[skinster]

Delegates to the recent Labour Party conference in the English seaside town of Brighton seemed not to notice a video playing in the main entrance. The world’s third biggest arms manufacturer, BAe Systems, supplier to Saudi Arabia, was promoting its guns, bombs, missiles, naval ships and fighter aircraft.

It seemed a perfidious symbol of a party in which millions of Britons now invest their political hopes. Once the preserve of Tony Blair, it is led today by Jeremy Corbyn, whose career has been very different from Blair’s and is rare in British establishment politics.

Addressing the Labour conference, the campaigner Naomi Klein described the rise of Corbyn as “part of a global phenomenon. We saw it in Bernie Sanders’ historic campaign in the US primaries, powered by millennials who know that safe centrist politics offers them no kind of safe future.”

In fact, at the end of the US primary elections last year, Sanders led his followers into the arms of Hillary Clinton, a liberal warmonger from a long tradition in the Democratic Party.

As President Obama’s Secretary of State, Clinton presided over the invasion of Libya in 2011, which led to a stampede of refugees to Europe. She gloated notoriously at the gruesome murder of Libya’s president. Two years earlier, she signed off on a coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras. That she has been invited to Wales on 14 October to be given an honorary doctorate by the University of Swansea because she is “synonymous with human rights” is unfathomable.

Like Clinton, Sanders is a cold-warrior and an “anti-communist” obsessive with a proprietorial view of the world beyond the United States. He supported Bill Clinton’s and Tony Blair’s illegal assault on Yugoslavia in 1998 and the invasions of Afghanistan, Syria and Libya, as well as Barack Obama's campaign of terrorism by drone. He backs the provocation of Russia and agrees that the whistleblower Edward Snowden should stand trial. He has called the late Hugo Chavez – a social democrat who won multiple elections - "a dead communist dictator".

While Sanders is a familiar liberal politician, Corbyn may well be a phenomenon, with his indefatigable support for the victims of American and British imperial adventures and for popular resistance movements.

For example, in the 1960s and 70s, the Chagos islanders were expelled from their homeland, a British colony in the Indian Ocean, by a Labour government. An entire population was kidnapped. The aim was to make way for a US military base on the main island of Diego Garcia: a secret deal for which the British were “compensated” with a discount of $14 million off the price of a Polaris nuclear submarine.

I have had much to do with the Chagos islanders and have filmed them in exile in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they suffered and grieved and some of them “died from sadness”, as I was told. They found a political champion in a Labour Member of Parliament, Jeremy Corbyn.

So did the Palestinians. So did Iraqis terrorised by a Labour prime minister’s invasion of their country in 2003. So did others struggling to break free from the designs of western power. Corbyn supported the likes of Hugo Chavez, who brought more than hope to societies subverted by the US behemoth.

And yet, now that Corbyn is closer to power than he might have ever imagined, his foreign policy remains a secret.

By secret, I mean there has been rhetoric and little else. “We must put our values at the heart of our foreign policy,” said Corbyn at the Labour conference. But what are these “values”?

Since 1945, like the Tories, British Labour has been an imperial party, obsequious to Washington and with a record exemplified by the crime in the Chagos islands.
What has changed? Is Jeremy Corbyn saying Labour will uncouple itself from the US war machine, and the US spying apparatus and US economic blockades that scar humanity?

His shadow Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry, says a Corbyn government “will put human rights back at the heart of Britain’s foreign policy”. But human rights have never been at the heart of British foreign policy -- only “interests”, as Lord Palmerston declared in the 19th century: the interests of those at the apex of British society.

Thornberry quoted the late Robin Cook who, as Tony Blair’s first Foreign Secretary in 1997, pledged an “ethical foreign policy” that would “make Britain once again a force for good in the world”.

History is not kind to imperial nostalgia. The recently commemorated division of India by a Labour government in 1947 – with a border hurriedly drawn up by a London barrister, Gordon Radcliffe, who had never been to India and never returned – led to blood-letting on a genocidal scale.

Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day

Patrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away,

He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate

Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date

And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,

But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect

Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,

And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,

But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,

A continent for better or worse divided.

W.H. Auden, ‘Partition’.

It was the same Labour government (1945--51), led by Prime Minister Clement Attlee – “radical” by today’s standards -- that dispatched General Douglas Gracey’s British imperial army to Saigon with orders to re-arm the defeated Japanese in order to prevent Vietnamese nationalists from liberating their own country. Thus, the longest war of the century was ignited.

It was a Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, whose policy of “mutuality” and “partnership” with some of the world’s most vicious despots, especially in the Middle East, forged relationships that endure today, often sidelining and crushing the human rights of whole communities and societies. The cause was British “interests” – oil, power, wealth.

In the “radical” 1960s, Labour’s Defence Secretary, Denis Healey, set up the Defence Sales Organisation (DSO) specifically to boost the arms trade and make money from selling lethal weapons to the world. Healey told Parliament, “While we attach the highest importance to making progress in the field of arms control and disarmament, we must also take what practical steps we can to ensure that this country does not fail to secure its rightful share of this valuable market.”

The doublethink was quintessentially Labour.

When I later asked Healey about this “valuable market”, he claimed his decision made no difference to the volume of military exports. In fact, it led to an almost doubling of Britain’s share of the arms market. Today, Britain is the second biggest arms dealer on earth, selling arms and fighter planes, machine guns and “riot control” vehicles, to 22 of the 30 countries on the British Government’s own list of human rights violators.

Will this cease under a Corbyn government? The preferred model - Robin Cook’s “ethical foreign policy” – is revealing. Like Jeremy Corbyn, Cook made his name as a backbencher and critic of the arms trade. “Wherever weapons are sold,” wrote Cook, “there is a tacit conspiracy to conceal the reality of war” and “it is a truism that every war for the past two decades has been fought by poor countries with weapons supplied by rich countries”.

Cook singled out the sale of British Hawk fighters to Indonesia as “particularly disturbing”. Indonesia “is not only repressive but actually at war on two fronts: in East Timor, where perhaps a sixth of the population has been slaughtered … and in West Papua, where it confronts an indigenous liberation movement”.

As Foreign Secretary, Cook promised “a thorough review of arms sales”. The then Nobel Peace Laureate, Bishop Carlos Belo of East Timor, appealed directly to Cook: “Please, I beg you, do not sustain any longer a conflict which without these arms sales could never have been pursued in the first place and not for so very long.” He was referring to Indonesia’s bombing of East Timor with British Hawks and the slaughter of his people with British machine guns. He received no reply.

The following week Cook called journalists to the Foreign Office to announce his “mission statement” for “human rights in a new century”. This PR event included the usual private briefings for selected journalists, including the BBC, in which Foreign Office officials lied that there was “no evidence” that British Hawk aircraft were deployed in East Timor.

A few days later, the Foreign Office issued the results of Cook’s “thorough review” of arms sales policy. “It was not realistic or practical,” wrote Cook, “to revoke licences which were valid and in force at the time of Labour’s election victory”. Suharto’s Minister for Defence, Edi Sudradjat, said that talks were already under way with Britain for the purchase of 18 more Hawk fighters. “The political change in Britain will not affect our negotiations,” he said. He was right.

Today, replace Indonesia with Saudi Arabia and East Timor with Yemen. British military aircraft – sold with the approval of both Tory and Labour governments and built by the firm whose promotional video had pride of place at the Labour Party conference – are bombing the life out of Yemen, one of the most impoverished countries in the world, where half the children are malnourished and there is the greatest cholera epidemic in modern times.

Hospitals and schools, weddings and funerals have been attacked. In Ryadh, British military personnel are reported to be training the Saudis in selecting targets.

In Labour’s 2017 manifesto, Jeremy Corbyn and his party colleagues promised that “Labour will demand a comprehensive, independent, UN-led investigation into alleged violations … in Yemen, including air strikes on civilians by the Saudi-led coalition. We will immediately suspend any further arms sales for use in the conflict until that investigation is concluded.”

But the evidence of Saudi Arabia’s crimes in Yemen is already documented by Amnesty and others, notably by the courageous reporting of the British journalist Iona Craig. The dossier is voluminous.

Labour does not promise to stop arms exports to Saudi Arabia. It does not say Britain will withdraw its support for governments responsible for the export of Islamist jihadism. There is no commitment to dismantle the arms trade.

The manifesto describes a “special relationship [with the US] based on shared values … When the current Trump administration chooses to ignore them … we will not be afraid to disagree”.

As Jeremy Corbyn knows, dealing with the US is not about merely “disagreeing”. The US is a rapacious, rogue power that ought not to be regarded as a natural ally of any state championing human rights, irrespective of whether Trump or anyone else is President.

When Emily Thornberry linked Venezuela with the Philippines as “increasingly autocratic regimes” – slogans bereft of contextual truth and ignoring the subversive US role in Venezuela -- she was consciously playing to the enemy: a tactic with which Jeremy Corbyn will be familiar.

A Corbyn government will allow the Chagos islanders the right of return. But Labour says nothing about renegotiating the 50-year renewal agreement that Britain has just signed with the US allowing it to use the base on Diego Garcia from which it has bombed Afghanistan and Iraq.

A Corbyn government will “immediately recognise the state of Palestine”. But it is silent on whether Britain will continue to arm Israel, continue to acquiesce in the illegal trade in Israel’s illegal “settlements” and continue to treat Israel merely as a warring party, rather than as an historic oppressor given immunity by Washington and London.

On Britain’s support for Nato’s current war preparations, Labour boasts that the “last Labour government spent above the benchmark of 2 per cent of GDP” on Nato. It says, “Conservative spending cuts have put Britain’s security at risk” and promises to boost Britain’s military “obligations”.

In fact, most of the £40 billion Britain currently spends on the military is not for territorial defence of the UK but for offensive purposes to enhance British “interests” as defined by those who have tried to smear Jeremy Corbyn as unpatriotic.

If the polls are reliable, most Britons are well ahead of their politicians, Tory and Labour. They would accept higher taxes to pay for public services; they want the National Health Service restored to full health. They want decent jobs and wages and housing and schools; they do not hate foreigners but resent exploitative labour. They have no fond memory of an empire on which the sun never set.

They oppose the invasion of other countries and regard Blair as a liar. The rise of Donald Trump has reminded them what a menace the United States can be, especially with their own country in tow.

The Labour Party is the beneficiary of this mood, but many of its pledges – certainly in foreign policy – are qualified and compromised, suggesting, for many Britons, more of the same.

Jeremy Corbyn is widely and properly recognised for his integrity; he opposes the renewal of Trident nuclear weapons; the Labour Party supports it. But he has given shadow cabinet positions to pro-war MPs who support Blairism, and tried to get rid of him and abused him as “unelectable”.

“We are the political mainstream now,” says Corbyn. Yes, but at what price?
http://mailchi.mp/johnpilger/the-rising ... 20411fda17

[mikema63]

“We are the political mainstream now,” says Corbyn. Yes, but at what price?

Generally the price is "selling out" so that enough people vote for you and you actually win.

A lot of hay has been made about corbyn but I'm pretty skeptical about some of the hopeful idealism I hear from some people about him. I think if he wins he's going to end up disappointing the left, but that's just the general sense I get and I'm a pessimist.

(also, my spell checker wants to change his name to corncob. It's not relevant, but it amused me.)

[Sivad]

A lot of hay has been made about corbyn but I'm pretty skeptical about some of the hopeful idealism I hear from some people about him. I think if he wins he's going to end up disappointing the left, but that's just the general sense I get and I'm a pessimist.

That's been the trend all across the West, from Obama to Hollande to Tsipris. They all betrayed their left base.

France’s President Hollande: An Imperial Collaborator Flushed down the Toilet

President Francois Hollande’s tenure was not far behind the FARC’s betrayal. Elected President of France in 2012 under the Socialist Party, he promised to ‘tax the rich’ by 75%, extend and deepen workers’ rights, reduce unemployment, revive bankrupt industries, prevent capitalist flight and end France’s military intervention in Third World countries.

After a brief flirtation with his campaign rhetoric, President Hollande went on a pro-business and militarist rampage against his voters:

First, he deregulated business relations with labor, making it easier and quicker to fire workers.

Second, he reduced business taxes by $40 billion Euros.

Third, he imposed and then extended a draconian state of emergency following a terrorist incident. This included the banning of strikes by workers protesting his anti-labor legislation and the double-digit unemployment rate.

Fourth, Hollande launched or promoted a series of imperial wars in the Middle East and North and Central Africa.

France under Francois Hollande initiated the NATO bombing of Libya, the murder of President Gadhafi, the total destruction of that nation and the uprooting of millions of Libyans and sub-Saharan African workers. This led to a massive flood of terrified refugees across the Mediterranean and into Europe with tens of thousands drowning in the process.

President Holland’s neo-colonial project oversaw the expansion of French troops into Mali (destabilized by the destruction of Libya) and the Central African Republic.

A clear promoter of genocide, Hollande sold arms and sent ‘advisers’ to support Saudi Arabia’s grotesque war against impoverished Yemen.

President Hollande joined the US mercenary invasion of Syria, allowing some of France’s finest nascent jihadis to join in the slaughter. His colonial ambitions have resulted in the flight of millions of refugees into Europe and other regions.

By the end of his term of office in 2017, Holland’s popularity had declined to 4%, the lowest level of electoral approval of any President in French history! The only rational move he undertook in his entire regime was to not seek re-election.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras: ‘Traitor of the Year’

Despite the stiff competition from other infamous leftist traitors around the world, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras wins the ‘Global Traitor of the Year’ award.

Tsipras deserves the label of ‘Global Traitor’ because:

1) He made the quickest and most brutal turn from left to right than any of his venal competitors.

2) He supported Greece’s subjugation to the dictates of the Brussels oligarchs privatization demands, agreeing to sell its entire national patrimony, including its infrastructure, islands, mines, beaches, museums, ports and transports etc.

3) He decreed the sharpest reduction of pensions, salaries and minimum wages in European history, while drastically increasing the cost of health care, hospitalization and drugs. He increased VAT, (consumer taxes) and tax on island imports and farm income while ‘looking the other way’ with rich tax evaders.

4) Tsipras is the only elected leader to convoke a referendum on harsh EU conditions, receive a massive mandate to reject the EU plan and then turn around and betray the Greek voters in less than a week. He even accepted more severe conditions than the original EU demands!

5) Tsipras reversed his promises to oppose EU sanctions against Russia and withdrew Greece’s historic support for the Palestinians. He signed a billion-dollar oil and gas deal with Israel which grabbed oil fields off the Gaza and Lebanon coast. Tsipras refused to oppose the US -EU bombing of Syria, and Libya - both former allies of Greece.

Tsipras, as the leader of the supposedly ‘radical left’ SYRIZA Party, leaped from left to right in the wink of an eye.
Deceit, Betrayal and the Left: The ‘Traitor of the Year Award’

[Nonsense]

IMHO, CORBYN is a FRAUD, as the saying goes, " You can fool some of the people, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time".

Well, when you have a 'Guru', along with young naïve followers, like 'religion', they wax lyrical nonsense in adherence to the 'leader' & his message.

In short, he is pulling the wool over their eyes, he would say that, like 'Jesus' or the, Pied Piper of Hamelin, he never called them unto him, they just followed the message that he spouted.

He is proof positive that, you can fool 'IDIOTS' ALL of the time, even well-meaning ones.

That aside, he will not deliver, for one simple reason, he NEVER speaks up in parliament about how the 'welfare reform' AKA '' AUSTERITY' that euphemism for waging economic war against those who are elderly, disabled ,or incapable(often as a result of their fecklessness) or circumstances out of their control, is affecting MILLIONS of people as a DIRECT 'POLITICAL' DECISION TO WAS THAT WAR AGAINST CERTAIN SECTIONS OF THE POPULATION.

The above was a matter of political choice, the economic mess that we are now in has happened since Labour lost power & is the CONSEQUENCE of letting the TORIES regain power thanks to that 'Liberal' idiot who thinks that in order to thwart BREXIT, it's OK to vote Labour or Tory.

In so doing, he is confirming his STUPIDITY by stating that voting 'Liberal ' is a proposition to be avoided, Ha, Ha, Ha, that must be one for that other 'Liberal' JERK, Vince CABLE.

I believe that CORBYN will win the next election, I would hope that he nationalise the utility companies, but he will have to issue 'rights' of ownership to everyone, otherwise the Tories will privatise them again at the first opportunity.

Just remember this, the TORIES have ruined our economy, that's a FACT, just compare the FACTS with when Labour were last in power.

[skinster]

More on the conference:

Palestine was the issue at Labour Party conference

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn received his longest and loudest standing ovation at his party’s conference when he called for an “end to the oppression of the Palestinian people” and Israel’s “50-year occupation and illegal settlement expansion.”

This was just one of the ways popular support for Palestinian rights was highly visible at the main UK opposition party’s annual gathering last week.

After some uncertainty last year, when Corbyn spoke at a Labour Friends of Israel reception, the Labour leader appeared to be more confident on the question of Palestine.

Corbyn’s better than expected performance in June’s general election fell just short of making him prime minister, but it did consolidate his control of the Labour Party leadership.

Left-wing magazine Red Pepper reported a new spirit of democratic debate at the conference, and clear signs that “the left has emphatically won Labour’s civil war.”

The other major arrival on the scene at this year’s conference was Jewish Voice for Labour, the new organization which opposes “attempts to widen the definition of anti-Semitism beyond its meaning of hostility towards or discrimination against Jews as Jews.”

The launch of the group was a direct challenge to the Jewish Labour Movement, a pro-Israel organization which has played a key role in a witch hunt aiming to misrepresent the Labour Party as “institutionally anti-Semitic.”

While the Israeli embassy’s allies at the conference were no doubt silently fuming, the mood among delegates was unmistakable – for Palestinian freedom and against Israeli occupation.

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, a veteran Palestine campaigner and a leading member of Jewish Voice for Labour, also received a standing ovation.

imborne-Idrissi was cheered by delegates in the packed Brighton conference center when she called for an end to Israeli occupation, “as a Jew, as an anti-racist and as a dedicated member of this revived socialist, internationalist Labour Party. And comrades, I’m not an anti-Semite!”

Since Corbyn was elected leader two years ago, the party has faced an almost entirely manufactured “anti-Semitism crisis.”

This panic has been led by an ad hoc alliance of the right-wing press, embittered anti-Corbyn Labour lawmakers and lobby groups within the party that are closely tied to the Israeli embassy.

Len McCluskey, the leader of the UK’s largest trade union Unite, told the BBC at the conference last week that he “never recognized” that Labour had “a problem with anti-Semitism.” He said the campaign was “mood music that was created by people who were trying to undermine Jeremy Corbyn.”

Wimborne-Idrissi’s rapturous welcome during the debate on international policy is another indication that the party grassroots does not buy the “Labour anti-Semitism crisis” story.

In May last year, a poll of members found only five percent agreeing that anti-Semitism is a bigger problem in Labour than in other parties. The largest group – 47 percent – agreed it was a problem, but “no worse than in other parties.”

Wimborne-Idrissi had opened her speech by welcoming the reintroduction into the Labour platform of a key paragraph on Palestine from the party’s election manifesto.

The extract of the conference report restoring the language can be read at the end of this article.

Labour’s election manifesto in June had called for “an end to the [Israeli] blockade” of Gaza, and of its “occupation and settlements.” It also promised a Labour government would “immediately recognize the state of Palestine.”

Although this party line on settlements was already a watered down position compared to an earlier leaked draft, the right-wing party bureaucracy seems to have been responsible for removing it altogether.

The National Policy Forum, a party body that issues an influential report, deleted the key paragraph in the summer amid criticism that it had watered down other key policies.

Battle behind scenes
The report offered a general endorsement of a “two-state solution,” but eliminated criticism of Israel, including its settlements which are illegal under international law.

Some weeks later, an anonymous “senior Jewish Labour source” claimed to the Jewish Chronicle that the new wording was “better than the election manifesto and a bit of a success.”

Earlier, the Jewish Labour Movement, a pro-Israel group, took credit for watering down the language in the election manifesto.

The Jewish Labour Movement did not reply to a request for comment.

“The leader’s office won a behind-the-scenes battle” over Labour’s policy on Palestine, according to Labour Party expert Alex Nunns, writing in Red Pepper.

Corbyn “was livid at the omission” and “put his foot down,” insisting the paragraph be restored at the conference, according to Nunns.

Nunns, the author of a book about the popular movement that brought Corbyn to the leadership, told The Electronic Intifada that the National Policy Forum’s process is opaque, so it was unclear how it was drafted, and on whose initiative the paragraph was removed.

Anti-Semitism debate
Delegates also debated a controversial rule change on anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry, a compromise proposal backed by Labour’s ruling national executive.

The Jewish Labour Movement had been pushing what one national executive member called a “more draconian” rule change that would have allowed expulsion of party members “where the victim or anyone else” considered a statement to be anti-Semitic.

But at the conference, Jewish Labour Movement vice-chair Mike Katz withdrew his group’s proposed rule change in favor of the national executive’s compromise.

Katz appeared annoyed as he spoke, calling for an end to accusations “of witch hunts and weaponizing anti-Semitism” to stifle criticism of Israel.

Katz may have been rattled by the audience’s warm welcome to the delegate who spoke immediately before him – Jewish Voice for Labour’s Leah Levane.

Levane’s local party had put forward a competing rule change to the one Katz’s group was proposing. Levane said her local party had come under great pressure to withdraw its motion and was doing so to preserve unity, despite misgivings that the compromise “leaves some gaps.”

She complained that, unlike the Jewish Labour Movement, her local party was given no input on the compromise and condemned those who make the accusation of anti-Semitism “every time you criticize the despicable behavior of the state of Israel.”

Levane received a standing ovation for a speech rejecting the right of the Jewish Labour Movement to “speak for me” and “many other Jewish Labour members.”

The national executive responded to Levane with a “categoric assurance” that the concerns she raised would be considered in an ongoing review of party democracy.

New Jewish group
The launch of Jewish Voice for Labour was the talk of the entire conference. “It was the only meeting of the official fringe that people were talking about. There was a real buzz about it,” author Alex Nunns told The Electronic Intifada.

Jewish Voice for Labour says its launch was attended by more than 300 people, with palpable excitement among the standing room-only crowd.

The biggest welcome was for surprise guests, including award-winning director Ken Loach.

To loud cheers, Unite leader Len McCluskey and Tosh McDonald, president of the train drivers union ASLEF, both announced that their unions would affiliate to Jewish Voice for Labour.

Jewish Voice for Labour’s founding comes as a vigorous challenge to the pro-Israel Jewish Labour Movement.

But the Israeli state’s allies within Labour still appear unwilling to abandon the anti-Semitism smears, as the expulsion of Israeli anti-Zionist Moshé Machover on Tuesday shows.

Loach, McCluskey and McDonald have all now also been targets of anti-Semitism smears.

It is in this context that they are embracing – and being welcomed – by a new group that takes a strong stance against anti-Jewish bigotry and defends the right to criticize Israel and its Zionist state ideology.

Has the witch hunt finally started to backfire?
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/as ... conference