The Barnsby Blog

Dear Ed.

Many thanks for the write-up in the SHS Oct. Newsletter of the Walsall Anarchist ‘Bomb Plot’  with the photograph I had not seen before of yourself, Rosemany Logan and me at the booklaunch of my Socialism in Birmingham and the Black Country at the House of Commons.The non-existant plot of 1892 is paralled by the non-existent plot of 2006 where the main purpose is to be able to spy on the Labour movement, this time Muslims in particular, but also anti-war Labour MPs and the trade union movement in particular.

I move on to the two appendices of my autobiography Subversive - One Third of the Autobiography of a Communist. First the record of the Furthest East Rhythm Club in the World at Imphal, Burma whose unique achievement  of 39 weekly meetings of its 52 members in a war zone were fully and wittily recorded and interrupted by the Japanese offensive which they hoped to conquer India and beyond, but in fact led to the siege of Imphal, where we were surrounded for three months by the Japanese and were supplied by what was then the biggest air lift known. The records of this jazz club came home with us and are deposited in the Jazz Archives at Loughton Library. Ever since we have been trying to interest bands or disc jockies in repeating these record sessions and thus give as much pleasure to modern jazz fans as they did to us over 60 years ago. The only two known toothless survivors are still attempting this in a year allegedly devoted to honouring those who sacrificed so that the world should be freed from racism and Nazis and we are still hoping we will live to see the day that these sessions are replicated.

The other appendix from my autobiography asks the question were the soldiers’ paper we distributed in 1942 calling for a second front in Europe in 1943 the first since the days of Cromwell’s New Model Army? Today attention is directed at the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, Sir Richard Dannatt,  who has had the courage to say that the presence of the British army exacerbates the poisition in Iraq. Such opinions in the not too distant past had been deemed treason and the  soldiers shot. This was not quite the case in 1942 when my papers were published, but the authorities were not amused and took the coward’s way out of detaching me from my unit and sending me abroad where I served four years in India and Burma. Appeals under the Freedom of Information Act have brought the reply that there is no information on my being exiled abroad for publishing the 4 issues of Second Front. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? But those concerned with the questions I have raised in the Socialist History Society and elsewhere concerning the origins of the Communist Party Group in Burma during the 2nd World War willl know  that some interesting Anarchist material has emerged about their newspapers during the 2nd World War. However, none of these so far produced were solders’ newspapers published by soldiers. Thus it seems to me that at present I lead the field and will expect the SHS, the Labour History and even  bourgoise publications such as History Today to note my claims and join a debate either to refute or support me  on what after all is a not unimportant historic question.

GEORGE BARNSBY
GB Working Class Library and Free Communist Bookshop

Ever since you were selected to contest the leadership of the Tory Party early in 2005  I have implored you to claim a position of immortality (with Disraeli and Winston Churchill)  by rejecting the  illegal, racist, barbarian and now considered unwinnable wars in Iraq and else where  by General Sir Richard Dannatt, and the majority of Britons.

At first you were oppposed to the war, negotiating with the Lib.Dems the very likely possibility that the result of the next general election would be a hung parliament of which you would ultimately become Prime Minister, but only if you repudiated the war in Iraq, which, to their everlasting credit, the Lib Dems did frome the beginning.

At this time you were very civil to me, answering my emails, which the over mighty shakers and doers of society, such as the press lords Paxman, Marr, Jon Snow, Kirsty Wark and institutions like the Civil Service, and Learning and Skills Council were  then and remain, not prepared to acknowledge the existence of such a lowly, working class person as myself.

Since then you have not only openly supported the wars of Bush and Blair, but have developed the same deplorable attitudes of the forementioned organisations by not replying to my emails.

I email you once again, not entirely in despair that your  present stance will be voluntarily changed, but because, if you ever become prime minister of Britain you will, either voluntarily or forcibly be ejected from Iraq, Afghanisatan, Palestine etc. You have made a mistake, which all of us do from time to time, and should correct it now while what little political credit you still enjoy in your laudable efforts to restructure the Tory Party remains.

For if you don’t you will be considered a fool. This is  a much more serious condition than being mistaken. It  afflicts, Bush, Blair and many of the tribe of New Labour who are leaving, like rats, the sinking ship of Blairism.  Brown, Prescott, Blunkett, Alastair Campbell, Straw, Reid, Beckett,  and others are already distancing themselves from Blair. And the burlesque Gilbert and Sullivan Ministers of Nothingness Blair has appointed will either have to do the same if they wish to save their wretched skins, or go down with the Titanic as Jowell and Kelly seem resigned to doing.

I refuse to believe that you are so unintelligent as to want voluntarily to join these Legions of the Damned.  Change your policy now and don’t forget to let me know that you have done so!.

GEORGE BARNSBY

Dear Megan

Thank you for you invitation to the above event, but unfortunately  I am too old and disabled to attend.

I have an affection for the Black Country Memories Club even though I cannot attend the meetings. It is worthy sucessor to the earlier Bilston Historical Society in the time of John Roper . These were the days when Dennis Turner and I were fellow socialists.

As a recent defector wench from Wednesbury to Bilston you may not be aware of recent cirumstances which make it impossible for me to want to be in the same room as Dennis and McFadden. Dennis  defected from being a chair of governors of the socialist Bilston Community College, the first multicultural college in Britain with its 30% ethnic minority staff, never equalled before or since, but which was closed by bigots and racists led by Blunkett and Blair.

Dennis not only became a Blairite supporter of the illegal, racist and unwinnable war in Iraq war, but accepted the ludicrous title of Lord Bilston and then handed over his safe labour seat to McFadden, a long-time Blairite. Certain Labour members of the SE W’ton Constituency Party, number and names not yet revealed, but they will be, aided and abbetted this foul work.

As the historian of the working class movement of Bilston I can neither  forgive nor forgot such perfidy.

Yours sincerely,

GEORGE BARNSBY

Dear Gyuli

Very many thanks for your long and comprehensive email. I feel quite humble in the face of your achievements, two in particular, your mastery of written English and your computer knowledge. This prompts me to ask you the following questions before I begin to answer your email. What is your salary in Hungary? Is it less than you would receive if you came to England, as of course you are entitled to as a fellow citizen of the European Community?  If you came to England would you be satisfied with doing the menial tasks which many foreigners including Hungarians, but particularly the Poles, are said to be taking  because they are tolerated here for doing the menial jobs that English workers don’t want, but find it almost impossible to find a job (and salary) in accord with their qualifications?

To turn to your questions to me, I would agree that those who manned the barricades in 1956 were likely to be working people, but were they the working people who had previoussly been reactionary, anti-semitic and anti-Communist, or those who had supported the Socialist government in 1949, as I saw with my own eyes, and whose discontents dated from after 1949?

You ask me again, what my reaction to 1956 was, But I have already told you this in my answers to your questionaire. I’ll say it again. I thought that there was no justification whatever for the Soviet invasion of Hungary, any more than there was for the British invasion of Suez that took place in the same year; that the arrest of Nagy after offering him immunity was despicable; that my attitude towards the Soviet Union would have to change radically for ever; that the pre-war fascist pro-Hitler elements remained strong and that I was happy with the Janos Kardar government that eventually succeded that of Nagy. This new criticism of the Soviet government was consolidated by Khrushchov’s later denunciation of Stalin and I became a Euro-Communist influenced largely by the writings of Santiago Carrillo of the Spanish Communist Party.

You then ask me a series of hypothetical questions that I really can’t answer. If the CP I supported in 1956 had won an election would a British Stalin have arisen? The answer is that it would not have won an election, the Labour Party in Britain remained the main party of the working class. Would I have been loyal enough to accept decisions on any position that the Party proposed for me. There is an answer to that because I was considered for the post of full-time Party organiser on a number of occasions. My answer was that I didn’t want to take it, firstly because I had a bladder weakness which meant I could never chair meetings without going to the loo and secondly that my working hours as a teacher meant that the Party already had two thirds of a full-time organiser. More to the point was the remark of the secretary of the Midland District of the Party, Harry Bourne, who said to me when I told him I proposed to resign as a teacher and do a full time course of study without a grant for an MA ‘Ihope you know what you are doing’. He knew, better than me, the problems that a Communist would have to face in finding another teaching post. This climaxed when after doing my PhD I found myself  with three degrees and unable to find a teaching post so I had to become a free lance insurance broker to make a living.

As for your other questions, would I arrest a class enemy even if were one of my own family and would I confess to crimes I had not committed if the Party demanded it. My answer to that is I don’t know. But this was not an option for me. I lived in Britain where certain freedoms existed, not granted by a generous middle and upper classes, but ground out of them by the actions of the working class. It was you Hungarians and workers in East Europe, the Soviet Union  and else where who faced these dreadful  choices and so I must turn the question back to you. What would have been your response?

The final page of your email discusses your reaction to the present situation in Hungary, but not entirely satisfactorily in my view. You do not discuss the plight of the Hungarian agricultural workers who claim that as a result of the neo-con Common Agricultural policy of the European Union everything of importance is owned by foreigners and so they are much worse off than they ever were under Janos Kardar in the Communist days. Do you agree that this is so?

You throw considerable light on the antics of your Prime Minister a multi-millionaire and representative of the Hungarian Socialist Party. You say he was formerly a leader of the Hungarian Communist youth and got his millions under suspicious circumstances during the heydays of privatisation. Here, is a parallel with the oligarchs in Russia and leads directly to Roman Abramovitch who filched his billions from the Russian people and who bought Chelsea Football Club when he found that they were available, unlike the two leading Spanish clubs which are not for sale because they are owned by their communities. Are the leading Hungarian football clubs up for grabs or are they owned by their localities?

Your ’socialist’ government is acting just as Tony Blair and New Labour are in Britain cutting education, health care etc. This you object to and makes you one of the majority of peope in the world (including me) who mistrust all politicans and understand that the future  depends on getting rid of the neo-cons Bush and Blair.

You end by saying that you are a liberal but not dependent on Communism, People’s Democracy or ’socialist’ governments. Well, nor am I. But I do happen to believe that the alternative to capitalism is the socialism pioneered by, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. That communism will not be introduced through politicians, but will be administered by the self-governing of the people themselves and the state will be consigned to the dustbin of history. What do you think Gyula?

I will end by asking you what has happened to you original project of keeping in touch with all of us you have traced at the 1949 World Youth Festival. As you will see from my cc list I am widening the discussion in Britain. I will keep in touch with the Spectors who were at Budapest at the Festival and I think I am in contact with Ilyan Thomas who I think emailed me saying that he was at the Festival, but a quick check on my Inbox fails to produce his name. Has he been in touch with you?  Have you submitted your PhD thesis and is it available? So many things to do from the project that you started.

With comradely greetings.

GEORGE BARNSBY

Who is the least interested in the blatherings of David Blunkett?  To those of us in Wolverhampton he was the racist and bigot who closed Bilston Community College the first multcultural college in Britain with its 30% of ethnic minority staff never equalled before or since.

Today Blunkett is one of the first of the rats to leave the sinking ship of Blairism in an attempt to save their own miserable skins.

More important to me is the local news that David Loughton that rascally, incompetent head of our New Cross Hospital Trust has had to postpone the transfer of our renowned Eye Infirmary to the MRSA ridden New Cross Hospital where eye patients who catch this terrible disease are likely to die, making Loughton, in plain language a murderer. All this to save a miserable two million quid on a vast debt of more than £30 millions. There has been a massive campaign to save the Eye Infirmary and so we say to the Friends, keep it up we shall yet keep the Eye permanently open.

With regard to the other  rats who are jumping ship I see that Alastair Campbell, once the iron clad protector of TBlair  is now touting his conscience around for all the world to see. Who will be next, will it be Hazel Blears, present chairperson of the Labour Party but only by royal appointmen of his majesty TB?; or perhaps Tessa Jowell, that staunchest of Blairites who ditched her own crooked husband to serve her master  and now seems prepared to advocate the flogging off of our health service, education service and anything else still in government hands to any  private speculator who turns up. Or it might even be Dennis Turner the Bilston MP who made the unique jump into the abyss of betrayal when he reneged from chair of governors of the socialist Bilston Community College to acceptance of the ludicrous title of Lord Turner and then allowed another long-serving Blairite, Pat McFadden (who has received his reward by becoming Minister of Nothingness) to occupy his safe Wolverhampton seat.

Rather than speculating on the next stage of the self destruction of New Labour I prefer to rejoice with my two friends Boris Johnson and Harry Flashman the self confessed coward, expelled from Rugby School who accidently became a national hero. These are two men after my own heart, free spirits who were reviled by the middle and upper classes, but  who all of us in the lower classes can admire.

Talking of the lower classes I refer to the reprobate four newscasters, Jeremy Paxton, Andrew Marr, Jon Snow and Kirsty Wark who disgraced their profession and betrayed the people of Britain by giving intellectual cover to Tony Blair, by not challening him on his illegal and racist war in Iraq. I am now on my 19th attempt to get them to reply to my charges, but it now transpires that they are all upper class toffs who went to ‘independent’ schools and Oxbridge and thus feel no obligation to reply to me who is of the lower class.

Blair and his New Labour warmongering satraps disgust me. I would rather mix with nice honest people. And who better than Paul Hunter the young snooker player who died this week of cancer, but who in his short life gave much pleasure to millions of people

GEORGE BARNSBY

Dear Boris

I was delighted at your performance on Any Questions last night.

I well remember that you were the first person to break the embargo imposed, either by David Dimbleby or informally, and quote the war in Iraq as the chief reason for removing Blair.

Now we have the problem of persuading David Cameron that he should revert to his original implied opposition to the war in Iraq when he discussed the possibility of an alliance with the Lib Dems. in the likely event of a hung parliament, since no coalition with the party of Ming would be possible without repudiation of the war.

Surely there are enough important anti-war figures among Tory supporters such as yourself, Kenneth Clarke, Simon Jenkins, Peter Hitchins, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Henry Porter, Max Hasting etc. to persuade David Cameron not only that he renounces the possibility of immortality of being the first Tory Prime Minister to reject the present wars, but also faces the certain ignominy of having to reverse his war-like stance as the wars in Iraq and elsewhere become unwinnable as Iraq is torn apart by civil war and Israel self destructs.

If, however, Parliament has been totally neutered by Blair and New Labour then we must take the anti-war struggle into the localities, passing motions refusing to pay taxes for Blair’s wars and reviving the George Lansbury tactics in the east end of London in 1921. These are the lines of struggle I shall be advocating in Wolverhampton.

Long may you prove a loose cannon to all warmongers!

GEORGE BARNSBY

The arrogance of Paxman and the others of imagining that they can ignore my charges defies belief. In these days of BLOGS and democratic instant journalism I am able and willing to pursue them to the grave (theirs or mine) in discussing the fact that we are totally dependent on the media and if they are cowardly  enough to fail to challenge Blair on his illegal and racist war in Iraq then all we are left with is not truth, but Blair-speak.

This ties up with the further question that we need an agreed standard of standard of objective news, the most important likely candidate being Al Jazeera the Arabic station which has now opened a London office under Sir David Frost. Paxman and co. should be in there arguing and putting suggestions  alterations rather than acting as stooges for Blair.

But the problem  goes deeper than this . Just as the theoretical basis for imperialism is the belief that the west has developed the most perfect form of democracy known to man, so the ranks of newscasters are crowded with those educated at independent schools and Oxbridge who in practice take the view that they are upper class and therefore superior to those of us who are working class. Jeremy Paxman was educated at an ‘independent’ school and went to Cambridge. Andrew Marr went to Scottish independent schools and Cambridge. Jon Snow went to an independent school and Liverpool University, but who needs Oxbridge if your father is a bishop. Kirsty Wark went to an independent school and to a top Scottish University.  (The only newscaster who went to a Comprehensive school and did not attend University seems to have been Kirsty Young of Channel  5.) The key question for the Big Four very popular and influential newscasters is how they break the block that they themselves have created? Do they continue to ignore me? Have they formed an official or unofficial blockade of me, an 87 year old working class anti-racist and anti-fascist.
Or will one of the four see sense and talk to me? The ball is in their court.

Perhaps the issue should be referred to Ofcom so that responsibility for the policy of Blair and Bush which might well involve the destruction of mankind shall not be laid at the door of the British press.

GEORGE BARNSBY

Dear Chris,

I am glad you reminded me that you were a sponsor of my Big Book, Socialism in Birmingham and the Black Country 1850-1939. Second on the list of about 130 and Professor at Nottingham University, where, I assume you still are and just eight years older.
There are two reasons why I am most interested in being in touch with you. The first is the so-called Walsall Anarchist Bomb plot which has featured recently in History Today, which I don’t think you have picked up. I have noticed with pleasure that you are on the Editorial Advisory Board of that magazine, but until today I have had no reason to contact you.

I wrote a piece for Peter Furtado, the editor of History Today telling him of my five encounters with the Bomb Plot. This followed an article in HT by a Roland Quinault. I hoped Peter would print this, but he declined. Since then I have had a sixth encounter from a non-political metallurgist, John D.Harper who is a relative of the firm that made the iron casings for the bomb and tackles the subject from the unique position of whether the plotters were efficient enough to be able to produce a bomb which could be detonated. His answer is No!
The Walsall Bomb plot ties in with the Garman family, daughters of a Wednesbury officer of health who migrated to London where they scandalised the country, Kathleen being mistress to USA born sculptor Jacob Epstein for many years. When Epstein’s wife died he married her and when he died she inherited  the most fabulous art collection in the world and donated it to Walsall Art Gallery. One of the two sons of the family, Douglas, became a Communist and became the Education Organiser of the Communist Party in London, where I saw him on a number of occasions. Thanks to Grham Stevenson, the Transport & General Workers’ Union organiser, I was recently able to download a biography of Douglas Garman, and was most gratified to learn that he remained a member of the Communist Party until his death and his papers are are in the national rchives. Douglas would have know all about spies in tthe labour movement as the government used spies to infiltrate into the  Communist Party.

A final link with you and History Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution. I was contacted by a Gyula Visag a few years ago, a young non-committed Hungarian who found himself in possession of all the papers concerning the 1948 World Youth Festival held in Budapest. He has now contacted many of the participants world wide. Gyula set a questionaire which asked participants to think back to those days and give their opinions. One question asked us to write about our reactions to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. I wrote that I was so impressed by the country wide support throughout Hungary for the Youth Festival, particularly in the factories where shop stewards told us to come back in a few years time and see what progress towards Socialism had been made, that when the revolt occurred in 1956, I was convinced that it was a capitalist counter-revolution originating with the war-time fascists and Jew baiting reactionaries who had made Hungary the last country to desert Hitler, and whose Roman Catholic collaborator Cardinal Mindzenty was properly, in my opinion,  in prison at the time.

A whole world has passed since that time. Hungary continued as one of the most prosperous and independent socialist countries under________ until the collapse of the Soviet Union, since when it has become common acceptance that socialism was bad and capitalism the only possible and democratic path to follow. However, today in Hungary there is a revolt of farmers, not much talked about in the west, who now find themselves in the European Union in the most desperate position that they have ever been literally starving and with everything of importance foreign owned as the laws of the Common Agricultural Policy insists on the ‘free trade’   which is the trade mark of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund which neo-cons have atttempted to impose and are now being resisted in every country of the vast sub-continent of South America. Perhaps capitalism does not imply either democracy or freedom.

I shall ask Gyula Virag whether he is still the ‘independent’ thinker that he imagined himself to be in 2001? when he first began to study the World Youth Festival or if he has been affected by changes in Hungary and might even agree that there is a case for a modernised, democratic path to Socialism in Hungary and the world.

GEORGE BARNSBY

Dear Gyula

Warmest of greetings to you.

You received from me yesterday an email addressed to Chris Wrigley a member of the editorial board of one of our most prestigious periodicals History Today. They are carrying an article in their October edition on the Uprising in Hungary of 1956. Some of the historians and political activists to whom this email will go know of our connection through you finding the names of all participants in the 1949 World Festival of Youth and of my subsequent filling in of your questionaire in which I stated that I considered the 1956 Uprising as a counter-revolution in view of the mass support the government enjoyed in 1949. After 1956 the Hungarian government under Janos Kardar implemented a  relaxed policy which gave Hungarians one of the highest standards of living within the Communist Bloc and also an enlightened programme on human rights. Such policies continued in Hungary until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then Hungarians have had the doubtfull privilege of being part of the ‘free’ capitalist world and it would seem that the defects of this system, notably its moving in bursts of boom and slump, and its tendencies to produce at one end inconceivable wealth and at the other
mass poverty and starvation seems now to have brought Hungarians to the position of near starvation and foreign ownership of most of the country’s resources in the European Union.

Farmers in Hungary have been particularly affected by the Common Agricultural Policy which insists on the ‘free trade’ as practised by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund whiose originators are the US neo-cons led by George W.Bush and on whose coat tails clings Britain’s Tony Blair. Hungarian farmers resisting  neo-con free trade join every one of the peoples of  that vast sub-continent of South America led by people such as Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, and Fidel Castro.

The question I ask you, my very good friend Gyula is, have you moved from your position of being an unattached neutral in discussing Hungarian affairs to a friend of the farmers and workers of Hungary?  I pass this buck to you.

This is not, of course, the end of the matter. When discussing history one is confrronted by the massive figure of Karl Marx whose spectre continues to haunt the capitalist word. One of the world respected historians who writes with sympathy of working people  is Richard Holmes, Professor of military and security studies at Cranfield University.  Holmes has written a remarkable book ‘Tommy’  which is the story of ordinary soldiers during World War 1. Looking through his Index I could find almost nothing on  Mutinies despite the fact that the most remarkable incident was the fraternisation of German and British troops at Xmas 1914. However, I passed on to Christmas in Holmes’ Index and found there a very full account of this mutiny. It left the military and political authorities with the almost impossible dilemma of either shooting the mutineers which would involve making public the fact that a munity had occurred, or of hushing it up, in which case they could not shoot the mutineers. The latter course seems to have been taken in Germany, where there seems to be little knowledge of the event, but in Britain it took nearly two years to quell the widespread opposition to the war and restore the ‘natural state of affairs’ that Germans and British would agree to kill each other for the benefit of capitalists and war mongers. We are urging Tristram Hunt, who is running a campaign with the Guardian newspaper to popularise working class history that he celebrates the mutiny at Xmas and every other Xmas from now on.

Another matter concerning Hungary was in the 1950s when Hungary beat England 6-3 at Wembley and 7 something in Budapest. Football is now being openly political with the purchasing of Manchester United by the US Glazers who will have to be the tools of George W.Bush,  and Chelsea whose unlimited wealth has been filched from the Russian people who may well want it back some day soon. My latest piece ‘I love Arsene Wenger even more after his Tenth Anniversary ar Arsenal’ is relevant this this matter.

I finally want to mention an important piece of historical research by Keith Flett entitled ‘Trends in Chartism after 1948. After three huge peaceful campaigns to get the vote for all working men, this deals with a period when working men discovered they were not going to get the vote and they had to collaborate with the middle classes. This gave rise to ‘reformism’  which has afflicted the working class movement ever since, up to and including the ultimate reformer Tony Blair. Flett discusses both the similarities  with present day struggles and also the differences. It is thus a blue print for modern struggles against Bush and Blair.

Again wishing you, Gyula, good health and anxious to hear your views on the world wide struggle for peace and survival.

GEORGE BARNSBY

Today all news stands still. There is an air of unreality. Of deja vu. Of politics played on a single stage. No one mentions Hugo Chavez or Evo Mores or the fact that every single country on the great sub-continent of South America is in revolt against the neo-cons of Bush on  whose coat tails clings Blair.

Who’s for the war in Iraq goes the cry. I am says Blair enthusiastically. I am growls Brown. I am says David Cameron who has forsaken immortality by supporting the war the war that the majority of his own party rejects. I am say a hundred and more Labour MPs still hoping to become the Minister of Nothingness or be ermined robed with fat emoluments in the House of Lords.

We’re not telling you whether we support the war say the so-called guardians of truth in the spoken word on our behalf such as Paxman, Jon Snow, Andrew Marr, Kirst Wark and others who gave intellectual support to Blair by never challenging  him on the subject of the illegal war in Iraq.

News programmes such as Any Questions or This Week which had some attraction,  now have none for no one now believes anyone who aspires to address them on politics
Truly the inmates have taken over the Asylum!

We have returned to a previous  stage spoken of by Mikhail Gorbachov where,  ‘We must let situations develop and then analyse them, rather than  predicting a fantasy future.’  This is true but still the slaughter goes on and the disintegration of Iraq and the self-destruction of Israel continue.

Is there any hope? If so it depends on outstanding individuals such as Chomsky, Soros,  Michael Moore and increasing numbers of Congressmen who oppose Bush in the USA.  Also pioneers of thought in Britain such as the Tories, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Simon Jenkins, Max Hastings and Henry Porter; and the activities of such as Tony Benn, the only man I know who was not deceived by Tony Blair  and ‘New Labour’ from the very first day;  also  the Women’s Institute, the first people to tumble Blair and boo him at their national conference years ago,  together with the  rejuvenated trade union movement in in Britain,  not least the National Union of Journalists which not only opposes the war, but publishes a code of behaviour for journalists,  which the lords of the third estate such as Paxman insolently ignore. This together with the continued support of the majority of the people of Britain who oppose the war in Iraq give hope that Bush and Blair can be removed. But it will be a close run thing.

GEORGE BARNSBY