Moby I love you for this simple truth

Moby comes clean about drugs, liquor, sex parties | Pop | guardian.co.uk Music: "...ultimately she's not doing things on a symbolic level. Cutting your hair off is symbolic. Losing your children and becoming a drug addict is not."

In respect of Britney Spears, of course. Who did you think it was meant about?

Erk! It's a competence issue too

Northern Rock nationalisation in turmoil over offshore trust | Business | The Guardian: "Liberal Democrat spokesman Vince Cable, a supporter of the Rock's nationalisation, suggested an Exocet may have gone through the government plan. The leftwing Labour MP John McDonnell, one of the first MPs to raise the issue, claimed the nationalisation programme could not proceed without the issue being addressed.

The chancellor, Alistair Darling, met Cable yesterday in an attempt to reassure him and retain vital Liberal Democrat support. Cable came away unconvinced. Granite accounts for almost half of Northern Rock's book of mortgage loans."

Clear as a Bell

Why Salmond Laughed All The Way To The Budget (from The Herald )

"...

"Abstaining from the vote on the SNP's Budget was one thing. It was tactically odd and incomprehensible in strategic terms. Who secures an amendment, as Labour did, then chooses to abstain? Who decrees a Budget "flawed" financially and fails to oppose it in the name of the people it represents? Labour's retrospective excuse - that the Nationalists already had a deal with the Tories - was as weak as watered shandy. If you oppose, you oppose.

"Yet that fiasco was not, in fact, the heart of the matter. Labour had reached that dark place even before the vote. Mr Salmond had threatened to resign if his government's Budget was rejected. Cut through the technicalities - particularly the provision that allows parliament 28 days to cobble together an alternative administration - and the challenge to the opposition was clear. If you want your heart's desire, if you want me out, take it to the electorate.

How best to put this? Here's how: confronted with that choice, Labour ran away. It did not have the stomach, the confidence, the organisation or (a lovely irony) the cash to take on the Nationalists. In that, not in £950 cheques or strange abstentions, lies the lasting damage to Ms Alexander.

"How do you tell voters that Mr Salmond is doing untold damage to Scotland yet refuse the invitation to attempt to remove him? Even if Labour and the Liberals had failed to muster all the votes required to defeat the Budget, cause the First Minister to resign and force an election, it might, surely, have seized a half-chance. Not a bit of it. The last thing it wanted was another trip to the polls.

"What was being acknowledged, I think, is that the SNP has become stronger in government. Put bravado to one side: at no point did Mr Salmond anticipate losing seats in an election. But nor did Labour believe that it could win back constituencies. The effect has been to make a minority administration seem bigger, more powerful, than its actual numbers would suggest."

...

Sad, but true

This scandal makes it clear: for Labour, money trumps principle every time | Columnists | Guardian Unlimited: "The British Labour party knows that no enormity would persuade the trade unions to disaffiliate. So it can ignore their demands and concentrate on the needs of the multi-millionaires."

'This is our best hope'

Published in the Morning Star
(Monday 04 February 2008)

MALCOLM BURNS witnesses John McDonnell challenge the Scottish left to seize a golden chance for progress.

LABOUR MP John McDonnell told a packed meeting of socialists in Scotland that the growing crisis in global capitalism provided the left with its greatest chance of progress in decades.

At a public meeting in Glasgow on Saturday, after the AGM of the Scottish Labour left's Campaign for Socialism, Mr McDonnell said that the dominance of the neoliberals and neoconservatives who have been in charge for the last decade was rapidly coming to an end.

"The opportunity for the left arises because new Labour's analysis is now looking hollow - and not just their theoretical analysis," he said.

"It's because of the impact of the capitalist crisis on people's real lives.

"There's no point in us as Labour saying: 'Look at the improvements over the last 10 years' - people just don't believe it."

The Socialist Campaign Group MP said that socialists in the Labour Party needed to look outside it to make common cause with campaigns springing up over a broad range of issues today.

"Political structures have become ossified," he added, "but politics is going on."

Mr McDonnell explained that democracy in the Labour Party has been largely closed down.

"Selections are fixed, the policy forums have no votes, deals like Warwick are made in back rooms and then never adhered to, the parliamentary Labour Party is controlled by patronage as MPs climb over their own grannies to get up the greasy pole," he said.

"But, on the ground, outside Parliament, most people didn't believe in Blair and they don't believe in Brown.

"Outside, in the real world, politics goes on. Everywhere you go, political campaigns are breaking out."

Among examples of "creative forces of protest," the Hayes and Harlington MP listed the campaign over the third runway at Heathrow, in his constituency, but also across London and the south-east.

"I've had public meetings of a thousand people in places like Chiswick and Putney.

"And the Heathrow Climate Camp was an extraordinary experience for me.

"I learned more about the environment from that than from all the debates in Parliament and my own reading."

Mr McDonnell told the meeting that women's groups were organising again to reclaim the night and campaigns on asylum rights were not just taking on the government's repressive actions but exposing the BNP.

"When the Saudi dictator was here last year, it was young people, it was the Socialist Youth Network of the Labour Representation Committee who hounded him across London.

"And, in industrial disputes, trade unions are discovering again that they are a social movement.

"PCS is expanding despite cuts in jobs, RMT are up 50 per cent. The unions that are winning are the fighting unions.

"It's buzzing out there, but what is the organisational form we need at this key moment?"

The Labour Representation Committee was established to bring together members and organisations to refound the Labour Party from within, he argued.

This has been attempted over five years but hasn't worked.

"Working in the Labour Party isn't going to work on its own," he argued.

"We need to work outside it as well. We need to campaign by campaigning."

MR McDonnell said that socialists in the Labour Party needed to build "bonds of solidarity" with socialists in other parties and none and with single-issue campaigns.

"There is an amazing opportunity for renewal on the socialist left. In 10 years' time, if we haven't taken it, we'll be kicking ourselves."

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Damned...

...by Brian Taylor:

BBC NEWS | The Reporters | Brian Taylor: "How could the vanguard, how could the bright new dawn scrimp and save? Big, serious, transformational politicians had big, serious, corporate budgets. They must have one too.

So why keep the donations deliberately below £1,000, the point at which they must be declared to the Electoral Commission? Same reason. It’s what big, smart people do.

So why did Charlie Gordon revive his contact with Paul Green to attract £950 for the cause? My guess? Charlie wanted to show his new boss he was a player."