For those who don't receive the Peoples Assembly Emails, the main Anti-Austerity movement in Britain took the initiative on the 10th February to convene a meeting and organise a committee with the following objective;
'The Committee aims to campaign locally and nationally to get Theresa May’s invitation to Trump rescinded because of his racist, misogynist and warmongering policies, and his climate-change denial. It aims to build the broadest-possible movement against Trump, and to work with everyone interested in organising a huge public protest should he visit London as the government intends.'
Below are a list of those who support the initiative and the date of the next rally
'The attending organisations interested in establishing the campaign were:
Abortion Rights
Alliance for Free Movement
Communist Party of Britain
CWU
Daymer
Egyptian revolutionary committee
Friends of Al-Aqsa
Friends of the Earth
Friends of Equador
Jeremy Corbyn’s Office (observing)
Kate Osamor MP
Muslim Engagement and Development
Momentum
Muslim Association of Britain
Muslim Voices
NUS
NUT
Palestine Solidarity Campaign
People’s Assembly
Rainbow Coalition
Stand up to Racism
Stop the War Coalition
Student Assembly against Austerity
TUC (observing)
UCU
Unite the Union
Venezuela Solidarity Campaign
Woodcraft Folk
Stand up to Trump: National Organising Summit
Saturday 18 February 10am - 5pm, Friends House Euston, London.'
All sorts pf poisonous political leaders have 'been (invited) to London to see the Queen' in the past. None of them should have been allowed to come. They all demonstrate the fawning hypocrisy of the British State. But the significance of Trump is that he and his coterie seek to lead the West into an authoritarian, war-mongering, planet ruining, racist and sexist future. This is something that the people of Britain can directly effect. The need first to refuse Trump, and then to push back all the right wing leaders popping up all over the West who have the same agenda and who draw their strength from Trump, is the most profound and critical matter in the here and now. We must hope and plan for the largest mass actions that Britain has ever seen.
There is another vital concern in this great moment.
On 23 February voters in Stoke Central (a city to the north of the English Midlands) and Copeland (in Cumbria in the Northwest of England) will play a major part in the future of the Labour Party. Polls show that both of these two previously held Labour Constituencies (seats) are in serious danger of falling to far-right UKIP's new leader, Paul Nuttall in the case of Stoke and to the Tories in the case of Copeland.
Any Labour losses will be put down to Labour's leader, Jeremy Corbyn, both by the national media and by most Labour MPs. Corbyn's anti nuclear views have featured heavily in the Copeland campaign. The constituency hosts the Sellafield nuclear plant, and nuclear submarines are built in nearby Barrow. The local Labour Party has tried to insist that Corbyn's views are not Labour's real policies and have refused to have him campaign in the Constituency. (It is also worth noting that the largest British Trade Union, UNITE, currently support Corbyn but oppose his stance on nuclear weapons and energy.) In Stoke the UK Independence Party, which ran second in many traditional Labour constituencies in the Midlands and the North in the 2015 General Election, are making a huge effort to topple Labour in Stoke and crown their own party leader with a seat in Parliament (which previous UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, has never achieved.)
In reality Corbyn's leadership has very little to do with the meltdown of the Labour Party. There is no sign that Labour's Scottish bloc of MPs will return after decades of complacency and lack of interest that Scottish Labour was renowned for. The same applies to many regions in England and Wales, where the traditional vote for Labour was ignored and despised by a Labour leadership desperate for decades to be part of the establishment. In reality Corbyn (as a Labour rebel for most of his life) offers what embers of enthusiasm are still there to be stoked, for those who want a transformative government. But the house whose tenancy Corbyn took over was already falling down. The hostile press are writing that Corbyn will step down voluntarily if the polls stay bad. That will simply make things worse. There is no way forward either inside or outside of Parliament via a shift to a leader with a new route, stuffed with concessions to the past, leading only to a dead future.
What the Peoples Assembly's initiative does is potentially rally the heartland of a new left in Britain - in action. It is still possible for the Corbyn leadership of Labour - and the movement against Trump (and his wretched European epigones) to fuse; to become a new political movement of the left; to begin the creation of a new political radicalism, out of the wreckage of Labour; with the best of the MPs who want and who give faith to those millions who want change. In other words to accept that Blair's New Labour is in its death throws and now the new left needs to reconstruct an alternative.
What is the alternative ... if there is no alternative? Labour will continue to rot and shrink. Mass action against austerity and the new right will continue, but without a new political point of departure, without an independent political voice. The paradox is that traditional Labour's agony can yet become a tremendous political renewal. And now the Peoples Assembly has made its unifying move, the opportunity to change British political history opens.
No comments:
Post a Comment