The lessons of history for Jeremy Corbyn

Martin Wright in The Telegraph


Conventional wisdom has it that Labour’s newly-elected leader will be taking the party back to the past. The most commonly imagined point of destination is the 1980s. Corbyn, we are told, is a latter day Michael Foot, whose tenure on Labour’s leadership will give us a Labour civil war and a decade or more of Tory dominance. A more positive historical allusion, has been offered by Melissa Benn, writing in the Guardian, who has argued that Corbyn is the direct heir of the Labour Party’s founding father, Keir Hardie. While both analogies are tenable, a more accurate parallel might be traced between Corbyn and a less well-known past Labour leader, George Lansbury.

Michael Foot and Tony Benn Photo: Getty Images


Lansbury took over the leadership of the Labour Party in 1932, in the wake of the disastrous economic crisis that had destroyed Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government in 1931. MacDonald had nurtured the Labour Party into a position of power over the preceding two decades, but abandoned its rank and file in the moment of crisis to join a National Government with the Conservatives. The Labour establishment – seen by many in the movement as heroes only a few years previously – were, by 1932, seen by most socialists as traitors. The demoralised Labour Party was decimated in the 1931 General Election, and Lansbury was elected leader because he was viewed as the embodiment of honesty, purity and principle. Is this beginning to sound familiar?

Like Corbyn, Lansbury was a London politician who was located firmly on the left of the Labour Party – his first political home as a socialist was in the revolutionary Marxist Social Democratic Federation. Like Corbyn, he was a “veteran” MP who had taken part in the struggles of what seemed like a previous age; by the time he secured the leadership of his party he was already in his 70s.

Like Corbyn, Lansbury was a habitual rebel, and a thorn in the side of his party’s moderate leadership. As editor of the Daily Herald he supported just about every shade of Left-wing rebel tendency available. He campaigned for Communists to be allowed to join the Labour Party. In the period before the Great War he’d gone to prison for the incitement of militant unlawful protest on behalf of the suffragettes. He was imprisoned again in 1921, when serving on Poplar Council, for contempt of court, after refusing to implement what he considered to be an unfair rates system. Like Corbyn, Lansbury was a life-long pacifist. He was the main organiser of the mass anti-war demonstration in Trafalgar Square in August 1914. He was also prepared to meet – against his better judgement - some pretty questionable individuals in pursuit of peace, including, in 1937, Hitler and Mussolini. By comparison, maybe meeting Hamas isn’t so big a deal.

 The parallels between Corbyn and Lansbury are so close that one might think that Corbyn is the ghost of Lansbury stalking the Labour Party. But what might history tell us about the Party’s current predicament? Lansbury’s leadership has traditionally been seen as a period of crisis for Labour – a spell in the proverbial wilderness. Lansbury inherited a depleted and divided party, struggled to make an impact against the overwhelming tendencies of the time, and by 1935 was driven from its leadership by his more right wing colleagues. Corbyn will need to be an exceptionally resourceful and gifted leader, not to mention lucky, if history is not to repeat itself in this respect.

Even if this is the case, though, Corbyn’s period as Labour leader need not be without significance. Lansbury’s tenure on the leadership may have been short, but it was not devoid of success. Like Jeremy Corbyn, Lansbury was a magician of mass-mobilisation. He managed to inspire more respect and devotion among grass roots socialists and labour supporters than arguably any other Labour leader before or since. He connected with Labour’s core supporters and mobilised them in a way that meant the Labour Party survived when it may have perished. He reconnected a wounded, demoralised and betrayed party with its core values and beliefs. Crucially, he created a political space in which the socialists of the future – among them Aneurin Bevan and Clement Attlee – could develop and prosper. And we all know what they managed to achieve.

Perhaps the real lesson that a bit of historical perspective can teach us about Corbyn’s remarkable coup doesn’t concern his electability, or alleged lack of it. After all, those that warn that he is unelectable haven’t done too well at winning elections themselves in recent years. No, history tells us that the Labour Party is experiencing a period when it needs to be revitalised, democratised and brought back into contact with its all-too-forgotten core beliefs. Like Lansbury over 70 years before him, Corbyn might well be the man for the job. If so, the really interesting question becomes not whether Corbyn can win in 2020, but who, out of the new MPs who were prominent in nominating and supporting him, will be the Bevans and Attlees of the future?

Britain - The Mafia State

George Monbiot in Outlook India

Be reasonable in response to the unreasonable: this is what voters in the Labour election are told. Accommodate, moderate, triangulate, for the alternative is to isolate yourself from reality. You might be inclined to agree. If so, please take a look at the reality to which you must submit.

To an extent unknown since before the First World War, economic relations in this country are becoming set in stone. It's not just that the very rich no longer fall while the very poor no longer rise. It's that the system itself is protected from risk. Through bail-outs, quantitative easing and delays in interest rate rises, speculative investment has been so well cushioned that, as Larry Elliott puts it, financial markets are "one of the last bastions of socialism left on earth."

Public services, infrastructure, the very fabric of the nation: these too are being converted into risk-free investments. Social cleansing is transforming inner London into an exclusive economic zone for property speculation. From a dozen directions, government policy converges on this objective. The benefits cap and the bedroom tax drive the poor out of their homes. The forced sale of high-value council houses creates a new asset pool. An uncapped and scarcely regulated private rental market turns these assets into gold. The freeze on council tax banding since 1991, the lifting of the inheritance tax threshold and £14 billion a year in breaks for private landlords all help to guarantee stupendous returns.

And for those who wish simply to sit on their assets, the government can help here too, by ensuring that there are no penalties for leaving buildings empty. As a result, great tracts of housing are removed from occupation. Agricultural land has proved an even better punt for City money: with the help of capital gains, inheritance and income tax exemptions, as well as farm subsidies, its price has quadrupled in 12 years.

Property in this country is a haven for the proceeds of international crime. The head of the National Crime Agency, Donald Toon, notes that "the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK."

It's hardly surprising, given the degree of oversight. Private Eye has produced a map of British land owned by companies registered in offshore tax havens. The holdings amount to 1.2 million acres, including much of our prime real estate. Among those it names as beneficiaries are a cast of Russian oligarchs, oil sheikhs, British aristocrats and newspaper proprietors. These are the people for whom government policy works, and the less regulated the system that enriches them, the happier they are.

The speculative property market is just one current in the great flow of cash that sluices through Britain while scarcely touching the sides. The financial sector exploits an astonishing political privilege: the City of London is the only jurisdiction in the UK not fully subject to the authority of parliament. In fact, the relationship seems to work the other way. Behind the Speaker's chair in the House of Commons sits the Remembrancer, whose job is to ensure that the interests of the City of London are recognised by the elected members. (A campaign to rescind this privilege — Don't Forget the Remembrancer — will be launched very soon). The City has one foot in the water: it is a semi-offshore state, a bit like the UK's Crown dependencies and overseas territories, tax havens legitimised by the Privy Council. Britain's financial secrecy undermines the tax base while providing a conduit into the legal economy for gangsters, kleptocrats and drug barons.

Even the more orthodox financial institutions deploy a long succession of scandalous practices: pension mis-selling, endowment mortgage fraud, the payment protection insurance con, Libor rigging. A former minister in the last government, Lord Green, ran HSBC while it engaged in money laundering for drugs gangs, systematic tax evasion and the provision of services to Saudi and Bangladeshi banks linked to the financing of terrorists. Sometimes the UK looks to me like an ever-so-civilised mafia state.

At next month's Conservative party conference, corporate executives will pay £2,500 to sit with a minister. Doubtless, because we are assured that there is no link between funding and policy, they will spend the day discussing the weather and the films they have seen. If we noticed such arrangements overseas, we might be inclined to regard them as corruption. But that can't be the case here, not least because the invitation explains that "fees associated with business day & dinner are considered a commercial transaction and therefore do not constitute a political donation."

The government also insists that there is no link between political donations and seats in the House of Lords. But a study by researchers at Oxford University found that the probability of so many major donors arriving there by chance is 1.36 x 10-38: roughly "equivalent to entering the National Lottery and winning the jackpot 5 times in a row". Why does the Lords remain unreformed? Because it permits plutocratic power to override democracy. Both rich and poor are kept in their place.

Governed either by or on behalf of the people who fleece us, we cannot be surprised to discover that all public services are being re-engineered for the benefit of private capital. Nor should we be surprised when governments help to negotiate, without public consent, treaties such as TTIP and CETA (the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement), which undermine the sovereignty of both parliament and the law. Aesop's observation that "we hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office" remains true in spirit, though hanging has been replaced by community payback.

Wherever you sniff in British public life, something stinks: I could fill this newspaper with examples. But, while every pore oozes corruption, our task, we are told, is merely to trim the nails of the body politic.

To fail to confront this system is to collaborate with it. Who on the left would wish to stand on the sidelines as this carve-up continues? Who would vote for anything but sweeping change?

Jeremy Corbyn's victory means Labour's living dead have been vanquished - and English politics has come to life again

Tariq Ali in The Independent


The ironies of history never fail to surprise. Measured by any criteria, Jeremy Corbyn is the most left-wing leader in the history of the Labour Party. He understands that those who do evil abroad are unlikely to do much good at home. He is the staunchest anti-imperialist Member of Parliament.

A contrast with his political forebears proves this assertion. Keir Hardie’s socialism floundered on the battlefields of the First World War. Clement Attlee was a great reformer domestically, but abroad his government approved the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Harold Wilson redistributed wealth but supported the US in Vietnam; Michael Foot as Leader of the Opposition was a rabid supporter of Margaret Thatcher’s war to retrieve the Malvinas/Falklands.

The Thatcherite Blair/Brown twins agreed to share power thus creating two power-hungry factions with no political differences except that Tony Blair hungered for both power and money. He gave us the wars in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq, while Gordon Brown was oblivious to the vulnerabilities of financialised capitalism and spent billions of taxpayers’ money bailing out banks that might have (after paying the depositors) been best left to croak. Both bureaucratised the Labour Party by neutering the party conference, reducing it to a tacky version of the US Democrats. All show, no substance. They denuded constituency Labour parties of the right to select their own prospective parliamentary candidates. This was the only way they could transform a large chunk of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) into a collection of over-promoted office boys and girls together with bandwagon careerists.

Three of them were on regular display in the campaign to succeed another of their number, Ed Miliband. What is ironic is that Miliband’s reform of the party’s electoral system was designed to appease the Blairites and their media chums by eliminating what was left of trade union power in the party and opening it up to outsiders in the lame hope that more congenial voters would ensure the domination of extreme centre politics.

So confident were they, that a few Blairites gave Corbyn the necessary parliamentary votes to stand as a token lefty and reveal the party’s generosity and attachment to diversity. Who would have thought that it would backfire so sensationally? Certainly not Corbyn. Nor anyone else. The Guardian came out for Yvette Cooper, its Blairite columnists denouncing the dinosaur from Islington, forgetting that, for younger folk, dinosaurs are a much loved and missed species. The Daily Mirror backed Andy Burnham.

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COMMENT: TODAY IS OUR DARKEST HOUR – WE HAVE BECOME UNELECTABLE
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No one who knows or sees and hears Corbyn can doubt his authenticity. I have shared numerous platforms with him over the past 40 years. On the key issues he has remained steadfast. What appealed to the young, who transformed the campaign into a social movement, was precisely what alienated the traditional political and media cliques. Corbyn was untutored, discursive, too left-wing, wanted to reverse the privatisations of the railways and utilities, etc. Many who registered to vote for him did so because of this and to break from the bland, unimaginative and visionless New Labour.

Corbyn had underestimated the changes in Scotland, but these actually helped his campaign. A Scottish National Party cohort in parliament that wanted to ditch the redundant and over-priced Trident; an electrifying maiden speech by 20-year-old Mhairi Black that took on the Tories. All this helped the Corbyn campaign. If Scotland, why not England?

As Labour members elect their most left-wing leader, the overwhelming majority of the PLP is in the death grip of the right. Anyone listening to Sadiq Khan’s speech after being elected as Labour’s choice for London mayor would have noticed the difference with the Corbyn campaign. Khan’s clichés were a reminder of how isolated Corbyn will be in the PLP. Corbyn will call on the party to unite behind him. But there is no getting away from the fact that the PLP majority is opposed to his policies. I guess they will try to tire him out and force compromise after compromise to discredit him (remember Alexis Tsipras in Greece), but I doubt they’ll succeed.

Corbyn understands the key issues on which no compromise is possible. He’s been campaigning for them long enough. His closeness to the Green agenda is not a secret, and the single Green MP now has a solid supporter in the new Labour leader. Taking back public transport from the profiteers is another element; cheap public housing for the young and the old will help rebuild communities. A robust tax regime that reverses the decades of privileges afforded the rich will unleash a fierce offensive by the City and its media and political acolytes, but it’s considered absolutely necessary.

Since the late Seventies, the redistribution of wealth in favour of the rich and the very rich has risen faster in Britain than in any other country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Corbyn is not interested in power for its own sake or to amass personal wealth.

Within the party, Corbyn will undoubtedly move to restore democracy. It’s the only way for Labour supporters in the country to be properly represented in parliament. None of this is easy and that is why a powerful movement, a new model campaigning army outside Parliament remains essential. It is the only way to ensure that the Corbyn agenda is fulfilled. None of this will happen overnight, and supporters have to be patient and not scream from the sidelines.

Some Labour MPs will desert. After all, they happily supported austerity. But, whatever happens, it will no longer be possible for the self-censoring BBC to keep the views espoused by the new Labour leader off the screen. The living dead have been vanquished, if temporarily. English politics has come to life again.

Travelling to work 'is work', European court rules

BBC News

Time spent travelling to and from first and last appointments by workers without a fixed office should be regarded as working time, the European Court of Justice has ruled.

This time has not previously been considered work by many employers.

It means firms including those employing care workers, gas fitters and sales reps may be in breach of EU working time regulations.

BBC legal correspondent Clive Coleman said it could have a "huge effect".

"Thousands of employers could now find themselves in breach of working time regulations," he added.

'Falling below minimum wage'

Chris Tutton, from the solicitors Irwin Mitchell, agreed the ruling would be "very significant" and could have an impact on pay.

"People may now be working an additional 10 hours a week once you take into account their travel time, and that may mean employers are falling below the national minimum wage level when you look at the hourly rate that staff are paid," he said.

The court says its judgment is about protecting the "health and safety" of workers as set out in the European Union's working time directive.

The directive is designed to protect workers from exploitation by employers, and it lays down regulations on matters such as how long employees work, how many breaks they have, and how much holiday they are entitled to.

'Bear the burden'

One of its main goals is to ensure that no employee in the EU is obliged to work more than an average of 48 hours a week.

The ruling came about because of an ongoing legal case in Spain involving a company called Tyco, which installs security systems.

The company shut its regional offices down in 2011, resulting in employees travelling varying distances before arriving at their first appointment.

The court ruling said: "The fact that the workers begin and finish the journeys at their homes stems directly from the decision of their employer to abolish the regional offices and not from the desire of the workers themselves.

"Requiring them to bear the burden of their employer's choice would be contrary to the objective of protecting the safety and health of workers pursued by the directive, which includes the necessity of guaranteeing workers a minimum rest period."

Technology and the amateur cricketer

Jon Hotten in Cricinfo


The professional cricketer lives an examined life, with feedback from various corners © Getty Images



Every journalist knows the horror of their own voice. The realisation comes early, when you begin recording interviews. There, on the tape or in the bytes or the VT, is not the voice you thought that you had, the one that's been echoing in your ears for your whole life, but the one that the rest of the world hears - reedy, nasal, pitched entirely differently.

It takes a while to get over the discovery and to become acquainted with the notion that self-image overlaps only slightly with the objective view of the rest of the world.

Cricket is deep into its age of analysis. Kartikeya Date's lovely piece in the current Cricket Monthly illuminates the depth of it: every ball in every major match is logged, filed, deconstructed. It means that the professional cricketer lives an examined life, and its information comes at them from all angles: their coaches, their laptops, the television, the internet, YouTube, Twitter… a bombardment of feedback that can leave them in no doubt as to what they look like in the eyes of the world. Reality here is absolute, self-image challenged from an early age.

It has a purpose, of course; all of this stuff, and in a sport that exacts a high psychological price, strong self-knowledge can be an important anchor. It's why the analysed player speaks constantly of "knowing my game", "executing my skills" and so on. There is no longer any mystery to how they do what they do and so they take refuge in the empirical evidence of their talents.

The amateur cricketer (apart from the serious, higher-level one) is the polar opposite, a player who relies almost totally on the powers of delusion. In our heads we are younger, stronger, faster and better than ever. Fleeting successes sustain the vision.

The classic response to failure is not to practise more but to buy a new bat or try a new grip or take up a new place in the order. Bowlers gaze at the television and imagine that their pace is up there at the dibbly-dobbly end of the pro game - Paul Collingwood maybe, or David Warner.

Does analysis have a role to play here, where the idea of preparation is a few taps on the boundary edge when you're next in? Can an encounter with the awful reality of your game offer the way towards the radical and constant self-improvement sought and often attained by the professional cricketer?

As with all technologies, the machinery required for analysing cricket is becoming more available as the hardware becomes affordable. As a joint birthday present (and maybe a not-so-subtle hint) our team-mates bought me and my fellow senior player Big Tone a session at the indoor school at Lord's, where they have installed a lane with Pitch Vision technology and another with Hawk-Eye. Pitch Vision ("Come face to face with your own performance outcomes") utilises sensors and cameras to offer immediate video playback and analysis of every delivery on both a big screen behind the net and via downloadable post-session data for perusal at your leisure.



A bowling action in pixels © Getty Images


Disconcertingly, it also measures the speed of each delivery. Accompanying me and Big Tone (ostensibly both batsmen) is our captain Charlie, who is an opening bowler and as such has more invested in the unyielding outcome of the speed gun.

I watch a playback as a stooped, shuffling figure advances slowly - really slowly - towards the crease before hopping into a round-arm, bent-backed delivery that progresses at a stately 50mph towards the batsman. "Ha!" I think. "Who's that old man…" before the dreaded realisation that, of course, it is me.

In my mind, I have a jaunty and rapid run-up and quite a high arm. The screen before me shatters that illusion forever. Sybil Fawlty's withering description of the hapless Basil as "a brillianteened stick-insect" flashes into my head as I watch myself replayed in super slo-mo. I briefly salvage some self-esteem with a delivery recorded at 62mph before realising that the screen is still showing Charlie's last ball.

The batting was a little better, or at least a little more familiar. I'd seen myself on camera years ago and so my psyche had absorbed the fact that I wasn't exactly King Viv, more of a taller Boycott type, whose defence was nonetheless far more permeable than the great man's. I had, though, an idea that my backlift was high and that I had a dynamic stance ready to push forward or back with coiled power. Sadly it was all more of a non-committed shuffle. Although my bat speed was something of a triumph, especially watching in normal time after a period of slow motion.

The Hawk-Eye session was equally revelatory. Its on-screen analysis is identical to its televisual output - the beehive, the pitch map, the strike zones and so on - except with very different, and reduced, figures. The finest moment was the side-on ball-tracker of one of Big Tone's medium-pacers. Stopping the gun at 42mph, it ascribed two long and looping parabolas and was actually descending as it hit the stumps. The ball's pathway resembled a 22-yard letter "m".

It was a lot of fun, and illuminated the gulf between the world of the pro cricketer, who must worry and fret about this sort of stuff, and the amateur, who, like me, watched Glenn Maxwell bowl the next day at 57mph with renewed admiration for his pace. In the blinding light of technology's glare, your game is laid bare. It will take me a while to retreat back into the land of comfortable and happily deluded fantasy.

The refugee crisis - Payback time?

F S Aijazuddin in The Dawn


IMMIGRATION can be a messy business. It leaves stains.

It is a subtle challenge to the notion that the world is a global village. The recent exodus by refugees fleeing insecure poverty in southern Europe to the stable affluence of its north puts this misconception to the test. Without warning, a human horde has swept across the continent of Europe. This phalanx of disturbed humanity has floated across seas, swum through rivers, trudged over mountains, permeated through city streets, and barged blithely through border check-posts in search of a German Paradise.

Countries in their way like Hungary have been subjected to pressures they have not had time to anticipate. Consequently, their resources are being strained, their public services overburdened, and their patience stretched. Nations that had cocooned themselves comfortably within the European Union are now questioning the very fundamentals of the EU, in particular its egalitarian commitment to free movement across invisible borders.

The combustible unrest in Syria alone does not explain this sudden surge. There have been other wars in the region — in Lebanon, for example, which its harried citizens quit in Mercedes overladen with monogrammed suitcases. Or Iraq, from which its nationals — bombarded and har­ried by the US-led coalition forces — fled to neighbouring countries. This latest influx of migrants though is different. It is determined. It is coordinated. And it seems to have foreknowledge which countries should be targeted, and where their vulnerabilities lie.

Such information does not come off the internet, nor can it be bought in the grey market. How and where did these displaced persons obtain this crash course in gate-crashing?

Euro-cynics contend that this could be a covert attempt by inimical powers to desta­bilise the complacency of European societies, using desperate civilian families in lieu of trained military forces. Euro-optimists are convinced that this flood will recede, as tsunamis do. Whenever it does, it will leave behind a detritus of disorder and discontent for host governments to manage.

No political bleach has yet been invented that can remove these lasting stains. They will remain. Recall: West Germany reunified with East Germany in 1990, but a united Germany has yet to absorb its Turkish guests. France quit its Muslim colony Algeria in 1962, yet it still has difficulties with non-designer headscarves. The United Kingdom has done more than most to accommodate West Indians, East Africans, South Asians, and now Russian oligarchs. But even Great Britain has geographical limitations.

Shakespeare described his island home as a “precious stone set in the silver sea,/ Which serves it in the office of a wall/ Or as a moat defensive to a house,/ Against the envy of less happier lands”. Shakespeare had not foreseen the Chunnel. Envious refugees at Calais peer into it, attracted like moths by the light at the British end — alluring, irresistible, and maddeningly within reach.

The vast Atlantic Ocean once separated the continents of Europe and America, but even that expanse of seawater could not prevent tenacious migrants navigating across it, landing on its eastern shores, and then cloning New England, New York, New Prague, New Vienna, New Orleans.

“Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore...” beckons the Statue of Liberty. Shoals of immigration have now forced the United States to reconsider this open invitation. In 1847, it tried to reverse the flow. It created Liberia in West Africa for its Afri­can and Carib­bean freed slaves. Not all of them wanted to return. None agreed with Liberia’s national motto: “The love of liberty brought us here”.

Today’s Ameri­cans are hyphena­ted with every nationality in the world. This ethnic diversity contributes to its superpower strength; yet, in that mix lies its weakness, its Kryptonite. By 2050, the US population will exceed 430 million. Whites will reduce from 67pc (2005) to 47pc (2050). Blacks will remain static at 13pc of the total. Asians will creep up from 5pc to a projected 9pc (blame it on Muslim fundamentalists). Hispanics, how­ever, will increase dramatically from 14pc in 2005 to almost 30pc by 2050, to be­come United States’ largest ethnic community.

That explains why President Obama felt the need to restore ties with Cuba. It was not an act of belated condescension by a super­power to a villain with a Spanish accent. It was a farsighted admission by the US of its geographic, ethnic, linguistic affinity with Hispanic countries in South America.

Future historians will interpret the unfurling of the US flag in Havana as a defining moment in its history, when the US — not in war, not in retaliation, not out of folie de grandeur, but voluntarily — shifted its worldview from a West-East axis to a North-South one, from military interventions to neighbourly cooperation.

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