Weekly Worker 627 June 1st
Weekly Worker (#627 June 1st ) has a cover devoted to events in the SSP: 'Tommy Sheridan's power grab: SSP spirals into all out civil war', and Peter Manson's story even starts on the front cover. Events at the SSP National Council were clearly fraught and angry and leave a nasty residue. Looks like a big victory for Sheridan and his supporters (including the SWP), but we'll have to see how Alan McCombes and the named 'petty-bourgeois feminist' MSPs respond. Socialist Worker saw it as the start of a rebirth for the SSP, could be the start of a split with George Galloway already stirring the pot and forming an alliance with Sheridan. The CPGB, of course, sees this as the almost inevitable result of the 'opportunistic rejection of working class socialism and seem to welcome this as it will undermine the 'notion that the SSP is something for us to aspire to.'
WW also carries Sheridan's 'Open Letter', a long and repetitive rant against his SSP enemies. It is his party. Peter Manson thinks it carries the ring of truth. Alan McCombes much shorter, issued on his release from Saughton jail carries some milder reproof, but calls for Tommy to withdraw his letter and to 'meet me face to face to thrash out these issues'. Risky!
Jack Conrad in 'Changes and responses' continues the CPGB theme of criticising green arguments about climate change and left adaptation to these ideas, especially via Campaign for Climate Change. Conrad sees this as Canute-lie: we can't stop climate change and Conrad produces a litany of long-term evidence for patterns of abrupt and other change. There is some acknowledgement of an anthropic contribution, before Conrad lays into varieties of Green-thinking, including a reiteration of the old policy of population at 20 million logically leading to extermination camps.
The Euston Manifesto gets a couple of pages devoted to it, even though it is 'totally bereft of vision, repeats all the standard CIA tropes about terrorism and, more than that, fears open debate'. A Laurence Parker argues that it's a rightist reaction against the mainstream anti-war movement. Much more interesting is an interview with Alan (not the minister) Johnson, titled, ' Third camp to first'. Blog accounts of the Manifesto launch on May 25th have Alan asa star and indeed inspritational speaker. Alan presents his shift as being based on realising that his old Third Campism was based on a Trotskyist 'death agony' perspective that doesn't work, so that there is a need to choose a lesser evil in order to defeat an 'immediate menace'. Alan's on-line journal Democratiya is worth looking at, critically, of course.
WW also carries Sheridan's 'Open Letter', a long and repetitive rant against his SSP enemies. It is his party. Peter Manson thinks it carries the ring of truth. Alan McCombes much shorter, issued on his release from Saughton jail carries some milder reproof, but calls for Tommy to withdraw his letter and to 'meet me face to face to thrash out these issues'. Risky!
Jack Conrad in 'Changes and responses' continues the CPGB theme of criticising green arguments about climate change and left adaptation to these ideas, especially via Campaign for Climate Change. Conrad sees this as Canute-lie: we can't stop climate change and Conrad produces a litany of long-term evidence for patterns of abrupt and other change. There is some acknowledgement of an anthropic contribution, before Conrad lays into varieties of Green-thinking, including a reiteration of the old policy of population at 20 million logically leading to extermination camps.
The Euston Manifesto gets a couple of pages devoted to it, even though it is 'totally bereft of vision, repeats all the standard CIA tropes about terrorism and, more than that, fears open debate'. A Laurence Parker argues that it's a rightist reaction against the mainstream anti-war movement. Much more interesting is an interview with Alan (not the minister) Johnson, titled, ' Third camp to first'. Blog accounts of the Manifesto launch on May 25th have Alan asa star and indeed inspritational speaker. Alan presents his shift as being based on realising that his old Third Campism was based on a Trotskyist 'death agony' perspective that doesn't work, so that there is a need to choose a lesser evil in order to defeat an 'immediate menace'. Alan's on-line journal Democratiya is worth looking at, critically, of course.
posted by badmatthew at 4:37 pm
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