There are weeks when decades happen

There's nothing like a popular vote to remind you where power lies in society; spoiler - not with popular votes. Thus, the hands of any British government wanting to operate within broadly mainstream economic constraints were today tied, not by the electorate, but by the ratings agency Standard and Poor, who cut the UK's credit rating. Expect others to follow. More generally, those most curious of creatures known as 'the markets' have not responded well to Thursday's Leave vote.

It would have been possible for a determined Leave campaign with a co-ordinated economic plan, prepared to stray beyond both mainstream constraints and the interests of capital, to manage a Leave vote in a way that didn't promise widespread poverty and public spending cuts whilst keeping the, uncertainty averse, forces of global credit capital and those irksome markets sufficiently content to spare it the coup de grace. However, that is not the Leave campaign we had: that was a monstrous concotion of xenophobes, British nationalists, economic reactionaries, and oddballs: an assembly of grotesque misfits wrapped in the Union Jack, who could only appeal to anyone on the basis of a widespread discontent, disaffection and desperation in search of an outlet. They had no plan, other than to 'Take Back Our Country' and 'Make Britain Great Again', all the while defending the sectional interests of a narrow part of British capital with no sense of a broader picture.

There is much still to say about the campaign, the EU, and the British economy. There is even more to say about what the referendum result shows about class. And there is still more to say yet about the petulant arrogance of much liberal reaction to the result. A strand of opinion in broadsheets, academia, and the Waitrose-shopping end of social media thinks that what last Thursday showed was that the swinish multitude should not be trusted with big decisions.

I will write about those things at some point. More urgent than any of them is the foul upsurge in open racism that has followed on the referendum campaign and result. Make no mistake, it wasn't that these things caused racism. Britain is, whatever the panglossians who inhabit Guardian columns might imagine, a racist society through and through. However, racism often lies buried - waiting nervous and Gollum-like in the shadows, consumed with self-hatred and unwilling to show its face. That it does is one of the greatest political achievements of recent decades. Yet, it's still there: hidden behind the remark that 'the area has changed', disguised as patriotism (if the two can ever be disentangled), implicit in a choice of friends. Once mainstream political discourse gets racialised, as it was by the immigration-focus of both main referendum campaigns, racists gain confidence. Things usually unsaid are spoken aloud. Combine this with the jingoistic upsurge that followed the result, the general flag-waving feel of Jubilee year, and most noxiously the ever-present threat of the far-right, and you have a toxic mix.

Jo Cox was its victim. There have been others. Since Thursday, racial abuse soared. Eastern Europeans were a particular focus: with cards reading 'go home Polish vermin' distributed outside a Cambridgeshire primary school. In West London, a Polish cultural centre was attacked. In East London two Polish men were beaten unconscious. The list of incidents goes on and horribly on:

But at least there's a political party in Britain, committed to equality and anti-racism, that will make the case strongly against racism, and build a cohesive movement in solidarity with its victims, right? Enter the Labour Party, glorious and ready to do battle against injustice and bigotry. Well, ordinary party members have been doing this. The PLP, however. Well, as the far-right roars and the economy falters, their priority is obviously to try to topple a popular leader who has increased Labour's share of the vote and presided over modest, but real, by-election successes.

The line is, of course, that Jeremy's weak leadership was responsible for the Leave vote. This is nonsense on several levels. Never mind the fact that Corbyn is not a weak leader - although this would not appear obvious to those whose idea of political leadership looks as though it has been cobbled together from a few evenings watching The Thick Of It - but that the bulk of the PLP don't want to be led by him, or by anyone with political ideas remotely similar to his. Never mind the fact that Corbyn was not in a position to persuade key Labour constituencies to vote Remain: one of Blairism's besetting sins is the reduction of politics to campaigns and soundbites, whereas all of those Leave votes in the north-east of England were about decades of feeling forgotten, being stripped of hope, crushed economically, and mocked culturally; not matters that can be set right with a broad grin. Never mind the fact that the only thing that would have been achieved by Corbyn going in all guns blazing on behalf of Remain would have been a Scotland-style meltdown in Labour support in parts of the north of England. None of this matters.

It is irrelevant because the coup is not actually about the referendum campaign or Corbyn's leadership style. It is about politics. A sizeable chuck of the PLP, Blairite clones imposed during the years when Labour had the imagination of Jeffrey Archer and the conscience of Dr Crippen, do not want a left-wing leader. You understand nothing about New Labour until you understand that it is about making the Labour Party permanently safe for capitalism. Most of its warriors, not being the most cerebral of souls, would be a bit hazy about what the word 'capitalism' means, preferring instead to wax lyrical about 'a dynamic, modern, economy'. For sure, New Labour is about winning elections, but not at any cost. Their lord and master Tony Blair let the cat out of the bag in this respect when he said that he would not take the 'route to victory' if it were a left-wing one.

In actual fact, the quisling tendancy in the PLP may not have to choose between power and principles. It is not inconceivable by any means that we will see some kind of National Government on a somehow-managing-to-Remain basis - composed of Tories, Lib Dems, and an SDPesque rump of Blairites - after an autumn election. Whether the split will come before or after this election will depend on the right's tactics, and whether they have the front to let unions and party activists pay in time and money for their election. (Incidentally: this scenario should be anticipated and pre-empted. Bold thinking about Scotland, up to and including the possibility of an electoral pact with the SNP in exchange for the promise of a second independence referendum, should be considered).

We cannot stop the right being right-wing. Nor can we make them loyal to the leadership: the strategy of a 'kinder, newer, politics' has been tried, in good faith, and has failed. The co-ordinated spotaneous resignations of shadow ministers throughout today put that beyond doubt. Now is the time to fight for the Labour Party. This, to be sure, should not be at the expense of defending communities against racism, nor at that of arguing for an alternative strategy on the economy. However, the remaining strangehold of the 1990s on Labour in parliament is a barrier to doing both these things. Words like 'accountability' and 'deselection' have now to be uttered openly. At constituency level the left has to plan so that the Labour Party in parliament in future looks more like the Labour Party at large.

The immediate priority is to support Jeremy. He is under attack, facing a vote of no confidence as I write. See Momentum here for a petition, and keep an eye out for more ways of offering support. These are desperate times within the Labour Party. Yet there is some hope. Here is Parliament Square this evening:

Anti-Semitism, Labour, and the cynicism of the Right.

There are certain phrases that immediately make me get my coat and leave the party: “Oh look, there’s Richard Littlejohn in the corner!” “Let me tell you about our holiday at a nudist camp.” “You’re Jewish? Cool. I’m a lifelong philosemite, you know."

So wrote Hadley Freeman a couple of years back, in a piece whose relevance to the present blogpost will become clear in due course. All the talk at the moment is not, however, of philosemitism, but of its apparent opposite.

Anti-Semitism is a problem. It is a problem in British society, shot through as it is with racism and religious intolerance. It is therefore no surprise that it is present to some extent in institutions that exist within that society, including the Labour Party. To be sure, it is unlikely that the Corbyn-led party could muster the levels of suspiciously anti-Jewish looking goings on achieved by the British Right. After all, it is no small thing to have one of one's most prominent youth organisations singing Nazi songs, or a tabloid ally running scare stories about Jewish areas of London. But then, few of us can aspire to the levels of the Conservative Party.

Aidan Burley - Google him

Nor am I convinced that the disturbing anti-Semitic strand running through some of the odder bits of the Left has any real hold within the Labour Party. This is not least because the Party has actually been fairly good at dealing with genuine cases of anti-Semitism. Luton councillor Aysegul Gurbuz, who praised Hitler, was rightly suspended. Gerry Downing, a veteran member of revolutionary socialism's batshit tendency, spoke about Labour's 'Jewish problem': as a consequence Labour no longer has a Downing problem, and I will be shedding no tears as a consequence. Similarly, dear reader, I can't get worked up about the plight of Ken Livingstone. For all that he has done over the years, and for all that I don't think he is an anti-Semite, he has at the very least a case of foot-in-mouth disease. Some time for quiet reflection will do him good.

If anything the Party machine has been over-zealous. This is not just through the troubling growth of a culture in which criticism of Israel is equated with anti-Semitism: witness the case of Jewish activist Tony Greenstein. The altogether eyebrow-lifting brief suspension of Jackie Walker, a long-time anti-racist of Jewish heritage, makes the machine look less guilty of the too strict application of decent principles as of a politically-motivated witch-hunt.

This suspicion grows once the case of Rhea Wolfson is considered. Chosen to replace Livingstone on the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance slate for Labour's NEC, Wolfson is a young Jewish woman, and an active synagogue-goer. Party rules mean that she needs the nomination of her CLP to make the ballot. She takes up the story on her Facebook page:

Over the past few weeks, I have been delighted to receive support for my candidacy for Labour's National Executive Committee (NEC) from a broad spectrum of opinion within the party, including nominations from dozens of Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs). It is clear that many members want to see me elected to the NEC.However, I am now concerned that a faction of the party are trying to take that option away from the membership. To appear on the ballot I needed to secure, amongst other things, the nomination of my home CLP.

Last night Eastwood CLP, where my family home is, met to nominate candidates for the NEC. It was proposed that, given I am currently a member of the CLP, there would be a straight vote for or against my nomination. I made my case and answered questions from the room. I was then asked to leave the room while they discussed my nomination further. Once I had left, the ex-leader of Scottish Labour, Jim Murphy, appealed to the CLP to not nominate me. He argued that it would not be appropriate to nominate me due to my endorsement by Momentum, which he claimed has a problem with anti-Semitism. The constituency has a large Jewish population. The CLP then voted to not endorse me, before re-inviting me back into the room.

Needless to say, this is hugely disappointing. It is disappointing because I am the only Jewish candidate in this election, because the wide range of organisations endorsing me includes the Jewish Labour Movement, and because I have a long record of challenging anti-Semitism and have in fact faced it on a daily basis since my candidacy was announced. But above all, it is disappointing because I know there are many members who want to vote for me, who could now have lost that opportunity. I am considering my options going forward.

Quite apart from the unwarranted slur on Momentum, there is more than a hint here of the suggestion that Rhea is the wrong sort of Jew for Murphy. Put in those terms the scrutiny to which she, along with other Jewish Labour activists, has been subjected cannot itself be absolved of participating in a certain kind of anti-Semitism. It would be noteworthy enough were it an isolated case, but it isn't. It is partnered by a peculiar trend amongst the liberal commentariat. At the absurd end of the spectrum here lie Julie Burchill's various interventions on behalf of her bizarre understanding of Judaism, culminating in her sending poison pen-letters to a synagogue. Burchill is joined in her cause by a supporting cast of acolytes from the creepier regions of the internet, to whose various social media accounts and webpages I can't bring myself to link. Meanwhile Nick Cohen is an altogether more serious, and therefore more dangerous, arbiter of acceptable Jewishness. Sam Kriss' take-down, here, is compulsory reading.

This strange current deserves more critical attention to be directed towards it. In the meanwhile, Rhea's candidacy can be supported here.

Corbyn and The Referendum Bind

Richard Seymour's book on the Corbyn phenomenon is well worth a read. Or at least, this is my judgement on the basis of having read two chapters earlier today. His take on the matter, which whilst being utterly supportive of the Labour leader is more pessimistic than is fashionable on the left , corresponds broadly to my own. 

That said, Richard brings out some genuine reasons for hope to which I think I've paid insufficient attention. The mere presence of Corbyn in the public sphere introduces left-wing ideas to a popular debate that has been dominated by neo-liberalism in recent decades. Meanwhile, his position as Labour leader and the related growth of groups like Momentum provides a context for a beleaguered British left to regroup and organise. We have more opportunities now, albeit ones we approach from a position of historic weakness, than we have had at any point in my adult life.

To state the obvious, this remaining the case depends to a large extent on Corbyn staying Labour leader. And there are people who have other ideas about that. From before his election as leader the knives have been out for him within the Parliamentary Labour Party and the structures and staff of the party. If the threat of a coup against his leadership seems less immediate after last month's election results (which, outside Scotland, were not too bad for Labour), this should be understood as a stay of execution, rather than a reprieve. Corbyn knows this; his parliamentary allies and advisors know this.

It is against this background that Corbyn's support for a Remain vote in this month's EU referendum should be understood. Let's be honest about this: he does not support the EU. Nor does John McDonnell. Nor does their most prominent media ally, Owen Jones, who is currently vocally advocating a remain vote. Jones has acknowledged the volte face: his line is that Labour must make the left case for a reformed EU and that the pro-Exit case will be dominated by anti-migrant racism. This does not wash: since last year, when he advocated exit, neither the prospects of a left reform of the EU (namely zero) nor the nature of the anti-EU forces in Britain have changed. Indeed, to the extent the left critics of the EU, like the Jones of Columns Past, have silenced themselves, they have gifted the pro-exit case to the nationalist right.

My point in saying this is not to accuse Corbyn and his circle of hypocrisy. They are in a genuine bind. Their support, lukewarm as it is, for Labour Remain is a calculated concession to the Right, much like their retreat on Britain's NATO membership. The hope is that by deferring to the post-Blair consensus on these issues they can broaden their coalition of support and secure their position. I do not share that hope.

The Labour leadership's advocacy of a Remain vote has been less than wholehearted. This matters because Labour voters could hold the future of Britain's EU membership in their hands and, if recent research is to be believed, hearly half of them are unaware of the Party's official position. Pressure is being put on Corbyn to be more vocal in his support for the Remain cause.

Whichever way the poll now goes, it will be used against Corbyn. If Britain leaves the EU, he will be blamed, and the indignation of the overwhelmingly pro-EU PLP stoked. On the other hand if, as is most likely, the vote is to stay this will be in spite of Corbyn. The Right will point to the example of the charismatic new mayor of London who, unlike John McDonnell (whose attitude on this will no doubt be that of a 'sectarian dinosaur'), was prepared to share a platform with the Prime Minister in defence of the national interest. He looks, they will say, like a leader in waiting.

Corbyn is in a double bind, and there is nothing he can do at this late stage. He will discover that he will never be able to concede enough to satiate his opponents in the PLP. But nor is he in any position to take them on directly; he lacks sufficient parliamentary support. If there is to be a future for this leadership, the task of fighting his corner rests with party activists and our ability to build a coalition of support for the leadership outside of parliament whilst exerting pressure on MPs.

Support the junior doctors, save our NHS

As large numbers of people took to London today to protest against austerity, I was at a local demonstration against a particular manifestation of the government's political and economic agenda: NHS cuts. 

This comes, of course, the week before junior doctors withdraw their labour entirely, the first time doctors have taken industrial action of this sort in the history of the NHS. The immediate cause of the dispute are new contracts, which will disadvantage junior doctors financially and push them into working exhausting and unsafe hours. The issues are explained here. In the face of the misinformation being spread about the doctors and their demands by the government and their friends in the media, it is vital that the BMA's case is given publicity. If you feel able, challenge criticism of the strike when you hear it. The previous link is to a PDF of a BMA leaflet. You could print and distribute this.

The misinformation and attacks will be stepped up as the strike moves towards a greater intensity. Striking doctors will feel vulnerable and exposed. At this point, expressions of support and solidarity will matter: these really can make the difference between someone persisting with the action and their giving up. Find a local picket line and support it. Even going for a few minutes can make a difference. Having been a striker on a picket line myself, it really was incredibly heartening to know that people outside my workplace were behind us. Talk to strikers, bring food, coffee, whatever - above all, go.

Support from the Labour Party, locally and nationally, has been patchy. If this improves it would give political momentum to the doctors' cause, and increase the pressure on the government. If you're a member of a Labour or trade union branch pass a motion in support of the strike. Write to local Labour MPs and (politely) ask them to get behind the action. Here is a lightly adapted version of a motion passed by a CLP in Sheffield that you could use in your own context:

The NHS is being dismantled as a comprehensive, national, public service by this government, through both underfunding, marketisation and privatisation despite the NHS having proved itself as an efficient, successful and hugely popular model of healthcare.

The junior doctors dispute, together with the campaign to save NHS student bursaries, gives us an opportunity to step up our role in the fight to save the NHS.

This branch/ CLP resolves:

• To support the junior doctors and NHS students, making links locally and visiting pickets lines and protests.
• [To support (LOCAL NHS CAMPAIGN)]
• To call on the party nationally to sharpen its stance on the NHS and clearly commit to reversing privatisation and marketisation and rebuilding a comprehensive, well funded publicly owned, run and provided NHS, based on meeting clinical need. Any integration of Health and Social care should be contingent on social care becoming a free, publicly funded and provided, service.
• To call on the party nationally to raise its profile on these issues, sending Jeremy Corbyn to address mass meetings on the NHS around the country and organising a national demonstration to save and rebuild the NHS.

Why I'll vote for British exit (but don't care very much)

...not, you will note, Brexit. The sullying of our political discourse with this silly coinage manages to annoy me more than pretty much anything else around the sorry excuse for politics that is the current EU debate.

Anyway.

The force for non-chauvinistic internationalism that is the red-white-and-blue clad Britain Stronger In Europe Campaign are putting about the claim that Britain leaving the EU would cause problems for the NHS. Here they are doing precisely that.

They have two reasons for saying this. The first can be dismissed swiftly:

A series of experts have predicted our economy would fall into ‘recession’ if we left the EU, meaning cuts to public services like the NHS.

Now, far be it from me to disagree with un-named 'experts' about the possibility of a post-exit recession (after all, there is going to be a recession sooner or later, quite apart from Britain's relationship to the EU). But it simply does not follow that this would mean cuts to the NHS. That would be a political decision. This is basically what those of us who have opposed cuts made in the wake of the 2008-9 crisis have being saying about those.

Their other claim is straightforwardly true:

And Vote Leave, the campaign for Britain to leave Europe, is run by people with a history of campaigning against the NHS. 

They have campaigned for:

• cuts to NHS spending and ending the NHS ring-fence

• cuts to NHS staff pay

• an increase in prescription charges

• allowing NHS trusts to fail

• increased NHS privatisation

Vote Leave is, there is no doubt about the matter, run by a shower of bastards. The only problem with this otherwise watertight strategy for getting the socially conscious to vote In is that exactly the same can be said for Britain Stronger In Europe. Although the list of members of their board is not displayed on BSE's website, it includes such luminaries as Peter Mandelson, Danny Alexander, and Damian Green. These are people who in various ways have contributed towards the privatisation and cutting of the NHS. The token non-bastard, Caroline Lucas, is not in a position to have much influence. In this respect she epitomises the position of the left more generally in the referendum debate.

As this might suggest, the referendum campaign is being conducted from the right by both sides. As far as I'm aware, nobody is actually running on a 'Our Position on the EU Makes It Easier to Clobber the Health Service' ticket. But both sides are certainly making the case that they are better placed to be tough on immigration and are advocating what is 'best for business'. With the Labour leadership half-heartedly falling behind a Labour In campaign headed up by Alan Johnson, again prioritising business as well as 'security', the prospects of any left voice being heard effectively during the next few months are precisely nil. Not, of course, that the perpetually over-optimistic British left will believe this in any numbers.

Now, I don't care terribly about all of this. Or rather, I don't care very much whether Britain stays in the EU. I care deeply that this debate is pitching politics to the right, and distracting attention from far more important issues. In actual fact I think that the impact of EU exit would be pretty minimal. The debate is basically a family row on the part of British capital, being conducted through the medium of politics. Those sections of capital whose markets are predominantly within the EU want to remain, others take a different view. And, as we saw with the Scottish referendum, the moment there is the tiniest threat that corporate profits might be under threat, out comes the hyperbole, out comes Project Fear. On the other hand, I don't think exit would pave the way for a British road to socialism, as the Stalinism re-enactment societies heading up the 'left' pro-exit case seem to think. Capitalism is a global system, and needs ultimately to be fought at a global level.

A footnote at this point. The most persuasive 'left' argument on the In side might seem to be based on the impact of the Social Chapter and similar instruments. So, Labour In For Britain, have this to say:

British workers benefit from EU agreements on workers’ rights, including the right to holiday pay, paid maternity and paternity leave, anti-discrimination laws, equal pay and protection for agency workers.

There is a seductive, but damaging, picture of the history of workers' rights at play here. These were not handed down from on high through the generosity of commissioners. They were fought for by workers themselves, organised into unions, in Europe and elsewhere. "No saviours from on high deliver".The struggles of unionised workers established norms for treatment in the workplace and in statute, which could not be transgressed without industrial strife. When standardised minimal conditions across the then EEC began to be discussed, these being needed for the smooth functioning of a single market, those norms had to be incorporated. They were, none the less, won from the bottom up, not the top down. In the presence of strong unions in Europe, the guarantees provided by the EU are irrelevant. In the absence of strong unions, those guarantees will be eroded in coming years.

Now, last year I blogged arguing for an abstention in this year's vote. Read it here. I agree with my reasoning in that post, but I now find myself disagreeing with my conclusion. I will, with little enthusiasm, and more that a little ennui, vote Leave. My reasons are two. First, far too much hope has been invested in the EU: from soft-leftists worshipping before the Social Chapter, to irritating liberals thinking they are a bulwark of cosmopolitan intelligence against their brutish inferiors (who all, you understand, hate foreigners). Illusions need to be laid bare, so that a better politics can thrive. Secondly, exit would precipitate a crisis in the Tory party, and that is no bad thing.

At the end of the day, however, all of this matters a lot less than people seem to think. So please don't spend hours agonising over how to cast your vote. If you want to do something useful, spend that time thinking about how you can support the junior doctors when they strike next month, and about how you're going to get to the Peoples' Assembly demonstration against austerity on 16th April.

Remembering Easter

"We are here", writes Terry Eagleton in his recent Hope Without Optimism, "to make trouble on behalf of those who can no longer make trouble themselves, namely the dead". Receiving his political formation through expatriate Irish republicanism, and now resident in the country, Eagleton's Irishness goes some way towards explaining the importance of narrative, history, and our relationship to each in his political thought. For the history of Ireland's still incomplete liberation from imperialism, and by extension of Britain's relationship to its last colony, is one in which the past looms large. Debates about the politics of the southern state, about partition, and about identities in the north are framed historically. The dead are silent participants, in their name claims are made, past injustices are redressed, and present-day senses of political self are established and reinforced. If you want confirmation of Benjamin's claim that people are driven to revolt by the image of enslaved ancestors, not liberated grandchildren, you need merely to glance across the Irish sea.

As with Benjamin's original quotation, Ireland's revolts are understood in terms of sacrifice (he also speaks, in terms which sit uncomfortably with his acquired status as the acceptable face of Marxism for English Literature syllabuses, of the 'hatred' of the labouring classes). The Easter Rising, which took place on Easter Monday a hundred years ago features heavily in the roll of those who laid down their lives for Ireland. Not by any means enjoying universal support at the time, the bloody manner in which the rising was put down, and its leaders executed, won support for the republican cause, and ultimately therefore played an important role in the movement for independence. It would be difficult to come up with a better example of a seemingly futile fight, born out of desperation, anger, and conviction having effects beyond reasonable expectation: it was hope in action, history spreading out from it, like ripples from a solitary stone hitting the water. There can be little surprise that this action from the underside of history, an episode that truly warrants the overused word 'heroic', has had its memory disputed through the subsequent years of civil war and partition, nor that its fallen are honoured to this day as martyrs. They certainly deserve more than the mechanised patriotic piety of politicians who have presided over an austerity regime as harsh in its consequences as any in Europe since 2008. What they deserve is the future.

Honouring those who died in rebellion against their rulers is always a risky business for those who hold power at the present moment. Reminding the presently powerless that their forebears responded to their situation by erecting barricades has the potential to backfire. History, though, cannot be altogether avoided, and all states are built on the bones of past ruling classes. For those states whose native bloodletting lies in the recent past, or whose existence remains contested, the question of original violence is a particularly treacherous one to negotiate. The past is too live to be consigned to a museum or smothered in nostalgia. It retains a power, at once a potential means to win the assent of the governed to state power, and also a convenant that power can be accused of betraying. If Fine Gale and Fianna Fáil politicians joined a military whose continuity with the rebel forces in 1916 is far from obvious in honouring the Rising's leaders yesterday, they would have done well to glance nervously over their shoulder at the representatives of the electorally ascendant Sinn Féin. The professional ideologists known as broadsheet journalists are well aware of this subversive power of memory, which is one reason they have been at the forefront of 1916 revision in recent months. A more recent convert to the cause is Bob Geldof, who without any apparent intended theological irony chose Easter to dismiss the idea that there are some causes worth dying for.

If the memory of the past is unstable, and so a site of present struggle, this is in part because the past itself was shot through with division and contradiction. The migraine-inducing wailing of Dolores O'Riordan, 'it's the same as its been since 1916/ in your head (in your head) they're still fighting' has a truth to it unintended by the author: they are still fighting. The irreconcilable differences, present in kernel within the Irish republicanism of the early 20th century, the fissures of class, politics, visions for Ireland and for the world, were fought out through the civil war, relived through the tragedy of partition, and continue to echo at the present time, the theme being picked up in many cases by people who do not recognise its origin. The tradition of past generations certainly does weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living. Much as in the case of actual nightmares, however, the solution has to be to redeem the trauma that gave rise to it. In the case of Ireland this would involve identifying the genuinely emancipatory strands in republicanism and claiming them, whilst identifying the forces capable of realising them in an Ireland that is divided and capitalist.

James Connolly has deservedly been quoted with a regularity bordering on the monotonous:

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.

These are words that these days are as likely to be found on t-shirts or beer mats as in political discussion, but if any lines have been vindicated by subsequent history they are these. Connolly's socialist republicanism was one for which freedom from imperialism was inseparable from the liberation of working people from exploitation, and was by its very nature internationalist. Strikingly, it was a politics to which the emancipation of women was integral:

The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave. In Ireland that female worker has hitherto exhibited, in her martyrdom, an almost damnable patience. She has toiled on the farms from her earliest childhood, attaining usually to the age of ripe womanhood without ever being vouchsafed the right to claim as her own a single penny of the money earned by her labour, and knowing that all her toil and privation would not earn her that right to the farm which would go without question to the most worthless member of the family, if that member chanced to be the eldest son.

To put matters mildly, Connolly's clear-sighted awareness of the oppression of women, unusual for a male leftist of the period, was not an obvious feature of subsequent Irish politics. More generally, his socialist republicanism met with opposition at the time from both the British state and within the republican movement. Its clearest immediate heirs fought in the anti-Treaty forces in the civil war; many of them went on to fight for the anti-fascists in the Spanish Civil War. It has precious little in common with the precious romanticism for which the legacy of the rising has been appropriated.

A politics of the oppressed acting in their own interests, this is the best honour we can do the dead of 1916, because to the extent that we undermine those who oppress and stunt humanity, wherever in the world we do it, we retrospectively delegitimise those who did so in the past. In that sense, at least, the Easter Rising can still be won.

Confessions of a confused socialist

It's a strange time to be active as a socialist in Britain. Hence, in part, the absence of much recent activity on this blog. I've written previously about my disquiet with the state of the left since Corbyn's welcome victory last autumn, and the uneasy feeling remains.

Back in December I think I saw the fundamental issue as being how we relate a bottom-up socialism that doesn't fetish parliament to the reality of a left-wing candidate having won the leadership of the Party. That is still at least of much of an issue as it was then. Fundamental questions have been asked: do we believe that capitalism is incompatible with human flourishing? If so, and if a socialist alternative is needed, how does a left-reformist Labour Party fit into with a strategy for moving in the direction of that alternative? Quite apart from this: what are we doing, individually, as a Labour left (organised in groups like Momentum and the LRC), and as the Labour Party to support the concrete grassroots opposition to Tory attacks? The junior doctors' strike is a prime example of something around which a good deal more organising should be happening

At the same time, of course, we can't ignore the reality of the Corbyn leadership, content in telling ourselves that the Labour Party or parliament don't really matter. If I believed that, I wouldn't be a Labour member; I won't bore you all on this Easter evening by rehearsing the reasons this is the case. The problem is precisely that these things matter, and that the left has, in an outcome slightly more antecedently improbable than Dapper Laughs turning out to be an expert in Jane Austen, won the leadership of the Labour Party. Its hold on this leadership is, however, at least as precarious as Laughs' actual grasp of Sense and Sensibility; if it loses that leadership, through pre-emptive backbench revolt or electoral failure, that will count against the intra-Labour left for years to come. "Your strategy has been tried and failed", the refrain will go, "now shut up, and listen to Dan Jarvis". And it may seem as though our critics would have a point.

The knives are being sharpened for Corbyn. Here's Jamie Reed's subtle Twitter account, for instance:

If the improbably named Rebel Alliance are not to have their way, the Party membership has to exert counter-pressure, making it clear to the PLP that we will not accept a coup. This will involve voicing our support to more sympathetic MPs, arguing the case with those who can be persuaded, and using mechanisms of accountability against those whose contempt for the membership is such that they want to reject last year's decisive leadership result. In this last respect, it is a serious tactical mistake for the leadership and elements of its organisational support to have downplayed talk of mandatory reselection. This is a basic democratic demand, whose time has come. Similarly, the present situation, where the left has the leadership and the membership without controlling the Party, is unsustainable. It's imperative that we organise to contest elections at CLP and other levels and, crucially, that we get Corbyn-supporting conference delegates sent this year: this conference will be a chance to consolidate his position, back left-wing policy, and set in motion democratic reform of the Party.

And the urgency of this task doesn't undo my initial point about not losing sight of the extra-parliamentary. There's a lot to be done.