Politics

The World Socialist website noted in March that Jeremy Corbyn had deleted hundreds of articles and speeches spanning decades, from his own web site.

The World Socialist argued it was to conceal his previous opposition to the EU. That may be so, and it fits because as I have said before, it seemed clear to me during the referendum campaign that he was lukewarm at best over his support for remaining in the EU.

And it was obvious when immediately after the result he was quick to close the door and say that there was no going back from the vote on Brexit.

But there is another article he deleted from his website. It was there when I first looked, and then later it was gone.

Gone, but not lost.

Thanks to the Internet Archive, a non-profit site that has indexed over fifty billion pages, you can read articles from current and defunct websites that would otherwise be lost forever.

Here is Corbyn’s article on Palestine that starts with a sentence that describes, as he puts it, the “running sore of the illegal occupation”.

Want to see the text without accessing the webarchive? It’s at CloudUp Corbyn and you can read it there.

Other Articles

There are other articles on Palestine and Gaza that Corbyn cannot delete. He cannot delete them because they are not on his website. They are on The Morning Star newspaper web site, to which he has been a long-time contributor.

In article after article, Corbyn makes a pretty damning case against Israel – everything from screaming warplanes to snipers shooting old men in wheelchairs. And woven in is praise for Hamas.

I looked through his articles on the Morning Star and I found one article critical of Saudi Arabia and one article critical of what was happening in the Congo.

But the greatest number of articles by far, are about Israel and critical of Israel. He sees nothing good in Israel, only something to condemn.

By only writing about Israel and not about all the other countries around the world about which he could speak, I know that under all that righteous anger, he is antisemitic.

He says at some points that he is right to speak about Israel because of Britain’s role in helping to establish Israel.  I don’t think that is much of a reason given the number of countries in which Britain has played a role. But even given that logic, what makes Britain’s role the benchmark about what injustices (as he sees them) he should write about and speak about?

I think it is a smokescreen for his hatred of Jews – one that he may not be able to admit to himself. I don’t know what he thinks of Jews at an individual level, one person speaking to one person. But as a group I think he sees them through the eyes of his version of the playing out of world history, and thus condemns them.

One-Party State

I see a quote in an article in the New Statesman from August 2015 where Paul Anderson, a former editor of the socialist weekly Tribune says that the Morning Star

..runs articles extolling the virtues of single-party ‘socialist’ states on a regular basis – North Korea, Cuba, China, Vietnam. Its default position on just about everything happening in the world is that anything any western power supports – but particularly the United States – must be opposed, which has led to it cheering on Putin, Hamas, Assad and a lot of other real nasties.

I think that is where Corbyn’s heart lies, towards that single-party State.

Stills is a photographic centre in Edinburgh. You can develop and print film there, attend courses on photography and design, and see what’s on in the gallery.

At the moment there is an exhibition of the life and work of the photographer Jo Spence, who was born in London 1934 and died in 1992.

She was merciless on herself and spent a lifetime examining her relationship with her mother and with the way society manages us. When she fell ill with breast cancer she documented what happened and how she was treated by the NHS.

She did phototherapy sessions with other photographers. One would act out a meaningful part of their life and the other would photograph it.

Jo did a series of herself as her mother, with all the aspects of that persona that Jo saw over the years. And she did a series of herself as a bride, and as a child, and as a woman investigating a hoover.

When she was 45 she started a degree course in Film and Photographic Arts at the Central London Polytechnic.

There she and Mary Ann Kennedy, Jane Munro, and Charlotte Pembrey formed a photography group known as the Polysnappers.

Amd their degree show was a series of panels on the subject of the politics of representation. You can see that in the image at the top of this article.

They combined commentary with bits cut out of newspapers and magazines, and the theme was clear: What is acceptable and desirable is pushed at us relentlessly. The task is to decode the message and know who is pushing it.

One panel caught my eye – and it is not directly on the theme of the politicisation of representation, but about photography and art.

There is a quote by Bill Jay that turns on its head some of the arguments about the second-class cinderella that is photography.

There is no doubt that art-photographers in America consider themselves a breed apart – one higher on the evolutionary scale of the medium – than photography in other fields. I remember discussing a set of documentary photographs with a critic and an historian who ended the conversation, to his satisfaction with the remark: ‘But of course they are not art’.

I agreed, which rather took him aback. ‘No’, I said, at their best such photographs are culturally, socially and historically more important than art…’ Why should anyone assume that Art is at the apex of a cultural pyramid and, by extension, anything that is not art is therefore less important?

…Photographers, then, have a cultural and social inferiority complex that is manifested in adolescent belligerency, an egomania that threatens to destroy the medium.

The country is running on empty.

Forget what you’ve heard about the English classes being defined by culture and leisure-time pursuits.

The classes in England are defined by money.

If it was hidden by a smoke-screen in earlier generations, it is naked now.

The solid middle class might have to pull their belts in a notch in times of economic austerity, but they will be able to sail to safety in the lifeboat of their cash savings. Not that I blame them – let’s be clear. This is just about people surviving as best they can in a fragmented society.

Available cash is what marks the middle class from the lower-middle class below them.

The lower-middle class has the aspirations and some of the jobs, but they don’t have the cash. They exist on borrowed money. Their greatest fear is to lose their house. Their mortgages are what keep them compliant.

I didn’t mention the working class. There isn’t any working class any more. As soon as the Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Right To Buy’ scheme gave Council tenants the right to buy their rented property, the working class disappeared. They are now the lower-middle class.

Well of course there are true working class people – people with nothing to protect and only their labour to give. But they don’t constitute a class now because they are too marginalised even to recognise one another.

Mark Carney On Bank Stress Tests

Shortly after the EU Referendum vote the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, sat on a panel and explained the stress tests that British banks were dealing with in the aftermath of Brexit. I listened to the whole thing – an hour of it.

If you want to listen to it, it’s on the Bank Of England website under Publications/Financial Stability

He said the banks are able to deal with twice as much stress as they faced in the days following Brexit. And they can deal with any future shocks.

A bit previous, as you might say, is what I thought. Let’s see what the situation is in six months or a year. Brett might be a slow burn.

He also said that banks needed to make credit available.

And now I have just read the August paper from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. It starts with a quote about the blues from Gil Scott-Heron, so it can’t be all bad.

It concludes that these are risky times, but financial markets worldwide continue to have an appetite for holding UK debt. And it says that banks need to make credit available.

As I said, we have a pseudo-middle class living on borrowed money. Mark Carney didn’t argue when one of the audience asked what he meant about banks extending credit given that the ratio of average debt to available income in the UK is 132%.

And if the average is 132%, think how high it must be for some people.

That can’t go on forever. I mean, seriously, how can it just trundle on?

And if you are in the ‘poor’ sector of the population, how can you even think about getting credit from a high-street source?

Mortgage Relief On Buy-To-Let Properties

Did you see how the Government took away the tax relief on mortgages on buy-to-let properties? That’s going to put the squeeze on those landlords who can only make their sums work when they get that relief.

They will have to sell the properties, and then those with real free cash will buy up the properties. Meanwhile, slowly but surely, those who bought their Council houses will lose their properties and the gap between the rich and the poor will widen yet more.

It really is the Enclosure Acts for the twenty-first Century.

Meanwhile the new Prime Minister talks about making this a society that is fairer and includes us all. Well I shouldn’t bitch before I see how it plays out, but I have my doubts.

My Take On This

You know the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned? Well it seems to me that the one thing that is not taken into account in these bank stress tests is when the pips start speaking for enough people to do more than just complain.

I really shouldn’t go on about this much more, because remember that we (the UK, that is) voted for the Conservatives a second time after complaining for five years that they were terrible.

We railed against their inhumanity. We asked how they could tip invalids out on the street and deny them benefits. We said it was an attack on the three pillars of the Welfare State – health, education, and housing.

And then we (the UK, that is) voted for them again.

And what did we learn? We learned that when push came to shove, we voted for ‘I’m alright Jack and let someone else suffer.’ And all that complaining was just hot air.

So maybe Britain is genuinely immune from any action to adjust society to a fairer, more inclusive version.

United By Faith and Informed By Science

My wife pointed out that Theresa May is the daughter of a vicar and Angela Merkel is the daughter of a theologian. What insights they must have into each other – something that not a lot of other politicians can share.

And did you know that Angela Merkel was a research scientist before going into politics. She holds a Doctor of Natural Sciences for her thesis on quantum chemistry, and worked as a researcher and published several papers.

I am a sucker for education.

The experts never had a chance against the threat of the immigrant in the room.

It truly didn’t matter how much the experts told Middle England the economy would tank if Britain left the EU. All Middle England heard was that leaving would stop those bloody immigrants and that’s what mattered.

Yes, they can allow London to be a melting pot. But Middle England doesn’t want immigrants messing up its vision of English life in the provinces.

The immigrant in the room is OK as long as the immigrant is in someone else’s room.

How can you counter that when the free movement of people is a fundamental pillar of the EU?

With hindsight, the architects of the EU might agree that the idea of the free movement of people is flawed.

They might recognise that giving people the right to work anywhere in the EU doesn’t take account of the fact that people are not just workers, they are people.

With hindsight they might see that people are not nomads floating like specks of dust to the nearest work hotspot.

In fact, say the Left, that was the idea. Corporations want to treat workers as faceless, replaceable units.

Jeremy Corbyn thinks the EU is a creature of corporations who use it to outflank collective bargaining.

When a workforce isn’t playing ball, both sides know that threatening to move production to Poland is a hollow threat but importing Polish workers who will work for less pay is a real threat.

Game, set, and match.

Corbyn Got What He Wanted

That’s why Corbyn made such an obvious dog’s breakfast of saying the opposite.

It was patently obvious during the lead up to the referendum that he was at war with his own Cabinet.

First he tried hiding in small venues up and down the country. Then he came out and delivered his message with such reluctance that anyone wondering where he stood could see he had a gun to his back.

Corbyn was sly by winking to his audience to tell them he was being forced to take a line he didn’t agree with.

The risk he ran, and the race he still has to run is whether he came across as muddled at best and disingenuous at worst – or whether with the old cadre gone he can forge a new face for Labour.

Personally I don’t like what he did. By all means be disingenuous with your political opponents. But don’t do it to your audience.

Nigel Farage sensed the zeitgeist; he knew what bigotry there was in the heartland of England. He knew he could swing enough votes to make a difference. He just didn’t imagine it would be enough to swing the decision.

So when Corbyn’s tactic coincided with the Middle England anti-immigrant voice, it created a storm that took the Leave campaign over the finish line – to everyone’s surprise.

Corbyn got what he wanted – and we are out of the EU. He was very quick to say there was no backtracking from that.

So where are we now?

Corbyn thought the overwhelmingly important issues for the populace were fair working conditions and a fair society.

It turns out that immigration of the ‘because they’re different’ kind was the most important decider for a lot of voters.

The elephant in the room after the referendum is still the question of immigration.

So now we have Corbyn’s version of the Left against Farage’s version of the Right. It’s a contest that Europe has seen before.

Strangely, the marginalised group are the moderate Conservatives.

Coda

Things are moving so rapidly that by the time I hit Publish, Corbyn may be either undisputed leader or out of the race entirely.