Observer, 25 Jan 15 –day of the Greek election)
That’s why Greece needs Syriza! The Recusant congratulates Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza party for this historic moral victory over the draconian capitalist yoke. This is also, significantly, the first time a European nation has elected a far left government since that ever-frequently cited decade thesedays, the 1930s.
An anti-austerity ‘rainbow alliance’ of Bennett-Sturgeon-Wood could well prove a formidable phalanx against the male-dominated pro-austerity brigade, and an ultimate foil for the chauvinistic right-wing of the Tories and Ukip. Here’s hoping. Suffice to say, The Recusant backs the Green Party, and is heartened to learn this week of a new surge in its support.