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. 

********** 

The Silent Sisterhood

by Les May

Asia Bibi

THERE’s a pub in Slaithwaite, or ‘Slawit’ as the locals call it, by the name of ‘The Silent Woman’. I imagine it has done a roaring trade recently as all feminist journalists and politicians hide there in case someone should chance to raise with them the case of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman who has fallen foul of Pakistan’s draconian, but vague, blasphemy laws.

A year ago the Twitterati were obsessing about the self promoting #MeToo movement; Harriet Harman was in full flow demanding anonymous ‘hot lines’ so that supposed male miscreants could be ‘outed’ and Clive Lewis was being pilloried by MPs Stella Creasy, Yvette Cooper, Jess Phillips, Mims Davies, Justine Greening and Guardian journalist Nadia Khomami, about something he said, which none of them actually witnessed.   More recently Boris Johnson was being accused of ‘Islamophobia’ for a comment about some women wearing burkas.

So what have this self righteous bunch had to say about the Asia Bibi case?  Not a lot it would seem.  Whilst they are keen to promote the idea that western women are living in fear of walking down the street in case some man wolf whistles at them, makes some tasteless remark or just says something they don’t like, a poor Pakistani woman who has just had her sentence overturned after eight years in jail with the prospect of death by hanging to look forward to, has been abandoned to her fate by these supposed liberals.

If anyone in this world is a victim it is Asia Bibi.  She picked up a drinking cup belonging to a Muslim woman and was accused of ‘polluting’ it simply by being a Christian woman and hence ‘unclean’.  An argument followed and lead to her being accused of blasphemy.   First she was beaten up by a mob which broke into her house, then she was charged with blasphemy, found guilty and sentenced to death.   This was upheld by a higher court.   Last week this sentence was overturned by the Pakistan Supreme Court which said the women who had made the accusations against her were lying.

What followed was that mobs demanding she be hanged rioted for several days doing what has been claimed to be £900 million of damage.  Imran Khan, the prime minister, struck a deal with the rioters that she would no be allowed to leave the country until the verdict had been ‘reviewed’.  Forcing her to stay in a country where tens of thousands of people want to kill her is inhumane.  Her lawyer has left the country in fear of his life.

I am normally very reluctant to resort to the word ‘racism’ to describe someone’s attitudes or beliefs, but I cannot help noticing that Asia Bibi is a poor, brown, ‘asian’ woman and the women who do the shouting about ‘misogyny’ are affluent, white and western.

The failure of these women to use their positions to draw the attention of the British public to Asia Bibi’s plight is difficult to explain unless they simply do not care, don’t think it will raise their profile in circles which will help them in their career or are afraid that they will be accused of ‘Islamophobia’.

There is one bit of good news. Heywood and Middleton MP Liz McInnes has written to the Minister of State, Mark Field, about this case and asked him to encourage his colleagues at the Home Office to consider the religious elements of this matter before making decisions on asylum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia_Bibi_blasphemy_case

Decide For Yourself

by Les May

YOU can find an image of the mural which has been denounced as ‘anti-Semitic’ by people attacking Corbyn at:

http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/anti-semitic-mural.html

If you click on it you will get an enlarged image. Right click on that and you will get a menu which includes ‘Save Image As’.  Find that file and click on it to load it into an image viewer. You will then be able to decide for yourself whether it really is ‘anti-Semitic’ or just a well executed piece of art which you are free to interpret as you wish.

As the ‘white on black’ font of the website is hard to read I have converted it to ‘black on white’ and appended it below. I hope the author does not mind.

How does a piece of public art lead to the possible downfall of one of 's most senior statesmen?  It sounds like a riddle and I'm sure it would baffle anybody just twenty years ago, but not in this current Orwellian age.  Literally just days after being accused of being a Russian agent, Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party and Her Majesty's Opposition, has been denounced as an anti-Semite. 

Being labelled an anti-Semite is incredibly easy these days if you're a UFO and ghost-believing tin foil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist like me, but it is still quite rare inside the pen of Corbyn's ideological community.  The mural was put up in 2012 by the artist Kalen Ockerman, better known as 'Mear One', see: http://mearone.com/. 

It was called Freedom for Humanity and was painted on a wall in the heart of 's .  It depicts a row of six elderly suited men sitting round a table which is covered by a board game that resembles Monopoly.  The table has no legs and its top is supported on the backs of four naked and faceless seated human figures who are bent over completely.  Behind them are a pile of loose cogs from a machine.  In the background is a pair of smoking factory chimneys next to two objects that are either volcanoes or cooling towers from a power station.  There is a network of lines behind them that look like chemtrails in the sky.  On the left is a man carrying a placard in his right hand that says: 

'The New World Order is the enemy of humanity.'  His left hand is held aloft in a fist.   On the right is a tired and sad-looking mother holding her baby. Above the scene is a rising sun framing a pyramid with a detached capstone containing the Eye of Providence.   I think it is a magnificent artwork and deserves to be ranked among the great examples of political graffiti across the world, like those ingenious pieces from and .  It must have been a striking experience to walk down the street and see it. I was planning to take a trip to the location and film it for HPANWO TV while it was still there.   Then I looked into the matter and I found out that it had already been obliterated in 2012, just three weeks after it had been finished.  The borough council ordered the destruction of the painting on the grounds that it was 'anti-Semitic!'   Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-london-19844681/kalen-ockerman-mural-to-be-removed-from-brick-lane.

The problem that has arisen today comes from all those years ago. Jeremy Corbyn originally spoke out against the removal of Freedom for Humanity.  He told the artist he was "in good company" and compared the removal of the painting to the famous Man at the Crossroads fresco in that was whitewashed by the Rockefellers for its Marxist iconography (It was happily recreated in at a later date).  There is absolutely no suggestion at all that the six antagonistic figures in the painting were Jews.  The artist himself denied it and the man on whose wall the mural was painted, a restaurant manager of Bangladeshi origin, said that two of the figures looked Indian, see source link above.  The allegation is that the faces of the six evil men included generic Jewish features of the kind seen in propaganda from Nazi Germany.  I don't see that myself; the faces are all very different.  Two of them, the one of the far right and the one third from the left, look like old photographs of British colonial officials from the days of the Empire.  The one on the far left has a full beard that is more typically Russian.  The problem with the painting is most likely its conspiracy theoretical element.  As I say in the background links below, there is a paranoid hypersensitivity when it comes to linking conspiracy theory of any kind to hatred of Jews.  This serves a purpose for the people behind the conspiracy because it means their enemies are hampered by social degradation and marginalization.  Therefore the conspirators eagerly encourage this public hysteria.  However, in the background links I explain why it is, in the vast majority of cases, a false premise.  The New World Order is caused by the Illuminati, not the Jews.  I can't put it any simpler than that; there are no qualifiers to that statement. Corbyn was first pulled up by a Jewish MP, Luciana Berger, on Twitter (where else?). 

Corbyn backed down and about-turned. He said that Freedom for Humanity was 'deeply disturbing' and he now 'wholeheartedly supported its removal'.   He went on:  

'I sincerely regret that I did not look more closely at the image I was commenting on, the contents of which are deeply disturbing and anti-Semitic.'

As I've explained, the content of the mural is not anti-Semitic and there is information available to explain why that is in detail which I have produced myself. Corbyn should have known better than to believe that a grovelling public apology would save him from the standard and predictable hashtag barrage.  It would have been better to stand his ground and fight the anti-Semitism premise altogether.  If Mr Corbyn had approached me I would have coached him in this matter. The media lynch mob is currently in full swing;  the torches and pitchforks are being passed round. Jewish welfare groups under the influence of the Israeli lobby have taken the bait hook, line and sinker.  Corbyn is desperately trying to placate them, in vain.  As I said, it's an exercise in futility.  

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43536830. 

This is just the latest in a series of attempts to discredit the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn by his Blairite opponents within the Labour Party.  See here for details of the previous flare-up: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/is-ken-livingstone-nazi.html.  The only real anti-Semitism in the Labour Party comes from the radicalized Muslims that the government have been breeding for the last few decades through their sponsorship of Saudi-run mega-mosques and their agents posing at popular media hate-preachers, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/anjem-choudary-arrest-blocked-by-mi5.html. 

Corbyn is actually very similar to Donald Trump.  He would be deeply offended at my comparison, but I think it's accurate.  He is a man in a political office whom the does not want in that role.  They worked hard to keep him out of it.  They have since wavered between trying to remove him and trying to manage the situation with him remaining as leader.  Whenever the latter fails they try the former.  Corbyn's career prospects are not looking rosy.   A part of me thinks this is probably for the best; not because of Corbyn himself but because of the second echelon of Labour officials behind him, a posse of total blackguards who are currently trying to ride in his slipstream to their own positions of power.  If Corbyn becomes Prime Minister then it will only be for a few months before there is an et tu Brutus situation and then he'll be lying in the back benches with Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Diane Abbott's knives his back.  At the same time, anything that the real 'Evil Six!' from the painting do not want gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.  Thankfully the Jewish voice of reason has not gone silent in its hour of need. Jenny Manson of the Jewish Voice for Labour defended Corbyn and marvelled at the ingenuity of the media for smearing 'the most passionate anti-racist campaigner of the last forty years' as 'pro-racist and anti-Semitic.'  

 Source: https://evolvepolitics.com/the-jewish-voice-twitter-account-is-absolutely-destroying-the-medias-latest-corbyn-anti-semitism-smear-tweets/. I take my hat off to these people; they face abuse from other Jews for their stances. They were there for David Icke when he was in this position and I'm glad they are here again.

See here for background: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/jews.html.

And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/new-mural-in-oxford.html.

And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/is-david-icke-dangerous.html.

And: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/programme-188-podcast-jews.html.

Relevance of Immigration in the UK Referendum

by Les May

YESTERDAY the Home Affairs Select Committee chaired by Yvette Cooper launched an inquiry into developing a consensus on an effective immigration policy. 

She said, ‘Immigration is one of the most important issues facing our country and will be central to the Brexit deal. Britain voted for change, especially on free movement, but there has been very little debate about what kind of reforms or immigration control that should now mean or how we get the best deal for the country.’   

Which isn’t strictly true.  In the recent referendum the only question that was asked was whether or not we wanted to leave or stay in the European Union.  There was no question about immigration, the single market, or about the wider question of free movement of people, good, capital and services, so no politician has the right to infer anything from the vote other than that a majority of people voted to leave the EU. This isn’t sophistry, it’s just a fact.   

Fixating on immigration ignores all the other reasons why people may have chosen to vote ‘leave’. Is immigration a significant factor in the growth of inequality? Is it really the reason why some people are paying out a third of their disposable income to rent a house for which they have little security of tenure?  Is it really the reason why some people have become reliant on food banks to ward off starvation?  Is it really the reason that some people feel they have been ‘left behind’ by globalization?  

No! It’s not that ‘they’ have come here to steal our jobs, its that our companies have exported jobs to ‘them’ to line the pockets of CEOs.

In the 1980s the ‘Chicago school’ of economists argued that companies should be run for the benefit of the ‘owners’.  The natural consequence of this was that the proportion of money going to wage earners fell and that to shareholders increased.

 http://www.oecd.org/els/emp/EMO%202012%20Eng_Chapter%203.pdf  

One way of boosting profits still further is to export manufacturing jobs to low wage economies in the Far East.  Check out where your Dyson vacuum was made.   

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2752100/800-jobs-to-go-as-sad-Dyson-moves-factory-to-Far-East.html  

Whether you think that Cooper belongs to it or not there is a strand in the Labour party the best way to fight off a challenge from UKIP for the so called ‘Labour vote’ is to emulate UKIP and start parroting ‘something must be done about immigration’. The effect of this will be to let the Tories off the hook as architects of our present era of ‘casino capitalism’ where a few winners take all and the rest of us squabble about what is left. 

I’m told that Corbyn has never said anything to indicate that he has any time for ‘populism’.  The indications are that he, and Diane Abbot, will tackle UKIP’s populist policies head on.  But that could bring them into conflict with those in the Labour party who think the best way forward is to become a kind of ‘UKIP Lite’. 

In summer the writers of ‘think pieces’ were speculating that the Right and Left wings would end up fighting over the carcase of the Labour party.  But if the recent referendum told us anything it’s that people do not always feel bound by those traditional allegiances.  How long before those same writers are predicting the death of the Labour party as its splits into those who are willing to scapegoat immigrants to garner votes and those who are not?

Re-writing Clause 4 for Labour Party

by Les May

WHEN I was a member of the Labour party my membership card carried the then Clause 4 (part 4) which was just 56 words long. Had I pondered it closely I would have noticed two things.  It confuses 'ends' and 'means', and its not clear what the term 'common ownership' actually means. 

This had not gone unnoticed by Anthony Crosland and Hugh Gaitskell. Crosland developed his ideas in his 1956 book 'The Future of Socialism' in which he pointed out that Labour's 'ends' could be achieved without 'common ownership' a.k.a. 'nationalisation'. Gaitskell's desire to change Clause 4 in 1959 may well have been motivated more by a realisation that it was unlikely every to be implemented in full and he thought that Labour should say so. Certainly it was not an issue in the 1959 election which Labour had just lost. Nor does it appear to have been one of the reasons Labour lost the elections of 1970 and 1979.  

Whether Labour's victory in 1997 with Blair as leader can be attributed to the newly written Clause 4 which dropped mention of 'common ownership' is doubtful. A study published in The Independent in 1994 made no mention of nationalisation being a reason for Labour unexpectedly losing the 1992 election.

In 1993 Blair had authored a Fabian Society pamphlet which put forward a case for defining socialism in terms of a set of values which were constant, while the policies needed to achieve them would have to change to account for changing society. 
Superficially it looks as if Blair was simply following on from Crosland and Gaitskell. But there is one subtle difference. 

Both Crosland and Gaitskell had a strong belief in the importance of equality. Crosland in particular developed the idea that 'equality' as not just about income and wealth. It included a more equal distribution of power, of equality of treatment by public bodies and institutions, and a more equal education system, though with its line about 'equitable distribution' Clause 4 was itself not clear on this. For both Crosland and Gaitskell 'equality' meant 'Equality of Outcome'.  
That's not what the New Labour version of Clause 4 said. It referred only to the fact that a just society promotes 'Equality of Opportunity'. That's no longer a policy exclusive to New Labour, the Tories say it too and the Lib-Dems used to say it until Clegg began to use the phrase 'social mobility' as something of a synonym.   
In 1996, Yvette Cooper wrote an article for 'The Independent on Sunday' which set out what 'equality' meant to New Labour and it is still worth reading as a summary of the New Labour project. In 2015 we are now able to see what twenty years of 'Equality of Opportunity' has got us apart from Blair and Mandelson taking the opportunity to make fortunes.  
Not everyone thinks that outcomes don't matter.  The Equality Trust has compiled figures showing the scale of inequality.  People in the bottom 10% of the population have on average a net income of £8,468.  The top 10% have net incomes almost ten times that (£79,042).  In this context 'net' means after direct taxes have been deducted and before benefits have been added. Inequality is much higher amongst original income than net income with the poorest 10% having on average an original income of £3,738 whilst the top 10% have an original income of £102,366 on average, which demonstrates the impact of redistribution on equality.  Wealth (property, shares, land etc) is even more unequally divided than income. The richest 10% of households hold 44% of all wealth.  The poorest 50%, by contrast, own just 9.5%. 
Income and wealth are quantifiable but twenty years on we find that there has been a qualitative change too. Whilst in 1996 Labour still defined itself as a 'left-of-centre' party it now sees itself as being in a fight for the 'centre ground' of politics.  
In their day both Crosland and Gaitskell were seen as 'right wing'.  (Mandelson's grandad, Herbert Morrison, was seen as even more 'right wing' and he masterminded the nationalisation of basic industries in the post 1945 Attlee government.)  Both would have welcomed a rewording of the original Clause 4. But I don't think either of them would have been foolish enough to 'throw the baby out with the bathwater'.  Time perhaps for a redrafting of Clause 4 to reflect some of the spirit of the original? :  
'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.'  http://www.labourcounts.com/clausefour.htm
 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/exclusive-how-did-labour-lose-in-92-the-most-authoritative-study-of-the-last-general-election-is-published-tomorrow-here-its-authors-present-their-conclusions-and-explode-the-myths-about-the-greatest-upset-since-1945-1439286.html http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/dec/02/david-cameron-boris-johnson-iq http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2012/01/19/cameron-s-moral-capitalism-speech-in-full  
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair/11547808/Revealed-how-Tony-Blair-makes-his-millions.html  
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair/11670425/Revealed-Tony-Blair-worth-a-staggering-60m.html  
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/8714791/Mandelson-poised-to-buy-8m-home.html  
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9514481/Lord-Mandelson-follows-Tony-Blairs-global-wealth-strategy.html 
https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk

Media Silence on Libyan Connection!

Posted by The Editors on August 14, 2015, 10:31 am

Lexis finds 2,040 articles mentioning Yvette Cooper in the last month. Not one of these mentions her support for the war that wrecked Libya. Lexis finds 2,453 articles mentioning Andy Burnham in the last month. Not one of these mentions his support for the war that wrecked Libya. Lexis finds 1,855 articles mentioning Liz Kendall in the last month. Not one of these mentions her support for the war that wrecked Libya. Maybe it's just us: illegal regime change, mass killing, ethnic cleansing, mass torture, disappearances, fragmented militia rule, near-complete economic and social chaos, 100,000s of refugees, many of them drowning in the Mediterranean - you'd think it would feature. Especially as Corbyn voted against.  It says a lot about the fanatical discipline of the 'free press' that no-one has discussed it in any newspaper - it's a very recent war crime and the consequences ('migrants') have been covered heavily by the press this summer.  But the unwritten media agreement with politics, as we know, is that no matter how many people our politicians kill abroad, the issue doesn't feature in domestic elections. Even though it matters hugely to many voters, and even though it has obvious implications for future killing. For example, the unwritten rule allows the Guardian and Telegraph to endorse Cooper in the full knowledge that she'll support more war crimes. They care so much about the 'responsibility to protect' - they could start by discussing political candidates' penchant for killing. Check here for voting record: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mps/  Sent in by Trevor Hoyle

Why Burnham, Cooper and Kendall should lose.

by Les May

THIS is not a paean of praise to Jeremy Corbyn.  If it were it would be headed 'Why Corbyn deserves to win', and it isn't.  I am delighted that Corbyn was nominated.  Not because I think he is a future prime minister, he is too old, but because the support he has received may re-energise younger and like minded MPs if there are still any left in the Labour party. 

Inevitably the present leadership contest is being presented as a battle between the 'Right' and 'Left' wings or the Labour party.  On second thoughts it's not. It is being presented as a battle between the 'Centre' and the 'Hard Left'. 

A battle for the 'soul' of the Labour party isn't a new phenomenon.  We've seen it all before.  We hear dire warnings that Corbyn will return Labour to the days of Tony Benn and Gerald Kaufman's comment that the 1983 manifesto was 'the longest suicide note in history'.  As we know that verdict was a bit premature and Labour survives to give a couple of hundred Labour MPs rather a good living, and they want to keep it that way, preferably without too much interference from the members and the unions. 

But those of us old enough to be a drain on the benefits system remember the late 1950s and early sixties.  Labour had just lost the third election in a row and it was argued that a fourth defeat would be terminal.  Unlike today there was little criticism of the leader, Hugh Gaitskell, who was generally thought to have performed well in the 1959 election. 

Gaitskell was rather bright and realised that Clause 4 confused ends (equitable distribution of the fruits of labour) and means (common ownership, a.k.a. nationalisation).  In other words a Labour government could achieve its aims without an explicit commitment to further nationalisation.  For younger readers I will mention that the three industries mentioned by Corbyn, railways, gas and electricity, were all publicly owned at the time. 

Although nationalisation has sometimes been seen just as an article of faith for some members of the Labour party, Gaitskell had a well thought out and more sophisticated view.  Recognising that the money to fund a social program has to come from somewhere he thought that the profits generated by publicly owned industries should go towards funding a Labour government's social program.  But a party can commit itself to an equitable distribution of the fruits of labour without explicitly committing itself to public ownership in which case it will have to fund its social program through taxation. 

The first of these I would call the 'socialist' model and the second the 'social democratic' model. 

Gaitskell was not alone in thinking that Clause 4, unchanged since it was drafted in 1918, was always going to provide a weapon for the Tories at election time because they could claim it meant Labour was intent on nationalising everything.  (That's different from today when it is nominally Labour MPs like Tory Lite Simon Danczuk who use the same tactic against Corbyn.)  Nye Bevan had explicitly rejected this in 1952 and suggested that a mixed economy was what most people would prefer.  He rejected it again in 1959. But whilst Bevan came to be seen as the darling of the 'Left', Gaitskell went down in Labour mythology as being on the 'Right' of the party. 

So what did Gaitskell see as appropriate aims for the Labour party?  At the 1959 party conference he set out seven basic principles: concern for the worst-off; social justice; a classless society; equality of all races and peoples; belief in human relations 'based on fellowship and cooperation'; precedence of public over private interest; freedom and democratic self government.

I believe these are just as relevant today as when Gaitskell set them out fifty six years ago. But how many of the present incumbents of the Labour benches would proclaim ALL of them.  How many of the leadership contenders would be willing to fight an election on them?  How many of them are willing to defend the last Labour government's record on spending to deliver its social program via the social democratic model.

With nearly five years to go before the next election and plenty of time both to formulate a coherent social program and for the Tories to fall over their own feet as they did under Macmillan in the early sixties and under Major in the mid nineties, I find the decision to abstain from voting on the Tories welfare bill incomprehensible.  I can only assume that the MPs who did are content to let the huge inequalities in our society continue forever. 

Personally I don't mind if Labour wants to follow the socialist model or the social democratic model, but for heavens sake choose one of them and stop trying to pretend that Tory policies represent the 'Centre' ground.  

Even for people who think Corbyn is too 'Left wing' or dislike his stance on Trident, there is a huge amount of ground to the 'Right' of him upon which Labour once stood and which has been abandoned. That is why Burnham, Cooper and Kendall deserve to lose. 

Postscript:  If you are thinking of calling me 'ageist' for saying Corbyn is too old don't bother for two reasons.  The first is I'll conclude you are an idiot, the second is that I'm a non-decrepit seventy three year old whose walked about 900 kilometres in each of the last six years, so I know what I'm talking about.