C.J. Stone's Blog, page 23

Wrecking ball ends sorting office hopes

The old delivery office on Cromwell Road: what it looks like now. Photograph courtesy of Jon Eldude

The old delivery office on Cromwell Road: what it used to look like

So the old delivery office on Cromwell Road has been demolished at last. One of my colleagues told me. He said that that they were starting work as he began a loop, and that they were finished by the time he got back.

“It took about 35 minutes,” he said. “They don’t hang around that lot.”

It’s the end of an era. Three years and three months since we moved: three years and seven months since our strike.

Another of my co-workers told me that as long as the office was there he still held out a secret hope that we could return one day.

He said that he had been talking to one of the managers who had admitted that costs had increased substantially since we moved.

It’s exactly what we said would happen. You can’t add forty minutes’ journey time to our day and then expect the same amount of work. The irony is that now we are privatised, that is precisely what is expected.

There’s an ever increasing pressure to get more work out of us for the same pay.

Many things have changed in the intervening years. I used to be proud of the fact that we were a sustainable industry, using bikes, and working from a local office. Nowadays we work in pairs from the back of a diesel van, and drive upwards of 20 miles a day.

We are supposed to use these trolleys but they slow us down, which means that most people sling their bags over their shoulders. I predict an epidemic of back problems in the coming years.

The old Whitstable office was small and intimate and generally upbeat. You could hear everyone’s conversations. There was a constant banter, which was highly entertaining at times.

The Canterbury office, on the other hand, is cavernous, and we share the building with the sorting machines, which rattle and groan like a tribe of demented lawnmowers, making it impossible to hear your own thoughts at times.

A number of respected colleagues have since left.

I suppose the one positive note is that the new building will house a Crown Post Office.

So that’s one campaign we haven’t lost.

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The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
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Are we living in an Age of Terror?

Bombing Vietnam back into the Stone Age

Have you noticed that, with all the turmoil in the Labour Party, the Chilcot Report has completely disappeared from the news agenda?

The question is no longer: should we try Tony Blair for launching an illegal war, in which possibly more than a million people have died, and countless others have had their lives destroyed, with disastrous consequences both for the region and for the world as a whole?

No, the question now is: is Jeremy Corbyn a good leader of the Labour Party, given that sometimes his delivery at Prime Minister’s Questions can be a little lacklustre?

This, after only ten months in the job, and with constant attacks from all sides, including his own.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. They say that Corbyn is “unelectable” and then, by making that claim very loudly and persistently to a hostile media, while undermining him at every opportunity, making sure that it does, in fact, come true.

Do you think it’s a coincidence, given that a large number of the 172 MPs who voted for the motion of no confidence, owe their jobs directly to the patronage of Tony Blair?

I was listening to Charles Clarke—Blair’s Home Secretary from December 2004 to May 2006—on Any Questions on Radio 4.

This was on Bastille Day when a lorry had ploughed into the crowds in Nice, France, killing 84 people and injuring many more.

The question was, are we living in an age which will be defined by future generations as “the Age of Terror”?

Clarke was thrashing round trying to find an answer. He suggested there was no precedent for the ideology behind the increasing violence of our times.

He referred to the National Liberation struggles of the 20th Century, such as those in Ireland or South Africa, but said that, while you might disagree with the aims of people like the IRA, you could at least understand their motivations.

He said that he thought the closest analogy was with the anarchists at the end of the 19th Century “who went round blowing up people because they felt that blowing up people was the thing to do.”

In other words, the Islamic State is nihilistic.

“They are talking about creating a society in which all the fundamental experiences of our society are destroyed. All sorts of fundamental freedoms, the position of women and so on, wouldn’t be allowed.”

He was also very clear in stating that the perpetrators of such attacks weren’t responding to international events, such as the wars in Iraq or Libya. In other words, he was exonerating Tony Blair from any responsibility for the current state of the world.

“They may be provocations at particular points,” he said, “but that’s not fundamentally what this is about.”

It’s strange that Charles Clarke can’t find a precedent for these barbarous acts. He’s about three years older than me, so you would have thought he would be able to recall one of the defining events of our era: the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War is a prime example of what happens when you start bombing a region “back into the Stone Age” as Gen. Curtis LeMay threatened in May 1964.

That’s a cute expression, and has been used many times since, most recently by Ted Cruz with reference to Islamic State—or “so-called Islamic State”, which seems to be the preferred formula for describing them in the media at the present time.

The consequence of such barbarity is more barbarity, as anyone with half a brain should be able to understand; and the exact analogy to the Islamic State during the period of the Vietnam War was the Khmer Rouge.

I won’t go into a history lesson here. You can read up on it if you like. I just think it is clear that the attempt to portray the activities of Islamic State as unprecedented is a gross violation of the truth.

Islamic State aren’t nihilistic: they are insane. They are insane, just as the Khmer Rouge were insane, but the circumstances which gave rise to that madness is the same in both cases: the large scale bombing and destruction of a region and a people by a technologically superior power, the United States.

It’s noticeable that, once the bombing stops, the insanity goes away.

The Khmer Rouge have long been consigned to the history books, and Vietnam, despite its communist ideology, is not averse to embracing the pleasures of the modern world.

The United States, it has to be noted, is also insane, and while there has been a wave of mass killings sweeping the world, from the UK to Norway, from Belgium, to Germany and France (but not South East Asia) the vast majority of those paroxysms of mad violence occur within the borders of the United States itself, often without any discernible ideology being attached.

John Donne said that no man is an island. He was referring to the presence of death in our lives. But it’s not stretching the point too far, I think, to say that the actions and beliefs of any one of us can affect us all. When murder and violence are the preferred options of the most powerful nation in the world, is it any wonder that the citizens of the world are inclined to take a lesson from that?

When you terrorise people the consequence is terrorism.

Corbyn knows that. Apparently, Blair does not.

It’s easy to explain why Corbyn proves popular

On the day that David Cameron went to see the Queen before he left number 10 for the last time, a Radio 4 journalist, speaking in hushed, reverential tones, compared it to when Winston Churchill left office.

The previous day another Radio 4 broadcaster was considering the Corbyn phenomenon.

He mused out loud that there must be a personality cult around the figure of the Labour leader; why else was he proving so popular?

He didn’t mention Stalin, but he might as well have done.

This is the means by which propaganda is instilled in us, in the form of images which we absorb almost unconsciously, and which then frame the debate.

That such a radical reconstruction of the truth was taking place in the context of the news – a supposed source of objectivity – shows how insidious the process is.

Corbyn is almost always described as “hard left” while his rivals in the Labour Party are referred to as “moderates”.

Well I have news for the reporter who was unable to figure out why Corbyn remains so popular, despite the media’s best efforts to undermine him: it has nothing to do with his personality. It’s his policies.

I read somewhere that the Labour Party under its previous leadership would have been incapable of creating the NHS.

And there’s the point. A Labour Party that is not committed to public services, to public ownership, to public investment and to redistribution of wealth, isn’t really a Labour Party at all.

It’s just a re-branded Tory Party with a red rose for its logo.

John Nicholson of the Scottish National Party, describing the way Corbyn was treated by the Parliamentary Labour Party, referred to their “visceral hatred from the word go”.

He said, “If I was a young Labour voter, I think I would find the behaviour of Labour backbenchers utterly frustrating: surely there has to be some sort of respect for the duly elected leader.”

It seems almost certain that Corbyn will be re-elected in the autumn.

It is also fairly obvious that the war of attrition from the backbenches will continue. What this means for the future of the Labour Party is unclear.

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The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE,
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The Gateway Between Two Worlds

The following film was of a performance called “The Gateway Between Two Worlds” which took place on the 4th June 2016 on the spit of pebbles known as “the Street” near Tankerton in Whitstable.

The piece was organised and performed by Helene Williams and Mark Fuller and featured the work of  local wicker maker Sonia McNally, with music by Jowe Head & the Demi-Monde, and a poem by CJ Stone.

CJ Stone’s part begins at just after the 17 minutes mark. You can read the text of the poem here.

Blair’s practised apology was painful to witness

By some strange trick of fate I ended up watching Tony Blair’s press conference in the wake of the Chilcot report last week.

The word that came to mind was “hubris”.

It’s from the Greek. It means “arrogance before the gods”. It refers to a person in a powerful position who, deluded about his capabilities, and with extreme arrogance, performs an act that offends the natural order and who is then punished for his crime.

Such a man is Tony Blair. Vain. Conceited. Ambitious. Over-burdened with a sense of his own self-importance, serving power rather than questioning it, a stooge for the global ambitions of the neoliberal elites.

His performance before the TV cameras was painful to behold. The tremor in his voice, the look of practised sincerity as he made his apology and then retracted it immediately, saying that he would do it all again, made me sick with anger.

It was obvious that he had prepared his defence in advance, having had access to the report for many months. In fact it was probably Tony Blair’s interference that was partly responsible for its long delay.

He had clearly laboured long and hard over his speech: not just writing and rewriting the words, but working on every inflection to get exactly the right tone into his voice.

Chilcot had exonerated him, he said. The report showed that he had acted in good faith.

In fact, Chilcot says no such thing.

Here is an actual quote: “The judgements about the severity posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were presented with a certainty that was not justified.”

I remember quite clearly Andrew Gilligan on the Today programme on the 29th May 2003, a few weeks after the invasion, quoting a senior intelligence source saying that the evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been, in that unforgettable phrase, “sexed up” by the government.

The intelligence source turned out to be Dr David Kelly.

Later that day Alastair Campbell was doing the rounds of radio and TV stations, just as he was on the day of the Chilcot report, vigorously defending Blair.

As a consequence of this Gilligan lost his job and Dr Kelly lost his life, but Blair and Campbell remained in place to continue their relentless spinning of the news.

Does that sound like “good faith” to you?

Coincidentally, while I was researching the notion of hubris I came across another word which is indelibly linked to it. That word is “nemesis”.

Nemesis is the spirit of divine retribution carried out on those who succumb to hubris.

In modern terms a nemesis is someone who is a long-standing rival: an arch-enemy.

How apt. It’s almost as if we are watching a Greek tragedy unfolding before our eyes, as Blair meets his nemesis, in the form of Jeremy Corbyn.

The two men couldn’t be more different. Blair is charismatic, duplicitous, manipulative and deeply dishonest; Corbyn is mild, uncharismatic, a little bit boring perhaps, but fundamentally honest.

It’s almost certain that Blair is behind the attempt to remove Corbyn from the leadership of the Labour Party.

We will just have to see how the drama plays out next.

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The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
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The difference between leave and remain

Boris Johnson with a brick: can you tell the difference?

As I’ve stated , I voted to leave the EU.

That wasn’t easy. It wasn’t easy to come to my decision, and it hasn’t been easy to deal with the fallout either.

I’ve been vilified, sworn at, called a racist, attacked, scorned. I’ve been labelled with any number of insulting names, and been unfriended by several people on Facebook, including by some who have known me for years.

I also have to admit that I wasn’t expecting to be on the winning side. Mine was a protest vote directed against the institutions of the EU and the political establishment, as I imagine it was for most leave voters.

We just wanted to tell them how pissed off we were.

The country was divided almost down the middle: 52% to 48%.

Interestingly, this is the exact figure that Nigel Farage gave for not accepting the referendum result had there been a win for remain, and the petition calling for a new referendum was set up by a leave supporter anticipating a win for the other side.

Isn’t irony delicious at times?

I’m also happy to agree with remain voters that it may still be too close to call. It’s not that I disagree with the result: it’s that I think the campaign itself was based upon a false dichotomy.

Both sides lied. Both sides used scare tactics. Both sides twisted information to suit their agenda. If the referendum shows anything, it’s that we are very badly served both by our media and by the people who claim to represent us.

In fact, virtually the whole of the establishment was in favour of remain: the government, the civil service, the financial institutions, the banks, big business, the corporations, the White House, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, the Liberal Party, half of the Tory Party, the Blairite wing of the Labour Party, most of the Cabinet and all of the Shadow Cabinet.

The voices we heard from the leave side were entirely disingenuous. The campaign for them was a platform for their own personal ambitions. Take Boris Johnson. Before the campaign he was making pro-European statements, and famously wrote two columns for the Telegraph: one in favour of remaining in the EU, the other against. In the end it was the latter that was published and it makes clear that whatever deliberations he was making prior to his decision were based entirely on what was good for his career, not on what was good for the country. The leave campaign for him was a strategic maneuver in some Machiavellian ploy to take over leadership of the Tory Party, and the half-arsed way he stepped out of the leadership contest once he knew he was facing opposition shows just how detached he was from the result. He was obviously not interested in it or he would have made a point of staying on in order to finish the job he started.

All of the main spokesmen for the leave campaign have now stepped down, which shows the disdain with which they hold those members of the public they were previously claiming to speak for.

So who is left to speak up for the leave voters now, many of them from the poorest and the most deprived parts of the UK?

Do remain voters really think that all seventeen million, four hundred and ten thousand, seven hundred and forty two of them of them are racists?

In fact a recent poll by Lord Ashcroft, shows just how untrue that is.

Nearly half (49%) of leave voters gave the reason for their decision as “the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK.”

Only 33% said that immigration and control of borders was their main reason for voting to leave, and even this is by no means an indication of racism. People are concerned about jobs, and mass migration from the EU is having a depressing effect on wages. Itinerant workers from Eastern Europe are able to take low-paid jobs that British workers with a mortgage and a family cannot. If there is simmering resentment at people from other nations and other cultures, it’s not because people are racist: it’s because they are being priced out of work.

It is also notable that the areas in the UK that voted to leave are the among most deprived parts of the country, while areas that voted to stay are among most privileged. By a large margin – 61% to 39% – leave voters think that children growing up today will be worse off than their parents; they see more threats to their standard of living and believe that life in Britain is worse now than it was 30 years ago.

Needless to say, remain voters think the opposite.

And there you have it: the real divide that the referendum has laid bare for us. Not racists versus anti-racists, or socially liberal people versus socially conservative people, or clever people versus gullible people: it’s between those who have fared well out of the last 30 years of EU membership (or at least haven’t lost out from it) and those who have felt the pinch of austerity, who have seen their communities decimated and their prospects destroyed, who have been finding it harder and harder to get a decent job or to make a living. It’s between those that have holidays and those who do not; between the well off, and those who struggle to make ends meet; between the complacent and the fearful; between those who shop in Waitrose and those forced to use food banks.

Of course, not every remain voter is well off, and not every leave voter is poor, but the great divide the referendum has exposed is all too real, and it doesn’t help that some remainers have been accusing the leave side of racism and stupidity. If there has been a surge in support for the far right, it’s partially because large numbers of people in this country feel that their concerns are being ignored.

So I have one last question to ask of remain voters: how many of you were 100% behind the EU? How many of you are really convinced that the European Union has been beneficial to the people of Europe as a whole?

If you read Yanis Varoufakis or Paul Mason, or others from the left wing of the remain side, they were perfectly clear that the European Union leaves a lot to be desired.

But, they said, we had to remain in Europe in order to reform it from within.

The decision to remain was a strategic one. Most remain voters that I spoke to were no more enthusiastic about the institutions of the EU than were leave voters, they just had a different opinion about what to do about it.

In other words, the differences between the remain side and the leave side are nowhere near as great as the results of the referendum campaign would have us believe.

Corbyn and the Left Exit argument

Jeremy Corbyn on Channel 4’s The Last Leg

The sheer, brazen, nerve of the man: David Cameron telling Jeremy Corbyn at Prime Minister’s Questions “For heaven’s sake man, go.”

It has nothing to do with David Cameron who the leader of the Labour Party is. It has nothing to do with the media, with Laura Kuenssberg or the Daily Mail. It has nothing to do with the electorate until such time as there is an election, and while Labour MPs, of whatever stripe, have a right to voice their concerns, it is not, finally, down to them either.

It is down to the membership, and most of us want Jeremy Corbyn to stay exactly where he is.

Unlike the EU, the Labour Party is a democratic organisation.

It is remarkably convenient, isn’t it, that this news about the Labour Party is distracting attention both from the splits within the Tory Party, and from the grave mess that the country finds itself in? None of this is down to Jeremy Corbyn. He didn’t call the referendum. He didn’t hand the racists a platform from which to speak. He’s not responsible for a disastrous and divisive campaign that has ripped the country in half, turning friend against friend, brother against sister, father against son.

48% to 52% is still too close to call. The country is in turmoil; the markets are jittery; nasty, febrile racism is on the rise. People are being attacked on the street simply because of their race or nationality. None of this is down to Jeremy Corbyn. All of it can be laid at David Cameron’s door.

Meanwhile Corbyn is being undermined by his own side in what looks remarkably like a prearranged coup.

In an earlier article I described Corbyn’s position as “win-win”. I now think that it may be the other way round.

Everyone knows that Corbyn is an instinctive Eurosceptic. He’s a Bennite, Tony Benn’s favourite MP. It’s a matter of record that it was Benn who called the last EU referendum in 1975, and that Corbyn has always spoken out against it.

So the Blairites had him in a pincer movement. Had he come out against the EU prior to the referendum campaign, they would have laid into him then. Had the remain camp won, they could still have berated him for his lacklustre performance, while waiting for another opportunity. As it happened, remain lost, and they were able to trigger their coup attempt on the back of that.

Whatever happened, Corbyn was always going to be the target.

I love Corbyn. He seems constitutionally incapable of lying. Thus, on the Last Leg, when asked how much, on a scale of one to ten he was in favour of the EU, he wavered and said, “about seven or seven and a half”. Any other politician in his position would have blustered and lied and said 11.

But I think that Corbyn made a tactical error by agreeing to lead the party in the remain campaign, albeit for entirely understandable reasons. He was trying to keep the party together. Recent events have shown that this was doomed to failure.

Meanwhile he betrayed many Labour voters who were always going to vote leave.

The media campaign made it look like it was racists versus anti-racists, right versus left, conservative versus liberal, nice people versus nasty people – but it was never as clear cut as that.

There were always good, sound, democratic left arguments for leaving the EU.

By kowtowing to the right in his own party Corbyn failed to speak up for the millions of Labour and ex-Labour voters who, worried by the effects of mass migration, crushed by austerity, seeing their living standards being eroded, and their public services in crisis, decided to give the whole political establishment a good kicking on the back of the referendum campaign.

Corbyn has never been part of that establishment. That’s why we voted for him.

We needed someone in a position of power to articulate the Left Exit argument.

That person could have been Jeremy Corbyn.

I voted leave in the name of democracy

OK, so I voted to leave the EU.

It took a long time to reach my decision. I was pulled both ways. Pretty well all of my friends were voting to remain and it was difficult to find myself in opposition to people I love and who I had shared a platform with on more than one occasion, but that is where my deliberations lead me.

The national debate took place almost exclusively on right-wings terms. It was all about immigration and the money in your wallet, with both sides twisting the facts to suit their agenda. There simply wasn’t a proper informed debate.

If I was was a conspiracy nut, I might think that this was deliberate. With Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson leading the out campaign, people on the left were bound to go the other way.

But that made for some very peculiar bedfellows in the remain camp too, which included Goldman Sachs, Tony Blair and George Osborne, as well as Jeremy Corbyn and Yanis Varoufakis, and it was obvious that Corbyn was conflicted.

The arguments I heard from my peers were all couched in negative terms. Everyone agreed that the EU is profoundly anti-democratic, wedded to neoliberalism and austerity: but better this than giving the country over to the xenophobes on the right, they said.

So we were being asked to stay in the EU, not because it is any good, but despite it being bad, because some of the people who were voting to leave were doing it for the wrong reasons.

Really there wasn’t much of a choice. It was austerity on one side and austerity on the other. Neoliberalism, support for the banks, a fire-sale of our public assets: outside of the media sound bites both sides were offering the same future.

The difference being, of course, that we can vote out UK governments every five years, but this was our only chance to vote out the EU.

During the Greek debt crisis the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, said “there can be no democratic choice against the European treaties.”

That sums it up for me.

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The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE,
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Referendum – In or Out?

Still trying to puzzle the referendum out. I hate the people who have been chosen to lead the Leave campaign as much as anyone. The debate so far has seriously sold the British public short, with lies and disinformation on both sides, and the main arguments focusing on people’s darkest and most negative emotions: anger, suspicion, hatred and fear.

All rational debate has gone out of the window. All we are seem to hear are the shrill pronouncements of prejudice and fear and meanwhile we’ve been seriously divided as a nation, with many working class people, worried about the effects of immigration on our way of life and our public services, being drawn into the Ukip orbit, while self-righteous leftists stand on the sidelines accusing them of xenophobia.

You seriously have to ask why most of the right-wing press is for Leave, while most of the financial institutions (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and CitiGroup) are for Remain. Normally I can gauge who I am for by who I am against, but even Murdoch has taken both positions, with the Sun going for Leave, while the Times has gone for Remain.

Doesn’t that worry you? It worries me.

If I were a conspiracy theorist I might think that this has all been planned in secret meetings between the Bilderberg Group and the Bavarian Illuminati during devil-worshiping rituals in Bohemian Grove, but I don’t think even they could have come up with a scenario quite as wildly unpredictable and divisive as this campaign has turned out to be. And as if to confirm this Lord Rothschild is for Remain, and, as everyone knows, he’s the leader of the Lizard People.

It’s even happening inside my own skull. One half of me is with my left-leaning friends on the Remain side: with Jeremy Corbyn, the Greens, Yanis Varoufakis and the hope that we can change the EU from within. The other half says no, the EU can’t be reformed, but a Leave vote will certainly wreak interesting chaos. So I’m torn between my reason and my passion here, between my conservative good sense and my instinct for revolutionary mayhem, for casting the dice and seeing where it rolls.

The result will be entirely unpredictable. The people of Europe, many of them also profoundly disillusioned with the European project, are watching this debate with keen interest. A Leave vote would certainly encourage Eurosceptics, both on the left and the right, to start agitating for their own referendums.

Meanwhile, here in the UK, the results are equally in the balance. How long will a Boris-lead Tory Party survive do you think, terminally split as it is and with a wafer-thin majority? Would there be a General Election? And what would happen to Ukip once its raison-d’etre has been removed? It would certainly gain a short-term advantage, which would damage both Labour and the Conservatives, but in the long-term, I imagine, it would be reabsorbed back into the right-wing of the Tory Party where it belongs, where it will be condemned to sing Rule Britannia in an echo chamber forever more.

Meanwhile Corbyn seems oddly sanguine about the whole thing. It’s a win-win situation for him. He’s arguing for Remain in order to stop the Blairites attacking him from the rear but his instincts have always been for Leave, and he can work with either result. That’s my guess anyway.

As for me, I probably won’t make up my mind until I walk into the poll booth tomorrow.

And then regret it as soon as I walk out again.

Pixi Morgan

Pixi with a couple of drinks, looking happy

Peacenik Pixi Morgan was at the vanguard of rebel society: Nomad, musician, protestor and punk, pagan. Christopher Stone sheds light on a bonafide fire starter, the frondeur spirit of nonconformity which characterised his existence now permeating coffeehouses and hipster hangouts throughout the land.

Interview by Saira Viola

http://internationaltimes.it/pixi-morgan/