mckenzied.com In defence of politics & some politicians, in loyal support of Labour and in appreciation of decent political journalism.

13 December 2016

Last resort not never resort

Filed under: Fascism,Labour,Labour leadership,Labour politics,Syria — Tags: — Ian McKenzie @ 6:19 pm

It turns out they were wrong, those people who told us that the only outcome to the Syrian genocide was a political solution. It turns out that there were two military solutions after all. One was to arm the secular moderate opposition to the fascist Assad, who were asking for a few MANPADS to down the helicopters barrel bombing their schools, hospitals and market places. The other was to wring our hands and let Assad, Putin and Iran kill half a million people.

War, what is it good for? Edwin Starr asked that question in 1970 as the Vietnam war was entering its final phase. His answer was “absolutely nothing”.

I disagree.

Of course, no decent person, no sane, rational human being would chose war over more peaceful means to achieve political ends. And yet, as a last resort, war can be a liberating, humanising course of action, and has been.

War came too late for millions of Jews, Slavs, Roma and homosexual people in early 1940s Europe. By the time the Vietnamese had, in the teeth of UN opposition, invaded to remove Pol Pot in Cambodia, 1.7 million people were dead. In 1994, about 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis lost their lives too, while an international community, forged in the post 2nd World War consensus, wrung its hands, or in the case of the French authorities, actively colluded in the genocide. The true horror of all those events was uncovered in weeks, months or years. This genocide in Syria was witnessed, live, on Twitter.
War is a very, very last resort.

But there comes a time when the crimes of some regimes are so evil and perpetrated with such fortitude, that they cannot be stopped by wishful thinking, by diplomatic persuasion, by political action or by economic sanction.

There comes a point beyond which such crimes can only be stopped by the application of armed and deadly force: “by any means necessary”, you might say.

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5 September 2016

Shadow Cabinet Elections will make a bad situation much worse

The Parliamentary Labour Party is about to vote on whether to reinstate elections to the shadow cabinet, reversing the only sensible thing Ed Miliband did as leader. It is a very bad idea in principle; in practice it will simply add to Labour’s catastrophe.

It’s bad in principle because leaders should be able to choose their own teams. No-one sensible would seriously expect a Labour cabinet to be elected, why a shadow cabinet? It was bad enough that after his 1997 landslide Tony Blair was required to keep the then elected team for a year as his incoming 1997-98 cabinet. Most of them were complete stars; I worked for one such. A few were not up to the job. A permanent such arrangement would be risible.

For moderate members who believe Corbyn is destroying the Labour Party, electing the shadow cabinet would be a self-defeating tactical blunder, playing into ultra-left hands. The current PLP would likely elect a sensible set of shadow Secretaries of State; they’d be spoilt for choice: Caroline Flint, Pay McFadden, Heidi Alexander, Rachel Reeves, John Healey, Chris Leslie, Peter Kyle, Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper, John Healey, Emma Reynolds, Lillian Greenwood, Julie Elliott, Ian Murray, Stephen Timms, Tom Blenkinsop, Bridget Phillipson, Lisa Nandy and scores of others would all be in contention. It’s a racing certainty that Corbyn’s current team would all find themselves out of a job. Richard Burgeon, for one, wouldn’t break double figures among his current colleagues. Diane Abbott? Pur-leaze.

But, I am told, shadow cabinet elections help PLP unity. Maybe in the 1980s they did. Now? Not so much.
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14 January 2016

Tony Blair’s last fortnight

Filed under: Labour,Labour leadership,Labour politics — Ian McKenzie @ 5:11 pm

On 15 June 2007 the Guardian asked its readers to suggest ways in which Tony Blair should spend his last 14 days as Prime Minister. I’ve just found what I wrote at the time. I stand by it today. The last line is a cracker, even though I do say so myself

Jun 15 07, 10:24pm

How should Tony Blair spend his last fortnight in office?

He should spend his last 14 days looking forward to life without Guardianistas and their delusional rancour.

He deserves to reflect and bask in the certain knowledge that he has left Britain a fairer and more successful country than he found it, that everyone is better off. He should dust off a copy of Keir Hardie’s manifesto and note that he has made a reality of the first Labour Leader’s dream of a National Minimum Wage and Reformed House of Lords. He should be proud that since 1997 there are 80,000 more nurses, 32,000 more doctors, 27,000 more teachers and more police officers than at any time in history; that the spend on the NHS has tripled in 10 years; that there are 80 new hospitals either built or on the way; that every A&E department in the country has been renovated; that crime has fallen (except kids stealing mobile phones off each other). But he should devote at least an hour to condemning in words of one syllable the BMA Tory front campaign and the greedy selfish NHS consultants and GPs who have had their mouths stuffed with gold (like in 1947) and are STILL whinging.

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28 July 2015

Corbyn needs to be crushed in the vote. If he’s not, Labour will be out of power for decades and deserve to be

This whole “should Corbyn be on the ballot paper or not” thing is now out of hand. It is really very simple. The left in the Labour Party has not been crushed since the mid 1980s around the end of the last era during which they were a malign influencing force. Unless the left are crushed Labour can’t win a general election. Unless Labour wins a general election the Tories will carry on running the country doing things the left and centre left don’t like.
Contrary to popular mythology (including my own at the time), Tony Bair didn’t vanquish the left. Sure, in 1984-5, there was the months-long Clause 4 national tour, I was at its last rally at Crofton Park’s famous Rivoli Ballroom, but the left knew the game was up and faded away. It was all a bit inevitable. What we really needed then, and desperately need now, was to be locked in a room until the fight was won. Blair’s true opposition inside the Labour Party wasn’t the left. It was Brown. And we all know how that turned out.
In about 21 days, about a quarter of a million members of the Labour Party will receive leadership election ballot papers. Sadly, membership numbers will be swelled by rather too many Trots and Tories to whom some idiot decided to give a vote for the sum of £3, but we will all have a vote.
I expect that Jeremy Corbyn will come last. A lot of people don’t agree. They include some pollsters who told us that a Tory majority was impossible in May 2015, and some bookies, including the one who had to pay me £450 because I thought a Tory majority wasn’t impossible but rather impossible to avoid.
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20 May 2015

If you didn’t see defeat coming, you don’t understand how politics works.

Filed under: Labour,Labour politics — Ian McKenzie @ 3:44 am

It’s at least ten years since anyone paid attention to what I think about politics, if they cared even then. But the last five years have been very frustrating and if I don’t get what follows below out of my system soon I’ll have an aneurism which would be very bad on top of the subdural and arachnoid brain haematoma I suffered in March at the hands of the hit and run driver who knocked me off my bike.

I know that an absence of rancour, a positive attitude and looking forward not back are in order. I know that the public in both the UK and the Scottish part of it need Labour rationally and calmly to hold both majority governments to account and I am sure that those responsible for doing those things in the Labour Party will do them just fine. For now though, I’ve waited over a week but I’ve seen nothing yet to make me feel positive about anything. The August 2013 Syria vote aside, I’m as angry as I’ve been about politics for decades. I’m angry about a few other things too, so apologies in advance for the splenetic tone of what follows.

We lost the 2015 general election in September 2010 and probably also the 2020 one as well. The result was bad for Labour but catastrophic for the millions of people who rely on us to look after their interests. We let them down, and badly. If the Labour Party – a major controlling proportion of it – doesn’t rapidly accept that the only chance to make amends is to stand in the centre ground, shoulder to shoulder with, listening to, working for the British people, and fight and win elections from there, then it will cease to exist and it will deserve to die.

Without the will and the means to win elections we are irrelevant. We might as well be Compass or a whelk stall.

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20 January 2015

Oi journalists! MPs tweeting campaign pics. It’s called democracy and it’s great.

Filed under: Labour,Labour activism — Ian McKenzie @ 10:31 pm
Wes Streeting is standing for Labour in Ilford North.

Wes Streeting is standing for Labour in Ilford North.

There is currently a deep and widening fracture between the British people and their political parties, apparently. The chasm is so big that the political party as a concept is in terminal decline. The main two parties are in particular danger because their joint share of the national vote has fallen dramatically in the last six decades: it’s all over now, baby blue and baby red.

These assertions have become truths all but universally acknowledged; it’s all a bit boring really. People do not join parties in large numbers any more. The electorate has slammed its doors on the main parties after saying “you are all the same”. People feel alienated and disenfranchised, believing that politicians are only in it for themselves and only come round at election times when they want votes and are nowhere to be seen during the rest of the electoral cycle. Yada yada yada.

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