yourfriendinthenorth

Defending the indefensible with the absurd

2011-12-14T22:24:00.002Z

"Despite its repressive character, the Gadaffi regime shared much of Libya's oil wealth with the mass of the people, providing some of the best health, education and utility services in Africa and the Middle East."

Morning Star
August 22nd 2011

"You can say what you want about Gaddafi," remarked a work colleague a few days ago, "but at least he was able to give his people free medical care and free education. America can't do that." My fellow worker, who we shall for the sake of argument call 'Michael', had surprised me. He had surprised me not because he had made a clever observation about Gaddafi's regime that I had somehow failed to take into account, but rather the surprise lay in the fact that he was someone who I thought would have known better. Clearly not.

But with the comment from 'Michael' came a strange sense of déjà vu. This was not the first time I had heard this little line about health and education used in relation to totalitarianism. Yes, I had heard it said about the Gaddafi regime in the Morning Star a few months previously but it goes back way before that. In his amusing autobiography Reasons to be Cheerful, Mark Steel tells an anecdote from the eighties about how a Communist Party member in Britain once told him of how Russian hospitals had performed a new pioneering operation to remove cataracts. All well and good said Steel, but it didn't exactly make up for the slaughter of Hungarians in 1956, did it?

My first recollection of this defence of ugliness came when a secondary school teacher was speaking about the USSR (yeah, fair enough, the Soviet system was a nasty piece of work but the sick weren't charged and the kiddies were educated... or something like that). It came up again during the NATO campaign in Kosovo in 1999 when a crusty old Stalinist remarked to me that for all Milosevic's failings he did at least operate Europe's only "anti-market economy" (really?) as well as provide his people with, you guessed it, free health and education.

When Iraq's Ba'athist dictatorship was toppled four years later the free-health-and-education guff seemed to go into overdrive. Even though I was an opponent of the campaign to oust Saddam and his family back in 2003, I did cringe when fellow anti-war comrades would seem to have to go one step further and highlight the benefits of the Ba'athist regime, like the nice if naive Canadian lady who pointed out to me that the country prior to the invasion had some wonderful museums and art galleries which were open free to the people. The citizens of Halabja were just so ungrateful, weren't they?

There is a far right equivalent to all of this. You will be familiar I'm sure with the man who claims that 'Hitler had some good ideas' and that the Führer did well to create full employment in Germany prior to the war, or perhaps you will be acquainted with the individual who notes how Mussolini made the Italian trains run on time. But on the left the obsession does seem to be with the free health and education that despots sometimes operate alongside concentration camps and mass graves. It can in an odd way be darkly funny, though the humour wears off slightly when you hear a member of the crackpot CPGB (M-L) praise the social services currently offered in North Korea.

I wonder do these people actually check to see if the dictatorships they so happily rush to holler the benefits of even possess these things. Did Saddam really allow free entry to art galleries in Baghdad? Does Harpal Brar have an in-depth knowledge of Pyongyang's school system? Do such people even care? Of course not. The point of these protestations is less a defence of sickening totalitarian governments and more a bizarre unwillingness to accept that the United States and it's allies in the democratic world are, finally, in the right. When all situations are analysed from the point of what you are against rather than what you stand for, you will inevitably find yourself in bed with all sorts of strange creatures.

Nevertheless, it is still encouraging to see at least one organisation on the Marxist left in Britain still prepared to offer no defence of the Gaddafi era whatsoever and welcome it's total destruction. As the tiny AWL put it in their newspaper:

If working-class organisation is our starting point, then the fundamental question must be whether that organisation is more or less possible, easier or harder, without the crushing, murderous Qaddafi regime. The answer is that it is infinitely more possible. And that alone is cause for celebration and hope.

Celebration and hope. I don't normally do positive endings, but I'll make an exception this one time.

"Deliver us lord from the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship..."

2011-08-04T16:37:00.006+01:00

At this stage I'm beginning to think that the Catholic Church is having a laugh. They have to be. Yesterday's report that Cardinal Sean Brady had written to a number of GAA county boards appealing for them to consider moving the times of matches and training sessions so as to avoid clashing with local Masses sounded like a joke. Except it wasn't a joke. And when you think about it, given all that has been revealed about the Catholic Church in Ireland over the past few months, it isn't even all that funny.

Could it really be that despite all the controversy surrounding the church and paedophilia, a controversy that Sean Brady himself was personally embroiled in, the leadership has reached the utterly absurd conclusion that the primary cause of falling Mass attendances on the island should be put down to Gaelic football and hurling matches being scheduled for the same time as the weekly act of worship? If so they are even more detached from reality than I considered them to be. Indeed, on reading the report of this affair on the RTE website yesterday afternoon I had an image of the Primate of All Ireland holed up Hitler-style in a bunker somewhere beneath Armagh Cathedral dictating this bizarre letter to his equally deluded fellow bishops, all of them still convinced that they can turn around the decline in their beloved church.

Of course, as a very kind spokesperson for the GAA in Ulster pointed out, "we don't have Sunday morning games." In other words, matches never actually clash with Mass times. Even if there were Sunday morning games that still would not prevent any good Catholic GAA lad or lassie attending Saturday night Mass in their area – and if a match is being played on a Saturday evening then those supporters attending that are thereby freed to praise their lord on a Sunday. Simple, no? Mr Brady does not seem to have thought this one through.

What this whole pathetic episode proves is that the Catholic Church in Ireland is still not aware that the Irish people have moved on while it remains lagging behind. What its followers have moved on to is a 21st century secular Ireland; what it remains stuck in is an Ireland where it called the shots on everything from the constitution right down to the throw-in times for Gaelic games. Sadly for them, and thankfully for the rest of us, that era is well and truly over, though Brady and his bunch still appears to be in denial. That denial cannot persist for much longer. In recent days the organisation has been lambasted in the Dail by the Taoiseach. Its appeal to the Gaelic Athletic Association to move its fixtures has been rebuffed. The pews have never been emptier than they are at present. If I were one of the top dogs in the One True Church I would be taking a good long look at myself and asking whether the poor turnouts for Mass might possibly have something to do with the church and those bothersome paedophile scandals rather than the GAA.

I just hope Sean Brady hasn't given Rowan Williams an idea. With the English footie season kicking off next Saturday and the CofE getting less relevant by the hour perhaps now would be a good time for the Archbishop of Canterbury to blame Manchester United and Chelsea for those declining church attendances in Albion. Just a thought.

Scottish Labour's problems far from a Scottish problem

2011-07-27T15:34:00.002+01:00

I don't particularly like Irn-Bru. I just thought I'd tell you that, though that fact is neither here nor there. So, what am I blathering on about?

A report in the Daily Record a couple of weeks back stated that, according to party insiders, Scottish Labour were planning on rebranding themselves as the Irn-Bru of modern politics and planning on putting forward more made in Scotland policies in order to make them distinct from the Labour Party as a UK-wide entity. The piece goes on to say that senior Labour figures have even studied how Scottish products like whisky and Irn-Bru retain a solid Caledonian identity while appealing to a wider market. I had a hunch the comrades in Albain would do something silly after their defeat in the Scottish Parliamentary election but this garbage really has surpassed anything I had imagined.

Clearly the leadership in Scotland feels that their drop in popularity has come around as a result of them being too closely tied a UK party. While this may well be a contributing factor for some ex-Labour voting Scots I do feel that it is not anywhere near being the whole story. STV's Political Editor Bernard Ponsonby was closer to the truth when he spoke of Iain Gray's "lack of narrative."

What he probably could have added is that this absence of a defining vision or goal is not just something which Labour in Scotland suffers from but that this is a criticism which at the present moment could well be levelled at virtually all of those parties aligned to the Party of European Socialists and the Socialist International. There has been nothing which one could call a distinct democratic socialist response to the current crisis in capitalism. The sticking plaster approach to patching up the system in a hope that it recovers may make sense if you come from a conservative or liberal camp, but surely even the most moderate of social democrats aspires to something much greater than simply that, don't they?

One of the problems with the leaders of the European centre-left at present is that they seem to be utterly incapable of thinking outside the box. Perhaps for them politics is not about policy but about image – get it right and you win, get it wrong and you lose. If so then it is easy to see why the top dogs at the Scottish Labour Party may feel that what they need now is a revamped political vehicle with a more nationalistic, made-in-Scotland tinge to it. After all, haven't they just been overtaken for the first time by the SNP? Well, yes, they have. However, while the Scottish Nationalists may have secured a majority in the Holyrood parliament, successive opinion polls have repeatedly shown overall support for independence to be in the minority. Just like votes for similar parties in Wales, Northern Ireland, Italy or the Basque Country, it would be foolish to interpret every single SNP vote in May as a vote to sever the link with London.

There are many factors behind the success of Alex Salmond's party. For some it is all about ending the union with England. For others an SNP vote is a vote for more powers for the Scottish Parliament, though not complete independence. Some may also consider their vote a protest vote; a way of giving a two-finger salute to both the coalition parties and the opposition at Westminster. There will also be a considerable left vote for the SNP. While it may be difficult to point to precise policies that set them apart from Labour in this regard, perception often counts for a lot and there is a feeling among many Scots that the Nats are now well to the left of Iain Gray's lot.

The important thing for Labour in Scotland is that they do not press the panic button just yet. Their vote in this year's Scottish election gave them 26.3% of the vote; their vote in the previous Holyrood poll gave them 29.2%. While a drop in your popularity is never a good thing this still does not represent a complete disaster for Labour. They remain a mass party, still able to fight back and regain their position as the leading party in Scotland. However, now is the time to make some choices. The answer to Labour's problems do not lie in hiring a PR company and deciding whether the word 'Scottish' should be in larger font than 'Labour' on their election literature. They do not lie in having Archie Gemmill's goal against Holland featured in a Party Election Broadcast in which Iain Gray's replacement watches the famed footage sipping some Irn-Bru and wrapped in the Cross of Saint Andrew.

If the Tories and the Lib Dems want to respond to their problems north of Hadrian's Wall by attempting to Caledonianise themselves then fair enough. Labour, however, should not feel compelled to follow their example. What the party needs to do now is take some time and think hard about the one thing that can truly set them apart from the rest of the field - policy. The decline cannot be reversed by a few quick fix tweaks and a rebranding suggested to them by a public relations guru. They must establish the unique narrative that Bernard Ponsonby spoke of, the thing which they so clearly lacked under the leadership of Iain Gray. To do so they must also appreciate that the decline is not confined only to Scotland but part of a wider downturn in the left of centre vote in the United Kingdom and across the European Union.

Clause IV of the Labour constitution states that the "Labour Party is a democratic socialist party." If they wish to rejuvenate the fortunes of the organisation, and by that I mean from the organisation from John o' Groats right down to Land's End, then they would be better advised to take their inspiration from democratic socialism than a carbonated soft drink from Cumbernauld.

We can't handle the truth

2011-06-18T00:02:00.003+01:00

I sincerely hope that this does not sound too insensitive but is this really headline news? I was always under the impression that everyone, nationalist and unionist, accepted that the Provisional IRA were responsible for the atrocity at Kingsmill in 1976 and that the South Armagh Republican Action Force was a piece of fiction. Will the HET's next revelation be that the INLA were responsible for the massacre at Darkley rather than the equally fictitious Catholic Reaction Force? Overall the report from the HET into the murders of these ten Protestant workers will have no tangible effect. It will not tell us anything we did not already know. It will not bring anyone to justice for the crime. Unionists will be angry. Republicans will point to the need to investigate similar killings of Catholics. And when it's all over we'll still be at the point where we started. Closure? You must be joking.

In the years since the ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement we have been exceedingly inept here in Northern Ireland at our attempts to investigate our recent troubles. Perhaps the reason for this lies in the very fact that they are so recent. Whether it is the Historical Enquiries Team or the Consultative Group on the Past or the never-ending flow of inquiries into various paramilitary and state killings, the end result has usually been a report that pleases one side of the sectarian fence and leaves the other side indulging in that favourite pastime of ours, whataboutery.

There was a time when I would have supported something along the lines of a South Africa-style truth commission but not now. The one piece of truth that has been uncovered over the past decade or so is that we are incapable of dealing with our past, at least not at the moment. Two and a half years ago I wrote a short post on this website regarding the Consultative Group on the past where I suggested it was time, in a political sense, to start concentrating on the future. I stated:

The best way to "deal with the legacy of the past" (as the CGP claims it is doing) is to stop dwelling on it and move on. I don't mean this to sound cold. I am not for one moment suggesting that the past be swept under the carpet or simply forgotten about, not that there would ever be any chance of that happening. We live in a society addicted to graveside orations and the commemoration of past battles so no one need worry about a sudden bout of mass amnesia hitting the province. However, the endless stream of costly committees and inquiries dealing with controversial elements of our past are achieving nothing other than keeping old wounds open.

Someday we will be able to deal with our past, but do not expect it to come anytime soon. Until then I suggest we, to use a horrible cliché, draw a line in the sand and just get on with things. Spanish people have only in recent times found themselves able to discuss their civil war which ended more than seventy years ago. The unwritten 'pacto de olvido' is probably the best template available when it comes to the way in which we in Northern Ireland confront our past. Sad? Indeed, very sad. But also true.

I don't mean to preach

2011-06-12T06:26:00.007+01:00

I didn't go to the World Atheist Convention in Dublin last weekend, though I doubt my failure to attend is considered a sin in such circles. However, Anthony McIntyre did and was kind enough to scribble up a short report afterwards on the day's goings on. Like Anthony I am not an "atheist activist" either. Indeed, the very notion of 'organised' atheism or some form of evangelical non-believer is enough to make me cringe. Thankfully I have never come across such a person. What I have come across though are members of the religious community complaining about "proselytising atheists."

That was the phrase a friend of mine used the other day. "If you don't believe in anything," he said, "why would you feel the need to go on about it?" I didn't get drawn into a lengthy debate (people of faith tend not to enjoy such things) but I did say that if his statement is accurate then would it not be equally true to say that if you do believe in a god why do you feel the need to "go on about it?" Or, to put it another way, why would you feel the need to have that god put in your country's constitution? Or, for another example, why would you feel the need for your church to control the schools our children are educated in? I could go on but you get the gist of what I'm saying.

As Christopher Hitchens put it so succinctly, "our belief is not a belief." In other words we atheists do not gather together in temples to shriek and celebrate our lack of faith. Nor is there a modern equivalent of the League of the Militant Godless going around attempting to enforce a brand of state atheism on society. If either of these two things ever occur I'll be the first to oppose them. Two things are currently in vogue though.

The first is the spontaneous reigniting of a philosophical debate on whether a god (or gods) exists or not. Bestsellers such as The God Delusion, god is not Great and Letters to a Christian Nation all appeared at around the same time. They were not coordinated. Their impact was not planned by a Machiavellian group of atheists. They are not part of any organised movement seeking recruits for its cause. That some in the faith-based community mistake contributions to a debate as proselytising speaks volumes. For me it is a sign that they fear reason. Evidence of this can be seen from the frankly idiotic retort of one the respondents to Anthony McIntyre's piece who made the comment "qui nimis probat, nihil probat" ("he who proves too much, proves nothing"). I don't know about you but I think I'll stick with the side that "proves too much."

The second thing that we have been seeing a lot of recently and is often mistaken for 'evangelical atheism' is actually little more than good old fashioned secularism. True, groups like the National Secular Society in the UK might well be chock-a-block with those horrible godless types, but their goals remain purely political. They are not attempting to 'save' anyone. They are not looking for converts. They merely strive to achieve that age old objective of the separation of church and state. I once came across one enlightened chap at university, a north Antrim Protestant no less, who described himself as a 'secular Christian'. If only the almighty could send us a few more of those in future.

So there you have it. I just thought I should get those couple of things straight. I'll stop blathering now and be on my merry way. I certainly wouldn't want to make it look like I was proselytising or anything.

Same as it ever was

2011-05-20T07:45:00.003+01:00

I don't believe in reincarnation or the odd idea that negative things which happen to you represent punishment for your sins in a past life, however if I did I would probably say that having Newry and Armagh as my constituency for Westminster and Assembly elections in Northern Ireland would be the supreme being's method of penalising me for whatever evil I got up to in my previous living form.

In what was already a fairly dull Assembly election to begin with, Newry and Armagh seemed as if it were the constituency at the very cutting edge of this latest electoral yawnfest. The six men elected in 2007 to misrepresent good folk from Loughgall to Crossmaglen were all reelected in 2011, all six of whom can now safely drop the pretence that they have any deep ideological differences and sit comfortably in the same coalition administration in Belfast. The campaign in the area didn't capture the imagination much either, possibly because there wasn't one specifically unique 'Newry and Armagh issue' for people to get stuck into (at times I found myself almost resenting Mid-Ulster for having a hospital which appears to have been under threat of closure since the dawn of time).

The candidates were all remarkably dull as well. No Willie Frazer for entertainment. No Paul Berry sex scandals to give us a chuckle. No Sharon Haughey posters for me steal. In fact, no women at all. And no left-wing candidates either. The most exciting development of the whole campaign for me was finding out that my constituency had its own hashtag on Twitter (#nar11 if you must know).

In the end I gave an extremely unenthusiastic first preference vote to David Murphy of the Alliance Party. I don't know David Murphy. I didn't see any of his posters in the area, nor was I visited by any canvassers for the Alliance Party. I didn't get a leaflet from him in the post. I can't even tell you what the man looks like. In fact, at one point I had a slight doubt in my mind as to whether or not David Murphy even existed but, in a landscape bereft of socialists and females, an Alliance candidate seemed almost revolutionary.

To be fair to my own constituency the news wasn't much brighter in the other seventeen areas. The election of Steve Agnew in North Down does give progressive-minded people a slight glimmer of hope. The growth in support for the Alliance Party is also a welcome development. The People Before Profit Alliance also put in a couple of good displays in Foyle and Belfast West. Overall the vote for non-sectarian candidates came in at around 10%. One in ten choosing to venture outside the sectarian bloc sounds encouraging until you take into account that the combined vote for Alliance and The Workers Party at the 1982 Assembly election was 12%. The idea that we may actually have travelled backwards since the era of hunger strikes and daily terrorist attacks should give us cause for concern.

While the state of Northern Ireland's non-sectarian bloc is a little disheartening, the state of the left is simply dismal. Any hope of a peacetime SDLP developing into something even vaguely social democratic seems to have all but evaporated. In my own neck of the woods they were circulating a leaflet providing the numbers of nationalists (for that read 'Catholics') that didn't turn out to vote in Newry and Armagh last time around. Even if one were to ignore such stupid tugging at the green heartstrings, there wasn't much in their wider campaign to indicate a leftward shift. Like almost every other party in the north the SDLP has thrown their weight behind the calls to reduce corporation tax, a policy that the political mainstream seems to consider the solution to all our ills (John Lowry's description of it as a step on the path to a "Liechtenstein on the Lagan" would be closer to my own way of thinking).

Results on the far left were mixed. Not even the most dedicated supporters of The Workers Party or the Socialist Party could find anything to smile about in the results for their candidates. The People Before Profit Alliance did slightly better. Eamonn McCann took over three thousand first preferences in Derry while Gerry Carroll polled surprisingly well in Belfast West with 1,661 votes. It speaks volumes for the far left that even in such difficult economic times for workers in this part of the world cooperation between parties is nonexistent. Well, in NI at least. Perhaps I'm missing something that is glaringly obvious but does it not seem strange, given the SWP and the Socialist Party are all-Ireland entities which joined forces to create a united left front in the 26 counties in February, that the same two organisations run against each other in the 6 counties just a few weeks later? Of course, in the end it wouldn't have mattered a jot - the far left would have remained seatless - but it would have at least sent out a positive message that the days of pointless bickering were in the past.

The future for the left in Northern Ireland appears no better now than it appeared ten, twenty or even thirty years ago. That is something I take no pleasure in saying but it is, I believe, the truth. At the next Stormont election will we see the same old faces from the far left fighting a losing struggle in the same old constituencies that they've been unsuccessfully contesting for years? Almost certainly. Will the centre-left once again fail to even show up? Probably, though I live in hope of being pleasantly surprised.

In summary then a good election for the Democratic Unionists, Sinn Fein and the Alliance Party. The decline in fortunes for the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP continues. The Greens are in the same position as they were following the last Assembly election, though this time they have more young and media-friendly representative flying the flag for them at Stormont. This election also finally confirmed what we always suspected about the Traditional Unionist Voice, namely that they are a one man band. Apart from Jim Allister narrowly winning the last seat in North Antrim that party appears to have little or no future. The Protestant people of Ulster have now sent out a message in the European, Westminster, local council and Assembly elections that they have no desire to return to the pantomime politics of the pre-Saint Andrew's Agreement DUP.

Even more of a one man show than the TUV appears to be the Northern Irish wing of UKIP. Their first adventure in NI politics ended with Newry and Mourne councillor Henry Reilly polling well but all of their other candidates performing dismally. On the left, as I have already commented, things remain in the same pathetic hopeless state that they always have been in. One piece of good news at least was poor showing from the British National Party. The far right group stood candidates in three constituencies (including the hideous Ann Cooper in Belfast East) and lost their deposits in all three.

Finally, a word of congratulations to Procapitalism who it would appear have replaced the now defunct Natural Law Party as possibly the most bizarre party in the province. Charles Smyth, their sole candidate (and perhaps member) in Northern Ireland, got 29 first preference votes in Belfast South, an increase of seven from the 2007 contest. Mr Smyth can now take some time off to celebrate at home with a glass of wine and a couple of Ayn Rand novels. Well done, Charles.

And that, as they say, is that. See you again in four years time for more... of the same.

Still living in the shadow of the gunmen

2011-05-18T23:22:00.004+01:00

Quite a few years ago, during a typically dull and damp Saturday afternoon in Belfast, I did quite an odd thing. I decided to spend £10 of my hard earned cash by climbing aboard a red double-decker bus and allowing myself to be taken on a guided tour of the city in which I lived. Leaving aside the driver and the tour guide, I was probably the only local person in the vehicle. Playing the part of a tourist on your own stomping ground is a truly surreal experience as well as an interesting one. The tour provided me with a little taste of what outsiders visiting here see when they come to our land and, to be honest, I was not overly impressed with what I witnessed.

The tour turned out to be a sickening cocktail of bad history mixed with equally bad comedy. While I appreciate that most foreign tourists do not want to explore the minutiae of our troubles when they jump on a tour bus for a one hour trip around the city, I did find the light-hearted treatment given to a conflict in which thousands of our citizens had been killed distasteful and more than a little bit embarrassing. As someone who has been on similar tours in other former conflict zones in various parts of the world I can only say that I had never encountered anything as crass before or since. Had the tour guide's gags been funny it might not have been so bad but sadly his material was probably even worse than anything I've ever come across on the unfathomably unfunny BBC Northern Ireland series Give My Head Peace.

Quite a large portion of the tour focussed on Belfast's vast array of paramilitary wall murals. These paintings which adorn the gable walls of houses in many working-class districts of the city can be viewed as either the work of talented artists celebrating the feats of brave men who defended their community in dangerous times or else as little more than sectarian dogs marking their territory (I side with the latter interpretation).

Thankfully in recent years there has been a move away from terrorist murals and towards a form of art that reflects and celebrates things a tad less threatening. Images of Gaelic games, Alex Higgins, the Harland and Wolff shipyard and David Healy's winning goal against England in that famous World Cup qualifier game against England are just four examples of new murals which have appeared in Belfast in recent years. In my own native county of Armagh the people of Portadown no longer have to suffer the hideous visage of loyalist mass murder Billy Wright staring down at them from a wall in the Brownstown Road area of the town, a repugnant sight now happily replaced with images of George Best in the red of Manchester United and the green of Northern Ireland. Unfortunately some out there seem to want to take a backward step.

As the BBC reported last week, two new murals are currently being painted in east Belfast which depict armed and masked UVF members from our recent troubles, one of which will actually be replacing a relatively new mural dedicated to Glentoran Football Club. The question that everyone seems to be asking about these two new murals is just who it is exactly that actually wants them to be there. MLAs, councillors (including John Kyle of the UVF-aligned PUP), community workers, clergy and your everyday ordinary bloke on the street all appear to be united in opposition to these latest works of paramilitary art, all of which does cause you to ask the next question which is why something cannot be done to remove such acts of criminal vandalism.

Perhaps part of the answer lies in the response of our political representatives. Take, for instance, the pathetic attitude taken towards these murals by Ulster Unionist councillor Jim Rodgers when he appeared on Radio Ulster last Tuesday morning. If ever there was an example of a human being beating around the bush then this was it. Rodgers balanced his opposition to paramilitary murals by stating that he was not against ones which paid tribute to the old Ulster Volunteer Force and also noted that murals in Belfast were a major tourist attraction.

On the first point, I am not all that sure about how adequate murals celebrating the old UVF really are. If the Belfast of the future is a place that tolerates images of loyalist paramilitaries from the early 20th century then, given our deeply ingrained culture of 'whataboutery', it will most likely have to be a place that tolerates gable wall paintings of IRA flying columns from the 1920s (you know, parity of esteem and all that). Secondly, so what if these are a major tourist attraction? Take a trip to Berlin and you will find very little evidence of the wall constructed by the Stalinists that divided that city for almost four decades. Perhaps we could take a leaf out of Berlin's book and preserve a few murals for the purposes of tourism, if only to show outsiders what a perverse society we once were. There surely must be no sane individual out there that would want to live in the shadow of one of these monstrosities and they certainly should not be forced to do so in the name of attracting camera-wielding foreigners. Tourism is one thing, a cheap holiday in other people's misery is quite another.

So, what is to be done? In my view the local councils in the areas where these things exist need to develop some backbone and begin to take immediate action to remove paramilitary murals from our midst. If alternative works of genuine community art can be agreed upon then fine; if not then they should be removed. Ordinary folk can also make a difference. For example, when dissident republican graffiti went up in Belfast and Derry celebrating the murder of Constable Ronan Kerr in April people in the areas affected came out and removed it. Their example is proof that people in working-class communities do not have to be constantly living in fear and do have the guts to come out in the open – unmasked – and stand up to the unelected armed thugs that yearn to exercise a Mafia-like control over what they see as 'their' areas.

A combination of local authorities taking a tough stance on them coupled with a more vocal rejection from people on the ground would be a massive step forward to consigning these things to the dustbin of Irish history. Paramilitary wall murals have no place in the Northern Ireland of the future, or indeed that of the present. In short, it's time for them to be decommissioned.

The problems of trying too hard

2011-05-12T02:47:00.002+01:00

I never thought I would find myself writing here about hip hop, BBC Radio 1Xtra or indeed the works of a certain individual who goes by the name of Mic Righteous but at this precise moment in time that is exactly what I am doing. When a friend remarked to me yesterday about a bizarre act of censorship he heard on the aforementioned DAB radio station I felt I just had to find out some more about it.

So, what's this whole kerfuffle about? Well, it appears that back in February the Beeb saw it necessary to edit out the word 'Palestine' from the Mic Righteous track Fire In The Booth when it was played on Charlie Sloth's show. For some evidence that this strange episode actually occurred click here. Now, regardless of your opinion of the tune, does this not seem a little peculiar? The BBC have responded by stating that they have a responsibility to be impartial when dealing with controversial subjects, which is entirely understandable, however I fail to see how the mere use of the word 'Palestine' could be interpreted as controversial.

This seems to be one of those occasions where the corporation has managed to manufacture a rod for its own back. Had this song been broadcast unedited would they now be snowed under with complaints from angry hip hop-loving supporters of Israel reeling from the offence of hearing this filthy word been used in public? Of course they bloody well wouldn't. By going to the bother of removing it though they have laid the foundations for something which could be much bigger. Like the Ross-Brand fiasco from a few years back, this didn't seem to get much in the way of complaints from the general public when it first went out three months ago. Unlike the Ross-Brand fiasco though I somehow cannot imagine that the Daily Mail will this time be publishing articles advising people to get offended.

I have always been of the opinion that the BBC's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has, rather than being biased in favour of one side or the other, been characterised by an extraordinary degree of ineptitude brought around by the odd lengths it goes to in the struggle to remain impartial. For every example someone like David Vance will have of pro-Palestinian bias there will always be a George Galloway waiting in the wings to highlight examples of how Auntie is controlled from the centre by those malign Zionist devils. However, even by the BBC's usual standards, this recent example of bizarre editing policy on Radio 1Xtra is truly absurd. Advice to BBC? Stop trying so hard.

Realignment of politics my arse

2011-05-09T23:54:00.001+01:00

Wouldn't it be great if it was like this all the time? Well, the sad truth is it probably will be like this all the time. Or for quite some time to come.

I'm not all that surprised by the news from Castlereagh that the DUP and the Ulster Unionists have formed a pact following Peter Robinson's party's loss of overall control of the council. After last year's debacle in Fermanagh and South Tyrone with the agreed pan-unionist candidate Rodney Connor there seems to be a continuing desire within unionism for some form of sectarian unity to combat the continued growth of Sinn Fein. However, while you may not agree with pacts in places like F&ST, you can at least appreciate the crude rationale behind them. Castlereagh is a different kettle of fish altogether.

The Castlereagh Borough Council area is around 80% Protestant. At the last election only two of the 23 seats on the council were taken by nationalists, both of whom were from the SDLP making the borough one of the few Provo-free zones in the north. A unionist pact in such an area does not just represent a sectarian alliance, it represents paranoia on a frankly extreme scale. And with the DUP's Jimmy Spratt calling on the pact to be replicated "in other areas across the Province" it is not difficult to see why many nationalists are unwilling to see the mandatory power-sharing element of the Good Friday Agreement tampered with at any point in the near future.

This grubby little pact in a tiny little corner of an insignficant little state is yet another sign that when it comes to eradicating sectarianism our current batch of mainstream political parties are just not up to the job. And why would they be? After all, their very existence is based on the continued survival of bigotry. Sectarianism is in their DNA. Yes, they may pay lip service to the so-called 'shared society' and our First Minister might pretend to have an interest in integrated education but when push comes to shove pacts and deals and local agreements will be struck to make sure 'themuns' are kept out. Nationalists do it in Belfast South. Unionists do it in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. They'd probably all like to do it in every area if only they could only find a way of getting everyone in their respective communities on board. I sometimes wonder why both sides here don't just drop the facade that there are serious differences between their various competeting organisations and go back to the pre-1969 way of doing things: a single unionist party and a single nationalist party.

So, welcome to the new Norn Iron. It's much the same as the old Norn Iron. At least the shopping centres are better.

Timely

2011-05-01T00:05:00.002+01:00

Below is footage from last week's Orwell Prize shortlist debate on the British monarchy. Unfortunately, like with so many of these public meetings you find videos of online, the sound quality isn't all that good but nevertheless it is still bearable. A similar discussion (with much better sound quality) took place on the last edition of Radio 4's Moral Maze in which they asked if the monarchy was compatible with a truly meritocratic society. Give both a listen when you're having a cuppa. Infinitely better for you than wasting a sunny Friday watching two toffs getting hitched:

Kate and William? Never heard of them

2011-03-30T21:49:00.006+01:00

Within a few hours of the 'red wedding' being announced, a souvenir Ed and Justine tea drinking device:

Brains to burn

2011-03-24T23:16:00.002Z

"I semi-jokingly asked how badly she wanted this favour... I asked her how good she was with her hands... she responded positively... I said I could ease through a decision if she showed me how good."

Brian Crowe (aka, guyfromlisburn)
Transcript of discussion from UKCB internet chatroom
Belfast Telegraph
March 24th 2011

I wondered where the Northern Ireland-based Burke's Corner blog had gone to. As an old teacher of mine used to say, it's the quiet ones you have to watch out for. And all this from a man who had gained the nickname 'brains'.

Behold, the master race!

2011-03-24T00:33:00.002Z

I originally thought that this was some sort of Chris Morris-style spoof. It is, however, genuine footage from a piece broadcast on Press TV about the English Defence League. A fascinating insight into the mind of a fascist:

The revolution continued

2011-03-23T03:16:00.002Z

"The problem has a name: Gaddafi. He must go."
José Manuel Barroso
March 11th 2011

The drawing of parallels between the Spanish Civil War and present day political developments in various parts of the world is a habit that many of us on the left just cannot seem to shake off. Sometimes though it is simply unavoidable. I found myself doing it again last Monday as I sat in the departures area of Cardiff Airport reading Jason Webster's ¡Guerra!, a book which looked at the scars left by the civil war of the thirties on today's generation of Spaniards. In one of the final chapters there is an account of the desperate attempts by people in the Republican zone in the spring of 1939 to escape Alicante, the last city in the country remaining loyal to the elected government. Amazingly even at such a late stage there was hope among some that the democratic world, or Britain to be specific, would intervene. Webster wrote:

The hope in Alicante was that the British would finally come to their aid and help them fight against the fascists who were threatening the whole of Europe. The British, on whom everyone's hopes had rested through all these years of war. But the British didn't want trouble, and they didn't want war.

Unfortunately no cavalry came over the hill at the last moment. You know the rest of the story.

Thanks to UN Security Council Resolution 1973 the city of Benghazi in 2011 will not be subjected to the same treatment as Alicante had to endure from the fascist forces of General Franco in 1939. There is of course still some way to go. I do have some concerns when I hear leaders like Cameron claim that this has nothing to do with regime change but instead being about the protection of Libyan citizens (as if a situation could even possibly exist whereby the safety of citizens could be guaranteed under Gaddafi). Nevertheless, at least something is being done and the promised merciless slaughter in Benghazi which Gaddafi was telling us about last week has been averted.

Had the usual minority of anti-intervention leftists had their way it is likely that things would have been very different. The most common position adopted by groups like the Socialist Workers Party has been one of supporting the revolution in Libya but opposing western intervention (outlined here). That sounds fine in theory I suppose yet the fact remains that this time last week the Libyan armed forces had pushed the anti-Gaddafi militias back to the point where they were under siege and on the verge of being annihilated.

I have no more love for Mr Cameron and Monsieur Sarkozy than Richard Boyd Barrett has, however if toppling a 41 year old totalitarian dictatorship and establishing a new democracy in Africa means standing with them on this issue then I am more than willing to do so. Now ask yourself what the alternative outlined in the pages of Socialist Worker and the Morning Star would deliver. The answer? Passive support for a revolution that ultimately failed and was ruthlessly put down. Or in other words, another glorious defeat. You might think different but personally I think left-wingers and progressives have suffered enough of those over the years.

Had the gutless Daladier and Chamberlain managed to drag up the courage to (belatedly) intervene in the early months of 1939 it is unlikely that those living in Spain's Republican zone would have come out in opposition at such a move. It is no surprise then that, despite whatever dirty dealings the Americans and the French and the British have engaged in down the years, the people of Benghazi and the areas controlled by the revolutionaries celebrated in the streets when the UN Security Council Resolution was passed last Friday night. These people are not counter-revolutionaries. They are not dupes of imperialism. They are men and women engaged in a struggle to liberate their country from one of the most oppressive regimes on the planet and they realise that to achieve their goals they will have to build alliances with some who may not exactly be their ideological bedfellows. That, comrades, is genuine practical internationalism and it is infinitely more revolutionary than the isolationist policy advocated by those socialists who declare their support for the revolution but who promote a strategy that would in due course kill it.

What happens next is the big question hanging over this whole affair. There has been much talk of mission creep and the possibility of ground troops being introduced. I find that scenario hard to envisage, but then again very few would have imagined that what we are witnessing right now could actually take place. Perhaps, alongside the current coalition support from the air, a Libyan equivalent of Peter Tatchell's 'Arm the Kurds, Topple Saddam' slogan could be made policy. Putting arms in the hands of the anti-Gaddafi resistance would certainly be much more preferable to the all too common western practice of selling sophisticated deadly weaponry to all manner of dictatorships. But whatever happens from here on in it is crucial that the democratic world does not shirk from its responsibilities to the struggle taking place.

Solidarity with the resistance. Death to fascism.

Here comes the science bit

2011-03-22T23:47:00.004Z

I bring you good news. Well, sort of. I actually bring you a report from the BBC's science and technology reporter Jason Palmer that claims religion "is set for extinction" in nine countries. The nations concerned? Canada, the Czech Republic, Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand, Finland, the Netherlands, Austria and... Ireland. I can't say I'm overly convinced by the findings of the Northwestern University in Illinois and the University of Arizona but we can always hope. Or pray.

The world turned upside down

2011-03-22T22:25:00.002Z

2011 has been quite a year so far. First we witness revolution across the Arab world. Then Ireland beat England at cricket. And now this:

You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology... Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.

I wonder if George has also had a change of heart about the Liberal Democrats? I do hope so.

Return of the Irps

2011-03-18T23:31:00.000Z

In an intriguing development that I've only stumbled across now I see that the Irish Republican Socialist Party is planning to contest the local elections here in May. While it is news that is unlikely to have Sinn Fein shaking in their shoes, it will be fascinating to see how both the IRSP and éirígí, two left-of-centre republican groups, will perform in the coming council elections.

I'd be extremely surprised if one of the parties won a seat, however I would be less shocked to see either one or both of the groupings put up a decent showing at the polls. I know a few people who vote Sinn Fein yet at the same time like to express a certain level of dissatisfaction with the way things have developed for the party in recent years. Perhaps one of these groups may be a sufficient outlet for such individuals to channel their frustration when they get to the polling booth. I would also be interested to find out the last time anyone stood on an IRSP ticket in an election anywhere in either Northern Ireland or the Republic. They certainly didn't contest any elections in the last decade and I cannot recall anything in the nineties. I imagine you have to go some way back to find the name of whoever it was last stood under the Irp label.

I can't say I've ever been a fan of the Irish Republican Socialist Party or its odd brand of politics. For me there is little in the works of Marx or Connolly that sits all that well with sectarian atrocities like the Darkley massacre. Nevertheless we are in a completely different era today and we should at least be critical of the party on the basis of what politics and ideas it brings to the peacetime table. Whether voters in two months time will be able to take a similar attitude and look beyond the group being the political wing of the INLA remains to be seen.

Themselves alone

2011-03-17T22:17:00.000Z

"You had something that was working and now its not" - that's how Kevin Myers summed up the tragic sectarianisation of the Saint Patrick's Day parade in Downpatrick on today's edition of Talkback on Radio Ulster. Whatever your view of Myers when it comes to other matters it is hard to fault him on this one. Downpatrick has for many years now been an example for how we can have a successful event in Northern Ireland which genuinely unites everyone and one of the ways in which this success was secured was the exclusion of flags which were considered contentious (in short, no Union Jacks or tricolours).

Congratulations then must go to Sinn Fein councillor Eamon McConvey for finding a way to bugger it all up. He insisted marching with the Irish tricolour this year as, in his opinion, the Saint Patrick's Cross which was being distributed by the local council was a symbol of the Protestant ascendancy. The Saint Patrick's Flag certainly has a strange history (it has been used by everyone from Eoin O'Duffy's Fine Gael forerunners in the Blueshirts to the Police Service of Northern Ireland) however it has rarely been looked upon as a particularly contentious symbol. If anything I would imagine most people in Northern Ireland, if not the island as a whole, would view it with indifference. Apart from Eamon McConvey.

If I could ask the councillor one question it would be this: why now? Why after all these years - 25 to be exact - has the Saint Patrick's Flag suddenly become something to be offended by? Could he not have been offended by it before now? Or has he simply decided to develop his offence eight weeks before an election? The only other time McConvey seems to have got a tad upset was in 2003 when he objected to a Comic Relief campaign operating in the town during the Saint Paddy's Day parade (something which in itself sounds like the synopsis for an episode of Give My Head Peace). Eamonn O'Neill of the SDLP has accused the Shinner of dishonouring the flag by using it as a "taunt." Quite right too, though then again we tend to enjoy using flags as taunts in this part of the world.

If councillor McConvey really does desire the Saint Patrick's festival in his town to be an inclusive day out for everyone then he is clearly going about it the wrong way. On the other hand if he would like to transform it into little more than a Taig version of the Twelfth then he is probably heading down the right route. This is, however, not naivety; this is classic Provo politics. You sometimes wonder how they plan on uniting Ireland when men like Eamon McConvey's only goal appears to be to keep places like Downpatrick partitioned along sectarian lines.

They slaughter thoroughbreds, don't they?

2011-03-17T12:24:00.007Z

I've always viewed horse racing as something of a semi-sport. In fact, there is a case to be made that it isn't really a sport at all. Were the government to suddenly outlaw gambling it is likely that football and tennis and rugby and snooker and tug of war and just about every other sport under the sun would make it through the ban, yet it is almost impossible to imagine the survival of the 'sport' in which a toff beats the living crap out of a horse in an effort to get it to the finish line before all of the other toffs hammering dumb animals with a whip in the field alongside him.

So, it'll come as no surprise to you at all that I couldn't give a damn about Cheltenham. But even I didn't think when I awoke this morning and switched on the BBC World Service just after 5am that I would be provided with a new reason to hate in the most intense terms possible this pathetic practice for it seems that the recession south of the border has led to some people having to put down/kill/destroy thoroughbred race horses that they can no longer afford.

Last year 4,618 thoroughbreds were slaughtered in the Republic. According to Shane O'Dwyer, a representative from the Irish Thoroughbred Breeders' Association, this was the correct thing to do as had the horses not been slaughtered they would have been left "out in the field to be a welfare case" (something which struck me as a sort of horsey version of the infamous statement made by a US Army officer during the Vietnam War that the village of Bến Tre had to be destroyed "in order to save it"). To be honest I can see whereabouts Mr O'Dwyer is coming from, I just happen to also think that sending almost 5,000 horses off to the abattoir should be a last resort. I somehow doubt it was.

Perhaps O'Dwyer and his pals in the ITBA could also issue useful advice for small-time businessmen to stop pretending to be big-time capitalists and stay well away from the horse racing game. It isn't called the 'sport of kings' for nothing. Unfortunately for 4,618 horses such advice has come a wee bit too late.

Mae fy hofrenfad yn llawn llyswennod

2011-03-11T04:42:00.003Z

I'm away off to Cardiff for the weekend to watch Ireland take on Wales in the Six Nations at the Millennium Stadium. While I'm gone I'll leave readers in the capable hands of The Joy Formidable, a three-piece Welsh band that released their debut album The Big Roar back in January. Despite being first released as a single back in 2008, the track featured here, Austere, was repackaged and reissued in the UK just before Christmas. And why not. A fine tune. However you choose to spend it, enjoy your weekend:

Seventh time as farce

2011-03-08T23:40:00.005Z

"We must not prop up Fine Gael and offer that party a monopoly of power. Fine Gael and Labour are distinctly different parties. In any other European state, we would lead the opposition. It ought to be no different in Ireland. Allowing a government to form with 114 seats out of 166 is inherently undemocratic and would allow a discredited Fianna Fail, who the people rejected outright, lead the charge. Labour Youth believes that this new government must be accountable to the people, and the only way of achieving that is by creating a strong opposition, led by the Labour Party and Mr Gilmore."

Colm Lawless
Chairperson
Labour Youth

I feel almost ashamed to say it yet last weekend as the general election results came in from around the Republic's 43 constituencies I found myself willing on Fine Gael to win a majority. The reason? If they won a majority the Labour leadership would have no option but to take their place as – for the first time in history – the primary party of opposition in Leinster House. However, FG did not get their majority and, as a consequence, the top dogs in both the Blueshirts and Labour were discussing coalition plans before the 166th seat in the 31st Dail had even been filled. Now, as expected, agreement has been reached on establishing the new government.

Those of us on the left will view the deal struck between Kenny and Gilmore in one of two ways. The first way views coalition as a way of providing a strong social democratic voice at the heart of government that can keep FG in check and prevent some of the more savage measures they would otherwise unleash were Labour not there; the second looks upon the decision as a mistake which relegates the party to the position of playing second fiddle to Enda and co and will ultimately deliver little of substance in the short, medium or long term. I fall into the latter camp.

The position of junior coalition partner with a larger right-wing party has been tried repeatedly by Labour down through the years and has repeatedly failed. While I cannot predict the future I see no reason to believe why it should be any different this time around. How much more intriguing a prospect it would have been to enter this new parliament as a 37-strong left opposition. With a discredited Fianna Fail gravely wounded and Fine Gael unlikely to maintain their present unprecedented level of popularity in these harsh times, who knows what position Labour could have found themselves in after a few years of providing effective centre-left opposition. The holy grail of a left-led government may not have been such an outlandish prospect. Now, with the party in coalition with the centre-right, such a possibility seems hard to imagine. If the next administration manages to somehow improve the south's current economic state it is likely that most of the credit will go to the larger of the two beasts in the government. If things go disastrously wrong, and they might, it is difficult to see how Labour could avoid an electoral mauling.

Labour should also remember that people who vote for them in elections are different in many ways to an FG voter. That might seem to be an absurdly obvious statement to make but it is one that may not be appreciated fully by some in the red camp. While some people who gave their first preference to FG on February 25th may in time come to regret doing so, it is probably fair to say the average Fine Gael voter will be more than willing to accept the planned cuts when they arrive ("everyone is going to suffer," as Enda himself callously put it during the five-way leaders debate on RTE). However, Labour voters are a different breed.

Note how backing for the Conservative Party in Britain has appeared to hold up relatively well since last year's general election in both the opinion polls and in subsequent by-elections while the Liberal Democrats seem to be haemorrhaging support. It will be interesting so see if this pattern is repeated in the Republic in the coming months, with the more progressive-minded Labour voter withdrawing their support for the party as they play their role in a coalition implementing extensive cuts that impact hardest on the people Labour should really be fighting to represent – the working class.

In the end though there was not even a serious debate on the virtues of acting as a strong left opposition. We were told that the choice was between 'the party and the country', a vomit-inducing political cliché that I recall being used by the Greens both before and on numerous occasions after they went into government with Fianna Fail (and didn't that arrangement go just swimmingly for the junior partner). We were told, in the words of Eric Byrne, that Labour now had a "patriotic duty" to go into government (where have I heard rubbish about patriotic duties before?). A Fine Gael-supporting friend of mine remarked to me yesterday that Labour had done the right thing as politics in the Republic at the moment is not about left and right but about "getting the job done." He is not the first and nor will he be the last to make such a statement, although it is an odd one to make as I appear to remember during the boom years that we were regularly told that politics was no longer about left and right. Quite why these people still think we should even have elections if politics is no longer about ideas beats me.

Anyhow, this combination of patriotism, emotional blackmail and supposedly commonsense political pragmatism has, for now, managed to quash debate on alternative political strategies for Labour. So, what alternatives are there for party members disgruntled with how things have transpired? One option would be to jump ship. But where?

Sinn Fein will no doubt attempt to pose as the main left-wing opposition force in the Dail now, however even after fourteen years of having TDs in Leinster House the nature of their socialism remains unclear. Their anti-establishment image is derived largely from the fact that they are the only one of the main parties south of the border never to have been stained by the responsibilities of holding office. Where they have sat in government, namely up north, their actions have been far from radical. For a party that was so ready to enter government with Fianna Fail prior to the 2007 general election, and one that sits comfortably in coalition the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland at the present time, I would not hold out much hope that the Provos holding a few portfolios in a future government could be the basis for radical social transformation in the 26 counties. The party leadership still appears to have an ongoing fixation with being in power in both Stormont and Leinster House by 2016, a plan which is itself a pitiable fifth-rate version of a united Ireland designed to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising.

As for the ULA, they have some excellent hard working activists and have already went much further than most groups in Europe containing Trotskyists in that they have actually secured seats in their national parliament. Even so, the bulk of the United Left Alliance is made up of revolutionary Leninist groupings that ultimately believe the bourgeois parliament in which they won their seats must be smashed and replaced with a workers state. That detachment from reality, combined with the fact that there remains a substantial degree of long-standing hostility between the CWI and IST factions in the alliance, means that it is difficult not to imagine some situation in the not-too-distant future which sees the ULA go the way of the Scottish Socialist Party, RESPECT in England and the Communist Refoundation Party in Italy. They will no doubt function as an important parliamentary voice to challenge the more unsavoury policies followed by the government in the forthcoming Dail but as a potential coherent left of centre vehicle for change in the long term I am simply not convinced.

Nevertheless, the election of a strong Sinn Fein/ULA bloc can only be a good thing in a parliament that is crying out for some proper adversaries to put it up to the incoming government. Whilst I am no admirer of the Provos and would not be a supporter of any of the Leninist parties involved in the ULA, their presence in the Dail should provide some much needed vocal (and at times possibly even entertaining) opposition. If it sounds like I am carping on a bit too much about the necessity for a solid opposition then I make no apology. In a democracy a strong opposition is as important as a stable government. As someone resident in Northern Ireland who has had to endure the yawnfest of what is essentially an elected dictatorship at Stormont over the past decade, that is a fact I have come to realise only too well.

Fianna Fail will certainly not be able to provide that constructive opposition in any shape or form so it will be to these smaller groups we will have to look to effectively articulate the views of the unhappy. FF have been severely weakened and for a party that has historically been motivated less by ideology and more by power and being a mass organisation the future remains extremely uncertain. Since its foundation the Soldiers of Destiny have always styled themselves as a broad church, much like the Ulster Unionists here in the north. The problems for a broad church begin, however, when they cease to be a dominant force. Ever since the DUP overtook the Ulster Unionists in the 2003 Northern Ireland Assembly election, the UUP has struggled to find a place for itself in the contemporary political scene – indeed it has drifted even further backwards. Don't be surprised if Fianna Fail's slide continues in the next few years. Don't be surprised either if, in their efforts to come up with something new in their time out of power, they have their 'UCUNF' moment. I'll leave it up to you to decide just what that might entail.

Returning to what you could term the 'real' opposition, the success of the Shinners and the United Left also means that for the first time since the heyday of The Workers Party in the late eighties and early nineties, Labour now has a sizeable electoral threat positioned to its left, a place to go for the discontented. Hopefully that threat in its backyard will prevent any further drift rightward. Well, hopefully.

While I genuinely hope that I am wrong, I fear that the Labour Party may have blown a once in a generation opportunity to actually make possible a left-led government in the south. In the end both imagination and ambition was lacking. It does make one wonder whether the party and its members actually want to become the largest party or whether they have some bizarre in-built inferiority complex that means even when they receive the greatest election result in their history they still feel the need to play mudguard. If they are happy with their role of making up the numbers in a coalition then such a mindset explains this week's decision perfectly. If they do not then it leaves you perplexed as to just how they can expect to build on the 37 seats they currently hold. After all, Labour's history as the perpetual prop for right-wing administrations makes for horrific reading.

The eighteen seats gained in the 1954 general election was followed by the winning of only eleven just three years later after a coalition government with Fine Gael. In the 1973 election nineteen seats were won and another administration was formed with FG. The result three years later was a mere sixteen seats and a Fianna Fail landslide. Four more seats were lost in the 1987 election after the party had spent five years in government with Garret FitzGerald. The thirty-three seats won during the Spring Tide election of 1992 was followed by the loss of almost half of those seats five years later following successive coalitions with both FF and FG. Yet still, even with such a track record to go on, well over 90% of delegates at UCD's O'Reilly Hall endorsed the decision to enter government, a statistic that leaves you wondering just whereabouts the Labour left is.

Only one TD, Dublin North's Tommy Broughan, has spoken out against the move. He accurately described the decision as a "tragic and hopeless error" and cleverly turned the sickening old party/country cliché on its head by suggesting that it might actually have been in the country's interest for his party not to enter government. With neither Sinn Fein nor the ULA providing, in my view at least, a credible long term vision I can only hope that the numbers in the Broughan camp swell as the weeks go by.

For now though the Labour Party can expect to get little more than a bit of mild applause and some patronising guff about their "courage" from the conservative media. Beyond that and a few fancy job titles in a centre-right-led administration? Not much. But sure at least they put the party before the country and isn't that the main thing?

Eamon Gilmore's place as Ireland's answer to Nick Clegg is surely sealed.

Bad winners

2011-03-03T20:49:00.005Z

And just in case it escaped your notice, we beat England. In cricket. Now, literally anything is possible:

Clothing by Philosophy Football.

The third way

2011-02-28T23:21:00.002Z

With coalition discussions due to begin soon in the south, the UNITE Regional Secretary Jimmy Kelly has made a few comments today that I found myself nodding along to while reading and which provide a very firm and coherent answer to those who will no doubt say that there is nothing to be gained for the left by Labour staying outside of government. If you are a member of the Labour Party in the Republic who feels a tad miffed at the prospect of your party's greatest ever general election result being utilised in order for Enda Kenny to become Taoiseach then take a moment to read a possible alternative strategy for the next five years:

This election was about change. Part of the change was unequivocal; the removal of Fianna Fáil from power, but the rest is now in the hands of the Labour Party leadership. The people did not vote for a Fine Gael overall majority. Their policies on privatisation, austerity and income cuts did not attract enough support and should not now be facilitated by the tired old fall-back of coalition with Labour.

The Labour Party has an historic opportunity to become the official opposition in the 31st Dáil, leading a greatly expanded Left wing coalition. The prospect of a Left-led government in the short-term has been greatly enhanced. We can now see the end of the old and outdated political divisions that dominated Irish politics since the 1930s. The political dividing line is no longer determined by Fianna Fáil. They have been totally rejected and must not be given the oxygen of being an unwanted official opposition. The dividing line is now between the Left and the Right.

If Labour grasps this opportunity, the party can lead an invigorated Left opposition in the Dáil. It will have 60 seats in the new Dáil, with Labour at the head, Sinn Féin, the United Left Alliance and other independents in support. Campaigning with civil society groups, we now have an opportunity to present the Irish people with a real choice, a real alternative to Fine Gael’s programme of austerity, privatisation, and income cuts. When Eamon Gilmore sits down with Enda Kenny he should explain that the old politics is over. Labour will not wait any longer. If Fine Gael wants to form a government, they shouldn't expect the Left to be a crutch or a mudguard. They should go to those of similar policy and psychology like Fianna Fáil or right-wing independents. Labour should look to the interests of the nation and working people, create new alliances with an expanded Left inside the Dail and social organisations outside. A Fine Gael-led government would only last two to three years. Then, finally, the goal of a Left-led government can become a reality. Labour should hold its nerve.

He didn't really say that, did he?

2011-02-28T01:21:00.002Z

"The incoming government is not going to leave our people in the dark... Paddy likes to know what the story is."

Enda Kenny
Taoiseach-elect
Saturday, February 26, 2011

Watch ya mouth

2011-02-27T22:30:00.001Z

I don't normally do blog round-ups or give awards for post of the month but Owen Jones's handy cut-out-and-keep guide to being a leftist is certainly deserving of such an accolade. Useful tips include everything from raiding the language of the right to getting yourself a few non-lefty mates, but perhaps the best bit of advice can be found in the line "radical ideas, moderate words." It all sounds so easy, doesn't it?

Noo moozik alurt

2011-02-27T21:00:00.002Z

Probably the best track from what is in my opinion the best album of the year so far (yes, I know, its only February). Its called Lammicken and its from the debut album Native Speaker by Canadian post-rock quartet Braids. Just thought I'd share it with you on this cold dank Sunday evening:

Pitchfork review here.

Change you can't possibly believe in

2011-02-26T23:58:00.004Z

"Stupidity is doing the same things and expecting different results."

Roy Keane
Quoted in Fintan O'Toole's Enough is Enough

So, the most important election since partition has now reached its conclusion and, according to all the pundits, the smart money is on a Fine Gael-Labour coalition government to take power in the 31st Dail. I don't know about you but for an election that was supposedly meant to be about change I've been left feeling just a little bit underwhelmed by the prospect. While it is true that the state of the parties has been given its biggest shake up since the 1932 Free State election, the fact remains that such an occurrence will have all the significance of a game of musical chairs if it results in the sort of alignment we have seen on several other occasions - namely an FG-led coalition with Labour while Fianna Fail head the opposition. As the newly elected Socialist Party TD Clare Daly correctly remarked on Saturday night during the RTE results programme, if there is one thing we know from previous coalition governments in the Republic it is that the junior party almost always suffers at the hands of the electorate the next time they get their chance to pass judgement. So, my question to the Labour leadership would be simple: why?

I recall reading an article by Proinsias de Rossa written around the time of the Labour-Democratic Left merger in which he outlined his goal of a left-led government. At the time it seemed a far-fetched prospect. A little more than a decade on and Labour has firmly established themselves as the second largest party in the 26 counties, leap-frogging the once dominant Fianna Fail in the process. The posters in this election campaign bearing the slogan 'Gilmore for Taoiseach', though always a remote possibility even when Labour was riding highest in the polls, displayed a new found confidence in a party which was at last looking beyond just playing its traditional role as a prop for a right-wing administration.

While at the time of writing only about half of the seats for the next Dail have been filled, it now seems likely that Labour will run the risk of squandering the best election result in their history in order to play second fiddle to Enda Kenny's party. There are a number of reasons why I dislike this. Firstly, both FG and Labour are going to be by far the two largest parties in the next Dail with well over 100 of the 166 seats in Leinster House. The main opposition force, most likely to be Fianna Fail, is probably going to have somewhere in the region of 20 to 25 seats - by far the smallest grouping of TDs ever to lead the opposition. Also, paltry number of seats aside, just what quality of opposition will FF be able to provide in the next Dail? As anyone who witnessed The Frontline debate on the economy on RTE just a couple of weeks before the election would be able to testify, there wasn't a world of policy difference between Brian Lenihan on Michael Noonan. Can we expect an ideological chasm to open up between both parties in the coming months and years? Don't hold your breath.

With the exception of the brief few years when Labour by default formed the first ever parliamentary opposition in Saorstat Eireann during that tumultuous period when the anti-Treatyite TDs were still sticking to their abstentionist guns, the history of Dail Eireann has been the story of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael essentially swapping seats in Leinster House. All those years of having right-wing Taoisigh facing right-wing leaders of the opposition has not been healthy. It would, in my opinion, be far better for Irish democracy and make for a much more interesting 31st Dáil were we to have for the first time a proper left-right battle between the two largest parties in the state.

The second reason I do not like the idea of a coalition is from an unashamedly selfish pro-Labour perspective. I believe that not only would a few years with Eamon Gilmore as leader of the opposition be good for a state whose politics has been shaped for the past eight decades by two ideologically indistinguishable remnants of the Civil War, it may also be of benefit to Labour when the elections for the 32nd Dail come around. As Enda Kenny said during the five-way leaders debate, "everyone's going to suffer." Once the euphoria of Fianna Fail's electoral obliteration subsides, Gilmore and co could very quickly find themselves being part of a government that is as unpopular as the one they replaced. If that is the case then all that hard work that went into securing the most Dail seats in Labour's history could very quickly be undone. Expect to hear much bluster in the coming days from pro-coalition Labourites about how going into power with the Blueshirts will help 'keep Fine Gael in check'. I may have been prepared to swallow such a line in the past but as the Green Party displayed in the last administration, and as the Lib Dems are showing us in Britain at the present time, junior coalition partners rarely perform such a useful function.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am not someone who fears seeing Labour in power or believes that their rightful place is in eternal opposition. Far from it. What I fear is that they are about to make the same mistake as they did following the Spring Tide election of 1992 when they followed up winning 33 seats that year by going into government with Fianna Fail and then subsequently losing half of those seats five years later. That said, even with the 33 seats they won back then, Labour remained the third largest party in Dail Eireann so entering government was to some extent understandable. The state they find themselves in after this general election is somewhat different and leaves them with a new and radical path open to them of left-led opposition, one which could put the party in a perfect position to build on the number of seats won this time around.

Nevertheless, if Labour does opt to go down the road of choosing to be the smaller party in a coalition government then I wish them well, even if my expectations are extremely low for what that might bring. Whatever happens, the next few years will make for an intriguing period in Irish politics. In the meantime I suggest somebody out there drives a stake through the heart of Fianna Fail when you have the chance. Mark my words - they'll be back.

How bizarre

2011-02-18T23:33:00.003Z

The Progressive London conference 2011 takes place tomorrow at Congress House in London, a meeting which aims to contribute to the building of a broad-based coalition against the Tory-led government's planned cutbacks. Nothing wrong with that concept although it is a bit hard to see how a motley crew of SWPers (Weyman Bennett), Stalinists (Kate Hudson and Andrew Murray) and Islamists (Ismail Patel and Dilwar H Khan) can, with some help from Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn, construct an alliance capable of giving Cameron and Osbrone sleepless nights. I could be proved completely wrong, though I seriously doubt it.

However, what really grabbed my attention was the inclusion in this meeting of another individual who would not exactly spring to the front of my mind when one would mention the word 'progressive'. His name? Mitchel McLaughlin. Yes, that's right. Mitchel McLaughlin, the Sinn Fein MLA for South Antrim. Progressive London states on its website that it is an organisation that exists to promote the kinds of progressive policies which have made London such a success. It lists the protection of the environment, the improvement of life for young Londoners and keeping the city safe from crime as three of its main concerns. How odd then to invite a man who was a spokesperson for the Provisional republican movement at a time when its military wing considered the bombing of horses in Hyde Park, the firing of mortars at Heathrow Airport and the slaughter of Christmas shoppers at Harrods to be 'progressive' contributions to life in London. Of course, Mitchel McLaughlin had no personal involvement in any acts of violence during the conflict. As Cedric Wilson once remarked in a rare moment of wit, Mitchel has a reputation as a sort of draft dodger within the republican community.

But let us not dwell on the past. Regardless of whatever massacres in London the Mitchel of yesteryear would have been willing to defend, the Mitchel of the present day can hardly be considered the man to advise the British left on fighting the cuts. As the Socialist Party's Joe Higgins observed a while back, the Shinners have something of a partitionist policy on cutbacks – against them in the south, implementing them in the north. Indeed, one really has to question just how serious they are about opposing cuts in the Republic. Sinn Fein representatives have spoken openly in the past about their willingness to go into coalition with conservative parties in the 26 counties. If they can stomach taking harsh decisions in a coalition administration with the right-wing DUP you can sure as hell bet your bottom dollar that they would not hesitate to make similarly harsh decisions were they to be in power with Fine Gael or Fianna Fail.

I suppose when you're speaking at event alongside people who are members of organisations like the Friends of Al-Aqsa, the Islamic Forum of Europe, the ambassador of Stalinist Cuba and a couple of folks who reckon North Korea is a fine example of actually existing socialism it is not all that difficult to see how Mitchel McLaughlin could suddenly appear to be a shining symbol of radical progressive politics. Then again, that could also tell you something about just what a tragic mess a section of the British 'left' finds itself in.

The battle for Spain

2011-02-16T17:28:00.006Z

In the days before Big Brother, Eurotrash and Alan Carr, the television station Channel 4 used to show programmes that were worth watching. One such example was an excellent six-part documentary series broadcast in 1983 about the Spanish Civil War, a series simply entitled The Spanish Civil War (still, much better than the My Big Fat Spanish Civil War that would have no doubt been narrated by Russell Brand had such a show been commissioned in more recent times). Anyhow, it is a truly fantastic series with a lot of great archive footage and some fascinating interviews with people from both sides of the divide who lived through the conflict. Episode one - Prelude to Tragedy - is embedded below. The other five episodes can be found through the YouTube links in the video. Give it a watch. It's much better than a gypsy wedding:

Justice?

2011-02-13T10:50:00.004Z

If this doesn't make you angry nothing will:

The former Egyptian president is accused of amassing a fortune of more than £3 billion - although some suggest it could be as much as £40 billion - during his 30 years in power. It is claimed his wealth was tied up in foreign banks, investments, bullion and properties in London, New York, Paris and Beverly Hills. In the knowledge his downfall was imminent, Mr Mubarak is understood to have attempted to place his assets out of reach of potential investigators.

I was actually surprised to learn that Mubarak was as disorganised as this. It has always been a trait of dictators from all parts of the world to prepare for the day they would have to flee from a risen people by stashing their cash off safely in foreign bank accounts. In the case of the Egyptian tyrant he appears to have spent the past month trying to make sure that his ill-gotten gains are secure. The Swiss have acted swiftly and froze the assets of Mubarak. Let us hope that other countries follow suit. However, regardless of whether it is £3 billion or £40 billion or even just a few million pounds, Hosni Mubarak is not exactly going to suffer for his three decades of dictatorship. If ever there was a man that deserved a Ceauşescu-style exit it is surely him.

Incidentally, Vince Cable was asked on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC One earlier this morning if he knew anything about Mubarak's hidden funds in the UK. He said he didn't and that he wasn't "aware that the banks had done anything improper." Do some people ever learn anything?

Better late than never

2011-02-07T19:42:00.008Z

So, after a disgracefully unacceptable 22 years, the Socialist International has finally taken the decision to expel Hosni Mubarak's Egyptian NDP. I know the heading to this item states 'better late than never' but perhaps 'too little too late' would be an equally accurate headline. The letter from the SI's general secretary Luis Ayala does nothing to improve the situation.

The expulsion document states that admitting the National Democratic Party to the Socialist International was done because the organisation "wanted to encourage the development of multi-party democracy in Egypt by expanding relationships in that part of the world." Such naive thinking could be excused had the NDP been expelled in, say for instance, 1993. I use 1993 as an example because in that year Mubarak recieved 96.3% of the vote in a presidential election - a level of support that Saddam Hussein or Joseph Stalin would have been proud of. As that preposterous election took place after four years of the NDP being a full member of the SI surely it would have been clear at that stage that it was time to give them the boot. If not, the 93.8% 'support' won by our old pal Hosni in the 1999 presidential election should have proved that he and his party had no interest in following any sort of democratic path, SI membership or no SI membership.

However, instead of expelling the party at an early stage, Luis Ayala and co have decided to wait until their move to kick out the NDP looks about as principled as the Berlin citizen who decided to burn their Nazi party membership card in April 1945. That the SI has waited 22 years to expel an organisation that should never have been allowed membership in the first place should be a source of shame for every party connected to the international. Why do I get the feeling though that, even as Mubarak's regime sits on death row, very few people in the parties connected to the Socialist International will have sleepless nights over their two decades long affiliation with one of north Africa's more unsavoury regimes.

Which side are we on, boys?

2011-02-01T10:37:00.000Z

I was pleased to see the Socialist International issue a statement a few days back announcing that it and it's members would stand "alongside the democratic forces and people in Egypt in pursuit of a common vision of a world which is more free and fair, and where humane, inclusive and democratic societies can flourish." Well said, but no less than one would expect from what is after all the largest left-wing international on the planet. Isn't it?

All is not as clear as it should be. You see, among the full member parties of the Socialist International is Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party. Yes, that's correct, the global body to which everyone from Ed Miliband to Eamon Gilmore and from Julia Gillard to Margaret Ritchie are members of has had within it's fold for quite some time now the Egyptian NDP. How an authoritarian party that has shown no signs in recent years of being moderately socialist or mildly social democratic has been allowed to hold down full membership of the SI is quite frankly a disgrace and no amount of carefully worded statements from our good comrades should be allowed to get them off the hook so easily.

Over the years the SI has played an admirable role in acting as the voice of the worldwide democratic left. Members of the international were staunch opponents of the Stalinist tyrannies in eastern Europe and whenever those regimes fell in 1989 the SI welcomed into its ranks many groups and individuals who would have been involved in the various Communist Parties in the Warsaw Pact states. However, at least in those cases the people concerned had ditched their old commitments to Marxism-Leninism and had began to embrace social democracy (even if it did appear a little awkward sometimes). With the Egyptian NDP there has been no such process of change. It remains a party controlled largely by one man heading what is to all intents and purposes a one-party state. The organisation had no place, has no place and nothing like it should ever again have a place in our proud organisation.

As Mubarak's Ceauşescu moment edges ever closer let us hope that the international forces of democratic socialism choose their allies in the new Egypt a lot better than they picked them in the old one.

Missing in inaction

2011-01-27T23:11:00.006Z

I haven't heard much about the Northern Ireland Labour Forum in recent times. Just in case you've forgotten, the NILF was set up in 2002 by the leadership of the Labour Party in the Republic to provide members up in this neck of the woods with an organisational structure. The forum was launched at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast with the then party leader Pat Rabbitte in attendance and members of the group included the prominent trade unionist Mark Langhammer as well as former Democratic Left supporters in the six counties that had been marooned in an odd state of political limbo following the 1999 merger.

In the years following its formation the group produced newsletters, published policy documents, recruited at universities, held meetings, put forward motions to conference and contributed to the party in many of the same ways branches south of the border would contribute, except for in one important area - elections. There had been much talk and speculation that they would stand candidates in local council elections however by 2009 the party had published its 21st Century Commission report which made clear that when it came to the north there would be no Labour candidates fighting for seats. So, that was that. All of which makes you wonder what the point of the NILF is these days and just why any left-leaning nordie would want to be a member.

The forum still had an online presence on the Labour Party website, though over the past couple of years it was rarely updated. Earlier this evening I decided to pay it a visit to see if anything had changed. When I got there I noticed that the party website had undergone a bit of renovation in time for the big election next month, however the section for the Northern Ireland Labour Forum had bizarrely disappeared. Well, perhaps not all that bizarre. Joining a political party that doesn't contest elections is a bit like going to a restaurant that doesn't serve food. Nevertheless, it would be nice to know what the current status of the northern members is in the party. All of the other sections appear to get a mention: Labour Youth, Labour Women, Labour Equality, the Labour Trade Union Group, Association of Labour Teachers, Labour Party Lawyers Group and the Labour Social Services Group. No NILF though. Have they been disbanded? Or have they become so pointless that the party leadership has forgotten that they even exist?

Although I never held out much hope that Labour would actually put their money where their mouth is and stand candidates in elections, I do feel that the forum (if it still exists) could play a crucial role alongside local members of UK Labour, trade unionists and other socialists and social democrats in the formation of a broad-based democratic socialist party in Northern Ireland. You might think that the fate of this tiny grouping is insignificant and in the grand scheme of things in local politics that may well be the case, but as a socialist living in a region where the anti-sectarian centre-left do not hold as much as a single council seat a voice in the wilderness is as good as no voice at all.

Ironically, at the top of the new Labour website are the words 'One Ireland'. Not quite, lads, not quite.

Thanks for the ceasefire. Now, would you please go away?

2011-01-26T05:59:00.002Z

"But if Eta may not have changed much, its circumstances and those of the society surrounding it certainly have. The organisation is a shadow of its former self, a lumpen rump. Under siege from the Spanish and French security services, as well as the Ertzainza, the Basque autonomous government police, Eta has been thoroughly penetrated, losing leaders almost as soon as it appoints them. For a group with a cellular structure, this can only happen when it is down to its last cells and, to judge from Eta's erratic behaviour, its last brain cells too."

David Gardner
Financial Times
January 20th 2010

So, with a whimper rather than a bang, ETA's armed campaign for an independent Basque homeland has been terminated. Dressed in outfits resembling some form of fashion fusion between the Ku Klux Klan and the Provisional IRA, the organisation stated that they had "decided to declare a permanent and general cease-fire which will be verifiable by the international community." Note well that this is, apparently, a "permanent" ceasefire. Not a mickey mouse ceasefire like those that have gone before. Permanent. Total. Unequivocal. In other words, no going back - the old methods are over. Now, what next?

Back in September when they made their first ceasefire statement I said here that ETA was essentially looking what the Provisional republican movement in Ireland was seeking in the 1990s, namely a face-saving way out of a conflict they realise they cannot win but also cannot admit to having lost. The problem is just what can the Spanish government possibly offer a terrorist group who in both political and 'military' terms have never been weaker than they are now. Following their original ceasefire announcement I remarked that "the Basque Country already has its own parliament, its own police force and sets its own taxes" and that there was "nothing to negotiate." So it remains. There will be no Basque equivalent of the Good Friday Agreement. The best they can realistically hope for is prisoner releases combined with the legalisation of their outlawed political wing Batasuna. In short, not much to show for almost half a century of armed struggle. ETA is going to find it tough to do as their Irish comrades did in, as Henry McDonald put it, dressing defeat up as victory.

Some will no doubt view the response of the governing socialists to the ceasefire upgrade as intransigent but their uncompromising stance comes with a lot of valid reasons. Back in 2006 the government responded positively to the ETA ceasefire of March that year and opened up talks with representatives of the organisation, talks that included the moderate constitutional nationalist PNV. On December 29th of that same year José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero spoke of his confidence for a lasting peace. 24 hours later ETA detonated a massive van bomb at Madrid-Barajas Airport killing two Ecuadorian workers and injuring dozens more. With that track record, and with support for the group having deteriorated enormously over the past five years, the response from Madrid should not be viewed as inflexible but rather the only possible one open to them.

Even so, depending of course on how ETA conducts itself in the coming months, the Spanish government still has a part to play. Their first step must be legalising what was Batasuna and providing the movement with the space to develop a political platform. If the 100,000 spoiled votes at the last parliamentary elections in the region were anything to go by there is still a fairly sizeable minority of people who need their voice to be heard in the democratic arena. Facilitating this should be relatively straightforward. Given that HB was tolerated during the worst years of ETA terrorism it should be possible to reverse the ban of 2003 without too much uproar being created. More complicated will be the emotive subject of prisoner releases, though that will be a bridge that will inevitably have to be crossed at some stage. Tied to all of this must be the winding up of ETA as a paramilitary force and that development may still be some way off.

While there may not be much potential for a Basque version of the GFA there may be a slight possibility of a Basque Adams or McGuinness emerging from the ashes of the failed ETA campaign. It will be interesting to see whether the movement will have the imagination to reinvent itself to meet the demands of a new era or whether it will just slowly die off. As an organisation with strong bonds to physical force Irish republicanism it could take historical encouragement from the manner in which Fianna Fail appeared from the anti-Treatyite defeat in the Irish Civil War to take power in the Free State less than a decade later or how their present day allies in Sinn Fein managed over a similar period of time to move from pariahs prosecuting a failing armed campaign to sitting in government in Belfast with their old unionist enemies.

With Spain presently being hit hard by recession and rising unemployment could a left-wing pro-independence party free from the whiff of cordite be an attractive alternative to both the conservative PNV and the governing PSOE? Maybe, maybe not. One thing is for sure, neither the present state of affairs nor a return to the style of politics espoused by pre-2003 Batasuna will appeal to the people of the Basque Country. If the so-called Basque 'national liberation movement' wants to have a future it will need to change and adapt – and do so quickly.

All of this will become clear in the long term. In the short term ETA must make clear that they intend to depart the scene for good and convince the people that they genuinely mean it this time. To do so will take more than a statement being read from behind a desk by three masked anonymous men. The ball remains in their court.

A woman's place is not on the touchline (apparently)

2011-01-25T23:44:00.001Z

When someone writing in the Daily Mail describes you as being "mean-spirited, misogynist and just plain outdated" you should probably take it as a sign that you might just be a little out of touch with the modern world. The remarks made by Sky presenter Richard Keys and pundit Andy Gray about lineswoman Sian Massey and West Ham vice-chairwoman Karren Brady have drummed up a lot of debate in recent days. In a way it seems almost wrong to attack both men. There has been a lot of self-righteous guff uttered in relation to the incident and today's sacking of Andy Gray by Sky (the people that bring you such enlightened viewing as Essex Babes, Northern Birds, Viewers Wives and red hot Mums) was most likely done with a view to protecting their own image rather than consciously striking a blow for the rights of women.

Nevertheless, sacking was the only option open. Such a measure makes clear that daft comments about women not understanding the offside rule are not deserving of a £1.7 million annual salary and a spot in front of the cameras discussing the biggest league in the world's most popular sport. This is not, as some will no doubt try and portray it, as a free speech issue. Nobody is trying to take away Andy Gray’s right to be a curmudgeonly old misogynist, but there is a time and a place for airing such views and the workplace is certainly not one of them. Those providing the excuse that these are the sort of remarks you hear from football fans up and down the country are also missing the point. That does not justify them. In the seventies and eighties terms such as 'nigger' and 'wog' were acceptable ways to describe the small minority of black players in the game at the time. Just because a particular form of intolerance is widespread does not make it any more acceptable.

Perhaps one of the more heartening aspects of this whole cringeworthy episode has been the support voiced by players and managers for Sian Massey. Let's hope that the controversy does not have a negative long term impact in driving women away from the game. Quite a few years back the powers that be in football decided to make a concerted effort to smashing the presence of racism in the sport. A similarly large stick needs to be taken to tackling the prejudices of sexism and homophobia in the game.

And the irony after all of this? Torres's goal was onside. Good call, lineswoman.

Two sugars please

2011-01-21T19:08:00.002Z

On this day in 1950 the author, journalist and democratic socialist George Orwell sadly, and prematurely, passed away. As someone listed in the inspiration column on the right of this blog it would be remiss of me not to mention him in some way. So, as the kettle behind me hisses its way towards the point of boiling, some of Orwell's thoughts on the issue that most divided him and I - tea:

Tea - unless one is drinking it in the Russian style - should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tea-lover ifyou destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to bebitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you areno longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you couldmake a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water. Some people would answer that they don't like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.

Thanks but no thanks, Arlene

2011-01-21T15:03:00.003Z

Not the sort of email one wants to see in their inbox first thing in the morning:

Trouble in the message centre

2011-01-21T12:22:00.017Z

If you think your job is bad, an article by Department for Work and Pensions call centre employee 'William Davies' in today's Guardian might just make you think again. As someone who worked in one particularly awful call centre several years ago I can well recognise his description of staff being "chained to their desks, monitored for every minute of the day." But ridiculous levels of scrutiny aside, the other element in the article that clicked with me came in the piece below:

Our priority should be helping people find work and providing a good service to the thousands of vulnerable customers we deal with: pensioners, disabled people, those living in poverty. Instead we have approximately five minutes to deal with each customer...

The call centre I worked in handled contracts for a various range of businesses that sold everything from car insurance to broadband packages yet rather than placing an emphasis on teaching us how to provide excellent service to the customers we were instead given a short crash course in what it was we were going to be selling, thrown onto the callfloor with a fairly poor understanding of the product concerned and then encouraged by management to get rid of the caller in as short a time as possible (usually somewhere around the three or four minute mark).

I could never really understand this as the moment someone would call you up your thoughts immediately turned to how you were going to get them off the line in order to keep your stats up. The actual service that you were providing was of secondary importance. Katrine Williams seems to agree. The PCS union's national negotiator and a worker at the Jobcentre Plus call centre in Newport, Ms Williams has said that the "two targets that matter to management are answering the calls and spending as little time as possible on the phone. If a call takes too long, we get somebody telling us to finish the call." Really, there is just no pleasing some people.

Breaks tended to be a further bone of contention. Not since my schooldays had I seen the need for someone to take a piss getting treated with such suspicion. According to William Davies, the DWP call centre only allows staff "19 minutes a day to use for toilet, refreshment and other breaks." You do wonder where they plucked the figure nineteen from. Would twenty minutes have been pushing it way too far?

Another common trait of call centres is the massive staff turnover rate. According to Davies the DWP's office has lost 20% of its workforce since April, a statistic that doesn't really shock me in the slightest. Because pay is normally poor and working conditions almost always atrocious, call centre jobs are used by many to fill a gap until something better comes along. I do not know of any business that would tolerate a situation where one-fifth of its workers departed in an eight month period. When you take into account the amount of money it must cost to be regularly recruiting and training staff to fill the vacancies left by those who get fed up extremely quickly you begin to wonder whether improving pay and working conditions might actually be in the interests of management rather than just the workers.

The 48 hour strike by several thousand workers in these call centres has now ended, however I imagine the dispute is a long way from being over. This one will be worth keeping an eye on.

To be free in 2011 means to participate: images and slogans from the latest great unrest

2011-01-19T07:16:00.001Z

The good comrades over at that always excellent leftist blog The Great Unrest have compiled a neat little gallery of posters from the encouraging wave of student protests in Britain. Some of them are good (a few clever plays on 'kettle' and 'kettling') while some of them are a tad predictable and unimaginative (you do wonder sometimes whether there is an article in the SWP constitution which calls for the word 'resistance' to be used on all posters). Strangely enough my own particular favourite of the batch on display did not contain one single word of English, yet in a way said so much more than most:

Breaking the connection with reality

2011-01-16T16:47:00.003Z

I've always been puzzled as to just what sort of person nowadays buys the Sinn Fein publication An Phoblacht/Republican News. Back in the days of the armed struggle I suppose it made sense from a Provo perspective to maintain an official newspaper that would that would act as a cheerleader for the shooting of census collectors and retired cops. These days though I fail to see the point of it. With the old 'War News' column now long gone and the repackaged pro-establishment Shinners in government with the DUP, do readers really rush out to buy AP/RN in order to find out about Michelle Gildernew's latest visit to a cattle market or if Conor Murphy has succeeded in having the roads gritted?

If you haven't read AP/RN before it might be worth taking a trip over to its online edition if only to see just how incredibly rubbish it is. The main page at present contains an extremely unexclusive interview with El Presidente Gerry Adams. If you have trouble finding this particular feature it is situated just below the range of scrolling photographs of Gerry Adams at the top of the page which is positioned just above the picture of Gerry Adams bearing the banner 'leadership in a time of crisis' which is in turn placed just to the left of a YouTube video of, you guessed it, Gerry Adams.

In amongst the North Korean-style yawnfest of Gerry worship this week is an article which really does make you wonder whether An Phoblacht/Republican News has the most gullible readership of any newspaper or magazine on the planet (Pyongyang included). This morning I came across the following headline via a link on Facebook:

Shankill Road voters are switching to Sinn Féin, say loyalist leaders

Now, to be fair, this story is based on comments made by a former UDA prisoner called Colin Halliday so I can't accuse AP/RN of inventing it completely out of thin air. However, I can accuse them of giving it a little bit too much space and perhaps providing readers with a slightly misleading headline. Shankill Road voters switching to the Provos? Come off it. Not even the loyalist who made the comments appears to think that. What he does provide is some anecdotal evidence of a few ballot papers that were supposedly seen coming from mainly Protestant areas where people had voted Sinn Fein. Is it true? Possibly. Is it worth getting excited about if you are a Shinner? Not really. After all, down through the years there has always been a few dissidents within either community that have voted for someone from 'the other side'.

If Sinn Fein want to start getting votes from the Shankill Road and other such areas then they could start by taking one small step in that direction - asking people in Protestant areas if they would like to vote for them. How many Sinn Fein posters would put up on the Shankill Road at the last election? How many houses were canvassed on the Shankill Road at the last election? I'm not a gambling man but if I were going to put money on it I'd hazard a guess that the answer to both questions would be somewhere in the region of zero.

"But Johnny," I hear you say, "it would be far too dangerous for Sinn Fein people to enter these areas." In my view if members of the Provisional movement, as was mentioned in the post previous to this, found themselves able to enter the Shankill in days gone by to plant bombs they should in peacetime be able to go there to convince the Protestant community of the benefits of republican politics. If they cannot then so be it. Let them continue with their harebrained policy of only asking 40% of the population if they'd fancy voting for them but while they do so can they please drop any pretence of being 'socialist' and just own up to being what they always have been - a sectarian Catholic nationalist party.

One doesn't have to go back to Connolly's involvement with striking workers at an aluminum factory in Larne in 1913 or the Shankill Road contingent that marched at Bodenstown in 1934 to see a different manifestation of republicanism. After the repulsive Shankill loyalist George Seawright was forced to stand down from his Belfast City Council seat in 1986, the only person to challenge his wife Liz and force a by-election was Peter Cullen of The Workers Party. While Cullen attracted very little in the way of support and Mrs Seawright ended up romping home with over 90% of the vote, it was still a principled act on the part of the WP to fight for the seat and canvass in an area during a particularly dangerous period of the Troubles where UVF and UDA violence had escalated following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. No such anti-sectarian principles exist within Sinn Fein at the present time. I recall one particular Shinner canvassing in my area at the last Assembly election remarking that the road I lived on appeared to be "a good road" because there happened to be quite a few GAA flags flying from houses at the time, a handy way of indicating what the faith of the occupant was. Perish the thought that the poor man would have had to speak to one of those bloody Prods.

The Provo attitude - and indeed the attitude of many nationalists on this island - to the Protestant and unionist community in Northern Ireland is quite a patronising one. Back in the old days there was a belief within republicanism that if only the British would leave and allow a united Ireland to come into being then those intransigent huns would give up their silly orange ways and become loyal citizens of an Irish Republic. This does still persist to an extent and the AP/RN article about the voting practices of certain people on the Shankill Road is a prime example that the residue of that belief still contaminates contemporary republican thinking. Just as they once believed Protestants would automatically integrate into a 32 county Irish state without any need for persuasion whatsoever, so too today do some republicans think that Protestant Sinn Fein voters can be magically created without even putting in the most basic work of going into loyalist areas and seeking out support.

There is a famous line from the 1940 Walt Disney film Pinocchio where it is said "anything is possible if you just believe." Whether it is talk of a united Ireland by 2016 or mythical Protestants flocking to vote for their party, you can't help but think that for some within Sinn Fein and AP/RN it could be the line that best sums up their politics.

Probably quite deceitful: Pat Sheehan's attempt to legitimise sectarian murder

2011-01-14T19:13:00.002Z

Probably quite civilised. Those were the three words Pat Sheehan, Gerry Adams's replacement at Stormont, used to describe the nature of the IRA's terror campaign. It is a commonly held belief within Provisional Irish republicanism that their armed campaign was somehow morally superior to the actions of both the loyalist paramilitaries and of the state forces. Regardless of whether or not it is true (and it is not), Pat Sheehan certainly did not do a very good job of trying to convince people of the civilised nature of the so-called 'armed struggle'.

Rejecting that notion that the Provo campaign was a sectarian offensive soaked in the blood of innocent civilians, Mr Sheehan stated that "the IRA, if it had wanted to kill Protestants, could have left a 1,000lb car-bomb on the Shankill." Out of all the locations in Northern Ireland he could have chosen this was a rather unfortunate one. You would have thought that the new West Belfast MLA would have been aware that the organisation he was once a member of did in fact detonate several bombs over the years in this part of his constituency. Two immediately spring to mind for me, the most obvious and most bloody being the October 1993 bombing of Frizzell's Fish Shop which left nine civilians dead.

The other PIRA bombing in the area that I recall was the attack on the Balmoral Showroom in December 1971 that killed four civilians. Coming amidst the regular acts of sectarian slaughter in the dark days of the early seventies, that particular bomb attack on civilians doing their Christmas shopping has probably been forgotten by most people outside of that area. It only sticks in my mind because of a brief mention it received during the 1999 BBC documentary Loyalists in which a description was given of the body of a decapitated infant found in a pram in the wreckage of the blast. In all two children were murdered in the attack on the furniture store; Tracey Munn, who was two years old, and Colin Nicholl, just seventeen months old. As Pat Sheehan said, all carried out in a "probably quite civilised" nature.

The 'we could have killed a load of Prods if we had wanted to' argument is an old one which is at the same time both brutally crude and blatantly untrue. It is not, however, one that Pat came up with by himself. The earliest example of it I can recall comes in Gerry Adams's 1986 book The Politics of Irish Freedom where he states that the IRA could have killed a lot more Protestants if they had desired to. It would appear Mr Sheehan is merely regurgitating a pathetic point of view first put forward by his predecessor nearly three decades ago (neither Sheehan nor Adams comment on the fact that the PIRA actually killed more civilians - well over 600 - than any other organisation involved in the Troubles). Of course, there is another angle to this that often isn't taken into account - what is sectarian murder and what constitutes an innocent victim? I have no doubt that my concept of what was sectarian and who was a civilian would be very different from that of Pat Sheehan.

Let me give you an example of what I mean by this. Wallace McVeigh was a 45 year old Protestant businessman. In May 1991 he was shot dead by Provisional IRA gunmen at Balmoral Market in south Belfast. He was not a member of the security forces. Wallace McVeigh's 'crime' was that his distribution company supplied fruit and vegetables to the British Army. For the armed goons of the Belfast Brigade this made him a collaborator with the occupation forces, a cog in the wheel of the British war machine in Ireland. Yet another "probably quite civilised" assassination in the long war. In my view, and I would hazard a guess in the view of most people on this island, this was nothing more than a grubby sectarian murder.

Defenders of the Provisional IRA's legacy will point to that organisation's record in targeting members of the security forces as evidence that the majority of their killings were not random killings. Yet scratch the surface and you soon discover that nor were they examples of sophisticated military prowess either. Take for instance the 204 members of the Royal Irish Regiment and Ulster Defence Regiment killed during the years of violence. Few republicans would argue that these men and women were anything other than fair game, yet they would be less quick to point out the fact that 162 of those 204 people were off-duty at the time they were murdered. Also considered legitimate targets were other non-combatants like Edgar Graham and Robert Bradford, civilians who were members of political parties.

The problem with the campaign waged by physical force republicans was that Pat Sheehan and his colleagues made up their own rules of engagement, rules which meant that a tenuous connection to the security forces was enough to categorise you as a legitimate target. The result of this definition of 'legitimate' meant that a substantial portion of the Protestant population of Northern Ireland automatically became potential targets for murder meaning that the killing of virtually any Protestant in the province could be moulded and shaped in such a way to make it appear legitimate. But outside of the hardcore supporters and swallowers of Provo propaganda, does anyone genuinely consider Wallace McVeigh as a collaborator with imperialism? No.

The rationale used to justify this pointless killing is similar to the UDA's attempt to jazz up the mass murder of Catholics at Greysteel as an attack on the "nationalist electorate" or INLA leader Seamus Costello's claim that there was a difference between killing Protestants (illegitimate) as opposed to killing unionists (legitimate). The term 'Orwellian' is these days thrown around fairly loosely by people who have probably read very little by the great man himself, but if you happen to be an English teacher currently studying Nineteen Eighty-Four with your class and you want to give them an example of doublespeak then the language used by paramilitary organisations here over the years wouldn't be an entirely poor one to provide.

One of Sheehan's other points was that the conflict here did not take place on the same violent scale as the conflicts seen in the Balkans following the collapse of Yugoslavia. Writing in last Friday's Belfast Telegraph, Owen Polley makes the important point that we should not rush to thank Pat and his friends for not killing us in greater numbers. He states:

Sheehan's choice of language is obscene, but it is more of what we've come to expect from the Sinn Fein propaganda machine. It is his broader point which deserves a little more attention. He notes that Northern Ireland didn't witness the scale "of mass killing and genocide" which characterised other ethnic conflicts. That much is true enough. But the absence of an Ulster 'Srebrenica' owes precious little to the IRA, or to the urban revolutionaries and nationalist fanatics who filled its ranks. The last thing we should do is congratulate terrorists - whether republican or loyalist - for their 'civility' during the Troubles.

But, of course, there was no such civility worth speaking of. No civility from the Provo gang that massacred Protestant workers in Kingsmill. No civility from Lenny Murphy and his 'Shankill Butchers' who abducted and slowly hacked to death innocent Catholics they picked up on the streets of Belfast. No civility from the INLA members that sprayed a Pentecostal Church in Darkley with gunfire killing several worshippers. No civility from the UDA murderers that shouted 'trick or treat' before shooting customers at a bar on Halloween 1993. No civility either from the soldiers of the Parachute Regiment that cut down fourteen unarmed civil rights protesters in Derry in 1972. Had all sides in this conflict been able to kill more they would have done so. That they didn't manage to do so deserves, as Owen Polley says, nothing in the way of praise or congratulation.

Tragically though I am afraid that as the years go by the protagonists in our little conflict, men like Pat Sheehan, will come to be judged in a much more positive manner than they deserve to be. Within the nationalist community it appears to get more and more difficult to find people willing to unreservedly condemn the PIRA campaign, particularly difficult I am sad to say amongst the young. Gauging support for loyalist paramilitarism has always been a difficult task but it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the passage of time, accompanied by some poorly written ballads, will transform men who shot taxi drivers and bombed bars into brave soldiers who defended Ulster in her time of need. The first sense I got that there was a peacetime reassessment of militant loyalism by some of the more 'respectable' elements of unionism came when John Taylor, a former Ulster Unionist MP and present member of the House of Lords, said in an interview with the journalist Peter Taylor that the UVF and the UDA had "achieved something which perhaps the security forces would never have achieved, and that was they were a significant contribution to the IRA finally accepting that they could not win."

You may consider the attitude of the coming generations to the Troubles as an irrelevance yet the fact is it will be the interpretation of our past by those coming generations that goes a long way to deciding the future of this country. Irish history has a strange Groundhog Day character to it. There is no reason to take for granted that the current period of peace we are lucky enough to live through will not come to the familiar and bloody end that so many others have. There is still a struggle to be fought, a struggle waged in favour of an anti-sectarian perspective of our history which prevents the Pat Sheehans and the Gusty Spences of this world from completing their transformation from paramilitary thugs to wise old pipe-smoking grandfathers.

The Troubles must be recalled for it was: a sectarian conflict which witnessed 30 wasted years in political terms and 3,524 wasted lives in human terms. It was not in any shape or form "probably quite civilised." Such an assertion crumbles at the slightest bit of scrutiny. All we require is for there to be enough people around to provide that scrutiny and resist the attempts by the Provisional republicans and their loyalist equivalents to portray the 'war' in this country as an honorable one. It was nothing of the sort.

Free the Saudi Arabia one

2011-01-07T00:29:00.009Z

You may remember last month that Mohamed Abdul Fadil Shousha, the governor of South Sinai, appeared to blame Mossad for a series of shark attacks on holidaymakers in the Egyptian coastal resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. The basis of the conspiracy theory was simple: Jewish secret agents throw nasty shark near to where people are swimming, shark attacks kill swimmers, Egyptian tourist industry brought down as a result. There was of course not one single shred of evidence for any of this but then this is a part of the world where things like facts and evidence are but minor details when it comes to whipping up a good old scare story about 'da Joos'.

Hot on the heels of that comes the latest Zionist animal infiltration into Arab territory with the capture by Saudi intelligence services of an Israeli spy vulture. No, you read that correctly, a spy vulture. The Daily Telegraph states:

The large bird, which was carrying a GPS transmitter and a tag bearing the identification code R65 from Tel Aviv University, strayed into rural Saudi Arabian territory at some point last week, according to a report in the Israeli daily Ma'ariv. Residents and local reporters told Saudi Arabia's Al-Weeam newspaper that the matter seemed to be linked to a "Zionist plot" and swiftly alerted security services. The bird has since been placed under arrest.

If this incident proves anything it shows just how absurd paranoid antisemitism is and how potent a force it remains. In certain parts of the Arab world once the Jews become linked to something, regardless of how seemingly innocuous it is, it can rapidly spiral into a sinister conspiracy theory directed from Israel by the forces of Zionism. According to the Israelis the bird is actually part of a long-term academic study of the migratory habits of the bird. Nevertheless, under arrest this Jewish vulture remains. So, anyone out there fancy launching a campaign to free the poor old thing?

Inspiration deficit

2011-01-06T07:39:00.004Z

The new Fine Gael website was launched yesterday morning. Or it could have been the morning before yesterday morning. I wasn't really paying attention that closely. Perhaps I should be doing so as in all likelihood, though it pains me to admit it, in a few weeks we will see a Fianna Fail-led coalition government in the Republic replaced by a Fine Gael-led coalition government. Yes, Labour will probably play their strongest second fiddle ever in that government, but second fiddle it will still be. It is also likely that the far left, in the shape of the United Left Alliance, will record their best result in the history of the 26 county state (before inevitably splitting and disintegrating shortly afterwards).

However, barring a really big upset, the people of the Republic are going to get just what they have received after every other election that has ever been held down there: a right-led government. And this after all the economic turmoil and predictions of generation defining political realignment. It has all the makings of a huge anti-climax. However, if you want a little snapshot of just how big an anti-climax the next administration is going to be then all you have to do is a pay a visit to the updated Fine Gael website. Emblazoned across the top of the new site for 2011 - the year of the great return to power - is the following:

Inspiring stuff it most certainly is not. It's extremely unlikely that these words will go down alongside "All Power to the Soviets!" or "¡No pasarán!" as one of political history's great one-liners. It's not even up to the standard of that most shallow and empty of recent political slogans, "Yes We Can". At least with that apolitical political slogan there was a willingness to be proactive and an expression of intent to do something, even if it was not entirely clear what it was that 'we' were capable of doing. In fact, this line from Enda Kenny about listening is actually quite an odd statement to be given such prominence for what it appears to be saying is that Fine Gael has no ideas, or at least if it has ideas they are not as important as the ideas of those people who are not members of the party. Of course, it may just be that I am over-analysing what is in reality a fairly crap PR gimmick that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny from anyone with a single functioning brain cell.

However, what deserves to be scrutinised are the three questions FG ask their readers on the site and they range from the ridiculous to the downright cynical. Firstly, to the ridiculous. Visitors to the site are asked what they think of the Irish Republic's current problems. This is, I would hazard a guess, one of the most pointless questions ever asked in the history of mankind. Just what sort of response are the folks at Fine Gael hoping to get to this one? Everyone thinks that the state is in a mess - that much we know. I can only assume that the guys and gals at Upper Mount Street are having a competition to see how many different ways you can say that the country is well and truly screwed. The next question does make a bit more sense: it asks the reader how they propose to improve the country. Fair enough? Well, not really. While not as utterly pointless as question one, it does leave you wanting to ask the likely leaders of the Republic's next government just why a few months before the general election they are seeking the ideas of members of the public on how to improve the economy rather than placing an emphasis on their own proposals.

Last but not least is the cynical third question where Fine Gael ask "how can we earn" your support. I say cynical because this appears to get the whole normal process of political communication arse about face. Call me an old traditionalist but I like a political party to set out their stall, explain what they stand for and then let me decide for myself whether I want to vote for that particular organisation or not. The way FG is now selling itself would seem to me to suggest that, instead of being the tools by which parties win power, matters of policy and ideology are now subservient to the supposedly unrelated goal of something called being elected. This dumb trick does have a slightly clever edge to it though. The cleverness lies in the fact that someone in the higher echelons of FG clearly realises that we live in a climate where politicians are, to put it mildly, not all that popular. What better way then for Fine Gael politicians to capitalise on the anti-political sentiment than for them to order themselves to shut up and listen to the plain people for once in a bizarre act of self-imposed silence. Clever, just not clever enough.

While there has never really been all that much difference between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael on what is often referred to as the 'bread and butter' issues, it always at least seemed to be the case that the latter of the two had something slightly more substantial in the way of an ideological (namely centre-right) standpoint. FF on the other hand never displayed any consistency in this regard. They could one day be found in the same camp as Eurosceptic nationalist parties in Brussels, then the next day aligned with the Liberal Democrats and their pro-European ELDR allies, only for the following day after that to be found boasting (as in the case of Bertie Ahern and Brian Lenihan Sr. at various times) of their strange interpretation of 'socialism'. In truth Fianna Fail will be whatever you want them to be. All things to all men yet in reality meaning nothing to no-one. Now, as the Soldiers of Destiny's poll rating slides downwards, Fine Gael are making a move to steal their clothes when it comes to the art of cynical vote-grabbing.

If I was going to offer a word of advice though to Fine Gael my message would be to cut out the cheap gimmicks. I think a lot of people in the Republic would actually disagree with Enda Kenny's assertion (if indeed he ever uttered the words in the banner at the top of the screen) that politicians talk too much and don't listen enough. The truth is that we have heard very little from Enda in recent times, so uninspiring and disastrous have some of his media performances been that his airtime seems to have been kept to a bare minimum. His front bench team, made up as it is of individuals like Michael Ring and Michael Noonan, seems long in the tooth in parts and equally as uninspiring as their leader. Rather than saying nothing and listening it is about time people heard what Enda Kenny and Fine Gael have to say, what it is they will do differently from Fianna Fail and how a government led by them would be different to one led by Labour. This is what people want to know about, not PR tricks designed to give the public a false sense of empowerment.

For decades now the political divide in the south has been drawn along Civil War lines. While it may be a long time since the issues at stake in the Civil War were a part of contemporary political discussion, neither sadly has anything really replaced those issues. General elections have been something akin to glorified local council elections, with the effect being that the people more often than not got glorified local councillors as national parliamentarians. What is now needed more than anything else is for the coming general election in the Republic to be a good old fashioned adversarial war of ideas. With leaders of the standard of Cowen and Kenny I would not hold out much hope for such a battle. If, however, Labour and the Shinners and the far left can really turn themselves into formidable forces in the course of the campaign and we do have the much needed ideological struggle that I am speaking about then anything is possible. The major story of this year's election in the 26 counties may yet turn out to be not who is leading the government following the vote but rather who is leading the opposition in Leinster House.

VAT = Vote Against Tories

2011-01-05T08:33:00.004Z

This one was probably staring us in the face in retrospect, but Kevin Maguire of the Daily Mirror beat everyone else to it:

Cameron didn't have to raise VAT. Cameron said he wouldn't hike VAT. Yet Cameron upped VAT. Next time the PM maintains he has "absolutely no plans" everyone will start counting their money. Cameron isn't entitled to ask for trust after this costly deception. What does VAT mean? Vote Against Tories.

Michael vs Michael

2011-01-04T23:02:00.005Z

Just a few months ago in Galway the veteran Labour Party TD Michael D. Higgins came up against the much more annoying and certainly much less cerebral figure of Michael Graham, a representative of the Tea Party movement from the United States who was on tour in Ireland at the time. To be completely honest the overall quality of the debate, which covers topics from the Middle East to American healthcare, isn't the best; as I've already said, Michael D. wasn't exactly sparring with his intellectual equal here. It is, however, entertaining in the way that an argument in a pub is entertaining once two guys decide to really go at each other (and it is also worth it just to hear Deputy Higgins use the word "wanker" in his typically polished tone of voice). Note too how George Hook, the man 'chairing' the debate, simply disappears for the vast majority of it. A replacement for Dimbleby he most certainly is not:

Hat Tip: Joe Duffy

Pointless lists of 2010 (part five): news stories

2010-12-31T22:18:00.002Z

The top ten YFITN news stories of 2010. Peter Robinson will be hoping not to feature as highly in 2011:

1. The year got off to a flyer with the Kirk and Iris affair. Peter hasn't really looked himself ever since.

2. Robbo again. Just a few months after marriage difficulties, the First Minister lost his Westminster seat in Belfast East.

3. The resignation of Dawn Purvis from the Progressive Unionist Party signalled the death of loyalist politics in Northern Ireland.

4. England's crash-and-burn performance at the World Cup in South Africa. I didn't take any pleasure in it whatsoever. Honest.

5. The continuing saga of Father James Chesney and the Claudy bombing.

6. Conor Lenihan, as in the Minister for Science down south Conor Lenihan, attended the launch of The Origin of Specious Nonsense at Buswell's Hotel in Dublin. Written by John J. May, the book aimed to expose the "fiction of evolution." Once again, Mr Lenihan is the Minister for Science in the Free State.

7. Soon after he arrived in the UK, Joseph Ratzinger (aka, the Pope) made a speech attacking the new brand of 'aggressive atheism'. He's entitled to do that of course. What he was not entitled to do was describe the Nazis as a "tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society." This is either a) a sign that Ratzinger does not know his history or b) a cynical historical rewrite from a former member of the Hitler Youth trying his best - and largely succeeding I am afraid to say - to make millions forget the role which the Catholic Church played in European fascism in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. For my response at the time, click here.

8. The far-right Sweden Democrats make their parliamentary breakthrough.

9. ETA called a ceasefire again. Maybe this one will actually stick.

10. Peter Robinson finally came out of the closet... as a supporter of Romanist indoctrination (i.e., integrated education). Apparently he had been a supporter all along. He just didn't mention it. Convenient that.

And finally a special number eleven:

11. Polls, polls and more polls. There seemed to be a couple of new polls every week in the Republic, each with completely different results to the other. Still, we love them really. And we await more in the coming weeks.

Pointless lists of 2010 (part four): books

2010-12-31T19:19:00.002Z

This list had at one point grown to include almost thirty books. Here's the trimmed-down top ten reads of the year:

Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor
Hand in the Fire by Hugo Hamilton
Hitch-22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens
Human Chain by Seamus Heaney
Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle
The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis
The Rage Against God by Peter Hitchens

Pointless lists of 2010 (part three): films

2010-12-31T19:01:00.002Z

Ten best films I've seen in the past twelve months:

Enemies of the People
Four Lions
Inception
Kick-Ass
Lebanon
Made in Dagenham
Metropolis*
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Killer Inside Me
The Social Network

*Re-release

Pointless lists of 2010 (part two): singles

2010-12-31T18:32:00.000Z

I don't believe I have actually bought a single in about ten years. However, youngsters inform that they do still exist. This is my pick of the year. As with the previous list, all in alphabetical order:

Beach House – Norway
Beach House - Zebra
Best Coast - Boyfriend
CHEW LiPS – Karen
Crystal Castles - Baptism
Crystal Castles – Celestica
Delorean – Stay Close
Fever Ray – Mercy Street
Florence and the Machine – Cosmic Love
Klaxons – Echoes
Laura Marling - Devil's Spoke
MGMT - Flash Delirium
Robyn – Dancing On My Own
Simian Mobile Disco – Cruel Intentions
Sleigh Bells – Rill Rill
Sleigh Bells – Tell 'Em
The Drums – Best Friend
The Fall - Bury
The National – Bloodbuzz Ohio
Yeasayer – Ambling Alp

Pointless lists of 2010 (part one): albums

2010-12-31T18:11:00.002Z

I could have named fifty but decided to limit myself to twenty. Arranged in alphabetical order:

Beach House - Teen Dream
Best Coast – Crazy For You
Caribou – Swim
Charlotte Gainsbourg - IRM
CHEW LiPS - Unicorn
Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles II
Delorean - Subiza
Glasser – Ring
Hot Chip - One Life Stand
Laura Marling - I Speak Because I Can
MGMT - Congratulations
The Golden Filter - Voluspa
The National - High Violet
Robyn – Body Talk Pt 1
Sleigh Bells - Treats
Tamaryn – The Waves
The Drums – The Drums
The National - High Violet
Two Door Cinema Club - Tourist History
Yeasayer - Odd Blood

Down the drain

2010-12-31T12:17:00.002Z

Ireland of the equals

2010-12-30T22:10:00.002Z

Given that Robert Lewandowski only broke into a flat in the Tates Avenue area of Belfast that was unoccupied on Christmas Eve in order to avoid freezing to death in temperatures of -10°C, and given that the person who normally lives in the flat was actually sympathetic to the plight of the homeless 29 year old Pole who was recently made unemployed, one would have thought that perhaps he would have received softer treatment than would usually be the case. No. District Judge Ken Nixon, UTV informs us, said "his theft and wrongful entry was without justification" and he imposed concurrent six months jail terms for each of the two offences. And a happy new year to you too, Mr Nixon.

This is not, I should point out, an isolated incident. I know of one person who had his car broken into in roughly the same area of south Belfast at roughly the same time this month. After checking that nothing had been stolen and no damage had been done (they actually left an empty KFC box behind them) he decided not to report it to the PSNI. In fact, he felt a bit sorry for the poor shivering wrecks. At least there are still some people with a bit of decency in the race/religious hate capital of Europe.

Many will no doubt say that what Mr Lewandowski did was still illegal, which is of course true, but then this was not a burglary but an act of desperation to stay alive. Think of it as a 21st century equivalent of the theft of Charles Trevelyan's corn, though it is highly unlikely that Robert Lewandowski will have any such sickly sweet ballads penned for him at anytime in the near future. At least he wasn't sent to Australia.

That homelessness still exists in a fairly prosperous west European democracy like our own should in truth shame us. That it exists on an island which currently has somewhere in the region of 3,000 'ghost estates' with thousands of empty homes on them seems to me to be even more of an injustice. However, given that we live in a place that finds itself unable to keep the citizens of its main city supplied with running water, I wouldn't hold out much hope for a quick solution to the issue of homelessness anytime soon.

Its in the jeans

2010-12-30T18:22:00.003Z

P. J. O'Rourke on the 'real' reason why Stalinism fell apart in eastern Europe:

The Soviet Union didn't collapse because of Reagan or Thatcher or missile bases or Star Wars: It collapsed because of Bulgarian blue jeans. The free market was trying to tell the Communists that Bulgarian blue jeans were ugly and didn’t fit, that people wouldn’t wear Bulgarian blue jeans — not, literally, to save their lives. But the Kremlin wasn’t listening, and the Berlin Wall came down.

Jessica Ennis woz robbed

2010-12-27T11:08:00.002Z

I was going to write something about how Tony McCoy (I refuse to call him "A.P." in the same way that I refuse to accept Graeme McDowell has a Portrush accent) was an undeserving winner of the BBC Sport Personality of the Year award on Sunday night, not just because the man is totally devoid of a personality but also because he competes in something that can barely be called a 'sport' as well. Anyhow, Owen Polley has more or less said everything I was going to and has done so without swearing so its probably best that you read his little contribution to this subject.

Before you head off and read Mr Chekov's post I would ask you to mull over this: 293,152 people voted by phone for Tony McCoy. Overall that meant he took 41% of the public vote - almost as much as the rest of the field combined. I know plenty of punters who squander huge amounts of money each week on the horses yet even amongst them I know of no-one who would call themselves a 'Tony McCoy fan'. Neither do I know of anyone who has ever been particularly spellbound by the Moneyglass man's personality. So, just who were these 293,152 souls that reached for their phones and voted for Mr McCoy? If you were won of the near 300,000 that loved county Antrim's finest jockey enough to cast your vote for him in the SPOTY poll then please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section. I remain baffled.

The magic of Christmas

2010-12-25T00:04:00.000Z

X is not Y

2010-12-23T22:51:00.001Z

I don't believe I have ever before laughed at anything concerning the Communist Party of Ireland, however this piece below from the December issue of their newspaper Socialist Voice did make me chuckle. Still not as funny as Brezhnev's novels though:

Radio moment of the year 2010

2010-12-16T21:39:00.003Z

And just in case you don't have a clue what all this is about, click here.

The Dunnes Stores Athletic Grounds?

2010-12-14T10:35:00.003Z

Or how about the Easyjet.com Athletic Grounds (well, the colours are the same)? Either way, another little bit of what makes the Gaelic Athletic Association special has, for me at least, died with the news that the Armagh GAA County Board is to sell naming rights for the new Athletic Grounds in Armagh city. I suppose its not totally out of the question that in a few years we might start to see whole clubs sell their names, in which case I might just log on to the Paddy Power website and stick twenty quid on Red Bull Crossmaglen Rangers to win the 2020 All-Ireland final.

I never thought I'd laugh at someone's pension fund going tits up...

2010-12-14T09:41:00.009Z

... but there's a first time for everything. I came across this little bit of information from Mick Fealty on Slugger this morning regarding the impact of the end of the Celtic Tiger era on Gerry and his mates:

The IRA had five companies completely ruined. They had built the companies up as pensions funds.

Those words were uttered in the House of Lords last month by Lord James of Blackheath, a Tory peer who said that he had been appointed by the Bank of England to deal with problems caused by the laundering of Provo money. Hard luck, lads. Good at bombing fish shops on the Shankill and shooting textile workers in south Armagh; not so good at running semi-legitimate businesses.

I wonder if photographs of these failed enterprises will make it onto the Republican Resistance Calendar for 2011?

Zionist sharks/Prods-only grit

2010-12-10T04:07:00.000Z

Mohamed Abdul Fadil Shousha, the governor of South Sinai, has come up with a novel theory to explain the recent spate of shark attacks in the Sharm el-Sheikh resort. Are you strapped in? Yes, as you might have guessed, it's those pesky Jews again. The governor remarked that "what is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark (in the sea) to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question." Igal Palmor of the Israeli foreign ministry responded by commenting that poor old Mohamed "must have seen Jaws one time too many, and confuses fact and fiction."

Well, Jaws was directed by Steven Spielberg. Steven Spielberg is Jewish. Spielberg has in the past defended Israel. Oh, let's see now. The shark in question killed a German tourist. You know, Germans, Nazis. All that stuff. And Egypt and Israel have had a few issues in the past. So, clearly the work of the Zionist devils.

On a separate note, I heard a more minor conspiracy theory developing on Stephen Nolan's Radio Ulster show yesterday morning. A couple of callers suggested that the roads in their areas were not being gritted in the current deluge of snow because, depending on what side of the fence they were on, they happened to be Catholic/Protestant areas.

Sectarianising grit. Politicising sharks. And, sadly, neither tale really surprises me.

The beast lives

2010-12-10T03:21:00.001Z

Sarah Carey echoes thoughts similar to my own on why we should not be getting to excited by the recent opinion polls south of the border and how the FF monster could yet come back from the grave:

People give the populist answer to pollsters instead of the truth. The polling companies have to 'adjust' the results to account for 'understating'... Anyway, the 'adjustments' can never quite keep pace with the lies. Those swearing never to vote Fianna Fail again will make an exception for their local TD who is a grand fella. Or they’ll register their protest this time with Sinn Féin or the United Left Alliance (or the People's Front of Judea as broadsheet.ie labelled the motley crew). But they'll be back... They always come back – no matter how many times Fianna Fáil completely wrecks the country. And they do it once a generation.

FAcking gutless

2010-12-09T00:42:00.002Z

Had England succeeded in winning the right to host the 2018 World Cup we would probably now, or if not now fairly soon, be reading in the pages of certain British newspapers just how much staging the tournament would be costing the UK taxpayer (see numerous London 2012 articles for more information). However, things did not go England's way in Zurich last Thursday and ever since the whinging has taken the form of that which is normally heard from the British media in the wake of one of Royaume Uni's disastrous Eurovision performances; by that I mean nasty, bitter and just a wee bit xenophobic. Or as Sandwell's finest put it, "handwringing angst from a nation that just doesn't seem to know how to lose gracefully."

Now, don't get me wrong, I would have liked to have seen England stage the big tournament in eight years time. For a start, and from a purely selfish point of view, it would have been easy to get to for little old me. It's going to be a long time before I'll be able to reach a World Cup via a budget airline - unless Michael O'Leary opens Moscow, Rio or Doha routes out of Dublin pretty soon. For another reason, they probably would have deserved it. They have the stadia. They have the cash. They have the facilities. They have the biggest league in the world. They also have the tradition when it comes to the tournament itself (and since 1966, with the exception of Uruguay, all previous World Cup winners have staged the competition at least once).

But then one can't dismiss Russia as lightweights either. They undoubtedly have the cash to put on a decent show, they should have the facilities for it and they also have an outstanding history of their own in the sport. It was also something of a surprise to discover that, despite having hosted Olympic Games and European Cup finals and championships in just about every sport under the sun, the Russians have never staged the finals of a major international soccer tournament. Had England lost out to Qatar (who were absurdly selected to stage World Cup 2022) then a lot of the anger about the location of the competition would have been justified. However, they didn't.

What really grates on me is the attitude of the powers that be in English football to last week's big decision. I lost a lot of respect for the English FA (admittedly my level of respect for them was never all that high) for the way they handled the allegations of corruption in FIFA before and after the ceremony in Switzerland. The £230 Mulberry handbags handed out to the wives of FIFA executive-committee members last year I can overlook. Like the MPs expenses scandal, all that handbaggate proved was that when it comes to corruption the English have a lot of catching up to do with Berlusconi, Fianna Fail and the Burmese junta.

No, what disgusted me was Andy Anson's spineless description of the BBC as "unpatriotic" for broadcasting their Panorama show which highlighted corruption at the top of FIFA. Oddly enough, in the wake of Panorama and Thursday's decision, some in the FA were only too happy to talk about the need for reform in FIFA. Too late, lads. As far as I am concerned if you see an injustice but decide to ignore it in the hope that you might gain some short term benefit then you are as guilty as the perpetrators of the injustice. That is the position that the English FA find themselves in. When Andy Anson was letting the public know all about his disapproval of the BBC's decision to show their documentary on the eve of the bid announcement he lambasted them for dragging up information which had been in the public domain for ten years or more. Yes, a decade or more. In other words, before England even launched their bid. So, why did nobody speak up back then? This question was put to Anson by a caller to Radio 5 live's 6-0-6 phone-in show last Saturday evening. No clear answer was forthcoming.

Oliver Holt of the Daily Mirror summed the whole fiasco up perfectly in the paper last Friday:

What cost us the tournament in the end was not that we said too much. It was that we didn't say enough. That is why all the people who criticised the British media for exposing corruption within Fifa should shuffle away into a corner this morning and hang their heads in shame. They should face the wall and stay there for a very long time – preferably until 2030, which is the next opportunity England has to stage the World Cup. Yesterday's decision to award the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar respectively justified at a stroke everything that Panorama and the Sunday Times were trying to do. England did not lose the right to host the 2018 World Cup because of the British media. It lost it precisely because of the corruption the British media has been fighting against.

Well said, Oliver. A slightly less cerebral response from a slightly less cerebral element of the British media came from talkSPORT presenter Micky Quinn who suggested that Sepp Blatter have his head chopped off. As I said: nasty, bitter and a little sprinkling of, as it was referred to in Father Ted, the old racism.

If the FA and the media have any sense they should cut the "handwringing angst" that comrade Piper spoke of. Right now it is they that seem to occupy the moral high ground. Yet it should not be forgotten that senior members of the Football Association were for many years, as they admit themselves, well aware of just what was taking place in the higher echelons of world football's governing body. To that extent they must feel a little bit like people who voted for Fianna Fail in the Irish Republic over the past decade do at the present time; irate, but also well aware that they played a large part in getting shit on by those that they helped prop up. For ordinary working class Englishmen and women, those who live for and care about the game, the chance of seeing a World Cup in their country is gone for at least another generation. Perhaps they should have a word with the folks at Soho Square. Now may be the time to reform the International Federation of Association Football. It just remains to be seen whether anyone in the FA, or any of the other national associations for that matter, has the balls to speak up.

"Repatriate to Britain all of you who call it home"

2010-12-08T22:23:00.007Z

John Winston Lennon. Dead 30 years today. Made some decent music with three other blokes in the latter half of the sixties. Never really cared much for their early stuff. An at best mediocre solo career. Held some nasty views on the political situation in my own part of the world. At least Ringo never wrote a song calling for the ethnic cleansing of Ireland's Protestants.

You've probably heard this already but I'm posting it anyway

2010-12-07T07:33:00.003Z

Given that the Culture Secretary is on record as saying that the Hillsborough disaster occurred as a result of football hooliganism, I'd find the use of the word 'cunt' a little bit on the soft side:

If I can shoot rabbits then I can hang Tariq

2010-12-06T23:00:00.002Z

Had George Galloway been alive at the time of the Nuremburg trials one can only presume that he would have been one of the few people campaigning to save Göring, Ribbentrop and others like them from the hangman's noose. The reason I say this is because in an interview with The Scotsman newspaper, an article where he also describes the execution of Saddam Hussein as "an act of senseless barbarism", the former MP for Bethnal Green and Bow states his opposition to the death penalty issued against Tariq Aziz, the Deputy Prime Minister of the Ba'athist regime from 1979 until its fall in 2003.

According to GG, he is "very upset the Vatican hasn't done more" to save Aziz. When asked why Rome should go to the bother of trying to save such a high-ranking member of one of the 20th century's most vile dictatorships, the talkSPORT presenter stated: "Because it's un-Christian to execute someone. And because he is the most prominent Catholic in any Arab country." Un-Christian to execute someone? Really? What a pity Arnaud Amalric and Father Jozef Tiso, to name but two, were not made aware of this Christian detestation of murder. I also cannot quite understand Galloway's reasoning in how being a Catholic should let one of the primary public faces of a totalitarian regime guilty of genocide get off scott free.

Smrt fašizmu, sloboda narodu. Death to fascism, freedom to the people. The slogan of the Yugoslav partisans during their struggle against Nazi occupation in the forties. Clearly Mr Galloway has a problem with the first word of this slogan, though only it seems when its applied to fascists (when applied to Jews, as in the case of Hamas or Hezbollah, he does appear to relax his attitude a little). Aziz may yet escape execution. In one of those bizarre twists of fate that history throws up now and then, Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi President and a Kurdish leader Aziz's comrades once wanted dead, is refusing to sign the former Deputy PM's execution order. Fair enough. Call me old fashioned, but I much prefer to see men of his ilk getting the Eichmann treatment. Death to fascism really should mean death to fascism.

Just when you think your opinion of Dundee's worst couldn't get any lower, he manages to outdo himself once again. One day he's speaking at a fundraiser for the antisemitic murder gang Hamas, the next he's appealing to Joseph Ratzinger to do more to save the life of a senior figure in Saddam Hussein's government. And to top it all off some people out there still consider George Galloway to be a socialist.

Some thoughts on the Donegal South West by-election

2010-12-03T01:27:00.000Z

Congratulations Pearse Doherty. I never thought I would ever utter these words, but the Shinners really did deserve this one. Why? Well, firstly, Pearse Doherty was a likeable and eloquent candidate who came across well in interviews and appeared to have a genuinely sound grasp of economic issues, an important factor as this has been the area where Sinn Fein have stumbled whilst trying to make their big breakthrough south of the border. It also probably helped that the by-election came at the same time the IMF were arriving in Dublin. For years the Provos have been ridiculed by the mainstream parties as having an economic policy that would bankrupt the country; that argument is at the present time quite a weak one as, evidently, the country is well and truly bankrupt.

Secondly, and most importantly in my view, it was only Doherty and Sinn Fein who bothered their backsides standing up for the constitutional rights of the people of Donegal South West in going to the courts to force this election (not bad for a party that until quite recently didn't recognise Bunreacht na hÉireann and still refuses to refer to the state as a 'Republic'). So, good on ye, Pearse. I'll never vote Sinn Fein, but credit where its due.

Now, to the others. If I were a Fianna Fail member right now I would, to put it politely, be crapping my pants. This was one of their strongest constituencies in the state, so the fact that their candidate Brian Ó Domhnaill finished a dismal third could be a sign of things to come (alternatively, optimistic FFers could interpret attracting 21.3% of the vote in the worst week in their history as an indication that they aren't dead in the water just yet). Barry O'Neill of Fine Gael put in a fairly solid performance, though it is unlikely that Enda and co will be getting too excited by it. This was FG's first opportunity to see how the party had capitalised on the continuing car crash that is Fianna Fail. Unfortunately for them the result appeared to be more of a consolidation of their vote in DSW than a great leap forward. Of the independents, former Sinn Fein councillor Thomas Pringle recorded a very respectable 10% and 3,438 first preference votes. Sadly the same could not be said for Anne Sweeney and her oddball New Island Party outfit that only attracted a mere 133 votes. Bizarrely, Sweeney withdrew from the contest a few days before polling and called on her supporters to boycott the thing altogether. Strange girl. Finally, we come to the Labour Party. If I was asked to make a statement that sums up the Labour effort in Donegal South West it would probably be the following: oh dear.

I do not believe that the words to describe just how appalling a candidate Frank McBrearty was for Labour actually exist in the English language. He may actually be the worst candidate ever put forward for an election at any time, north or south (and, remember, this is the island that give us Mervyn Storey). Quite how an inarticulate, idiotic buffoon of his nature managed to be selected as a candidate in a parliamentary by-election for one of the big three parties in the Irish Republic leaves me scratching my head. However, that the organisation he was selected for was the Labour Party – my own comrades and the party now for the first time realistically in the running to potentially form the state's first left-led government after next year's general election – simply leaves me in despair. His last place finish should have come as no surprise.

One of the problems in Irish politics over the years is that the Dail has had far too many politicians who are not so much national parliamentarians as they are glorified county councillors. To describe McBrearty though as a glorified county councillor would be doing a great disservice to the many hard working and thoughtful individuals elected at local council level. His television and radio appearances were dreadful. All of them. One would have been forgiven for thinking the man was a character from Killinaskully. He had no ideas, no apparent knowledge of party policy, he was very often quite rude and at all times seemed like a man totally out of his depth. When questioned by interviewers he would run off some meaningless line like "I'm Eamon Gilmore's man in Donegal" or "the people of Donegal want Eamon Gilmore for Taoiseach" or "I'll fight for the people of Donegal like I fought for justice." Cringeworthy stuff. In one interview he appeared to think that a bond cost €8. In another he accused Pearse Doherty of being more concerned about people in Northern Ireland (a dig at Doherty's membership of a 32 county party as well as his refusal to appeal to people in the constituency not to do their shopping in Enniskillen). At times I found myself so embarrassed that I had to change channels on the telly or switch to another radio station once I heard him beginning to ramble. I once even sensed that poor old Pat Kenny was embaressed for him. It really was that bad. Next to Frank McBrearty, Jackie Healy-Rae would look almost Churchillian.

Had he been a failed candidate in a general election it would not have been so bad. In that case his pathetic figure would at least have been lost amongst battles going on in the 42 other southern constituencies. However, with the attention of the national media focussed on Donegal for several weeks, Frank McBrearty was, tragically, the face of the Labour Party in the Republic for much of November.

Perhaps the party should have stuck with the 73 year old election veteran Seamus Rodgers for just one more campaign. Seamus had in his time been a candidate in Donegal for Sinn Fein (pre-1969 split), Official Sinn Fein, SFWP, The Workers Party, Democratic Left and in more recent times the Labour Party. In his day Rodgers could pull in around 10% of the first preference vote in the constituency, roughly the same vote that McBrearty attracted. However, given that he would have been nowhere near as downright disastrous as Frank we can only guess at just how much better he would have fared. On the bright side, if one in ten people in Donegal South West are willing to vote Frank McBrearty number one then there is undoubtedly a good base there for a strong Labour challenge at some stage in the future – all they need now is a candidate capable of launching such a challenge.

In short, a good day for the Shinners. Everyone else will have a lot of thinking to do between now and the big election early in the new year.

Left? Yes.

2010-12-02T23:04:00.000Z

Terry talks Trots

2010-12-01T23:43:00.000Z

Comrade Glavin on the AWL in Britain. I quite like them too. Great bunch of lads.

The 'willy nilly' doctrine

2010-11-30T22:07:00.004Z

I've suspected it for a long time but this week's Wikileaks revelations would appear to confirm it: China isn't really all that bothered about North Korea. Having been seduced long ago by the whiff of capitalism, the days when Chinese leaders were willing to send their sons to die in defence of the DPRK are long gone.

You would think then, with Pyongyang friendless and bankrupt, that the international community would not be willing to tolerate irrational murderous acts such as the slaughter of 46 South Korean sailors on March 26th in a North Korean torpedo attack and last week's artillery bombardment of Yeonpyeong island that left two ROK marines and two civilians dead. The response though from State Department spokesperson Mark Toner was that there would be no "willy nilly" response from the United States to these provocations. Willy nilly. I'm sure those words struck fear into the hearts of the North Korean leadership.

The rationale behind the north's reckless actions remains unclear. There are those that believe it is designed in some way to build up the military reputation of Kim Jong-un. Others, such as the former US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, are of the opinion that the northern military generals are now acting independently of the country's leadership (which if true could be an even more frightening prospect than that which we have been faced with). Whatever the reason, North Korea is becoming increasingly aggressive and the more the democratic world chooses to turn the other cheek the more hostile they will become in future. As I said here last month, we cannot wish North Korea out of existence, we cannot negotiate it out of existence at six party talks and we sure as hell cannot appease it out of existence. The question is just how long the democratic world will permit an isolated, companionless mafia state to make fools of them. I hope we get our answer soon. The 'willy nilly' doctrine is well past its sell by date.

Meanwhile, and to end on a slightly more positive note, the BBC has obtained footage that may just show us images of the bravest human being on the planet. Click here for a smuggled video recording taken inside the DPRK showing a lone North Korean woman standing up to one of Kim Jong-il's police goons. Sister, I salute you!

This is capitalism

2010-10-22T06:52:00.001+01:00

The current assault on the living standards of working people cannot be viewed in isolation. While it is logical that we are always first and foremost concerned with the situation in our own country, and indeed in our own local area, austerity measures like those announced on Wednesday by that repulsive little creep George Osborne are hitting workers right across the globe. However, few measures I have come across are as downright absurd at those currently planned in the tiny African republic of Malawi.

At present a pension reform bill is proposing that the retirement age for Malawians be raised to 60 for men and 55 for women. The problem? The average person in the country can only expect to live a mere 50 years, a statistic that puts Malawi near the bottom of the world's life expectancy list (210th and out of 224 nations to be precise).

I suppose from a right-wing point of view it makes perfect sense: avoid the financial burden of pensions by setting the retirement age at a point the majority of the population will never actually live to. Cameron and Osborne must be sitting at home right now in awe of the Malawian government and wondering how they did not think of such an ingeniously wicked plan. Not that they would ever do anything like that of course. Would they?

"I have no interest in a party that does not want to be at the centre of government in Westminster"

2010-10-21T20:46:00.002+01:00

Hot on the heels of Boyd Black's contribution to the News Letter's Union 2021 series, the Rev. Chris Hudson, another Labour Party supporter in Northern Ireland, has offered some thoughts of his own in the paper on the current state of party politics here:

We should not be blackmailed by any party that sees every election as a Rangers v Celtic match. Let Sinn Fein and the DUP continue the politics of the tribal head count but the rest of us must motivate the people of Northern Ireland towards inclusive issue based politics… Maintaining cultural and religious characteristics as criteria for supporting a political ideology will only sustain Northern Ireland in a static wasteful divided society as we approach 2021.

The crucial line in the piece comes with his assertion that "I have no interest in a party that does not want to be at the centre of government in Westminster." I could not agree more. There are few other parts of the world I can think of where the citizens seem content to be governed by parties that do not have as much as a single vote in their region. Surely such a scenario cannot continue to exist for many more years?

I do sometimes wonder whether I'm beginning to sound a tad repetitive in regularly posting on this site about the subject of Labour contesting elections in Northern Ireland and thereby maximising the UK-wide left vote, but following the savage cuts announced yesterday by the right-wing administration in London and the utterly hopeless response of our tiny little ineffectual sectarian six county parties I realise that I shouldn't be concerned at all. In the coming months I intend to be more repetitive.

By jove, I think he's got it. Maybe.

2010-10-15T23:44:00.001+01:00

I almost choked on my Fruit Pastille this evening when I spotted a headline on the UTV website stating 'Robinson wants to end school apartheid'. Apparently the leader of the Democratic Unionists, a party that to put it mildly could never have been considered one of the cheerleaders for integrated education, has now arrived at the conclusion that perhaps separating children on the basis of religion in Northern Ireland has not been such a grand idea after all. He says:

We cannot hope to move beyond our present community divisions while our young people are educated separately. The reality is that our education system is a benign form of apartheid, which is fundamentally damaging to our society. I entirely accept that such fundamental change will not happen overnight but that is no excuse for further delay in making a start. I know that we will face difficulties in dislodging the vested interests that are so strong in this sector, but I am absolutely convinced that we must.

The First Minister also added, in what will undoubtedly be the most divisive aspect of his remarks, that the government should stop funding schools that separate "our children almost entirely on the basis of their religion." Very well, a late convert is better than no convert at all I suppose. However, has Robinson and his crew really changed their tune?

At the present time it is simply too soon to tell whether we are witnessing a Damascene conversion. If we are then it is a truly spectacular one. The DUP have been harsh critics of integrated education over the years, usually employing the old tactic of scaring supporters away from the proposal with the belief that their kids will be forced to play Gaelic games and learn Irish under such a system (the Catholic Church has traditionally used the prospect of these two things being removed under an integrated structure in order to frighten its own followers). Ian Paisley once went as far as to describe integrated education as "Romanist indoctrination." Even right now Peter Robinson's own website states in the education policy section that he "opposes existing privileges for integrated and Irish medium schools which have a detrimental impact on other schools." From his recent remarks though, especially the one about cutting off funding for schools that separate children on the basis of their religion, it would seem that Robinson now does not want to just give integrated education a few privileges with regard to funding but rather make sure it has outright priority over all other forms.

His comments also come as a surprise when viewed in the wider UK context. The New Labour government were always keen to talk up the benefits of religious schooling. Nick Clegg, Lib Dem leader and an atheist, said this week that he is considering sending his children to a faith school. Prior to the general election this year the Tories pledged to increase the number of faith schools. How ironic it would be that at a time when the trend on the other side of the water was drifting towards giving religious creeps control over the education of British children that Northern Ireland could become a model for good community relations and social cohesion.

Let us not get too carried away. The idea of integrated schooling goes way back in this part of the world. Our first Minister for Education, Lord Londonderry, proposed it for primary pupils in the early days of the northern state but then, as now, it was shot down by the churches. In more recent times, with the honourable exception of Alliance, it has either been rejected by mainstream politicians or else treated as a matter of minor importance. If Peter Robinson is prepared to move beyond this state of affairs then I will applaud him. Until I see something more tangible than the words just uttered I shall refrain from clapping too loudly.

Ignoring the inevitable?

2010-10-08T10:45:00.000+01:00

According to The Chosun Ilbo the South Korean military is planning to step up psychological operations against its neighbour to the north by changing the frequency of its radio broadcasts from FM to AM so that it can be heard by more of the oppressed citizens of the DPRK (strangely enough North Korea is said to be carrying out psy-ops of its own via, of all things, Twitter). At the same time the south is preparing to send balloons carrying transistor radios across its northern frontier in order to make sure people there get the message. Seoul has announced that it will also increase leaflet drops in the north and resume propaganda broadcasts via loudspeakers along the border. All nice gestures indeed, but hardly ones that will have Kim Jong-il quaking in his boots. With the regime in Pyongyang looking to be as firmly in power as they have ever been, now may be the time to adopt a slightly tougher attitude.

Back in March the north torpedoed the South Korean Cheonan warship killing 46 sailors. The south did not respond. In August the north fired 110 artillery rounds into the West Sea. Again the south did not retaliate. With such blatant military provocations added to Seoul's continuing reluctance to take a more aggressive stance against North Korea, it is not hard to see how the editorial in The Chosun Ilbo was able to draw a historical parallel with the attitude taken by democracies in 1930s Europe to the threat of fascism:

Looking back at history, repeated failures by governments to live up to their word, especially in matters of diplomacy and national security, often ended up inviting war. In the 1930s when Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime rearmed itself violating the Treaty of Versailles and occupied portions of Czechoslovakia, the British and French governments merely issued verbal warnings saying they would not tolerate additional acts of provocation. Judging the discrepancy between rhetoric and action as weakness, Germany ended up invading Poland. It was then that the UK and France declared war on Germany, starting World War II, which ended up costing tens of millions of lives. Winston Churchill said World War II could have easily been avoided if proper steps were taken at the right time. South Korea's words and actions must always be consistent. That is the only way to prevent North Korea from misjudging the situation.

Totalitarian dictatorships are of course unpredictable beasts in that they can often collapse just as easily as they can declare war. At the opening of the 1980s few people predicted the revolutions that would sweep eastern Europe in the final months of that decade. There may be some hoping that the DPRK, now officially in a period of transition to a new leadership, will suddenly implode at some point in the near future in the same way that Romania, Czechoslovakia and their Stalinist neighbours did in that momentous year of 1989. Unfortunately, that is unlikely. Even more disgraceful than those indulging in such wishful thinking is the fact that there are many senior officials in the south who are content for the status quo to continue, so afraid are they of the potential cost of reunification and the possibility of millions of their fellow countrymen flocking to Seoul and other cities in the south in the wake of the 65 year old border evaporating.

One thing is for sure though, eventually something will have to give. When it does it may well be that we end up witnessing the rapid disintegration of the Kim dynasty. Alternatively, it could be a more horrifying scenario that could leave Seoul and its western allies wishing they had avoided falling into the age old trap of appeasement. For now South Korea may not be interested in war, however it may discover at some stage in the not-too-distant future that war is very much interested in them.

The meaning of Tom Elliott

2010-10-07T07:00:00.004+01:00

It will be interesting to see who Sinn Fein and the DUP eventually choose to replace Gerry Adams and Peter Robinson because, if their partners in government are anything to go by, it seems that to lead a political party in Northern Ireland these days one has to be dour, monotone and breathtakingly uninspiring. The SDLP set the bar rather high when they elected Margaret Ritchie as their leader last year. Last week members of the Ulster Unionists surpassed even that when they elected the Fermanagh farmer Tom Elliott as their man to take the once monolithic party of unionism in Ireland into the future. But who is Tom Elliott and in just what direction is he going to take the organisation?

Elliot's CV is certainly impeccable for anyone wanting to lead a unionist party. He is a Past County Grand Master of the Orange Order within Fermanagh and Assistant Secretary to the Grand Lodge of Ireland and is also a member of the Royal Black Preceptory. He served in both the Ulster Defence Regiment and Royal Irish Regiment, is a former member of Fermanagh District Council and has been an MLA for Fermanagh and South Tyrone since 2003. So, that's his background, but what precisely can we expect from his leadership? At this point things become a little less clear.

Tom Elliott's website currently contains two short videos of him being interviewed by former UTV presenter Lynda Bryans, though to be honest neither really sheds much light on what exactly he stands for beyond some general banalities about him being a family man and wanting to secure the union (declarations of marital infidelity and a desire for a 32 county socialist republic aren't likely to gain you many votes in a UUP leadership election).

Last month's joint Q&A session featuring himself and his leadership rival Basil McCrea for the News Letter does tell us a little bit more about the man, though it was again difficult to detect just what Elliott's big idea was to help turn around a party that is presently in the worst electoral state of its 105 year history. When asked what the key difference would be in his leadership compared to that of previous UUP leaders, Elliott stated that he would "ensure that grassroots members of the Ulster Unionist Party are kept aware of party policy and informed how decision-making is proceeding." He added that he would also focus on "party development to ensure electoral recovery and structured community planning that will provide political confidence for the electorate." Nothing all that groundbreaking there you might say. On the following question of whether the Ulster Unionists could become the biggest pro-union party in five or ten years, he merely answered that people would be "keen to vote for the UUP when they experience the cohesive and progressive approach that the UUP will be pursuing under my leadership." Inspiring stuff it most certainly is not.

If you had managed to remain awake at this point you would have made it to the third question and, for many people in Northern Ireland, the biggie: unionist unity. In his answer, Basil McCrea clearly ruled out a pact with the DUP saying that the UUs had to stand on their own two feet. Elliott though gave a slightly more cryptic response:

I am convinced that the electorate wants us to contest elections as the Ulster Unionist Party. If you're asking me if I will work to cooperate closely with the present government, then the answer is obvious – I have already made tentative arrangements to ensure that is done in a constructive, planned and ongoing manner. As at present, I am happy to explore a working relationship with other parties on specific issues if that will benefit all the people in Northern Ireland, but I will ensure that we will not be pushed over by nationalists, republicans or other self-interested and compromised unionists.

It was a smart answer from a man many would like to portray as something of a country bumpkin. There are those in the UUP that want nothing to do with the DUP, there are those that would happily enter into an electoral arrangement with them in some constituencies if it meant keeping a nationalist out and there are those who still harbour the dream of a single united unionist party. Elliott's answer here gave a little bit of everything to everyone.

For the anti-pact brigade there was his recognition that the "electorate wants us to contest elections as the Ulster Unionist Party," while the unionist unity enthusiasts can take hope from his declaration that he is "happy to explore a working relationship with other parties on specific issues." Don't forget, Tom was the Ulster Unionist hopeful who stood aside to give 'pan-Prod' candidate Rodney Connor a free run in Fermanagh and South Tyrone in this year's general election, so fans of unionist unity would have plenty of reason to be impressed by his track record in this area. Basil's answer was more straightforward – no pact. In saying such a thing, McCrea would have almost certainly lost the votes of those enthusiastic for some form of pan-unionist cooperation. Tom was leaving the door open for everyone. Again, when asked about who the party's main opponent was, the man who would go on to win the leadership race managed to give in an answer in which he didn't mention any party whatsoever. McCrea stated quite clearly that their "electoral battle is with the DUP."

What about the bread-and-butter issues, I hear you ask. Details of what concerned both men were a bit thin in this area. If anything, the Ballinamallard man probably gave the more comprehensive answer of the two. While McCrea spouted out something about the UUP adopting a 'can-do' attitude and having a determination to make a difference (how very New Labour), Elliott said that he wanted to see a more coherent education strategy for transfer between schools as well as a structured review of overall governance in the province.

The prospect of a Sinn Fein First Minister seems to be the only thing left (short of a full-blown united Ireland of course) that has the potential to frighten unionists. When the issue reared its head in the News Letter interview, Mr McCrea pointed out that the First Minister's office was a joint office and that the alternative to a republican taking that post if they were entitled to it would be a constitutional crisis. A good firm honest answer you might say, but then again one that some UUP members could have interpreted as a tad soft. His opponent chose his words more carefully, accusing the Democratic Unionists of "selfish and perverse negotiating" at Saint Andrews and handing the Provos the opportunity of taking the top job at Stormont. He claimed that he was negotiating with the British government to change the legislation back to what it was at the time of the 1998 referendum but would not comment any further. It was, like his answer to the unionist unity question, extremely clever. He didn't exactly say that he would oppose a Sinn Fein First Minister under any circumstances, but he did at least make it sound as if he was unhappy at the prospect of there being one.

It would be daft of me not to mention the moment of the campaign: Tom Elliott's remark that he would not be attending either a gay pride parade or a GAA game. As comments go it was an incredibly negative one, but not an entirely dim-witted one either. While he is far from being some sort of Machiavellian political strategist, I very much doubt that it was a slip of the tongue on his part; Elliott knew exactly what he was saying and who it would appeal to. Like it or loathe it, even within the more moderate unionist party, such intolerant posturing still has a fanbase. It was also a direct swipe at his election rival who has in the past attended both the Belfast gay pride march and GAA events in an attempt to broaden his party's horizons. Tommy boy though was having none of it and, as he well knows, there are plenty of people in the party quite happy not to have their horizons broadened. This was the point at which the contest probably hit its lowest point with McCrea questioning whether Elliott would visit Peadar Heffron, the Irish-speaking, GAA-playing PSNI officer who was critically injured in January in a dissident republican car bomb attack.

For me, the protracted debate over these comments became incredibly boring very quickly. Unfortunately though, any time the leadership contest was discussed in the media they rapidly raced to the top of the agenda. The day after he became party leader, Tom Elliott was on Radio Ulster's Talkback show with Wendy Austin. Once again, the GAA/gay pride comments were the first thing he was grilled on. You may have thought that now with the election over he may have expressed some form of regret and expressed a wish that he had chosen he words more carefully. Not a bit of it. Elliott stated that he had no interest in either Gaelic games nor gay parades and that he would not be engaging in what he called "tokenism." It was a weak explanation.

Trevor Ringland, the former Ireland rugby international and UCUNF candidate in East Belfast in the general election, was right when he stated that such acts by unionist leaders were a crucial part of building the so-called shared society that we hear much about but which there is very little evidence of coming into being. Aren't politicians though, particularly party leaders, supposed to turn up at events they couldn't give a damn about? Is Tom just going to attend events which are of interest to him? It certainly appears odd to me, but then I'm not leader of the Ulster Unionists. It remains to be seen whether the new head of the party will be taking up Mr Ringland's offer of a ticket for next year All-Ireland football final at Croke Park. If he has any idea about how to play this politics game and all the displays of falseness that accompany it he should be there, even if can't tell the difference between a 45 and a square ball. If he is still intent on not going to Croker, he can always pass the ticket onto my good self (my email address is on the right-hand side of the screen, Tom).

An ominous sign for the future of the Ulster Unionism may be found in the apparent break up of the party's liberal wing in the days after the election result. Trevor Ringland resigned at lunchtime on Monday. Lesley Macaulay's position as a candidate for the party in East Londonderry at the next Assembly poll is now thought to be under threat. Also rejected this week as potential candidates for Stormont in Upper Bann and Belfast South were Harry Hamilton and Paula Bradshaw. All four of these individuals were UCUNF candidates at the general election in the spring. While it may not yet constitute the Stalinesque 'purge' that some people having been talking about, it is obvious to everyone now that the moderates in the UUP face a tough battle in the coming months. Some may decide the battle isn't worth it and join Alliance. Some might decide to run as independents. And some, like Trevor Ringland, might throw in the towel altogether and return to concentrating on community work and playing in Queen tribute bands. Whatever happens, it is difficult to see the Hamiltons and the Macaulays playing a major role in the higher echelons of the party at any stage in the near future.

Back to the question I posed at the start of this: just who the hell is Tom Elliott? Is he a homophobic, anti-Catholic bigot who wouldn't be caught within ten miles of a GAA pitch or a parade full of gay boys? Is he a practical leader whose fairly ambiguous answers to questions during the campaign display a man who is at heart a classic political pragmatist? Will he be, like David Trimble, the man many some considered the more hardline of the candidates in the race to become leader only to eventually turn out to be an open-minded liberal who will have a transformative effect on the party? Or will he be none of these, a man totally bereft of ideas and unable to turn around the ailing fortunes of the Ulster Unionist Party; incapable of banging the Lambeg drum louder and out-orange the DUP, while at the same time not imaginative enough to steer them in an alternative direction?

He certainly is neither an intensely anti-Catholic bigot nor a rabid homophobe, however the fact that he is willing to appeal to both sections of the community shows that he is still willing to indulge in a spot of populism when he deems it necessary. He will most likely be a pragmatic leader that is well aware of the fact that the days of intractable 'no surrender' unionism are dead and buried, though that in itself is hardly worthy of a round of applause as the party had already reached this stage under the leadership of Trimble and Empey. The big challenge facing Tom Elliott is whether or not he will be able to take the organisation beyond what it is now, namely a minority party of unionism designed for those 'decent people' who still find the DUP a wee bit too distasteful. Tom might well be a nice chap who probably made a decent councillor and Assembly member down in Fermanagh, but a born leader? I doubt it.

Now, more than ever, the UUP requires a leader with charisma, vision and a big idea about where it can go next. Trimble dragged the organisation kicking and screaming out of the not-an-inch era in a courageous act of historical necessity. Empey, for all his flaws, attempted to reposition the party firmly on the centre-right of local politics while giving them input into the national political scene by forging links with the Conservatives across the water. The next stage on the journey needs someone who is both courageous and imaginative at the head of the organisation. To that extent, the members of the Ulster Unionist Party would appear to have chosen the wrong man. Tom Elliott may not be a step backwards for unionism but there is certainly nothing to suggest he is a step forwards. For now, Elliott appears little more than a step to the side, and that is not what the UUP needs at the present time.

The mysterious death of comrade Hardy

2010-10-07T04:31:00.000+01:00

That the left has had its fair share of lunatics over the years is beyond dispute. That the French Trotskyist outfit Lutte Ouvrière (Workers' Struggle) ranks extremely highly in the insanity stakes is pretty much beyond argument. LO is an organisation that has fascinated me for quite some time due to its absolute weirdness. A highly secretive conspiratorial sect that is said to be difficult to even become a member of, one former activist has described the "iron discipline which rhythms the life of this Trotskyist organisation, whose responsibles (cadres) do not have the right to have children, lest they be excluded." In fact, the organisation takes secrecy to a whole new level with even its very name being unclear (Lutte Ouvrière is actually the name of the weekly newspaper it publishes, not the title given to the organisation itself). Add to all of this the fact that party members function under aliases meaning that many of the committed militants do not know the real names of their fellow LOers and you pretty much have an image of fully-fledged political cult.

But now Lutte Ouvrière, or whatever the hell they are called, have really outdone themselves. Robert Barcia, alias 'Hardy' (don't ask) and leader of LO since 1956, has died. So what, you may well ask. Don't we all die? Well, yes we do, but not in the circumstances of comrade Hardy. Barcia died on July 12th last year, however news of his passing was only revealed a fortnight ago - a whole fourteen months after the poor sod's communist heart stopped beating. Why though? Was the shock that great? Were they under the false impression that the man was immortal? I realise Leon Trotsky once remarked that old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man, but I'm sure even he didn't consider the harsh reality of death to be that much of a surprise.

A spokesperson for the party denied that they had indulged in a spot of corpse hiding. Nathalie Arthaud, the current head of this strange cult, commented: "I've read that we did everything to hide Hardy's death. That's totally false! If you had called me a year ago I would have told you the truth." So, according to Nathalie, someone had to ask if Robert Barcia was dead before they would tell us? How very, very odd. Even the North Koreans didn't attempt to hide the fact that Kim Il-sung had kicked the bucket in 1994.

Given LO's clandestine nature we may never find out just what the thinking was that led to this whole peculiar episode. Transition issues? Possibly. Political parties that have been under the same leader for a few decades do usually have difficulties when that person passes on and the time comes to find a successor. The next time The Right Honourable Member of Parliament for Belfast West hasn't been seen around for a few weeks it may just be time to start asking a few questions regarding his whereabouts.

What if Facebook had existed years ago?

2010-10-07T02:25:00.004+01:00

It probably would have looked something like this:

More tomfoolery here.

Just one more thing

2010-10-06T22:00:00.000+01:00

Here is an interesting little insight into how members of the Labour Party in my patch voted in the recent leadership election. David Miliband came out on top with 34.26% of the vote while Andy Burnham, the only candidate to support allowing Labour to fight elections in Northern Ireland, also put in a strong showing by gaining the support of a quarter of local party members. The guy who ended up winning the contest, our Ed, finished a lowly third. Diane Abbott came in a distant fourth. And, finally, I think it is fairly safe to assume that Ed Balls and Yvette will not be contacting the Northern Ireland Tourist Board for their latest brochure.

Chucking ice cream at tanks

2010-10-06T20:28:00.002+01:00

It would appear that the Real IRA's threatened assault upon the "bankers and the institutions they serve in financing Britain's colonial and capitalist system" has finally begun. The opening strike in the early hours of yesterday morning was something of an anti-climax since it was not the high-profile economic target that they had hinted at but rather a branch of the Ulster Bank on the Culmore Road in Derry. Nevertheless, no matter whether it is a bomb detonated in the City of London or one set off outside the offices of a bank in a small Northern Irish town, such acts remain reckless and put the lives of scores of innocent civilians at risk. But what has brought on this shift in tactics?

There are some who reckon that such pathetic faux anti-capitalist bluster will attract disaffected young people in the working-class nationalist ghettos of Belfast and Derry, however I am not so sure. Do angry young republicans foaming at the mouth to get the Brits out of Ireland really join a paramilitary group in order to blow up their local banks? Probably not. While last month's statement to Henry McDonald of the Guardian may impress a few kids looking to add a little touch of red to their deep green nationalism it will most likely not have any major impact on filling the ranks with new recruits.

Up until now the Real IRA, and indeed all of the other republican groups in Northern Ireland claiming to be the IRA, have not had much success in launching attacks on the security forces. Despite being around now for twelve years, the RIRA have failed to kill a single police officer. With Operation Banner now a period consigned to the history books the group does not have a visible military presence to launch attacks on, though ironically for a republican group they would love nothing more than to have British troops back on Irish streets. Recent bomb attacks have tended to take place, primarily in the hours of darkness, on court houses and police stations, yet because such buildings have been heavily fortified since the days when they were targets for the Provisional IRA the actual damage caused to them has been fairly minimal. As an Irish News journalist remarked in the wake of the attack on Strand Road PSNI station in August, the car bombing had about the same destructive impact on the base as ice cream would have if it were thrown at a tank (unfortunately the same could not be said for a nearby kebab shop – surely not a legitimate target even by the RIRA's pathetic reasoning – which was destroyed in the blast). The ice cream/tank analogy could just as easily be applied to the impact bombing a branch of the Ulster Bank will have on global capitalism.

After a string of botched operations and ineffectual bomb attacks it could well be that some in the Real IRA have decided on adding a few soft targets to their list. With an armed struggle against kebab shops not an option, targeting banks probably sounded like a decent bet from the point of view of a dissident republican commander; there's lots to choose from, they aren't heavily guarded, they aren't heavily fortified, they can justify it by spouting out some crap about capitalism and colonialism, plus the images of a few destroyed buildings plastered across the front pages of the morning papers will help re-establish a bit of their terrorist credibility. Everyone's a winner. Well, everyone except the 99.9% of the Irish people that don't support them.

So, let us not give these imbeciles and their supposedly radical rhetoric the time of day. These are the desperate actions of desperate men carrying out a pathetic armed campaign that has the support of nobody bar themselves. In recent years the now-abandoned ETA campaign in the Basque Country had descended into a farce, a violent and murderous farce, but a farce nonetheless. With their terrorist capabilities severely weakened and their public support shrinking rapidly, they were reduced to carrying out attacks on people and institutions unconnected to the Spanish state – universities, businessmen, journalists, even an attempt to extort money from a Basque footballer.

If the Real IRA genuinely believe that bombing a small branch of a bank in a small city in the north-west of Ireland is striking a blow against "Britain's colonial and capitalist system" then they are about as much in touch with reality as David Koresh and his apocalyptic Branch Davidian cult were. That there are some out there who advocate talking with the dissidents is frankly laughable. We must do two things in relation to them: a) ignore them, and b) let the Police Service of Northern Ireland and An Garda Síochána do their work with the full help and cooperation of all the people on this island. Their support base is miniscule. Their potential for growth is small. With attacks like those of Tuesday morning, they are their own gravediggers.

"There is a right-wing wind blowing over Europe"

2010-10-05T05:35:00.002+01:00

The above heading comes from a line written in a Guardian article last month by Henning Mankell, crime fiction writer and author of the excellent Wallander series of novels, in the wake of September's Swedish general election and the stunning success of the right-wing Sweden Democrats. The SD has been growing steadily since its formation in 1988 and last month made its parliamentary breakthrough taking 20 seats in the Riksdag with 5.7% of the vote. So, should we be worried?

We on the left should always be concerned at the growth of a nationalistic, right of centre, anti-immigration party regardless of what part of the world it happens to rear its head in. However, the parties of the far-right in Europe, or to be more accurate those parties to the right of mainstream European conservative forces, are quite a mixed bag and much more complex than one might at first imagine. If you want to learn a bit about the far-right it is usually advisable to look at just what sort of company the organisation you are looking at keeps. The SDs choice of pals is extremely surprising. The BNP, the Front National in France and the Hungarian Jobbik movement, to name but three, are all grouped together in the European Parliament under the Alliance of European National Movements banner, as well as in a wider association of extremist organisations called Euronat. These parties do have an ally in Sweden, though it is the electorally insignificant National Democrats (an organisation with no MEPs, no MPs and a mere three out of Sweden's almost 13,000 local government seats).

When one traces the roots of the SDs back to the late 1980s then they will indeed find that they too were once connected with this repulsive band of fascist neanderthals but in recent times they have repositioned themselves with more respectable types, namely the Alliance for Europe of the Nations. This name may well ring a few bells with Irish readers as it was the pan-European entity which Fianna Fail was hitched up to until last year when it jumped ship, somewhat confusingly, to the Liberal Democrat group. Members of the alliance at present include French Gaullists, Sicilian autonomists and some Eurosceptic parties in the Baltic states and other parts of the old eastern bloc. So, while certainly to the right of the EPP parties, it would appear that the SDs are not as far to the right as the Griffins, Le Pens and Morvais of this world.

Of course, this does not make the Sweden Democrats any less repugnant. They advocate staunchly anti-immigrant policies, maintain some deeply homophobic views, they are vehemently anti-EU and do not shy away from whipping up some good old fashioned hysteria about the threat posed to Swedish democracy by Muslims. However, if you can stomach buying a copy of today's Daily Express the chances are you will come across all of these forms of intolerance in the one edition that you choose to purchase. This mix of nationalism, conservatism and traditional right-wing populism places them closer to UKIP, the Greek LAOS and Geert Wilders's Party for Freedom in the Netherlands than the more ethnonationalist factions of the reactionary right. As I said, it does not make them any less horrible but it does mean that we are in combat with a slightly different political force. To that extent, Henning Mankell is right when he says that Swedish leftists, liberals and the moderate right should have argued the SDs to oblivion.

My position has always been simple. If we are going to ban fascists then let us ban them from the outset. It is not undemocratic to deny freedom of speech to totalitarian organisations that have as their goal the destruction of free speech. This means having the guts to nip such parties and organisations in the bud when they are still in their infancy. There is no point in quoting Voltaire and making grandiose statements about free speech when these parties are miniscule only for you to then turn around and begin to call for their election broadcasts to be banned once they have tasted some degree of electoral success. The choice is clear: stamp them out and consign them to the history books with German national socialism and Iraqi Ba'athism or else take them on. In the majority of cases we will be forced to do the latter.

How pathetic then it is to read of the leader of the Left Party in Sweden, Lars Ohly, refusing to have his make-up done at the same time as SD head Jimmie Åkesson prior to a television interview. Is this the best that the left can do? Is this what they call anti-fascism? At least if comrade Ohly had punched this nauseating little creep in the face I could have had a bit of respect for him but such childish whinging about having to share rooms with these people reminds me of the petty stunts unionist politicians in Northern Ireland used to pull back in the days when Sinn Fein were still in quarantine.

The far-right operate best when they can portray themselves as victims of political correctness, of people being denied the right to 'tell the truth'. Give them a level playing field and they either end up looking like fools (as with Nick Griffin's crash-and-burn Question Time performance last autumn) or else split due to internal personality conflicts (as was the case with Austria's Freedom Party). But regardless of whether the party in question is of the reactionary populist type or the more hardline ethnonationalist variety, we are not going to be able to ignore them out of existence. Arguing them into oblivion is our only option.

In doing so we should not take our eye off the ball. There is indeed a right-wing wind blowing over Europe, but we should not focus all our attention on the smaller, more extreme manifestations of hate on the political fringes. This year we have witnessed the destruction of dozens of Roma camps in France and the forced deportation of hundreds of Roma to their countries of origin. These horrific acts were carried out under the orders of a supposedly moderate, centre-right administration in Paris. It may yet be that in these harsh economic times it is the mainstream forces of conservatism - the Sarkozys, the Berlusconis, the Camerons - that pose the most serious threat to European society. With men like this heading so-called 'moderate' conservatism, that right-wing wind may yet become a hurricane.

Probably the worst interview in the world. Ever.

2010-10-05T03:19:00.002+01:00

Bloody fecking hilarious though:

Where have I heard that one before?

2010-10-05T00:02:00.003+01:00

The lefties too stubborn to quit over at Cedar Lounge Revolution have in recent years put in an absolutely Stakhanovite performance in building up the Irish Left Online Document Archive, a collection of policy documents and newspapers from various strands of the left ranging from obscure Trotskyist groupuscules through to the mainstream British and Irish Labour parties. Great stuff if you're the sort of person who enjoys spending their Saturday nights tucked up on the sofa poring over the ins and outs of The Irish Industrial Revolution (and I speak as someone who spent last Saturday night reading a lengthy exchange between leftists on the subject of Kronstadt).

The latest addition to the Irish Left Online Document Archive does not take us as far back as the Russian Civil War. In fact, it comes from 1984. The piece concerned is the agenda for the 23rd national conference of the youth section of the British Labour Party and in particular its references to Northern Ireland. In some ways the document seems almost as remote as the aforementioned rebellion in north-western Russia in the early twenties; its hard to imagine the 'detrotted' Young Labour of today calling for anything like a "trade union organised workers defence committee to protect working class homes against sectarian and state violence." Even so, some causes never date. Given that the Labour Party in Northern Ireland has in recent days launched a petition calling on the leadership to grant members here the same organising rights as those in Britain, I found the following motion quite timely:

... the only way forward for Northern Irish workers is the formation of a Labour Party based on the Trade Union Movement with socialist policies, and sees the importance of the British Labour movement in the achievement of this aim.

Here's hoping another 26 years are not allowed to pass without there being a proper left of centre alternative on offer to workers in Northern Ireland.

We, the undersigned...

2010-10-04T11:47:00.000+01:00

The Labour Party in my neck of the woods is at present running a petition calling on the party leadership to allow members of the organisation here to stand candidates in Northern Irish elections. The petition will later be given to Labour's National Executive Committee in order to show the substantial amount of support there is out there for such a move. Go to the Labour NI homepage and add your name to it.

We can do better than this.

Kronstadt revisited

2010-10-02T22:22:00.002+01:00

You either think it was a necessary act to help defend the October Revolution or else you reckon it marked an early signpost on the road to totalitarianism in the Soviet Union, as Victor Serge put it a "first step towards Stalinism." Either way, the exchanges below between Chris Cutrone of the Platypus Affiliated Society and the ever readable Principia Dialectica on the topic of the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion (spotted via Poumista) provided me with sufficient entertainment on a Saturday night spent supping tea, munching soda bread and regretting not leaving the house. The mention of Kronstadt also reminded me of a debate I once had with an anarchist in Banbridge (those blokes do turn up in the oddest places) on this very subject. I actually believe he was the first anarchist I ever met. I wonder what ever happened to him?

Anyway, enjoy. Usual far-left geekery warnings apply:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Possible new conspiracy theory for people bored with all the David Kelly nonsense

2010-10-01T23:11:00.009+01:00

How long before the Daily Express start questioning the 'official version' of Peter Boatman's suicide which took place earlier today? It would seem that some people out there aren't prepared to wait that long. Where would we be without a bit of good old fashioned paranoia?

The last breath of loyalist politics

2010-09-30T07:05:00.001+01:00

Had the PUP been infiltrated by members of the republican movement as part of some convoluted covert conspiracy to undermine the party it is unlikely that they could have done as good a job in destroying the organisation as the present leadership has succeeded in doing in recent years. For a group connected to an armed terrorist faction that displayed a certain callous expertise over the years in the murder of innocent civilians, the political arm of this section of Northern Ireland's loyalist movement has become extremely proficient in shooting itself in the foot every time the chance arises. Last night they discharged another few rounds into their tootsies when they voted to retain their links to the Ulster Volunteer Force and Red Hand Commando.

Even if they had chosen to sever their links to these paramilitary groups I somehow doubt it would seriously alter their fortunes in the short, medium or long term. The PUP is in terminal decline. The slide started when Billy Hutchinson lost his Stormont seat in North Belfast. It deteriorated further with the death of leader David Ervine in January 2007. In June, following the UVF murder of Bobby Moffett on the Shankill Road, Ervine's successor and the party's only MLA, Dawn Purvis, resigned as head of the organisation. With no MPs, no MLAs and only a couple of councillors in the whole of Northern Ireland it would now appear that the writing is on the wall for loyalist politics.

There was a period back in the wake of the CLMC ceasefire in October 1994 when it looked as if the parties aligned to the two main Protestant paramilitary groups – the PUP and the Ulster Democratic Party – might actually carve out a significant place for themselves on the province's political scene. It didn't materialise. I must admit to having been one of those on the left who watched the development of loyalist politics with interest back in the mid to late nineties. Some of the early signs were indeed promising. Both the UDP and the PUP, particularly the latter, were making leftish noises on various issues ranging from abortion to the 11-plus, noises that set them apart from the traditional conservative representatives of unionists in the UUP and the DUP. Today the political representatives of loyalism find themselves in a sorry state.

It is difficult to understand what led members of the Progressive Unionist Party to last night make the decision that they did. While I might be personally of the view that the Pups are dead and buried, surely there must have been a sizeable section of the membership present that realised some sort of change has to be made to try and turn things around. A clean break with the thugs and bully boys of the UVF and RHC would have sent out a positive message. Maintaining the link is unlikely to win much in the way of new support.

Prior to the vote there was a discussion on Stephen Nolan's Radio Ulster show yesterday morning featuring BBC Northern Ireland's former security correspondent Brian Rowen. In the item Rowen made reference to people trying to encourage the UVF to follow a political path. A political path? Don't insult our intelligence. In the year 2010 such talk simply perplexes me. This is the language of the peace process, a peace process that reached its conclusion several years ago. It is sixteen years next month since the loyalist ceasefire - sixteen years. It is twelve years since the Good Friday Agreement. It is also five years since the Provisional IRA completed decommissioning and disappeared off the scene. The question now really has to be asked within loyalism is just what are organisations like the UVF for? Who is it that they exist to oppose? Does it not strike these halfwits just how absurd it is that the Provo's military wing has been wound up, Sinn Fein sit in the government of Northern Ireland, they accept the institutions of partition and give their full unconditional support to the police while loyalists continue to maintain armed vigilante organisations that do nothing except stick two fingers up at Her Majesty's law in this part of the United Kingdom? Perhaps irony isn't their thing.

To hell with them I say. We have had sixteen years of relative peace and quiet in Northern Ireland now. It is time for us all to move on, though it is a pity that the PUP has proved incapable of doing so and opted to remain tied to a band of brutes. If these fools had any interest in politics they would have went down that avenue long ago. As I have already pointed out, it is half a decade since the Provisionals declared a formal end to their campaign. Surely that declaration alone removed the raison d'être of paramilitary groups like the UVF. If it did not then I would happily invite a supporter of the organisation, or indeed someone from the Progressive Unionist Party, to leave a comment on this website or drop me an email explaining exactly what it would take to see the disbandment of this illegal army. While I never considered their terror campaign justified, nor did it do anything to keep these six counties in the union with Britain, they are now, by their own criteria, redundant.

The truth is that there is no longer any politics in the UVF. If there was they would not exist. They are an apolitical gangster mafia. They are a purely criminal organisation. These men are not interested in general elections or Assembly elections or local council elections. They are interested in drug dealing, extortion rackets and controlling territory just as much as any Sicilian don. It is difficult to imagine the organisation that provided Northern Ireland with such sadistic sectarian psychopaths as Gusty Spence, Lenny Murphy and Billy Wright could actually degenerate to an even lower level than it was in the days before 1994. In the near two decades since it declared a cessation of what it called "operational hostilities" (or shooting taxi drivers, factory workers and people drinking in pubs to you and I) the so-called 'hardmen' of loyalist paramilitarism have contributed largely to the destruction of the very working-class Protestant districts they laughingly once claimed to be defending.

If the majority of members of the Progressive Unionist Party wish to remain manacled to such groups then they are welcome to them. I hope they enjoy their company. If there is, however, anyone left in the party professing to hold progressive or left of centre views then I would appeal to them to do the right thing: take a leaf from their former colleague Dawn Purvis's book, get to hell out of the PUP and start to build a genuinely anti-sectarian democratic socialist force in Northern Ireland.

Decisions, decisions

2010-09-29T00:06:00.001+01:00

Members of the Labour Party in Britain made two big decisions last week. One of the decisions was a fairly sound one. One of them was, sadly, not so sound.

Taking the negative one first, party members in London have selected Ken Livingstone as their candidate for the next London mayoral election. The selection of Livingstone is, in my view, a significant step backwards. It is not that the man is too left-wing as some would you have you believe. On the contrary, the man misleadingly nicknamed 'Red Ken' is just not left-wing enough. Remember that Livingstone is the man who once described the despicable Yusuf al-Qaradawi as "one of the leading progressive voices in the Muslim world" and an individual who is the target of a "huge smear campaign organised by the Zionists." For those of you not au fait with the hate-filled preaching of this supposedly progressive Islamic voice, al-Qaradawi is on record as saying that the Holocaust was divine punishment for the Jews sent by Allah in order to "put them in their place." To say that this vermin is one of Islam's shining lights does not only put your socialist credentials at risk but it is also a gross insult to the tens of millions of Muslims out there who would want absolutely nothing to do with such filth.

Livingstone is also the man who in 2000 broke his original promise not to run as an independent in the inaugural London mayoral election if he did not obtain the Labour nomination. His loyalty to Labour has been brought into question numerous times in the years since, by his involvement in everything from appointing members of the Trotskyist microsect Socialist Action to his GLA administration and only this year appearing on the RESPECT general election flyers for George Galloway who stood against Labour's Jim Fitzpatrick in Poplar and Limehouse.

Since losing to Boris Johnson in the last election in 2008, Livingstone has been advising Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's favourite Latin American goon, Hugo Chavez. Ken is also still well capable of making the odd outrageous statement now and then. During the London Labour Mayoral hustings over the summer he shamefully stated that the intervention in Iraq had "took the lives of 52 Londoners." Quite which act of Anglo-American imperialist aggression the newt enthusiast blames for taking the lives of almost 3,000 New Yorkers four years previously is not entirely clear.

Still, the members of the Labour Party in the city have spoken and Ken Livingstone is to be the candidate for Mayor in 2012. Very well. The crucial thing now is for activists in the city to unite behind the Livingstone campaign in order to boot out Boris. Having a charming upper-class buffoon present Have I Got News For You was relatively amusing. Having him Mayor of the largest city in the European Union is not so hilarious. Unlike Ken who ran against his party in 2000 when he wasn't chosen, Oona King (who had thrown her hat in the ring in the race for the Labour nomination) has given her full backing to his campaign to defeat Boris Johnson. That's real political maturity, comrade Livingstone.

On the bright side, the Labour Party on Saturday chose Ed Miliband as their new leader. It was clear from very early on in the race that the new leader would be one of Ralph's boys, the question was which one. Personally, I did not mind who became leader as long as it wasn't Ed Balls or Diane Abbott. Neither Balls nor Abbott are particularly bad human beings, they just aren't natural born leaders (but then again, they never were going to win). I liked a lot of what I heard from Andy Burnham, not least his promise to give Labour members in Northern Ireland the same rights as members in GB (but then again, he was never going to win either). In the end it was a clear cut choice: Miliband or Miliband.

In the beginning I favoured David over his sibling. He was, at the risk of sounding slightly shallow, the more Prime Ministerial of the two. He also had the more impressive CV and had played a more senior role in the last Labour administration. As Foreign Secretary for three years he had a higher international profile than his brother. Yet the truth is that when it came down to the nitty gritty of ideology there was very little to separate the two. Both men are firmly on the centre-left of British politics. Because there was so little to separate them politically one could only really make their decision on who was best to lead the party on the basis of what I would usually consider to be the more superficial elements of politics. Which one came across best on the hustings? Who seemed the more engaging of the two on the BBC Question Time special a few weeks back? Which of the brothers possessed the personality and leadership qualities necessary to get British citizens off their backsides at the next general election and go to their nearest polling station to rid the country the present Conservative-Liberal coalition (incidentally, I don't use that naff 'Con-Dem' term to describe the present government)? On all of these I thought Ed just about edged it. Miliband the elder came across a tad wooden, a bit aloof. I'll say it again, these are not normally the things I would focus on in a political battle, but in a clash where there was so little to split the two men policy-wise you just had to make your call based on such factors (and nowadays such factors unfortunately influence a lot of people when it comes to deciding which box they'll tick on their ballot paper).

Now begins the long struggle to oust the Tories and their Liberal hangers on. There are reasons too to be cheerful. As Laura Kuenssberg observed during the BBC's coverage of the result on Saturday evening, party members appeared united and in a buoyant mood. So they should be. This is not 1983. Even when faced with an unpopular government at a time of recession headed by a Prime Minister for whom nothing could ever seem to go right, Cameron and the Conservatives still failed to land a knockout blow in the last general election. Many who voted Lib Dem back in May now feel betrayed by the deal they subsequently struck with the Tories. The most recent YouGov opinion poll has Labour ahead of the Conservatives for the first time in three years.

Already the right-wing press are starting to show just what sort of lengths they are going to go to in order to make sure Ed Miliband never makes it to Number 10. "Get ready for 'Red' Ed Miliband, the unions' choice," read the headline to James Kirkup's piece in the Daily Telegraph. Expect to hear much more of this type of thing in the coming months and years. The idea though that Ed is now going to drag the party back into the bad old days of the early eighties is frankly codswallop. Nothing that he has said points toward such a move. However, hard facts are often less important than perceptions and particularly when those very perceptions can be actively encouraged by a tremendously conservative media in order to frighten an electorate (there is no need to drag up stories about 1992 and Sun headlines again).

But then nor should people on the left moan and whine about what the Tory press say. They are called the Tory press for a reason – they are Tories. It should not be a surprise that they are hostile to the new leader of the Labour Party. Do not forget that Tony Blair did not make it into Downing Street thanks to Rupert Murdoch. The Sun only declared for Blair on March 17th 1997, a mere six weeks before the election when it had become clear to absolutely everyone that the Conservatives were on their way out. It wasn't of course that the said publication had undergone a sudden conversion to democratic socialism. Far from it. Mr Murdoch does not like to be seen backing a losing horse and if in a few years time Ed Miliband has a sizeable lead in the polls going into a general election I would not at all be surprised if we witnessed a similar move. So, to hell with the myth that Labour cannot win an election unless the Kelvin MacKenzies of this world are saying nice things about them. It has been done before. It can be done again.

One week. Two decisions. So, Red Ed for PM and Red Ken for Mayor of London? Aye, I'll settle for that.

"Action, drama and excitement all the way here in Belfast..."

2010-09-28T23:29:00.002+01:00

The video below will most likely be mystifying to those souls not of this island who are fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the regular Saturday afternoon occurrence on BBC Northern Ireland whereby the highly agreeable Gabby Logan is removed from our screens and replaced with the much less photogenic visage of Mark Sidebottom who subsequently informs us of the results of local sporting events that most likely had more people present on the pitch than in the crowd. Thank goodness for the BBC's Red Button service:

Polls apart

2010-09-27T07:33:00.001+01:00

Opinion polls. Just where would we be without them? Or more precisely, just where would journalists be without them? Poll findings, no matter how unspectacular they may be, are always a good way to fill a few column inches. Personally though, I couldn't give a damn about them. It's not that I share Peter Hitchens's slightly conspiratorial view that polls are "the best way to influence public opinion, largely because they're treated as impartial oracles of the truth by most people who read them." I don't believe they do shape public opinion. I don't give a damn about them because I reckon they are pretty much meaningless. A news story about an opinion poll is essentially a news story about absolutely nothing.

Take the findings of two separate opinion polls the Irish Republic last week. The first one was the Millward Brown Lansdowne poll for TV3 News. It threw up the following results:

Labour: 35%
Fine Gael: 30%
Fianna Fail: 22%
Sinn Fein: 4%
Greens: 2%

Much excitement followed. The Labour Party has never received anything higher than 19.5% in a southern election. The TV3 News poll has them on almost double that (and more than treble what they recorded at the last general election in 2007). Cue lots of speculation about Eamon Gilmore becoming Taoiseach and Labour forming the first left-led government in the history of the state. Then, only a few days later, another poll arrived. This was the Red C poll for the Sunday Business Post and it painted a completely different picture:

Fine Gael: 31%
Fianna Fail: 24%
Labour: 23%
Sinn Fein: 10%
Greens: 3%

Now, if you ask me, the second poll would appear to be the more accurate of the two. Both polls seem to agree that Fine Gael support is hovering somewhere around the 30% mark while support for the Soldiers of Destiny is in the low 20s. Both polls also concur that the Greens are in a spot of bother. However, where they wildly differ is in their reading of support for Labour and Sinn Fein.

The Millward Brown Lansdowne poll, if it were accurate, would signal something of a disaster for the Provos. It certainly would not have been the sort of thing Gerry and co would have been imagining ten years ago when Sinn Fein were talking up their chances of overtaking Labour as the third largest party in the Republic and the leading force on the left of southern politics. When one takes into account the fact that in the 1981 general election the Anti H-Block prisoner candidates took 3.1% of the vote in the state, it would not say much for the new slick unarmed Sinn Fein machine if they were only capable of pulling in an extra 0.9%. Yet I somehow doubt that support is actually that low. As high as 10%? Perhaps not, but I would still expect to see some sort of an improvement on the 7% they received in the disappointing 2007 election.

The Labour results are the ones which differ most outrageously; 35% for TV3 News, 23% for the Sunday Business Post. It may just be me being cynical in order to not get my hopes built up for a gargantuan red surge but 35% appears to overestimate the level of support for the party. Not surprisingly, the Labour website has the TV3 News poll right at the top of its page and an interview with Eamon Gilmore on RTE's News at One accompanying it. Just as predictably, they have no details whatsoever of the much more modest Red C poll findings that appeared a couple of days afterwards. I suppose that, regardless of which survey of public opinion you read, it is probably safe to assume that Labour are heading for the best general election result in their history. In that we lefties can take some comfort.

So, seven days on and we are none the wiser about the way the public south of the border are thinking. If anything we might actually be even more confused. Maybe now is the time to reach into my big bag of clichés and pull out an old favourite: there is only one opinion poll that really matters – the general election.

Fine Gael's peculiar addiction to populist drivel

2010-09-26T22:21:00.004+01:00

I used to think it unfair to call a member of Fine Gael a Blueshirt. Yes, one of component parts in the formation of the party in the early 1930s was the repulsive Blueshirt movement. And yes, the head of that movement, General Eoin O'Duffy, did become the first leader of the Fine Gael party. And yes indeed, the organisation did have its fair share of loons many moons ago, such as the hideous Oliver J. Flanagan of Laois who could always be relied upon for a good swipe at the Jews and the Freemasons. Yet I have always considered it a low blow to throw the Blueshirt insult in the direction of the boys and girls of the so-called United Ireland Party. Now, I'm not so sure.

Make no mistake, I am not saying that Fine Gael is a racist or neo-Nazi party. To label them such would frankly be ludicrous. It is very much a party of the mainstream European centre-right. However, that is precisely what makes the comments of some members in recent times so concerning. It would not be so bad if loose talk was confined to people like redneck Enniscorthy FG councillor Patrick Kavanagh and his remarks back in June about members of the travelling community "ethnic cleansing" areas of Wexford of settled people, but it is not limited to such individuals. Leo Varadkar, hardly a marginal figure in the party, not too long ago was proposing a voluntary repatriation scheme for foreigners which involved giving them free dole money to go back to wherever they came from. Enda Kenny, the leader of the opposition and person likely to be the next Taoiseach, is not afraid of indulging in a bit of the old racism himself. The man who once referred to the Congolese revolutionary leader Patrice Lumumba as a "nigger" has also expressed concerns in recent years about how immigration is eroding Ireland's "Celtic and Christian" identity.

You could of course claim that all of this is quite mild, that nobody at 51 Upper Mount Street is proposing the construction of concentration camps in Connemara but then that would be to miss the point. Voluntary repatriation, 'niggers', ethnic cleansing, Celtic and Christian identity; these are not terms that should be in the vocabulary of any run-of-the-mill respectable mainstream conservative political party. These are dangerous phrases. Once such language becomes respectable amongst the political class it can have a much more extreme manifestation by the time it trickles down to street level. We witnessed such phenomena here in Northern Ireland during the Troubles when well dressed, well heeled politicians would effortlessly whip up hate and then distance themselves from the subsequent sectarian bloodshed. Racism may not yet carry the same level of violent hate in southern society that sectarianism has historically commanded in the north, but if senior members of Fine Gael can speak openly of planning to send immigrants home and call Africans niggers you can sure as hell appreciate how difficult life can become for the lone Romanian working behind the counter in the chipper on a Friday night or for the sole Nigerian kid in the school classroom.

A few days back I was listening to Ryan Tubridy's show on RTE 2FM and caught his interview with Gerry Breen, the Fine Gael Lord Mayor of Dublin. Mr Breen's big idea at the moment is to get the drug addicts and beggars - most of them foreign as he helpfully pointed out - away from around the centre of Dublin and onto some as yet unspecified location. Apparently Dublin is a "soft touch" (yes, he really did use such a hackneyed cliché) for these undesireables and they are, among other things, frightening the tourists. This is an odd if unoriginal proposal. Such reactionary drivel really should not get beyond the letters page of a trashy right-wing British tabloid or the drunken halfwit propping up the bar at your local but, like the comments of Varadkar and Kenny mentioned previously, that is just what has happened.

Breen of course isn't stupid. He knows that the sort of talk that would get you a round of applause from Sun readers and talkSPORT listeners can also get you votes. Populist garbage like this will be well received in certain unthinking quarters. The Lord Mayor is well aware that there are plenty of frustrated working-class men and women on the dole queues of Dublin aggravated at their drop in living standards in the post-Celtic Tiger era and only too happy to back a politician seen to be stamping out some make-believe network of professional beggars from eastern Europe who are making thousands on a weekly basis out of their citywide racket. Whether or not such a racket actually exists is another thing, but then populist rhetoric doesn't necessarily have to have the truth on its side to be effective.

In fairness to Tubridy, he did push the Lord Mayor for a more comprehensive outline of what exactly it was that he proposed. Where would these beggars go, wondered the presenter? Breen didn't know. Did he have any concrete answers on how to solve the problem of begging in the city, Tubridy asked? The First Citizen again replied with a no and stated that he wasn't there to provide solutions (just indulge in a little bit of 'Paisleyesque' stirring up). A lot of information on the problem, he acknowledged, was anecdotal. In short, the only tangible thing to come out of the interview was that the current Lord Mayor of Dublin doesn't seem to like seeing poor people in the flesh.

So, what can we put these unbalanced displays of intolerant idiocy by Breen and his party colleagues down to? Are they just inherently racist and can't help it? No, of course not. Is it part of the historical residue remaining in the Fine Gael DNA from the Blueshirt era? Too simplistic. I think it has much more to do with a noticeable shift in the politics of the European mainstream centre-right. Whether it is President Sarkozy's UMP in France or Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom alliance in Italy, Fine Gael's European partners have all moved sharply rightwards in recent years. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that some in FG could be getting dragged in with them in that general direction. They could be worse I suppose. Some mainstream former EPP groups, such as the British Tories, have drifted so far rightwards that they have formed a completely new European body and allied themselves with nasty little east European factions like Latvia's Fatherland and Freedom party, an organisation that takes quite a generous view of the Nazis. And as the explosion in support for ultra-right parties in normally tolerant European countries like the Netherlands and Sweden proves, hardline posturing by the centre-right does not limit the growth of extremists. If anything it encourages them. The centre-right, in Ireland and elsewhere, should be displaying competent and responsible leadership, not indulging in populism of the worst kind.

As I have already said, this is not about Fine Gael becoming a fascist party; it is about members of that party saying things that would not be out of place in a press release from the BNP. I cannot imagine an elected representative for FG in the Fitzgerald or Bruton years coming out with ridiculous guff about travellers ethnic cleansing people or voluntary repatriation or taking a shot at the beggars. This is not the sort of chatter one expects from a party that could very well this time next year be in government in the Republic. More to the point, and from a left-wing perspective, just how would a Labour Party in coalition with FG feel if similar trash talk was to raise its head during their time in power with them? Only time will tell on that. Let us hope that Fine Gael display some wisdom and do not follow the drift to the right being pursued by their continental cousins. If they are incapable of doing that then perhaps they may just be a little more deserving of the Blueshirt label than I previously thought.

Black on red: the Labour contribution to Union 2021

2010-09-25T23:59:00.009+01:00

The Labour Party now accepts members here and our membership is growing rapidly. But that is not enough. Labour must now accept its responsibility to help shift our politics away from its current basis in communal politics. To move on, the public need Labour Party candidates standing in elections.

Boyd Black speaketh the truth! The secretary of the Labour Party in Northern Ireland offers his tuppenceworth to the News Letter's Union 2021 series. A short piece but a decent analysis of where we are, how we got here and how we move on.

Oh, and congratulations to Ed Miliband on winning the party leadership. The boy done good. And if he gives Labour members in Northern Ireland the same organising rights as their comrades on the other side of the Irish Sea then I'll love him more than he loves that brother of his (which may or may not be all that difficult, depending on which rumour one believes).

OAWA?

2010-09-25T15:50:00.002+01:00

England play in white, Wales play in red, Scotland play in dark blue so why is our wee Norn Iron playing in green?!? Our team should take the field in a kit most fans see as our national colour - Orange!!

Orange our national colour? Is it? I think this is what one calls an identity crisis - a Facebook campaign to get the Northern Ireland soccer team playing in the same colours as Armagh's GAA lads and lassies. Truly bizarre:

The absurd world of 'unionist unity'

2010-09-21T22:32:00.001+01:00

The criminally unfunny Hole in the Wall Gang spent years trying to produce comedies on the Northern Ireland situation. They were all shit. As anyone that actually lives here can testify, reality is hilarious enough. For example, news emerged today that the leaders of the DUP and the Ulster Unionists have written to An Taoiseach to express their objection to the proposed takeover by the ESB of Northern Ireland Electricity. According to the RTE website, the unionist leaders described the plan as "inappropriate" and stated that "it amounted to the purchase of a 'key component' of Northern Ireland's national infrastructure."

One could perhaps applaud the actions of the unionists if they were attempting to keep NIE in public ownership, but that isn't the case. NIE was privatised back in the early nineties and is at present owned, through Viridian, by the Atlanta and Bahrain-based bank Arcapita (a company which was known as the First Islamic Investment Bank before owners decided on a name change in the post-9/11 climate). So, why the outcry? What is the big difference between Viridian owning this "key component" of Northern Ireland's infrastructure and the ESB owning it? It would appear to be that unionist opposition to the purchase appears to be based solely on the notion of 'them boys down there' keeping the lights on up here. And to think some people wonder why Northern Ireland is an economic wasteland.

Welcome to united unionism, 21st century style. The orange card has been played many times in Irish history, however this latest display of pan-Protestant unity in the face of the threat of 'Fenian electricity' really does mark a new and slightly surreal low.

A view from the belly of the beast

2010-09-20T23:43:00.005+01:00

Yoani Sánchez on the extremely unsocialist plans by Cuba's Stalinist dictatorship to boost unemployment by one million and the utter uselessness of the country's only legal union:

... What I see around me is an 'omni-proprietary' state, owner of the machines, the industries, the infrastructure of a nation and of all the decisions made about it. A master who pays the lowest possible wages and demands applause and unconditional ideological fealty from his workers. This miserly owner now warns that he cannot continue to employ more than one million of those working on the public payroll. "To advance the development and actualization of the economic model," we are told payrolls must be drastically reduced, while opportunities for self-employment will see only the smallest and most controlled expansion. Even the Cuban Workers Center — the only labor union allowed in the country — reports that the layoffs will come soon and we must accept them with discipline. A sad performance for those whose role it is to represent the rights of their members vis-a-vis the powers-that-be and not vice versa.

We on the left who are fortunate enough to live in the democratic world should not hesitate in declaring our solidarity with Cuban workers against the actions of the regime in Havana. We do not waver in voicing our opposition to the savage cutbacks by the Cameron and Papandreou governments here in Europe. We should not flinch from opposing the equally brutal measures of the Castro dictatorship. Solidarity requires consistency, not hypocrisy.

Up Down and all that

2010-09-19T00:53:00.003+01:00

Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Ratzinger?

2010-09-18T04:22:00.002+01:00

I promised myself that I would not write anything here regarding the visit of Joseph Alois Ratzinger to Britain this week. Launching attacks upon the Roman Catholic Church is a remarkably easy thing to do nowadays. Everyone, including a large proportion of Catholics, realise that the institution is rotten to the core and has quite a bit of internal tidying up to do before it gets whatever dignity it had back again (though if you are an Irish Catholic reading this I would encourage you to visit countmeout.ie and follow the instructions provided).

However, after listening to Mr Ratzinger's comments about Nazism somehow being the product what happens when faith is absent in a society I just had to say something. Actually, I don't have to say anything. I shall leave it to Herr Hitler himself, speaking in Berlin in 1933, to explain just what he thought about the presence of a god in society:

We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.

There was more godbothering from the Führer the following year:

National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary, it stands on the ground of a real Christianity. The Church's interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of to-day, in our fight against the Bolshevist culture, against an atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for the consciousness of a community in our national life, for the conquest of hatred and disunion between the classes, for the conquest of civil war and unrest, of strife and discord. These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles.

And not forgetting Hitler's remarks during the negotiations for the Reichskonkordat that every single Catholic now seems to have conveniently forgotten about:

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith.

These types of remarks by Nazism's head honcho are not tucked away in the pages of obscure old history books. You can find them quite easily, complete with the relevant footnotes and sources, on that horrible godless website known as Wikipedia. I have no doubt that Mr Ratzinger and Catholics of his ilk who spew out such historical falsifications are well aware of just where Adolf Hitler stood on the question of atheism. They are many things, but they are not stupid. They know the facts. What they desire is for the rest of us to forget them.

Popes and cardinals and bishops can do many things but they cannot rewrite history. The history of fascism in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s is closely tied with the history of Catholicism in that era. Even this week's state visit was only made possible thanks to the 1929 Lateran Treaty signed between the Holy See and Benito Mussolini establishing the Vatican City State as an independent entity. And what of the Ustaše in Croatia? Or Salazar's Portugal? Or Francoist Spain? Or the fact that the head of fascist Slovakia was Father Jozef Tiso? Even here in Ireland, a country where the far-right never managed to make a breakthrough, a 700-strong volunteer brigade from the Blueshirt movement which travelled to Spain to support Franco's overthrow of the democratically elected republican government was given the blessing of Catholic priests.

Fascism and Nazism did not arise out of the absence of faith. Their origins, not exclusively but to a large extent, lay in its presence in these societies. That the leader of this discredited institution is, 65 years after the end of the war, still attempting to peddle the myth that Hitler and his followers were somehow atheists does not give us much hope today for an honest conclusion to the more recent crimes involving child raping priests. I suppose we can always hope, or, if you still have the stomach for it, pray.

The myth of Blair's subordinance to Washington

2010-09-17T23:11:00.006+01:00

"And wouldn't Clem Attlee and Ernie Bevin have applauded when in Kosovo, faced with racial genocide in Europe for the first time since they fought fascism in the Second World War, it was Britain and this Government that helped defeat it and set one million people free back to their homeland?"

Tony Blair
Speech to the Labour Party Conference
Bournemouth, England
28th September 1999

'Bush's poodle'. I never did like that slogan for some reason. Perhaps its because I always associate that particular one with the cigar-chomping dictatorship fanboy George Galloway, or maybe its simply because it lacks any semblance of wit or humour that protest slogans have often thrown up in the past. I do fear though that the totally inaccurate interpretation of British foreign policy during the Blair years summed up by such simplistic one-liners, namely that London blindly followed whatever the administration in Washington told it to, has become accepted almost as hard truth nowadays. I don't just mean truth to the small foolish band of Trots, Stalinists and anarchists that shouted and hollered and threw eggs around at Tony Blair's recent book signing in the Eason store on Dublin's O'Connell Street, but rather to what you could call the average bloke in the street. Such a view though ignores the facts.

Say that a leader or a politician has principles these days and you will most likely be laughed at. Say that Tony Blair or indeed anyone involved at the top of the Labour Party over the past thirteen years were principled and some people would have you sectioned. Nevertheless I am convinced that Mr Blair was a man of principle when it came to his belief in interventionism, in his opposition to old Bennite isolationsim, in his anti-totalitarianism, in his belief in social democratic internationalism. Take two conflicts that the United Kingdom intervened in before George Bush even came to power in the United States: Kosovo in 1999 and Sierra Leone in 2000.

Christopher Hitchens mentions both military campaigns in his review of Tony Blair's memoirs in this month's issue of Atlantic. While they are unlikely to alter the mindset of anyone who believes that the former Prime Minister is a war criminal who should be up in trial in the Hague, the comments make for worthwhile reading. On the successful national liberation struggle in Kosovo, Hitchens writes:

The Tories had been all but pro-Milošević during the Balkan horrors—a cause of shame that Blair did much to redeem by pressing a hard line on the attempted Serbian cleansing of Kosovo. The record plainly shows that he was more determined than Washington on this occasion, while expressing the imperative for a badly compromised Europe to face the responsibility for its neglected Adriatic front. Before the fall of Milošević, furthermore, he went to Chicago in April 1999 to deliver a significant speech, in which he stressed that internal affairs were not a disguise under which despots should be allowed to conduct genocide or rearmament. He specifically mentioned the outstanding case of Saddam Hussein. (At this point, George W. Bush was a somewhat isolationist governor of Texas.)

Secondly, on the smashing of the thugs and war criminals of the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone - without the involvement of the US:

This West African country, originally established as a haven for free slaves, was by the year 2000 being overrun by a criminal mercenary force sponsored by the insane Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. Its funds came from the blood-diamond racket, and its tactics were those of child-soldier enslavement and hand-lopping. A vestigial UN force had done about as much to stop this as UN forces customarily do. After a direct appeal from Sierra Leone’s president, Blair decided to commit troops, who very swiftly dispersed the mercenaries and arrested their ghastly leader, Foday Sankoh. It is not too much to say that another Rwanda had been averted. Blair might have been forgiven for claiming more credit in this instance than he actually does.

On the more controversial interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq one may have their differences with Mr Blair, however from reading A Journey I do not detect any hint of man who simply went along with those wars merely because his 'master' in Washington told him too. To claim that Tony Blair was a poodle is as absurd as portraying Jacques Chirac as a hardcore opponent of US imperialism.

And what of the results of those two campaigns? Both certainly remain works in progress, though the democratic revolutions in Afghanistan and Iraq have already made significant leaps forward. In Afghanistan we have a flawed young democracy which may take time to mature, but given a choice between that or else the return of the Taleban and al-Qaeda there should be no question of even neutrality in the present struggle. Better news lies further to the west where Operation Iraqi Freedom has now come to an end. The leaders of the Hussein clan dictatorship have had their Ceauşescu/Mussolini moments. Two successful general elections have been held in the country since 2005, the last one returning to power the secular Iraqi National Movement (which includes various liberals, leftists and even the Iraqi Communist Party). The current President of Iraq is Jalal Talabani, a member of the Socialist International-aligned PUK and one of those Kurds that Saddam tried his best to wipe off the face of the earth. Given where we were less than a decade ago I think I can use the word 'revolution' to describe the transformation that has occurred.

When these revolutions are finally complete and the people of these lands live in peaceful, free and independent republics just what will the anti-war movement in the west have to show for its endeavours, apart from ten years of pretending to care about international law? Had groups like the StWC and the IAWM put forward alternatives (like Peter Tatchell to his credit did) I could have accepted their opposition, but they put forward none. Their strategy was to oppose all interventions at all costs and to dress up their opposition with self-righteous guff about international law that they couldn't give a damn about.

The reality of their 'anti-war' position in practice meant peaceful co-existence with fascism, and thereby the continuation of the Ba'athist and Taleban wars against the beleaguered opposition movements that western leftists and liberals should have looked upon as their comrades. If they can take no joy in the the prevention of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, of the maintenance of democracy in Sierra Leone, of the overthrow of theocratic fascism in Afghanistan and of the smashing of the Ba'athist dictatorship in Iraq then so be it. History will show that when revolution came they opted for the status quo. Tony Blair did not. Let them throw eggs.

Actually existing Thatcherism

2010-09-15T23:17:00.004+01:00

The news from Cuba this past week can probably best be summed up as follows: first of all, Castro the elder admitted to an American journalist that the present Cuban model of a centrally planned economy isn't working and then, a couple of days later, we hear of a sweeping privatisation drive and plans to kick one million people out of work. Nice to see the Cuban revolution is still going strong, isn't it?

The big difference between what is taking place in this Caribbean outpost of Stalinism and the harsh set of cutbacks being planned in these islands by George Osborne and Brian Lenihan is that British and Irish workers can attempt to fight the cuts in their own lands through their organisation in free and independent trade unions. Cuban workers have no such luxury. Yes, there are indeed independent trade unionists in Cuba, it is just that unfortunately quite a few of them are behind bars with political activists, homosexuals and anyone else that disagrees with the Communist Party. The only trade union recognised by the Cuban state is the CTC, the Confederación de Trabajadores Cubanos. Their response to the Havana government's plans? Predictable:

Our state cannot and should not continue maintaining companies, productive entities, services and budgeted sectors with bloated payrolls and losses that hurt the economy.

Spoken like a true Tory neoliberal, don't you think?

The response to the regime's latest economic plans from the Morning Star, the Cuban Support Group - Ireland and others like them in this part of the world should be interesting.

Workers unite... just the Protestant ones though

2010-09-12T08:30:00.003+01:00

I was interested to read an article by Andy Martin on the BBC website yesterday evening concerning the possible changing nature of the Ulster Defence Association and its alleged move away from criminality and illegal activity. All of which is good news of course, even if it is slightly belated. The years since the October 1994 ceasefire have been torrid ones for the loyalist organisation. With the threat of armed Provisional republicanism removed from the scene, the UDA rapidly degenerated into an apolitical mafia gang headed by a whole host of bizarre thugs and goons. What Andy Martin's article doesn't explore though is where the UDA is going in the long term. Will its leadership be happy to shut up shop and drift into the history books or will they attempt to pursue a new political path? A clue may lie in an article featured in the local press a few weeks ago.

The Union 2021 series has been a regular feature in the News Letter over the past couple of months in which people of various political stripes have been asked to provide their vision of Northern Ireland on its centenary, a landmark date just a little over a decade off now. One contributor who caught my eye was Paul Clissold, general secretary of the Ulster Political Research Group in south Belfast. As most readers with an interest in Northern Irish politics will know, the UPRG has been the political mouthpiece for the UDA ever since the Ulster Democratic Party disintegrated back in the early 2000s. In the years since there has been no signal from the UDA that they intend to have another go at the party politics game, though in his article Clissold hints at a possible change in attitude and uses some interesting language. He states:

I contend that there is a new dynamic in this country that would allow a left of centre working class unionist/loyalist political party to flourish. A party that campaigns for the aspirations of the working class and understands the plight of the poor and dispossessed. A party that embraces the past and encourages all shades of loyalism to come together. A party that lives and breathes in the area and campaigns for employment, education and regeneration. Such a party has a place in our society today and will be surely much needed in 2021 when it is hoped that we will be out of this terrible recession and into a period of growth.

This is interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, here we have an indication from a senior loyalist activist that a new party may be about to emerge from the ashes of the UDA in the post-paramilitary age in Northern Ireland. Secondly, and more even more interestingly, Clissold states that such a party would be “left of centre.” A small sign of progress then for myself and my comrades? Well, not exactly.

This left of centre party spoken of here would be a “left of centre working class unionist/loyalist political party.” In other words, this is a Prods-only 'socialism'. Given that at this precise moment we are witnessing the slow-motion disintegration of a left of centre loyalist party, namely the UVF-aligned Progressive Unionist Party, one really has to ask why on earth Mr Clissold feels the need to form yet another such organisation when the lessons of history prove quite clearly that such a party is not the sort of vehicle that is capable of winning over mass support.

If Paul Clissold and the Ulster Political Research Group feel that there is a new dynamic that would allow for the flourishing of a new left-wing organisation in Northern Ireland why do they not put their money where their mouth is and attempt to build a force to represent and fight for the interests of disadvantaged working-class Catholic and Protestant communities? The answer is because Clissold and his friends have no interest in building such a vehicle. Indeed, I very much doubt whether what he and the UPRG have in mind could even be described as being in any way recognisably 'left'. Class politics is only class politics if it fights on behalf – or even claims to fight on behalf – of the interests of the whole working-class. Clissold's vision of a party does not do this. Yes, such a grouping may well draw its membership from the working class but that does not in any way make it left-wing or socialist. After all, the vast bulk of the British National Party’s membership comes from underprivileged white working class communities. What Clissold appears to be offering us here is little more than a thinly defined orange 'leftism' which remains at heart deeply sectarian.

Just in case you feel I am being too cynical and should perhaps be giving the UPRG an opportunity to prove their worth, the next paragraph should shatter any hopes you have of even the most moderate social democratic force emerging out of the ranks of loyalism. On the subject of the much talked about concept of unionist unity, Clissold states:

Unionist unity is ultimately desirable and can be achieved through an eventual maturing of all strands and elements within the broader unionist family. My particular brand of working class loyalism must be housed in this family before true unity can be achieved. If that means a gradual realignment of the status quo currently monopolising the market then I welcome it.

So folks, there you have it in black and white. Unionist unity is “ultimately desirable” and this so-called working class loyalism “must be housed in this family.” When it comes to the crunch Clissold, the working class loyalist, does not view his working class neighbours in the Lower Ormeau and Short Strand and Ardoyne and the Falls as his comrades but rather the reactionary Christian fundamentalists of the DUP and the Tory-linked Ulster Unionists.

What Clissold proposes in his Union 2021 column is in reality not a left of centre party at all but rather a glorified community organisation that will do little more than highlight problems in and campaign for funding for deprived Protestant areas, most likely those were the UDA was once strong. You can call this many things but it is not socialism. There is no sign that this vehicle will attempt to radically break away from its traditional roots in the manner that, for example, the Official republican movement did with The Workers Party when they shed their nationalist baggage in a sincere if failed attempt to win support from Protestants. Would this new party make a concerted effort to win votes from the Catholic community or would its engagement with them be limited to an annual visit to a meeting at Féile an Phobail and a few rounds of golf with Martin McAleese? I'll let you guess the answer to that one.

Don't get me wrong, just as there were decent left-leaning types in the old Ulster Democratic Party so too are there most likely people in the UDA and UPRG who, had they been born on the other side of the Irish Sea, would be partisan Labour supporters. Paul Clissold is probably one of them. However, what Clissold and co have to do is ask themselves this question: can a genuine realignment of politics really occur in Northern Ireland while party politics is shaped by organisations which place their position on the border above everything else on their list of priorities? My answer to that is no. If people within the UDA and UPRG seriously want to make a break with the past and are sincere in their desire to see centre-left politics in the province then they need to make centre-left politics their number one priority. Unfortunately, as long as loyalists view unionist unity as being “ultimately desirable”, they offer no potential for changing the status quo in Northern Ireland, regardless of how much noise they make about left of centre politics.

Be afraid, be very afraid

2010-09-11T21:26:00.006+01:00

An odd thing happened in recent years in the field of British politics: it became radical to be a Liberal Democrat. Remember those thrilling days of Cleggmania a few months back in which an entire country was inexplicably swept off its feet by the ultra-bland lightweight MP for Sheffield Hallam? I do. How I cringed at the sight of impressionable people placing 'Liberal Democrats' in the political views section of their Facebook info in the days after that first live televised debate (oddly enough many of these people lived in Northern Ireland were the party doesn't even exist). Perhaps you recall how Charles Kennedy and his party were treated by some in 2003 as the saviours of progressive politics in the UK for their stance in opposing the liberation of Iraq. Or maybe it was Vince Cable that floated your boat. What was it again that made Vince such a media favourite in recent times? Ah, yes. Good old Vince carved out a place for himself as a modern day economic prophet because he predicted some years back that we might just have a recession at some point in the future (of course, Herr Marx's 160 year old observations about the cyclical boom-and-bust nature of capitalism remains completely redundant and irrelevant in the contemporary world).

Vince is back in the news again, though I doubt that the middle-class Guardian readers that got a strange radical kick out of aligning themselves with the Lib Dems prior to last May will be singing his praises at this weekend's dinner parties. Mr Cable is now voicing his support for the privatisation of Royal Mail. Yes, that's correct; in a period when capitalism has screwed up royally (no pun intended) the great British economic prophet of our time is now proposing that a postal service that has functioned successfully in state hands since the time of Charles II be handed over to the capitalists.

The idea that the private sector is slick and efficient whereas the public sector is cumbersome and incompetent is taken to be axiomatic by many nowadays. Recent history though should teach us otherwise. Such a view is crude and simplistic. British Rail may not have been in an ideal state when it was privatised by the Conservatives in the 1980s, however two decades later could one honestly claim that UK railways are a gleaming example of how a 21st century public transport system should be run? I doubt it. Could a better job have been made of it if British Rail had been kept in public ownership and an attempt made to rectify the problems that it had? Hardly a far-fetched scenario if you ask me. Perhaps those enthusiastic for the privatisation of Royal Mail should take some time to dwell on that.

It is not just socialists who have problems with privatisation. In his twilight years Harold Macmillan famously likened the Thatcherite programme to “selling the family silver.” Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail columnist and a man certainly not of the left, has frequently spoken of his support for the renationalisation of the railways. And, since we're on the subject of the Royal Mail, it is worth taking a glimpse across the Atlantic to see what President Barack Obama had to say when he was asked about the possibility of privatising the United States Postal Service. His answer was as follows:

Bad idea most of the time. There are examples where privatisation makes sense, where people can do things much more efficiently. But often what you see is companies want to buy those parts of a government-run op that are profitable, and they don't want to do anything else. So, for example, the US Postal Service, everybody would love to have that high-end part of the business that FedEx and UPS are already in, business to business you make a lot of money. But do they want to deliver that postcard to a remote area somewhere in rural America that is a money loser? Well, the US Post Office provides universal service. Those companies would not want to provide universal service.

Well put, Mr President.

You see, opposition to privatisation and deregulation does not always arise out of the ridiculous notion that people like myself are simply dogmatic old leftists who hate entrepreneurs and the private sector. Supporters of privatisation have for many years stated that their ideas are based on common sense, efficiency and pragmatism. In my view it is the democratic socialist vision of a society armed with strong public services free from the influence of private profit that is in fact grounded in common sense, efficiency and pragmatism. It is that democratic socialist vision which is absent among even the best of the Liberal Democrats and it is for that reason that the Lib Dems were not, are not and can never be considered as a genuine alternative to the Labour Party, regardless of how frustrated some of us may have become at certain points in the Blair-Brown era. Perhaps now those of you still getting high on the Cleggmania drug will find the more potent dose of something called reality enough to erase whatever illusions that particular trip conjured up. Worse may be about to follow. Now may be a good time to amend your choice of 'Liberal Democrats' on the political views part of your Facebook profile.