Video of ambulance crew who went to the scene of scientist Dr John Kelly's death.

Thanks to starry plough for heads up.

MH

Did the Blair Government have a hand in removing the troublesome scientist Dr David Kelly.

The revamped Morning Star leads with an interesting story today, Iraq WMD expert was assassinated. According to the Star, thirteen doctors have demanded a fresh inquiry into the scientist David Kelly’s death near his Oxfordshire home in 2003. Dr Kelly, a Ministry of Defense biological warfare expert who questioned the government's justification for invading Iraq, was found dead near woodland a short distance from his home soon after he was exposed as the source for a critical BBC report on the war on Iraq in 2003.

After Mr Kelly’s death, the Blair government did all it could to pervert the due process of the law, and up until this day have succeeded in kicking David Kelly’s death into the long grass. First by asking Lord Hutton to conduct an inquiry, * which had no legal status and then acting covertly to place Kelly’s Inquest on the back burner. I find it very interesting that a coroner’s inquest into Mr Kelly's death has never taken place, for in the north of Ireland this practice was used time and again whenever the UK ‘security forces’ were involved in a contentious death.

A group of thirteen doctors have now mounted a legal challenge to over turn Hutton’s report, as they are skeptical about whether Mr Kelly took his own life. David Halpin, a retired orthopedic and trauma surgery consultant and spokesperson for the group of doctors, said it is extremely rare for coroners inquest not to be held and dismissed Hutton’s explanation of how Kelly took his own live. Which involved the scientist cutting his left wrist with a pen knife and bleeding to death. Halpin claimed such an explanation was inadequate; and the 13 specialist have compiled a medical dossier that rejects such a conclusion. He went on to say,

"Such a cut to the ulnar artery, which is small and difficult to access, could not have caused death. The bleeding from Dr Kelly's wrist is unlikely to have been so voluminous and rapid that it was the cause of death,"

"There is evidence of a cover-up and I think it is highly likely that Dr Kelly was assassinated."

The full Morning Star article can be read here.

* Hutton was a man who is known to have had connections to the UK security service and according to press reports is a close friend of Blair.

Time and again left candidate's enter election campaigns with enough baggage to overload and sink even the most seaworthy vessel.

There has been a fascinating debate taking place over at the award winning Irish web site The Cedar Lounge Revolution. (CLR) It is not about the big issues that many left political activists engage with, but the comparatively small ones which all the same play an important role in the lives of many working class voters; and which any progressive political party ignores at their peril. It started out as a run of the mill debate about why Sinn Féin’s vote in the south of Ireland stalled in the recent European and local elections. It then evolved into a wider debate that has relevance to all left political activists who are attempting to build an electoral support base.

Some commenter's to the blog felt that the time has come for the left to be far more astute and tailor their political platform accordingly. Some went as far as to say whilst the core of the left’s economic and social platform is still strongly supported by a broad section of working class people and the progressive section of the middle classes. It is a mistake to believe workers are fully supportive of some of the lefts core beliefs.

A recent article by Toiréasa Ferris was raised, an up and coming SF activist she wrote, “The recent Ard Fheis [annual conference] motion on blood-sports and constant ‘rights talk’ by our national spokespeople show the party to be out of touch with its base.”

Her argument was rejected by most left posters to the CLR thread, but one SF member writing under the name ‘Blissett’ would have none of it.

“As regards hare coursing lads, ye have no idea. I foolishly thought at the Ard Fheis that it was just a fluffy motion that would please a few animal rights folks. But anyone who was canvassing will tell you this was an issue. I was canvassing in Cork City (city!!!) for SF and it was raised a number of times. The Irish field ran a concerted campaign, and anyone in a harrier club or who did coursing, was armed with their facts and ready for us. So don’t underestimate that issue, may have cost a fistful of votes for the sake of nothing.”

‘Eamond Dublin’ angrily replied, “If tearing apart hares and shooting rabbits is your only outlet well then why not try “jew baiting” a la Borat. Muckers who would call this an issue are not the type of political supporters you would want. If you wanna shoot, use targets not wee animals. These banjo playing cretins have no morals let alone politics so why would SF chase their vote.”

Which for me just about sums up perfectly why this debate has relevancy not just for SF, but for the Irish and UK left as a whole. Whilst we might be appalled by 'some' of the views expressed by working class people, to call them cretins and pass them by until we meet a worker who agrees with us, will not help us change society and ensure such views are consigned to history.

It also exposes the chasm that still exists on the left between those who see elections as part of the process we must engage in if we are to move into the political mainstream and play a greater role in influencing the type of society we live in; and those on the Left who see elections as an irrelevant side show; at most a propaganda exercise which allows the left to set out its stall and make recruits to the cause, in preparation for the 'big day.'

The latter is clearly the dominant force within the English non LP left and goes some way to explain its marginalization. True these people are slowly waking up to the fact that unlike in the past, they cannot ignore the electoral process completely, but they still demand if left candidates are to stand, their election manifesto must cross all the T’s and dot all the i’s of a transitional type program or a left-wing cookbook.

Thus time and again a left candidate enters an election campaign with enough baggage to overload and sink even the most seaworthy vessel, which is basically what happened with the candidates who stood in the recent UK European elections.

Abolition of the monarchy, withdrawal from the EU, open borders and free access to the country for all immigrants, ending of all blood-sports, equal rights for LGBT, yearly parliaments, support for the Palestinians, even the House of Lords to be replaced with a Soviet, etc. All noble causes I’m sure, but when you overload candidates with unnecessary baggage it is ignoring the brutalizing impact upon the working classes consciousness of thirty years of Conservative and Neo-liberal rule.

If we can go back to hare coursing for a minute or two, SF’s ‘suggestion’ that it should be banned clearly cost them votes, It mattered not a jot that tens of thousands of Irish people are not out coursing. What is relevant is voters cannot see the wood from the trees, thus they ignore all the progressive things the left candidate proposes when (s)he starts talking about such a ban and start worrying their own ’sport’ will be next on the list to be banned, whether it is fishing with rod and line, shooting, keeping ferrets to hunt, or god knows what other acts of torture they inflict on animal's.

Thus as I said at the top of this piece it is imperative any Left Party picks astutely the issues it is going to fight their election campaign on. This does not mean we should hide the fact that we wish to see all blood ‘sports’ banned or that we favor open borders and equality for GLBT, it is just that we must define the issues we give preference to when it comes to the ballot box.

It is not as if we are short of policies that working class people will support, I would suggest any left party could do worse than have as its main electoral bullet points the ring-fencing of government funding of the NHS, state benefits and pensions and other areas of the Welfare State, a massive extension of council house building and State education, an end to the UK’s involvement in military adventures abroad, the immediate withdrawal of all military personal from Afghanistan and Iraq, climate change and other environmental issues, putting any decision to renew Trident to a referendum and finally withdrawing from the statute book all anti trade union legislation and re-nationalizing the railways and taking the high street banks into full state ownership.

Cartoon of Week

Copyright © Steve Bell 2009

Workers must tell both government and bosses, "We are not paying for your economic crisis."

Over the last three months or so, a consensus has emerged between the two main political parties within the UK, (Tory and Labour ), and within the mainstream media, that public expenditure must be massively reduced and in the national interest the best way to do this is to cut health-care, education, State infrastructure, benefits and wages, whilst increasing working hours, and raising the retirement age to 70.

Never mind there has been no national debate as to whether this is the correct way to proceed, or that such policies will do little to reflate the economy and will hit hardest those who are already struggling to survive on extremely low incomes.

The last time such a flawed economic strategy was tried was in the 1930’s, it failed miserably and proved disastrous for the majority of people and it took World War two to finally drag the British economy out of the doldrums. No, all such a strategy achieves is to ring fence the great wealth of the ruling elites, whilst causing great hardships to the majority of the population who had no hand in creating the economic mess.

In their arrogance, by demanding such an economic strategy, both Tory and Labour are telling the people of the UK that the country cannot afford for all, a first class system of health care and education, a level of sickness and unemployment benefits that allows people to live a reasonable life until they return to work, State pensions worthy of the name, or an improved transport infrastructure which would undoubtedly be a gateway out of recession.

As John McDonnell makes clear in the Morning Star article I republish below, we must tell the Tory and Labour leaderships if they are unable or unwilling to provide the aforementioned, which helps make life bearable in the 21st Century, then they need to move over and make room for those who can, as the UK is well able to finance such a system of societal aid.

Which makes it doubly imperative the Left pulls together and forms an electoral coalition which will stand progressive candidates at the forthcoming General election. If there are cut backs to be made, we need progressives not only out on the street, but also in the parliamentary chamber to demand Health, Education, Benefits, etc, are ring fenced against any cuts, and if they are to be made they come in areas like defense. As a teenager said to me yesterday, not a single person beyond the economic and political ruling elites have benefited from the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations.

MH

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It's the poor who suffer - yet again.

By John McDonnell

In the last major economic depression in the 1930s, a Labour government fell because it decided that the cure for the latest crisis of capitalism was to cut public spending - in particular, to cut benefits to the unemployed.

A Labour prime minister and his main ministerial allies accepted wholeheartedly the economic orthodoxy of the time that public expenditure had to be reined in to stabilise the markets.

Working people, living at best on subsistence incomes but more often on the edge of destitution, were told that the country couldn't afford to pay them decent wages, house them, educate their children or treat their sick.

Labour ministers who stayed in office in the national government were applauded by their Conservative colleagues and the press for their statesmanship in telling their working-class supporters that they had to accept wage cuts and longer hours for the sake of the economy. These ministers were lauded for their patriotism in putting the interests of the country before the interests of their class.

The consequence of this acquiescence by a Labour government was a level of unemployment that impoverished millions of people in Britain and many millions more across the globe.

Over the last three months the same consensus has emerged across the three main political parties and within the mainstream media. In the interests of the country, wages must be cut, working hours increased, public expenditure must be massively reduced and there has even been a call to increase the retirement age to 70.

In effect the difference between the parties is not the direction of political travel but the depth and speed of cutting wages and public spending.

Having dabbled with a bit of last-minute panic Keynesianism as the scale of the latest crisis began to unfold, the government has now budgeted for a £20 billion programme of cuts and privatisation, is introducing workfare in its Welfare Reform Bill and is attempting to introduce by the back door a public-sector pay freeze and, eventually, an overall strategy of pay cuts.

The usual alliance of big-business associations, the City and media commentators is urging the government to behave "responsibly" and bring forward an even larger-scale programme of public spending cuts.

The Telegraph's right-wing columnist Matthew d'Ancona has praised elements in the Labour Party around the Compass group for calling for austerity measures. Civil servants are reported to be preparing a "doomsday" plan for 20 per cent cuts in public services.

With unemployment rising rapidly and faced with a constant media propaganda barrage, some people are understandably falling for the line that the country can't afford decent wages and public services. It's the same old line they gave out in the '30s and in every economic downturn since.

Others are looking for scapegoats and the fascists are still around, just as they were in the 1930s, to exploit these fears and confusions.

Occasionally the realities of the situation peep through and show what is needed.

Just as the collapse of Northern Rock and Royal Bank of Scotland exposed the casino banking that contributed to this recession, the announcement last week of record bonuses at Goldman Sachs demonstrated starkly not just the grotesque inequalities of our society but also the absolute lack of effective government control of the finance sector and therefore the economy.

At the same time, the failure of National Express on the East Coast railway line exposed the scandalous waste of public resources in subsidising the privatisation rip-off of our public services.

The slogan repeated now on demonstrations and picket lines that "we are not paying for your crisis" is exactly the right one.

By refusing to accept pay cuts, phoney sabbaticals, longer hours, worsening conditions and cuts in public services, we are forcing change in how we manage our economy, how firms are managed and controlled, how we distribute the profits of these companies and the wealth of our country, how our public services are provided and what our taxes are spent on.

Every refusal to accept a cut is a demand for the system to change. It is a statement about the unfairness and incompetence of the existing system for managing our economy and controlling our lives.

If we are told that our wages and public services can't be afforded, we can show them where we don't want our resources spent - for example on wars, weapons and privatisations - and where they can find billions more by creating a just tax system where everybody and every company pays a fair share.

If they try to tell us in a company or a public service or in government that all this can't be done, then we should tell them that if they can't manage the place then move over because we can.

John McDonnell is Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington.

The Chinese government will make Ürümqi a terribly cold and harsh place for the Uighur people.

The bloodshed in Ürümqi, the capital city of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China,

has been ignored by much of the European left. Which when you consider that China is governed by a communist party, which still ‘claims’ to be socialist, is an unforgivable omission. It seems it is perfectly acceptable for the left to condemn, or defend the Iranian government when its people come out onto the street, but when it comes to China, it is almost a no go area.

Why is this, for the recent events in Ürümqi, have as much if not more importance than the demonstrations which erupted after last months Iranian presidential election. Could it be because the western media coverage is both scarce and more sympathetic to the Chinese Government than it was to its Iranian counterpart? Or perhaps could there be a subconscious form of Islamophobia at work?

After looking at the TV pictures and news photographs that have emerged from Ürümqi in the last few days, it looks very much like the Chinese Government is orchestrating a violent backlash against the indigenous Uighurs. The Chinese government are claiming what we have witnessed in the last two days was a spontaneous outpouring of violence from the Han Chinese settlers against the Uighurs, after they had suffered violence at the hands of Uighurs mobs at the end of last week.

However if we look a little closer at the video and photographs coming out of Ürümqi, in contrast to the Uighurs demonstrations, which consisted of people of all ages and both sexes, the marauding Han mobs who were out on the streets in search of Uighurs to kill and maim, are made up of young men of military age who appear to be coordinating closely with the Chinese ‘security forces.’ (Echoes of the 1974 UDA led Ulster Workers Council Strike perhaps?)

The one thing the Western left likes is certainty, for some the Iranian middle class backlash against what they regarded as a rigged election result provided that; and thus they had no doubts about openly giving there support to those demonstrators who came out onto the streets of Tehran, that they were led by a man who when prime minister played a leading role in slaughtering the Iranian secular left mattered not a jot. To give them their support, all this section of the left needed to know was a government was brutally suppressing its people when it demanded the right to demonstrate in opposition to a government decision.

Yet today these very same people are no where to be seen, twitter is silent, no marches on the Chinese embassy are being organized and the left internet sites are silent. I would like to believe this is a sign of maturity and lessons have been learnt from the knee jerk reaction to the recent events in Iran, although I doubt this is true.

The truth is probably more simple, like everyone else the left is susceptible to western media outbursts; and like the West in general it is a victim of the Chinese governments success in keeping its dirty linen secret. Whatever the reason for our refusal to lift the veil on modern day China, there is one certainty that will emerge about the outcome of the recent events in Ürümqi. In the coming weeks and months the Chinese government will make it a terribly cold and harsh place for the Uighur people. *

* Uighurs are a Turkic-Muslim ethnic group which has been living in their part of the world for centuries. This region, reoccupied by the Qing dynasty in the mid-18th century, had become a Chinese province named Xinjiang in 1884; in 1955, after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in October 1949, was reorganised as the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region.

Read more here, although just to be clear I am not endorsing any political opinion by publishing this link.

http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/7514

http://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/xinjiang-burning/

http://www.chinaworker.org/

Three of the above links were sent to me by Stuart, who felt I was out of order when I wrote the left media ignores China as if it were a no go area.

How Ireland's nouveau riche are Ireland's new problem.

A reader of Organized Rage recently sent me an email part of which I have published below. I am sure he articulately expresses how many of us feel these days when people go about their daily business without a thought for anyway but themselves.

---------------------------------

Mick,

The owner of a vehicle refused to move out of a handicapped zone in a shopping centre in Clarinbridge this morning.

The woman, who was not displaying a handicapped parking permit, moved into the clearly marked spot in her imported 2005 GM Hummer vehicle. Despite being informed that she was illegally parking in a handicapped zone, she refused to move. When asked if she was aware that her action was preventing disabled drivers and the elderly from safely parking and potentially causing harm, her response was 'I don't care'. She then proceeded into the shopping centre. No tow trucks were on hand to impound the vehicle and the woman subsequently left a short time later without incident.

This is another example of how Ireland's nouveau riche are Ireland's new problem. They believe themselves above the law and above the common rules of living in a community. This kind of arrogance and disregard s is symptomatic of the trouble we are in and why things will not change until we do.

CB

Obituary: Willy Goldman; Chronicler of London's East-End Jewish life, and working class political activist.

Willy Goldman

Obituary: Willy Goldman, author of East End My Cradle, a portrait of Jewish life in London.

Willy Goldman, who has died aged 99, was an outstanding member of the small group of "proletarian" writers encouraged into existence in the 1930s by left-wing literary operators. East End My Cradle, Goldman's hard-eyed autobiographical vignettes of immigrant East End Jewish life - impoverished, tough, in thrall to the sweat-shop boss and perennial fluctuations in the garment trade - is a classic. First published in 1940 by Faber & Faber with the blessing of TS Eliot, it has, rightly, kept coming back into print.

Goldman was born in Welk Street, Stepney, east London, into a recently arrived Yiddish-speaking Russian-Romanian Jewish family. He was his father's second child, first-born of his father's second wife, who bore a further six children. As East End My Cradle reveals, Goldman grew up in a rough atmosphere of local goy against local yid. The Talmud was dinned in violently at religious school. He was dragged off to the Brick Lane synagogue every sabbath by his fiercely pious grandfather, a Petticoat Lane barrow-man, terrible in black.

Goldman dropped religion straight after his barmitzvah: "Yiddisher goy," his grandfather raged. Goldman's rather lackadaisical, occasional fish-selling, father insisted his son leave school at 14 and go into tailoring. But he hated the oppressive, "barbaric" Jewish master-tailors, and was soon trying for work down at the gentile-run docks. Saving his own soul, he took to self-education, reading in the Whitechapel reference library. Physically weak, he toughened himself up in boys' club boxing rings and, when he got political, joined the Young Communists. As a young boxing champ, he captained a team on a boxing tour of the Soviet Union sponsored by the leftist Workers' Sport Federation.

In the early 1930s he took to writing, short fact-fictions. He wanted, he said, "to put the East End down on paper." The Left Review, the British home of Soviet-inspired socialist realism, took a story. John Lehmann, the Bloomsburyite cultural missionary, welcomed Goldman into the pages of New Writing, which was started up in 1936 to promote otherwise mute Miltons from the docks, mines and ordinary urban streets. It is said that Frieda Eisler, the German-Jewish communist who became Goldman's first wife, introduced him to Lehmann. It is also said that he married her to prevent her from being deported to Hitler's Germany. (As Frieda Goldman-Eisler she became a distinguished psycholinguist.)

Lehmann made himself a sort of father to Goldman, taking him into his editorial team and helping him to spend months in Vienna, where he worked on East End My Cradle and other narratives. With a rising reputation for documentary-style stories, Goldman became a regular of the smaller magazines, the various series of New Writing, its successor, Penguin New Writing, and of short-story collections.

Despite the working-class writer's perennial problems of shortage of funds and conducive writing conditions, and the distractions of the second world war - unfit for military service due to his old TB condition, Goldman worked clearing up bomb sites - the books poured out: The Light in the Dust (1944), A Tent of Blue (1946), Some Blind Hand (1946), A Start in Life (1947) and The Forgotten Word (1948). He published a short wartime play, That Thy Days May Be Long (1945), about the agricultural Home Front. Socially observant, satirical, especially of leftist-literary pretenders, his prose volumes make him a precursor of the Angry Young Men.

In 1951 Goldman was runner-up in an Observer short-story competition (Muriel Spark won); but by then he hadn't much new material in him. The writing drought coincided more or less with his third marriage (his second, to Barbara Rogers, had ended in divorce), in 1950, to Joan, a schoolteacher, then the birth of a son, a move to rural Somerset, and soon after that another, to leafy Beaconsfield. Two daughters were born in the 1960s.

Goldman did labouring jobs, worked for a while as an usher at Marylebone magistrates' court, and then at ferrying patients to hospital, but was essentially a house husband. An angry old man of the still-smouldering left, he turned out fierce missives to the papers on his ratty old typewriter. In his six terrible pullovers and tatty old mac, bashing away at a punching-ball in his wrecked greenhouse, he resembled nothing so much as his grandfather.

Latterly he and Joan settled in Richmond, Surrey. She died in 2008. Shortly before his death, Goldman was gratified to learn that Faber planned to reprint East End My Cradle.

His son and two daughters survive him.

• William Goldman, writer, born 4 April 1910; died 25 April 2009