Category: intemperants

More on the suppression of dope (hashish and marijuana) and the persecution of its users.

Part Two – Police and Policy
The first thing to note is that, if you live in the UK, especially if you’re rich, you are beneficiaries of the biggest drugs cartel and people trafficker the world has ever seen – the British Empire. So much for the moral position. We quit the trade in humans in 1807 and, after getting round to abolishing legal slavery altogether in 1833, compensated slave owners with the largest government payout of all time, which appears to have been a major factor in the growth of British industry in that century. However those enslaved people from Africa and the debt-slaves in and from India had been essential as producers of our drugs. Which ones? Opium*, tobacco, tea, coffee, cocoa and sugar (yes, sugar) – all of them psychoactive chemicals to which many of us remain addicted … there aren’t many people in the ‘developed world’ and beyond who doesn’t use one or more of those. The claim “I’ve never used drugs”? Wrong, they’re just not illegal at this time. Then at the start of the 20th century governments began to worry about opium. This, it’s said, was primarily racist because they feared the influx of Chinese workers, both debt slaves and kidnap victims, to North America and Europe was spreading the smoking of opium. Ironic because it was the British who’d made the habit common in China by waging two wars to enforce their illegal trade in cheap opium. At the time the Brits produced the best quality opium in the world in Bengal but this was losing its status as synthetic derivatives, like morphine, could be made from any quality of plant. In 1909 an international commission was set up to regulate the trade and restrictions gradually grew tighter. Nevertheless, until it was superseded by other chemicals, opium was remained a big component in the pharmaceutical industry for many more decades and I may well have been fed some as a child. This is when prohibition began. Cannabis came later.
[* The best book on this I’ve come across is ‘The Opium War’ by Brian Inglis, 1976, who also wrote another on recreational drugs, called ‘The Forbidden Game: A Social History of Drugs’, 1975]

There are accounts of why and how cannabis became a prohibited substance but I like the one I read in one of Pete Loveday’s ‘Russell’ comics (Plain Rapper Comix #2). Hemp is a very useful plant, not just for its medicinal properties but in the garden and in industry. Until suitable plastics arrived, hemp rope was the best you could get and in the age of sail you needed lots, it also provided the sails and canvas clothing – the British navy alone required thousands of tons a year. Simply put, the hemp that’s grown for fibre tends not to be much good for smoking, it has some of the alkaloids but concentrations are low. Consequently smoking or eating hemp and its resin didn’t catch on with Europeans before they had more contact with cultures that did in North Africa, the Middle East and India. It was regarded then as exotic and therefore dubious. Certainly soldiers and sailors who served in those parts tried it and still do (I’ve been told that it was also common among bargees when our canals were still industrial highways). In America, North and South, smoking weed came with black people kidnapped and shipped from Africa, as it was practised in many parts of that continent, whether brought there by the Arabs or discovered locally. That fact didn’t endear it to the racist establishment in the USA, so back to Loveday’s story. By the end of the 19th century the biggest producer of hemp in the world was Russia, then in the 1920s they developed a new method of making paper cheaply using hemp fibre. This scared the shit out of William Randolph Hearst, the original to Rupert Murdoch, who had bought whole forests to provide wood pulp for his newspapers. But Hearst had a friend, J Edgar Hoover, boss of the FBI. Prohibition of alcohol was in force and Hoover was sympathetic to the idea that marijuana, because of its link to jazz and black culture, shouldn’t replace booze. The ban was soon in force and the African-Americans got another stick to beat them. Whatever the validity of that account, it’s definitely plausible. What is certain is that in 1925 the International Opium Convention imposed its first regulation on hashish and the game was on.

Cannabis first became illegal in the UK in 1928 when the 1925 Dangerous Drugs Act came into force but no-one took much notice of it. The only people really affected by the law were the West Indian migrants to Britain after World War 2. I can remember seeing reports in my dad’s News of the World of ‘Jamaicans’ (they were all Jamaicans according to our ‘journalists’) being busted and often gaoled for planting budgerigar seeds in their gardens. I couldn’t see the harm in that but it wasn’t explained. Then in the 1960s white kids began to catch on and the moral panic grew. But this time the youth were often university educated and had friends in high places. The fightback started. So, while it was OK to persecute major black artists like Louis Armstrong, when the cops started busting famous white musicians like Jagger and Richards it didn’t go down so well. That’s when that notorious advert in The Times appeared. From 1967 onwards smoking dope and taking acid (LSD) exploded across North America and Europe and the authorities went mental. I’ve heard Trotskyists claim it was all just a middle-class diversion, which shows how out of touch they were with working-class youth, who embraced it and the music enthusiastically. The powers that be were terrified that these kids were out of their control and becoming too laid back to take work seriously enough for the profiteers. The UK’s anti-drug laws were amended constantly – the first time in 1964, then in ’67, ’71 , ’85 , ’86 , ’91 , ’98, 200, ’03 , ’06 – ’09, the latest in 2016. Drug squads proliferated and eventually became more effective. Likewise customs officers and the coast guards – as prices began to rise, the professionals moved in to smuggle and deal. The problem was that hashish is very bulky and aromatic, marijuana even more so, which made them easy to discover with sniffer dogs, however well packaged the goods were. The best hash from the tribal areas between India and Pakistan, from Nepal, Afghanistan and the Lebanon disappeared, even before wars broke out there, and was replaced with cheap, lowgrade shit from Morocco. Thus giving rise to the claim that ‘the cannabis available now is stronger than you’re used to’. Not me, sunshine! What happened instead was that the smugglers and dealers could make more money from powders like heroin and cocaine, which are harder to detect. The argument that cannabis is ‘a gateway’ to harder drugs is a lie, it was the law what done it. That’s the simple historical fact. Then we got the ‘War on Drugs’ and all hell broke loose.

There’s much that’s good about the American people but their grasp of history is probably worse than of geography. So the lessons of Prohibition hadn’t sunk in but this replay was no farce. Invasions by the USSR and then USA, destroyed peace in Afghanistan and the autonomous Pashtun and Waziri regions of Pakistan. The hashish industry virtually disappeared and was replaced by opium cultivation and heroin production. In the Golden Triangle of Myanmar (Burma), Laos and Thailand indigenous rebel movements and corrupt army generals (warlords) now got CIA backing against the ‘communists’ in China and North Viet Nam. As Brian Inglis described it, CIA planes flew heroin from Laos to South Viet Nam from where the local gangsters shipped it on. According to him this led to the insanity of the widows of Viet Cong fighters selling smack to GI, to come home as junkies if they survived. This was such an open secret that Hollywood made a film called ‘Air America’ (the actual name of the CIA’s airline) telling the story as a comedy with Mel Gibson in the lead!

In Latin America the situation became almost as catastrophic. Previously most of the good weed had come from Mexico and much still does, but interdiction made it ever harder giving rise to two results. One was entrepreneurial heads from LA and San Francisco moving to the forests in Northern California and Oregon where they set up up farms to grow their own. Not having the same amount of sun as south of the border, they went to selective breeding to boost the THC content of their crop. Firstly they popularised ‘sensi’ – sin semilla (seedless) weed – where the female plant produces more resin instead of wasting its energy on making the fruit. Then they created skunk and its relatives … and here we are. The second result of the success of border controls was to hand the business to gangsters who, as we’ve seen, make the Sicilian Mafia look like Boy Scouts. Marijuana still gets through but the big bucks are in cocaine, even more so since the advent of ‘crack’. These gangs terrorised whole countries and practically took over some smaller ones, most famously Panama, as they tried one new route after another to get stuff into the US. Economists are clear that, as long as there’s a demand, a supply will be found and in North America the demand was vast. Everything’s been used – shipping containers, small boats, small planes and, recently it’s said, small submarines but the favourite remains ‘mules’, human couriers poor and desperate enough to take the risk. As Inglis pointed out, and even officials have conceded, customs only finds about 10% of the smuggled goods coming through. The cartels can afford that and factor it into their prices. So prisons fill up with the by-catch. In the UK the men have HMP Verne, on Portland Bill, while the women were sent to Holloway when it was still open. Those people aren’t criminals but the victims of US and European economic imperialism and this stupid campaign to stop their better-off people having fun.

That’s enough for this episode so I’ll sum up. The current state of the world, including the levels of crime and drug misuse, is entirely the fault of governments and moralising pressure groups. Sloppy journalists should have the facts rammed down their throats or told to shut the fuck up – for one thing, everything they label as ‘the 60s’ actually happened in the 1970s. No authority on earth will ever stop humans using chemicals of one sort or another to give themselves a different outlook or a good time. More and more professionals, including senior police officers, have realised the truth of this and that cannabis is not the evil it’s been painted to be. States in the USA have legalised medicinal marijuana and more countries have stopped busting users, even if few have yet made buying dope legal, but still the war goes on and now there’s a psychopath in the White House who embodies everything that’s insane and perverted in the American character. He won’t win either but who knows what more damage he’ll create.

One final footnote: despite the subtitle, I’ve said little about the conduct and the crimes (and I do mean crimes) of police forces in all this because they’d fill a whole book, even to deal with superficially. The biggest of these is that throughout the 1970s and 1980s and probably beyond, there was a secret war between the CIA and the FBI, one supporting the drugs trade, the other trying to stop it. Talk about chickens coming home to roost!

RA 6.8.17

.. for sanity? BBC Radio 4 today (4th August) broadcast a discussion of sorts on the famous advert in The Times 50 years ago in the form of an open letter to demand the decriminalisation of cannabis. The programme was devised and presented by Peter Hitchens, a Tory and so-called journalist for that arseswipe called The Daily Mail. In it he interviewed a number of the signatories to that letter to see if they still agreed with it. All of them did, despite Hitchens’ attempts to get them to revise their position by repeating the lies about skunk being the ‘stronger cannabis’ now commonly available. Sadly, though some of them talked about their objection to prohibition, no-one made the point that it was precisely prohibition that led to skunk, to the spread of addiction to heroin and crack, to the creation of dodgy ‘designer’ drugs and all the criminal cartels and gangs, whose bloody trade wars fill the front pages of the tabloid press and their cousins in other media.

Should I write to the Beeb to request something to ‘balance’ that broadcast? Experience tells me not to waste the stamp. So, if there’s anyone out there reading this, here’s my reply to it.

Part One – Chemistry
Firstly skunk is not stronger than the weed we used to get hold of, it’s just been bred by dope farmers in Northern California to have a much higher content of THC than it normally had. Does that make it stronger? No, it just throws the balance of psycho-active chemicals out of kilter. What difference does that make? Well I’m a smoker not a neurologist and wasn’t aware of that modification when I first tried it, but I didn’t like the hammer blow it seemed to deliver to my brain and I quickly decided to avoid it. Forty years ago BBC’s ‘Panorama’ did an investigation into the current state of research. The reason for it was that the government had just imposed a tax on synthetic tobacco. You can be forgiven for never having heard of that as it soon died a death because it had no hit to it at all. Its development was clearly for a purpose and that was as the vehicle for mass-produced joints of fake baccy laced with THC. This is what the tobacco industry had lined up for us, if dope was legalised and a very good reason for preferring decriminalisation to legalisation. Only the well-off would be able to afford the real thing. The Panorama team interviewed a number of researchers into cannabis and they fell into two camps – those who claimed it was addictive and those who said it wasn’t. Sadly I didn’t get hold of a recording but came away with the distinct impression that the ‘addictive’ trials were using synthetic THC not herbal cannabis.

We’ve been here before – it’s called the search for the active principle. As chemistry became a science during the 18th and 19th centuries, it became clear that what made herbal remedies work were the chemicals they contained. So chemists went looking for them and the pharmaceutical industry was born. They had another idea, however, to remove the ‘impurities’ that caused problems like addiction. Opium was an obvious target, so they refined it and produced morphine (1804) – much stronger than the plant resin or tinctures and … more addictive. So they had another go and produced heroin (1874) and still the penny didn’t drop. This mindset has yet to change. Whatever they’ve evolved to do for the plants (mostly defence mechanisms against pests and diseases), in humans the effects of the chemicals associated with those ‘active principles’ may be good or bad. In the latter case practitioners have learned over centuries how to deal with them. In the case of hemp, on the other hand, there are a number of cannabinoid alkaloids that buffer the effect of THC and make it a much more benign drug. This has been realised by a number of researchers but ignored by law-makers and moralists who hate us having fun. As for tabloid journalists .. forget it, too complicated for their tiny brains.

Whatever the truth is for THC, traditional cannabis, herb or resin, is completely non-addictive and I speak from personal experience over several decades. In fact it has zero-tolerance, which means that, however much you use it, you don’t need more to get high. Medical practitioners who claim otherwise clearly don’t understand what addiction is – a physical change in the body – as opposed to a habit – a psychological dependency. Some people can succumb to the latter with cannabis but it’s easily dealt with if the underlying mental problems are sorted.

So dope is not a dangerous drug except to those who want to control our minds. In fact it’s been used by humans in many parts of the world for thousands of years and has appeared in the archeological record even earlier than alcohol. In our times, until it was banned and replaced, one of the commonest medicinal uses for cannabis tincture (extract in alcohol) was in childbirth, to relax the mother’s birth canal and make delivery easier. So much for it being a dangerous drug.

There’s much more to be said on this topic but I’ll save that for later. Meanwhile look out for more put-downs of the social revolutions that climaxed in the 1960s, the Tories are getting jittery again. Journalists, especially for right-wing rags, like to typify dope smokers as lazy and superficial – talk about pots and kettles!

RA 4-5.8.17

Just listened to an interview and Q&A with Matthew Taylor, who’s written a report for the government on these approaches to employment (or not, depending on your legal advisor). Although he claims an intention to protect the low paid and vulnerable, his main thrust seemed to be avoiding loading too much regulation on small and start-up businesses. While there are people who find these options suit them well, there are many more who are ripped off by them. As I’ve written before, ‘the flexible workforce’ means one that bends over so it can be screwed more easily. Whether or not there is genuine choice in taking such a job was raised but didn’t touch two key points. One is pressure from the Job Centre to take such a job or lose benefits; the other is that once on a zero-hours contract or self-employed, you’re not entitled to Jobseekers Allowance and virtually impossible to claim anything else because your hours, and therefore income, are unpredictable. I’ve met this when driven to sign on with a temp agency and found myself being hired from Tuesday to Thursday, laid off, hired from Tuesday to Thursday … etc. I managed to bail out of that but these days it’s a lot harder. What makes that even more of a rat’s nest now is the time it takes for your benefits to be processed, if you are entitled to claim, since computers have replaced paperwork in the Job Centres. Instead of a couple of days, it can now take 6 weeks or more. I’ve just learned that this situation will get worse because the misgovernment is planning to close about 1 in 10 of those Job Centres. What a surprise …

Meanwhile the self-employed and small-business owners have long been hard-line Tory supporters and see themselves as the most persecuted section of the population. It never seems to occur to them that they get turned over by Tory governments probably more than by Labour. It would be good if it was made easier for people to start a business, if they want to, such as letting them claim unemployment benefit or whatever until the business starts making a profit. There is too much regulation for small businesses but that could be eased by giving them quick access to the laws and regulations small employers need to me aware of and by providing more accessible legal protection and redress for workers. What we have now is a licence to rob and avoid responsibilities to staff.

RA 12.7.17

This year is the 50th anniversary of a great book but one that relatively few people will have heard of. It was called ‘Report from Iron Mountain – on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace’ and it was a spoof. At that time there was almost a fashion in think-tanks, like the Rand Corporation, producing studies for governments and industry on current trends and possible futures. Iron Mountain, or more fully ‘Iron Mountain Atomic Storage Corporation’, was real – it was a depository for business records, set up in a former iron mine outside of Boston, for those corporations who hoped to carry on trading after a nuclear war. This was in the 1950s. The firm is still going and has branches around the world, including in the UK, but now of course most of the data is digitised. This name gave the book, which really was a slim volume, credibility as a genuine think-tank report. Its subject, as the subtitle shows, is an interesting one – it was not just a question of the possibility of peace but also its desirability. But surely peace is always desirable?

The book answers that question early on because the premise of the book was ‘business as usual’. The question then was ‘is peace compatible with business?’ The difficulty is that under capitalism capital needs to be destroyed periodically to allow for renewal, reinvestment and more profits. This analysis is basically marxist and, though the book didn’t point that out, American business has been aware of its truth for a long time. The main mechanism for the destruction of capital, the argument ran, is war and in fact we live in a warfare state. However simplistic that sounds, you only have to watch the news. So for peace instead of war, a replacement must be found for that function. The book considers three principal options.

The first, and most popular with liberals, would be a massive programme to bring living standards in the ‘3rd World’ up to the levels we enjoy in the West. However it is is soon dismissed because, while vast amounts of investment capital would be required to to bring this about, it would then plateau and would not deliver the destruction of that capital needed to maintain the capitalist system.

The second option was another massive programme to explore and possibly colonise the rest of the solar system. This has had its proponents recently too. But it would suffer the same problem – an even more massive outlay of capital but then nothing more – just another plateau.

The third and winning option I would summarise as an ongoing series of managed environmental disasters. To quote the book, ‘Nevertheless, an effective political substitute for war would require “alternate enemies”, some of which might seem equally farfetched in the context of the current war system. It may be, for instance, that gross pollution of the environment can eventually replace the possibility of mass destruction by nuclear weapons as the principal apparent threat to the survival of the species. Poisoning of the air and of the principal sources of food and water supply is already well advanced, and at first glance would seem promising in this respect; it constitutes a threat that can be dealt with only through social organization and political power. But from present indications it will be a generation to a generation and a half before environmental pollution, however severe, will be sufficiently menacing, on a global scale, to offer a possible basis for a solution.’ Sound familiar? The advantage of this over the other two is that the destruction would be ongoing and, hence, would keep capitalism running.

Now I’m not suggesting that this is already happening, but I am hoping no-one thinks of mentioning it to D Trump. Of course, what ‘Iron Mountain’ deliberately avoids considering is the ending of capitalism as well as warfare. To quote the book again. ‘War is not, as is widely assumed, primarily an instrument of policy utilized by nations to extend or defend their expressed political values or their economic interests. On the contrary, it is itself the principal basis of organization on which all modern societies are constructed.’ How does that make you feel?

I have massively compressed and simplified the arguments in this work, which is much more cleverly constructed to look like an authentic study for a US government deeply entangled in the Vietnam War and heading for the near-global revolutionary upsurge of 1968. Many people still believe it’s real. If you want to check it out for yourself, it can still be bought on line or downloaded. Happy trails!

RA 21.6.17

I’m starting this just after midnight on election night and the pundits are panicking (looks like bookies are better at it). If I have any readers, you might be thinking that my last post showed I was equally adrift but I don’t think so. JC got a better showing in the campaign than he’s had previously but the make-up of the Labour Party hasn’t changed yet. To be honest, I hoped it would be wiped out and most of the Blairite hacks gone. If they’re still in their seats, then I reckon my assessment of the future has yet to be disproved unless .. a good result makes them recalculate their view of their leader. I’d be happy with a hung Parliament (trying to ignore visions of lamp-posts in Parliament Square) with a weak Tory government and a strong Opposition of different parties that actually stop their more vicious policies. The best outcome would be the public waking up from its zombie condition and becoming politically active. Much is being made of the youth/student vote – reasons to be cheerful. Yes, I’m an optimist really. Opposition is useful!

I’m puzzled that the SNP has lost so much support but even more that the Tories have gained at the nationalists’ expense when the Scots weren’t in favour of Brexit. I’m too far away to know what that’s about. Apologies to any friends in the North.

Resurrection time ..
JC lives! .. despite the best assassination attempts of his colleagues. Will his disciples do a better job this time? Mandelson leads the recalculation with his familiar ‘No Labour’ refrain that, to get into power, they need to win over Tory voters. That’s not why they got 40% of the poll this time. Will Jeremy keep steering left? Ask your bookie.

The May Queen got herself well tangled up on her pole (’scuse the pun) but, if I were to wear my most cynical hat, I might suspect she planned to lose so that Labour got lumbered with the EU negotiations and catch all the flying smelly stuff that’s going to come with that. Whatever – now is not the moment for the rest of us to relax.

RA 9.6.17

The British Labour Party – born 1900; died 1995 – was a coalition of different tendencies. This is pretty much the standard model of political parties in liberal democracies and these divisions are always a source of internal tension and power struggles, which usually subside if that party comes to power but surface again when in opposition. Generally though, parties that do get into government tend to hold together despite the cracks.

However the Labour Party in the UK was unique in its mixture compared to similar parties elsewhere. Whereas most European social-democratic parties had some kind of marxist basis 1, the Labour Party differed in that the UK already had a strong trade union movement that was indigenous and not much influenced by Marx or marxist thinking. The UK also differed in that in the last half of the 19th century, the Liberal Party had been seen as the defender of working class rights and interests. But by the end of that century the limitations of that relationship were showing more clearly as the mass trade unions, like those of the railway workers and miners, became more powerful than the older ‘craft’ unions. As the pressure for a voice for workers in Parliament increased, those Liberals who favoured ‘social’ liberalism over economic liberalism joined with trade unionists and socialists (social-democrats) to form the Labour Representation Committee. This was the body that grew into the Labour Party.

So, from its inception, the Labour Party was a reformist one and at times has included or worked with groups, like the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the Co-operative Party and the Fabian Society. Its constitution was famously written by two Fabians, Sydney and Beatrice Webb in 1917 and adopted in 1918. The Webbs, like all Fabians, were avowedly reformist, despite their admiration of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, nevertheless they included in that constitution the famous Clause 4:-

“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

This short declaration of intent became the battleground for nearly all the future battles between the left and the right of the Party.

The centre of the dispute was the phrase, ‘common ownership’. For the Webbs and many others it meant nationalisation, for the Co-op Party it meant co-operatives, but for many left socialists it meant full workers’ control. Many within the Party saw nationalised industries and services, preferably under a Labour government, as the same thing as workers’ control.

I’ve seen a photo of a group of miners setting up a signboard outside their pit in 1947, which read: “This colliery is now under worker’s control”, whereas the ‘truth’ was shown in the one below.

In fact both groups of men were as deluded as the Russian workers who thought that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ meant they were in control. ‘On behalf of the people’ here meant, as in Russia, on behalf of the government. In other words, state capitalism.

As long as business is good, state capitalism seems to work in the workers’ favour, but they have no say as to the use of profits, the investment of more capital or the development of the industry. The classic case was the GPO, which successive governments milked, whether or not it made money, and hid that extraction from the public when calculating its ‘losses’.

On the other hand, workers didn’t help themselves much either. Trade unions fought for their members interests first and foremost 2 and rarely co-operated. This was reinforced by the ‘closed shop’ which was intended to safeguard unionised workers from having their wages undercut by non-union workers. Instead it led to constant ‘demarcation disputes’ about who had the ‘right’ to a particular job. It also created resentment among those unemployed workers excluded from work. The trade unions in the UK never had ‘too much power’ but they did become inward-looking and self-satisfied. Too often they failed to react to new technologies in time or to keep the public on their side until it was too late.

When the Tories under Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, they had their plans to destroy union power in place. Using the right-wing press as their shock troops they pinned the economic downturn, caused by the steep price of oil when OPEC 3 was formed, on Labour and the unions. Cameron and Co have done exactly the same with the collapse of the banks in 2008. In both cases this has left the Labour Party speechless with panic, so it turned on its own left wing for a scapegoat.

If the right wing of the party consists of liberals and reformists who believe in accommodation with capitalism and getting workers the best ‘deal’ they can, the left is, or was, a more varied mix. It included militant trade unionists, left socialists who believed in the gradual achievement of Clause 4’s aims by ‘evolution not revolution’ and, by this time, various Trotskyists. The biggest group of these were organised in Militant Tendency, though there were others, notably the International Marxist Group (IMG, aka the ‘Migs’).

These groups were mostly the product of the near-global revolution of 1968. That year was the high point of radicalism that had spread across the world following WW2, driven by the liberation wars of colonial peoples, civil rights struggles of minorities and a general rejection of the political status quo – especially of the so-called Communist Party, but also the social-democratic parties. But, while the latter were seen as part of the problem, some at least, like the UK Labour Party, could be pushed into making useful legislation. However, with the defeat of those uprisings in France, Czechoslovakia and the USA, militants who still believed in political revolution looked for other tactics. Trotskyists, who saw themselves as the true heirs of Marx, in the UK began a programme of ‘entryism’. This involved joining the Labour Party, not with the intention of taking it over, but pushing a left-wing agenda and ultimately recruiting as many of its disaffected militants as possible before leaving with them and setting up a ‘real’ revolutionary party. Unfortunately their ‘analysis’ of the situation in 1980s Britain failed to take account of the forces against them and the lack of fight amongst the working class. They became the best target the Labour right had had since the Communist Party in the 1930s.

The settling of accounts came in 1986. One bunch of right-wingers had already jumped ship in 1981 and set up the Social Democratic Party, unconscious of the irony that the first with that name was founded by Karl Marx. Then the right sat back and let the triumphalist left write the manifesto for the 1983 General Election. This reasonable, if hopelessly optimistic, wish-list, dubbed by Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, was then blamed for the party’s third defeat in a row. Everyone else knew that had been caused by Thatcher’s ‘victory’ in the Falklands War.

So, at the Labour Party Conference in 1985, Neil Kinnock declared war on Militant Tendency. Those who did not renounce the faith were soon expelled. The right wing of the party had finally won and awarded themselves a red rose to celebrate the fact (thus alienating all their supporters in Yorkshire). Nor was this their only error. Not only did they get rid of those invasive Trots, they also lost most of their young activists who were in touch with the ‘grass roots’ – not perhaps the Labour hard core voters and trade unionists who still had jobs, but all the rest whose lives and livings were being decimated by Thatcherite ‘monetarism’ and the mass exodus of capital and industries to cheaper off-shore havens of exploitation.

The defeat of the Tories in 1997 was misread by the right as a vindication of their policies. They followed up Kinnock’s ‘New Realism’ – neither new nor realistic, just the mantra that they’d never win again without middle-class votes – with New Labour. A wave of, mainly university-bred, MPs and ‘advisors’ took over in the sure belief they could run capitalism better than the Tories. For a while they did.

Sadly, in fact, Labour was already dead. At the party conference in 1995, they had ditched Clause 4 and with it any pretence that they were a party of ‘labour’. They had watched as the Tories wiped out whole industries, sold off nationalised ones, sold off council housing to tenants, sold mental hospitals and school playing fields to ‘developers’, destroyed the National Union of Mineworkers and outlawed any effective industrial action by other unions. When they got back in power under Blair, none of this was reversed. Furthermore they had colluded in the enforcement of the Poll Tax until mass action broke it down. Ignoring the haemorrhage of working class activists and belief, they put their faith in ‘floating voters’ and the residual traditions of sympathy in the once-upon-a-time industrial heartlands.

They’ve lost the plot and don’t know where to look for it. The slaughter of their Scottish MPs in the election of 2015 was not a result of rising nationalism – the referendum made that clear – but a total loss of any trust in the Labour Party to defend them from the Tories’ depredations, whether in power or not. The Labour leadership weren’t even able to defend themselves from the ludicrous lie that they, and not the casino banks, were responsible for the economic collapse since 2008. They weren’t because Gordon Brown had made it clear in 1997 that he would be continuing Tory economic policies. To admit that would be to reveal how far right they’d moved. There’s nothing left to choose between them and the liars and thieves running the country. Small wonder that many working class voters looked to UKIP’s clowns to save them from redundancy and penury.

I see little hope for the future of that corpse being revived. In the last two years there has been a major revival of Labour’s membership under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. To the horror of the Labour right wing, the left has returned stronger than ever but they refuse to accept it. They’re totally glued to the idea that a socialist Labour Party in unelectable and are doing everything in their power to stop Corbyn and his supporters in their tracks. So far, apart from saying so out loud in public, they’ve collaborated with zionist activists to accuse of anti-semitism any critics of the Israeli government’s policy of apartheid and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. They’ve even tried to accuse the Trotskyists of trying to take over the party again, even though they’re shadows of their previous selves. No trick is too dirty to use. Corbyn, meanwhile, continues to try to hold the party together and, outnumbered by his enemies in Parliament rolls over and reluctantly agrees with the right’s policies and lies. Unless he finds his backbone, the Labour Party isn’t just a headless chicken, it’s a gutless one too.

ra 10.5.15, updated 1.5.17

1 Although many European socialist parties still have their roots in marxism, the rise of the Communist Party after the Russian Revolution saw them all rejecting it and any attempts at revolutionary change.

2 This was almost always built into their constitutions, which saw their rôle as solely looking after the interests of their members within the current system and nothing more. So they’ve had no other agenda beyond fighting for more pay, improving conditions of work (rarely) and hanging on to jobs and old practices in the face of changes in their industries and services. The NUM, the union with the best record of defending other workers, especially nurses, was crushed with Labour’s approval. The Tories had managed what Barbara Castle and ‘In Place of Strife’ had failed to do.

3 The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, who had organised themselves for the first time to get a fair price, instead of letting the oil companies continue to rip them off.

Disclaimer: the above is a personal and frankly partisan (not party) opinion piece of someone who lived through the second half of the 20th century and been on the fringes of some of the events described. Historians and partisans of other credos will undoubtedly trash it. Good luck with coming up with a better one.