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Is there anything more nauseating than someone who is immune from the effects of the economic downturn saying how the recession might be good news?

Here's Conservative Health Spokesman Andrew Lansley (pictured above):

"On many counts, recessions can be good for us. People tend to smoke less, drink less alcohol, eat less rich food and spend more time at home with their families."

Don't you just love the 'us'?

As a superannuated member of Britain’s political elite, you can be sure the recession will not be impacting on Mr Lansley.

Meanwhile Richard Kay reports:

David Cameron is set to defy the credit crunch by going to a lavish black-tie party -only weeks after he instructed Tory chiefs not be seen drinking champagne at a reception.
Most of the Conservative high command is likely to be at multi-millionaire hedge fund tycoon Michael Hintze's 55th birthday bash later this week - but they are under orders to keep details secret.
Although his investment fund has had £200 million wiped off its value in recent weeks, Hintze, one of the Tories' most prominent backers, is understood to be determined to push the boat out.

As I've said before many times before, the big divide in Britain today is not between Labour and Conservative, but between the political elite and the rest of us.

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A very happy Thanksgiving Day to all US readers of this blog.

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Here's the second and concluding part of my article on The Baader-Meinhof gang from The Daily Express. You can read Part One here.

Above you can watch a trailer for Uli Edel's new film 'Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex', which is currently on general release.


Though the violence shocked most Germans, a 1971 opinion poll found one in five under the age of 30 expressed a “certain sympathy” for the gang’s members, while one in ten Northern Germans said they would willingly shelter Red Army Faction members for a night.

By now the authorities were desperate to break up the gang. In June 1972, German police burst into the apartment of a young Scottish businessman and shot him dead, even though no evidence could be later produced to link him to the gang. It was in the same month, however, that Baader was arrested after a lengthy shoot-out in Frankfurt along with Meinhof who was betrayed to the police by Fritz Rodewald, a teacher in whose house she had been staying.

In 1974 Meinhof was given an eight-year jail sentence. Eighteen months later, aged 41, she was found dead, hanging from a rope made from a towel in her prison cell. The official version was suicide: Meinhof was depressed after not hearing from her children on Mother’s Day. Yet her supporters maintain she was killed by the authorities. More than 4,000 people attended her funeral. A neurologist who conducted the autopsy on Meinhof noticed changes to her brain caused by an earlier operation for a brain tumour-leading to claims that her transformation from aspiring writer to terrorist may have been caused by a mental illness.

Gang members, trying to force the authorities to release Andreas Baader from jail kidnapped German industrialist Hanns-Martin Scheyler, a former SS officer. At the same time in October 1977, a Palestinian group with links to Baader-Meinhof hijacked a Lufthansa plane and its 91 passengers, demanding the release of Baader- and 10 other gang members. After a six-day siege, German special forces boarded the plane and killed the hijackers.

Seeing his chance of freedom gone, Baader, now 34, and two associates took part in a suicide pact. Again, that is the official version: surviving gang member Irmgard Moller claimed that, like Meinhof, Baader and his colleagues were victims of ‘extra-judicial killings‘.

Even with two of its key members dead, the Red Army Faction was still far from finished. The gang reacted to the death of their founder, by murdering their hostage on the same day. "After 43 days, we have ended Hanns-Martin Schleyer's miserable and corrupt existence. The fight has only just begun.” a letter from the gang to a French newspaper announced.

Over the next thirteen years, the Red Army Faction continued their campaign of violence- targeting businessmen, bankers, US military figures and politicians.
Then in April 1998, after five years without carrying out any operations, the gang officially announced their dissolution. In an official letter the group announced:

"Almost 28 years ago, on 14 May 1970, the RAF arose in a campaign of liberation. Today we end this project. The urban guerrilla in the shape of the RAF is now history."

A decade later though, with the release of the new film, Germany’s most notorious- and controversial terror group- and its two charismatic founders- is once again in the limelight.

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It's been quite hilarious reading the completely OTT response of various media commentators to the incredibly timid economic measures announced by the British government yesterday.

The government said that they would raise the top rate of income tax to 45% on income over £150,000 in 2010- hardly a revolutionary measure considering that most other countries in Europe have a top rate of tax for high earners (often cutting in at a much lower rate than the one proposed by Alistair Darling) but apparently it means that 'socialism' has returned to Britain and we are back to the 1970s.

If only!

If we really did have a Socialist government in Britain here's some of the things they'd be doing:

* Renationalising public transport, the energy companies, utilities and Britain's infrastructure.

*Reintroducing a staunchly progressive income tax system.

* Abolishing VAT on fuel altogether.

* Abolishing prescription charges in England.

* Reintroducing free dental care on the NHS.

* Pulling Britain out of the EU, NATO, and the World Trade Organisation.

* Pulling British troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan (funny isn't it, that despite the billions of pounds of public money this would save, the opposition Conservatives, who are calling for government cuts, never even mention this particular economy?)

* Introducing free personal care for the elderly.

* Re-establishing the link between pensions and average earnings, not in 2012 as the government has promised, but now.

* Establishing the very important principle that not a penny of taxpayers money should be given to a private company without the taxpayer acquiring equity in that company.

* Making all 'short-selling' illegal- not just of bank shares.

* Closing the loopholes which mean that billionaires whose money is largely made in Britain, pay little, or no tax whatsoever.


When we do get a government doing all or most of those things, then I think we can accurately call it 'socialist'. In the meantime we can only smile at the attempts to portray Gordon Brown (above) as the George Lansbury of the 21st century.

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This article of mine appears in The First Post

Anyone who argues that, as a political force, socialism is dead, ought to visit the Netherlands. The Socialist Party of the Netherlands (SP) is the fastest growing political group in the country.

They won 25 seats in the last general election - an increase of 16 seats - and made huge gains in last year's local elections. They are now the third largest party in Holland in terms of members and could well replace the Dutch Labour Party as the main alternative to the Christian Democrats.

Why are they so successful? I would suggest that it is because they are a socialist party that actually has socialist policies. They oppose the privatisation of public services, advocate higher taxes on the very wealthy and have condemned the "the culture of greed" caused by "a capitalism based on inflated bonuses and easy money". They oppose war and Nato and the nascent European superstate. They were the only left-wing Dutch party in Parliament to oppose the new EU Constitution in the 2005 referendum.

Of course the fact that they have one of the most charismatic - and photogenic - of all of European political leaders in the 41-year-old epidemiologist Agnes Kant (pictured above) does them no harm.

Part of its popularity with the voters lies in one particular policy which differentiates it from British or other European parties of the left: they oppose large scale immigration. The SP see the 'free movement of labour' as part of the neoliberal globalist package - something which benefits big business but not ordinary people. Their opposition to immigration is not based on racism - as tends to be the case with the BNP and other far-right parties in Europe - but on their socialist ideology.

A recent publication by the SP asserted that labour migration in the EU was making "more acute the contrasts between rich and poor and competition between different groups of workers within the EU". Instead of lauding the free movement of labour as other parties on the left do, the SP calls for policies "to make migration unnecessary" and for the EU funds to be used to enable poorer regions of the continent to be self-supporting.

The SP's opposition to large-scale immigration is not a recent development. In the 1980s, the party's booklet Gastarbeid en Kapitaal (Migrant Labour and Capital), denounced the migration of foreign workers into the Netherlands as a capitalist ploy to drive down wages and destroy working class solidarity.

This is a far cry from the traditional position of the British left - which despite overwhelming evidence that large-scale immigration does reduce wages - still clings to an the ideology of open borders. In doing so, they are not only complying with the wishes of big business, who for obvious reasons welcome the influx of large numbers of people from low-wage economies onto their labour market; they are also espousing a policy which is unpopular with large swathes of the electorate and which is likely to become even more unpopular as unemployment grows.

The success of the Socialist Party of the Netherlands shows that there are lots of votes to be won by an unequivocally left-wing party which has the courage and sense to oppose large-scale immigration on non-racist, anti-capitalist grounds.

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Barack Obama's signature issue in the primaries was his "good judgment" to oppose the Iraq war. He invoked this more than any other qualification in his early battles with Hillary Clinton. She may have experience, he'd charge, but she lacked the wisdom to oppose the war. Indeed, the whole Democratic establishment was somehow corrupt or out of touch for not opposing the war, according to the Obamaphiles. So now Barack Obama is going to appoint Hillary Clinton to be the chief architect of his foreign policy. Moreover, he picked Joe Biden to be his running mate and "partner" in the White House explicitly because of his foreign policy experience and judgment. But wait: Joe Biden, too, supported the war. Meanwhile, at Defense, it looks like he will keep George W. Bush's man, Robert Gates.......surely keeping Bush's SecDef is not exactly what the anti-war Dems had in mind as "change we can believe in." Heck, Joe Lieberman's sitting pretty and he endorsed McCain. It will be interesting to see how long Obama's charisma can paper over reality.

opines neo-con commentator Jonah Goldberg in The NRO.

Is Barack Obama in the process of betraying his anti-war supporters?

Today's Sunday Telegraph , in a piece entitled "Obama accused of selling out on Iraq by picking hawks to run his foreign policy team" quotes Chris Bowers of the OpenLeft.com blog who complains:

"That is, over all, a centre-right foreign policy team. I feel incredibly frustrated. Progressives are being entirely left out of Obama's major appointments so far."

Meanwhile, Markos Moulitsas, founder of the anti-war Daily Kos site, warns that Democrats risk sounding "tone deaf" to the views of "the American electorate that voted in overwhelming numbers for change from the discredited Bush policies."

I've put a question mark on the heading of this blog post, because of course we're still to see what Obama's foreign policy will be like in practice.

But as far as his early appointments are concerned, it's hardly a promising start, is it?

(many thanks to Stuart Reid for alerting me to the Goldberg piece).

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Well, can anyone remember a weekend when not only did none of the Big Four win, but none of them even scored a goal? I certainly can't.

Long-standing readers will know my views on the Premiership, and how top flight football has become mind-numbingly predictable since its introduction. But the2008-9 season is shaping up to be rather interesting. We've had the incredible rise of Hull City (whose manager Phil Brown is pictured above) and the surprisingly good showing of Stoke City. The demise of Arsenal. The fall- and rise- of Tottenham. Robinho working his magic at Man City. And a league table where only a handful of points separate half the division.

Of course, its odds on that 'normal service' will soon be resumed. But in the meantime lets enjoy the unpredictability while it lasts!

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