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On 15 February 2003, Corbyn gave a speech  in Hyde Park at the podium of the Stop the War Coalition, with which he had been associated since its formation in 2001. Nearly two million people – Corbyn's natural constituency – marched that day in London against the impending war. Here, as a Member of Parliament from Islington North, Corbyn called for a vote on the war in the House of Commons so that he could vote against it. George W. Bush and Tony Blair wished to start a war, Corbyn warned, that would 'set off a spiral of conflict, of hate, of misery, of desperation that will fuel the wars, the conflict, the terrorism, the depression and the misery of future generations'. It was a powerful speech – prophetic only because these obvious warnings keep being deliberately undermined by the capitalist media.

Little wonder that Corbyn was invited to share the main stage at the Mumbai World Social Forum the next year. At the plenary, Corbyn was joined by Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian National Initiative and by Arundhati Roy. Roy, in her speech, was sharp in her criticism of the US war on Iraq. Here is a powerful extract,

If all of us are indeed against Imperialism and against the project of neo-liberalism, then let's turn our gaze on Iraq. Iraq is the inevitable culmination of both. Plenty of anti-war activists have retreated in confusion since the capture of Saddam Hussein. Isn't the world better off without Saddam Hussein? they ask timidly.

Let's look this thing in the eye once and for all. To applaud the U.S. army's capture of Saddam Hussein and therefore, in retrospect, justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disembowelling the Boston Strangler. And that — after a quarter century partnership in which the Ripping and Strangling was a joint enterprise. It's an in-house quarrel. They're business partners who fell out over a dirty deal. Jack's the CEO.

So if we are against Imperialism, shall we agree that we are against the U.S. occupation and that we believe that the U.S. must withdraw from Iraq and pay reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage that the war has inflicted?

Nothing in this would be alien to Corbyn, who had as fierce words of opposition to the war-mongering of the British government and the US government.

The panel that Corbyn shared with Arundhati Roy and Mustafa Barghouti was chaired by Captain Lakshmi Sahgal (1914-2012; for more on her, see the obituary  by Lisa Armstrong and myself). Two years before the World Social Forum, Captain Sahgal had been nominated by the Left parties as their candidate in the presidential election. She visited every part of India, vigorously campaigning against the dangerously unstable warmongering system that threatened the planet. In particular, she said that the nomination by the BJP of a nuclear scientist at a time when Indian and Pakistani armies prowled the border between the countries with great menace sent the wrong message to the world. Captain Sahgal had been a key figure in the Azad Hind Fauj and was the Minister of Women's Affairs in the Azad Hind Government. Captain Sahgal, who joined the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) in 1971, was a hero of India's freedom movement.

I asked Sahgal's daughter – the CPI-M Politburo member Subhashini Ali – about the interaction between Corbyn and her mother at the World Social Forum. Subhashini had been on the stage that day as the translator for Corbyn.

Lakhshmi Sehgal was introduced to Corbyn as a freedom fighter.  And with a twinkle in her eyes at him, she said what a good time she had had fighting the British. And he seemed to like that'.

Corbyn was very 'low key and not a great orator', remembered Ali. But, she remembers, 'what he said was good'. He was clear-cut in his opposition to the West's war on Iraq and on the chaos this would create in West Asia and North Africa.

A superb orator herself and a Member of Parliament from Kanpur after the 1989 election, Subhashini added some masala to Corbyn's prose. It was an accurate translation, but – as she put it – dhuandhar, a wonderful Hindi word that implies the thunder of a waterfall. 'Every time there was applause', Subhashini remembers, 'he looked at me quizzically. I met him in a lift later and he laughed and said that I should translate for him regularly'.

Prabir Purkayastha, who helped organise the World Social Forum, remembers that Corbyn congratulated Subhashini for her translation – saying he had never had a crowd of a hundred thousand applaud his speeches with such enthusiasm. All that changed when he ran to be the leader of the Labour Party.
 

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Jeremy Corbyn

This June 8, British voters will decide whether or not to continue with the conservative status quo, or take a chance on a new kind of left-wing politics that would represent a firm break with the orthodoxies of the ruling Conservative Party and the Labour Party’s establishment wing.

The post Jeremy Corbyn Dares to Speak Truth About the ‘War on Terror’—and British Voters Are Responding appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Jeremy Corbyn's speech on terrorism. BBC, fair use.

Michael Fallon richly deserved to fall into the trap that Krishnan Guru-Murthy recently sprang on him, which saw him pouring scorn on words previously spoken by foreign secretary Boris Johnson. His spluttering insistence that we not seek to understand the motives of killers such as Salman Abedi represents politics at its most grating – as a brazen insult to the intelligence of the public.

But behind the attacks faced by Jeremy Corbyn from both right and centre regarding his comments about the failure of the war on terror lies a serious and genuine debate. Can we really say, more than a decade after the Iraq War, that our foreign engagements are a major cause of jihadist terrorism at home?

In a recent column in the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland pours scorn on what he admits is Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘carefully caveated’ position. His argument is that jihadists are driven primarily by an inward-looking ideology which hates us for who we are, not for what we do. As he points out, within this frame of reference, even inaction by the West – as in Bosnia for example – can be used as material by entrepreneurs of grievance.
He’s not altogether wrong, but it’s more complicated than that.

Take, for example, a recent propaganda article by ISIS themselves, with the usefully straightforward title “Why We Hate You and Why We Fight You”.

The purpose of this article is exactly what it says it is: to clarify, once and for all, in the most straightforward terms, what the self-ascribed meaning of ISIS’s violence is.

And yet, this being so, the remarkable thing is that the article isn’t clear at all.

The piece opens by praising Florida nightclub killer Omar Mateen’s “attack on a sodomite, Crusader nightclub”, but goes on to express frustration at the idea that it might be considered a mere hate crime, or, worse, “senseless violence”. As ISIS insist, they have “repeatedly stated their goals, intentions and motivations” for violence, which are, it says, to be understood as “brutal retaliation” against “the crimes of the West against Islam and Muslims”, crimes which include “waging war against the Caliphate”, but also “insulting the Prophet” or “burning the Qur’an”.

“Although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary… the fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you” the piece insists. And yet, a few paragraphs earlier, it hints at the idea that a temporary cessation of violence might be possible: “even if you were to stop fighting us, your best-case scenario in a state of war would be that we would suspend our attacks against you – if we deemed it necessary – in order to focus on the closer and more immediate threats”.

Utterly uncompromising as this all sounds, there is still a tension in the words. ISIS wants to declare an unlimited war on unbelief as such; but it also wants to retain the notion that it can use violence as strategic leverage, which requires at least some limited concession to the idea that it could choose to stop (even though it couldn’t choose not to hate). It is worth pointing out that this ideology is no different in its essentials from that upheld by hardline, but officially tolerated scholars in Saudi Arabia too: that there is an obligation for true believers to ‘hate’ all others, even if actual hot conflict can, for reasons of expediency, be put on what might in practice be indefinite hold.

What conclusion can we draw from this? Certainly not that ISIS is worth cutting deals with. Rather, what it ought to reinforce is the point that ideology is not a sort of ineffable uncaused cause. However rigid and vicious, it doesn’t predict how a group or an individual will behave on its own. Even ISIS, for all its savagery and hatred, didn’t as such start its campaign of killing and direct incitement against Western targets and homelands prior to the first Western air strikes aimed at containing and rolling back its sudden advance into Iraq.

If we have learned anything from the ‘war on terror’, it is that murderous ideologies (which increasingly often seem to be almost interchangeable), are not just things that fall from the sky, Invasion of the Body Snatchers style, but rather things which, like nettles, flourish in disrupted ground. Where military interventions – even interventions which may have been well-meaning – have led to anarchy, they have created conditions conducive to socialising young people into the habits and attitudes of seemingly incomprehensible violence. Libya is an obvious example.

In the case of ISIS, a totalistic and expansive ideology may well provide ready justification for violence under almost any circumstance. But radical movements cannot flourish as fragmented archipelagos of true believers. In recent years, research into radicalisation has been increasingly interested in the role of wider milieus of people who have some emotional sympathy for the radicals, even if they don’t accept their specific beliefs. ISIS are well aware of this, and narratives of victimisation of Sunni Muslims are a key part of their attempts to reach a wider audience.

The morning after the Manchester bombing, I happened to give a lift to a Syrian friend, a former politics professor, whose family had been obliged to leave the country because, among other things, the encroachment of ISIS into their hometown. Naturally, he was full of dismay about the attack, and concern for the victims; but after a few minutes, he added quietly that hardly a week goes by without his hearing from some friend or other about more civilians killed by Western air strikes. He wasn’t, of course, trying to use one to justify the other, or suggesting that the killer had himself been thus motivated. But he was in little doubt that this fact helps at least to blunt the outrage that some might otherwise feel at attacks on Western civilians. According to the monitoring group Airwars, the minimum estimate for civilians killed in Syria and Iraq by Western coalition airstrikes since August 2014 now stands at 3,681.

But what if Corbyn is wrong in his assessment? What if there has been an evolution of the almost meteorological system of interaction between state failure, murderous militias, global media, identity crises in crumbling Western communities, and the ‘long tail’ effect whereby, if a group like ISIS solicits widely enough for killers, someone somewhere is bound to answer the call? What if the complex link between terrorism and foreign wars really has broken? Well then, the only real solution is to properly fund interventions at the level of our own communities, by building robust and trusted partnerships; to do that, and to deepen our cooperation with European and other partners. The need for better community policing is perhaps the single intervention most agreed upon by counter-terrorism experts. But police can’t do it if they aren’t resourced to do it, not to mention the many other public servants supposedly charged with a duty of care under the UK’s Prevent strategy. Theresa May can’t have it both ways.

Gilbert Ramsay is a lecturer in International Relations at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV), University of St Andrews.

Courtesy: Open Democracy
 

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It cannot be an accident that Jeremy Corbyn launched what may be his one and only general election manifesto in the city of Bradford. One of the forerunners of today’s Corbyn-led Labour Party was the Independent Labour Party (ILP). It was a full-blooded left wing party, founded in 1893 in Bradford. And, Keir Hardie, the ILP’s first leader and founder of the Labour Party, has frequently been cited by Corbyn as one of his inspirations. 

Both Hardie and the ILP were very strong advocates of workers’ rights, having emerged from the then nascent union movement. Corbyn, a former full-time officer of one of the forerunner’s of the biggest union in Britain, UNISON, is equally a very strong advocate of workers’ rights. This shows up in the publication today of Labour’s general election manifesto.

Among the most significant of the pledges in the manifesto on rights at work are:

• All workers equal rights from day one, whether part-time or full-time
• Banning zero hours contracts so that every worker gets a guaranteed number of hours each week
• Ending the use of overseas labour to undercut domestic wages and conditions
• Repealing the Trade Union Act 2016 and rolling out collective bargaining by sector
• Guaranteeing unions a right to access workplaces to represent members
• Raising the minimum wage to the level of the living wage
• Ending the public sector pay cap
• Instituting a maximum pay ratio of 20:1 in the public sector and companies bidding for public contracts
• Banning unpaid internships
• Abolishing employment tribunal fees
• Giving self-employed workers the status of workers
• Setting up a commission to modernise the law around employment status
• Creating a Ministry of Labour with the resources to enforce workers’ rights

These pledges are essentially a replication of A Manifesto for Labour Law by the Institute of Employment Rights in June 2016, devised in conjunction with labour law academics to promote healthy policy for workers.

Labour’s worker problem

The socialist left has often argued that Labour has failed to inspire the loyalty of workers, and union members especially, by being insufficiently radical. Consequently, the argument goes, there was less than a compelling reason to vote for Labour. Along with pledges to bring the water industry, railways, Royal Mail and some energy companies back into public ownership (which should reduce pressure on workers’ wages and conditions), this cannot be said to be the case this time round. 

Some have criticised Corbyn’s Labour for giving into the allegedly vested and backward interest of unions. As Martin Kettle of the Guardian argued, “union power is not the same as workers’ rights”.

At one level, this is a valid point. With only around a quarter of workers now holding union membership, workers cannot rely on unions any time soon to be able to effectively defend their rights and interests. 

But when one recognises that the implementation of workers’ rights has always needed the help of unions because they are the only sizeable independent organisations with the resources to do so, this point loses its force. Unions inform workers of their rights and help them apply them. Plus, unions have always helped more than just their members because employers apply the gains of union negotiated deals to all employees. 

Wider significance

But focusing on the union aspect blinds critics to the actual significance of Labour’s manifesto. This is that, compared to what the Tories are proposing, Labour prioritises collective rights over individual rights so that workers can act together to advance their interests. Labour’s manifesto recognises that the workers are stronger together, echoing a fundamental belief of Karl Marx that the condition of the freedom of the individual is the condition of the freedom of all.

Indeed, without collective rights in law, especially with regard to the right to strike, any collective bargaining can easily end up being merely collective begging.

The most obvious case in point concerns the right to sectoral collective bargaining, which Labour has emphasised in its manifesto. In Britain, companies in the same sector compete primarily against each other on the basis of their labour costs. Hence, there is a competitive advantage to cut wages and conditions as the principle route to profitability. 

But by providing a statutory basis to sectoral collective bargaining, all companies in a sector would be compelled to furnish workers with the same minimum terms and conditions. No longer would they compete on labour costs in a “race to the bottom”. And, their attention would turn to improving productivity through investment in technology and training. 

With stronger collective rights, applied and enforced with the help of unions, both unions and workers’ rights would be immeasurably strengthened. Time will shortly tell whether Labour’s manifesto will help it regain the support of working class voters. Or whether Theresa May’s pitch to be the workers’ friend will gain sufficient traction. 

If Corbyn is successful, it will be a fitting tribute to the heritage of Bradford. It was here that an almighty 19-week strike at the city’s Manningham Mills textile factory by some 5,000 workers over wage cuts in 1891 gave a big spur to the founding of the ILP. It will also have been fitting that Labour launched the manifesto at the University of Bradford given that it started out life in 1832 as the Bradford Mechanics Institute, an organisation designed to help working class people gain the necessary skills for the ever changing world of work.

This article was first published on theconversation.com.
 

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