The Barnsby Blog

Irrespective of whether Christ actually lived, or whether his family can be traced for a further 300 years after his death, both of which contradictory theories are being currently peddled, we Atheists are stuck celebrating Xmas which is as good as any other excuse for putting our feet up, relaxing and singing those old tunes of which the Devil has a monopoly.

I unhesitatingly nominate my favourite newspaper, the only one owned by its readers, the Morning Star of 23 December, on two counts. The first was the article by Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, entitled The Only Awards that Really Matter. Robert has so far not been renowned for his sense of humour, but this is a hilarious piece. It regretted those who have snubbed the South Croyden Bugle and Advertisers annual poltical awards held in the plush surroundings of Ruskin House (the HQ of the CPB) and regretted that the only person to trek to that distant staging post for the South Pole (Croyden) was the Morning Star’s reporter Ann Douglas.

The packed event sponsored generously by the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders and also the US private equity fund Tell Sid we’re Buying Up Britain Investments. The Master of Ceremonies was that former Olympic sprint champion and old Etonian, Jeffrey Archer who delved into his sack to produce Jonathan Aitken, a former cabinet colleague and fellow member of the Tory Old Felons Fraternity or TOFF. And so the article goes on.

The other article in that issue of the Morning Star was Keith Flett’s article on Capitalism at Christmas which pilloried Charles Dickens as the inventor of Christmas who grew to hate it (Humbug!) with much other interesting historical material.

We  follow a precedent set with our Autumn 2006 BLOG by printing responses to our latest Winter BLOG and also items which have occurred since which may or may not appear in our next BLOG. The key event continues to be the total powerlessness of Bush and Blair who continue to delude themselves  that they directing things whereas events are driving them.

WULFRUNA AND CLASS POLITICS.

An important local event is that our History & Heritage Society has discussed my advice that the title of their bi-monthly report WULFRUNA is not a title suitable to an organisation seriously concerned with history. They conclude that they think this woman is so embedded in popular culture that, despite taking my point, they will continue to use that title. I think they will live to regret it. My point was that Wulfruna rather than being the splendid benefactor to Wolverhampton that is expressed in her statue in St.Peter’s Square was the Mrs. Thatcher of her age who accepted a gift she was not entitled to receive e.g.virtually the whole of modern Wolverhampton from a robber baron in the shape of the king of Wessex who wasn’t even a citizen of the state to which we belonged, namely Mercia.

Thus we have a very rare example of class politics from the medieval past, which should make us look out for other examples rather than slur over existing ones. I am, of course, a political animal. I have class politics in my bones. I am a follower of Karl Marx who states that all previously existing societies have been class societies. My mind goes back to Desmond Halestrap a fellow militant  who asked me if I had thoughts of progressive history in the Pendeford district of Wolverhampton. I stated that my tracing the line of the Roman road from Barnhurst Farm with pupils (C stream as well as B and A stream pupils) was almost revolutionary. Also there was a long established factory branch of the W’ton  Communist Party with an enviable record of increasing production of aircraft at the Boulton Paul factory during the 2^nd World War but which was destroyed during the Cold War by the People newspaper raising a national spy scare claiming that its members were a threat to the security of the nation.

With regard to the Roman road which came through Wolverhampton, I said  there were so few people in Wolverhampton at that time that they were unlikely to be able to challenge the  Romans. But, wait. Who were these people, skilled workers and labourers laying a foundation to the road, with drainage ditches either side then a surface. Who were they? Were they Britons  opposed to the Roman occupation whose descendents about 400AD took their revenge by seeing the Romans quit the territory later to be called England.

I ask because I knew  Indian workers who squatted each day breaking stones to the required size for the roads through the mountains and jungles of Imphal on the  Burma border on which I travelled from Dimapur to Imphal.  Here if one dared to look down the ravine  were hundreds of trucks which had fallen over the edge each with a dead Indian driver, Indian troops with perhaps an occasional British soldier. These Indian civilians and soldiers helped make possible the victory against Japan. But their fellow Indians took their revenge for the crimes of British imperialism over the centuries  by taking their freedom after the war, even if it seemed, like the retreat from Iraq today, a planned withdrawal. Such are the realities of politics which the ruling class tries to hide, thus making fools of us working people unless we develop a class instinct.

This is the classic case in Britain of western orientated thinking which believes that the most important event that ever occurred is western civilisation. Such thinking was debunked by the liberal historian A.J.P. Taylor, but such is this mindset that it invades all our thinking, so that those who think class are seen as some strange creatures who can be patronised as extremists. ‘The philosophers have interpreted the world’, says Marx. ‘The point is to change it.’ Today the necessity is to change from capitalism to socialism.

But this will be better understood  if we know how previous societies changed.

The most important changes were from antiquity to feudalism for which essential reading is Engels’ Origins of the Family and also Perry Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. But even more important is the experiences of those who have survived from antiquity, above all the indigenous population of Bolivia as exemplified by Evo Mores; also American  and Australian examples of almost total butchery of ancient peoples but whose few survivors, their lands stolen from them and they reduced to poverty and degradation are now fighting back and pose the  question  of whether the survivors of ‘primitive communism’ can set an example leading to modern socialism.

As far as Wolverhampton is concerned we can note that by the time our population was first numbered in the ‘census’ of the Domesday Book of 1085 it consisted of only one free man,  the remainder consisting of perhaps 225 persons being in various stages of servility as villains, bordars and serfs. For full details of this see my pamphlet ‘The Origins of Wolverhampton to 1085’ written as a contribution to the millenary celebrations in the town. This will shortly be available on my website:      www.gbpeopleslibrary.co.uk

As far as Wulfruna is concerned, she operated in the period between the Britons who were a classless society where the land belonged to the tribe and could not be given away and the Roman class society which was essentially a slave economy and the Celtic, Anglo-Saxons descended from the Britons which was essentially classless, land belonging to the tribe with a national Parliament, the Witan,  determining who the future leader should be and operating a local democracy.

Wulfruna by willing her ‘gift’ of Wolverhampton to the local church  operated as the class agent of those, like the king of Wessex, who operated the stick and carrot policy of using the Church to threaten ever-lasting damnation for any who dared to step out of line, and which eventually brought about  three states, Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria and after the Norman Conquest the single state of England.

Whether the sufferings of the working people in medieval times  the Industrial Revolution and the period of the British Empire were justified or not is today being worked out in far off Bolivia and other areas where the indigenous population survived.  This is now the question of our time, the worldwide necessary transition from capitalism to Socialism.

For some time the BLOG has been dedicated as follows:

THIS IS AN OFFERING TO THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE OF WOLVERHAMPTON AND BEYOND DEDICATED TO THE PRINCIPLE THAT TONY BLAIR, WAR CRIMINAL, SERIAL KILLER, BARBARIAN AND TRAITOR SHOULD BE ARRESTED AT ONCE AND SHARE AN EXERCISE YARD WITH SADDAM HUSSAIN.  This dedication was taken from the writings of Peter Rhodes, chief reporter of the Wolverhampton Express and Star. We now wish to alter this to the classic statement of Ken Purchase, Wolverhampton MP on  Blair:

WE’D GIVE HIM TEN MINUTES TO CLEAR HIS DESK.

FROM DIFFERING OPINIONS TO DISGUST TO DETESTATION.

It has taken the Commander- in -chief of the British Army to state what was obvious to many of us starting with Jonathan Dimbleby of ITV some years ago, namely that the war in Iraq was unwinnable because for every Iraqi killed two patriots/terrorists would be created. Our email of 12 Oct was very short with Blunkett. Called STUFF BLUNKETT it characterised his ‘sensational disclosures’ as the ravings of one of the rats deserting the sinking ship of New Labour to save their own miserable skins. As far as Wolverhampton is concerned, Blunkett was, with Blair, the one of the bigots and racists who closed of Bilston Community College, the first multicultural College in Britain with its  30% of ethnic minority staff, never equalled before or since. Warming to our theme we showed that Dennis Turner had made the unique betrayal from chair of the governors of the socialist Bilston Community College to Blairite accepting the ludicrous title of Lord Bilston and then gifting his safe Labour seat to McFadden, a Blair crony.

THE WOLVERHAMPTON EYE INFIRMARY

Readers will know of the very impressive efforts of the Friends of Wolverhampton Eye Infirmary to save it from the clutches of the MRSA ridden local hospital New Cross. It is a recognised medical fact that if an eye patient contracts MRSA this is tantamount to a death sentence. Yet this is the policy of the chief executive, who resigned before he was pushed from Warwickshire Health Trusts and was then taken on as chief executive of Wolverhampton. We describe David Loughton as rascally and incompetent for insisting on following this murderous policy to save a couple of million quid from a total debt of more than £30m. Fortunately he does not even have the money to make this transfer. So the Eye remains open and with another push from the Friends we ought to be able to keep it open permanently. In the meantime we will enquire how the board of the New Cross Trust came to appoint Loughton and see what changes in its composition we can recommend.

THE BETRAYAL OF THE NEWS CASTERS.

Readers will also be aware of the betrayal of the four main newscaster Jeremy Paxton, Andrew Marr, Jon Snow and Kirsty Wark of their duty to their profession to follow truth wherever it leads by not questioning Blair on his illegal and racist wars in Iraq and elsewhere. We are now on our 19^th attempt to get them to answer our charges and we shall continue to the 119^th if necessary. Our latest discovery is that all of them are aristocrats of labour, all of them having gone to ‘public’ schools and Oxbridge and so consider themselves superior beings  having no obligation to reply to those of us of the lower orders. We shall see who cracks first.

FOOTBALL

The past year has been the most exhilarating and exciting for one who has been an Arsenal supporter for 70 years and for 50 years a Wolves fan.. It began in September 2005 with the struggle of Arsenal to obtain the fourth place necessary to qualify for this season’s European Cup which was  achieved only because Spurs had food poisoning and lost a vital match. It followed for me what was the marvellous discovery of knowing that George Frith a black fellow historian and race relations activist over many years who is now so disabled that he cannot hold a paper to his face unless  it  is done by a member of his devoted family is  an Arsenal supporter. Also I have a friend in my street who reads the Barnsby Blog as does his grandfather in India and he is an Arsenal supporter from his stubbornness of  knowing that every one else he knows is an Wolves supporter. There followed the disappointments of the English team in the World Cup and the excitement of the opening of the Arsenal Emirates Stadium. Then came a disappointing early start for Arsenal, followed by a recovery which took them near to the top of the Premiership but further disappointments currently All this has been recorded in detail on my website. But the private has become the personal in football and a number of serious questions remain to be answered.

1.The first is what has been widely described as the Metatarsal Deficiency.

Until recently the great footballers of our era, Stanley Matthews and Billy Wright rarely suffered from broken toes because they were protected by a boot with a steel and leather toecap. The prevalence today of such injuries is because footwear manufacturers aim, not to protect toes, but to protect their profits. These injuries will not stop until football boots are built with a  light weight modern steel  to protect  the toes. This is now agreed to be feasible solution. But Nike who have a monopoly of providing boots for the World Cup apparently do not agree for a letter to their headquarters in the USA has not so far been answered. The problem will not be solved until footballers themselves refuse to suffer such self-inflicted wounds and their trade union the PFA take up their case and it is supported by the Football Association in Britain and FIFA abroad.

2. The Ownership of Football Clubs.

The ownership of clubs is a political matter. Manchester United is owned by the US sporting syndicate, the Glazers, despite the continuing opposition of MUST (the Independent Man United Supporters’ Trust). Sir Alex Ferguson, the Man United manager supports the takeover, despite the fact that he used to be a socialist in his early days. The problem is that clubs taken over by US,  become subject to the war policies of George W. Bush . Now Aston Villa are also being taken-over by US interests, without a protest by that astutest of football managers, Martin O’Neil. Now it appears that West Ham are also be be taken over by US interests. Where will it end.

But just as people are protesting at globalisation and subjection to the neo-con. politics of  Bush there is now groundswell support that football teams are national assets which should be owned by their localities.

The world is split between Brazilian supporters who believe that Pele was the world’s greatest ever player and Argentinians who support ‘hand of God’  Maradona. He believes that the greatest person after God is Fidel Castro and supporters world-wide wear the Che Guevara tee shirt.

Thierry Henry has worn the Maradona symbol and such is his influence in the culture of youth  and anti-racism that Sepp Blatt the chief of FIFA appointed him the first and only Ambassador of World Sport.

Recently Arsene Wenger has spoken up for clubs being owned by their supporters. This might be seem strange for a club that has been controlled since the 1930s by the most aristocratic of capitalist interests, merchant bankers,  but it clearly means that Arsenal is not up for sale to anyone. An analogous example is Wolverhampton Wanderers who are owned by an absentee tax avoider, Sir Jack Hayward, but Sir Jack is a very special case. His money was made in the Bahamas and his vast financial resources have been used not only to bankroll the club he owns but also such causes as bringing the first iron ship in the world back from the USA to its home in Bristol. Sir Jack is indeed an exceptional capitalist. His patriotism is so fierce that he will not even allow foreign cars in his enterprises. Today he has resumed control of his beloved Wolves, but has finished financing it and seems to have no alternative  but  to sell it, especially as Wolves supporters, despite their reputations of being both numerous and enthusiastic, seem to have no stomach for buying and controlling the club. However,  I’m convinced that Sir Jack will never sell the club to foreigners. We shall see.

In Spain, the two greatest football clubs are not for sale and reflect the patriotism of the country. Barcelona is the club of the Republican, Basque country whose city Guernica was destroyed during the German interventionists of the so-called civil war of the 1930’s.  Real Madrid, on the other hand was owned by the falangist supporters of General Franco and still reflects that position.

ENABLING THE ELDERLY

When the W’ton Race Equality Council was closed in 2005 my influence as Honorary Vice-Chair, Founder member from 1965, and representative of WREC on a number of committees including the W’ton University Equal Opportunities Committee and Age Concern came to an abrupt end. I was therefore reluctantly obliged to assert my personal influence as a lifetime anti-racist, and increasingly as an elderly person to assert my own rights and the rights of all other aged persons  to participate in public affairs through both written submissions and home visits by the concerned authorities. If this was not allowed, the elderly would be discriminated against and this would represent Discrimination against the elderly, which is illegal.

The new race equality unit in Wolverhampton appears to have been guilty of this discrimination and although the activity of the Race Equality Partnership Wolverhampton seems only to be at fault in not sufficiently early recognising what one might call ‘institutional ageism’, the same cannot be said of  the chief representative of Wolverhampton City Council, Karen Cross, who has deliberately and flagrantly refused to answer my telephone calls and emails to visit  and discuss with me my current views which include the fate of the documents of WREC and other pertinent matters. So I have now sent an email to Karen telling here that I will report her to the  government Minister for Social Exclusion and the CRE if she continues to ignore and exclude me.

This is not only a Wolverhampton issue, because the above named ministry itself, also the CRE , and its otherwise excellent new periodical CATALYST, is organising the proposed Race Convention 2006  at the end of November and even the most eminent anti-racist bodies such as Runnymede show few signs of admitting written communications at their conferences to enable the aged and disabled, not to mention ethnic minority aged and infirm to participate. They thus appear to be guilty of ‘Institutional Ageism’, if not ‘Institutional Racism’.

I LOVE ARSENE WENGER A LITTLE LESS TODAY.

The tantrums of Arsene Wenger on Arsenal’s defeat at West Ham were more like the reactions of a ten year child than those of a football legend celebrating his fiftieth birthday. How demeaning .

Nor is his conduct  excused by the fact that Jose Mourinho the Chelsea manager’s reaction to defeat seems to have been  even more outrageous when he accused the referee of bias. Both will be hauled before the FA and given very large fines if found guilty. But the fines will be a flea bite compared with the financial resources of these two clubs. The only  penalty which really hurts is the deduction of points and this the FA is unlikely to do.

Sadly, the golden reputation of Arsene Wenger is permanently sullied.  It may be that his fate is to be that of a man able to produce youthful  teams  almost out of a hat, but which inspires other teams to develop tactics to stop these Arsenal teams from scoring. The fact that the present money bags leading teams such as Chelsea and Manchester United are also losing matches suggests that the Portsmouths, Boltons,

Readings and Wigans stand a chance of winning honours, and who is to say that this is a bad thing for the game?

Since writing this Arsene has apologised handsomely, but the damage has been done. The image of him,  arms tightly akimbo and a scowl on his intellectual face can never be erased. It would not have suited Herbert Chapman or the players of the nineteen thirties.

THE STATE OF EDUCATION IN WOLVERHAMPTON 2006.

This has proved to be a most important project. There is much to be proud of in our educational system. Schools and teachers have been properly honoured in, for instance, The Teachers of the Year Awards. The vast majority work without being honoured to enhance the education and reputation of the children they teach and their schools. Their have been a number of important initiatives such as Community Through Learning which aim to help the most under-privileged to progress in spite of the bureaucrats, The Men in  Suits which leaves too many young people with only an ASBOS to their name when they leave school.

This results in an uncertainty of whether Black pupils might need to riot, as occurred in Birmingham last year, to bring their problems to the attention of the authorities. The policy of schools taking on Academic status is an invitation not to take  the children in their cachment areas and therefore discriminate against the less affluent children including ethnic minority youngsters.

There have been other weaknesses. The closure of Bilston Community College, the first multicultural college in Britain on charges of inefficiency and corruption have not been proved, so that the legitimacy of  Wolverhampton City College is  in doubt. The promise that Wolverhampton University should be one of a new kind superior to Oxford and Cambridge from the time that it attracted more ethnic minority students than any other has not been fulfilled. A result has been that the possibility of Wolverhampton having been considered the Racist capital of Britain in the time of Enoch Powell to the leading city of Culture and Education in 2007 is still to be realised.as other cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham have not been challenged.

THE RATS CONTINUE TO LEAVE THE SINKING SHIP.

Sir George Cadbury has joined the growing list of New Labour defectors. He joins the list of recent heavy weights of the like of Peter Hain and  Charles Clarke. A  number of these are competing for the post of Deputy Prime Minister under whoever is prime minister at the time. It has taken the greatest bruiser of them all, John Prescott, to point out that no such post exists under our present non-written Constitution; it is entirely in the gift of the prime minister and Gordon Brown the expected winner, now  no different from Blair than two peas from the same pod, is not likely to oblige by making any such appointment.

LEST WE FORGET

I did nearly forget. So anxious am I to get Tristram Hunt and the Guardian newspaper to commemorate the collaboration of German and British forces at Xmas 1914  I almost forgot that before Xmas comes Armistice Day on November 11^th.

I want to state what 1918 means to me. My father was born in a Workhouse, and because of poverty, with perhaps just a dash of excitement, served in the army for over 20 years including all four years of the 1914-18 war only to die in 1923 as a result of being gassed during that war. My mother, protector of her younger brothers from an abusive father, suffered the agony of losing two brothers, Sidney and George within a few days of each other, George on 7^th October and Sidney on 31^st  October  1914 and a third brother later in the war. This made her anti-war all her life, so that when her own two sons, (also called

George and Sidney after their uncles), returned from service throughout the 2^nd.World War from 1939 to 1946 safely, but was followed immediately after by the Cold War threatening nuclear annihilation, she took out the  petition of the World Peace Congress on to doorsteps and was shaken to the core at the hostile attitude that she met.

I have participated in the Peace movement myself ever since and am pleased to think the little I have been able to do has helped to preserve my own two sons from the horrors of war.

THE DAY THE WORLD CHANGED

The world changed for ever when in November  the Democratic Party in the USA captured both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The day before Bush was the most important man in the world, capable of destroying, but not controlling it. The next day he was he was a non-entity, buoyed only by the delusion that just ‘one more push’ would restore his fortunes. Responsible for this were two factors. One was that the people of the USA  finally realised that the war in Iraq was their Vietnam, that it was unwinnable and unless US troops were withdrawn they would be evicted. The second factor was the bravery of the people of Iraq who ensured that however many times Bush declared the war won it never was. Some people believe the war was justified, but there was no withdrawal strategy. This is the reverse of the truth. The Neo-Cons had a very clear strategy. It was to bomb Iraq to bits, to reconstruct parts of it by giving building contracts to monopolists, particularly US monopolists, pay for it with Iraqi oil and move on to the next target in a rolling, never ending series of wars until the US was master of the world, could invade whoever it chose and the victims would eventually be brought to realise that it was in their own best interests. All this nonsense was brought to a juddering halt at the first attempt by the resolution of the Iraq people.

But what most of the modern news media, that fashion our thinking these days, have not realised is that if Bush and Blair are powerless their erstwhile enemies must now be powerful. It seems that the immediate post-war world will be run by peoples of faiths. Not fundamentalist and crackpot religions, these have been dealt a severe blow with their master, Bush, but main stream religious faiths of which Islam is the largest comprising about 10% of the world’s population, it is said. Of these Osama bin Laden is the most important leader and surely must take his place in the counsels of the world. Before the horror  of this logical proposition had subsided, I was pleased to note the support of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, a welcome addition to logical thinkers in the world. He has already agreed to meet the Pope, has asserted the importance of human rights and condemned the Creationists who not only want to run  their churches, but also us. Of so-called terrorist he has mildly said that ‘even terrorists can have serious moral goals’. This surely means Bush bad, (the archbishop condemned the war from the beginning),  Al Queda not so bad.

In the immediate future the religious faiths will play an important part in shaping the world. But there is a constituency even larger than those who believe that divine intervention created the world. This is the Secularists. Many of these believe that the  recruitment to religious faith has always created the problems they claim they want to solve.

The champion of secularists is Karl Marx,  who has always been a spectre haunting capitalism. He will continue a spectre at every gathering as capitalism with its two fundamental disorders of movement always in slumps and booms and its distribution of resources in ultimately unsustainable extremes of vast wealth at one end and poverty and starvation at the other.

FEMINISM

Once again feminists are having to reclaim the streets and my sympathy for them leads me to want to explain my experiences with feminism over a period of 80 years. To accept that women are equal to men  came as naturally to me as did jazz and recognition of racial equality. When I married in the 1950s I accepted  that Esme was equal to me and in some respects superior. I did what I thought was the sharing of household chores, cleaning the house at the week end and washing up most days. But since I was both a teacher and secretary of the Wolverhampton Borough Communist Party it seemed natural to me that equality went no further. A chastening experience occurred when I organised the first Women’s meeting in Wolverhampton and thought that entitled me to stay at the meeting, until one female asked why a man was present at the meeting and all eyes turned to me. To prevent eviction I made some excuse about having other things to do and fled. Later, at a Party school in Italy I felt that women had taken over the whole thing, but silence being the better part of valour, I did not complain. The next milestone was Greenham Common. Since then it has taken a very foolish fellow to deny equality. But, as with race relations, equality has been only skin deep and progress in equality in salaries and status has been as limited in Britain as it has been in the US.

Modern feminism fascinates me. In Wolverhampton we have Inspirational Women  successfully battling away to inspire women to start their own businesses and not confined to catering and other female dominated trades, but to engineering and other ‘manly’ pursuits where equality is adhered to more often in words rather than in deeds.

Every aspect of women’s liberations is represented in the Black Country from the Women’s Institutes, whose national conference many years ago first exposed Blair for the vapid and superficial man that he is; Women’s Co-operative Guilds and trade union women’s groups; the Fawcett Society for those with a taste for history; an Older Feminist Network; Syster Tree for Pagans and much concerned with the environment; societies for every aspect of women’s welfare and interests. But the one I like best is Linda Bellos’ Diversity Solutions. Linda is British, black, Jewish, Lesbian, and business woman, which just about covers everything.

KEN LIVINGSTONE SPOILS THE PARTY.

A strange thing happened recently. A grand gathering of the great and the good including the government were due to meet to celebrate thirty years of the Race Relations Act and how to improve Race Relations. But Ken Livingstone dramatically intervened to suggest that Sir Trevor Phillips was not a suitable person to be in charge of Race Relations in  Britain. I have considerable sympathy with Ken. Trevor was happy to accept the ‘honour’ of the OBE (Order of the British Empire) at a time when there was considerable opposition to anyone, let alone ethnic minority people, truckling with imperialism in this way.

I had further complaints against Phillips. One was that when he said that the Iraq war was ‘not within his remit’ he opened the door to considerable speculation. Was he in favour of the war or not?; Was he in favour of the proposed new omnibus Equal Opportunity which would put Race Relations at the back of the queue. Would he accept leadership of this polyglot new organisation and thus complete his capitulation to the war criminal and racist New Labour Blairites. Also we had local problems with Trevor. One was his acquiescence in the closing of the first multicultural college in Britain, Bilston Community  College and the other was his closure of Wolverhampton Race Equality Council which was the oldest REC continuously controlled by the two main EM groups in the City, Afro-Caribbs and Indians.

On the other hand I have less sympathy with the grounds on which Ken took issue with Trevor, namely the question of whether we are becoming a nation divided into ghettoes or not. To my mind there is not much against communities voluntarily deciding  that they want to live together, as did an Indian friend of mine, British born and bred, who moved into the more affluent district of Tettenhall, but sighed for the comradeship of  others who spoke the Punjabi he had been brought up to speak, or the local pubs with Indian food and an Indian culture. This he does not find inconsistent with his general belief that his nationality is  English.

The first day of the Conference seems to have been entirely ignored by the media. It coincided with the arrival of the CREs new radical journal CATALYST which claims to print  the views of all, but fails to print the view of those who feel that the CRE cannot represent  anybody if it refuses to mention the war in Iraq. I wrote to CATALYST under the heading,  Only Two Cheers for Catalyst, but the magazine has not seen fit to print my views.  This Nov-Dec issue is full of worthy contributions mainly from well-known people. But a quick glance through its 35 glossy pages did not reveal a single mention of the war in Iraq. So much for reality.  I shall write again giving only one cheer for the magazine and see if they print that.

THE VIEWS OF THE MUSLIM COMMUNITY.

Meanwhile I have turned to the Muslim community for advice concerning the war in Iraq. The one organisation in Wolverhampton which includes Muslim, is the Inter-Faith Group, but this seems to make no public statements. Apart from this there is an uncertain number of  Mosques which I could approach, but there seem to be no other Muslim bodies. Other towns in the Black Country seem to be more enterprising. There is a Muslim Welfare Society at Darlaston, a  Confederation of Bangladeshi Muslim Organisation in West Bromwich, and  Muslim Organisations in Oldbury and Walsall. Whether these organisations issue policy statements is not known. Nationally there is the Muslim Council of Britain to which most Muslim organisations are affiliated and which does issue statements regularly, particularly political statements stating their absolute opposition to the war in Iraq  and the marginalisation of the Muslim Community, particularly youths. The Muslim community will play a more important part both   locally and nationally than it has in the past.

CONCLUSIONS

It is proposed to bring this Winter BLOG to a conclusion for a number of reasons. Firstly December is now only two days away. Secondly I have published Minor Blogs throughout the Autumn, so that the Main BLOG need not be the twelve page publication that it has been in the past.

But so many issues have still not been discussed.

The economic position, for instance. I turn for my weekly political economy lesson to William Keegan of the Observer. Next to the pronouncements of the Governor of the Bank of England a local grammar school pupil made good who controls not only the government’s Rate of Interest negotiations but is influential with the world wide Bank of International Settlements. Will there or won’t there be a slump?. It all depends on the price of Houses apparently, which has occupied the mind of Gordon Brown, since he has been the occupant of No.11 Downing Street, but promised the key to No.10.

The main reason for abbreviating this BLOG is the unprecedented world situation in which for the first time since 1945 we are rid of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) and Peaceful Co-existence of the people of the world is possible.

The original point of my BLOG was to help raise the City of Wolverhampton from its former position of Capital of Racism in Britain in the days of Enoch Powell 1951 to 1974, to a the most important University city and Centre of Culture, 2007. Although the BLOG has extended to have a national impact this only adds to the importance of Wolverhampton competing with the likes of Scotland, Manchester, Liverpool, Brighton and others in becoming the most important city in Britain.

END.

Dear David

You’ve had so many opportunities to to join the immortals by repudiating Bush’s and Blair’s war in Iraq and elsewhere and failed to take it, that you seem to have an urge to commit hari-kiri.

Consider the facts. Bush turned overnight by US electors from most powerful despot and racist in the world to an impotent nobody. And Blair necessarily sharing the same fate. Those who Bush persecuted become logically important. Re-enter on this scene Osama bin Laden.

Almost everyone agrees that the only solution is to withdraw from Iraq and leave the unfortunate Iraqis to make what they can of the havoc wrought in their country by Bush and Blair.

Yet you stubbornly refuse to condemn the war.

And look where it leads you. Blair will put to Parliament a nuclear programme for Trident which will result in Labour opposition and the only man  who can save Blair is you we are told. Could there be a more absurd position for you.

It is interesting to speculate what would happen at that debate if you decide to support Blair. Unknown numbers of Labour MPs will revolt against Blair, and an unknown, but substantial number of Tory MPs will revolt against your leadership. The Lib-Dems will vote to a man and women against Blair because they never supported the war in the first place. Add to that the Scottish Nationalists intention to vote against Blair and add the smaller parties and Blair could well lose the vote. In fact whether Blair wins or loses carcely matters since he now has no power at all. Nor will you have any power even if you win the next general election because by then Iraq will no longer be on the agenda  we  having been chucked out.

As I have said before. Get wise and join the majority of the people of the world who are against all wars and want to live in this exciting modern world in peace and security.

GEORGE BARNSBY
GB Working Class Library and Free Communist Bookshop