Source: Morning Star

Jeremy Corbyn MP remembers his friend Mike Marqusee, prolific writer and tireless activist who couldn’t stomach Tony Blair and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A fascinating and complex man, Mike was never afraid to deal with difficult questions, be they personal or political, or both.

He wrote frequently about cancer from the standpoint of his own experience and of total support and admiration for the NHS and the treatment he received.

Notably, he became irritated when people would tell him he was “brave,” in fighting cancer. He pithily put it in a Guardian article: “This is a front line, it is impossible to flee from.”

Mike as ever used his own experience to make the political point that as a naturalised British person born in the US he received excellent health treatment which in the US would have bankrupted him and his family, or left him with an xunpayable and ongoing debt.

He loathed and hated the free-market economics and immorality and hypocrisy of the US healthcare system.

Mark Steel & Jeremy Corbyn at funeral of Mike Marqusee, 20/02/2015

I first met Mike as a Labour Party member in Haringey when he was a youth worker in Holloway, north London. He was an inspiration to the disparate group of youth who enjoyed zany evenings with Mike at the former Highbury Roundhouse.

Indeed, only a month ago, as I was cycling home on a wet and cold night, a woman stopped me and asked how Mike was, because she had heard he was not well and went on to talk about the positive influence he had made on her life even though she gave him a hard time as a youth some 30 years ago.

He was a very effective member of the Labour Party, particularly in Islington North, and a great friend and support to me on many occasions. He couldn’t stomach new Labour, Blair and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He was politically active all of his life on the left, and never saw things through a sectarian prism.

His writings are what we have and they are amazing and prolific. His great work, jointly with Richard Heffernan, Defeats from the Jaws of Victory was a brilliant analysis of the 1992 election campaign and Labour’s constant retreat ideologically from the Tories.

Mike loved sport, poetry, politics and history, and had the rare ability to be a “sport nut” in his own words and at the same time be objective about the commercial interests and dishonesty of sport.

His love for cricket and India and Pakistan, partly because of their love for the game, enabled him to explore the colonial heritage of cricket in the great tradition of CLR James.

Mike’s Anyone But England, with its lovely subheading Cricket and the National Malaise, dealt in detail with not only the history of the game but also the class-ridden nature of the cricket establishment and the often dubious financing of so-called professional cricketers, in the way the game was supposedly an amateur sport.

Mike wrote an amazing book about Muhammad  Ali, titled Redemption Song, which he described as Ali in the spirit of the 1960s. In it he managed to weave together both Ali’s boxing career, the politics of the time, his victories, later his imprisonment and opposition to the Vietnam war and then an amazing comeback to become the all-American icon of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

He wrote many other books and one he was very proud of was Chimes of Freedom — about the politics of Bob Dylan’s art — in which he deftly wove together Dylan’s exploration and growth as a musician in the early 1960s with the civil rights movement in the US and including the killing of James Meredith, Martin Luther King and many others, and the inspiration that Dylan’s music gave to the anti-war movement.

Published by Verso Books

Mike also wrote in his deeply honest book If I Am Not For Myself about life growing up in the US as a young Jewish boy, his strong opposition to the Vietnam war, which had a big effect on him, and describing his anti-zionist Jewish attitudes — all a fascinating description of how his own politics were formed. Mike was a strong supporter of the rights and justice for all Palestinian people.

When he wrote he would become totally absorbed in the subject. His studies of William Blake for example have showed a depth and breadth of knowledge of English history, poetry and the mysticism Blake encompassed, and the huge political influence he’s had on the lives of many people.

He loved poetry deeply and wrote great poetry himself.

Mike should be respected for his selfless devotions to the cause of socialism and justice, his understanding of the power of culture and sport, and the way in which he illustrated how colonialism and racism has so brutally disfigured the lives of so many people.

In the few hours after his death, messages were already on social media — all over the world — from people who had been inspired by his work and his infectious activism.

Mike’s progressive family were an important influence on him. His partner and the love of his life lawyer Liz Davies, former chair of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, gave amazing support and inspiration to him, and our deepest sympathies must go to Liz.

Socialists need to always remember that an understanding of culture and history is as essential as any understanding of economics as vehicles for social change.

Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, received a huge welcome from the Glastonbury Festival crowd when he appeared on the main Pyramid Stage on Saturday 24 June 2017. He made an appeal to equality, and an end to the division in wealth and poverty. “We’re doing things differently, we’re doing things better!”

He quoted the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley :

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.

“Let us be together and recognise another world is possible, if we come together to… achieve a decent, better society where everybody matters.”

The crowd response

“Oh, Jeremy Corbyn, Oh Jeremy Corbyn”. Glastonbury crowds cheer the Labour leader as he delivers a political speech. pic.twitter.com/uULZIoRWBG

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) June 24, 2017

Jeremy Corbyn’s speech in full

There’s a message on that wall for President Donald Trump. And do you know what it says? “Build bridges, not walls.”

Politics is actually about everyday life. It’s about all of us, what we dream, what we want, and what we want for everybody else.

The commentariat got it wrong. The elites got it wrong. Politics is about the lives of all of us, and the wonderful campaign that I was involved with, that I was so proud to lead, brought people back into politics because they believed there was something on offer for them.

But what was even more inspiring was the number of young people who got involved for the first time.

Because they were fed up with being denigrated, fed up with being told they don’t matter. Fed up with being told they never participate, and utterly fed up with being told that their generation was going to pay more to get less in education, in health, in housing, in pensions and everything else.

That they should accept low wages and insecurity, and they should see it as just part of life. Well it didn’t quite work out like that did it?

And do you know what? That politics that got out of the box, is not going back in any box, because we’re there demanding and achieving something very different in our society and in our lives. There’s a number of things they’re very simple very basic questions we should ask ourselves.

Is it right that so many people in our country have no home to live in and only the street to sleep on?

Is it right that so many people are frightened of where they live at the moment, having seen the horrors of what happened at Grenfell Tower?

Is it right that so many people live in such poverty, in a society surrounded by such riches? No it obviously is not.

And is it right that European nationals living in this country, making their contribution to our society, working in our hospitals, schools and universities, don’t know if they are going to be allowed to remain here.

I say, they all must stay, and they all must be part of our world, and be part of our community.

Because what festivals, what this festival is about, are about coming together. This festival was envisaged as being for music yes, but also for the environment, and for peace.

You heard the message from E P Thompson earlier on, and what a wonderful man he was.

Do you know what? When people across the world think the same, cooperate the same, maybe in different languages, in different faiths, in different cultures, peace is possible, and must be achieved.

And do you know what? Let’s stop the denigration of refugees, people looking for a place of safety in a cruel and dangerous world.

They are all human beings just like all of us here today, looking for a place of safety and looking to make their contribution to the future of all of us, so let’s support them in their hour of need, not see them as a threat and a danger.

But let’s also look at instability and problems around the world and tackle the causes of war: the greed for natural resources, the denial of human rights, the imprisonment of political opponents.

Let’s look to build a world of human rights, peace, justice, and democracy all over the planet.

This place in Glastonbury is truly wonderful. I remember coming to this area as a child being taken up to Glastonbury tour by my mum and dad and thinking what a wonderful place it is, because there’s something very special about it.

It’s a place where people come together and they achieve things.

We have a democracy because people laid down their lives that we might have the right to vote, because women laid down their lives that women would get the right to vote at the time of the First World War.

That determination of the collective, won us, won us all, the principle of healthcare as a human right for all of us.

Nothing was given from above, nothing was given from above by the elites and the powerful, it was only ever gained from below by the masses of people demanding something better, demanding their share of the wealth and the cake that’s created.

So it is about bringing those ideas together, it is about the unity that we achieve and we achieve inspiration though lots of things.

In every child there’s a poem, in every child there’s a painting, in every child there’s music, and do you know what? As people get older we get embarrassed about that, thinking wooooh, can’t be thinking that sort of thing, can’t be writing poetry.

No. I want all our children to be inspired, all our children to have the right to play music, to write poetry, to learn in the way that they want.

In this festival, this wonderful festival, with all its stages and all its music, gives that choice and that opportunity to so many young musicians that they can achieve and inspire us all and I’m proud to be here for that, I’m proud to be here to support the peace movement and its activities here and the way that message gets across, but I’m also very proud to be here for the environmental causes that go with it.

We cannot go on destroying this planet through global warming, through pollution, through destruction of habitat, through pollution of our seas and our rivers.

We have to live on this planet, there is only one planet, not even Donald Trump believes there’s another planet somewhere else.

And so let us protect the planet we have got, use the technology we have to manage and control the use of our natural resources that the planet has her for future generations in better state than it is at the present time.

But it’s also about our creativity, creativity that brought us the things we have talked about, but that creativity together can be a tool for getting a message across, a message that racism is wrong, divisive and evil within our society.

Racism in any form divides, weakens and denies us the skills and brilliance of people who are being discriminated against in just the same way that sexism was, be it in lower pay for women, less opportunities for women, or less aspirations.

We need to challenge sexism in any form in our society, to challenge homophobia, to challenge all the discrimination that goes on and to ensure that the society that we want to build is one that’s inclusive for all.

I want to see a world where there’s real opportunity for everybody within our society, that means sharing the wealth out in every part of our country and looking to global policies that share the wealth, not glorify in the injustice of inequality where the rich seem to get inextricably richer and the vast majority continually lose out, and those that are desperately poor live on the margins of society euphemistically known as the fourth world.

Surely we can as intelligent human beings do things differently and do things better.

And when we are here in Glastonbury we are doing things differently, we are doing things better, and we are seeing that inspiration.

And there are many people that we learn from in our lives, we learn from our parents, we learn from our teachers, we learn from those that have written music for us or written poetry for us.

It’s that sense of unlocking the potential in all of us that I find so inspiring, and I’m inspired by many poets and many people, and I think we should adopt a maxim in life, that everyone we meet is unique, everyone we meet knows something we don’t know, is slightly different to us in some ways.

Don’t see them as a threat, don’t see them as an enemy, see them as a source of knowledge, a source of friendship, and a source of inspiration.

And if I may, I would like to quote one of my favourite poets Percy B. Shelley, who wrote in the early 19th Century, many, many poems and travelled extensively around Europe.

And the line I like the best is this one:

Rise like lions after slumber,
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew:
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
You are many, they are few!

I quote Shelley because he inspired like so many others do. I’m proud to be at Glastonbury because it inspires so many music festivals all over the country.

Let us be together and recognise another world is possible if we come together to understand that , understand the power we have got, and achieve a decent, better society where everyone matters, and those poverty-stricken people are enriched in their lives and the rest of us are secured by their enrichment.

Thank you very much!

Source: Labour Party

Whether it be UKIP in Britain, Donald Trump in the United States, Jobbik in Hungary or Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France.

Politics has been shaken across the world and, as socialists and progressives,  we know very well why the populist right is gaining ground. But we are finding it increasingly hard to get our message heard and it is up to us to offer the political leadership needed for a real alternative.

We know the gap between rich and poor is widening. We know living standards are stagnating or falling and insecurity is growing. We know that many people feel left behind by the forces unleashed by globalization – powerless in the face of deregulated corporate power.

Often the populist right do identify the right problems but their solutions are the toxic dead ends of the past, seeking to divert it with rhetoric designed to divide and blame.

They are political parasites, feeding on people’s concerns and worsening conditions, blaming the most vulnerable for society’s ills instead of offering a way to take back real control of our lives from powerful elites who serve their own interests.

But unless progressive parties and movements break with that failed economic and political establishment it is the siren voices of the populist far right that will fill the gap

It can be difficult to convince the long-term unemployed that the reason there is no work is not that immigrants are stealing their jobs but the result of the economic programme of the right that has failed to deliver sustainable growth, security and rising living standards for all.

Or It can be hard to make clear that our public services are being run down because of years of austerity and predatory privatisation, rather than overspending and government waste, but it is vital that we do.

We cannot abandon our socialist principles because we are told this is the only way to win power. That is nonsense.

The reason we are losing ground to the right today is because the message of what socialism is and what it can achieve in people’s daily lives has been steadily diluted.

Many people no longer understand what we stand for.

Too often in recent years the left in Europe has been seen as apologists for a broken system rather than the answer to how to deliver radical social and economic reform for the 21^st century.

Too often the left has been seen as the accomplice to reckless, unfettered capitalism rather than a challenge to it.

Too often the left has been seen as standing up for the privileged few rather than for the many we exist to represent and defend.

If we are only seen as protectors of the status quo how can we expect people to turn to us when they can see that status quo has failed?

We must stand for real change, and a break with the failed elite politics and economics of the past.

If we do, I have every confidence that the principles of solidarity, internationalism and socialism that we stand for can be at the heart of European politics in the 21^st century.

That’s why it is vital that our rhetoric cannot be used to legitimise the scapegoating of refugees or migrant workers.

When we talk about refugees we need to talk about them as human beings, not as numbers, or as a burden, but instead as children, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters.

And when we face the challenge of migration we need to work together to halt the exploitation of migrant labour to undercut pay and conditions in a race to the bottom across Europe. We cannot allow the parties of the right to sow divisions and fan the flames of fear.

When it comes to Britain’s referendum vote to leave the European Union we in the Labour party respect that decision, and we want to work together with Socialist and progressive parties across Europe to find the best possible solution that benefits both Britain and the EU in the Brexit negotiations.

Labour is calling on the British Government to guarantee the rights of all EU Citizens before Article 50 negotiations begin, and not to use them as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

Labour is pushing for Brexit negotiations to be carried out in a transparent manner, in a spirit that aims to find a deal that works for all across our the continent.

I believe our movement has the new ideas to take on and beat the populist right.. But we must harvest those ideas and that energy, allow a space within our parties for new ideas to be heard and build a movement with a democratic culture at its very heart.

It is when people lose faith in the power of politics to improve people’s lives that the space opens up for the far right to scapegoat and blame. Our task is harder, to restore people’s confidence that we have both the vision and an understanding of the lives of those we represent to change them for the better.

Many people are worried about the direction that Europe is taking. Well now is time for us to turn the tide. To put the interests of working people front and centre stage and  to fight for our values, of social justice, solidarity, equality and internationalism.

If we do that together, and break with the failed politics of the past, I am confident we can overcome the challenge from the populist right.

Creeping Fascism: Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of the Far Right

A tide of racism, nationalism, and authoritarianism is sweeping the world. With the world economy hobbled by debt and stagnation, society being torn apart by austerity and inequality, and a political system paralysed by corporate power, support for the Far Right is surging. This new book by Dr Neil Faulkner and Samir Dathi argues that we face the clear and present danger of ‘creeping fascism’.

Price £12 post free

Free Movement and Beyond – Agenda Setting for Brexit Britain

Current thinking of prominent ‘critical Remainers’ who argued for staying within the European Union while seeking its democratic and progressive transformation. Among the contributors are Diane Abbott MP, Yanis Varoufakis, Mary Kaldor and Caroline Lucas MP.

Price: £9.95