Thought the former Bolshevik revolutionary had been murdered by an NKVD agent in Mexico in 1940?
Then think again.
It’s an internet exclusive, but I can reveal that Leon is alive and in the rudest of health- and still chasing leaders.
Thought the former Bolshevik revolutionary had been murdered by an NKVD agent in Mexico in 1940?
Then think again.
It’s an internet exclusive, but I can reveal that Leon is alive and in the rudest of health- and still chasing leaders.
This piece of mine appears in the Sunday Express.
It’s also cross-posted at the Campaign For Public Ownership website.
If you’re of like mind and would like to see Britain's railways- and our bus transport and public utilities- renationalised, please get involved in the campaign.
If the government can take the East Coast line into public ownership, why not the entire network?
Nationalise the losses, privatise the gains. That’s the Government’s policy when it comes to the banks and now, it seems, it applies to the railways, too.
Transport Minister Lord Adonis last week announced that the Government would take back the East Coast line, the busiest inter-city route in the country, from private operator National Express, which had warned it was likely to default on a franchise payment. Adonis says public ownership will only be temporary and the Government will tender for a new operator from the end of 2010.
So why should the taxpayer be expected to pick up a £700million bill now and another private operator be allowed to come along and cream off the profits later? Why should National Express, which made more than £80million profit last year, be allowed to keep its other two rail franchises?
Franchising has meant that the private firms have effectively struck a no-lose bet. If business goes well, they make huge profits. If it doesn’t, they walk away and the taxpayer picks up the tab.
Rather than being a temporary, emergency measure, the Government’s decision to take this line into public ownership should be the first step in the re-establishment of a publicly owned railway. Such a policy would not only be popular, it would save a fortune.
Britain’s privatised train companies have been milking the public purse for years. The totals involved make the amount that Ronnie Biggs and his Great Train Robbers stole pale into insignificance but while Biggs remains behind bars, Britain’s 21st- century train robbers continue to fleece the public. Fares have consistently risen above the rate of inflation and, earlier this year, some went up by as much as 11 per cent. In May, fares for railcard users rose by up to 50 per cent. It really doesn’t have to be like this.
For an example of how a unitary publicly-owned railway can deliver enormous benefits to users, we don’t need to look far. In Belgium, fares are up to 20 times cheaper than in Britain, while the ticketing system is simpler. In Britain, there can be up to 200 different fares for the same journey. In Belgium, the price of a ticket is determined by distance: a system that used to operate in Britain, too, before “market-pricing”. Prices don’t go up in the rush hour: Belgian Railways simply puts on more trains, which it can do because, unlike Britain’s privatised rail operators, it owns its own rolling stock. Moreover, Belgian fares actually drop by 50 per cent at weekends to make it easier for people to get out and about. The fundamental difference between the railways in Belgium and the rest of mainland Europe, and those in Britain, is that there, railways are publicly owned and run as a public service.
In Britain, since privatisation, the need to maximise profits has come before all other considerations, often with disastrous consequences for passengers. Because hiring extra carriages from the leasing companies is deemed too expensive, Britain’s rail firms try to ration existing capacity by pricing people off trains. The result is frequent overcrowding.
Restoring the railways to public ownership could bring relief to Britain’s long-suffering passengers and usher in a new golden age. The reopening of stations closed by the misguided Dr Beeching in the Sixties, the introduction of extra services and the reduction in fares to the European average would help persuade millions of Britons to leave their cars and take the train.
This summer, many of us will experience the delights of rail travel in Belgium and other European countries.
The question we need to be asking Lord Adonis is: why, if other countries can have affordable, reliable, publicly-owned railways with easy to understand ticket pricing, do we in Britain have to put up with such a ludicrously expensive, fragmented and user-unfriendly system?
Worried about whether you can afford a proper holiday this summer?
Or that your factory/office is about to close down due to the recession?
Well, there’s a group of people who are doing just fine.
Here’s an extract from Alex Brummer’s excellent article in today’s Daily Mail on how the taxpayer has helped pay for these lavish bonuses:
Surviving investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, the Barclays offshoot BarCap and Morgan Stanley have been able to become so profitable so quickly because many of their competitors (including Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns) have collapsed.
Others such as the Royal Bank of Scotland and Citigroup are incapacitated.
What is not being recognised, however, is that were it not for the enormous amounts of public money poured into the global monetary system by national governments, those surviving banks would also be in dire trouble.
The figures are mind-boggling. Estimates compiled by leading economists suggest that the aid provided so far by our government to the banking system is as much as £1,269billion.
In the U.S., the total has reached £6,415billion, while in Europe, where governments have still to fully confront the losses, the figure is £1,007 billion.
Without these enormous bailouts, which may not be recouped by the taxpayer for at least a decade, financial groups such as broker-dealer Goldman Sachs might never have been able to have stayed afloat.
In other words: Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the poor.
Nationalise the Losses, Privatise the Gains.
And there won't be any change in the situation until the vast majority start to show a little bit more anger at the way the 'Masters of the Universe' are continuing to enrich themselves at our expense.
This article of mine appears in the First Post.
No Western leaders have yet congratulated President Ahmadinejad on his controversial election victory in Iran. But among the list of leaders who have done so is a name that many will find surprising: President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.
Karzai telephoned Ahmadinejad to congratulate him on his victory, saying that relations between Afghanistan and its Western neighbour had "expanded" during Ahmadinejad's time in office and that he hoped ties would continue to strengthen.
You won't read too much about it in the mainstream Western media, but the truth is that in a battle which the US President and British Prime Minister repeatedly tell us is fundamental to our own security - Iran is on 'our' side.
Shia Iran's opposition to the Sunni fundamentalists of the Taliban is longstanding - in fact, over the past 20 years or so, it's fair to say that Iran has been more consistently and firmly opposed to the Taliban than the United States.
After the Taliban took power in 1996, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, denounced the group as an affront to Islam, and the killing of 11 Iranian diplomats and truck drivers in 1998 almost led to an Iranian invasion of Afghanistan, which was averted by the intervention of the US and UN.
After 9/11, Iran played a key role in the toppling of the Taliban and participated with the US and other Western countries on post-war planning for Afghanistan. Iran's contribution to the anti-Taliban struggle was acknowledged by US officials: James Dobbins, who worked with diplomats from Iran and other neigbours of Afghanistan to create the first post-Taliban government, said that the Iranians were the "most active" of the foreign backers of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, while Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that two days before the fall of Kabul, there were places in Afghanistan "where there are some Iranian liaison people, as well as some American liaison people" working with the same Afghan forces.
But in May 2003, under pressure from the neocons, President Bush cancelled co-operation with Iran.
Since then, US officials have claimed that Iran is actually working against Western interests in Afghanistan and has been aiding the Taliban. But hard evidence to support these claims has proved as elusive as Iraqi WMD. The allegations of US officials have been refuted by those closest to the action - like General Dan McNeill, the former top US commander in Afghanistan, who said there was "no information to support" the assertion that Iran had provided weapons to the Taliban.
In fact, Iran's line on the Taliban remains as uncompromising as ever. Only last October, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki warned the West not to hold talks with the Taliban: "We advise them to think about the consequences of the talks... which are taking place in the region and in Europe and avoid being bitten in the same spot twice."
So why if Iran is on 'our side' in the war against the Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, does the West remain so hostile to Tehran? The answer, of course, is the enduring influence of the neocons, who see the world through a pro-Israeli prism.
Iran is opposed to the Taliban and it is certainly no friend of al-Qaeda. But because of its sponsorship of Hamas and Hezbollah, it is deemed by the 'Israel-firstists' to be public enemy number one. The neocons have successfully managed to conflate Israel's perceived enemies with those of the West: Iran is seen as a threat to Israeli hegemony in the Middle East, therefore it's a threat to the US and Britain. They've also managed to spin the myth of a coherent and unified Islamic network of terror, which includes Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria, the Taliban and al-Qaeda - and before 2003, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, too. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims: "These terrorist states and terror organisations together form a terror network, whose constituent parts support each other operationally as well as politically."
Bowing to neocon and Zionist pressure to isolate Iran is undoubtedly hampering Western efforts in Afghanistan. Enlisting the Islamic Republic's support in the battle against the Taliban is no guarantee of success - but it would certainly increase the chances.
Last weekend, we heard that Iran was preparing a new package of "political, security and international" issues to put to the West. It's highly likely that Afghanistan will be among the issues covered in that package and that there will an offer of Iranian co-operation in return for concessions on the country's nuclear energy programme.
The pro-Israeli lobby will do all it can to get the proposals rejected; but if, as Obama, Brown et al state, it is really true that the war against the Taliban is fundamental to our national security, and that it is a conflict that must be won, then Western leaders would be wise to give them the most serious consideration.
Boris Johnson is a worried man. He thinks that new planned EU regulations on hedge funds and other vulture capitalists will be a disaster for Britain.
Daniel Hannan, the Tory MEP who went on Fox TV in America to attack the NHS as a sixty year 'mistake', agrees:
The City is staring into the abyss. If the proposed EU directive on hedge funds goes through, London will go the way of Bruges, Venice and Amsterdam: a once dominant financial entrepôt sidelined by more virile cities.
What a load of Castor and Pollux.
Johnson and Hannan and other fanatical neoliberals would like us to believe that without vulture capitalists, London, and indeed the rest of Britain, would hit the buffers.
How is it then that during the period when Britain and Europe experienced their fastest growth in living standards- the thirty years following World War Two- capitalism was strictly regulated and hedge funds and other vulture capitalist vehicles did not exist?
The truth is that we survived perfectly well without hedge funds, 'private equity' companies and venture capitalists in the 50s, 60s, and 70s and we'd survive perfectly well without them again.
For a corrective to the neoliberal nonsense of Johnson and Hannan, there's a great article in today's Observer by Will Hutton on the sort of institutions the Mayor of London should be celebrating- eg The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the institutions he shouldn't.
I am sick of hedge funds. Sick of their special pleading that they should not suffer the regulation proposed by Brussels and will flee the country, supposedly taking billions in tax revenue with them. Sick of politicians - Johnson on the right and Paul Myners on the left - feeling that they have to speak up for them as an allegedly key part of our financial service industry, so hitting back at the delusions of mainland Europeans that hedge funds represent all that is bad about Anglo-Saxon capitalism.
... hedge funds do represent the unlovely priorities of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. They were an important factor behind today's financial crisis. Brutally, it would matter scarcely a jot if the hedge-fund industry shrank to the size it was a decade ago. It might even promote a less casino-oriented financial system
This article of mine on the New McCarthyism, appears in the First Post.
It all started with Glenn Hoddle.
When historians of the future debate when it was that Britain went from being one of the freest countries in the world, a place where people were able to express their honestly-held views and opinions without fear of comeback, to one where they could not, they're likely to fix on the date of 2nd February 1999.
For it was then that Hoddle, the England football manager, was dismissed, not because of poor results, or flagging team morale, but because of the views he had expressed on reincarnation and disabled people in an interview with a national newspaper. Even Prime Minister Tony Blair felt it would be a good move to jump on the anti-Hoddle bandwagon. He described the England manager's comments as "very offensive" and argued that it would be "very difficult" for him to stay in his position.
The sacking of Hoddle set a highly dangerous precedent for hounding someone out of their job for expressing the 'wrong' opinions on matters quite unrelated to their work.
The procedure is usually works like this: a public figure expresses opinions to which the New McCarthyites take exception. The public figure, fearing his livelihood will be threatened by the whipped-up hysteria his comments have generated, is pressurised into making an embarrassing - and completely unwarranted - apology for what they have said.
Ten years on, the latest recipient of the 'Hoddle treatment' is Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone. Speaking on Channel 4 News, the sanctimonious Labour MP Denis MacShane (above) called for pressure to be exerted to get Ecclestone to stand down after he had criticised democracy and cited Adolf Hitler for his ability to "get things done". (It is actually rather difficult to deny this. After all, the big problem with Adolf Hitler was that he did manage to 'get things done' - more is the pity.)
MacShane's demands for Ecclestone to go were echoed by pressure groups from outside the UK: there were calls for his resignation from the president of the World Jewish Congress Ronald Lauder. And a senior German Jewish official called for him to be boycotted by Formula One teams. Dieter Graumann, a vice-president of the Central Council of Jews, said: "No team should work with him any more."
But although many people would take issue with the tastelessness of Ecclestone's assertions, we might ask what on earth do his views on Hitler, Saddam and the Taliban and the merits of different political systems, have to do with his stewardship of Formula One?
Ecclestone caved into the pressure and issued toe-curling apologies to the Times newspaper and the Jewish Chronicle, where, despite having expressed no support for Hitler's persecution of Jews in his original interview, he nevertheless felt obliged to state: "Most of my mates are Jewish people, I spoke to two or three very prominent people today, Jewish people. One of them said to me, 'Bernie, you're more Jewish than all of my friends'."
In 2007, it was pop star and former art student Bryan Ferry's fate to experience the wrath of the new McCarthyites for praising the iconography of the Third Reich, in an interview with a German newspaper.
In the furore which followed, Ferry was pressurised, like Ecclestone, into issuing an apology, in which he made it clear that he, like every "right-minded individual" regarded the Nazi regime "evil and abhorrent". "I trust that he will never make the same mistake again", said the former Labour MP Lord Janner, ominously.
Since the Hoddle affair, it has become increasingly common for people to have their livelihoods threatened for expressing opinions which are at variance with the officially approved positions.
Last December, PC Graham Cogman, despite fifteen years of service, was sacked for his opposition to gay sex. An NHS nurse, Caroline Petrie, was suspended for two months because she offered to pray for a elderly patient.
David Booker, a charity worker in Southampton, was suspended under 'diversity' rules after telling a colleague, during an informal night-shift discussion, that although he was not homophobic, he did not agree with same-sex partnerships. And Treasury civil servant Azad Ali was suspended for views he had expressed on Middle Eastern conflicts on his blog - though he has since been reinstated.
It could reasonably be said that at no point in Britain's recent history has expressing honestly-held opinions been such a high risk activity as it is today.
Due to the pervasive influence of political correctness, the efforts of vociferous single-issue lobbies and pressure groups and the passing of illiberal laws which infringe freedom of speech - such as the Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006, we are fast approaching the stage when only views within the officially approved parameters can be voiced without fear of comeback. And the parameters are getting smaller and smaller.
In the Britain of 2009, don't express disapproval of gay partnerships or you may be labelled a homophobe - or, in the case of David Booker, be suspended from your job. Don't criticise Israel too strongly or you run the risk of being labelled an anti-semite. Don't express a belief in reincarnation and the concept of karma. Don't say that you disapprove of contemporary 'democracy' and admire some dictators. And whatever you do, don't appear to offer a sliver of even grudging respect for any aspect of Nazi Germany, even the art-work.
Democracy should mean encouraging people to voice opinions freely and without fear. And it certainly shouldn't mean only being allowed to express opinions which the political elite or certain lobbies and pressure groups deem to be 'acceptable'.
Although the interventions of clowns like Tony Blair and Denis MacShane make the whole thing seem ridiculous and amusing, the sight of politicians coming on to our television screens to call for the heads of sporting figures for expressing their honestly-held opinions/the 'wrong' views, constitutes a threat to our freedoms which is in fact extremely serious.
Well, how was it for you? I thought Michael Jackson's memorial service was a very moving event, and the perfect send-off to a great performer. The highlights for me were a great speech by the Rev Al Sharpton on the way Jackson broke down barriers, a very moving eulogy by Brooke Shields, in which she quoted that wonderful line from Antoine de Saint Exupery's The Little Prince: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye”, and a superb rendition of Jackson's favourite song, the Charlie Chaplin classic 'Smile', by his brother Jermaine.
To mark the day that Jackson is laid to rest, I thought I'd post a video of him singing his favourite song (video by bramblebramble).
RIP Michael Jackson. You achieved rather more in your life- and gave rather more pleasure to people than the bitter individuals who have attacked you in the last few days.