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*Shock* poll finding o' the day

Wednesday, October 28, 2009
From across the channel, naturellement.

The nice people at IFOP have been polling French farmers as to their political leanings.  Go on, have a guess which way they swing.  Or at least how they swung in 2007:




Being a helpful sort of chap I have ringed the far left's candidates in red.  So, with the exception of the Asterix-moustached Bove - admittedly a farmer, of sorts - and the Green's Voynet, all of the far left fared far worse with the fermiers than with the French overall. Royal's showing was dismal - 10% of famers compared to a quarter of the overall population.  As for the second round, that went 73% Sarko, 27% Sego.  The French went 53/47.

Jaws up from the floor yet?

Dairy farmers were wonderfully sound - 82% / 18% for Sarko.  However, the laurels go to farmers with 100 hectares or more - 88/12.  Meanwhile, back at the present day, Sarko attracts the support of 56% of farmers compared to 39% of Gauls overall.  Elsewhere, 38% want the death penalty back, compared to 40% overall  

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posted by Croydonian

French professionals for bossnapping

Friday, July 31, 2009
The Plain People of France have again been polled on their attitudes to bossnapping and the like, the previous survey having been blogged here.

And, rather encouragingly, there has been something of a upswing in decency, respect for life, property and so forth - outright condemnation of bossnapping rises from 7% to 15% and approval slips from 30% to a still jaw-dropping 23%.

Demonstrating what one might, if generous, term confusion, some 9% of professionals / executives approve, down from 24%. One might think that they've got their class identification a tad derrière about visage.

Digging into the demographics, men are more likely than women either to approve or condemn outright. Women lead on 'understand, but don't approve'. Must be that empathy that we XY types apparently lack. Only 4% of manual workers are prepared to condemn bossnapping, which must be thrilling for Trot agitators. Mind you, some 7% of what the pollsters call the Extrême gauche disapprove, and in this context extreme left means Lutte Ouvrière and the NPA, both of which are Trot parties, although in the case of the latter, with a few useful idiots along for the ride too. No Communist polled disapproved, although the datum is caveated as involving fewer than 40 pollees. Doubtless they are dreaming of storming the Winter Elysée Palace.

In a new development, the poll also asks about threats of destruction of corporate property in the pursuit of better redundancy etc deals. Overall, some 16% approve, and 34% disapprove Showing the same degree of false consciousness as they did for the previous question, 8% of professionals / execs approve. Men are the keener sex with 20% approving, and my fellow Gen X-ers (ish - 34-49) are the most likely to take The Damned's 'Smash it up' to heart, with 19% approving. A rather poor indicator for the insurrectionist left is that 18-24 year old are the most condemnatory at 44%. Heartening. Perhaps the most risible finding is that while PCF fans would not condemn bossnapping, some 5% condemn this threat. Greens are the most critical of the far left, which is odd, as presumably a wrecked factory can't despoil Gaia.

Asked why the toiling masses are up to what they are up to, the favoured excuse is 'a sense of injustice over executive salaries and dividend pay outs', followed by 'the closure / layoff is all down to stock market reasons'. The presumed rationale chosen by those condemning outright is 'fear of unemployment'. Further down the list of 'reasons' is 'the presence and influence of the extreme left'. Overall, 11% cite this, compared to 28% of Gaullists. As only 3% of Trots and 9% of Communists agree, they should be flattered that there are so many on the Right who think them capable of performing the vanguard role.

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posted by Croydonian

Hypocrite's corner

Monday, July 20, 2009
Our old friend Ken Loach:

"Director Ken Loach has pulled out of the Melbourne International Film festival in protest against Israeli funding.

British-based Loach pulled his film Looking For Eric after organisers refused to bow to his demands they reject Israeli government sponsorship".

More here, and indeed, all over the place.

Loach has long been associated with the far left, and currently hangs his hat with Respect. Respect is not, inter alia, very keen on the Afghan wars that his nation is currently prosecuting. However, he is more than happy to accept funding for his films from the UK Film Council, which is paid for by the lottery, inter alia. 'The Wind that Shakes the Barley', his paean to the 'Bold Fenian Men' trousered around half a million in funding from the rest of us. Surely a man so committed to his ideals would not wish to accept tainted money, would he?

And as I noted some three years ago:

"This is the delightful man I saw quoted in a French magazine (I've translated from the original) thus: "I don't know why is it called Great Britain, it is just a small island off the coast of *France*". I wonder if the French would care to fund his next venture, or better still take him off our hands completely".

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posted by Croydonian

News you might have missed, or Pyongyang today, London tomorrow

Tuesday, July 14, 2009
"Pyongyang, July 13 (KCNA) -- A meeting was held in London on June 27 under the sponsorship of the British Coordinating Committee of Friends of Korea on the occasion of the month of international solidarity with the Korean people.

Attending the meeting were figures of political parties and organizations including the New Communist Party of Britain, the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), the Revolutionary Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), the Socialist Labour Party and the British Association for the Study of Songun Policy and popular masses of UK and personages of the European Society for the Study of the Juche Idea.

Must have been an awfully big hall. I am impressed that no less than four alphabet soup far-left parties managed to make common ground for more than a heartbeat. Also, was e-mail or airmail responsible for the delay in publication?

A bit of googling shows up the following:

NCGB: "The party is politically closest to what it sees as anti-revisionist Communist Parties who would see the Soviet leadership from Nikita Khrushchev onwards as stepping away from socialism. Internationally it supports Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea". And from the horse's mouth: "Anglo-American imperialism and the rest of their pack at the United Nations are wailing at Democratic Korea’s latest nuclear test. None of this would have happened in the first place had the Americans honoured their agreement with the DPR Korea to build light-water reactors as they promised in 1994".

CPGB(ML): "Many CPGB-ML members are also active in the Stop the War Coalition, their respective trade unions, pensioners' campaigns, and solidarity movements with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Cuba, Belarus and China".

More on its DPRK stance here, but a taster: "Anyone who has actually been to the DPRK will have witnessed for themselves that people there are happy. They have a far greater degree of control over their own lives and many more opportunities to influence their communities than people have in bourgeois 'democratic' countries. The average educational level is much higher. People's musical and artistic abilities are developed to a far greater extent than is the case in capitalist countries, and there are far greater opportunities for participation in sport (as opposed to just watching it on television), as all facilities for the above purposes are plentiful and free".

RCPB-ML: "It is a small party, with less than 30 members, and is closely related to the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) and now has good relations with the New Communist Party of Britain". It was quite keen on Hoxha's Albania, apparently. And they have the following available in its bookshop: "Composers and Climate Change £0.20p"

SLP (Scargill's lot): "According to accounts filed for the year of 2007 with the Electoral Commission, the Socialist Labour Party had 3,020 members and 2,978 members through affiliates, making a total of 5,998. It had an income of about £19,400 and an expenditure of about £14,400".....The SLP's difficulties have in part stemmed from a number of internal conflicts...culminated in the expulsion of the pro-Stalin group around Harpal Brar who then formed the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)".

Isn't it nice that #2 and #4 kissed and made up?

A small addendum:

"The servicepersons have constructed the Anbyon Youth Power Station, Pyongyang-Hyangsan Sightseeing Highway, Chongryu Bridge, Kumnung Tunnel No. 2 and other grand monumental edifices and modern factories including catfish farm and chicken farm. They have thus laid a solid foundation for developing the economy at a leaping pace".

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posted by Croydonian

Ostalgia (sic)

Friday, June 26, 2009
From German daily The Local:

"The daily Berliner Zeitung reported on Friday that 20 years after the joyous scenes of the Berlin Wall being torn down, 49 percent of easterners asked agreed with the statement: “The German Democratic Republic had more good than bad sides. There were a few problems but one could live well there.”

A further eight percent chose the statement: “The GDR had overwhelmingly good sides. One lived there better and happier than today in reunified Germany.”

A look at the 2005 results shows that the PDS, the successor to the DDR's Communists (or 'Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands' as it styled itself) secured some 8.7% of the vote, so the latter figure is no great surprise.

The 49% of trimmers disgust me, frankly: "it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world...but for Olympic gold medals?" (With apologies to Robert Bolt)

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posted by Croydonian

Survey o' the day

Saturday, June 13, 2009
From France, naturally.

Asked about the future of the French Left, some 54% of Gauls would like a grand merger of all the left wing parties - Socialists, Greens, Communists and the two lots of Trots just for starters. While I suspect this is owed to a desire for the Left to win an election some time this century as the divsions in the Left continue to serve Sarko, it is fair to say that it is not going to happen, any more than our own dear Labour party would merge with Respect, the SWP, SPGB, CPGB (and all the rest of the far Left's alphabet soup), Greens etc etc.

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posted by Croydonian

And to think people reckon the British Socialists have problems

Monday, June 08, 2009
Given that every person with a blog is doing the UK's results, and as regulars will know what I think of the UK's results, there's not much point in chewing over those. So, I am hopping across the channel to see what our French chums have been up to.


Consider this map of results by département:

And compare it with the 2007 national results:


While I am mixing moutons with chèvres, note how the Socialists have been stomped just about everywhere, and poor old Bayrou could not even take his own département and fared no better than fourth. Aubry lost in her backyard too.

The stand out oddity for me is the result in the Vendée (the pale blue blob at 9 o'clock) , where De Villiers came top. De Villiers, in UK terms, might be considered a Eurosceptic high Tory, and headed the Libertas list in France. The Vendee has long been seen as a bastion of high Tory politics, including such Monarchism as the French have, with this dating back centuries. As a point of comparison, it is not too far fetched to consider whether one would expect Oxford and its environs to have remained fiercely royalist etc ever since being on the losing side of the civil war. Anyway, he took a rounded third of the vote there, followed by Sarko's lot with 23%. That appears to be at least double the figure De Villiers secured in the surrounding départements.

The best that the Socialists appear to have done anywhere is about 25%, and they were pushed to third in a number of depts by the extreme left in the form of the Greens, including central Paris and the départements that are home to many of the other big cities. While the French have a tradition of voting with the heart (or, I hope, for laughs) for the nutty fringe in anything bar the Presidential second round, it is pretty alarming that supposedly urban sophisticates wish to turn their back on the 21st century and head off to some sort of eco année zéro.

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posted by Croydonian

One of history's greatest villains makes a comeback.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009
From London Student, via Labourstart.org:

"SOAS support staff are likely to strike after trade union activist Joseph Stalin lost an appeal against his sacking. Unison, the trade union for administrative staff at the college, is balloting its members for strike action over the dismissal. It says that Stalin’s role in the justice for cleaners campaign, seeking to raise cleaners wages to the London Living Wage standard, marked him as a target for school management".

A rather better use of his time than smashing the kulaks, I would think. Turns out that his full name is Joseph Stalin Bermudez. I suspect that his parents were not Christian Democrats, and that he may not be related to Enrique Bermúdez, a Contra commander.

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posted by Croydonian

France, we need to talk

Tuesday, April 07, 2009
There has been a small wave of kidnapping of business leaderes by disgruntled ouvriers on the other side of the Ditch, typified by this:

"Protesting against job losses and meagre redundancy payouts, local employees of the US firm Caterpillar decided to take matters into their own hands and locked their superiors inside the plant's management headquarters". Source

Not good. What might be termed false imprisonment under common law. And, naturally, the Plain People of France have been polled on their attitudes to bossnapping by IFOP.

These are the jaw-dropping headline findings:

Condemn them outright - 7%
Condemn but understand - 63%
Approve - *30%*

24% of what we might call ABC1s approve, as do 40% of both C2s and Ds.

Digging deeper, it is the 50-64 year olds that is the most approving age cohort. Must be the odious soixante-huitards and their useful idiots coming to the fore. 25-34 year olds are least enthused at a nevertheless utterly appalling 20%. Fully 51% of partisans of both Trot parties approve, a comparatively low figure, as do 37% of Communists, 35% of Socialists and 28% of Greens. Poor, if not surprising. What is scandalous is that 15% of Gaullists and 15% of Liberals also think bossnapping is just dandy. The highest rate of outright condemnation is from artisans / shop keepers at 45%.

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posted by Croydonian

What really divides the French Left

Friday, February 27, 2009
Keeping up with the splits in the French Left is pretty well a full-time job, but courtesy of a poll by CSA for Le Parisien, I believe I can divine clear red water, as the tastes of the far left and the near left in thespians are really quite distinct.

Firstly, actresses.

Top of the heap for the Plain People of France is Sophie Marceau, most noted in these parts for 'Braveheart'. Fully 51% of Gauls like her best, as do 59% of the extreme left, but only 44% of Socialists. The only overtly political thing she appears to have done is to refuse to share a TV studio with Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Staying with actresses the average Briton is in with a sporting chance of having heard of, Catherine Deneuve is not especially divisive, whereas Liberals have a bit of a thing for Monica Bellucci - 35% vs the average of 26%. Socialists do not rate her - 15%. She seems pretty apolitical bar being upset about the Italian ban on sperm donations. Emmanuelle Beart (23%), notable for Manon des Sources, rouses the far left (27%) and the Gaullists (28%). She has a track record of leftish activism, but the Liberals (19%) are unimpressed.

Heading onto more purely French phenomena, Greens just love the unfortunately named Catherine Frot, at 37% to the national average of 23%, and Liberals have a thing for Cecile de France at 26% to 17%. She's une Belge, so I think the poll is cheating.

As to male board creepers, Dany Boon reigns supreme, courtesy of 'Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis' (see multiple passim) at 54%, but he is not flavour of the month with the far left - 45%, but very popular with Greens at 60%. Gaullists are fond of Depardieu at 38% to the national average of 29% but he seems to have upset the Liberals - 15%. Greens have it in for Daniel Auteuil at 14% to 26%. I can't find any references to his idea of fun being to fly tip toxic waste, but who knows?

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posted by Croydonian

The trouble with broadcast election coverage

Monday, February 23, 2009
In much the same way that every party and his or her dog has a good old moan about the BBC's bias, lack of interest etc etc, AZAPO are not at all happy with the South African Broadcasting Corp:

"Funani ka Ntontela, Azapo's Eastern Cape secretary, said the manner in which the public broadcaster covers political parties, demonstrated bias in favour of the African National Congress (ANC) and its splinter group Congress of the People (Cope). "Azapo sent countless letters to the SABC complaining about this sad state of affairs. In all fairness, thus far nothing has changed despite commitment to the contrary," he said.


A bit of digging shows that the Azanian People's Organization secured a hugely impressive 0.25% of the vote last time, or slightly less than Respect did here in 2005, and slightly more than the Scottish Socialists. As such it was the 12th most successful South African part in terms of votes, on a par with the SDLP.

Azania as a name can provoke the odd stiffled snigger, what with it being the name of Waugh's fictional African state in 'Black Mischief'.

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posted by Croydonian

Hypocrisy corner

Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Guess which British political party has a leader crying into her (dead giveaway, that) yak's milk over the goings on involving disgruntled workers at sundry plants on the east coast? You know, the oil refinery and so forth?

Caroline Lucas of the Green Party, who is an MEP, owing to the hateful system of PR foisted on us for European elections And she's so upset about the prospect of disruption to oil supplies that she, along with some fellow travellers, is threatening to veto this year's incoming European Commission:

"Today MEPs from UK, Germany and Italy, representing Socialists, Greens and European Left Groups threatened to veto this year's incoming European Commission".

And says she: "Instead of blaming "foreign workers", we should be challenging the rights of multinationals to undercut local pay rates and exploit workers. It's clear that the Posted Workers Directive needs to be revised, so that its original intention, to provide equal treatment for all workers, is upheld."

So maybe she is not that keen on oil, but the folks at Lindsey and elsewhere would find themselves deeply unemployed, and probably put on trial for envirocrimes if the Greens were ever to gain power and inflict their version of Year Zero on us.

She is joined by a couple of Labour MEPs, an Italian described as 'a Socialist', even though her Italian party is called 'Partito della Rifondazione Comunista - Sinistra Europea' (its emblem is a red flag with a hammer and sickle...) and a German Green who, for her pains, has had her name misspelled. Anyway, it is quite bold of this quartet to claim that they will veto the incoming commission, given that there are 785 MEPs now, and there will be 736 come the June election.

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posted by Croydonian

Chutzpah corner

Friday, January 09, 2009
From the Mail & Guardian (South Africa):

"The Young Communist League (YCL) on Thursday said SABC's acting CEO Gab Mampone should take responsibility for the news division to counter any biased reporting during the election".

A root around the YCL's site shows it to be Marxist-Leninist, but to stand for 'freedom', inter alia.

Go tell it to the marines....

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A little bit of Christmas cheer from France

Saturday, December 27, 2008
From Libération:

"The French Communist Party will rent out its historic offices. 120 Rue La Fayette is up for rent 'at the market price'".

Sounds like they are finally embracing eurocommunism / Chanel Socialism....

As a further note of amusement, one of the floors has already been rented out to a company specialising in cartoon strips and animation.

I bet the conversations on the stairs would be worth listening on..

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posted by Croydonian

The *real* split between Communists and Trots

Thursday, December 04, 2008
has been revealed, in France at least, by a survey on holiday plans, dreams and the like c/o those nice people at IFOP.

35% of the Plain People of France fancy lounging around somewhere sunny, as do 36% of PCF enthusiasts but 43% of Trots (they are referred to as the extreme left, but I know from experience that this means Arlette Laguiller and Olivier Besancenot fans). The more amusing bit is the revelation that the Trots are fearful philistines and are significantly less interested in cultural tours - 15% vs 23% for the Plain People of France and 28% for Communists. Mind you, apparently no Front National voters fancy this at all.

Further, offered a range of long haul destinations, Communists disproportionately fancy Guadeloupe and Trots Rio. Communists have a major downer on Oz and New Zealand, whereas those deeply hypocritical Greens really fancy it - what about all those CO2 emissions, eh? Better still, neither Trots nor Tankies dream of a jaunt to China - 2% for the former, 0% for the latter against 3% for Gauls overall. Shame they did not offer the DPRK (of which more later).

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posted by Croydonian

A brief observation on Maria Gatland

Wednesday, December 03, 2008
I have never met Mrs Gatland, although I may have been in the same room as her. She represents an adjoining ward to mine, by the way. I have equivocated about writing this, as I try to steer clear of writing about UK issues that are already major news. More here.

Anyway, the first parallel worth drawing is that unlike in a Labour controlled borough on the wrong side of the river, she resigned from her post as soon as her embarrassing past entered into the public domain.

Further, her muscular sympathies with the 'Bold Fenian Men' ended some 35 years ago, she having repented at the time. While I do not think that time automatically wipes the slate, it does not appear that she has done anything that would have Special Branch, the RUC or whatever slavering at the prospect of a prosecution, were it not for the Good Friday Agreement and so forth.

If councillors are selected by the Conservatives in the same way that prospective MPs are, then her most grievous sin this century was in giving a less than a full and frank answer to the boilerplate text of 'have you ever done anything that has the potential to embarrass the Conservative Party'.

Were she asked that she should have given the answer we all now know, and even if she were not, it is more than arguable that she should have volunteered it.

However, judging from the photos of Mrs Gatland, she appears to be no older than in her early sixties, suggesting that she would have been associated with the Provos when she was in her early twenties or younger. Since then she appears to have led a blameless life and furthermore has engaged in good works and I would argue that this entitles her if not to forgiveness than at least to a degree of sympathy.

Moving swiftly on, a little light googling of the whistle blower, one Peter Latham who researches for a group called 'Save Our Schools', throws this up for 2006:

Broad Green - Peter Latham (Communist Party of Britain) 177.

They might not be one and the same. Furthermore, the same individual stood on the PR list for the 2008 GLA elections on the Unity for Peace and Socialism list, this being the CPB under another name. It won less than a tenth of the vote of the Stop the Congestion Charge list.

Given the ambiguous relationship between the British extreme left and Irish Republicanism, one does have to wonder whether the outing of Mrs Gatland - supposedly under sentence of death by the IRA - was motivated by more than concern over education in Croydon.

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Something for bourgeois South Eastern Greens to note

Tuesday, November 25, 2008
In 2004 173,351 people in the South East of England voted for the Green Party in the form of Caroline Lucas. I was not one of them, surprisingly enough. She crept in via the D'Hondt list system, not FPP, naturally.

Rooting around among some of my lesser used bookmarks, I chanced upon the 'People Before Profit' charter, via the SWP's website. Google will bring up the references, there being some sites I refuse to link to.

This is it:

  1. Wage increases no lower than the rate of inflation as given by the Retail Price Index. No to the government’s 2 percent pay limit.
  2. Increase tax on big companies. Introduce a windfall tax on corporation superprofits, especially those of the oil companies.
  3. Repeal the Tory anti-union laws. Support the Trade Union Freedom Bill.
  4. Unsold houses and flats should be taken over by local councils to ease the housing crisis. No house repossessions. For an emergency programme of council house building.
  5. Stop the privatisation of public services. Free and equal health and education services available to all.
  6. End the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and use the money to expand public services. Stop the erosion of civil liberties.
  7. Abolish tax on fuel and energy for old people and the poor. Re-establish the link between wages and pensions.
  8. No to racism. No to the British National Party. No scapegoating of immigrants.
  9. Reintroduce grants and abolish tuition fees for students.
  10. Increase the minimum wage to £8.00 an hour.
Definitively hard left, is it not?

Ms Lucas likes it a lot:

"I fully support the Charter and am happy to lend it my support. However, I would also encourage you to seek to broaden its appeal by addressing the lack of any environmental perspective or reference to the causes of the current economic crisis and unemployment. To this end, I recommend that two additions be made to the Charter as follows:
● Fight rising unemployment with massive investment in energy saving and renewable
energy.
● End the free for all and regulate financial institutions".

That the Greens are not just a bunch of tree huggers but firmly on the hard left has been obvious for years, but I do wonder how many of those 173,351 voters realise their MP makes common ground with 4th International Trots. Note that the only other extreme left party to stand, Respect, reaped a grand total of 13,426 votes.

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posted by Croydonian

What kind of reputation does an ex Stasi employee have?

Sunday, November 16, 2008
One that involves injuncting the German language Wikipedia site, apparently. Anyway, Lutz Heilman, for it is he, an MP for the extreme left Left Party has sicced his lawyers on http://www.wikipedia.de/ (if not de.wikipedia.org....). Note that he is all of 42, so his Stasi career shows some enthusiasm, as that particular Babylon fell when he was all of 23. Having been elected via a party list system on PR, I cannot excoriate the voters of any particular town, but the people of the Länder of Brandenburg, Sachsen and Sachsen-Anhalt have a lot to answer for.

While our rather over-reaching defamation laws do not apply on the other side of the Rhine, it puts me in mind of Dering v Uris, wherein an Auschwitz doctor sued a novelist for his depiction of him. What emerged from the trial is that Dering had no reputation to protect and was awarded all of a penny in damges, and had to pay costs too.

Those in command of German can read the entry here, or in English here. It involves allegations of involvement in a porn business and not completing his degree.

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posted by Croydonian

Look what Chavez has made out of the spare wheel

Saturday, November 15, 2008
From Novosti:

"Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has announced plans to hold an alternative summit on the global financial crisis to counter the meeting of world leaders currently taking place in Washington....Chavez said that he would invite representatives from the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas trade bloc (ALBA) and members of the Petrocaribe oil initiative to attend the summit. The two groups include a large number of Latin American and Caribbean countries".

ALBA consists of Venezuela, Cuba (fancy...), Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras and some of the small islands of the Caribbean (as a footnote, 'you are from a small island' is a pseudo-insult thrown out by folk of Jamaican extraction). Petrocaribe is Chavez's vehicle for gaining diplomatic etc leverage from selling Venezuela's oil at non-market prices and includes Suriname, Guyana (1), Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Belize, Guatemala and lots of small island states.

And what is he hoping to achieve, apart from getting his face in the papers?

"We will hold in Caracas a summit of small countries to adopt decisions on overcoming the financial crisis," national media reported Chavez as saying at a United Socialist Party of Venezuela meeting".

Doubtless the decisions will revolve around creating a LatAm/Caribbean socialist siege economy. It will end in fraudulent elections, crushing of dissent tears, you'll see.

(1) Given that Venezuela claims well nigh three-quarters of Guyana's national territory, I advise PM Sam Hinds to sup with a long spoon.

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'Liberals' sharing a platform with an apologist for mass murder

Thursday, November 13, 2008
Not very liberal is it? But that is what will be happening in January, under the aegis of Livingstone's new plaything, Progressive London.

It all sounds quite rainbow coalition initially:

"Speakers at the 24 January Progressive London conference at the Trades Union Congress include Jon Cruddas MP; Bonnie Greer; John Harris; Dawn Butler MP; Green Assembly members Jenny Jones AM and Darren Johnson AM; Labour Leader on the Assembly Len Duvall AM; Leader of the London Assembly Liberal Democrats Mike Tuffrey AM; Karen Buck MP; former Deputy Mayor of London Nicky Gavron AM; Professor Eric Hobsbawm; Professor Doreen Massey; Kate Hudson, Chair of CND; Claude Moraes MEP; Neal Lawson of Compass; trade unionists including Steve Hart of Unite, Regional Secretary of UNISON Linda Perks, and the General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union Billy Hayes".

That Socialists will happily make common ground with the extreme left does not come as a huge surprise. They used to call these things popular fronts. However, this is what Tuffrey has said about himself on the GLA LD website: 'In his personal life, Mike supports several community, civil liberties and environmental causes and lives in Clapham'. I would have credited Cruddas with a shred more decency too, for what that's worth.

For those not altogether au fait with Hobsbawm's oeuvre, here are some choice quotes about the decrepit historian:

From Johann Hari (yes, really): "He would gladly have spied for Stalin, he explained recently and without regret, if only he had been asked. In his autobiography, he explains that he "treats the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness. He is the David Irvine (sic) of the left. Why do so many decent people associate themselves with him? I can only conclude that we have not seriously thought about the victims of the tyranny he defends".

Olive Kamm in The Times: "According to the historian Robert Conquest, Hobsbawm was asked by Michael Ignatieff in a BBC interview in 1994: “What (your view) comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?” He replied: “Yes.”...Moving to more recent panegyric, Hobsbawm remarks in On History (1997): “Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even nominal, use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989.”

Kamm tailed his piece with this "Prospect’s “five intellectuals” are to be accorded dinner with a Cabinet minister and a newspaper editor, with the conversation recorded for the magazine. If Hobsbawm’s interlocutors have any gumption, they will refuse to sit with him".

He's right, isn't he?

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