This also ignores that whatever remains of the Communist Party is essentially an appendage of Labour. Not that this is something to be proud of, I’m just pointing out that you can stuff your hyperbole up your arse.

As for who reads my blog, I care why? Though you’d be surprised; I’ve gone to different constituency and wider Labour meetings and been approached by people who read and enjoy this blog – even if they don’t comment.

Err, you’re a bit thick to be in Labour then aren’t you? Or do you believe it is constructive to be in a party where 99.99% of the other members think you’re talking absolute bollocks?

Perhaps you know you couldn’t get elected as a member of any of the far-left parties that actually share your views. How does “power before principle” fit into your Marxian worldview, then?

I’m not even going to comment on this notion of me wishing to elect a ‘radical Labour government’…it makes me wonder if you’ve been reading anything I’ve said.

To move to more substantive issues:

First of all, I have pointed out that the case of liberties is a problem with the British ‘establishment’. I haven’t used that word ‘establishment’ because the British establishment is not limited to people, or structures of power. It has an ideological element as well, which I don’t think the word adequately conveys.

Take the next step, however. Your next step is to deny that anything can be done. My next step is to suggest what has to be done, the upshot being there is no alternative (oh irony of ironies!). Either we build the activist movement you sneer at as being naive or we (and who that we is, I’ll come to in a moment) remain forever the pawns of these political elites, the vagaries of global capitalism and the corresponding ideology and intellectual fads which tie those things together.

It is the working class which much build that movement. I don’t know how you can maintain that there is no working class, unless you are using a really bastardised version of the term to mean ‘manual’ or ‘unskilled’ labour, which has declined as deindustrialisation has progressed. I’m using it (what else?) in the Marxist sense of: those people who create surplus value but do not control the uses to which it is put. In that sense there are more of us than ever.

We are disorganised – but we are disorganised as the result of a concrete, historical battle. One part of that was the Miners’ strike, but it goes far beyond that of course – and extends even to the era of ‘consensus’ politics between these so-called Keynsian Conservatives and their Labour equivalents. The reason the Miners’ strike looms so large in labour history is that it was a key turning point.

Many historians use that phrase of it, but I don’t mean it as some form of irreversible epoch-change, such as the invention of the telephone. It’s not a case of once-done-you-can’t-go-back. Formally speaking we can’t change the past, but we can rebuild the movement that was involved in the struggles of the 1980s (which went far beyond the Miners) and fight new battles. One of those battles will be about our liberties.

Your accusations of ex post facto rationalisation strike me as rather absurd. I’m not advocating a defence of the Labour Party; indeed, I’ve often clashed with fellow members about the realities of our chances of conquering the Party using internal structures which are basically set up to obfuscate any sort of democratic will of the active membership, whether by use of plebiscites, or union bloc votes or depriving Conference of its former powers.

The Labour Party is a fact of history; if it is lost, it is lost. I have no emotional attachment to it and frankly I’d rather not be in the same party as James Purnell. I am not convinced it is lost while there is such a large movement of working class activists and the remnants of the organised working class based around the LRC, which I mentioned earlier.

With this, we begin to get off the original point. My contention was not that the Tories will necessarily be worse – although they could be, we have no idea what events the future holds for terrorist attacks on this nation, plus corresponding media whipping up of public outrage etc. My contention is that building a movement to change decisively our situation in regard to civil liberties is harmed by being so close to the Conservatives, and to a lesser extent the Lib Dems.

This I have addressed still further in the article above entitled “Convention on Modern Liberties: a brief reply”.

Dave – if you think you’ve got me ‘bang to rights’, I fear you haven’t been listening. I didn’t need your long screed on the illiberality of the Tories; it’s taken as read. I’m only surprised that you don’t draw the obvious conclusion from your argument: that this is a problem with the British establishment, whoever happens to be running it.

I think your vision of a strong, activist base holding the government’s feet to the fire is charming but naive. It’s never happened, in living memory, and it certainly won’t happen now. There’s barely a working class in Britain any more, let alone an organised one.

Any party that vies seriosuly for political power in Britain is interested in cracking heads. Nonetheless, if we’re going to get into the evolution of political parties, one could equally well argue that a genuine conservative (of which there are one or two left in the Tory party, amongst all the neoliberals, and who arguably may be re-emerging as a force) has more of a commitment to the personal liberty of the individual than a genuine socialist; certainly in the British context.

Tory and Labour both prove authoritarian when in government; but I can see no reason, epistemological or otherwise, to suppose that the Tory party currently would be worse than Labour. My point about the miners’ strike example was that if the best you can come up with to convince me otherwise is a one-off industrial dispute which happened when I was 11, then … well, I remain unconvinced. Parties change. Labour has changed, radically, form a socialist, or at least socially democratic party, to a neoliberal one. The Tories changed radically when they elected Thatcher as leader, from a bunch of Keynesian conservatives to, er, another bunch of neoliberals. Parties change as times change, especially parties as opportunistic as the Tories.

In fact, I remain unconvinced by British politics as a whole. The whole shabby spectacle of elites vying for power is recognised as a joke by most people, and rightly so. As I explored in my first book, the global market in any case renders any genuinely radical political project null and void, whether they are attempted in the UK of South Africa.

If you want to believe, against all the evidence that I can see, that a popular working class movement is some day going to arise and elect a radical Labour government which will actually fulfill its promises rather than kowtow to capital, then I admire your optimism, but I don’t share it. It sounds to me like the ex post-facto rationalisation of tribalism rather than a glimpse into political realities.

I agree with Paul that Labour councillors at local level can do some good things (as well as some very bad ones; where I live the Labour councillors are largely venal and spineless, and spend most of their time rolling over in front of corporate developers). But for a genuine radical, there have to be better places to be.

You can be Don Paskini if I can be Bickerstaffe Record

Paul K – at least Dave hasn’t accused you of intellectual masturbation, though it’s possible he’s just warming up this morning.