Dr. Johnson wasn’t always right, but he was absolutely right when he made his famous statement that “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. He was abolsutely right because, back in April 1775, he wasn’t referring to patriotism per se. He was referring to the ‘patriotism’ of Pitt the Elder, the first Earl of Chatham, and his supporters whom he termed “the self-professed patriots”. Johnson admired what he called ‘true patriotism” but he loathed Pitt and abhorred those who used the flag and other national symbols as a symbol of their attachment and devotion to their country. Plus ça change.

We have an outbreak, a plague even, of flag waving. It has been primarily the work of Reform, but we have suffered from Starmer and McSweeney aping Farage to the extent that we have heard Starmer and Yvette Cooper boasting about the number of union flags on display in their respective homes.

Reform has not been quite so desperate to prove their patriotism. They have used an assortment of flags to demonstrate their opposition to refugees. They have graffitied the cross of St George (the patron saint of Palestine)on roundabouts and bus stops. They have flown it and the union flag from lamp posts and rooftops.

That’s all pretty pathetic by Labour standards.

Starmer boasts that he is the Labour leader “who put the Union Jack on our Labour Party membership cards” thus provoking a mass exodus of members, including me. He went on, “I always sit in front of a Union Jack, and I’ve been doing it for years”.

Even such commitment is not enough for the Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary at the time. “We actually have Union Jack bunting on our garden shed at the moment, I’ve got St George’s flags, I’ve got St George’s bunting, I’ve got Union Jack flags and tablecloths … we’ve got the lot.”

You might think that this is one of those absurd national debates between two irrelevant parties. But it has now reached Warwick.

Reform won the County Council elections earlier this year, but the MP remains the Labour Matt Western. Reform have introduced a new policy about flags. Only the Union Jack (UK), St George’s Cross (England) and the Bear and Ragged Staff (Warwickshire) may be flown at the Country Council HQ.

Which means the removal of the Ukrainian flag and its replacement with the Bear and Ragged Staff. Matt is not happy.

“Ukraine is still at war. Russia started it”, he said, justifying his insistence that the flag of Ukraine should be reinstated.

So there you go. That’s where we stand at the moment. I shall be pressing for the raising of the red flag at the earliest opportunity.

Today from the every smith vaults: Wednesday was a busy day. To Symphony Hall to hear a magnificent performance by the CBSO of Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony (2pm), before a magnificent 4-0 victory by Coventry over Millwall (7.45pm) before the Red Sox just failed to beat the Evil Empire 3-4 at Yankee Stadium. I'be been playing the Shostakovich all morning of course - "An artist's response to unjust criticism"!

“I support Palestine Action.” I’m probably not allowed to say that, or write that. And we are told that we don’t understand, we don’t know the facts, Palestine Action has targeted Jewish businesses, as well as people. But we are not going to tell you who or what or which.

The proscription of Palestine Action was wrong in principle and in practice. The method by which it became law was about as sneaky and disingenuous as you could imagine.

Right wing Yvette Cooper and her people could imagine such a procedure, however. And did.

Here’s how. Under the Terrorism Act of 2000, some 84 organisations have been proscribed. They are, almost without exception, Islamist extremist, white supremacist organisations which have carried out or threatened to carry out violent atrocities on a massive scale.

For the last five years, Palestine Action has been attempting, in its own words, to prevent ‘military targets in the UK from facilitating gross abuses of international law’.

This aim is not particularly contentious in the UK, where the Government is at odds with the people, and its activities have not been the subject of any political measure until now. After all, there are a plethora of criminal laws to address these activities.

The problem is that juries are not always reliable. They don’t take the word of the authorities as gospel and have in the past - Starmer himself will testify - acquitted individuals on the grounds that there was good reason for the damage.

So, out comes the full force of government power. We will proscribe them. We will classify them as terrorists. And get the police to carry the can.

But how to get this insane abuse of power through Parliament? Let’s find some unproscribed idiots and add them to Palestine Action in a single amendment order. Ah yes, here we are. Maniacs Murder Cult. Tick. And our old friends the Russian Imperial Movement. Tick.

And just in case MPs see through the ploy, we’ll start a whispering campaign. Palestine Action has been doing things which we can’t tell you about but tare absolutely terrible. Really, they are.

“I shall do such things what they are yet I now not but they shall be the terrors of the earth.”

It was enough. Our gallant fighters for liberty and democracy in the Commons voted 385 to 26 to diminish the civil rights of the people of the UK and make a mockery of parliament.

As Zara Sultana said, “To equate a spray can of paint with a suicide bomb isn’t just absurd, it is grotesque.”

And Labour MPS wonder why we’re going to start a new party.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Playing now, and acting as a form of balm to soothe my anger is the latest addition to the vaults. It is of course the new album from The Swaps, Fast Train, released a couple of days ago. If this represents the direction Beth, James and Adam are heading, it’ll do for me.

It is no accident (as we Marxists often say) that on the day the New left party was announced, Keir Starmer made a statement on the situation in Gaza. “We are clear that statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people” he said, and wrote, and tweeted.

Cynics will argue that this statement, which we have waited for for for nearly two years, is a direct response to his realisation that he has destroyed the Labour Party, his electoral prospects and what’s left of his reputation.

Most people believe that Starmer’s views on the Palestine issue were made clear back in October 2023, when he was asked by Ferrari on LBC, “Does Israel have the right to cut off food … cut off water?”

“I believe Israel does have that right” he replied.

And though, a week later after hundreds of resignations from the party and the ritual humiliation of Labour ministers and MPs trying to defend their leader on TV, he still didn’t apologise.

In what we now expect of him, he denied that he had said it. He would call it a “clarification”, but we all know it was a lie.

Many of us believe that it was statements like Starmer’s and those of other senior world figures - I won’t call them statesmen - which gave Netanyahu tacit approval to launch the operations which continue today.

What he also did, and I doubt whether either he or McSweeney understood this, was cross a line as far as the Labour membership was concerned.

Do I need to enumerate his passion for right wing policies? His cuts to winter fuel allowance, the two child benefit cap, disability benefits? All these were measures of which ordinary people said, “I didn’t vote Labour for this.”

At the same time, he dragged into the condemnation his own MPs, who, against their better judgement, embarrassed and demeaned themselves by voting for him and justifying his policies. And if they did stand up for themselves, for Labour policies, they were suspended after being told of the new listening approach to party business.

As for ordinary members, we were told that the door was open and we didn’t like it, we could go.

So we did.

This was quite an achievement. Even Tony Blair, during and post Iraq managed to maintain a reasonably broad church. But Tony Blair was advised by Peter Mandelson, who told him that the working class and the lefties had nowhere else to go.

Well, now we do.

I have no idea what the new party will be called - my lot can’t even agree on a name for our What’sApp group! - but that doesn’t matter. Conference will sort it. Conference will debate and decide our policies and our leadership group.

We will, I hope, reach out to other left leaning parties and organisations, including those in the Green Party who embrace socialism and share our commitment to democracy.

You see, Starmer, this is not for you and yours. McSweeney’s focus groups won’t have a role. And nor will McSweeney.

You see, it is not merely a new party. It is new kind of political party.

Today from the everysmith vaults: At this moment I am listening to Test Match Special, but before the day's play started, it was The Poet's Echo CD. Not the Britten, wonderful though that is, but the Shostakovich - Four Pushkin Romances Opus 46 ​- sung beautifully (of course) by Gareth Brynmor John.

Truth exists, someone said. It's lies that are invented. This is not a distinction that would be recognised by Keir Starmer, although I suspect he would be happy with Francis Bacon's gloss on John's original context. As Bacon points out, the question reported in the gospel is not an enquiry, but a dismissal of the question itself. It is a reluctance, a refusal, even to engage with the idea of truth.
​
I raise this because the airwaves have been polluted by Labour yes-persons - it was Jess Phillips this morning - claiming that the suspension of four ‘rebel’ MPs was justified.

The justification - and there is a degree of irony involved when one hears it said by Ms Phillips - is as follows: “We all stood for election on a manifesto as part of a team. If we vote against that manifesto, we get what we deserve”.

Well, yes. Except that the votes were against policies which were never in the manifesto.

It is a lie. But Starmer and McSweeney continue to send spokespersons out on the media round to claim that the suspended members had voted against Labour Party policy. Our media, of course, has not read the manifesto or is not minded to push back against the lies.

“Nil admirari.” Let nothing surprise you.

It was the family motto of 25 year old John Wildman who, in 1647, presented the first Leveller manifesto to the grandees.

All my political life, I have voted “Labour with no illusions”. Nothing that a Labour government does surprises me.

Until this government. And here's why I should have known better.

I should have realised. I should have got the hell out earler. I should have listened to Starmer and realised that he was lying through his teeth but to a script.

Labour is finished. So are the MPs who stay, haunted by their imposed justifications for policies they know are disgraceful.

There is a new party coming this way soon. I'm getting on that bus as soon as.

Today from the everysmith vaults: In the next three months I have tickets for Shostakovich at Symphony Hall, Birmingham; Mahler and Schubert in Oxford, and Bob Dylan at the CBS Arena - "Who is the best player you ever saw at Coventry?". Playing right now, as I type, is Chopin Scherzo #2.

The morning of the vote on disability benefits (Tuesday 1st of July), I received a letter from the Labour Party. It told me that the party was doing a great job, taking “tough decisions” which have resulted in all of us “turning a corner”. These choices were, said our General Secretary, “Labour choices” which reflected “Labour values”. “We hope that this makes you proud” she told me. “Max, we would love to have you back” she said. “Will you rejoin the Labour Party?”

They must be desperate. It is true that I was a member of the Labour Party for many years, many decades in fact; and, with one or two absences (the late ‘60s and the Iraq War, for example) remained so until the current Starmer regime decided that people like me were not wanted on the voyage. 

I should have resigned over Gaza, and Starmer’s statement on LBC that Israel’s right to self-defence included the right to cut off power, water, and food. I didn’t. I protested. I wrote to my Labour MP, met him, put my views forward. But I didn’t resign. Not then.

I actually resigned on the day that my MP joined the majority of Labour MPs to vote in favour cutting the winter fuel allowance for pensioners.

The announcement came out of the blue. Reeves had gone for cuts which even Osbourne’s austerity policy could not entertain. Of course, it was a Labour choice. It reflected Labour values. And it appeared to fund not the so-called black hole but Starmer’s determination to fund the defence of Ukraine.

Just before the election, we had been moved from the Warwick and Leamington constituency to the doughnut constituency of Kenilworth and Southam. It was not pleasant finding oneself being represented by a Tory.

Except that, in the winter fuel allowance debate, the Tory voted against the cuts. It was my old Labour MP who voted for it. Not only voted for it but wrote a long justification of doing so, which included drawing a parallel between the fuel allowance and his subsidised train fares to London and back. Loyalist Labour members told me that over 50% of pensioners were millionaires, and how they used to spend the fuel allowance on shoes.

And the same thing happened last Tuesday. Jeremy Wright voted against the PIP and disability cuts. Matt Western, who had originally signed the ‘reasoned amendment’, then voted unreasonably in favour of the shambolic government.

Some of you - thanks - will have noted that this is my first post for some months. Medically and mentally I have been reluctant to take on the political situation here, in Palestine, in the US.

But we need to face up to it. It’s no use turning off the news. I shall be joining a political party. 

It might be Green. It might be a new Corbyn alliance, especially if Faiza Shaheen is involved.

But it sure as hell won’t be Starmer’s Labour.
​
Today from the everysmith vaults: I have inherited a number of recordings of The Ring Cycle and am currently on the Rudolf Kempe 1957 version from Covent Garden. Despite the ‘bootleg’ quality of the recording, it is close to that of Solti. Commended.

Depending on their political allegiance, America is celebrating or decrying what they call (apparently) the trifecta, which is a combination of three successes and derives from betting. In this case, it refers to Trump’s victories in the Presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives, to which one might add his inbuilt majority in the Supreme Court.

What this will mean, in practice, is a complete absence of checks and balances in government, giving Trump carte blanche to do pretty much whatever he wishes. It is clear from the early appointments to key roles that the policies which he threatened will be implemented.

The mainstream media in the UK has been raising its concerns about this loss of due democratic process, pointing out that the US now has a mentally unstable president who is free to pursue his idiocies without any accountability.

The press is right to do so. And one would wish that they would demonstrate some consistency from their high horses by condemning equally the electoral dictatorship which is the current Labour government.

That Starmer has adopted such an authoritarian approach will be no surprise to members of his own party. They gave him a majority in the leadership election after reading his 10 pledges and his commitment to democratic socialist policies. Having achieved the leadership, he then reneged on all those promises.

So it should have been no surprise at all when the new Labour Trifecta - Starmer, Reeves and McSweeney - immediately reneged on the promises that they had made to then electorate as a whole during the election campaign.

More than than that, it reneged on what amounts to the founding principles of the party itself. “Labour is a moral crusade or it is nothing” proclaimed Harold Wilson.

It is no longer a moral crusade, but neither is it nothing. Rather, it is a highly organised, highly disciplined, authoritarian machine.

Nor is it governing in the interests of “working people”. Nor even in the interests of retired working people, reliant on their pensions and winter fuel allowances to live.

And the real issue is that these dictatorships are not the result of a coup. No armed forces were involved. The only weapons used were lies, launched into the electorate by the “laser-focused” media.

The power of Trump and Starmer is overwhelming. Their own parties have been purged of all independent thinking and, as Johnson’s expulsion of thirty or so Tory MPs, it is the more honourable and intelligent members who are being disappeared to be replaced by the likes of Akehurst, Josan, Athwal, Ward, Tatler et al.

Even Blair didn’t stoop to this kind of behaviour. But Boris Johnson did. And now Starmer is. They have all the power and all the responsibility. But …

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Today from the everysmith vaults: Bob has left these shores after a highly acclaimed tour of the UK, reaching into Wolverhapton even. The culmination was, appropriately, at the Royal Albert Hall, and I'm listening to that final show - thanks as ever to the remastering mastery of BennyBoy.

There’s been some weird shit going down in New York over the last few days and nights. At the Garden, Trump conjured up a grotesque roll call of the right - comedians, Fox News celebs, members of the hard-nosed hard right - in order to stick it to the liberal establishment, one of whom claimed that a “floating island of garbage” was, in fact, Puerto Rico. A couple of days later, at Yankee Stadium, two Yankees fans grabbed the wrists of a Dodgers player as he reached over the wall to make a catch. (What makes this particularly egregious is that the player concerned was the great Mookie Betts, late of Fenway Park, Boston.)

Yes, I am conflating the two events, and probably without any justification. I really shouldn’t assume that Austin Capobianco is a Trump supporter, but I do. Anyone who can attempt to grab the ball out of the mitt whilst risking causing an injury to the player concerned is not someone who cares about right and wrong.

What I am not doing is condemning all Yankees fans for the behaviour of a single fan. And nor am I generalising about the Republican Party on the basis of Trump.

In the same way that Starmer has purged the Labour Party of any hint of socialist authenticity, so Trump has purged the GOP of the half-way decent Republican values which were espoused by, for example, McCain and Romney.

There still exists a Republicans Against Trump organisation, which stands up for those values, just as Labour In Exile continues to represent a thread of democratic socialism on which Labour was founded.

Starmer triumphed in the UK because the competition was non-existent. It’s not so simple in the US, where Kamala Harris and the Democrats have shown themselves to be a worthy opponents. Brave too, because Trump has shown himself to be an unforgiving shit and is on record that one of the objectives of his campaign is revenge.

Well, the Dodgers did it for us. The Yankees and their fans lost out again in the World Series, with a bizarre fifth inning in which Cole gave up five unearned runs.

I’m hoping that the news on Wednesday morning will produce a political parallel to the baseball and make all the above irrelevant.

In short, I’m hoping that a black woman will defeat a right wing middle-aged white man.

(And that might be a warning to Starmer in the years to come.)

Today from the everysmith vaults: Radio 3 has done its job again. I turned on the radio the other afternoon to hear an unfamiliar string quartet playing. The rolling display informed me that I was listening to a piece by Verdi, the only string quartet he composed and the only non vocal music. It's in E minor and it's bloody good.

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Taken As Red, by Guardian and ITV political reporter Anushka Asthana. As my readers will know, this is the story of the ‘change’ in the Labour party in the first five years of Starmer’s leadership. I hadn’t got more than a hundred pages in, but already the narrative was clear that the real leader during this time was actually Morgan MacSweeney. At which point, I remember, my phone buzzed to alert me of a news notification …

The news was that Sue Gray had resigned and that Starmer’s new Chief of Staff was his old Chief of Staff.

In other words, not the one who knew how to govern, but the one who knew how to manipulate the vote.

I am not a fan, as this post makes clear, but one has to hand it to him. Had he achieved a political swing equivalent to Blair's in 1997, he would have handed Starmer a parliamentary majority of just two MPs. What McSweeney’s strategy actually achieved was a major of 172.

This had two important consequences which are becoming frighteningly apparent now.

The first is that Starmer thought he was omnipotent and began to act as if he were God. Not just a narcissistic World King, you understand, but God itself - and thus entitled to all kinds of sacrifices (the Labour Left) and gifts (clothing, spectacles, tickets to racing, gigs, football etc etc).

The second is scarier.

He has began to act as if he had an authentic popular majority and a mandate which reflects a 50% plus share of the vote. Which he fell short of, falling short even of his derided (by him) predecessor.

So he and his acolyte, Ms Reeves, decided to cancel the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance - a move which brought my previous ideological objections into the personal realm. (I am a pensioner, and I need that money.)

There were other moves as well which can only be implemented by someone who, frankly, doesn’t give a flying fuck about the “working people” or children in poverty which he goes on about.

But the cancellation of the winter fuel allowance was the exemplar, the iconic moment.

This was the sign the ruling elite were waiting for: it was a marketing mission statement. Labour had no plans for socialism or even a caring liberal approach.

It was going to kow-tow to those who had funded the Tories but now funded Labour - that’s right, the off-shore hedge funds with interests in arms sales and “defence contracts” who snook a few million into Starmer’s coffers just before the election when it would not be made public until it was too late.

None of this, of course, is what one might expect of the Labour party for which I worked and argued and supported for many years.

It is, however, what one might expect of an authoritarian liar like Starmer, who needs a Rasputin to confirm the correctness of his actions.

It is, however, what one might expect from a party which is being run by a Svengali figure who makes Dominic Cummings look like a benign godfather.

Today from the everysmith vaults: My favourite local band, The Swaps, have just released an excellent recording of an excellent show at the Upton Blues Festival. It’s on Bandcamp and the trio are on top form with some great songs, especially from Beth!

I was a chapter or two into The Island: WH Auden and the Last Of Englishness before I recognised the coincidence. The author, an Associate Professor of English at Stanford, shares his name with the narrator of Antony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Both works cover a similar period (although Powell starts earlier and finishes later) and both deal (although in very different ways) with a sense of national identity.

Despite my admiration for both Auden and Powell, I hadn’t until this point thought of the two writers in the same breath. They occupied different rooms in the same mansion, but never met. In this mansion, there was no common room, no common ground.

I was attracted to Auden by his left-wing,  quasi-Marxist politics. The poems which I knew by heart were the poems he later repudiated: Spain, of course, and September 1, 1939.

My admiration for Powell is for the wry, sardonic observations of society. Powell’s Nick Jenkins is a sponge, an everyman who watches and listens.

What they have in common is a focus on the nature of Englishness. Powell’s sequence is a study of English society and politics. Auden’s earlier work is self-consciously English, and self-consciously social.

“What’s become of Wystan?” asked Larkin. And so did I as a teenager, working his way through the self-consciously clever later poems.

I wish that Nick Jenkins had encountered an Auden, perhaps in a version of La Bas’s House at Gresham’s. But there is no character that can be linked to Auden, nor indeed any of the poets we would associated with “The Thirties”. (Actually, I seem to remember reading somewhere that aspects of Mark Members are “suggestive” of Stephen Spender.)

We do not know how Powell would have fictionalised Auden. Or why he chose not to use Auden.

They knew each other. Powell felt betrayed by the emigration to the US of Auden and Isherwood. Where Evelyn Waugh mocked him, referring to the two emigrants as Parsnip and Pimpernell, Powell was unforgiving.

The name Auden did not pass his lips again. Auden was, forever, “that shit”.

Which, when one comes to think of it, is a very English response.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Prompted by the musings above, I am playing The Capriol Suite by Peter Warlock, AKA Maclintick.

Did you watch the feed from the Democratic National Convention  the other night? Did you watch the Obamas and marvel at the rhetoric, the fluency, the passion, the intellect? And did you conclude, reluctantly, that there is no equivalent in the UK; that the apparatchiks of this new manifestation of New Labour have no desire to enthuse or inspire the electorate with ideas and policies?

More than fifty years ago, when I was already a seasoned campaigner and voter for Labour, a favourite (and effective) canvassing line was “Vote Labour with no illusions”. This thought has kept me going through every election since 1970. With no illusions, I have voted for Labour under the leadership of Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Jeremy Cornyn and Keir Starmer.

Why do we do this time after time, with and without illusions?

Because a Labour Government will reverse the child benefit cap.

Because a Labour Government will protect pensioners’ winter fuel allowance.

Because a Labour Government will never suspend MPs for voting according to their conscience.

Because a labour Government will never expel the likes of Faiza Shaheen just because they can.

Because a Labour Government will never select the likes of Luke Lakehurst to represent the party.

Because a Labour Government will protect the green belt against development.

Because a Labour Government will stop sending arms to countries occupying other countries.

Because a Labour Government will make refugees welcome and create safe and legal routes.

Because a Labour Government will never appoint disgraced dinosaurs  such as Milburn and Smith to government.

Because a Labour Government will renationalise the water companies.

I could go on and probably will on another occasion. Meantime, I am beginning to recognise that after these five decades, I misunderstood the advice.

I was voting Labour with delusions.
​
Today from the everysmith vaults: Playing right now (rain has stopped play in Manchester) is The Grateful Dead on the 24 August 1972 at Berkeley. A brilliant and generous recording (the Monday and Tuesday shows also) from John Hilgart. Thanks.