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.

Back in January this year, after a series of text messages with Councillor King, I posted a suggestion on the Warwick & Leamington CLP forum. My argument was that the Labour (and Green) councillors on the planning committee of Warwick District Council had voted for a change to the planning permission for the Taylor Wimpey development at Union View which would cause chaos and disruption for residents of Hatton, Hatton Park, Hatton Green, Hatton Station and Shrewley.

I'm posting this now because the chaos and disruption continues to this day and the underlying issue has not been addressed.

The issues are, of course, not merely the officers’ proposal which was seconded by Councillor King and then nodded through by the planning committee with barely a murmur. The bare murmur in fact came from a Conservative councillor, and his thorough and analytical presentation to the committe was ignored because the officers had backed the developers and the councillors had, in the main, not done any homework.

Had they done so, they would have been minded and able to challenge the officers and the developers and refuse the application. But it is clear from watching the video of the meeting that, with the exception of Councillor Phillips, no-one had looked at the big picture nor examined the details. Certainly the Labour representative was unaware of the implications of the decision so casually made.

The issue continues to be a cause of major concern to my neighbours and the rest of the Hatton population. This discontent is being exploited by the Conservatives who are blaming the Green/Labour coalition for their distress. My sense is that it will adversely affect Labour’s chances in the local elections next year. Some of us worked hard earlier this year to gain a seat or two in the Budbrooke ward, and came close. Unfortunately, I know some who voted Labour in the WDC election will not do so again in the CC election in 2025.

As a long-standing member of the Labour party, longer-standing than many on the District Council, I have often argued for a proper relationship between electors and elected representatives. Once a member becomes a Councillor via the hard work of many local comrades, they disappear into a self-contained bubble. The rest of us have no role and no say. Were you, for example, consulted on the coalition with the Greens? Or the proposal for the merger of WDC and Stratford?

This is not intended to be ad hominem, but Councillor King, who seconded the egregious motion which has prompted all this, is a councillor for Leamington Clarendon. He is not actually on the Planning Committee but was, at the time, a substitute for a councillor who couldn’t make it.

Nevertheless, if he is sitting in judgement on matters relating to the other side of Warwick, he should surely consult Labour members in that part of the district before he casts his vote. At the very least, he should have ascertained the feelings of the residents affected.

And the same principle should apply to all our councillors.

Today from the everysmith vaults: ​Seven Last Words, played by The Lindsays. I've always regarded this as a secular piece and I'm thinking of using the Intro for a secular broadcast. Listen out.

It hasn’t been very long but we are already seeing just what kind of leader we have elected. Many of us have been clear that our vote for Labour was in no sense a vote for Starmer, nor for the egregious privateer Wes Streeting, nor for Ashworth or Lakehurst or Evans or any of the vicious cabalistas who have taken over our party. I say this now because they need to be aware that their super-majority is a frail thing: it will vanish completely with a paltry 6% swing next time.

“Next time” is five years away, however. And that is a hell of a long time in politics. Anything could happen. Well, almost anything. We are not going to see anything approaching a socialist policy, for example. And we are unlikely to see much of the structure created by the Tories over 14 years overturned.

I am no psephologist, but Sir John Curtice is clearly correct. The Labour majority is the result of the collapse of the Tory party. Which is a problem for the new government, because its potential programme is essentially a version of what we have endured for 14 years.

We are about to experience another five years of the same old.

As we watched overnight on Thursday/Friday, there were hints that the electorate is aware of the dangers.

Ashworth was defeated, and Streeting almost so, not solely because of Labour’s anti-Gaza position, but because they are seriously unpleasant people, seemingly without an ounce of humanity.

We are fortunate that the Leicestershire voters kept Ashworth from Parliament. Streeting snook in by 500 or so votes. But this quasi-humiliation did not temper his approach.

On Friday, an NHS contract for ‘Integrated Care’ worth £32 million was put up for grabs. It’s a Tory scheme of course, based on an American system, but Labour were running with it within 24 hours of winning the election.

One might think that if anyone could be trusted to ‘change’ the received wisdom, it would be Streeting. He was from the start one of Starmer’s yes-men. But Starmer is wearing belt (Streeting) and braces (Alan Milburn).

Yes, that Alan Milburn, the former Labour health secretary who was responsible for the PFI deals before becoming chair of the PriceWaterhouseCoopers health industry board, in which highly role he championed private medicine.

Milburn is not the only milk monitor being brought in to ensure that Starmer’s apprentices do not allow a tad of socialism into their policies.

Education is another field in which he is fiddling nervously.

Joining the department headed by Bridget Phillipson, and replacing the exemplary Matt Western as HE minister, is someone we all thought was gone for good.

But please welcome back the woman who resigned in disgrace and was thrown out by her electors in Redditch back in 2009.

A woman who fiddled her expenses and whose husband, she said, watched porn while she was at late night debates - and why shouldn’t the public pay for his habit?

Yes, this is the appalling Jacqui Smith, who should not only not be in power, but should not be in the labour party either.

But it’s people like Milburn and Smith that Starmer needs. Because even in a party which has been purged of any kind of independent socialist thinking, Starmer is not brave enough or bright enough to run his own course.

He needs these dinosaurs from the tail-end of the Blair-Brown hegemony.

He’s running scared of the likes of Faiza Shaheen, Jeremy Corbyn,  Diane Abbott, Jovan Owusu-Nepaul, Ken Loach. He’s even frightened of eminently sensible, moderate, intelligent and honourable MPs like Matt Western with their cross-party appeal and understated skills, who have shown they can win a Tory seat and build a foundation of votes. (Starmer of course managed to lose 18,000 of the votes he gained under Corbyn.)

Like so many good people who have been members of the Labour party for much longer than Starmer, and who fought a safe Tory constituency rather than a safe Labour one, Matt is not required on this voyage.

But without him, and people like him, we won’t get anywhere.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Meanwhile, Bob is on the road again. It’s the Outlaw Tour with Willie Nelson, and he’s changing the set list each evening. Fortunately, on the road with him are some great tapers - notable BlueChair - sending their recordings to Benny Boy for tweaking and refinement. Currently playing, is the show from Bethel on Sunday. Sox beat the Evil Empire that night too!

The newspapers, broadcast media and political podcasts over the last few days have been obsessed with the machinations inside the Tory party in Basildon and Billericay. It is one of the safest Tory seats in the country, with a majority so large that it should withstand a Labour landslide come July. With the incumbent MP John Baron standing down, and with only a month to go before the election, the Chair of the Conservative Party, Richard Holden, has announced the new candidate. It is Richard Holden.

The move has shocked not only the Tory voters of Basildon and Billericay but also the unshockable political journalists. The news featured on most bulletins and on Newsnight. It also featured prominently in the press and The News Agents devoted an entire podcast to the topic.

That this flagrant example of parachuting should attract so much attention from the mainstream media has surprised some of us on the Left, where parachuting is part of everyday life.

And in the Labour Party, we don’t just put our yes-men and women into seats without an incumbent. We trump up charges against existing candidates, find them guilty and allow those who made that judgement to move into a safe seat without challenge.

The dismissal of Faiza Shaheen in Chingford and Woodford Green is perhaps the most egregious. Labour has lost a candidate who would have been a credit to the party and a serious player in parliament.

Faiza was removed on the basis of a few tweets over 14 years, none of which seem in any way contentious but were used by three NEC members - two of whom took over safe seats and one of which said nothing and failed even to turn on his camera during the Zoom interview - to justify their factionalism.

Faiza is a great loss. Let’s look at a gain.

Luke Lakehurst is a seriously unpleasant man, but he is - since a couple of hours before the closing of nominations - the Labout candidate for North Durham.

He is an extremist, a self-proclaimed “Zionist shitlord” who has accused the UN of being anti-semitic and - a non-Jew himself - has accused non-Zionist Jews of abandoning their Jewish identity. “They don’t go to shul at all. It’s become a purely cultural thing around a bowl of chicken soup.”

He also, famously, said of (the late MP) Glenda Jackson that she made him “want to puke” and “sets my gag reflex going”.

But that’s ok - it’s not as if he’s a Tory donor. And why should the media be concerned about this man being parachuted into a safe Labour seat.

After all, Starmer was clear that all candidates should meet the highest standards.

Faiza, a working class Muslim with a PhD and a community base, doesn’t. Akehurst, a shit with no community base, does.

Standards? Or double standards?

Today from the everysmith vaults: ​The Lindsays, playing the Razumovsky quartets. I miss them.

These days, I am seldom surprised by the behaviour of our elected representatives at local and national levels. Here in Warwick, we have a particularly offensive example, as three councillors used an Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting to direct their prejudices against SEND children and their parents. It rightly provoked a furious reaction. The local MP was on the tele; the Council released a statement; the Leader could not comment because it was all under investigation; demonstrations were held at Shire Hall; and the councillors involved showed themselves to be only a little chastened and barely apologetic.

I do not expect my councillors to be Nobel prize winners or postgraduate alumni from top universities. I do not look to them for their rhetorical and oratorical skills. I do not even ask for them to share my political views.

But I do require, as a minimum standard, the qualities of competence and compassion, intelligence and common sense.

To watch the video of the Children and Young People Overview and Scrutiny Committee is to be appalled not merely by the ignorance of the specific comments but also by the standard of the discussion as a whole.

As it happens, I have also been watching the video recording of the Planning Committee of the Warwick District Council at work. Specifically, I have been watching our councillors decide whether or not to allow Taylor Wimpey to amend the original development proposals and thus require the installation of “temporary” traffic lights on an already busy road for a year or more.

This is not the small matter of a minor and occasional inconvenience. There are only two means of access and egress and both are effectively blocked by long tailbacks morning, evening and frequently throughout the day.

The “temporary” traffic lights which make moving from our home to … well, anywhere really, are not the problem. They are the symptom of the problem.

And that problem is Warwickshire District Council and its planning committee.

Back in 2019, the 5th of November to be precise, the proposal to approve the new development was put to the committee by the officers.

After a discussion in which the vast majority of councillors expressed serious disquiet, it was proposed to approve the officers’ recommendations.

The proposer? The Conservative Councillor Sukhi Sanghera.

Remember this is the evening of the 5th of November.

That same day, the 5th of November, The Insolvency Service had issued a press release announcing the extension of restrictions on Sanghera. 

Bizarrely, the Council itself (on the 8th) claimed that it had become aware of the decision from the press release but not until the 6th. So did this validate the involvement of Sanghera in the decision-making?

Not really, because he had been disqualified from being a member effective from 15 August 2019.

But even a proposal as flimsy as this needs a seconder. At this point, there is a pause. The chair, Councillor Boad, informed the committee, none of whom was minded to get involved, that if he didn’t get a seconder, they would all “be there all night”.

At which point, the recording has Councillor Kennedy, a novice Green elected six months previously, formally seconded - with the rider that he didn’t know what he was doing!

And that is how this insane development got the go-ahead, with a proposal from a councillor who was sitting illegally and was subsequently jailed.

Today from the everysmith vaults: 60 years or so ago I was a frequent but irregular visitor to Les Cousins, a folk and blues club which hosted many of the greats of the folk and blues world as well as many just starting out. A recent 3 CD release - the soundtrack of Soho's legendary folk and blues club - includes tunes from pretty much everyone who ever played in that basement. I commend it to you.