You are in the company of Roger Warren Evans, Welsh socialist lawyer and company director, on a journey to work out a new socialist order capable of generating equality and freedom for the world.  Nothing less will do. 
    

 

 

 

  
 



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Week 17
Sunday 27 April 2003

Edwina
Hart

The weather has been cruel to canvassers like me, on-the-knocker this weekend, with Edwina Hart, Assembly Finance Minister and the "Welsh Chancellor" - she is our candidate for the Gower Constituency, and a popular local "favourite daughter" - Labour's principal task, of course, is to resist the advance of Plaid Cymru (pronounced Cum-rie, with first-syllable stress..)

These are dark and
dangerous days

No sense of direction has emerged, since the "victory" of Baghdad.  The truth is, that nobody can really believe the scale of the destruction wreaked, by the Coalition attack, upon the United Nations and the world's hopes for a consensual world order.  We face a grim future, ordered unilaterally by a rogue state, the United States.  Edward Said delivers an excoriating critique of American conduct, in The Observer.

Casualties of War 
Rawnsley, Cohen, Aaronovitch

All war brings casualties.  And these three writers - Andrew Rawnsley, Nick Cohen, and David Aaronovitch - who have previously commanded my respect and interest, are all war casualties, because of their spineless and unconvincing espousal of Blair's War.  I was appalled at the shallowness of their argumentation, and the weakness of their moral sense.

  • I already perceive the effect.  I cannot help it.  Before, when I saw their names on a page, I would stop to read.  Now, I turn over.  They have, sadly, lost my respect.

Union shop,
closed shop...

Kevin Curran is wrong, to consider advocating the "closed shop" again.  As the successor to John Edmonds as GMB General Secretary, he should be ploughing other furrows.  I recall being required, in the winter of 1959, to argue the case for the union shop as against the closed shop - as part of the US Debating Tour, where I represented Cambridge University...

Just a reminder - union shop was where all employees were required to join the union upon taking the job, but closed shop was where you had to be a Union member before you were permitted to accept the job, so that Union effectively controlled the composition of the workforce.

Nine years, Nine MPs
assassinated

This is the face of a frightened man.  Russian MP Sergei Yushenkov died last week in Moscow, gunned down in yet another contract killing. The ruinous interpenetration of politics by organised crime constitutes a real threat to the fledgling Russian democratic state.  Yushenkov, 52, had been trained as a professional Communist organiser, before taking a PHD and becoming a military academy lecturer.  He entered politics in 1991, as an MP.  Nine MPs have died in the last nine years - three of them in the last three months, in the run-up to a General Election, report the Guardian  and BBC News.  The cool, dead-pan prose of the Moscow Times makes chilling reading.

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Schoolboy Atheism

I was deeply disappointed by the shoddy attack upon the Christian "religion" published by Ludovic Kennedy in the Guardian.  Kennedy has always been a flag-waving atheist, mocking Christians with remarkably superficial schoolboy arguments.  Given his august pre-eminence, and his 83 years, the schoolboy arguments have come to seem more incongruous.  But it is nevertheless right that these issues should be put before us all - again and again and again.

Politics is not just about money, or GDP, or hospital waiting-lists, or benefits or pensions, or trade union rights or transport timetables. 

Our political institutions encapsulate and express our communal and collective lives.  If I were Rhodri Morgan, I would abandon the derogatory English title "Wales", and re-name my country Cymru.

What are your thoughts?  Drop me a line

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Budget Footnotes

Budgets invariably throw up basic statistics which are difficult to come by, at other times of year -

City in turmoil...
 they're missing the point

Our "City" institutions continue in turmoil.  This Summer, many lobby-groups are planning to besiege the City's AGMs, armed with token shareholdings, trying to close doors after all the horses have long departed.  A growing sense of deep scandal is abroad, and of incipient erosion of the disciplines of the company law system.

But they're missing the point.  Tinkering will achieve nothing. The doors of the Secret City must be thrown open, and the light of publicity let in.  Shareholders must be given the right of prior approval - before the horses are released.  Nothing less will do the trick. 

This will require the radical reform of company law, and will have to be tackled by international agreement.   Labour should make a start.

What are your thoughts?  Drop me a line

I am sure you will want to keep in touch with what Steve Bell is drawing, in The Guardian

Abdroids Rule OK

Natural persons are retreating from the corporate frontline.  1,852 individual directors of UK companies have already taken advantage of new statutory provisions to prevent anyone find out where they live. This is the "Huntingdon Life Sciences Defence"... 

But this twist in the corporate saga is a threatening one.  It is only contact with natural persons that enables the system of abstract personality to be properly policed, at any level.  This is further dismal evidence of the global explosion of the secretive device of artificial personality, which constitutes a threat to the freedoms of us all.

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Charitable Loos...

Psst!  Can I interest you
in public loos?  I am seeking supporters and partners, from all over the UK, for a new charity project to provide public toilet facilities.

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Public Primacy Misunderstood

One pleasure of web-logging is that of checking on ones own consistency over time, although one also may stand accused of E-narcissism.  But on 12 May 2002, I was much exercised by the privatisation of Airport Rescue Services - what has happened to that important PFI question?

Try BBC News, the public service website for the best and quickest access to the news, as well as a huge political data resource, the BBC is unbeatable

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Follow my August 2002 Russian Tour Diary, now unfolding in splendid technicolor - capacity problems have so far limited the scale of how much I can E-publish, but there is still plenty to read -

What are your thoughts?  Drop me a line

Diary 2002

Now up to date!  I have re-structured my Diary to give you a day-to-day means of looking back, throughout the year just click through

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Week 17
Sunday 27 April 2003

 

 		     

 

Staged "Confessions"

We are hearing strange confessions of personal crises, from Jack Straw and senior Ministers. They dramatically declare that they would have laid down their political lives, in the cause of aggression against Iraq - if the House of Commons vote had gone against them...

But these confessions are not what they seem.  At the moment, active negotiations are progressing among human rights lawyers, to indict Tony Blair for his decision to take his country into war - by his personal exercise of the Royal Prerogative. That is, as a matter of law, his personal decision - and would constitute the ideal, unambiguous focus for legal proceedings. The Government no doubt knows about all this, because we are no good at secrecy  and this Website is certainly monitored.  And they must be keen to spike the legal guns arrayed against them.

  • These "confessions" are, I believe, a crude stage-managed attempt to generalise responsibility for the aggression, and build a defence against war-crime prosecution. Wot, Royal Prerogative?  Not me, Guv - it was the Commons wot did it.  Tony Blair is trying, retrospectively, to pass the buck to his parliamentary colleagues - having made it clear at the time that the Commons vote was only advisory, thus discouraging opposition in the first place.  He is getting his retaliation in first. 

    History is being re-written, before our very eyes.

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Thomas is a new arrival in our family.  I saw him for the first time on Good Friday in Aberaeron (Ceredigion, West Wales).  He had newly arrived on an Easter trip from New England, where he was born and where my nephew Oliver Baughan and his wife Jo are currently living. 

Thomas is my first great-nephew, my first experience of being two generations away from my own kith and kin.  You must forgive a touch of pride on my part - Thomas is a fine fellow, grandson of my sister Eleanor - he has a soothing influence upon the anguished, raging political breast...

Not so even, Stevens

My sheer horror at the Stevens "Finucane" Report was mitigated by my pride in LIBERTY, the civil rights campaign of which I am a member and which in 1989 fearlessly made its public allegations of murderous Police collusion in Northern Ireland.  In 1989 I was still deeply immersed in building supermarkets for Sainsburys, not in civil rights matters.  But LIBERTY Director John Wadham put the record straight, writing in The Guardian. 

I am deeply ashamed that "my" State was capable of such appalling corruption and abuse of power - and that it has taken fourteen years merely to raise the issue in authoritative form. 

BBC News gives a remarkable history of the whole event, of which I was only dimly aware.  I can offer no immediate solution, but all the our systems of covert intelligence must clearly be subject to ruthless scrutiny and reorganisation.

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Win-Win, for Blair?

Downing Street vehemently denied the suggestion last week (which I endorsed..) that Tony Blair might well hold a Euro Referendum even if Brown opposed it.  True, the risks of losing a Euro Referendum would be high. But even if he lost - and then had to hand over the UK Premiership to Gordon Brown - Blair would have repaired his battered Euro-reputation, and positioned himself to become "President of Europe" in due course - Guardian reports confirm the force of that analysis.

So I persist.  Blair is an attention-seeker, and the massive constituency of the enlarged EU must seem inordinately attractive to him.  Blair is a also gambler (which I am not..) and backing the Euro in a risky Referendum might look to him like a win-win proposition...

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My New Party Line..

I have been struggling for some time to find the right "tack" for Labour Party reform.   When I wrote last October, I advocated a much closer form of power-sharing between the new salariat and rank-and-file volunteers - a greater role for lay Members in the conduct of Government, and in Party leadership polls.  I advocated integration, not separation.

  • I have changed my mind.  Because integration has been tried, and has failed. The salariat always crushes the volunteers, then ignores them.  

I now say that separation of roles would be preferable.  Each element should be given its own "power sector", with the work of Government and Opposition left to the salariat, allowing the volunteers to assume exclusive responsibility for the life of the Labour Party "in the country".

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Revolutionary
work in progress

Baby Bonds - Child Trust Funds - these are, potentially, the biggest idea of this Government, as big a vote-winner for Labour as bargain-basement Council-house sales were, for the Thatcher Government.

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Not many job advertisements appear on these pages.  But this is an exception.  A key political vacancy has arisen, for the job of General Secretary of the Fabian Society.  As tensions accumulate within the Labour Party itself, the Fabian Society is growing in importance.  There are now over 1000 Fabians, all socialists, who are not members of the Labour Party...  I have the honour to have been elected, to represent the Welsh Fabians, on the Fabian Executive Committee.

My hope is that the trawl will attract a truly independent socialist spirit, as the retiring Michael Jacob has proved himself to be.  I wish him a full and challenging life, with his young family. And I express my gratitude for his great Fabian career.  If you fancy applying, you can find the details here.

What are your thoughts?  Drop me a line

As US economic concerns accumulate, remember my mid-March words of caution - America cannot afford a war... It is clear to me that the recovery of international consumer confidence (indeed, even of American consumer confidence) will be a very slow process, and presupposes that America will abstain from further disruptive aggression. I forecast that the American public will get more and more worried about their President and the long-term implications of his "foreign policy".  And that will delay global economic recovery.

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Try BBC News, the public service website

 

 

Other recent topics
  • Confidence is indivisible >>>
  • A new participative Britain >>>
    •
  • Socialism inspires liberalism >>>
  • America cannot afford war >>>
  • Labour Party Reform >>>
  • My Letter to Ian McCartney >>>
  • Giving away a railway station >>>
  • Socialist retail strategy >>>
  • Reforming the Police >>>
  • My Draft Labour Manifesto >>>
  • Capitalism? An illusion... >>>
  • Police NOT War >>>
  • Politics mirror war >>>
  • Abdroids invade Lloyds of London >>>
  • Beware LA collapse >>>
  • And read my own Big Theory itself, at
    Multiple Differential Uncertainty         

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Special Footnote

I love the online newspapers, which are my access to the world - share them with me - click through to their Homepages from here -

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