Splintered Sunrise

A little snippet of GUBU from the Irish News:

A ‘BLOOD and thunder’ band with links to the youth wing of the UVF is among dozens of loyalist bands to receive funding from the Ulster-Scots Agency and the National Lottery.

Sixty-five flute, accordion and pipe bands were given funds totalling more than £166,100 last year.

More than £4,600 of lottery money went to Pride of Ardoyne, which takes part in a contentious parade past the Ardoyne shops in north Belfast each year.

The funding, administered through the Arts Council, was for new instruments.

The band marches with a banner bearing an emblem of the Young Citizens Volunteers – the UVF’s youth wing – and the names of two former band members, UVF man Sam Rockett, who was killed by the UDA during the 2000 loyalist feud, and William Hanna, killed by the British army in 1978.

A spokesman for the Arts Council said that although it “monitors the artistic quality of applicants and is aware of its obligations under ‘Good Relations’ and Section 75 legislation, we are not proscriptive on grounds of an applicant’s political or religious background”.

“We respect their organisational independence, at the same time actively encouraging applicants to develop and expand their audiences and to break down barriers in society, in line with the aspirations of the Good Friday Agreement,” he said.

Among the bands given funding by the Ulster-Scots Agency was Mourne Young Defenders Flute Band which received £1,800 for musical tuition and a further £1,219 for an ‘Ulster-Scots summer school’ run by its members.

Mourne took part in the 2006 Love Ulster parade in Dublin which ended in clash-es with gardai and republican protesters. The band was set up in memory of Alan Johnston, an Orangeman and UDR member who was killed at his workplace in Kilkeel, Co Down, by the IRA in 1988.

The Arts Council gave about £102,500 to 24 bands, mostly for musical tuition.

The Ulster-Scots Agency gave about £56,500 to 38 bands for instruments.

The Big Lottery Fund gave £6,980 to three bands under its Awards for All scheme.

The figures were released in response to an assembly question from Sinn Fein MLA Paul Butler.

A spokeswoman for the Ulster-Scots Agency said that to receive funding bands must show that:

- they have good administration and a plan to attract new members

- the project is “financially viable”

- the project has “an Ulster-Scots element”.

A spokeswoman for the Big Lottery Fund said its scheme helped “organisations to run projects which will bring people together and increase community activity”.

“We continue to proactively promote the programme through outreach and development work and continue to target all sections of the Northern Ireland community,” she said.

It is the Second World War. The Nazi menace is threatening the world, but fear not! We can always count on Captain Invincible (a sort of amalgam of Superman and Captain America) to swoop in from the skies and defend what’s right against Hitler and his minions.

But then the war ends, and the next thing you know, Captain Invincible is arraigned before HUAC on charges of premature anti-fascism, flying without a licence, and wearing underwear in public (red underwear too, which the Committee finds significant). Cap storms out of the witch-hunt, and disappears from public view.

Fast forward to the early 1980s. Cap surfaces once again, in Sydney of all places. Sad to say, our superhero is now a washed-up alcoholic. And yet what the world needs now is a shining hero. Cap’s old nemesis Mr Midnight has raided a military base and stolen the top-secret Hypno-Ray for use in his latest dastardly scheme. (It’s a real estate scam, as it happens, and suspiciously similar to Lex Luthor’s real estate scam in the recent Superman Returns.) So there’s nothing for it but to find Cap, dry him out, and send him into battle.

This is a very silly movie, but scarcely more silly than most of the superhero movies that do big box office nowadays. And yet, there’s lots to like about it. It’s an affectionate but quite accurate send-up of the Golden Age of comics. It’s also an Australian production, which means lots of vaguely familiar-looking Aussie character actors. (This being the time when there only were about fifteen actors in Australia.) There’s plenty of the dry Antipodean humour that made Starstruck so much fun. There’s also a nice cameo of the US president striding around purposefully, followed by a hilariously grovelling Australian prime minister. Part of the Vietnam hangover?

And the cast doesn’t hurt either. In the lead is an appropriately world-weary Alan Arkin, playing a very Lower East Side superhero of the kind that Jack Kirby would have recognised. And as the villain, Christopher Lee, who’s never been shy about sending up his own image, strutting about in black leather and being generally menacing.

Oh, did I mention it’s a musical? Yes it is, courtesy of Richards Hartley and O’Brien, of Rocky Horror fame. If you like The Wicker Man, and are dying to see more of Christopher Lee in all-singing all-dancing mode, this is the picture for you. Just unplug the old brain first, and go with it.

And so we come to the question of what the election results say about prospects for the left. And the answer to that would be, not very much. But just about enough to be getting on with, if those involved can rise to the occasion.

The Respect results were solid enough – below what might have been expected, with Galloway not even coming close to that GLA seat, but far from being disastrous. Of course the split hasn’t helped, with the exit of the SWP meaning a loss of both resources and activists, and with both sides looking a bit like damaged goods, as usually happens in splits. On the other hand, 2.4% is not too bad given the circumstances, and the excellent vote for Hanif in City and East, plus the third council seat in Sparkbrook, show there is still critical mass in the party’s East London and South Birmingham strongholds. And, while some of the other results were poor, some were quite encouraging.

The problem is this – while Respect does have its strongholds, it’s very much a localised force. Even in London, Respect doesn’t exist in most of the city. And the prospects for expansion would have to be taken long-term – the Cheetham Hill result in Manchester, for example, shows potential, but you’d be looking years ahead to convert that into a mass base. That requires long-range planning and a fundamental break from the politics of get-rich-quick schemes.

But this problem of localisation is one for the left generally. The Socialist Party has a scattering of members nationwide, but in electoral terms it’s severely localised, and its implantation in the unions is also pretty sectional. You can also take a look at local formations with broadly Old Labour politics in places like Blaenau Gwent or Barrow, not to mention a whole raft of vaguely leftwing independent councillors. The left-of-Labour spectrum has very little traction, but there is a sociological space for a socialist alternative – it’s really a problem of organisation, of low levels of struggle and of atomisation.

What I think is this. None of these local formations are remotely likely to dissolve themselves into Respect – the most you can say for the moment is that, if Respect threw itself into non-sectarian networking in a serious way, as well as consolidating its own bases, it could be a centre of gravity for a smallish but significant left current. Also on the clár should be cultivating a dialogue with the Green Left, as well as keeping an eye on the LRC and Compass to see if there are any signs of life in the Labour Party. You can never tell where new forces will come from.

Obviously this poses a challenge for Respect. I’m not wildly enthusiastic about Respect as is – I’d like it to have a firmer socialist identity and more of an orientation to the working class than it does. The party also needs to get itself a bit of a sense of dynamism. Potentially, there’s a lot of good will out there towards the post-split Respect simply due to it not being the SWP, who have a serious track record of alienating their sometime allies. It would be a failure of massive proportions if that was allowed to dissipate.

As far as the SWP/Reespect/Left List is concerned, things are clarified a little. It should be pointed out that not all the Left List results were terrible – there is a fair base of support in Preston and Sheffield at least. We may point out that these results are based on long-term concentrated work that empirically goes against the grain of the SWP’s national practice. But then again, the key people are Michael Lavalette and Maxine Bowler, excellent comrades in many ways but also very very loyal to the SWP. While in principle there should be an opening to the Left List where it has a serious presence, in practice that poses a problem.

In London on the other hand, the results were diabolical. It may be that, with Galloway failing to win election to the GLA, the SWP has staved off the immediate danger of an exodus of members to Respect, as happened last autumn. But spending in excess of sixty grand to get results well below what the Socialist Alliance polled in 2000 is an embarrassment to say the least. Lindsey has never struck me as the kind of woman who would enjoy being spanked, so it’s no wonder she was the sole candidate not to appear at the mayoral declaration.

It puts the CC in an awkward position, doesn’t it? Some people were clear that the purpose of the Left List was to be a spoiler for Respect – hence the leaflets saying “Respect is standing as the Left List” and such like. But the membership were spun the idea that Lindsey was in with a serious shout of getting onto the GLA, that she was a national figure with mass electoral appeal, and that at the very least the Left List vote would run Respect close if not surpass it. None of these things have come to pass, for various reasons – an unknown name, yeah, but also an unbelievably sectarian mayoral campaign that, in the context of the Ken-Boris polarisation, aimed 90% of its fire at Ken and most of the rest at George. One may doubt if Cliff or Hallas would have got themselves into this position in the first place, but they certainly wouldn’t have run the sort of campaign their epigones did.

And so it is that John Rees, despite all his bluster, has cemented his reputation as the Rube Goldberg of revolutionary politics. The SWP’s few remaining allies in the Left List will have been given pause for thought. The three councillors in Tower Hamlets will be distinctly jittery. And, while I’m not expecting any move from inside the SWP leadership, if anyone is contemplating a coup against the Power Couple, now would be the time to do it. It’s hard to see the SWP playing any positive role in the broader movement while John and Lindsey remain in situ. Certainly, not many people will be falling over themselves to work with them any time soon.

Apart from the Tory victory last Thursday, one of the other depressing aspects of the local elections was the success of the BNP. This, it has to be said, was patchy, as the fascists failed to make the big breakthrough they had hoped for in their Lancashire, Yorkshire and Black Country strongholds. But their feat in surpassing the 5% mark in London and returning Richard Barnbrook, their leader on Barking and Dagenham council, to the GLA will have given them a spring in their step.

It will also, at least for the time being, strengthen the hand of the Griffin leadership within the fissile ranks of the BNP. Griffin, you see, has a cunning plan. Being a smart bloke, and not being content to spend the rest of his life leading an irrelevant sect, he’s been studying the examples of his analogues in Europe.

There really is no fundamental reason why Britain can’t have a sizeable right-populist party like you have in several European countries. But the candidates for that ecological niche have so far failed to fit the bill. UKIP had a certain amount of dynamism behind it, but UKIP is too monomaniacally focussed on the EU, too full of blazer-wearing retired colonels and too prone to define its reactionary politics in terms of hankering after the days when good old Smithy was running Rhodesia. There’s a certain market for that sort of thing, but it’s a limited and ageing market. The BNP is a lot more streetwise, but it’s been hampered in turn by being full of thugs - you can sell racism to the electorate, but it’s harder to sell thuggery - and by being mired in Third Reich nostalgia.

Griffin understands this. He is well aware that for decades the Austrian Freedom Party bounced around on about 5% of the vote - its spectacular growth under Haider was precisely the result of Haider spending years distancing the party from its Nazi and Pan-German roots in favour of a more contemporary appeal. Fini has done something similar in Italy, as has (to a much lesser extent) Le Pen in France. To say nothing of the various hard-right parties on the continent who don’t have roots in pre-war fascism. Fidelity to the fascist tradition may keep a cadre together in hard times, but it does severely limit the possibilities of appealing to a broader audience.

That’s why the Griffin leadership has been throwing old fascist shibbolethim overboard with gay abandon. You see a lot of this in the foreign policy sphere. Traditionally, the British far right has had an anti-Zionist stance deriving from its anti-Semitism. Sometimes this has shaded into a vague Arabism, and even into saluting the indefatigability of Saddam and Gaddafi. Yet today we find the BNP taking a staunchly pro-Israeli position, which might be surprising from a group that not so long ago was selling Holocaust denial tracts in its bookshop. But this is only surprising if you assume that fascists can’t have an opportunistic streak, and are so stupid they don’t realise that, while anti-Semitism isn’t respectable any more, there is a good deal of mileage to be had from bashing the Muslims.

And as with the Middle East, so with the Balkans. Recently the BNP has been banging the drum in favour of Serbian sovereignty in Kosovo. And yet, during the Yugoslav wars when such positions were actually relevant, the BNP held fast to the traditional fascist position of calling for victory to Croatia. Indeed, if memory serves, some BNP guys tried to set up an “International Brigade” to fight for the Croats, who were supposed to be defending European civilisation from the communist Serbs. Is it likely that Griffin has suddenly discovered a deep affinity for Serbia? I think not. It’s more likely that the new BNP position has its roots in Londoners’ fear and loathing of violent Albanian gangsters.

But what’s more important is domestic politics. This means going into run-down estates that Labour has pretty much abandoned, and offering people a seductive cocktail of what looks at first glance very like Old Labour politics, combined with racism as a global explanation of the working class’s woes. In certain working-class areas, especially racially segregated places like Oldham or Dewsbury, or white flight areas like Dagenham, you can understand the appeal to people at the bottom of the pile.

What’s obviously called for is an imaginative response. I think what Cruddas has been doing at grassroots level in Dagenham is interesting for this reason, that Cruddas understands that the white working class tends to be resistant to moralistic appeals from do-gooders, and that an anti-fascist and anti-racist strategy needs to be tied in to offering some kind of politics of hope and solidarity. Cruddas reckons you can do this by reconnecting the Labour Party with its core base. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. But thinking along these lines is vital if we want to do anything beyond contemplating Barnbrook in City Hall and throwing up our hands in horror.

More on this at Socialist Unity.

Cripes!

I mean to say, by jingo! What in the wide world of sports were the London electorate thinking of?

First, let’s consider the national picture. It’s been clear for some years that the Labour vote was collapsing. What’s saved New Labour up to this point is that it’s largely collapsed into abstention. To the extent that traditional Labour voters have defected, they’ve gone all over the shop - to the Lib Dems in some areas, the BNP in others and so on. There hasn’t been a massive swing to the Tories. And I’m still not sure that there is - what’s happening seems to be that the traditional Tory base, after years of demoralisation, has become energised again. Plus, there’s Rankin’ Dave Cameron with his strategy of making the Tories as inoffensive as possible, so they aren’t in a position where the majority of the electorate hate their guts and will return even the most useless Labour government in order to keep them out.

So you ended up in London with a sort of dual Boris campaign. There was the official Boris campaign, with the candidate playing down his neo-Thatcherite politics, straining mightily to avoid gaffes, and apparently having no policies other than buying a shitload of new Routemaster buses. In fact, in the popular view BoJo was more or less eviscerated of any politics, and simply viewed as that amusing bloke off Have I Got News For You. Then you had the unofficial Boris campaign, aka the Daily Mail and Evil Standard, pitching squarely to mobilise the Tory base on a hard rightist basis. Which seems to have worked: there was a massive turnout in the Tory-voting suburbs, the UKIP vote collapsed towards the Tories, and they also managed to mop up a large chunk of right-leaning Lib Dems.

The optics of the thing were really quite fascinating. On crime, Boris made some modest noises about putting more PSCOs on the Tube. Meanwhile, the Evil Standard screeched that London was facing a tidal wave of violent crime, and it was all Ken’s fault. On race - and the whole election had a nasty racial overtone - the contrast was even sharper. Boris spent a lot of time living down his various politically incorrect remarks of the past, and stressing how proud he was of London’s great multiracial community. On the other hand, the Mail and Standard promised that Boris would end the ethnic gravy train at City Hall. Hence the prominence of the Lee Jasper saga. Actually, though I’m none too fond of Jasper, my view is that Lee Jasper-type figures are pretty much unavoidable in big multi-ethnic cities, and Boris is likely to acquire some Jaspers of his own.

So now London gazes into the uncharted future of a Boris administration. Given that the city has just replaced a competent and experienced city manager with someone whose only experience of administration relates to the Spectator drinks cabinet, it’s no wonder Cameron is nervous.

As for the Cheeky Chappie, there may be a few useful pointers here. It’s notable that Ken’s vote rose quite sharply as voters rallied to stop Boris. It’s also worth noting that not only did Ken outpoll the Labour Party, but the Labour vote as such held up much better in London than elsewhere. At a time when the New Labour coalition seems to have broken down, should we really be surprised that an old-fashioned left social democrat, who has made modest but tangible improvements to Londoners’ quality of life, should do relatively well when Labour as a whole has done appallingly? It’s something that Labour Party members might do well to consider.

You see, Paul, being a trade union general secretary is very much like making love to a beautiful woman. You have to seduce the membership, string them along with your honeyed words, whisper sweet nothings in their ears, promise them the earth. Then, as soon as you get the chance, you screw them so hard they’ll be walking funny for a week.

Yes, I couldn’t suppress a smile at the news that Swiss Toni was running for the top job in SIPTU. This is one of those occasions where, though you have to support the left candidate against the right, your heart sinks at the prospect of doing so. Presumably a credible left candidate, like Clare Daly or Des Res, was unavailable.

It’s nice that Swiss is putting on a big show of taking this seriously. He’s been banging on a lot about the Crisis and how workers shouldn’t have to pay for it. This is, I assume, the same crisis he’s been prophesying for years. I’m also slightly startled to see that Swiss has procured himself a swanky website. Back in the days when I knew him, he was still having trouble with new-fangled gizmos like the tele-phone wire.

I can’t help thinking that it would be a laugh if he actually won. For, although the Gen Sec job is well remunerated and has a nice pension attached, I don’t believe he wants to win. Swiss is quite comfortable at the university. He is also, let’s not forget, permanent Great White Chief of the Socialist Workers Party, a position he’s held since being headhunted by Cliff thirty years ago, and which he could continue to hold for the rest of his natural life, provided he stays on the Brits’ good side.

So why this quixotic run? Well, I recall the first Carolann Duggan campaign, where Carolann’s high vote surprised everybody, despite her being exactly the kind of candidate union members warm to. At the time there was a clear anti-partnership platform, and there was a reasonable perspective that a rank-and-file movement would be built out of the campaign. Of course, no rank-and-file movement was built, and some of us were quite clear that the Swips weren’t going to build one, although many comrades thought they would. I assume this run has more to do with raising the group’s profile, and boosting morale in the ranks. After all, in a two-horse race it would take a really diabolical candidate to get less than 30%.

Still, Swiss on the campaign trail must be a real treat. Clever and articulate he may be, but other adjectives also come to mind, like dour and abrasive. Not exactly your hail-fellow-well-met type. A makeover may be called for. Give the dude a trendy haircut and stick him in a shiny suit. If he’s still going around in that green jumper with no elbows, now would be a good time to retire it. Maybe even break out the fine wines and Belgian chocolates…