Salvaging something in the Wreckage. by Les May

THERE’s an understatement!

Last Thursday was not a good day for Labour. I’ve heard three explanations so far; Mandleson ‘It was a hangover of Jeremy Corbyn’, Starmer ‘We lost the trust of working people’, my wife ‘Labour should have focussed on Tory stinginess towards the NHS workers’.

I have a different view. My guess is that what scuppered Labour under Starmer is what scuppered Labour under Corbyn. It’s called Brexit. The people who wanted it in 2019 still want it in 2021. They associate the Tories with Brexit, Labour with being at best lukewarm about it and at worst against it. Whether its downside will have become apparent by 2024 or 2029 is unknown. Perhaps the older Brexiteers will have fallen off their perch or the young ones begun to wonder what all the fuss was about. For the moment Labour is stuck with Starmer and we are all stuck with Boris.

So what can be salvaged. Starmer is probably feeling safe for the moment because the rest of the front bench is so unprepossessing. It’s just possible that Starmer will come to realise that eventually he has to reconnect with those supporters who gave the Labour party a distinct ‘buzz’ under Corbyn and are now leaving or just drifting away from it, though I doubt it. Many of these will be the people who went out ‘on the knocker’ at election time to drum up support from Labour. They won’t be doing that in 2024.

And what about chancer in chief Boris? As we are stuck with the Tories for at least three more years what can we make of this? Curiously enough the results may have an upside. Remember all those particularly nasty sounding Tories who had such a lot to say during the Brexit debate? Remember how Boris had to find a new Chancellor who was more amenable to spending money to fund furlough during the pandemic? Waiting in the wings are a lot of ‘small state’, low public spending zealots. For the moment at least they are unlikely to be able to eject Boris.

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Sleaze And Dynamic Alternatives. by Les May

MY Dad was born in Walsden, which is hardly deepest Yorkshire, and moved west at the age of two to spend all his life in Lancashire. But he liked to parade his ‘Yorkshireness’ by quoting what he claimed was the county motto of I’ tha’ dos owt’ for nowt, do it fo’ thi’ sen. Not exactly an ennobling aspiration, but a reminder that when anyone hands favours in cash or kind to a politician or their party, something is expected in return.

Boris Johnson may be telling the truth that he (eventually) paid for his change of décor, but if it is found that he initially approached someone else to foot the bill, there will be a quest to find out what favours Johnson bestowed in return. And irrespective of what emerges the aura of sleaze will envelope Johnson for the rest of his time in public life.

But even if those ‘favours’ turn out to be on an epic scale, will it be enough to tarnish the Tories enough to lead to the start of that long slide in public distrust which led to the demise of the John Major government’s support and his election defeat in 1997?

Speaking on Saturday’s BBC programme, Dateline London, the political commentator Steve Richards pointed out that in 1997 there was what he called a ‘dynamic alternative’ to Major and the Tories in the shape of Tony Blair.

Given what we now know about Blair it is easy to forget the enthusiasm and hope with which Labour people greeted his becoming Prime Minister with a huge mandate for change in the shape of his parliamentary majority. Whether you like Blair or not, Richard’s analysis is spot on.

So ultimately whether Johnson’s present little difficulties represent the beginning of the end for the Tories may depend on one thing; ‘Is Labour under Keir Starmer a dynamic alternative?’ Answers on a postage stamp please.

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It’s Time To Report The Pay Gap by Les May

WHEN I first became interested in left wing politics in the early 1960s the people I met were primarily interested reducing inequalities of income, wealth, power and influence. Times change; being ‘of the left’ today frequently means an obsession with identity politics. Inequalities between groups which can be attributed to differences of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, you name it, are all seen as grist to the mill. Inequalities of income, wealth, power and influence within these different groups are largely ignored.

Today the BBC reported; ‘Three quarters of employers want large firms to be forced to release data on the pay gap between staff of different ethnicities, a leaked report shows. The findings, seen by the BBC, came from a consultation exercise on ethnicity pay gap reporting launched by Theresa May in October 2018. The then PM promised to 'help employers identify the actions needed to create a fairer and more diverse workforce'. But two years later, the government has yet to respond’.

The news report included an interview with someone who was described as a ‘consultant’, which presumably means they were being paid quite a lot of money for doing this very important job. Now it happens that the interviewee was a woman and she was black. But the question which occurs to me is should I get more excited that in some big company someone who happens to be black and/or a woman is being paid a paltry £110,000 when her white male counterpart is being paid £120,000, or should I be more concerned that the same company has a proportion of it’s staff on zero hours contracts being paid minimum wage.

If we are going to have big companies forced to report the pay gap between staff of different ethnicities and sexes, then by the same token companies should be forced to report the differences in remuneration between executives, managers, shop floor workers and toilet cleaners.

One of the ways I shall judge Keir Starmer is whether he shows any sign of a commitment to reducing income and wealth inequalities. Signposting his willingness to support mandatory reporting of the pay gap within companies would be a good start.

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Blackmailers Always Want More Revisited

by Les May

SEVERAL days ago the High Court struck out a claim for libel against the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) made by Tony Greenstein. The organisation now boasts that the ruling made it permissible for it to call him, and presumably anyone else, a “notorious antisemite” in articles on the CAA website.

The problem for anyone challenging the CAA over such personal attacks is that whilst they are made with all the certainty of them being objectively true, the law treats them merely as opinions, and as the saying goes ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’.

The finding makes Mr Greenstein liable for costs of nearly £68,000, something else the CAA is eager to crow about.

Having seen off Greenstein the CAA is now renewing its attacks on the Labour party claiming that Starmer has ‘conned’ them and offered them ‘crumbs’ by allowing the Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension to be dealt with by the Labour Party’s existing disciplinary procedures which resulted in the lifting of the suspension. If Starmer thought that his removing the Labour whip would result in him being allowed to deal with complaints of anti-semitism in his own way, he was mistaken. The response from the CAA has been to claim ‘New evidence emerges showing that incompetence, factionalism and politicisation remain the hallmarks of Labour’s disciplinary process under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership’. Blackmailers always want more.

Not content with that, at the end of October the CAA submitted a short letter and almost 70 pages of allegations against a number of former and sitting Labour MPs who it referred to as ‘Respondents’ as if it had some legal authority . If Starmer actually read these he must have wondered who is in charge of the Labour party, himself or the unelected Gideon Falter and Joe Glasman of the CAA.

It should also be said that Starmer’s action in removing the Labour whip from Corbyn may be the start of an attempt to reverse the democratisation of the party which placed the decision about who should by Leader in the hands of the membership, and not in the hands of the parliamentary party.

The ruling against Greenstein is a warning that it is not possible to challenge the tactics of the CAA head on, pernicious though they are. But it is possible to point out some of the shortcomings of this organisation.

The CAA likes to present itself as a ‘non-governmental organisation’ and a ‘charity’. In 2019 its income was almost £900,000, almost all from legacies and donations. But when the Charity Commission investigated complaints against the CAA’s Gideon Falter said, ‘There are many people who oppose our mission and complain to the Charity Commission at every opportunity’ and described it as an ‘orchestrated campaign’. In October 2018 the report in the Jewish Chronicle showed how the CAA had broken charity law;

The Charity Commission told the JC its investigation was launched "following concerns raised about a petition launched by the charity which called for the resignation of the leader of the Opposition".

A spokesperson said: “Charities are free to campaign and engage in political activity in furthering their purposes...

"But there are rules that charities must follow. One of the most important of these rules is that charities must stress their independence from party politics and demonstrate party political balance.

"This is a cornerstone of charity law and the public rightly expect us to uphold it robustly."

The commission instructed CAA to change the petition's wording "to ensure it complied with our guidance on campaigning and political activity".

Reading the CAA’s most recent complaints against named individuals in the Labour party, which quote exactly which of the Labour party’s rules have been broken, it is difficult to see how the organisation can be said to complying with rules set out for charities.

The CAA makes much of its ‘methodology’ in its investigations into anti-semitism. But this is what the Institute from Jewish Policy Research had to say about its methods in January 2015;

However, unfortunately, the organisation’s survey about antisemitism is littered with flaws, and in the context of a clear need for accurate data on this topic, its work may even be rather irresponsible.

Its report is based on two surveys – one of Jews living in the UK, exploring their perceptions and experiences of antisemitism, and one of the general population of the UK, exploring its attitudes towards Jews.

In the first one, the data about Jewish attitudes are based on an open web survey that had very limited capacity to assess whether respondents were in any way representative of the British Jewish population. So the percentages quoted are of survey respondents, not of Jews in the UK. The findings might be representative of the Jewish community in some way, but it is at least equally likely that they are not. Unfortunately, due to quite basic methodological flaws and weaknesses, there is absolutely no way the researchers or any readers of the report can really know

.

Because of this, the claim in the report, for example, that “more than half of all British Jews feel that antisemitism now echoes the 1930s” verges into irresponsible territory – it is an incendiary finding, and there is simply no way to ascertain whether or not it is accurate. Moreover, the very inclusion of such a question in the survey, which most credible scholars of the Holocaust utterly refute, was a dubious decision in and of itself, and raises issues about the organisers’ pre-existing hypotheses and assumptions. Professional social researchers build credible surveys and analyse the data with an open mind; the CAA survey falls short both in terms of its methodology and its analysis.

The second survey, conducted by YouGov, is much better – the results are certainly broadly representative of the UK population. The findings would have benefited significantly from greater contextualisation, both in terms of attitudes towards other minorities, and the inclusion of some positive statements about Jews rather than just negative ones, which would have helped to provide some balance and nuance. But the research makes a valuable contribution to knowledge. The inclusion of some context might also have altered the way in which the results were presented in the CAA report and press release, which included the rather sensationalist claim that almost half of British adults harbour some kind of antisemitic view.

A far more accurate and honest read of the YouGov data would highlight the fact that between 75% and 90% of people in Britain either do not hold antisemitic views or have no particular view of Jews either way, and only about 4% to 5% of people can be characterised as clearly antisemitic when looking at individual measures of antisemitism. This figure is similar to Pew data gathered in 2009 and 2014 which estimated the level of antisemitic attitudes at somewhere between 2% and 7%, and Anti-Defamation League data gathered in 2014 which, while also flawed, put it at 8%, and, more robustly, identified the UK as among the least antisemitic countries in the world. It is possible that the proportion has risen in light of the summer’s events in Gaza (and those interested should look out for the next results from the Pew Global Attitudes Survey), but the notion that it has risen to such a significant degree seems to be highly implausible.

So much for the Campaign Against Antisemitism's‘methodology’.

In what I write and say I try to avoid using words like ‘racist’, ‘islamo-phobic’, ‘anti-semitic’, ‘fascist’, ‘nazi’ etc, largely because the way they are sometimes used against individuals is difficult to distinguish from what has been called ‘hate speech’. Nor do I find it easy to distinguish the repeated attacks by organisations like the CAA on Corbyn and other individuals, easy to distinguish from what is called in social media circles ‘trolling’.

The Labour party and those of us who support it have a choice to make. We can go on trying to appease organisations like the CAA or we can insist that if it feels it has the right to call people anti-semites, we have the right to defend ourselves against such charges and to criticise the policies of the state of Israel and those who act as apologists for it. To paraphrase Shakespeare: 'Caesar would not be wolf, if the Romans were not sheep'.

The Charity Commission website carries details of the CAA. The page headed ‘What, who, how, where’ is revealing, and rather difficult to equate with it’s recent activities with regard to the Labour party and its supporters.

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Letter from 14 Labour NEC members orders general secretary to rebuke Starmer and instruct him to immediately restore whip to Corbyn!

FOURTEEN members of Labour’s 39-member National Executive Committee (NEC) have written a damning and explosive letter to Labour general secretary David Evans about the conduct of party leader Keir Starmer – one that blows open the opaque events of this week surrounding Jeremy Corbyn’s reinstatement.

The letter:

Condemns the ‘double jeopardy’ and ‘deliberate political interference’ of withdrawing the whip from Corbyn after he was reinstated by an NEC panel;

makes clear that the decision of the panel was based on independent legal advice and the recommendation of Labour’s disciplinary investigative unit;

implies that their advice was that there were no valid grounds for Corbyn’s suspension;

confirms that the whip had been restored to Corbyn on the lifting of his suspension, making an utter mockery of Starmer’s excuse that he was ‘not restoring’ the whip rather than withdrawing it;

makes clear that the meddling in the disciplinary outcome is exactly that kind of ‘political interference’ the EHRC has ruled unlawful;

accuses Starmer and other right-wing MPs of smearing the NEC panel members who acted in accordance with the party’s rules and the legal advice they gave;

says that Starmer has put NEC members in a legal bind – and that as a highly-qualified barrister he has no excuse for his ‘unconscionable’ choice;

demands that Evans rebuke Starmer for his political interference in party processes and undermining public confidence in Labour’s disciplinary process;

‘requires’ Evans to immediately ‘demand’ that Starmer upholds the NEC panel’s decision and restores the whip to Corbyn:

Dear David,

On Tuesday 17th November a Disputes Panel of the NEC sat to consider current discipline cases one of which was the complaint against Jeremy Corbyn MP. The Panel after many hours of consideration and deliberation, including advice and guidance on process from the Head of Disputes in GLU and an independent Barrister provided by the party, established that there had been no breach of Labour Party rules. As such the Panel determined that Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension should be lifted.

As with all other cases considered by the Dispute Panels, as soon as the panel’s decisions have been ratified as per the agreed process, Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension was required to be immediately lifted. Any consequence of the suspension, namely the suspension of the whip, was of course to immediately fall away as a consequence of the NEC panel decision.

The decision of the Leader the following day to withhold the whip from Jeremy Corbyn MP is an act of deliberate political interference in the handling of a complaint. It defies the decision of the NEC panel, is a matter of double jeopardy that flies in the face of natural justice, it undermines the Rule Book and it is precisely the type of action found to be unlawful indirect discrimination by the EHRC report.

We would remind the leadership that the political interference criticised by the EHRC included interference intended to speed up the disciplinary process.

The Leader of the party in addition made commentary that the Jewish community have no faith in the process of the Dispute’s panel. Although intended to be a damning comment on the Dispute’s process generally it is of course a direct criticism of the decision reached by the Dispute’s Panel on Tuesday. This criticism has been joined by other MPs, no doubt following the lead of the Leader.

Neither the Party nor the Leader have made clear that the Disputes Panel in question received legal advice on the day and as is the norm that includes a recommendation from the GLU staff, in particular the Head of Legal appointed by the Leader as to the sanction that should be awarded.

This is an unacceptable attack on the lay volunteers elected to uphold the Rule Book, it is direct political interference and it is unacceptable.

We understand that the Party will now face legal action as a result of the decision of the Leader to undermine the disciplinary processes. This will inevitably mean that members of the panel are asked to give evidence in a Court of law. It is unconscionable, given that the Leader is Queens Counsel and must have read and digested the EHRC report, that members of the NEC should be placed in this position by his actions.

As members of the NEC with responsibility to uphold the Rule Book we require confirmation that the General Secretary will now write to the Leader of the Party to admonish him for interfering in the NEC processes, for levelling public criticism intended to undermine confidence in the dispute process and for taking a decision that is directly contradictory to the NEC Panel decision. The General Secretary must demand that the Leader upholds the decision of the Dispute’s panel and immediately reinstates the whip to Jeremy Corbyn MP.

Signed

Howard Beckett

Jayne Taylor

Ian Murray

Andi Fox

Mick Whelan

Andy Kerr

Pauline McCarthy

Ellen Morrison

Lara McNeill

Mish Rahman

Laura Pidcock

Yasmine Dar

Nadia Jama

Gemma Bolton

Anti-socialism In The Labour Party

by Les May

A COUPLE of weeks ago the Sunday People newspaper carried a piece headed ‘Don’t talk about Jez’. It claimed that General Secretary David Evans, had written to constituency parties warning members not to talk about Corbyn’s possible expulsion. It went on to claim that one MP who was at the meeting which discussed the EHRC report said ‘In forty years I’ve never seen anything like it. It was a bit scary. Starmer spoke at length. He never mentioned Jeremy Corbyn once. It’s like 1938 in the USSR with the show trials.’

Even allowing for a degree of exaggeration and a bit of paraphrasing it seems that Corbyn is being ‘unpersoned’ in the Labour party. Starmer’s decision to exclude Corbyn from the parliamentary Labour party by not to restoring the whip to him would presumably mean that he could not stand as an official Labour candidate in any future General Election. The problem for Starmer is not that Corbyn is anti-semitic; it’s that he is pro-socialism.

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A Gradely Book for Gradely Folk!

BOOK REVIEW by Christopher Draper

FOR anyone who imagines Sir Keir Starmer, a sharp-suited, Cambridge-educated lawyer and Knight of the Realm, is the embodiment of Socialism, Paul Salveson’s newly published evocation of the writings and cultural milieu of a pioneering Bolton socialist will prove a revelation.

“Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” celebrates, revisits and re-enacts a classic text (“Moorland & Memories”) published a century ago by Allen Clarke (1863-1935), an astonishingly prolific and wide-ranging radical journalist familiar to his contemporaries as the proprietor, editor and chief writer of such popular Northern newspapers as, “Teddy Ashton’s Journal – a Gradely Paper for Gradely Folk”. Clarke wrote poetry, short stories, social and political commentaries and philosophical essays. Although he was an exceptional talent, the popularity of Clarke’s writings with working folk is indicative of the vivacity and cultural diversity of the North’s pioneering socialist and labour movement before it fell beneath the wheels of electioneering and concentrated on getting careerists and snake oil salesmen into Parliament.

Salveson describes Clarke’s politics as, “Libertarian Socialist” but notes that “quite a big part of him leant towards anarchism of the non-violent Tolstoyan sort”. That’s how I first came across Clarke, whilst researching the street-level origins of British anarchism and John Tamlyn, a Burnley-based libertarian whose stories were published in “Teddy Ashton’s Journal”. Much of this very warp and weft of the everyday lives, political networks and cultural milieu of pioneering Northern socialists is still missed by London-centric historians and ivory-towered academics. In contrast Salveson digs down into his home turf and maintains living links with the people, places and politics he writes about. Through a hundred and eighty pages and twenty-eight profusely illustrated chapters, “Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” meanders around Clarke’s Lancashire homeland on foot, by bike and rail, teasing out the many and varied threads running through Clarke’s original 1920 volume. (If only Salveson had included an index readers would be spared page-turning meanderings in attempting to locate particular topics!).

Firstly we get an introduction to the man himself. Clarke was the son of cotton workers and he joined them as a “little piecer” employed in the mill when he was only eleven but the family were far from passive, ignorant victims of poverty. His father was a union activist, blacklisted for his beliefs and the family were avid readers interested in a range of intellectual topics. Appalled by the working conditions he experienced in the factories Allen turned to writing. Employed as a journalist by a series of Northern newspapers he also experimented as a newspaper proprietor and with publication of “Teddy Ashton’s Journal” hit upon a winning formula, which at its peak in the 1890’s attracted a readership of 50,000 every week.

The paper’s letters column, bulging with missives from weavers, minders and railwaymen, shows his readership was overwhelmingly working class. Clarke considered himself part of that great Northern industrial working class and his stories, both serious and comic, featured ordinary people’s lives in the mills, weaving sheds and mines. His political vision, though, extended way beyond the factories he thought so damaged the beloved landscape as well as workers lives. He delighted in nature and the wild places of the North. Salveson clearly shares Clarke’s wider vision of how socialism should and can offer so much more than higher wages and in tracing the threads of Clarke’s writings Salveson re-enacts some of Clarke’s original geographical and philosophical rambles.

Tolstoy, Gandhi, Whitman, Edward Carpenter and Michael Davitt all appear in “Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” as well as trams, windmills and steam engines. Besides the richness of detailed local history perhaps the ultimate value of this book is as a model and inspiration to readers to dig into their own home turf and rediscover the rich radical networks of mutual aid that thrived before our political vision grew dim. As Clarke recalled in “Teddy Ashton’s Lancashire Annual (1908)”:

“I remember Pendle,

Where in days gone by

Crowds of comrades gathered

‘Neath the moor top sky;

Oh the friendly greetings,

When our hearts were jolly bowls

With fellowship o’er flowing,

And the vision in our souls!”

(“Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” – priced £21 – is available at all good bookshops and WH Smith, or direct from the author at paul.salveson@myphone.coop)

Margaret Hodge's ‘Irrelevant Man’ by Les May

IN an article I wrote for NV in February of this year I said:

‘Last year I attended a Labour party supporting discussion group. Everyone who attended was aware that the constant barrage of articles in the press on the squabbling within the Labour party about anti-semitism, was simply serving to distract attention from Labour’s policy proposals. One of the people who attended had first hand experience of the disciplinary procedures within the party because they had been subjected to an investigation. One outcome of this was that they had been told they must not discuss any aspect of the investigation or procedures with third parties. Secret procedures like this seem to me to have all the hallmarks of a ‘Star Chamber’, so after the discussion group wound up I approached the person involved, told them I wrote for NV and asked if they would speak to me if I gave them an assurance that I would ensure that they could not be identified, and a veto on the use any articles I wrote about their experiences.

'We agreed to exchange telephone numbers and e-mail addresses as we lived some distance apart. I said I would contact the person after they returned from holiday. When I did the person said they had had second thoughts because even with my assurances of anonymity and a final veto, they were still scared that they would be ejected from the Labour party if it came to light that they had talked to anyone about what their experiences. It does not seem an exaggeration to say they had been traumatised by their experience.’

As I have no reason to doubt the veracity of what I was told I find it difficult to understand how anyone can claim that allegations of anti-semitism were not taken seriously by the Labour party.

Taken at its face value, the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn suggests that the findings of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) are being treated by the Labour party as something which cannot be questioned.

This is a dangerous road to travel. The EHRC is not a court. Its findings apply to bodies, not individuals, something which is much easier to ‘prove’ because individuals are protected by the rules of evidence whereby those accused can cross-examine the witness.

By definition ‘unlawful acts of discrimination and harassment’ are against individuals and as the adage goes “where there’s blame, there’s a claim”. In coming months are we going to be treated to the spectacle of Jeremy Corbyn fighting for his political reputation, and in many ways his political legacy, alongside the unedifying sight of individuals suing the Labour party for compensation and citing the EHRC report as evidence?

Figuring out whether Corbyn’s suspension and potential expulsion from the Labour party has an impact on membership won’t be easy due to its complicated support structure of ‘full members’, ‘affiliated supporters’ and ‘registered supporters’. In August 2015, prior to Corbyn’s election to the leadership the Labour Party reported 292,505 full members. In December 2017 this figure had risen to about 552,000 full members making it Britain’s most financially well party at the time. Perhaps Margaret Hodge’s ‘irrelevant man’ won’t prove to be so irrelevant after all.

Today, Saturday, speaking on the BBC News programme ‘Dateline London’ the political presenter Jo Coburn raised the question of whether if, in response to the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour party, some unions reduced their financial support, Keir Starmer might be quite happy to see their influence wane. Coburn is asking the wrong question. As I point out in the last paragraph, the number of full members of the Labour party almost doubled in the two years after Corbyn’s election to the leadership. The right question is whether Labour can afford to dispense with the unions and Corbyn at the same time. Corbyn has asked his supporters to stay in the party; they may not feel they any longer have a home there.

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Covid 19: Pandemic Or Endemic? by Les May

THIS morning a ‘Lidl Weekly’ brochure dropped through my door telling me all the wonderful offers available in Lidl stores between 15 and 21 October. It’s just the most recent of a line of similar brochures from different retailers stretching back to long before the world had heard of Covid 19 or Donald Trump. In every case the intention of whoever promoted it, was to shape, change, manipulate, choose your favourite epithet, my behaviour so that I would spend some money with them. Before every election what drops through my door are leaflets, not asking me to spend money, but to buy into the policies promoted by one or other of the parties. So it would seem that our politicians realise that if you want to influence someone’s behaviour mailshots are quite an effective way of doing so. Or do they?

Yesterday morning I watched Robert Jenrick, Secretary of State for Housing Communities and Local Government, being asked about the new ‘Three Tier’ restrictions proposed by the Government which it hopes will suppress the dangerous rise in new infections, hospital admissions and deaths resulting from the Covid pandemic. How are we to find out which ‘tier’ we are in? Go to www.gov.uk says Mr Jenrick, and find out for yourself!

One of the things we have learned in recent months is that there has been a decline in the willingness of some people to comply with what is expected of them. Only one fifth to one quarter of people who are told they should self isolate after being in contact with an infected person, actually do so. It’s not clear that everyone even knows what ‘self isolate’ actually means.

A frequent excuse for non-compliance with this and other restrictions is that people don’t know what the ‘rules’ are. Personally I put much more reliance on the World Health Organisation’s common sense rules like meeting as few people as possible, keeping as far away as possible from anyone I do meet and disinfecting anything anyone else might have touched, to protect my wife and myself, rather than anything the government tells me. But common sense seems to be in short supply in some quarters

.

Unless the government makes an effort to cut through the fog of confusion and excuses the new ‘Three Tier’ system will not work. Restrictions like those proposed will be viewed as a massive inconvenience to many people, perhaps especially to those who feel they are a least risk of picking up the virus or becoming seriously ill if they do get it. So why expect them to go out of their way to find out for themselves just how much freedom of action they are about to lose?

My understanding, gleaned from news reports is that Rochdale, as part of Greater Manchester, is in ‘Tier Two’. Telling people to find out for themselves what the new restrictions are by visiting the web sites of national and local government seems to me a recipe for failure. Some people cannot and some people will not do it.

Since March my criticism of the government’s strategy of been restrained, not because I particularly like what it has been doing, but because I am sceptical that anyone else would have been able to do much better.

But all along it seems to have been ‘penny wise and pound foolish’. It has relied too much on technology because it appears to be a cheap short cut to getting things done. We’ve had the fiasco of the ‘world beating app’, when the money might have been better spent on old fashioned shoe leather and door to door methods of tracing contacts. Telling people to go to a website to find out the rules in their area is just another example of this.

Starmer and Johnson may spar across the floor of the Commons, each claiming they know how to cut down the number of new infections. Neither seems to have paused to reflect upon the fact that this virus is not going to go away. It is going to be with us for the foreseeable future and possibly forever. If that pessimistic assessment is correct then we have to learn to live with it by changing our behaviour to accommodate that fact.

If we are to live anything like a normal life again we have to make doing the things that will keep the virus in check, and ourselves and others safe, second nature. By not doing this we have squandered all the effort and inconvenience that was needed in Spring to get the virus under control.

As I pointed out in an article on the NV blog on 16 August the number of cases was already beginning to rise again. Instead of delaying taking action until something as drastic as a ‘circuit breaker lockdown’ was needed, the time could have been better spent in reminding everyone that public health measures like physical distancing, mixing with as few people as possible, wearing a face mask when inside buildings with people not of your household and scrupulous hand washing, were still important.

The virus is apolitical; Labour or Tory it can kill you if you become infected. Starmer and Johnson need to stop playing politics and start to look at how we can avoid once more squandering the effort and inconvenience which will be needed to bring the virus under control

.

Though I take much the same view as the economist J. K. Galbraith, that advertising is just another way of boosting consumption, hence profits, by creating demand where none would otherwise exist, it may be just what the government needs to turn to, to get the public health message across.

Seven weeks ago on 27 August I wrote something on the NV blog with specific reference to Rochdale Council, but the same applies to the government:

‘These are irksome things to do for most of us. We’ve a devil dancing on our shoulder telling us to just get on with our lives. We need constant reminders as to why these things are important. It’s got to be Education, Education, Education! A nd this is where I think Rochdale Council has failed miserably because it is "just going through the motions". Where are the large notices on every lamp post and every shop window and every billboard, reminding people of what they need to do to beat the virus? Non-existent so far as I can tell.’

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Will They Never Learn?

by Les May

SPEAKING at the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) hustings last Thursday Lisa Nandy is reported as describing anti-semitism as ‘a particular sort of racism’ and went on to say, ‘It’s a sort of racism that punches up not down, that argues that Jewish people are privileged and powerful, and because there are people on the left who believe that their job is to challenge privilege and power, therefore wrongly and disgracefully they argue that Jewish people are a legitimate target for racism’.

I doubt that Nandy can provide a single instance of what she claims. Is she saying that Labour supporter should not challenge privilege and power when it is exercised by people who happen to be Jewish?

She went on to say that if she became leader she would try to go further than accepting the IHRA definition of anti-Jewish hatred. This is some of what the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) has to say about that definition;

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which is increasingly being adopted or considered by western governments, is worded in such a way as to be easily adopted or considered by western governments to intentionally equate legitimate criticisms of Israel and advocacy for Palestinian rights with antisemitism, as a means to suppress the former.

This conflation undermines both the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality and the global struggle against antisemitism. It also serves to shield Israel from being held accountable to universal standards of human rights and international law.

You can find the full text at the link below.

https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/first-ever-40-jewish-groups-worldwide-oppose-equating-antisemitism-with-criticism-of-israel/#english

In fairness to Nandy it seems that, just as she did, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Emily Thornberry also declared themselves to be Zionists, and Keir Starmer’s comments could be so construed. What is clear is that they meant that they believe that the state of Israel has a right to exist and I don’t think many Labour supporters would disagree. But whether Nandy’s pledge to go further than the IHRA definition of anti-Jewish hatred was altogether wise remains to be seen.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/15/we-must-define-antisemitism-to-fight-it-effectively

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/mar/07/debunking-myth-that-anti-zionism-is-antisemitic

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Tail Succeeds in Wagging Dog!

by Les May

Angela Rayner aka Cinderella

LAST year I attended a Labour party supporting discussion group.  Everyone who attended was aware that the constant barrage of articles in the press on the squabbling within the Labour party about anti-semitism, was simply serving to distract attention from Labour’s policy proposals.  One of the people who attended had first hand experience of the disciplinary procedures within the party because they had been subjected to an investigation.  One outcome of this was that they had been told they must not discuss any aspect of the investigation or procedures with third parties.  Secret procedures like this seem to me to have all the hallmarks of a ‘Star Chamber’, so after the discussion group wound up I approached the person involved, told them I wrote for NV and asked if they would speak to me if I gave them an assurance that I would ensure that they could not be identified, and a veto on the use any articles I wrote about their experiences.

We agreed to exchange telephone numbers and e-mail addresses as we lived some distance apart.  I said I would contact the person after they returned from holiday. When I did the person said they had had second thoughts because even with my assurances of anonymity and a final veto, they were still scared that they would be ejected from the Labour party if it came to light that they had talked to anyone about what their experiences.  It does not seem an exaggeration to say they had been traumatised by their experience.

Given the apparent failure of Labour to get its policy message over to the electorate, which in no small measure was a result of the constant distraction of trying to deal with the anti-semitism row, one might have thought that anyone hoping to lead the party would avoid taking sides about anything which might cause a rift within the party.  Seemingly not!

Rebecca Long-Bailey, Lisa Nandy, Angela Rayner and Emily Thornberry have all pledged support to the 12 demands of the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights. Keir Starmer is reported as having said ‘trans rights are human rights, that the issue shouldn’t become a political football, and that the we need to dial this down’.  (I’m not surprised at the first three, but I thought Thornberry had ‘more oil in her can’, as we say in Rochdale.

Yesterday the ‘i’ reported that a senior Shadow Cabinet member representing a northern constituency had called it a distraction and said ‘My constituents don’t give a flying fuck about transsexual issues’.  Debbie Hayton, who refers to herself as ‘trans’, wrote in The Spectator, ‘they seem oblivious that the public has little time for extreme transgender ideology’ and that ‘Labour is lurching towards a crisis brought on by transgender campaigners whose demand for compliance is total’.

It would appear that Labour has learned nothing from what many people still see as a witch hunt those who refused to buy into the demands of the Zionist lobby disguised as an attack on anti-semitism.  It is too late to put the ‘trans’ genie back in the bottle; the damage is already done.  Labour cannot afford to expel members for thinking differently.  Tolerance means accepting that others have a different view to you.  It does not mean that you have to accept that someone else is right and you are wrong, just because they say so.

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2020/02/do-rebecca-long-bailey-and-angela-rayner-have-a-problem-with-trans-people-like-me/

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/rebecca-long-bailey-keir-starmer-trans-rights-pledges-womens-place-a9333376.html

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1241298/Rebecca-Long-Bailey-Labour-leadership-contest-Lloyd-Russell-Moyle-bbc-news-politics-live

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/13/veteran-left-wing-feminists-row-labour-leader-hopefuls-branding/

https://labourlist.org/2020/02/trans-rights-deputy-hustings-and-tv-debates-labours-leadership-latest/

https://twitter.com/Labour_Trans/status/1226939313264394241

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The Politics of Delusion

by Les May

I VOTE Labour. In the referendum I voted to remain in the EU, but accepted the result.   At no time have I felt it necessary to criticise Labour’s policy about Brexit. It has confounded the ‘scribblers’ in the media whose criticism has had to be limited to grumbling about its lack of clarity. How nice it would have been for them if Labour had declared its support for, or opposition to, a further referendum.  They would have been able to look forward to lots of ‘exclusive’ briefings from Labour MPs in favour of or against the policy, as the equivalent of open warfare gripped the party. It has not happened.

Credit for this not happening is not due to Corbyn alone.  Those seen as ‘big names’ in the party who do not entirely agree with his stance, John McDonnell, Emily Thornberry, Keir Starmer, plus those Labour MPs which some sections of the media would find more congenial as Labour leader, e.g. Yvette Cooper, Hillary Benn and Stephen Kinnock, have been muted in their criticism.

Criticism has tended to come from Labour MPs eager to convince us that if only it would adopt their preferred strategy of supporting a second referendum and campaigning to remain in the EU, the party’s poll ratings would magically improve.

What people who believe this forget is that Labour does not have a majority in Parliament. Labour is essentially a bystander with no power to influence the decisions of the next prime minister, who at this moment is being selected by 160,000 Tory party members in no way representative of the wider population and who seem happy to trash the economy, the union with Scotland and tear up the international treaty which gave guarantees to the people of Ireland in a single minded pursuit of leaving the EU.

If Labour did adopt such a strategy it would have the support of the Welsh and Scottish nationalists, LibDems, MPs who identify themselves as Independent and some Tories.   Even if collectively the different groupings could muster a majority, constitutionally there appears to be no mechanism by which Parliament can prevent a Johnson or Hunt led government forcing us to leave the EU without a deal. To believe that Labour declaring itself in favour of a second referendum and that it will campaign to remain in the EU will in some way influence what happens when a Johnson or Hunt led government takes over is the politics of delusion.

The people who believe this are not alone in being deluded. Corbyn, Hunt and Johnson all share their own delusions.  They believe that if they become Prime Minister they will be able to negotiate with the EU to produce something that is different from the deal that was rejected three times by Parliament.  Corbyn has already tried to sweet talk the Irish government to no avail. I doubt whether the other 27 countries of the EU are exactly quaking in the boots at the prospect of meeting Boris or Jeremy who both seem to think that threatening to leave with ‘no deal’ is going to wring some major concession from the EU.

Labour’s worst nightmare has to be that blame will be dumped on it for the chaos that will follow if Hunt or Johnson have to ‘put their money where their mouth is’ and the UK leaves the EU without a deal.  Labour will be accused of doing ‘too little, too late’ by people who don’t want to acknowledge that its ability to significantly affect whether the UK leaves the EU after the referendum was always limited. Labour’s best option now is probably to look to a damage limitation strategy. 

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Unite, Len McCluskey & Labour's Squabble

YESTERDAY Len McCluskey accused Labour'a deputy leader, Tom Watson, of being a 'poor imitation of Machiavelli' as alleged rumours were rife of another challenge against Jeremy Corbyn's leadership following Labour's poor showing in the EU elections.

McCluskey's remarks matter because his union is a major paymaster for the Labour Party.  Judging by what he had to say he seemed to suggest that Sir Keir Starmer was likely to be a challenger for the leader's job.


The Unite union's policy agreed by the union’s 2016 policy conference made it clear that the union accepted the result of the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union.  It also set out our union’s priorities for dealing with the process of Brexit, which included protecting jobs, defending employment rights, and opposing the racist backlash that the referendum campaign unleashed.

In June 2018, Unite even joined the National Shop Steward's Network (NSSN) which has long been dominated by the Socialist Party (formerly Militant).  The ideology of this group has been bitterly anti-EU and has been rooted in a belief in the old-fashion concept of the 'British Road to Socialism'.
The recent affiliation of McCluskey's Unite seems to have been encouraged by a decision by the NSSN in 2018 not to field candidates against the Labour Party in elections. 

By linking up with the hole-in-the-corner anti-EU Trotskyist NSSN must now suggest that Unite, which formerly backed Remain, is stuck in the BREXIT trough.

Sir Keir Starmer has now said a second referendum is the 'only way' to break the Brexit deadlock, after Labour suffered a mauling from voters in the European elections.

 Meanwhile,three former ministers are now daring Corbyn to sack them in solidarity with Alastair Campbell who was expelled yesterday for saying that he voted LibDem in the European elections.

Mr Corbyn's office has thus far refused to say if the trio would be expelled

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The Fair Sex?

By Les May

I’d like to see more MPs in parliament with the same sort of life experience as that of Heywood and Middleton MP Liz McInnes.  She’s not from a privileged background, she did not slide easily from university, to a job with a charity and then into parliament, like some women MPs I could mention.   She has had what I, and no doubt many of her constituents, think of as ‘a proper job’.

But on one point I disagree with her profoundly.  That is her continuing support for policies which in make it difficult for men accused of rape to be treated fairly and equitably.  Or if you like, her support for policies which lead to men being treated unfairly and inequitably.  By ‘fairness’ I mean something more than the legal test of ‘natural justice’, though it is increasingly the case that organisations like universities and trades unions to not adhere to the test of ‘natural justice’ when dealing with accusations against men of sexual assault.

The proximate reason for me writing this article is a piece which appeared recently in the Rochdale Observer in which Liz McInnes responded to the comments of a Manchester solicitor, Nick Freeman, who called for people who make false claims of rape to be named and shamed on a public register.

Now I think these comments by this solicitor are extremely unhelpful in the context of any rational discussion about rape.  But they would never have been made if, in rape cases, the accuser was not granted lifetime anonymity whilst the name of the person accused is made public.  What prompted them was the case of Liam Allan who was on bail for two years charged with six rapes and six sexual assaults.  When the case finally came to court it was revealed that the police had withheld evidence which would have demonstrated not only that he was not guilty of the crime he was charged with, but that no crime had been committed.

Liz McInnes’s reported comment that, ‘justice was done in the end and I don’t see any reason to change the law around anonymity’, is in my view thoughtless callousness.  At the very least this case should have prompted some reflection because in this case the ‘victim’ is Liam Allen not the young woman who made the accusations knowing them to be false.   But knowing also that the police have been instructed to believe the complainant and that she would be treated as a ‘victim’ even though her supposed assailant had never even been brought before a court.

Nor do I think she can substantiate her further comment that ‘the statistics show that the numbers of false allegations are very, very small compared with the total number of cases’.

I say this without malice.  Getting accurate figures for these things is very difficult, not least because so many women’s advocacy groups cherry pick and simply highlight the figures which support their case.

The best figures I have been able to obtain are that in 2016 convictions for rape and other sexual offences were 5,190 and 13,490 respectively.  They are taken from a BBC website report dated 10 October 2017.  Don’t bother trying to follow the link to the CPS website for the original report, you’ll get a 404 error.   The CPS seems more interested in demonstrating how efficiently it process cases than in providing a breakdown of conviction rates and attrition rates for serious crimes like rape.

What seems to be agreed is that taking these two classes of sexual offence together the conviction rate, that is the proportion of cases brought before the court which result in a conviction, is about 60%, and that for the same two classes of offence the attrition rate, that is the proportion of cases reported to the police which result in a conviction, is about 14%.  Both these figures seem to be comparable with the rates for other serious crimes.

I draw three conclusions from this. First is that juries are very willing to convict men if there is good evidence of their guilt.  Second that if the criterion used by the CPS is that a case should only go to court if there is a 50% chance of a conviction, then the CPS is getting things right.  Third that 2 out of every 5 men brought before a court and publicly accused of a sexual offence, are in fact innocent.  I suggest this is the figure which Liz McInnes should have in mind when she ponders the question of whether there is any reason to change the law around anonymity.

Whilst these figures do not support solicitor Freeman’s claim that the Liam Allen case is ‘the tip of the iceberg’ and certainly demolishes his call for a ‘name and shame’ register which would only turn reporting a potential crime to the police into little more than an exercise of Russian roulette, they do not support Liz McInnes’s claim that the Allen case does not suggest we need a rethink about the anonymity rule.

Not only is it unfair that accuser can hide behind a veil of anonymity whilst even an innocent accused cannot, there are occasions when anonymity seriously disadvantages the accused.   This happened in the Ched Evans case.

Evans was convicted of rape in 2012 and spent two and a half years in prison.

When initially questioned Evans told the police that his accuser had used specific words indicating that she was a willing participant.  His conviction was quashed in 2016 by the Court of Appeal, and a retrial was ordered.  At the retrial later in 2016 he was found not guilty.  The Court of Appeal based its judgement on the fact that new evidence had appeared.  That new evidence was that the complainant had used the identical words in a sexual encounters with two other men close to the night she had her encounter with Evans.  This made Evan’s account entirely plausible.  Had the complainant not been given anonymity this ‘new evidence’ could well have been available to the defence at the time of the original trial.

The Evans case also shows why the oft repeated call for anonymity for the accused is not the way to go, as once again the ‘new evidence’ would not have been available at the initial trial.

An unwelcome side effect of the anonymity rule is the implication that in cases where there is enough evidence to launch a prosecution, the complainant is somehow shamed simply because they believe something happened to them against their will. This cannot be right.

Even more insidious is the practice of referring to complainants as ‘victims’ at the outset and insisting that they should be believed.  Commenting on the recent collapse of the Liam Allen and Isaac Itiary cases Lord Macdonald, who was Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) from 2003 to 2008, said that these were examples of two failures of public policy: “Firstly, the political rhetoric that privileges victims’ rights over defendant protections has come home to roost. Complainants should be treated with respect, but the inclination to defer to them as victims, even before a trial has determined that this is what they are, tramples over the objectivity police should bring to their investigations.”

Previously McDonald had said:

'… the worst miscarriages of justice I have seen in my career have resulted from blinkered investigations in which the police [have] believed a theory at the start of the case and then gone on to 'prove' that theory. This supposedly pro-victims' rights stance of saying we believe the victims at the outset is precisely what we don't want. We don't want the police deciding what the truth is before the investigation starts … Not everyone who tells the police that they have been a victim of crime is telling the truth, it leads to the police believing people who are telling lies.'

'The victims’ rights movement was born from the best of reasons, but it is now leading to an imbalance in the justice system that threatens basic fairness.'

It was Keir Starmer who as DPP promoted this use of the term ‘victim’ for complainants.  He has been enthusiastically followed by the present incumbent Alison Saunders.

Fortunately, as I pointed out in my NV article ‘A Great Injustice and the Rules of Evidence’ (19 November 2016), the ending of the 2015-2016 session of Parliament meant that Starmer could not do any more harm with his Private Member Victims of Crime Etc (Rights, Entitlements and Related Matters) Bill.

The reason that I consider this even more insidious than the anonymity rule is that it has been extended even further by large sections of the press in recent weeks, egged on by MPs like Harriet Harman.

Routinely any accusation of an act of vaguely sexual impropriety is immediately taken to be true.   The accuser is then referred to as a ‘victim’ or even a ‘survivor’. Harman, who really ought to know better, went so far to say, ‘I think that the absolute key to this, when I think about my own experience and think about the Harvey Weinstein thing, is we need a system of whistle-blowing, anonymous whistle-blowing’.

Frankly this kind of thing is worthy of the East German secret police, the Stasi, at its worst.  Where is the fairness in such a system?   Nor is there any real comparison to be made between Harman’s claim of being ‘propositioned’ by a tutor and some of the accusations levelled at Weinstein.

Whilst I have concentrated on the impact of what I see as a steady move towards making it more difficult for any man to defend himself in court against an accusation of rape or other serious sexual offence, such moves ultimately undermine our belief that if we find ourselves in court we will be presumed as ‘innocent until proven guilty.  That is something that should trouble us all.