The Hard Hat Riot: The Birth of 'Trumpism'?

American Carnage

On 8 May 1970 200 construction workers in New York City went on the rampage. They attacked students and anti-war protesters whilst the police looked on and did nothing. A little over two weeks later union leaders from the construction industry met President Nixon, gifting him a hard hat and promising him the support that would see him re-elected to office in 1972.

The 'Hard Hat Riot' is now largely forgotten, but it's hard not to see the parallels with today. A reactionary white working class had come onto the streets to violently oppose an unpatriotic 'liberal elite', and to lend their support to a corrupt, and soon to be impeached, right wing president.

So what was it all about?

Fire and Fury

On 30 April 1970 President Nixon had sent the South Vietnamese Army, backed by US air power, over the Vietnamese border into Cambodia.

The Vietnam War was already unpopular, and had already split America, but this escalation in the fighting galvanised the anti-war movement and sparked a new wave of protests. Amongst the campuses where activists mobilised was Kent State University in Ohio.

But Kent State wasn't Berkeley. It was a quiet sort of place and protests here had been peaceful affairs. However after rioting in downtown Kent following a demostration further protests were banned. The National Guard was called in, and 1000 soldiers put the university under military occupation. On 4 May students, joined by anti-war protesters from elsewhere, defied the ban. When the National Guard failed to get them to disperse, 28 guardsmen opened fire, killing four, leaving another paralysed for life, and wounding eight others.

John Filo's photograph of Mary Vecchio's scream, as she knelt next to the body of Jeffrey Miller, became the defining image of the day, and one of the most iconic of the entire era.

Very Fine People On Both Sides

The massacre shocked the nation, but perhaps not in the way you'd expect. True, the USA's only ever nation-wide student strike took place immediately afterwards, with four million students boycotting lessons. However a Gallup Poll revealed that only 11% of respondents blamed the National Guard for the deaths, and 58% blamed the students.

A huge anti-war rally was planned in New York for 9 May, and in the morning on the day before the about a thousand protesters gathered outside the stock exchange on Wall Street to mourn the dead students, and demand an end to the war.

Just before midday a couple of hundred construction workers carrying American flags turned up to heckle, soon joined by others. Many had armed themselves, and they soon broke through the half hearted police line and attacked the protesters. With the police doing nothing it was, rather bizarrely, stock exchange workers from Wall Street that tried to protect the students.

Susan Harman, then 29, tried save a student being attacked by three men, one armed with a pair of iron clippers, beating up one student. "Don't", she said. "Let go of my jacket, bitch" was the reply, followed by “If you want to be treated like an equal, we’ll treat you like one" and the three men beat her to the ground.

Soon the peaceful demo was scattered and the students were pursued down Wall Street by the hard hats. Anyone who looked like a hippy was attacked.

The mob then descended on City Hall, where the flag was flying at half mast in response to the
massacre. Construction workers broke in and raised it at its full height.

They spent the rest of the day causing mayhem in the local area. Trinity Church, which had become a makeshift field hospital, was attacked and a Red Cross flag torn down, possibly because someone thought it looked communist. Windows where smashed at Pace University. The final casualty toll was 70 injured, most of whom required hospital treatment.

The story was that working class patriots, outraged by the desecration of the flag and the lack of loyalty from middle class students, had decided to take matters into their own hands. The 'silent majority' had spoken out. Republican politicians, who had spent most of the last decade condemning student activism of any kind, spoke out to congratulate the hard hats.Vice-President Spiro Agnew sent a message to union leader Peter Brennan congratulating him on "the impressive display in patriotism–and a spirit of pride in country that seems to have become unfashionable in recent years."

Alternative Facts

But what was the truth?

Well, for a start the protest was certainly not spontaneous. The hard hats weren't AWOL from work for a start. They were encouraged to leave their sites by their shop stewards, and promised they would still be paid. Some were reportedly offered a bonus. One witness inside Wall Street claimed to have seen two men in suits organising the attacks.

However the workers don't appear to have needed asking twice, and enthusiastically got stuck into bashing the hippies. But did that mean the working class supported the war?

Well, some clearly did, but polls throughout the period consistently show support for the US intervention was highest amongst the top wage earners, the parents of the protesting students, and lowest amongst those who actually went to fight and die in Vietnam, the working class, including the white working class.

The anti-war movement was certainly started by middle class students, but by 1970 it was far broader than that. Students for a Democratic Society, the group behind the big rallies in Berkeley and elsewhere, had fallen apart in 1969. The face of protest in the seventies was as likely to be a veteran from the Bronx throwing his medals away as a hippy from Haight-Ashbury making the peace sign. 

Make America Great Again

But the Vietnam War was not the only drama in sixties America. Alongside ran the story of Civil
Rights movement.

The construction industry, heavily unionised and with relatively good pay and conditions, had traditionally been a whites-only job. However, in the 1960s this had changed. The parity index is a way of expressing the number of workers from a minority in a particular field with 100% meaning that the proportion was exactly the same as the general population. After a decade of affirmative action programs the parity index for construction work in New York in 1970 was 95%, meaning a very high level of integration.

However this had not gone down well with the unions. In March 1970 a proposal was put forward by Peter Brennan, President of the Construction Trades Council, that a separate apprenticeship centre be created for black workers, with the catch that neither Trade Union membership, nor a job, was on offer at the end of it. As a result of such intransigence, ten years after the Hard Hat Riot the parity index in the New York construction industry had fallen to 72%.

It is impossible to know how much, either consciously or unconsciously, race contributed to the events of 4 May 1970. But it looks likely that the riot was as much about defending white privilege at home as US imperialism abroad.

Violence On Many Sides

The events at City Hall were overshadowed the very next day by the arrival of 100,000 anti-war protesters. The events of Kent State shootings, plus the military failure of Nixon's invasion, had changed the nations view of the war, and for the first time more people opposed it than supported it. Three years later US troops would return home.

Before that happened Richard Nixon would be returned to the White House by a landslide. Nixon never had majority working class support. No modern Republican ever has, but with Republican voters remaining loyal even as crisis and scandal started to envelop him, even a small loss of traditional Democrat voters gave him the victory.

In the aftermath of the Hard Hat Riot, construction union leaders went to the White House and were warmly received. Peter Brennan became Nixon's Labor Secretary.

Fake News

The narrative of the Hard Hat Riot, of a white working class willing to fight for their country, and a
smug middle class who weren't, has certainly stuck. Just think of how Vietnam is portrayed in popular culture: Rambo is working class, 'Hawkeye' Pierce (literally in Korea, but metaphorically in Vietnam) is middle class.

But in real life it was the Donald Trumps of the world who supported Vietnam, whilst dodging the draft themselves on spurious grounds, and the likes of Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July) who opposed it. The student protesters, like the hard hatted rioters, were remarkable in that they acted out of character.

In the end though normal services were resumed. Brennan had to leave government after Watergate. He returned to his roll with the union, but the next Republican elected to President was not as kind to him as Nixon. Reagan's war on organised labour saw 100,000 non-unionised contractors enter the construction market.

America First

It's never worth wasting too much time going in debating the ideology of fascism. At its core fascism is just about defending privilege, but what makes a fascist different to a mere authoritarian is the use of violence.

Despite the many similarities, one thing that distinguishes Trump, and Nixon, from Hitler is they did not have an army of street thugs at their disposal.

However the Hard Hat Riot showed that such a force was there if Nixon had wanted to use it. Events in Charlottesberg show that Trump has such an army too. His refusal to condemn the murder of Heather Hayer shows he does not necesarily rule this out. If so, let's be quite clear what this would be: American fascism born, not on the 4th of July, but on 8th May 1970.

Construction Workers U.S.A. by Herbert A. Applebaum
The Seventies Unplugged by Gerrad DeGroot 

Labour Party Occupied!

It's been rather strange to watch an election that I'm not allowed to vote in.

Despite being a member of an affiliated trade union myself, and despite my wife being a full member of the party, neither of us received ballot papers.

However that doesn't matter in the long run and the Jedi Obi One Corbynobi has been reelected as leader of the venerable old Labour Order. Hopefully this will now be The Force Awakens, not the Revenged of the Sithed Off.

But the strangest part of the contest is how Corbyn's opponents seem to have spent the entire campaign boxing at shadows. Talk of 'Trotskyite infiltrators', 'the new Militant tendancy' and a 'return to Syndicalism' just miss the point entirely.

Yes, there are all those types of people in the party, along with anti-semites, misogynists and abusive trolls, and they probably think all their Christmases have come at once right now, but they are not running this thing. We have not fallen back through some wormhole to the seventies, or even the thirties. Red Robbo is not driving this and Stalin has not risen from the grave and dispatched Comintern agents to bring down British democracy. Orwell, if he were alive, would be part of this movement, not against it.

Occupy Wall Street, with a good question

This is Occupy the Labour Party. This is the people who have been hacked off with party politics for
the last twenty years finally deciding take an interest in elections and get a candidate they can actually vote for. These are the people who marched against the Iraq War, who mobilise against fracking, who stood up to the Brexit racists, who rally for the climate and stood against the EDL.

These are people who think the Labour Party should not be supported by anonymous millionaires, should not seek endorsement from billionaire newspaper owners, should not try to do a deal with the City and should not be made up of MPs taking five and six figure 'consultancies' from unelected corporations.

Against them were the new old guard of New Labour who do not see how the ground has shifted under their feet. Kinnock, Brown and Miliband all lost general elections, so are in no position to call anyone 'unelectable'.

The socially liberal but economically conservative Cameron was a far better Blair than even Blair himself, and the City were always going to prefer the real thing to a cheap Labour copy.

Owen Smith in Liverpool, with ice cream van.

There is no technocratic solution here. There is no playing at politics and being better Tories than the Tories. That game is over.

The New Labour strategy of funding from rising wealth cannot work since global capitalism tanked ten years ago. There is no room for manoeuvre any more on the economy. The City demands austerity for the poor and socialism for the rich. You may as well be a communist as a Keynsian right now, they will treat you exactly the same, as 'Red(ish) Ed' found out.

Nor can there be any meaningful comprise with an Establishment that sees itself as besieged on all sides. Whether in Greece, North Dakota or here there is no negotiation with an economically, environmentally and intellectually bankrupt ruling orthodoxy. They will lie, they will cheat and they will fight. They will not listen. They will not be reasonable.

This result is not be the end. Party leadership elections are not general elections. Our man has won, but Corbyn's supporters, especially those like me who aren't allowed back into the party, need to get out on the streets and get the message out. They need to campaign, to door knock and to reach the people who only read The Sun or the Daily Mail, who believe the UKIP lies, who voted Brexit, who do not live in the post-industrial north, who do not work in the public sector and who possibly share very few of our values, but who need change as much as everyone else.

Corbyn will need to decide what he wants to do. It's not clear they he knows what to do, or even if he understands the movement he is the figurehead for. Perhaps he should take a hint from Gandhi, a man he clearly admires, who when he realised he had started something he could no longer control said:

 "There go my people. I must follow them, as I am their leader."

Bird Brains

Just when you thought that you might be starting to understand Americans, along comes the Guardian with the story of Lee Sherman. Sherman worked for Pittsburgh Plate Glass, a company with a somewhat dodgy health and safety reputation, even by US standards. During his time there he was gassed and blown up, exposed to dangerous chemicals and nearly dissolved in acid. The company had him dump toxic chemical in the local river at night, which eventually wiped out the local fishing industry. When Sherman started to go off sick he was sacked for absenteeism. Even his time off to serve in the Army reserve was counted against him.

The rub is that Sherman supports the Tea Party. Never mind that weak regulation failed to save either his health or his job, he wants less of it.

Support for the delusional far right like the Tea Party always seemed pretty stupid unless you actually were a billionaire, but in the post-Credit Crunch world of perpetual austerity it seems pathologically stupid. But support there certainly is. Opinion polls regularly showed that the number of people who supported Obama's very modest health care reforms in Texas was actually less than the number of people who didn't have health insurance. In other words there were Texans willing to risk an unnecessary demise from a curable disease rather than support something they saw as 'communist'. An extreme case of Better Dead Than Red.

Indeed, it sometimes seems there is actually more support for the policies of tax cuts for the fat cats
and free reign for the big corporations at the bottom of the social strata than at the top. Transition Town founder Rob Hopkins once told me that at a 'Chatham House rules' junket he attended he asked a Captain of Industry what he thought the Credit Crunch meant and he replied "this is what the end of Western Civilisation looks like".

But if those at the top know the wheels have come off the waggon it is clearly not in their interest to let on. Not so the middle class. Most Corbynistas are middle class apparently, and the Green Party, 'as everyone knows', is both bourgeois and female, leading the Telegraph to declare their manifesto was "communism designed by a middle class woman", which is a line so good they should have used it as a campaign slogan.

But what about those on the lower rungs of society. The working class who may still work, but for whom prosperity never came? Our own rather tragic version of the Tea Party is UKIP. Across huge chunks of formerly Labour voting England, in the post-industrial north and the down-at-heel seaside towns of the east, in places that failed to boom under Thatcher or bounce back under Blair, UKIP has its supporters. If only we can evict the foreigners and get the EU bureaucrats of our back, they say, then industry would flourish, Britannia would rule the waves again. Capitalism may have failed to bring prosperity to all in two hundred years of trying, but if only the red tape was ripped up, the trade unions beaten down and health and safety brigade told off, then this time it would work.

It's bonkers, but people believe it. Why?

B F Skinner

Seventy odd years ago the American psychologist B F Skinner was doing some very strange things to animals. As well as teaching his cats to play the piano and his beagle to play hide-and-seek, he had an idea for the military to use pigeons as the guidance system for missiles.

Skinner was the father of the study of Behaviourism. Anyone today who talks about positive and negative reinforcement is using the language Skinner derived from his experiment on rats and more pigeons.Trapping the poor animals inside what was later called a Skinner Box, he had the tap levers in order to get rewards of food.

The clever bit, or the utterly evil bit, depending on your point of view, was that Skinner made sure they didn't always get their food. Some pigeons would get fed every time they pecked the lever, some every other time, and for some unfortunate birds it was completely random whether food appeared. Then Skinner would let the food run out.

The results were interesting. Group one would figure out pretty quickly what had happened and down beaks, so to speak. The second group would carry on a bit longer before working out that the free dinners were over. The third group though, the ones who received random rewards, would carry on pecking away for much longer. I've heard - and I can't prove this mind - that Skinner let some of them peck themselves to death still hoping that another pellet will come their way.

People aren't pigeons, but it's hard not to see an analogy here. For people like Lee Sherman life has always been a lottery. The industrial accidents that killed his co-workers could easily have taken his life. That he has survived to 82 despite a life in a toxic industry is surely just good fortune. That he was sacked for getting sick may not be a surprise to us, but he may well regard it as just bad luck.

To the Lee Shermans of the world, who see the fat cats walking away with riches they can only dream of, who get their world view from the Tea Party and their 'news' from Fox, it may seem that if only they wait a little longer their luck will change. If only the liberals don't steal their prize, if only they can stop the immigrants jumping the queue.

They believe that their turn will come if only they take the medicine at a higher and higher dose. Telling them that food tray ran out years ago or that they have only ever been pawns in some giant social experiment, which even its architects now regard as having failed, will not be welcome news.

So across the red states of the USA, and in UKIPland in the UK, the turkeys continue to vote for Christmas.

"All that is solid turns into air"

Rod Holt looking serious at Keep Corbyn rally, Manchester 1 July 2016

So wrote Marx in the Communist Manisfesto 166 years ago, and this seems a very good description of UK politics over the last two weeks.

UKIP, although only given a single MP by the UK's first-past-the-post electoral system (and not even an MP they actually like), have never-the-less managed to get their main policy adopted by a reluctant government.

The Tories themselves, the most resiliant of all political parties, are regrouping after the resignation of their leader, and the humbling of both his prospective heirs.

The Labour Party meanwhile, is either a farce of tragic proportions or a tragedy of farcial proportions, with the parliamentary party and its resurgent membership either on a collision course or heading in opposite directions.

So what on earth is going on?

The obvious answer is that politics as we know it has ceased to exist. The traditional left/right split has almost become meaningless.

Political compass of UK parties May 2015

Various alternatives have been proposed. The two dimensional model of the Political Compass, which grades parties on both their economic and social liberalism, being a popular alternative.

The problem is, when you look at the UK, it turns out 90% of us voted for right wing, authoritarian parties. This might be true, but it's not very useful.

In my opinion, the extra dimension you really need to add at the moment, is whether the party is pro or anti-austerity.

UKIP, with their 'back to the 1950s/blame it all on the EU' views may not be a coherent anti-austerity party, indeed their billionaire backers and ex-banker leader (now ex-leader) rather suggest otherwise, but they did hoover up a huge chunk of disaffection with the status quo.  Anti-immigrant rather than anti-austerity perhaps, they are still different to the Tories.

In 2015 Labour offered up austerity-lite, and the Green Party were the only real anti-austerity party of the left. The SNP though were channelling the same disaffection north of the border as UKIP did in England, and mostly (if not entirely) sending it leftwards.

Today Labour is pretty much an anti-austerity party of the left, or rather it is a party whose members and leadership appear to be mostly anti-austerity, but whose MPs aren't. If Labour's current difficulties result in a split, then we will end up with an austerity-lite Blue Labour and anti-austerity Red Labour.

The Europeans

European Parliament as of June 2015

Looking out across Europe we see the same political mess as here. In the countries hardest hit by the Credit Crunch the fault lines are becoming clearly. Broadly speaking the people of Europe are up to 20% anti-immigrant right, 60% pro-austerity centre (usually split between two traditional parties) and about 20% anti-austerity left.

The error bars are at least 10% on those figures, and the results of individual elections are skewed by voters wanting to kick out corrupt or incompetent governemts and punish those seen as responsible for mess we're all in.

Hellenic Parliament as of September 2015

In Greece, for example, the pro-austerity left party PASOK has been almost completely wiped out, giving the anti-austerity parties of the left nearly 45% of the vote. However they also seem to have stolen support from the anti-austerity right as the Golden Dawn (the Greek BNP) and the Independent Greeks (the Greek UKIP) used to muster about 15% of the vote between them, whilst now they're down to about 10%.

Back in Blighty

In the UK in the last election the figures for the 2015 election (rounded to the nearest 5%) were:

UKIP (anti-austerity/immigrant right) 15%

Conservatives (pro-austerity right) 35%
Labour and LibDems (pro-austerity left) 40%
Green and SNP (anti-austerity left) 10%

Of course, in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn and his pals all voted Labour. If we pretend that Corbyn's election as leader immediately transformed Labour into an anti-austerity party of the left (which it obviously didn't), then the breakdown of the electorate after this years local government elections becomes:

Anti-austerity/immigrant right 15%
Pro-austerity right 30%
Pro-austerity left 15%
Anti-austerity left 50%

Clearly Labour did not become Syriza overnight, and 25% of the electorate have not become anti-capitalists since the general election. All we can say is that the true political views of UK voters are probably somewhere in the middle of these two sets of figures.

A 20/30/30/20 split is not impossible.

So what?

The obvious answer is chaos.

A progressive alliance?

Our first-past-the-post system, billionaire owned media and electorate that prefers to vote for confident idiots, gives an advantage to parties who are able to target marginal seats, reward the rich and present a confident front, which is the Tories.

However if we really do have 20/30/30/20 split in the vote, then no one politcial faction, even one prepared to play fast and loose with the rules for electoral expences, can guarantee victory on its own.

The question will be, what alliances will emerge? If Labour splits, will some of the austerity-lite middle of the party follow Corbyn and can an anti-austerity left 'progressive alliance' really work? These are very important questions.

Other deals are possible. Tory/UKIP is certainly on the cards. A Tory/Blue Labour/LibDem alliance of the pro-austerity middle is not impossible, and potentially unbeatable. Even a UKIP/Red Labour deal is not out of the question, as this is effectively the coalition that runs Greece.

To the barricades?

All of which is very frustrating to those of us who don't want to use politics as a game, but as a means of actually getting things done. Unless you really do think The Revolution is at hand, you have to

Occupy London, February 2012

vote for someone.

Even if you're sure you want to vote for an anti-austerity left party, unless you live in Chippenham, you can't actually vote for Corbyn yourself. We need some options, and they aren't easy right now.

The complete Marx quote is "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober sense, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

Alas, I think in the second half here Marx is in error, or at least premature. Sober sense is the one thing I feel I can safely predict is going to be abscent from UK politics for a while yet.

New UK Fracking Licenses Explained In Three Maps

Fracking in Greater Manchester came a bit closer today as new licenses were announced by the government. They take a little bit of explaining so here goes.

Here is a map of the known to have shale gas reserves in the UK. Note the vast swath of red across the Midlands and the Home Counties.

Now here is a political map of the UK after the last General Election. Note the vast swaths of blue across the Midlands and the Home Counties.

And finally here’s a map of the areas licensed from today. Now take a look at the Midlands and the Home Counties. Notice anything?

So now we know who’s being fracked and why.

How to save the Human Rights Act

In 1215 King John met a group of his barons by an ancient yew tree, a meeting place since Anglo-Saxon times. There he signed a document that outlawed absolute monarchy. Ancient freedoms that dated back to the fall of the Roman Empire had been violated by the king and so the barons demanded these rights were now preserved in writing. The Magna Carter, signed at Runnymede, was the first human rights act.

 Eight hundred years later I am in London for the 70th Anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, watching some very old soldiers parading proudly in the sunshine. These men, and women, had grown up in the aftermath of the Great Depression in a country where no job meant no home and no healthcare. They then fought Nazi tyranny and celebrated victory by creating the Welfare State and giving liberty to the people of the greatest empire the world has ever seen.

Meanwhile Britain's new government is to celebrate these historical events by abolishing the 1998 Human Rights Act. This is seen as quick and popular move by the Prime Minister, a sop to our billionaire owned right-wing press that is already celebrating that "Human Rights Madness" is over.

The Act requires British courts to "take into account" judgements of the Human Court of Human Rights. It does not bind us to the court's decisions, but nor does abolishing it completely free us; the only way we could do that would be to leave the Council of Europe.

The Act is to be replaced with a 'British bill of rights'. These have not been published, mainly because they don't exist. The committee that was to draw them up broke up three years ago when it couldn't agree. Anyone who believes this as yet unfinished bill will give us the same rights has more faith than I have in a Prime Minister who is willing to say without irony:

"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone."

The European Convention on Human Rights, which underpins the Human Rights Act, was draw up in 1950 by a continent recovering from the ravages of total war and the brutality of the Nazi regime. Deriving from the UN Declaration of Human Rights passed two years early it aimed to make 'never again' really mean never again.

However whilst the Act remains a backstop against totalitarianism, it's main beneficiaries have been people in society who are usually forgotten, even by Human Rights champions.

Thanks to the Act council's can no longer require women fleeing domestic violence be separated from their families, the army can't sack you for being gay and victims of human trafficking are treated as people and not just contraband cargo.

Personally I have been affected in two ways. After I was found not guilty of Criminal Damage to six acres of Genetically Modified maize the Human Rights Act meant the police had to destroy the DNA sample they'd taken off me. Meanwhile at work, if I decide a person with dementia isn't safe to live in the community an independent person checks my decision.

If we do not take act these rights will go. Now is the time to fight.

Governments can make very bad decisions when trying to please the tabloid pack, witness the Dangerous Dogs Act. Once they get going they can also stick with even worse decisions rather than look weak, such as the Poll Tax.

The best way to save the Human Rights Act is to convince the government as quickly as possible that this will not be the quick victory they hope, but a long and difficult campaign. We have four lines of defence; the Scots, the Irish, the Lords and the backbenches.

1. Scotland

The Human Rights Act was incorporated into Scottish law when the devolved parliament was set up in Edinburgh. It is far from clear if Westminster has the authority to change this without the consent of the Scots, which is most definitely not going to be given.

In the complicated language of devolution this covered by the Sewel Convention, and legal experts are divided on the issue. Scotland has just returned a record number of Nationalist MPs to Westminster, where they have no power whatsoever. Furthermore instead of the second vote on independence they want, they are about to get a referendum on leaving the European Union, which they don't want. 

Abolishing the HRA north of the border could cause a massive legal battle and political revolt, neither of which a government elected primarily by the south of England will really want.

2. Northern Ireland

Across the Irish Sea are similar problems. The HRA is part of the Good Friday Agreement which brought to an end nearly 30 years of The Troubles. Replacing it would require cross party agreement from Nationalists and Unionists in a parliament where arguments about innocuous things such as flags can quickly escalate into international incidents.

Furthermore The Province has good reason to be grateful to the European Commission on Human Rights. In 1976 the court ruled that the use by the British Army of hooding, wall-standing, sleep deprivation, starvation and subjection to noise, known as the 'Five techniques', amounted to torture. Greece under the Colonels was the only other EU country to have been found to have tortured it's own citizens.

The Irish, of whatever colour, are unlikely to want to rewrite the agreement that brought them peace or to lose rights that within my lifetime have stopped torture.

3.The Lords

The Conservatives now have a majority in the House of Commons, but as they are no longer in
coalition with the Liberal Democrats no longer have one in the House of Lords.

Principles dating back over a hundred years mean that the Lords can't oppose manifesto commitments, but they can delay them for up to two years. What's more the Lords take their responsibilities as guardians our mostly unwritten constitution seriously.

The Lords can prevent this being a quick win for the government, will expose the proposals to expert scrutiny and demand the Prime Minister expend valuable Commons time if he wishes to get them through.

4. The Backbenchers

The government majority in the Commons is only twelve. The non-appearance of Sein Fein at Westminster and Ulster Unionist support makes this a little more in practise, but it's still not much.

The Conservative Party seems to care more for the rights of corporations than individuals, but there are backbenchers who still value individual liberty, and even some who like European institutions like the Commission on Human Rights. One such in Kenneth Clarke who has said:

"I personally think it is unthinkable to leave the European convention on human rights. It was drafted by British lawyers after the second world war to protect the values we fought the war for."

Ex-Chancellor and Home Secretary Clarke, the model for the smoking Minister of Health in Yes Prime Minister, has no future in this Eurosceptic Cabinet so can basically say what he wants.

That it has come to relying on a man whose day job is selling cigarettes to Vietnamese kids to defend our human rights says a lot about the parlous state of UK politics, but unless we plan on giving up on being human, now is the time to fight with whatever weapons we have.

My Address to Election Candidates

I was invited to address General Election candidates standing in the constituency of Cheadle in Stockport, Greater Manchester at a hustings organised by 38 Degrees and held in Stockport Art Gallery. This is what I said:


I am very pleased to be here today to ask the Candidates a question on energy policy, because you can’t talk about energy without discussing Climate Change, and there is surely no issue in the world right now which is more important to the future of human civilisation, yet where political leadership is so obviously lacking. 

The integrity of the science that warns of the danger is constantly being reinforced, whilst those that deny the problem are regularly shown to have none. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, led by a Climate Change sceptic and partly funded by Climate Change deniers, confirmed the predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whilst the astrophysicist Willie Soon, a prominent critic of the scientific consensus in the media, turned out to be fully funded by the fossil fuel industry.

We have been aware of this problem for more than a quarter of a century, yet our efforts to deal with it have come to nothing. Market based solutions have conspicuously failed. Indeed, Sir Nicholas Stern has called Climate Change the  “greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen”.

The politicians have done a little better than the business leaders. In 2008 the previous UK government passed the Climate Change Act which requires an 80% reduction in Greenhouse Gas emission by 2050, but then this year the current government passed the Infrastructure Bill which includes the legal requirement to ‘maximise economic recovery of UK petroleum.’

Meanwhile the fossil fuel industry continues to benefit from billions of pounds of state subsidies much of it hidden. British companies mine the tar sands of Canada, explore for new oil in the pristine wilderness of the Arctic or look to exploit the shale gas in the rocks beneath our feet in Greater Manchester.

Internationally the politics is stalled. Negotiations to get a global deal come of age this year with the COP21 meeting in Paris, yet we are no nearer a stalled. Few people would argue with George Monbiot’s description of the process as “hundreds of intelligent, educated, well-paid and elegantly-dressed people wasting their lives”.

And it’s not as if we don’t know what needs to be done. Renewable energy, better public transport and more insulation in our homes is pretty much all that is needed. What’s more, whilst a cleaner air, less traffic and warmer houses are all desirable things in their own right, the Campaign Against Climate Change has shown that making this happen will create one million new jobs, meaning the solution to our climate crisis can also be the solution to our social crisis. 

It will take a fair bit of investment, but less than it took to save the financial system after the Credit Crunch. If the banks were too big to fail, then the climate definitely is.

So what is to be done?

The Guardian newspaper, our only newspaper not owned by a billionaire, is putting its weight behind the fossil fuel divestment campaign and efforts to keep the carbon in the ground the case for which, says editor Alan Rushbridger, “is becoming an overwhelming one”.

So my question to the Candidates is in three parts; do they accept the science of Climate Change, do they agree that what we have tried so far to solve the problem has failed and most likely will continue to fail, and will they support the campaign to keep fossil fuel fuels in the ground by saying no to imports of Canadian tar sand oil, stopping British companies drilling in the Arctic Ocean and ending the rush to frack for shale gas?

SYRIZA: A guide for Brits who hope.

Greece solidarity demonstration, London, 11 Feb 2015

Imagine a small political party, polling only a few percent in elections and made up of assortment of colourful characters from the progressive fringe of politics, seemingly unable to agree on lunch let alone policy. Imagine then that this party suddenly becomes the only anti-austerity party in town and starts to build up an irresistible level of support from those disillusioned by mainstream politics. It stands in a General Election and becomes the government.

Over here the Green Party in England and Wales must be dreaming of such a result, but this really is the story of SYRIZA in Greece, the only country in the world where the citizens voluntarily attend pro-government rallies. But what does it mean for those of us in Blighty hoping that the recent surge in support for the Greens mean Natalie Bennett will be our Alex Tsipras?

It's all Greek to me

Syntagma Square, Athens, 11 Feb 2015

The first thing to say about politics in the Hellenic Republic is, it's complicated. I've been trying to follow it for twenty five years ago and I'm as confused as ever. The second thing to say is when we speak of a war between Left and Right in the UK we are speaking metaphorically. In Greece it's literal.

The story could begin in 1924 with the formation of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), or in 1936 when the fascist Metaxas, a charming man who liked strapping opponents to blocks of ice, suspended parliament, but instead we'll start with the end of the Second World War

Athens 1944, Photograph: Dmitri Kessel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

In Britain 1945 saw a victory at the ballot box for the centre-left Labour Party, but Greece it was the far left guerrillas of the ELAS who appeared to have the upper hand. However before they could form a government Churchill rearmed the Nazi Security Battalions with British guns and turned them on their fellow countrymen.

The Greek Civil War that followed was a confused and bloody business. Often as not it saw neighbouring villages settling scores with only a pretence to political motives, but for the Greek Left it was a catharsis. Defeated and then brutally suppressed in the 'democratic' post-war Hellenic Republic, the Left spent the fifties either in hiding or exiled to island gulags. Even the hint of a return to power in the late sixties was enough to provoke a military coup and worse repression.

Athens Polytechnic 1973, tanks getting ready to attack students.

When the youth of Greece eventually rebelled in the seventies it wasn't, like over here, against the imagined inequity of their parents, but the very real oppression of the Colonels. Their 1973 uprising was a bloody failure, but democracy did return a year later in the form of the centre-right New Democracy Party.

The KKE became legal again, but this didn't actually help them very much as, in the time honoured tradition of the Left, it was time for a split. Events in Paris and Prague in the spring of 1968 had shaken communist parties across the continent. The British Communist Party had almost ceased to exist by this point, but elsewhere the Eurocommunists were ousting the old guard. Embracing democracy they thrust themselves to the forefront of the liberation struggles of the decade.

It was this split that would ultimately lead to the Eurocommunists joining SYRIZA, but for now it was the pro-Moscow grouping that was the larger faction. Partly because of the historical wartime struggle against the Nazis, partly because of the contemporary struggle against military rule and no doubt partly because Greeks are just permanently contrary. The main effect of the in-fighting though was to leave the popularist Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) effectively unchallenged on the left of Greek politics.

When the seventies turned into the eighties Britain and Greece went in very different directions. Here the selfish hedonism of the sixties turned into the selfish monetarism of the eighties, but in Greece the youth who'd rebelled by listening to Greek bands playing Western rock music under the dictatorship helped to elect the country's first post-war left wing government. Andreas Papandreo's PASOK swept into office with the rallying cry "Change". A National Health Service was created, former Communist guerrillas were given pensions, the exiles returned and the generation excluded from society by The Colonels was rewarded with easy jobs in the public sector.

Athens Polytechnic 1995, riot police get ready to attack students

The 1990s in Greece saw a new wave of student radicalism and anarchists, who I've not really had time to mention yet, made most of the running. Murray Bookchin used to read Aristotle and Greek anarchists read Bookchin, so in a sense Social Ecology was coming home.

In Britain we occupied trees to stop roads, in Greece they occupied schools and universities. The Greek police were once again their usual liberal selves and there was a non-negligable body count in these actions. It was also not uncommon to see lorry loads of machine gun wielding coppers parked up in anarchist parts of Athens. It all came to a head in 1995 when 3000 people occupied the Polytechnic. (Just to confuse Brits who remember polytechnics as cut price higher education, the Athens Polytechnic is one of their top universities). The police moved in, the media, who often ended up being attacked by anarchists at demos and so weren't minded to give them good press, had a field day and when it was all over the movement was effectively dead.

Anti-war graffiti on NATO vehicles, Greece 1999

In 1999 the brief war between NATO and Serbia gave the Left another cause. Meanwhile the Battle of Seattle had opened a new front against Capitalism, and as the Eurocommunists and other far left groups prepared for the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa they decided to decided to form something they initially called Space for Dialogue for the Unity and Common Action of the Left, but which became SYRIZA three years later.

The PASOK government  meanwhile, having employed Goldman Sachs to cook the books, had been allowed to join the Eurozone. The ruse appeared to be paying off and the country was on the up for most of the noughties. Then the Credit Crunch hit, and the Eurozone economies crashed. The centre-right New Democracy Party was in power by this time. They were unsurprisingly booted out in 2009 when George (son of Andreas) Papandreo's PASOK ran against under the slogan "there is money". Unfortunately nobody had told him there wasn't.

In Britain the centre-left had been in power when the Credit Crunch hit but left the austerity to the opposition, in Greece it was the other way round. In Britain the damage was serious. In Greece it was fatal. In the 2015 elections PASOK came seventh, behind both the far-right fascists of the Golden Dawn and the ultra-left communists of the KKE.

Unlike in Britain, the far left was still alive and well. The Hellenic Republic had its equivalent of Occupy in the Squares Movement, but the Left had shown its power three years early, in December 2008. When the Greek police shot dead Andreas Grigoropoulos, a fifteen year old boy out celebrating his name day, the resulting riots were the worst since the fall of the Colonels. Just like in 1974 students were central to the revolt, but this time the reasons were more obscure.

Protest in front of Greek parliament, May 2011

Greece had problems of corruption, youth unemployment and inequality, but at that time no worse than many other European countries. The anger of its young people seemed to be directed at the Neoliberal world generally rather than the Hellenic Republic in particular. It was if, as before, Greece was a decade behind the times and it was fighting the Battle of Seattle all over again.

The KKE though had nothing to do with this. For them nothing short of a Revolution would do and they denounced the Squares Movement as nothing less than a "mechanism of the ruling class". When you see Occupy as too reactionary you are seriously left! This retreat from reality opened the door for SYRIZA who started their march to power with the anti-austerity campaigners in Syntagma Square.

Christodoulos Xeros

If you think with the KKE we're reached the edge of Greek progressive politics, you'd be wrong. If you want further proof that the Hellenic Republic really is stuck in a seventies time warp there are the terrorists. Yes, some on the Greek Left really are still trying to bomb their way to a Revolution forty years after our own Angry Brigade stopped blowing up fashion boutiques and went off to do more useful things. Indeed, recently rearrested terrorist Christodoulos Xeros even looks like he should be fronting his own Prog. Rock band. To understand Greek politics you have to realise that for some these people do almost have pop star status. When the New Democracy HQ was bombed during the recent election campaign, SYRIZA supporters celebrated online.

SYRIZA then has sprung from a very different political landscape to our Green Party. Here, the
Second World War united the country not split it apart and in the sixties our Left was moderated by being in power not radicalised by oppression, and I guess that's nothing to complain about.

SYRIZA may be a new party, but the continuity of the Greek Left is contained within it. When Tsipras lays a wreath at a memorial to Greeks killed by the Nazis it links the present crisis to a historical struggle whilst Caroline Lucas visiting a wind farm doesn't.

Manolis Glezos, still fighting at 91

This continuity is illustrated by the remarkable Manolis Glezos. As a teenager he snuck onto the Acropolis via a cave sacred to the ancient god Pan and tore down the Swastika flying over the Parthenon. As part of the Greek resistance he once nearly blew up Winston Churchill.  The post-war government sentenced him to death but he was reprieved. He was elected to parliament whilst in prison and released after going on hunger strike. He was imprisoned again under the Colonels then on release he became a PASOK MEP. He now sits in the Greek parliament for SYRIZA when he's not protesting on the streets. So much for becoming more right wing as you get older.

SYRIZA obviously owes its election to government to the scale of the disaster that overtook Greece after the Credit Crunch. Britain may not have lost 25% of its GDP since 2008, nor do we have to bring your own drugs when we go to hospital, but the same factors that have pushed mainstream voters into the arms for the far left are playing out here; the descent of the underclass into utter poverty, the collapse of the Middle Class into working poor, the destruction of the public sector and the flight of the lucky 1% who can afford it out of the big cities, and into their gilded cages of private schools and hospitals. It's all our happening here too, just a little slower.

But whilst SYRIZA may well be the response to this in Greece, but we mustn't jump the gun in assuming it's the solution. Tsipras sometimes sounds like he's the next of the Papandreo dynasty. "Change" or "there is money" could have been his mottos this time around, and the reason PASOK has been wiped out is because the riposte to both was "there wasn't". SYRIZA's Green credentials are also rather thin. A belated change of policy to Eldorado mine project and some warm words on Climate Change and ecosocialism, but that's it.

Despite that they are clearly better than the alternatives though. However if we think a British SYRIZA is inevitable we may be disappointed. The Greek Left isn't back so much as it never went away. In the UK it was buried years ago.

Britain, Europe and indeed the world need an alternative to rapacious capitalism, unsustainable consumerism and unjust austerity, but ultimately liberation is something each country must build for itself, not a franchise we can buy into.