Anthony McIntyre's Blog, page 1220

Investors Who Profit As Oil Workers Face Repression

Gabriel Levy @ People And Nature draws attention to repression of oil workers in Kazakhstan.


While workers in the western Kazakhstan oilfield suffer repeated waves of state repression – from the notorious police massacre of strikers at Zhanaozen in December 2011 to this year’s fines, arrests and bans on trade union organisation – investment funds based in New York and London profit directly from their labour.

Kushakbayev worked at the Oil Construction Company (OCC), an oilfield service company, where workers staged a two-week hunger strike in December last year, in protest at the winding-up of Kazakhstan’s independent union federation. It was OCC’s management that complained to the court of his involvement.

Workers at Techno Trading Ltd also went on strike. Kushakbayev was convicted on 7 April of encouraging them to take action, and ordered to pay 25.2 million tenge (about $80,000) to the company in compensation (according to a court press release).

Oil Construction Company is wholly owned by AktauNefteServis, which in turn is wholly owned by Kazmunaigaz. (See its annual report.) AktauNefteServis works mainly for Mangistaumunaigas, an oil production company operation in the Mangistau region of western Kazakhstan. Mangistaumunaigas is a joint venture between Kazmunaigaz and the Chinese oil company CNPC, valued at $2.6 billion when they bought it in 2009.

Techno Trading is another oilfield service company that works almost entirely for Kazmunaigaz subsidiaries in the Mangistau oil fields.

Kazmunaigaz, like many national oil companies in producing countries, is a huge holding company with subsidiaries that produce, transport and refine oil and gas, as well as oilfield service companies and other smaller units. Kazmunaigaz is 100% owned by the government, through the Samruk-Kazyna investment fund (90%) and the National Bank (10%).

Kazmunaigaz is solidly linked to Chinese oil companies through 50-50 joint ventures such as Mangistaumunaigas, and to the city of London and international investors through its Kazmunaigaz Exploration and Production (KMG EP). KMG EP is owned 57.9% by Kazmunaigaz, 8.1% by itself through Treasury shares, and 34% by investors on the London and Kazakhstan stock exchanges. Among the largest of these (according to Reuters) are the China Investment Corporation, the Chinese sovereign wealth fund (in which the state keeps its foreign exchange), and BlackRock Frontiers Investment Trust, a fund run by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager that invests about $4 trillion of rich people’s money. (As of 31 December 2016, BlackRock Frontiers Investment Trust plc listed KMG EP as 2% of its investments.)
Nurbek Kushakbayev entering court
KMG EP’s minority investors last year clashed with Kazmunaigaz management, who wanted to strengthen their own control over KMG EP – and in August last year defeated their parent company.

KMG EP has several senior managers who came from the British oil industry. KMG EP’s chairman, Christopher Hopkinson, previously worked for Shell, Imperial Energy, as BG Group’s senior vice president for North Africa, and for the Russian oil company TNK-BP, a partnership between Russian oligarchs and the UK’s largest oil firm.

KMG EP is not directly linked to the small service companies at the centre of this year’s anti-union crackdown. But the climate of fear that the Kazakh authorities are trying to create in the western Kazakhstan oil field is part of the context in which the company makes its money.

■ One of KMG EP’s two production subsidiaries, Ozenmunaigaz, was at the centre of the 2011 strike movement that ended with the police shooting of strikers in December that year. Several thousand of its employees formed the largest contingent in that strike, the biggest ever in the Kazakh oilfield.

■ Ozenmunaigaz and Mangistaumunaigas are neighbours on the oil field. (KMG EP managers liked Mangistaumunaigas so much that they cut a deal with Kazmunaigaz to buy it, which fell through because state regulators would not approve it. (See KMG EP’s annual report 2012, p. 33).)

■ KMG EP, with its links to the city of London, help to burnish Kazmunaigaz’s reputation on western money markets, helping it to keep the door open to western and Chinese money at the same time. A recent investor presentation boasted that since the initial public offering (IPO) of its shares in 2006, KMG EP had returned $4.6 billion to investors.

On 12 April KMG EP held its regular Board of Directors’ meeting and agreed to distribute $63 million, or about 15% of the net profit for 2016, to shareholders.

Who knows whether the gentlemen at the meeting discussed the cruel punishment that was dished out days before to Nushek Kushakbayev, for his part in furthering workplace organisation, and defending workplace rights, on the oilfield where they make their money? Certainly they didn’t mention it in the announcement they made of their decisions via the London stock exchange.

■ Free Nurbek Kushakbayev! Support independent workers’ organisation in Kazakhstan!

Cui Bono?

The Uri Avnery Column seeks to find who benefits from the recent gas attack on civilians in Syria.
Cui Bono – "who benefits" – is the first question an experienced detective asks when investigating a crime.
Since I was a detective myself for a short time in my youth, I know the meaning. Often, the first and obvious suspicion is false. You ask yourself "cui bono", and another suspect, who you did not think about, appears.

For two weeks now, this question has been troubling my mind. It does not leave me.

In Syria, a terrible war crime has been committed. The civilian population in a rebel-held town called Idlib was hit with poison gas. Dozens of civilians, including children, died a miserable death.

Who could do such a thing? The answer was obvious: that terrible dictator, Bashar al-Assad. Who else?

And so, within a few minutes (literally) the New York Times and a host of excellent newspapers throughout the West proclaimed without hesitation: Assad did it!

No need for proof. No investigation. It was just self-evident. Of course Assad. Within minutes, everybody knew it.

A storm of indignation swept the Western world. He must be punished! Poor Donald Trump, who does not have a clue, submitted to pressure and ordered a senseless missile strike on a Syrian airfield, after preaching for years that the US must under no circumstances get involved in Syria. Suddenly he reversed himself. Just to teach that bastard a lesson. And to show the world what a he-he-he-man he, Trump, really is.

The operation was an immense success. Overnight, the despised Trump became a national hero. Even liberals kissed his feet.

But Throughout, that question continued to nag my mind. Why did Assad do it? What did he have to gain?

The simple answer is: Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

("Assad" means "lion" in Arabic. Contrary to what Western experts and statesmen seem to believe, the emphasis is on the first syllable.)

With the help of Russia, Iran and Hizbullah, Assad is slowly winning the civil war that has been ravishing Syria for years, He already holds almost all the major cities that constitute the core of Syria. He has enough weapons to kill as many enemy civilians as his heart desires.

So why, for Allah's sake, should he use gas to kill a few dozen more? Why arouse the anger of the entire world, inviting American intervention?

There is no way to deny the conclusion: Assad had the least to gain from the dastardly deed. On the list of "cui bono", he is the very last.

Assad is a cynical dictator, perhaps cruel, but he is far from being a fool. He was raised by his father, Hafez al-Assad, who was a long-time dictator before him. Even if he were a fool, his advisors include some of the cleverest people on earth: Vladimir Putin of Russia, Hassan Rouhani of Iran, Hassan Nasrallah of Hizbullah.

So who had something to gain? Well, half a dozen Syrian sects and militias who are fighting against Assad and against each other in the crazy civil war. Also their Sunni Arab allies, the Saudi and other Gulf Sheikhs. And Israel, of course. They all have an interest in arousing the civilized world against the Syrian dictator.

Simple logic.

A Military act must have a political aim. As Carl von Clausewitz famously said 200 years ago: war is the continuation of politics by other means.

The two main opponents in the Syrian civil war are the Assad regime and Daesh. So what is the aim of the US? It sounds like a joke: The US wants to destroy both sides. Another joke: First it wants to destroy Daesh, therefore it bombs Assad.

The destruction of Daesh is highly desirable. There are few more detestable groups in the world. But Daesh is an idea, rather than just an organization. The destruction of the Daesh state would disperse thousands of dedicated assassins all over the world.

(Interestingly enough, the original Assassins, some 900 years ago, were Muslim fanatics very similar to Daesh now.)

America's own clients in Syria are a sorry lot, almost beaten. They have no chance of winning.

Hurting Assad now just means prolonging a civil war which is now even more senseless than before.

For Me, a professional journalist most of my life, the most depressing aspect of this whole chapter is the influence of the American and Western media in general.

I read the New York Times and admire it. Yet it shredded all its professional standards by publishing an unproven assumption as gospel truth, with no need for verification. Perhaps Assad is to blame, after all. But where is the proof? Who investigated, and what were the results?

Worse, the "news" immediately became a world-wide truth. Many millions repeat it unthinkingly as self-evident, like sunrise in the east and sunset in the west.

No questions raised. No proof demanded or provided. Very depressing.

Back To the dictator. Why does Syria need a dictator? Why isn't it a beautiful US-style democracy? Why doesn't it gratefully accept US-devised "regime-change"?

The Syrian dictatorship is no accidental phenomenon. It has very concrete roots.

Syria was created by France after World War I. A part of it later split off and became Lebanon.

Both are artificial creations. I doubt whether there are even today real "Syrians" and real "Lebanese".

Lebanon is a mountainous country, ideally suited for small sects which need to defend themselves. Over the centuries, many small sects found refuge there. As a result, Lebanon is full of such sects, which distrust each other – Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, Maronite Christians, many other Christian sects, Druze, Kurds.

Syria is much the same, with most of the same sects, and the addition of the Alawites. These, like the Shiites, are the followers of Ali Ibn Abi Talib, cousin and son-in-law of the prophet (hence the name). They occupy a patch of land in the North of Syria.

Both countries needed to invent a system that allowed such diverse and mutually-suspicious entities to live together. They found two different systems.

In Lebanon, with a past of many brutal civil wars, they invented a way of sharing. The President is always a Maronite, the Prime Minister a Sunni, the commander of the army a Druze, and the Speaker of Parliament a Shiite.

When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the Shiites in the south were the lowest on the ladder. They welcomed our soldiers with rice. But soon they realized that the Israelis had not come just to defeat their overbearing neighbors, but intended to stay. So the lowly Shiites started a very successful guerrilla campaign, in the course of which they became the most powerful community in Lebanon. They are led by Hizballah, the Party of Allah. But the system still holds.

The Syrians found another solution. They willingly submitted to a dictatorship, to hold the country together and assure internal peace.

The Bible tells us that when the Children of Israel decided that they needed a king, they chose a man called Saul who belonged to the smallest tribe, Binyamin. The modern Syrians did much the same: they submitted to a dictator from one of their smallest tribes: the Alawites.

The Assads are secular, anti-religious rulers – the very opposite of the fanatical, murderous Daesh. Many Muslims believe that the Alawites are not Muslims at all. Since Syria lost the Yom Kippur war against Israel, 44 years ago, the Assads have kept the peace on our border, though Israel has annexed the Syrian Golan Heights.

The civil war in Syria is still going on. Everybody is fighting against everybody. The diverse groups of "rebels", created, financed and armed by the US, are now in a bad shape. There are several competing groups of Jihadists, who all hate the Jihadist Daesh. There is a Kurdish enclave, which wants to secede. The Kurds are not Arabs, but are mainly Muslims. There are Kurdish enclaves in neighboring Turkey, Iraq and Iran, whose mutual hostility prevents them making common cause.

And there is poor, innocent Donald Trump, who has sworn not to get involved in all this mess, and who is doing just that.

A day before, Trump was despised by half the American people, including most of the media. Just by launching a few missiles, he has won general admiration as a forceful and wise leader.

What does that say about the American people, and about humanity in general?

Darcus Howe

Mick Hall @ Organized Rage obituarises Darcus Howe : Anti racist campaigner, journalist and broadcaster, a fiery fighter for truth and justice.


Darcus Howe (26 February 1943 – 1 April 2017) was an anti racist, broadcaster, writer, and civil liberties campaigner. Originally from Trinidad, Howe arrived in England intending to study law.
There he joined the British Black Panthers, a group named in sympathy with the US organisation. He first came to a wider public attention in 1970 as one of the Mangrove Nine, when he marched to the police station in Notting Hill, London, to protest against police raids of the Mangrove restaurant, and again in 1981 when he organised a 20,000-strong "Black People's March" in protest at the failed police investigation into the New Cross Fire, in which 13 black teenagers has their lives stolen.

Born in Trinidad, the son of an Anglican priest. He was schooled at Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain, and first moved to England at the age of 18. He intended to study law but instead turned to journalism. He returned to Trinidad for a short while, where his uncle and mentor, internationalist, writer, journalist and socialist C. L. R. James, encouraged him to combine writing with political activism. (C.L.R.J spent his latter years living with the Howe family in London and it was often difficult to decide which was more proud of the other.)

A brief spell as assistant editor on the Trinidad trade union paper The Vanguard was followed by a return to Britain, where from 1973 to 1985 Howe served as editor of the political magazine Race Today, produced by the Brixton based Race Today Collective, which included Farrukh Dhondy and Linton Kwesi Johnson, and others. Howe's successor as editor, Leila Hassan, eventually became his third wife.

Howe became a member of the British Black Panther Movement, and in the summer of 1970 took part in a protest against the all to frequent police raids of the Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill owned by Frank Crichlow, where Darcus worked part time.

The restaurant had become a meeting hub for black people, serving as a place of both organisation and recreation, it also served as an informal head office for the Notting Hill Carnival. It was raided 12 times between January 1969 and July 1970 by police allegedly looking for drugs. And finally having had enough 150 plus demonstrators marched on the local police station in protest. Six weeks later, Howe and eight others, the Mangrove Nine, were arrested and charged for riot, affray and assault.

He and four of his co-defendants were acquitted at the Old Bailey of all charges after a 55-day trial in 1971, which included an unsuccessful demand by Howe for an all-black jury, and a fracas in the dock when some of the defendants complained about the presence of prison officers. The judge stated that there was "evidence of racial hatred on both sides." Nevertheless, this was the first acknowledgement from a British judge that there was racial hatred in the Metropolitan Police.

Having been continuously targeted by the police in 1977 they finally got their pound of flesh, when Howe was sentenced to three months' imprisonment for assault, after challenging a racist bigot at a London Underground Station. He was released upon appeal after a campaign over his arrest and sentencing.

With the birth of Channel Four, Darcus began a successful broadcasting career, fronting programs such as the series Black on Black, The Bandung File and later White Tribe. Darcus could be prickly: an uppity nigger is the term the slave owners would have used, but he was all the better for that. Truth and resistance to wrongs were his watch words and the world is a lesser place within Darcus Howe in it.

The clip below gives you an idea of what Darcus was like in free flow, sick and increasingly frail he puts some manners on a BBC talking head.

Ex-IRA Man: Sinn Fein Were Never Going To Reveal Truth

In the News Letter last month Adam Kula speaks to Anthony McIntyre about the impact, if any, on the North's legacy issue by the death of Martin McGuinness.

Anthony McIntyre said truth recovery 'is about recrimination, not reconciliation'

I don’t think they’re going to disclose about their past. Truth recovery up north is about recrimination, not reconciliation. There is nothing to be gained for them in term of exposing themselves if recrimination is the goal. This is why we have these endless demands for British soldiers to be brought in front of the courts for Bloody Sunday and a range of other activities. This strategy of [Sinn Fein seeking] prosecutions actually helps keep secrets hidden, because people won’t come forward while the threat of prosecution exists. I long ago gave up on the question of any effective truth recovery process. They want the truth – on behalf of others.

He said the continued focus upon uncovering truth through the criminal courts – which demand proof beyond a reasonable doubt to secure a conviction – is a failure. "That’s no way to enter into a truth recovery process; you have to go for a balance of probability, and the balance of probability is not courtroom-standard evidence,” he said.

In summary, when it comes to the impact his death will have on learning the truth, Mr McIntyre said: “I don’t think it makes any difference. There has to be generosity, and I don’t think there is any generosity in the north.”

Mr McIntyre himself served a 17 year sentence for murdering Kenneth Lenaghan. A member of the UVF, the book Lost Lives said Lenaghan (34) died after being shot from a passing car (along with three other men) while standing outside a pub in south Belfast on February 27, 1976. Mr McIntyre also says he served another year-and-a-half in jail for other IRA activities.Today he is a writer and a prominent critic of Sinn Fein. He is also behind the Boston College project, the controversial US-based scheme to record the stories of former paramilitaries - including their misdeeds - with the idea being that they remain secret until their deaths.

When it comes to Mr McGuinness himself, Mr McIntyre said he was:

a very important figure in the history of this country; a man who was quite prepared to use violence against a very violent state - and I’m not going to condemn him for using that violence.

Lost Lives records that, between 1966 and 2006, republicans killed more than 2,100 people. The security forces by contrast killed 367.

Sayeeda Warsi’s Blinkered View Of Islamism

Maryam Namazie  reviews a book by Sayeeda Warsi. It originally featured in the Evening Standard. Maryam Namazie is an Iranian-born co-spokesperson of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and One Law for All.


Sayeeda Warsi’s new book catalogues some of the hypocrisy and double standards of the British Government, the rise of the far-Right and bigotry against Muslims, yet has a glaring blind spot when it comes to Islamism. According to Warsi, Islamist terrorism is the result of everything but Islamist ideology.

Since most of those killed by Islamists are “Muslims” in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa, her argument that terrorism is the result of Islamophobia, racism, foreign policy and social exclusion is unconvincing. Also, she fails to see that many aggrieved people end up involved in progressive political and civil rights work rather than inciting violence or murdering women, men and children in schools and marketplaces.

Without any apparent understanding of the context and rise of the contemporary transnational Islamist movement, including Iran’s key role in it, Warsi says “simmering resentment” began when the British Government apparently failed to prosecute Salman Rushdie for blasphemy. “Muslims,” she says, “wanted British laws to protect Islam,” and when it didn’t happen, the Iranians were more than happy to step in with what she characterises as “concern and moral support”. According to her, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa put Iran in “pole position, ready and willing to come out leading the collective Muslim sentiment”.

Like any good apologist who is more concerned with blasphemy than murder, and who homogenises “Muslim sentiment” to coincide with her own, Warsi doesn’t seem bothered that the act of “concern” was a fatwa against a British citizen, nor that it took place during the bloody Eighties, when thousands of Iranians were executed by the regime. Warsi also seems to conveniently overlook the fact that blasphemy laws continue to persecute freethinkers such as Ayaz Nizami in Pakistan and Sina Dehghan in Iran.

Her apologia for Islamism is shocking. She says, for example, that “Islamist ideology has created a new generation of Muslim democrats” such as the AKP in Turkey (though President Erdogan has arrested tens of thousands, limited freedoms and rights of citizens, and is murdering Kurds).

She approvingly quotes a former US assistant secretary of state saying “’Islamists’ are Muslims with political goals”, which is like saying Pegida are Christians with political goals. She compares the “young men who first went out to help as the Syrian civil war started” with the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, which is like comparing fascists with anti-fascists.

She says prominent Islamists such as Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood are “democratically engaged both in the UK and overseas” (though in 1971 in Bangladesh, some members of Jamaat-e-Islami were implicated in organising lynchings against people demanding independence, and senior UK-based Muslim Brotherhood leader Kamal Helbawy has praised Osama Bin Laden).

Every Islamist agenda Warsi writes about, such as gender segregation, the veil or Sharia courts, is sanitised and trivialised, while almost every organisation or personality is either misunderstood, misrepresented or merely branded “controversial”.

Zakir Naik, for example, who promotes the death penalty for apostates and ex-Muslims is, according to Warsi, “considered sectarian by some, an intellectual by others, an inciter of hatred by some and an enlightened orator by others”.

Having bought into the Islamist narrative, she falsely conflates criticism of Islam and Islamism with bigotry against Muslims and uses “Islamophobia” to scaremonger people into silence. And while she is critical of identity politics and the homogenisation of “Muslims”, she — wittingly or unwittingly — promotes both.

Warsi’s solution to the situation we are faced with today is more of the same: more religion in the public space and stronger “religious identities”, though it is clearly less religion that we need, not more. And while she considers secularisation a threat, it is in fact the separation of religion from the state, universal values and citizenship rights that will provide minimum guarantees against the intolerance and violence of religion in politics and power.


Sayeeda Warsi,  2017.  The Enemy Within: A Tale of Muslim Britain. Publisher: Allen Lane. ISBN-13: 978-0241276020

A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sr. Maura

Via The Transcripts John McDonagh speaks to Eileen Markey, author of the book, A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sr. Maura, the definitive biography of Maura Clarke, M.M. – may Sister rest in peace.Radio Free Éireann
WBAI 99.5FM Pacifica Radio
New York Citylisten on the internet: wbai.org Saturdays Noon ESTAudio Player
(begins time stamp ~ 12:59)


John: Now I’m going to speak of a woman who came from Rockaway, Queens and anybody who’s born and raised in Queens knows what Rockaway means to you. I know they call it ‘Acapulco’, the ‘Irish Riviera’ but if you grew up in the ’50’s and ’60’s and you were in Woodside you were waiting for that bus at 61st and Roosevelt to take you down Woodhaven Boulevard to Cross Bay to go to that bungalow – this was it – this was Miami Beach to us. And your parents would always throw you out to go up to Rockaway at 116th Street and ‘get a bit of colour’ which means get burnt but don’t get so burnt that you’ll have to go to the hospital because when we came back to the neighbourhood you had to show you ‘had a bit of colour’. Well, this story revolves around the Irish community out in the Rockaway area and the book that Eileen Markey has out is called: A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sr. Maura (Clarke). And Eileen, are you there with us?

Eileen: I am.

John: Yeah, maybe you could give just a bit of background about Sr. Maura Clarke and her family and her father – just to give about the type of upbringing she had before she joined the Maryknoll nuns.
Sr. Maura at her work in Nicaragua
Eileen: Yes. Maura Clarke was an Irish-American woman born in the Bronx but raised in Rockaway, in the Rockaway Park neighbourhood, in the ’30’s and ’40’s.

She’s known to us now because she’s one of four North American women who were killed in 1980 in El Salvador by the US-backed military government of El Salvador – so she’s one of those Maryknoll nuns. But I wrote this book to tell what her life was before she was killed and that life as a child was very much that – the Irish Riviera in Rockaway. She was one of the few year-rounders, right. So many people spent their summers out there – like you taking the bus out or many other people relocating from other boroughs to these bungalows for the summer – but Maura’s family was one of the year-rounders. So she grew up in that – you know close and communal Rockaway world, Irish-immigrant world and went to Stella Maris Academy and then like lots of girls in her day joined the convent.

John: And then her father was an immigrant from Co. Sligo. Maybe you could tell about the effect – we’re playing here about what went on in 1916 – but what carried on then was the Revolutionary War that lasted until 1921.

Eileen: Yeah, exactly. Her father emigrated from Sligo in 1914 but then, like so many people, went back to join the revolution. So he wasn’t there for ’16 but he went back in ’20 and fought for the end of the revolution and then became an anti-treaty IRA man during the Civil War and then made his way back to the US in the mid-20’s but remained a – you know he had made vows to the IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood) in his late teens, before 1916, and so when he came back to the US after the war he kept up those ties and especially told those stories. So he had you know, he had all these revolutionary guerrilla stories that Maura grew up hearing about and you know, old Sligo partisans were always coming to whatever house the family happened to live in in Rockaway and Sundays filled with these old rebels coming to tell stories and sing songs and she very much grew up hearing all of those heroic stories and these poems and songs and that really shaped how she understood things years later when she found herself in Central America.

John: And she joined the Maryknoll nuns. Maybe you could give a brief history of the Maryknoll nuns and why she was attracted to that.

Eileen: Yeah, The Maryknolls are really interesting. So there’s always been orders of nuns and there’s always been missionary orders but the Maryknolls were an American order; they were founded in the first decade of the twentieth century as a women’s missionary order so they’re all American girls who served overseas – first in China, then The Philippines and then eventually in Latin America.
And these were ballsy, adventurous, exciting girls. There was a lot of press about the Maryknoll sisters in the 1950’s and I found this great article I think in Time magazine that described the kind of girls the Mother Superior looked for which were: Not shy, not shrinking violets but well-rounded, healthy girls who had dates and were outward looking. So I spent a lot of time early in my research for this book speaking to Maryknoll sisters now in their eighties and I said: So why did you want to become a nun, Sister? or Why did you want to become a Maryknoll? And they said: They wanted to serve God, they were deeply religious but also for a blue-collar, first generation girl in the 1940’s and ’50’s – there wasn’t much for those girls. They weren’t going to college from those neighbourhoods. They weren’t going to be able to join the foreign service so becoming a Maryknoll sister meant joining up for this organisation that served the wide world – you were going to have an adventure.
You were going to learn a new language, you were going to work in the jungle, you were going to ride on mules up through the mountains and go down rivers on rafts and meet people very different than you and be very much part of the wide, expansive world – not the hemmed in world of what was available to girls, in particularly to working class girls, in those eras. So Maura was attracted to that. She’d grown up I think – you know my kids read National Geographic – but for her it was reading the magazine of the Columban Fathers and Maryknoll magazine and that looked like an adventurous life and so she was attracted to that. She wanted to do something big with her life and that led her into Maryknoll as a place where you could be part of the big, wide world and meet people very different than yourself.

John: Well you talk about part of the big, wide world – I mean now we’re having conversation here in this country about how Russia has influence on our election but nobody has a bigger influence on elections, particularly in Central America – I was down in Nicaragua in the early ’90’s for the election down there and speaking to the people there – we had an embargo in Nicaragua, we were training the Contras with US tax dollars and telling the people of Nicaragua: If you don’t elect the person we want we are going to continue the war down there – El Salvador was the same thing – so even though she’s getting spiritually involved with the Maryknoll nuns it gets very political when you end up in countries like Nicaragua and El Salvador and you see what our country is doing to these countries.

Eileen: Yeah, exactly and so Maura’s story is this. It’s all a Cold War story. The book begins – I begin the book at the end of World War II and what that felt like in Rockaway with the war ending. But of course the end of World War II was the beginning of the Cold War and Maura being killed in the Salvadoran Civil War – the Salvadoran Civil War was its own thing, its own revolution, but it was certainly a proxy war in the Cold War, right? From the time of President Monroe the US believed that it had the right to control the hemisphere – to control what happened in any of these countries – and we did. We invaded Nicaragua multiple times in the beginning of the twentieth century, we supported and propped up a dictator there throughout, you know until 1979 when he was overthrown (that’s Somoza) and similarly in El Salvador we were very invested in making sure that the government in El Salvador kept markets open for US goods and for US business interests. And because Maura’s work was working with poor people she came into conflict with that. You know, she set out as this very kind of naive and sweet missionary to the mountains of Nicaragua to work with very poor people, to run a school in an isolated gold mining community but she’s there as Vatican II begins to happen and the nuns are asked to look critically at their work to figure out: Well, what’s the work you do and how does that bring about the Kingdom of God?

And so their work in the middle of the ’60’s shifted from running a school for poor kids in this gold mining town to really doing adult-based education but that meant reading the Bible and saying: Well, what does Jesus want? What’s the kind of world that Jesus wants us to build? And if you look at those things sincerely, or at least when she looked them sincerely, it led her into opposition to this dictatorship in Nicaragua and so she transforms from – you know, everybody in power loves the nuns when they’re just educating people and teaching them about sin and helping them stay as part of the social structure that exists – but in the mid-’60’s the nuns and so many other people and all these lay people starting saying: Well wait. Maybe this system is corrupt. Maybe I’m not poor because I’m lazy. Maybe I’m poor because the whole thing is arranged against me and maybe I need to be doing something to shift the structure of this society that makes me poor. And that’s really what the middle years of her life were about – was working to change the structural conditions.

John: And Eileen, you write about the effect now of her father’s influence on her with the letters now she’s sending back from Nicaragua and El Salvador. Explain what were the letters to her father like?

Eileen: Yeah, so in like 1970 she goes away from this gold mining town and into like this squatters’ encampment outside of Managua to continue doing this adult faith formation which is really political, right? You’re getting poor people together to talk about what their lives mean and what God wants for their lives and that quickly becomes opposition to the Somoza regime. And then as the ’70’s wear on the resistance to Somoza is rising and the Sandinistas are gathering steam as a guerrilla revolutionary force and a lot of the kids she’s been working with – you know teaching those as altar boys and that she teaches in a youth group and a Confirmation class, they’re coming to the convent door saying: Bless me, Sister. I’m leaving. I’m going to join the Sandinistas in the mountains. Give me your blessing before I head off. And Maura writes home to her dad during these years saying: You know, it’s heart-wrenching to see these young people leaving. They’re taking up arms and that’s a complicated thing. And she’s afraid that they’re going to die but she also says: Dad, it reminds me of what you went through. So she’d been raised on the stories of the Irish revolution and the IRA and she recognises these young people in Nicaragua in the mid-’70’s as her dad in another guise.

John: And Eileen, I just now want to get up to: What exactly happened to her? How did she end up in El Salvador and the effect of her death on US policy in Central America?

Eileen: So she ends up – you know she works in Nicaragua for about two decades and then the Maryknoll sisters have this rule that you have to come back every so often and do service to the headquarters. So she spends the late ’70’s in the US doing consciousness-raising workshops with middle class Catholics. It’s not the old-fashioned ‘Hey, give money to the missions’ – it’s Catholic social teaching – you know – what does the world require, sort of – so she’s doing that in the late ’70’s as the revolution’s about to occur in Nicaragua. And during this time – 1980, the beginning of 1980, Archbishop Romero, who’s the archbishop of San Salvador in El Salvador, he’s assassinated but before he was assassinated he asked for more Maryknoll Sisters to come to El Salvador to do this same work – organising and spiritual care work with the people in El Salvador. There’d been some nuns there for a long time but he wanted more.

And so Maura, as a veteran Latin American missionary, she’s asked: Well, do you think – you could go back to Nicaragua when you’re done this US work or you could go to El Salvador – we need more people down there with your kind of experience. So after a lot of thinking and praying and discerning she decides she’s going to go to El Salvador. So she spends just a couple of months in the Fall of 1980 in El Salvador doing really amasing work and (you know I’m switching from Nicaragua to El Salvador here) there’d been a people’s movement for land rights, for human rights, for economic reform that was met with a really vicious, directed campaign of state terror on the part of the Salvadoran government of which we were arming and advising. And she and the other women she’s killed with, along with seventy-five thousand Salvadorans, are killed by this government.
So on December 2nd 1980 she and these three other women are stopped at a checkpoint set up just for them – the military was looking for them – and they’re killed and their bodies dumped by the side of the road – and you know, nine thousand other people were killed that way, nine thousand other civilians were killed that way in El Salvador that year, in the first year of that civil war, seventy-five thousand over the course of the war – but for people in the US it was like: Wait! What? They killed nuns? They killed North American nuns? And I think for a lot of people in the US it was this shocking – you know these wars are going on in Central America but most Americans don’t really know anything about them or don’t really know which end is up. But when a US ally kills four American women and three of them are nuns I think it made a lot of people in the US sit up and say: Wait! What’s going on? And which side are we on? Are we on the side that’s killing nuns? So it had this tremendous impact in the US throughout the ’80’s of really keeping US policy in Central America on the front pages. And you know, it involved many people in the US in resisting those wars and in arguing against Reagan, against continued support for the Salvadoran regime.

John: (station identification) And we’re speaking with Eileen Markey. She has a book out called: A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sr. Maura (Clarke) and Eileen, thanks for coming on. And can people – are you doing any book readings around the New York area?

Eileen: Not any more right now but hopefully we’ll schedule more. In the Fall I’m going to be at Glucksman Ireland House. I’ll let you know when that happens. I’ve got a Facebook page, Eileen Markey/Author, where you can see where I’m going to be. I’ll be at Notre Dame in a couple of weeks.

John: You’ll be out in South Bend talking about the book. And what is the reaction you’re getting all these years later about her life?

Eileen: It’s great! People seem to like the book. It’s a beautiful story. I mean, it’s a sad story when you begin thinking about this killing but the book really is about who she was when she was alive and how she got there. We only know about them as these dead women and the book is really bringing her back to life and understanding all the disparate influences that led her to be who she was. And she’s a lovely person to spend – I enjoyed spending five years with her.


She’s a lovely person to spend three hundred pages with so people seem to like it and it brings up really important issues about what religion and politics mean and how you work for justice in the real world so I think people are enjoying it.

John: And that’s Eileen Markey. Her book is: A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sr. Maura (Clarke). You can get it on amazon and all – what’s left of – any bookstores here in the United States. Eileen, thanks for coming on.

Eileen: Thanks a lot John. Have a great day.

John: And talking about the impact that the 1916 Uprising had on her – father from Sligo and the letters that she was sending up – and seeing the comparisons in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
(ends time stamp ~ 29:10)

How Sad And Delusional The Last Twenty Years

Larry Hughes endorses some ideas of  Sean Bresnahan.

It is doing no harm to keep the focus on unification and a potential referendum/border poll.
We can hardly wait on the likes of Bertie Ahern advocating a 60% RC majority in the wee 6 before that is undertaken. Obviously the Soldiers of Destiny want another lengthy spell fleecing the 26 counties and the EU, undisturbed by such triviality as national sovereignty. Bertie should follow his own advice of some years ago just before he stepped off the Celtic Tiger express train he deliberately slammed into the buffers.
The pressure you and the 1916 Societies are creating has already shown its first little shoots of success. It is important to note that SF who have sat idly by for a decade while the DUP fleeced the wee 6 and the UK treasury, has had to react to the groundswell of public opinion regarding Stormont corruption and ineptitude. Adams is aware that nationalists in the north won't take the abuse from unionists that his MLAs soaked up. His assertion in recent days that no return to the status quo at Stormont is the reality and not a negotiating tactic and that if there wasn't an election then joint authority was the only acceptable option is significant. It is perhaps proof that, if incapable of actually 'leading', SF has at least the capacity to detect the political mood. It has become clear that the 'leadership' of nationalism in the wee 6 needs to be pressured and directed from the electorate itself. So, keep the pressure up. They will react.
Also, what you are doing is a much better venture than dressing up in military garb and parading pointlessly around various towns and graveyards attempting to look menacing rather than like the state agents many believe a considerable number of those involved to be. That carry on with all the horrific revelations about agents and scoundrels galore does little good at this stage. Who wants their children involved in or at the mercy of such evil? People want away from that, not a return to it.
Those of us 'mere-mortals' who by common sense or sheer good fortune (or a combination of both) had nothing to do with republicanism since the 94-96 surrender and who watched with shock and awe the arrival of the GFA can all count our collective good fortune. We have survived unblemished politically the lies from left right and centre within the Republican Movement in the run up to the 94 ceasefire and the evil that prevailed back then amongst the so-called leadership. Our recent history has shown us beyond doubt that secret societies and the 'corner of the mouth' whispering brigade with the untouchables (British agents) in control is not the way forward. Quite amazingly some of those who have overseen the decommissioning, support for the RUC and all the other capitulations of the Provos still live mentally in the era where they had authority over mere underlings. How sad and delusional is that twenty plus years on? And how dangerous!
This new investigation under way in the North may lead to the unearthing of even more historical evil. New revelations and possible jail time for top ranking Provos just over the horizon looks like a distinct possibility. The British are hardly investing £26 million to jail their own soldiers. Who would bet against Barra McGrory presently being engaged in digging his own grave? They haven't totally gone away you know. It will all be something best observed from afar. Far, far, Afar!
Dignified commemorations of those who sadly sacrificed/wasted their lives for an 'equality' agenda (as now stated ) and what you are doing towards a democratic border poll is sound and provides the best and safest way forward for nationalists wanting to apply pressure for unification.
I for one wish you every continued success.

A State That Has Lost Its Way

Writing in Socialist Voice , socialist activist  Tommy McKearney asks:
What on earth is going on in the Republic of Ireland—or, more to the point, what form of governance is operating in that 26-county state? Reflect for a moment on some of the issues undermining the well-being of society. A banking collapse that first resulted in a massive debilitating debt being loaded onto the public, that was then followed with a NAMA fire-sale of Irish assets, allowing foreign vulture funds to make enormous profits. Then there is a serious homelessness crisis, demanding a major public house-building programme that the Government refuses to embark on, in spite of historically low borrowing rates.
Follow that with a health service in disarray, and add in the confusion surrounding how best to address Brexit. And of course we have the seemingly endless series of controversies involving the Gardaí.
The Dáil is apparently unable to deal directly or decisively with these issues, any one of which would create questions about the Government’s competence but taken together undermine its very authority. In place of a confident and capable Government we find it reacting ineptly to the politics of the latest scandal, resulting in yet another commission of inquiry.
A recent article in the Irish Times reported that twelve such tribunals and commissions of investigation are under way at present, and the number is due to grow. Moreover, we have a lame-duck Taoiseach whose departure date appears to be receding with every passing day.
The situation is so serious that it reminds one of the tongue-in-cheek comment made by Brendan Behan when he suggested apologising to the British and asking them to come back and govern us from Dublin.

Let us be clear, though: this is not running with the old imperialist slander that the Irish are incapable of self-government. The problem rests with the present Government, the main opposition party, and even the nature of the governing institutions. Together they have surrendered economic sovereignty, and demonstrate an alarming lack of ability to confront powerful interest groups—and we’re not referring to the trade union movement, with which they are clearly all too happy to do battle.
In a nutshell, there is an absence of direction of governance in the Republic, epitomised by the series of scandals that have taken place within the Garda Síochána. Everybody is aware of the apparently endless revelations of incompetence, extending in some cases to corruption, within the police force of the Republic. Matters that would give rise to enormous concern in any state appear to be entirely beyond the remit of the government to rectify. Under circumstances that demand a root-and-branch change of Garda management, the Fine Gael-led government is reluctant to tackle the force’s hierarchy and initiate reform.
Nor is Fianna Fáil, the largest opposition party, anxious to bring the issue to a head. Mícheál Martin is asking the commissioner to consider her position; but will he withdraw support from the coalition if O’Sullivan and her senior officers are not replaced with a competent authority?
The policing fiasco is symptomatic of a wider and more general malaise within the Irish political system. Having surrendered economic sovereignty to the EU and global finance houses, the Republic’s political ruling class has gradually lost its ability to chart its own path, and this failing eddies across much of its actions. While adept at holding on to office, they have nevertheless lost their way and are bereft of any clear idea about how to steer the state independently—as distinct from responding to pressure from agencies over which working people have little or no influence. In essence, this amounts to a loss of republican sovereignty.
This is evident over a range of issues but is particularly obvious in relation to the state’s implementation of the European Union’s neo-liberal agenda. Among many self-inflicted injuries arising from membership of the EU there is the surrender of natural resources, participation in the euro zone, and capitulation in 2010 to the EU Central Bank. Now we are learning of threats from the EU commissioner for the environment, Karmenu Vella (conveyed conveniently in a letter to a Fine Gael member of the EU Parliament, Brian Hayes) that the EU is still demanding that we pay additional water charges, in spite of the fact that a majority of TDs claim they are opposed to doing so.
The answer to the lack of meaningful sovereignty is not simply changing the faces in the Dáil. The immediate cause of the difficulty lies in blind adherence to market-driven neo-liberalism. Dublin governments are forced to rule against state intervention in finance, housing, health, and transport, insisting that the market must decide. Nor is this list finite, as practically all other areas are under review for privatisation.
This arrangement benefits the ruling class, who adhere to the policies of deregulation demanded by free-market capitalism, and do so at the expense of working people.
The problem is compounded by the nature of the Republic’s governing institutions. Without lapsing into juvenile ultra-leftism, our representative bourgeois democracy, regulated through pro-establishment media, suffers inadequacies. While the ability to periodically select or reject a government is a precious right, its value is diluted by the power and influence of media that all too often set the parameters of discussion and debate, the most recent example being the coverage of Bus Éireann workers on strike. Instead of focusing on the need for a comprehensive public transport service, reportage concentrated on the inconvenience to travellers while failing to mention the long-term consequences of a purely profit-driven network. The result has been to provide a smokescreen for the unmentionable Shane Ross, allowing him to escape responsibility for degrading a vital service.
Clearly there is a need to improve on the quality of our democracy in order to ensure that the working class is not further disadvantaged. We have seen over the recent past how a popular mass movement such as the anti-water tax campaign has influenced politics in the Republic. It is necessary to draw lessons from this example and create structures that would facilitate similar intervention in other areas.
Organised labour has the ICTU, through which trade unions find a platform for meeting and discussing issues of mutual importance. Wider society might well consider establishing something similar that would mobilise popular support on matters of real importance to working people.
Incapable of dealing decisively with a range of important issues, the Irish ruling class is not so much in crisis as unable to deal effectively with a crisis. They may remain in place for a time, but in the event of another economic downturn or crash they will fail again.
It is important therefore that the working class have a coherent structure around which to rally. With the centenary of the first Dáil approaching, it must surely be worth considering convening a People’s Assembly to do just that.

The Tunic Of Nessus

The Uri Avnery Column  examines the legacy of the Six Day War.

In A few weeks, Israel will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War. Millions of words, most of them hollow, will be poured out. As usual.
But the event deserves better. It is a drama unique in human history. Only a biblical writer could do it justice. William Shakespeare could have turned his hand to it.

I suppose that most readers were not yet alive at the time, and certainly not yet able to understand what was happening.

So let me try to recount the drama as I saw it unfolding.

It Started on Independence Day, 1967, the annual celebration of the official founding of the State of Israel. It was only the 19th anniversary.

The Prime Minister, Levy Eshkol, was standing on the tribune reviewing a march-past of the armed forces. Eshkol was as far removed from military ceremonial as one can imagine. He was a civilian through and through, the leader of a group of party elders who had drummed the authoritarian David Ben-Gurion out of the ruling Labor Party four years earlier.

At the height of the ceremonies, somebody handed Eshkol a piece of paper. Eshkol glanced at it and continued as if nothing had happened.

It was a short message: The Egyptian army is entering the Sinai peninsula.

The First public reaction was disbelief. What? The Egyptian army? Everybody knew that the Egyptian army was busy in far-away Yemen. There, a civil war was raging, and the Egyptians had intervened, not very successfully.

But the following days confirmed the unbelievable: Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, the Egyptian president, was indeed sending military units into the Sinai desert. It was a clear provocation of Israel.

The Sinai peninsula belongs to Egypt. In 1956 Israel had occupied it, in collusion with two declining colonial empires, France and Britain. Ben-Gurion, then the Prime Minister, had declared the "Third Israeli Empire" (following David and the Hasmoneans more than two thousand years before), but had to retract mournfully.

US President Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet President Nikolai Bulganin had both sent ultimatums, and Israel had no choice but to obey. So Israel gave back everything it had conquered, but got two consolation prizes: the Sinai was demilitarized. UN troops occupied key positions. Also, the Egyptians had to open the Strait of Tiran, the exit from the Gulf of Aqaba, on which Israel's (small) exports to the East depended.

What had induced Nasser, a great orator but sober statesman, to start another adventure?

It Started in Syria, a competitor of Egypt for the leadership of the Arab world. Yasser Arafat's guerrillas were raiding Israel from the Syrian border, and the Israeli Chief-of-Staff had declared that the Israeli army would march on Damascus if this nuisance did not stop.

Nasser saw an opportunity to reassert his leadership of the Arab world. He warned Israel to leave Syria alone, and in order to underline his message he sent his army into Sinai. Also, he told the UN troops in Sinai to evacuate several of their positions.

This angered the UN Secretary-General, the Burmese U Thant, who was not a very wise leader either. He answered that if Nasser insisted, all UN troops would leave. Since Nasser could not back down without losing face, all the UN troops left.

A mood of panic swept Israel. All the army reserves were called up. Men disappeared from the streets, Israel's manhood was concentrated on the Egyptian border, doing nothing and getting more impatient from day to day.

As if by design, the fear in Israel became worse from day to day. The civilian Eshkol inspired no confidence as a military leader. To make matters much worse, something curious happened. To quieten the panic, Eshkol decided to address the nation. He made a speech on the radio (no TV yet) which he had written down in advance. Before reading it out, he gave it to his main advisor, who made some small corrections, but at one place this man forgot to strike out the corrected word.

When Eshkol reached this place, he hesitated. Which version was the right one? It was as if the Prime Minister (who was also the Minister of Defense) was stuttering when the fate of the nation was hanging in the balance.

But Was it? While the panic grew all around me, I was walking around like a bridegroom at a funeral. Even my wife thought that I had become a bit crazy.

But I had good reason. Some months before the start of the crisis I had been invited to give a talk in a kibbutz. As usual, after I was done I was invited to coffee with some of the veteran members. There, a member told me in confidence that a week earlier the army commander of the northern front had also given a talk and been invited to coffee, and confided to the veterans: "Every night, before going to bed, I pray to God that Nasser will send his army into the Sinai. There we shall annihilate them."

At the time I was the editor of a mass-circulation magazine, as well as a member of the Knesset and the Chairman of the party that had sent me there. I wrote an article called "Nasser has Fallen into a Trap", which only reinforced the impression that I was off my rocker.

But Nasser soon realized that he had indeed fallen into a trap. He frantically tried to get out – but the wrong way. He issued blood-curdling threats, declared the closure of the Straits of Tiran (but also quietly sent a trusted colleague to Washington, urging the President to restrain Israel. Like all Arab leaders at the time, he sincerely believed that Israel was just an American puppet.)

In fact, the straits were never really closed. But the announcement made war inevitable. Under immense public pressure, Eshkol had to give up the Ministry of Defense and turn it over to Moshe Dayan. Several of the most respected generals demanded a meeting with Eshkol and threatened to resign if the army was not immediately ordered to attack. The order was given.

On The second day of the war I was called to the Knesset. I was sick with influenza, but got up and drove to Jerusalem. My shining white car shone like a meteor among the mass of tanks also hastening to Jerusalem, but the soldiers let me through, showering me with jocular comments.

The Knesset was under fire from Jordanian artillery. We hurriedly voted on the war budget (I voted for it and do not repent it, as I repented two other votes, but that is another subject). Then we were rushed to the shelter.

There, a high-ranking friend whispered in my ear: "It's all over. We have destroyed the Egyptian Air Force on the ground." And so we had. The real founder of the Israeli Air Force, Ezer Weitzman, had been planning this day for years and had created a force specifically shaped for this one job.

The following is history. In six incredible days the Israeli army easily destroyed three Arab armies, and elements of some more, which were left without air cover. The country was in a delirium of joy. Victory songs and victory parties abounded. All reason was sent to the devil.

On The fifth day of the war I published an "open letter" to the Prime Minister, calling on him to order an immediate plebiscite among the Palestinians in the territories we had just conquered, allowing them to choose between return to the Kingdom of Jordan, or Egypt in the case of Gaza, annexation by Israel, or a national state of their own.

A few days after the end of the war Eshkol invited me to a private meeting, and after listening to my ideas about a Palestinian state side by side with Israel, asked me good-naturedly:

Uri, what kind of merchant are you? If one wants to make a deal, one starts by asking the maximum and offering the minimum, and slowly nears a compromise. You want us to offer them everything in advance?

So nothing was offered the Palestinians. 50 years later we are stuck with the occupation. Israel has changed completely, the despised Right-wing has assumed almost absolute power, settlers roam the West Bank, and Gaza has been turned into an isolated ghetto. Israel has turned into a colonial apartheid state.

If I were religious, I would describe it this way: many years ago God sent his chosen people, Israel, into exile from the Holy Land as punishment for their sins. 130 years ago a part of the people of Israel decided to return to the Holy Land without God’s permission. Now God has punished the people of Israel again by giving them a miraculous victory, and turning that same victory into a curse that is leading to disaster.

For this purpose, God borrowed an idea from his Greek colleagues. He has turned the occupied territories into the Tunic of Nessus.

Nessus, the centaur, was killed by the hero Hercules. Before he died, Nessus covered his tunic with his tainted blood, which was a deadly poison. When Hercules put it on, it adhered to his skin and he could not take it off again. When he tried, it killed him.

When Blair Set Up His Institute For Global Change ...

Mick Hall @ Organized Rage is of the view that:

If calls for a national government and a re-run of EU referendum grow we'll all have to decide which side we're on


When Tony Blair announced earlier this year he was setting up a new organisation many on the left believed this was simply a spoiler as the Copeland and Stoke Central by-elections were due. They were mistaken and current events are slowly revealing what lays behind Blair's latest political wheeze.

So what is his master plan and how does he believe he will achieve his aim of stopping Brexit, and will it ever amount to much more than a figment of Blair's warped imagination?

It became clearer after he announced he'd established his Institute for Global Change, arguing the centre ground needs re-energising. Never mind that the centre ground of British politics has moved far to the right politically since Blair was PM. What he regards as the centre ground today would have made even Margaret Thatcher raise an eyebrow: left social democrats, socialists, the Greens, environmentalists,  trade unions all have no place in it, nor do social democratic nationalist parties like the SNP and SDLP.

Blair's centre ground is made up of neoliberals like himself, George Osborne, and other Cameronite Tories along with their former bed fellows the Liberal Democrats, rightwing Thatcherites like Ken Clarke, the Blairites who remain in the LP, Katharine Viner - the editor of the Guardian - and the middle class flotsam like Polly Toynbee who surround her. Plus influential members of the British security services whom he promoted beyond their wildest dreams.

Multi national corporations and the Banksters will provide the cheque books which will allow the knowhow to brought in from the private sector. Media access will be guaranteed by the Russian oligarch and owner of the Evening Standard Alexander Lebedev, with his son Evgeny acting as his point man.

As the year goes on we can expect nudge tactics from them all in their attempt to gain public support for a government of national unity and a second EU referendum.

One thing is clear, Blair and his creatures in Parliament, the constituencies, mainstream media and the newspapers have given up on the Labour party as a way to achieve their aims.

Those Labour MPs who believe Jeremy Corbyn is a disastrous leader and must go, have the solution in their own hands. Currently, would-be leadership candidates need the support of 15% of the parliamentary party for their name to be added to the leadership ballot. If Corbyn's opponents were to support lowering the threshold to 5% of MPs, which would allow an MP who is more in tune with the membership to become a candidate. Jeremy could retire as leader with dignity knowing a left wing candidate from the next generation could at the very least enter the contest for the leadership.

That Corbyn's opponents refuse to do this is indicative not only of their contemptuous attitude towards the party membership, but their complete lack of confidence in their own ability to win a leadership contest. Thus they smear and sneer at the Corbyn leadership in the most hapless manner, believing with the help of their fellow collaborators in the mainstream media they will push the party over the proverbial cliff and leave them free to join a government of national unity or a new 'centre party' if it evolves.

They have woken up to the fact they would have to expel over three million members to regain complete control of the LP and this would mean fighting a long war of attrition with the membership and they neither have the time, people or inclination to do this. Besides having been defeated by the membership twice in the last two years even the most hard headed dunderhead like their useful idiot Tom Watson must have understood for them the LP is a lost cause.

What I find revealing about Blair's current campaign to rehabilitate himself is how bleeding heart liberals like Polly Toynbee have revealed their true selves so openly by flocking to his banner. Having spent the last seven years writing articles which oppose Osborne's austerity measures, she now retreats into a right-wing class prejudiced Blairite bubble.

After George Osborne the architect of so much human misery was made editor of the Evening Standard, she flips to the dark side having this to say about the most odious man in Britain:*

He will stiffen the backbone of the majority of remain Tory MPs to take back control from the Brexit extremists and their bully press. Facing down those wreckers needs this schemer, yet more Machiavellian than they are.

If he means to use the Standard as an antidote to killer Brexit, then urge him on: go for it, George!

Toynbee understands Osborne and Cameron infected British politics with:

mean-minded malice, kicking the weak, and leaving in his wake a trail of 500 food banks feeding over a million people made destitute by his policies.

As she writes just that in her article, but none of this matters now to the once fragrant Polly.

She along with all the rest of the Blairites understand perfectly the only way Brexit can be stopped is to replace the Government of Mrs May with a coalition government of national unity. To do this Blair set up his Institute for Global Change and began to get his ducks in a row. Osborne's appointment to the Standard is just one of them.

Before people get to soppy about the EU it failed to protect working class people against austerity and the massive cuts to benefits. Nor the sky high cost of housing to rent or buy, the imposition of the lump, or Zero hours contracts as it's called today, anti-trade union legislation, fracking, invading other peoples countries on the pretext of humanitarian intervention, and countless other barbaric acts imposed on us and innocent people overseas by British governments over the last 30 odd years.

To be blunt the EU has become an undemocratic neoliberal sinkhole in which the writ of the billionaires and the multinationals runs free. I voted remain but forget all the tosh about fake news and folk who voted leave being brain washed. When millions voted leave they made their decision on how their lives have changed for the worse over the last decade, and what they perceived was happening in their local community.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the current EU president when PM of Luxembourg wrote the book on how multi nationals and millionaires can avoid paying tax. First he made Luxembourg a tax haven then helped infect the EU with neoliberalism.

A social European Union which put the well-being of it's citizens first is a distant memory.

When people are suffering oppression and want, they reach for the nearest political vehicle they hope might bring them some respite. Where the LP failed to go, Ukip stepped into the void. When Cameron gifted the nation a referendum on the EU every reactionary politician and bigot offered up Brexit as the solution on which to hang these peoples woes, they grabbed it with both hands. And this was almost inevitable given they had come to believe the LP had all but abandoned them in recent years.

If and when Brexit begins to go pear shaped as it may in all probability, and the calls for a national government and a re-run referendum grow, we will all have to make up our minds which side we're on. Do we side with the touts, banksters, corporate shysters, media hacks, parliamentary Quislings and war criminals, or the ordinary folk who voted Brexit in good faith?


* Osborne could be a potent weapon in this Brexit war by Polly Toynbee.