"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Expel the Blairite Traitors

John Hutton and Alan Milburn: dead for the labour movement
EXTRACT: There is a precedent, naturally enough. In the early 1930s, the last decade when capitalism faced an economic crisis as serious as the present one, the incumbent Labour minority government found itself irretrievably split on cuts in unemployment benefit. Ramsay MacDonald, the prime minister, responded by forming a ‘national government’ with Tories and Liberals - he and the other Labour members of the new government were immediately expelled from the party, even if slightly reluctantly.
It is necessary to do this again when faced with the current crop of collaborators and traitors. OK, Milburn and Hutton may be political small fry compared to MacDonald, Philip Snowden and JH Thomas, but they clearly represent the sort of Blairite baggage that must be unceremoniously dumped if Labour is to have any chance of constituting itself as a serious oppositional force with resonance in the working class. In 1948 Aneurin Bevan memorably described the Tory Party as “lower than vermin”, as it “condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation”. Could you imagine even in your wildest dreams John Hutton or Alan Milburn saying anything even remotely similar?
Posted by at 1:15 pm

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