Only Corbyn can save Labour’s ass

You can’t steal the Tories’ political clothes.

Future historians will see the 2010 UK General Election as the moment the ‘British’ Labour Party died, poisoned to its core by the ‘New Labour’ experiment. Gordon’s Brown’s catastrophic loss may not have translated immediately into a Tory majority, but that was only a matter of time.

The poison had been slow but nobody in Labour seemed to recognise what was happening as the gangrene turned black and pussy. Tony Blair didn’t win the 1997 General Election; the Tories connived and corrupted their way out of power, and an electorate, utterly sick of almost two decades of self-serving lies and destruction of the fabric of the ‘nation’ threw them out. Quite honestly they’d as likely have voted in the Three Amigos, complete with embroidered chaps and ten-gallon hats, as a triad of Tory-Liters led by Blair, all with uniform suits that cost even more than the real Tories’ ones.

Gordon Brown’s catastrophe was just the moment when everyone realised the awful truth: there was no further point to Labour at all. Ed Milliband spent years trying to persuade everyone that he could win a General Election, but he was doomed to ignominious failure. Not because he was an awful leader, or at least, not only because of that; but because Labour is now unelectable.

It’s easy to see why. The relentless sliming of Tony Blair and his incessant push towards the right disembowelled any notion of principle or purpose the party ever had. Labour always struggled to be elected, but its strongest suit was its social conscience. In the past, when people suffered, the British electorate (as it was then) voted Labour to put an end to Tories helping themselves. That’s how we got the National Health Service.

You can’t beat the Tories at their own game. They wrote the rule book. Well, actually, they didn’t, it was Niccolo Machiavelli and it’s called ‘The Prince’. Read it some time. It will explain everything you need to know about how the Tory mind works: grab and hold on to power any way we can, to make ourselves rich. That’s what Toryism is. It’s not hindered by baggage such as principles.

And because of that, trying to steal its clothes is a total waste of time. All you end up with is a bunch of worn out rags from Oxfam when you thought you’d just blagged some Savile Row.  And the next thing you know, here’s the Tories, elbowing their way to the trough again, wearing brand new suits that look remarkably like the ones you just bought.

Yet that is what Labour, under the surpassingly short-sighted leadership of Blair, Brown and Mandelson, tried to do, aided and abetted by hired help like Alistair Campbell and John McTernan, the orchestrator of ‘Scottish’ Labour’s defenestration this year. You can’t help but think these goons were being paid too much — and still are, in McTernan’s case.

You can’t out-Tory the Tories. You either wait for them to make themselves unelectable, or you come up with that anathema to Blairism, a principled position to challenge them. There’s no point in trying to challenge them on the right; everybody knows it’s a con. New Labour can chatter on as much as it likes about fiscal responsibility and you know what? It won’t make a damn bit of difference, because no Labour voter wants austerity in the first place, and the Tories know it’s a ruse. And the consequence of all this Tory-Lite centrism, designed to pick up Tory voters, is that Labour voters have stopped going to the polls.

Why should they? Labour — in any meaningful sense — no longer exists. Blairite UK Labour made the exact same mistake in England as it did in Scotland: it just assumed its ‘core vote’ would put up with anything. It was wrong in Scotland and it is wrong in England. Unless Labour is radical, it is unelectable. It’s that simple. It has to actually appeal to its natural voters, and the more it woos blimps and blue-rinses, the more it repels the core vote.

You have to enthuse a popular support and, when the Tories control all of the mainstream media, that is a tough job. It takes dedication, hard work and passion but absolutely most of all, it demands that you have something to enthuse people about, and a leader capable of doing it..

Labour has to abandon the blimps and blue rinses, the get-rich-quick barrow boys and self-serving bankers, and stand up what it was invented to stand up for — ordinary people and their rights.

Whatever happens now, Labour will not win a majority in 2020. That’s a given. We know that already.

But here’s a thing: the UK electoral system automatically favours two large parties. So the non-Tory vote will not fracture into a multiplicity of parties if Labour should collapse; it will remain essentially a two-party system. The only two parties (leaving aside Scotland) that these could be are the Tories and Labour.

Absent the SNP deciding to contest seats in England (which they could; and that would put the cat in with the doos) Labour still has a choice: to be a perpetual party of opposition, drained of any life, like Banquo’s ghost, providing spurious legitimacy for a permanent Tory dictatorship, or it must reinvent itself as a populist and popular party of the Left, committed to radical reform of the economy, a reversal of privatisation, abolition of the Lords, constitutional reform, protection for workers and so much more that it has abandoned in its rush to become the new Tories.

This is the tactic that the SNP in Scotland, Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece and may others have used and are using to upset the comfortable political status quo. The quicker Labour realises it must abandon its Tory-Lite fantasy and get back to the hard work of real politics, the quicker it will have a chance of breaking out of an otherwise vicious cycle of collapse.

The only person who can save Labour’s sorry ass now, is Jeremy Corbyn. And you only have to look at the reaction from the Tory-Lite wing to see that he might actually get the chance. Bookmakers have already begun paying out on bets that he will become leader, a whole month before the election. That is unprecedented.

So much the better. Labour needs to understand right now that no matter who it puts in the driving seat it will not win a majority in 2020. But only under Corbyn might it possibly hope to repeat the trick the SNP pulled off in Scotland (and which the Labour Scottish Branch so miserably failed and fails to replicate) and build a mass party of grass-roots enthusiasts. The only way it can do this is by enthusing the Left and the young. Only Corbyn can do this.

Furthermore, only under Corbyn could a deal be worked out with the SNP to maintain a Labour Government long enough to push through the necessary constitutional reform that will ensure that never again will a bunch of Etonite yobs hold absolute power on a third of the votes cast.

And, should it be elected, Labour must actually deliver: this will be a one-time only chance to save the party and if they go back to the old ways of promising the Earth and delivering a barrow load of infill, there won’t be another. Electors are savvy now and they have the Internet in their pockets. The old certainties are gone, and lies and broken promises will be remembered.

The almost certain immediate result of Corbyn’s election result will be that a number of high-profile Tory-Liters will try to mount a palace coup and when that fails, go off in a huff and start their own party, as did the so-called SDP over thirty years ago. And just like their utterly failed predecessor, this new breakaway group will, after a year or two of abject failure, join forces with the Liberals, who have no principles to worry about; they’ll suck any anyone’s cock if they think it might get them a Cabinet position or two. (Not that I have any objection to fellatio, you understand; but it’s an activity better suited to the bedroom than public life.)

And that will be the epitaph of Blairism; soon it will be forgotten, just like the names of the Gang of Four that led the breakaway SDP split. I’m not even going to look them up; and that is what is going to happen to the Tory-Lite, New Labour Blairites.

Jeremy Corbyn will likely even gain a seat or two back in Scotland, though the wind has changed too far to reverse the SNP’s domination for a long while yet. But even though I am an SNP supporter, I have in the past voted for Labour and, were I living in England and had to, I might consider voting for the party again, under Corbyn. Otherwise I’d just vote Green in protest.

Rod Fleming on Google+

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Evolution observed in trout

You have to be brain-dead to deny the fact of Evolution these days. Well, these last 150 years actually… Apparently though, at least 40% of USians (other Americans are smarter), are indeed just so cerebrally demised. Hopped the neurological twig as it were. Zombified the gray matter. Deceased the thinking apparatus.

Now why would we worry? These are sister-shagging Bible belt rednecks who still think the South actually won the Civil War, aren’t they? ‘Oh no man we just kinda took a time out for a mint juleps n some grits n shit them gaddamn Yankees done called time on us!’ So who cares what they think?

Well the trouble is, they get to elect the Preseedunt of the Yewnited States (of America, not Mexico), and unfortunately, given the performance of some of the incumbents, that is the most powerful office in the world. I mean they elected Dubbya. (Well they didn’t really, but he still got the job.) And there is a risk they might elect another scion of the Terminally Religionard House of Bush next year.

‘Howdee do Jebby boy! Done shot any coons lately? I do mean raccoons now, y’all. Maybe one o them Afreecan Geeraffes? Or a Liahn?’

Mind you, I must admit that this one is less obviously an evolutionary throwback

Well he does

— an irony lost on the Scions of Bush — than the last. Visually anyway. Lemme pick a louse or two there, Dub.

Maybe southern shitkickers too busy chasing their sisters’ tails to think about it might not be worried that the most powerful person in the world might be a man whose brain has already said ‘Hasta la vista’, but the rest of us should.

You could ask whatever it is now, a quarter of a million dead Iraqis, or Kurds or Syrians what they think, but oh dang woops a daisy, they done got killed already. And anyway, they ain’t Chrischuns.

But one must never lose hope of turning the tide of wilful, self inflicted, deliberate stupidity that laps at the shores of ‘Amereeca’. And there are signs of hope: The Southern Baptist Convention, one of the most intensely and egregiously thick religious groups in the United States, has quietly — not telling anyone now– lost a million adherents over the last few years, down from 17 million to 16. And even better, this reduction has been linked to Internet access, suggesting that mutts too stupid to read a book will believe what they see on a screen in front of them — something the yellow journalists at Fox figured out a while ago.

But because the Internet is not filtered by Murdoch-friendly aliens attempting to take over the planet on the quiet, some actual real truth slips through. From time to time.

And here is a nice piece just to show that. Scientific American magazine (the readership of which is probably not amongst the 40%,) has run a story this week about observed Evolution in trout.

Fish are known to be able to adapt quickly to environmental changes, particularly pollutants like heavy metals and PCBs. Noting this, the magazine discusses a study on  trout (Salmo trutta) in southwest England (where the greeting used to be ‘Oooaarr buoy, oo well terday?’ but has become ‘Ayoh morning cheps do try not to get the doorstep muddy,’ due to an influx of early-retired middle-class Londoners making it impossible for locals to afford to live there.)

Anyway SM says that the study ‘reveals not only that the local populations of these trout have changed rapidly in response to pollution, it also ties distinct genetic changes to precise events in human industrial history.’

In other words, we can see the evolution and at the same time we can see what caused it. Neat huh? (Stop sticking your tongue in Lucy-Mae’s ear, Jebediah. Lawsh knows what your mother would think. Oh, she’s your cousin…just this once then.)

An egregious picture of some nice food. Including a trout

The team from the University of Exeter were able to identify two specific genetic divergences in the fish, both directly related to industrial activities, one 960 and the other 150 years ago.

From the SM piece, ‘Dating techniques can be quite imprecise but the fact that both splits fit events in history so well was compelling and a big surprise,’ says Jamie Stevens, the research team leader. ‘The adaptation appears to be metal-specific, with trout in each river adapted to a unique cocktail of metals. A fish in one river might tolerate arsenic but would die in a catchment high in tin or zinc.’

These splits coincide with peaks in mining and industrial activity and it appears that the fish suffered ‘bottlenecks’ at each of these two points, when their numbers were drastically reduced and only the most resistant to the pollution survived, passing on this genetic adaptation to future generations.

(Bottlenecks are something that we discuss in Why Men Made God, by the way. Great read.)

Egregious picture of a girl with a trout. It’s Friday

So not only can we show that Evolution happens, we can also show that human activity can provoke it. So, job done. Evolution observed, theory confirmed, all Evolution-deniers either shut up or shoot yourselves.

Now I know that the Bible-belters are all standing there with their fingers (or their cousin’s tongues) in their ears shouting ‘Lalalalala I can’t hear you,’ (or ‘Ooooh, Jebby let’s go back to Ma’s trailer and make a baby,’) but that’s no reason not to share a good wee story from an excellent magazine.

And hey, maybe somebody might learn something. Maybe.

Rod Fleming on Google+

The post Evolution observed in trout appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

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3 Ps One: Pot; marijuana

The first of our 3 Ps is Pot.

Pot — marijuana, cannabis, grass, weed, call it what you like, has been used by humans since the beginning of recorded history. It is likely that we have been using it for tens of thousands of years.

While there are risks associated with the use of pot, these are vastly overstated and much less than those of using alcohol or tobacco, both of which cause huge numbers of deaths and human suffering and by the way, cost society a vast amount of money. Marijuana prohibition is one of the greatest misuses of state resources and taxpayers’ money in the world today.

Until the 1930s pot use was legal and largely unremarked. William Randolph Hearst, the American media tycoon, changed that. Hearst was the inventor of ‘yellow journalism’ the sensationalising of factually incorrect and often invented stories for political purposes. He was a fanatical right-winger and a friend of Adolph Hitler. Up until the engagement of the United Sates in World War 2, Hearst remained in close contact with Nazi authorities in Germany regularly had his newspapers run anti-Russian, anti-Communist and pro-German articles, which were provided by the Gestapo’s propaganda services.

Attack on Pearl Harbor, 1941

Hearst was anti-British and a fervent ‘isolationist’ who used his media to discourage American entry into the European war. He repeatedly attacked Roosevelt’s attempts to help European states, especially the UK, against the Nazis through schemes like lend-lease and severely restricted the President’s ability to assist in the disaster. Amongst his other crimes, therefore, Hearst may be indicted for being accessory to the murders of millions of Europeans, especially Jews and other minorities like homosexuals. It was only at the point of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that he was forced to backtrack.

At home, Hearst had invested hugely in forestry and other resources to produce wood-based paper. However, making wood-based paper is very damaging to the environment and relatively expensive. Paper made from hemp (the male pot plant) is cheaper, a better product and less damaging. Hearst risked being undercut.

Hearst (centre) with high-ranking Nazis

Hearst, as well as being a Nazi and fascist sympathiser and more, was a virulent racist who particularly detested Mexicans. Marijuana use was popular amongst them and, never being one to waste an effort, Hearst saw a way to make sure his investment in wood-based paper production paid off, and to make as many Mexicans as miserable as he could: he used his media to persuade the US government to make hemp illegal either for paper production or for consumption.

He was greatly assisted in this by Henry J. Anslinger, a career civil servant in the recently-formed Bureau of Narcotics, who was also a white supremacist racist. Like Hearst, Anslinger despised blacks, Mexicans, Asians and Filipinos. He also hated Jazz and Blues music, which, here revealing his profound misogyny, he thought caused white women to become ‘immoral’. Since marijuana was popular amongst Jazz and Blues musicians, Anslinger was presented with another easy target, which Hearst lost no time in demonising.

The sick mentality at the heart of the American right was revealed in the attitudes of these two evil men: racism, white supremacy, misogyny and the appropriation of women’s bodies

Using its usual combination of threats and bullying, the US, again motivated by Hearst’s media empire, ‘persuaded’ its trading partners to do the same. So the fact is, ladies and gentlemen, that smoking pot is illegal because it suited the business ends of a Nazi-sympathising media tycoon with no respect for truth, and the career of a bureaucrat. That is why countless billions have been wasted and innumerable lives lost and ruined in the entirely specious ‘War on Drugs’. There is no other reason.

Smoking pot is a victimless crime. Even if it were proven that it was as damaging as other, legal, recreational drugs, the only person being harmed is the person consuming it. Any other harm comes simply from the fact of its prohibition. As country star Willie Nelson said. ‘the most dangerous thing you can do with marijuana is get caught with it.’

A little personal history. I began smoking pot when I was 15, while I was a young musician playing in bands. I loved it. I didn’t drink alcohol. I smoked pretty much every day for the next six years, and then toned it down, only because my life changed a bit. When I did so, I had no difficulty. I didn’t become an addict. I took my degree and entered journalism as a photographer. I was headhunted for the launch of Scotland on Sunday, and soon became the youngest, ever, Executive Picture Editor in Scotland. I ran a very successful photography business for decades, I have beautiful children who all took or are taking degrees, I took my own Master’s degree and I own my home outright. Does it sound like pot ruined my life? Don’t be a blithering idiot. And I still enjoy a blast, believe me.

And it’s not just me. I know countless people who would say the same — who run good little businesses, some good big businesses, who, for years, every time you saw them, had smoke coming out of their ears. Doctors, lawyers, university professors (a lot of them, actually) journalists, you name it. Reeking for years and you’re telling me it hurt them? Away, what utter garbage.

Did any of us succumb to the draw of stronger drugs? No. We just looked at that and said, ‘that shit ain’t for me bud, don’t bogart that joint.’

And while I was smoking a lot I hardly ever drank. My friends and I would go weeks at a time without even a pint. Can you believe that?

Which should tell you why pot is still illegal, so long after Hearst’s death. Yes folks, it has nothing to do with the paltry harm it can do. It has nothing to do with the (now discredited) suggestion that it can cause mental instability. It has nothing to do with utter nonsense about ‘gateway drugs’ or non-existent ‘social consequences.’

The main reason pot is still so widely illegal is that the alcohol producing companies spend fortunes hiring sharp-suited little shits to persuade politicians to keep it so, because they think that way, we’ll buy more alcohol. They are aided and abetted by career bean-pushers like Anslinger who populate police and regulatory bureaux across the globe, whose only interest is their next pay cheque.

A wise man once told me, ‘When you see people doing something there’s no reasonable explanation for, the answer is always money.’ Case in point.

Pot is important and it’s the first of the 3Ps because in the first place, its use is a crime that is in itself utterly victimless. Its victims stem from a specious attempt to prohibit it, either through lives and livelihoods lost to government agencies like the American DEA, or amongst the criminals to whom the business has been ceded by politicians. The persecution of consumers has ruined the lives of countless otherwise hardworking, ordinary people. They were victimised for smoking a plant that will happily grow in your garden. Is that a fair use of the power of the state?

Criminalising the use of pot criminalises pot consumers. Even if you are never caught, criminalising a relatively harmless natural substance makes consumers reconsider the relationship of individual to state. Now while most pot consumers are probably by nature non-conformists, knowing that the state holds you to be criminal for doing something that does you no harm, makes you rethink your perspective on the law. It makes you ask, ‘How many other laws are as absurd as this one?’

It tells you that obeying the law is a matter of choice, because if the law is wrong about pot, then what else is it wrong about? It means we have to look at each and every law and decide, one by one, whether or not we think it should be obeyed.

In the absence of moral authority, which law abandons the instance it criminalises people for doing something that harms no-one else, why should we obey any law? Out of fear. Is that the relationship we want to have between state and people, one of obedience enforced by fear? I don’t want a society like that.

I do not think it is helpful for the law to be considered an ass, but for the law not to be considered so, all the ass-like laws — and this is one — have to be repealed.

Prohibition didn’t work with alcohol in the 1920s in America, and it hasn’t worked with pot. The so-called ‘war on drugs’ has been an unmitigated disaster. It has destabilised large parts of the world and led to untold death and suffering; yet it has not impacted one iota on the availability of pot. Face it, that war is lost. It’s over. If you want to do some good, maybe — just maybe — you could divert resources from the failed attempt to prohibit a substance that dos no harm to really working on one that does, like meth — and not through prohibition, but rehabilitation. Hell, give them pot instead — it might work.

Prohibition of pot has poured billions directly into the pockets of organised crime families all over the world. Not only is that money then used to fund far more nefarious operations, it has other consequences. Today, in the UK, thousands of Vietnamese have been smuggled in to work inn marijuana-growing factories — as SLAVES. That is right, prohibition of marijuana has directly led to the re-establishment of a slave economy actually inside the UK. And the same is true across Europe.

Does anyone imagine for one second that this atrocity would be permitted in a legal business? Are you nuts? There would be inspections, Health and Safety, minimum wage, working hours… the people who now are working as slaves would actually be making a living. And they would be PAYING TAX. Just as the business owners would.

The alcohol business generates huge amounts of revenue that goes directly to the exchequers of the countries where it exists. This comes through duty, through point of sale taxes, through income tax paid by workers and corporation tax paid by the companies.

Not ONE PENNY of this potential fortune goes to any government where marijuana is prohibited and instead ALL of it goes into the pockets of the crime bosses and, further back the chain, is used to fund terrorism, killing, extortion, people trafficking, smuggling and the panoply of criminal activities.

The only way to stop this is to legalise the consumption, trade and sale of marijuana and control its production — which is exactly what we do with alcohol, so we have the mechanisms and the personnel already in place.

In the UK, according to a 2014 survey, 29% of the population had used an illegal substance — and so are criminalised under this absurd law — while 52% of voters favour legalisation. In the light of that, is continuing with a failed attempt to outlaw something that almost a third of the population has used — with no ill effect — an intelligent use of the power of the state? Is that a reasonable use of taxpayers’ money? Yet the politicians, ever in the pockets of business, continue to throw taxpayers money at prohibition, when simple legalisation would save all that, put an end to the crime barons and their slave trade and raise huge amounts of revenue for the Exchequer.

In recent years, chinks of light have begun to appear. At time of writing, just under half (24) of all American states have either decriminalised or fully legalised pot, with absolutely no ill effects to public health and, in some case, considerable benefit to their exchequers. Colorado, with a population the size of Scotland, 5 million, raised $76m (£48m) in marijuana tax revenues during its first year of legalisation.

In Europe, improvement is slow but only today we read that several English police forces have decided to stop prosecuting for growing or consuming the plant. In Spain, you can both grow and smoke in your own home. The Czech Republic has legalised cannabis, one more reason to go there. And despite pressure from France and Germany, the Dutch capital, Amsterdam, remains a toker’s refuge.

Nevertheless we would have to consider that, on this measure of our freedom, we are not doing well. Government authority is being used in an unreasonable way, damaging the lives of huge numbers of otherwise law-abiding, taxpaying citizens and turning them into criminals. Doing so debases both the notion of criminality and the justice system itself. It makes legislatures a laughing-stock and plays into the hands of crime barons. On this ‘P’ we need to do much better.

I think imma smoke me a spliff now.

Rod Fleming on Google+

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