Though Cowards Flinch

Looks spookily like George Galloway in this picture

Hidden somewhere within a series of letters addressed to Bishop Creighton, Lord Acton made examples of powerful and influential men (the King, to name one example, and the Pope) insisting that in cases of moral criminality, they were not above the law – the opinion seemingly held by his interlocutor.

‘Here are the greatest names coupled with the greatest crimes’ Lord Acton exclaimed of those highly authoritative men –  ’you would spare those criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice, still more, still higher for the sake of historical science.’

Creighton fetishised these men somewhat, until to him it seemed they were immune to laws all others were subject to. Lord Acton had no truck with this; to the extent where he distrusted those who exercised influence. ‘Great men’, he said, ‘are almost always bad men’.

What preceded this was a quote Lord Acton is now most infamously known for: ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’

But Lord Acton was wrong, right? If “[p]ower tends to corrupt,” then surely “absolute power” only has a tendency to corrupt absolutely.

By using the word ‘tends’ Acton acknowledges that corruption is not a necessary element of power, but that the tendency is there. However in the claim that follows, Acton seems to imply that corruption is a logical necessity of power.

Post-hoc (corruption), ergo propter hoc (power).

He contradicts himself.

Lord Acton says the word ‘and’ before adding ‘power corrupts absolutely’, where the word but would appear better suited (though of course he would still be wrong, assuming he sticks with the belief that power tends to corrupt).

Dropping the word tendency in the second part of Acton’s infamous line shows his logic to be flawed – perhaps Alex Callinicos, leading member of the Socialist Workers’ Party and great grandson of Lord Acton, consequently felt duty bound to be the secretary of the International Socialist Tendency…

Dominic Hobson: author and proto-fascist

The decision by the Daily Telegraph to publish this article by its personal finance expert, Iain Cowie, on election day was an interesting one, to say the least.

Cowie’s core proposal, padded out with a few hundred words of distinctly bizarre, very 1980′s retro-game theory about blokes in a pub, is as follows:

Why don’t we restrict votes to people who actually pay something into the system? No, I am not suggesting a return to property-based eligibility; although that system worked quite well when Parliament administered not just Britain but most of the world. Today, income would be a much better test, setting the bar as low as possible; perhaps including everyone who pays at least £100 of income tax each year.

The initial reaction of most people who saw the article will surely have been a mix of amusement and bemusement, and perhaps a little horror, that the Telegraph should be providing a platform for someone advocating, presumably seriously, the termination of universal suffrage. 

But perhaps it’s better not to be too complacent about this being some kind of off-the-wall self-parody, because the broad idea that votes for everyone is a bad idea appears to be gaining ground.  

Cowie’s article is in fact not much more than a badly mangled version of an essay by Dominic Hobson published on Hobson’s Global Custodian company blog in 2010.  Indeed, it is likely that Cowie knows Hobson from London’s financial journalism circles, and it is intriguing to wonder to what extent the question of how to disenfranchise the poor has been a subject of polite dinner party debate, or whether it’s one of those subjects which still only comes up when the lads have moved from the wine bar champers to the pub and are one over the eight.

Hobson therefore arrives at the same conclusion as Cowie, though he expresses it somewhat more fundamentally:

The only lasting solution to the plague of unlimited democracy is to attack democracy at its moral foundation: the political equality of the citizen.

The logic by which he gets to this conclusion is deeply flawed of course.  For Hobson, the key cause of the crisis of capitalism (2007-11) was “the wilful misconduct of monetary policy” by “politicians, public officials and central bankers”.   Bankers (the non-central ones) are simply “scapegoats”, in Hobson’s version of the world.

From this insight, Hobson then feels able to establish that capitalist growth is always and iredeemably disrupted by having too much democracy, rather than by, say, any flaws inherent to the capitalist system. Too much democracy, Hobson argues, leads us to:

predatory public sector coalitions of government employees, trade unionists and socialist politicians, which prey on their private sector counterparts to the point where substantial tax rebellions are in train already.

In Hobsonworld, those people generally known as “tax avoiders” really are noble “rebels” standing up for liberty in the face of the onslaught of the socialist horde.

Yet the fact that you can drive a socialist tank through the holes in Hobson’s logic is less important than the fact that he is now out there, loud and proud making what he claims is an intellectually valid case for terminating the voting rights of large numbers of people. 

For Hobson is not a foam-mouthed American nutjob, though his essay has been picked up with glee by some such nutjobs, and some of the language he adopts in his essay seems designed for that market. 

Hobson is a well-respected financial journalist and commentator, whose wider reputation rests largely on his magisterial ‘National Wealth: Who Gets What in Britain’ written in the late 1990s. His style and (at least hitherto) keen intellect thus make for an essay which will convince many on the Right, who largely lack the acumen and/or desire to see through the holes in his logic.

In Hobson’s apparent trajectory from normal enough right-wing financial analyst of the early 21st century (1), to proto-fascist of 2010, we should perhaps see broader warning signals that the core of our democratic rights may come under threat in a way which is currently difficult to imagine, but which may surprise us all the more because it is currently so unthinkable.

Certainly, if we dig a little below the surface, the signs are there that those libertarian who self-project themselves as moral custodians of individual freedoms are starting to talk explicitly of who qualifies for such freedom, and to make the case against those who do not meet their criteria.  Thus, one such libertarian constructs his anti-tax case on the basis of two different ‘classes’ of people:

I resent taxation. It is the method by which the political classes rob the productive class to buy the votes of the less productive classes. As a member of the productive class, what’s to like ?

This notion that only those making a net contribution to society should have rights is of course linked to the conditionality of rights espoused in New Labour’s dalliance with communitarianism, but has become more explicit under the new Conservative government.  Thus it comes as no surprise, in hindsight, to note that the Conservative manifesto made an explicit

ambition of every adult citizen being a member of an active neighbourhood group (p.37).

There is, I suggest, a political and philosophical link between the responsibilities imposed on citizens by the Big Society agenda and the potential for the withdrawal of what have hitherto been seen as fundamental rights from those whom the state decides are not meeting their responsibilities.

Maybe, in this context, we should be dusting off our old copies (or the pdfs) of Robert Michels’ seminal Political Parties (published 1911), and starting to pay heed to the ‘iron law of oligarchy’, under which Conservative regimes are driven ineluctably towards political authoritarianism, and – as an adjunct –  the kind of politicised thought-policing we have seen in recent weeks (Unsurprisingly, those “rebelling” against tax on petrol, were able to go about their protest, and make their threats to close down a major source of the country’s energy, without so much as a second glance from the police).

Of course I’m not suggesting that the Conservative government is currently drafting up a bill to remove the right of “non-taxpayers” to vote in the next election.  Any attempt to restrict voting rights would be more likely to come initially in the form of, let us say, the localism agenda, where already people are to be granted the right to a referendum AGAINST taxes, but not for them, and where quite conceivably Big Society logic might in time determine that only those who ’put into’ their local community get a say in how it is run.

But these may be philosophical bridgeheads to a wider argument, more openly pursued by right-wing politicians at the behest of opinion-formers like Dominic Hobson, that restricting democracy to those who make the ”correct” choices is an idea whose time has come (back).

On the Left, we need to be aware that, in the UK and elsewhere, the Right is quite content to use the “specious democratic mask” (Michels, p.11) to develop its authoritarian control in the name of the popular will, and that this may include changing the face of what democracy is – from a human right to a property right.  In the UK, we now have plenty of evidence that the ruling upper-class elite in the UK, though not in itself fascistic, is – by dint of its resource dependency - open to influence from a far right, which IS now dallying with fascism, to a much greater extent than they would have us know.

It is for the Left to ensure that our government is not, in time, confronted by Hobson’s choice.

Notes:

 (1)  In the preface to The National Wealth: Who Gets What in Britain Hobson says this of his own political leanings:

My preferences are obvious, but not I hope intrusive. They lie with shoppers rather than votes; taxpayers, not tax-eaters; entrepreneurs over professionals; and with market rather than institutions, especially of the political kind.

Last year author Steve Coll presented a study of the bin Laden family to an audience at the LSE, a podcast of which can be downloaded from the LSE website and is well worth a listen.

My favourite story from the presentation starts by introducing Mohammed bin Laden, Father of Osama and entrepeneur. He sent his children to study in boarding schools either in Lebanon or England, not happy with the quality of local education offered in Saudi Arabia at the time. As a wealthy Saudi Royal, he could afford aircraft and had pilots including ex-US military personnel to transport him to business meetings, foreign shopping trips etc. 

On a particular excursion in 1967, near the Yemeni border, Mohammed bin Laden’s pilot made a miscalculation, stalled the plane, falling 500 ft to his, and his passenger’s', deaths.

When Mohammed bin Laden died he left behind a $150m construction company which had many contracts, including in Jerusalem where Mohammed had a house which was seized during the war in Israel in 1967.

The company was left to Salem bin Laden, Osama’s elder brother. At the time he lived in Gloucester Road, London, having just finished school. He was an eccentric, and performed in a rock band called The Echoes.

He had acquired his Father’s business intuitions, but was reluctant to adopt the kind of culture which surrounded top CEO’s at the time. One time he was dining with a CEO from a Fortune 1000 company who ordered an expensive bottle of red wine. When the waiter brought the wine over bin Laden’s business guest began to complain about the wine’s taste, purposely belittling the restaurant staff. Salem, pretending to use the bathroom of the restaurant went in to the back room where the staff were, requested the waiter transfer the wine into a different bottle and serve it. When the waiter did this bin Laden’s guest exclaimed that this was the proper wine and that the waiter ought to have done his job properly to begin with. Soon after Salem ended their business relationship.

In the 80s him and his now notorious brother would collaborate, and though having different attitudes to life, religion, had very meaningful relations. In May 88 the two went to Texas to fly ultra light aircraft, and despite Salem’s skill as a pilot himself, flew into some powerlines, fell and died.

After, Osama bin Laden went back to Afghanistan and two months later formed al Qaeda.   

Peter Hitchens talks about David Cameron as though he were a sandal wearing, bearded leftie. In spite of Cameron’s rhetoric on the EU that half our laws emanate from EU bureaucrats, his alignment to the European Conservatives and Reformists (which according to pro-Europe Ken Clarke sits the Tory party with neo-fascists or cranks in Europe) and his constant snubs (today Downing Street refused to fly the EU flag, defying Europe Union “wishes”), Hitchens says Cameron has done nothing to stop Britain from sleepwalking into Europe’s arms.

But then Hitchens would say that – for him everything bad, from abortion to crime to human rights, has by its side a box-ticking regulator with a foreign accent.

Cameron can say what he wants about the EU, but Hitchens will tell us that the homunculus inside the Prime Minister’s head is wearing a blue tie with yellow stars on it.

Though it is fair to say Hitchens is not always the best judge of good reasons to stay out of Europe; much like Dan Hannan for whom it appears 85% of laws come straight from legislation books locked up in Herman Van Rompuy’s secret underground lab which one enters to the overbearing sound of Ode To Joy (and Beethoven was probably a freemason – coincidence? Er, yes!).

But Hitchens is nothing if not consistent in his dislike of the EU, and his judgement that the UK Conservative party secretly likes the membership status it has in Europe. In May 2009 he wrote an article suggesting that while Thatcher saw off the dreaded unions, she did little to counter the “cultural revolutionaries who wanted to undermine marriage, dissolve the family, sexualise children and use State schools as an egalitarian sausage machine, turning out brainwashed Leftists by the million.”

For him there was little point in Thatcher defeating the shop stewards since so many of our laws are dictated by the unelected directive in Europe.

But while not agreeing with the premise, I happen to agree with Hitchens that Thatcher created the grounds where the EU cold flourish in the UK (though, of course, Hitchens would have no truck with my conclusions). Firstly, in ruthlessly destroying the lives of miners, and so much of the workforce in Britain, she weakened the industrial base of the country. She recognised that industry, and worse nationalised industry, provided too much security for the wage labourers who she despised, and did nothing to conquer the world – a task she admired, educated, as she was, to be an Empire politician.

Thatcher really came at the wrong time; the sun had set for the imperial nation she grew up fantasising about, but post-industrialism opened up a new promise – what if Britain was a economic powerhouse! Mother Hayek destroyed the public sector and brought about a neo-liberal model, re-inscribed later by Blair, and whose ferocity has been matched by today’s coalition government under the banner “big society”. Perversely, however, this new model required a new workforce; the unskilled worker, and much of it. While Enoch Powell warned of the rivers of blood, Thatcher’s capitalism required as many workers as possible (too many if necessary, to keep unemployed workers as back-up to drive down wages and undercut unions). The best way to sustain this model was to free up trade, and exploit the immigrant workforce – a set of principles which has been written into every European Union treaty from Maastricht to Lisbon.

Clearly Thatcher had worked anti-Europe rhetoric into her brand, much as Cameron has done, but the European Union is really the sum total of the conservative capitalism they both adore so much. They both may have waxed lyrical to the tune of isolationism, but a free market EU is set in stone in the Conservative party unconscious.

It is for this reason that there is still a plausible Left case against the EU; at best the European Union is a charter for unregulated capitalism with an unelected hub at the beck and call of multinational corporations who are free to exploit the resources of whichever workforce it chooses, set up shop in whichever country gives it the best deal for tax and regulation, move whole swathes of the workforce from place to place and can pick up and leave whenever it wants – reducing whole areas to depression and despair.

It used to be said that a Pro-European Tory was a Liberal Democrat, indeed many former members of the Tory Reform Group are now Liberal Democrats (Baron Lee of Trafford, Baron Dykes, Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne to name but three). But their difference to modern Conservative party attitudes towards the EU is that they were avowed in their championing of EU policy. Free market and neoliberal Tories forget how closely they operate under the EU spell. Any leftie who opposes Thatcherism (and that is nearly every one) should oppose the EU too.

Slate Magazine tonight have said Newt Gingrich will run for Republican presidential nomination.

Bryan Fischer is the Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association – a conservative organisation which promotes “Christian values”. He has been keeping US bloggers and commentators busy recently with his almost daily dose of bile which he often pumps out during his talk radio program Focal Point on American Family Radio.

To cite some examples, it is Fischer’s opinion that all new immigrants to the US must convert to Christianity or stay put and that the US should put an end to all Muslim immigration.

He once wrote on his blog that welfare in the US has destroyed the African-American family by telling them that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and that the state has incentivised “fornication rather than marriage” to which he reasoned “it’s no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits.”

Elsewhere Fischer stated that Native Americans, on account of their inability to convert to Christianity, were “morally disqualified” from maintaining their land.

He has also called grizzly bears a “curse” – but you get the idea; he’s not a very nice man indeed, and his rhetoric is filled with hate.

The American Family Association and a former US House Speaker

If you were planning on running for Presidential candidate (or at least testing those waters) – on a moderate GOP ticket – you probably wouldn’t want to touch the man with a bargepole. But Newt Gingrich has done just that.

Associated Press broke the story in March a “group connected to former U.S. House Speaker [...] contributed $125,000 to a Mississippi nonprofit organization […] AFA Action Inc., a nonprofit arm of the American Family Association”. Anyone else might have claimed ignorance saying they cannot micromanage every transaction or some other excuse, but instead Gingrich decided just to deny the extreme views of the AFA, saying:

You [Igor Volsky, Health Care Policy Editor for ThinkProgress.org, questioning Gingrich] bring a series of allegations that I can’t check about a group that is largely a Christian based membership group, that is fairly widespread in its membership and I suspect most of those people do not in any way think of themselves as a hate group even if that’s how you would characterize them.

I suggest Gingrich picks up a newspaper once in a while and checks the views of AFAs’ spokesperson – he’ll soon see rather than being a mere Christian organisation, it is host to an anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-Grizzly bear bigot whose absurd opinions are the real threat.

Islam and the Law of the Land

Another recent controversy involved Fischer saying Muslims have no first amendment rights “for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam.”

Of course the first amendment actually guarantees freedom of religion and “prohibits the government from passing legislation to establish an official religion or preferring one religion over another.”

But he wriggles out of this one, qualifying his comment: “They have that privilege [to build Mosques in the US] at the moment, but it is a privilege that can be revoked if, as is in fact the case, Islam is a totalitarian ideology dedicated to the destruction of the United States.”

So because Fischer chooses not to distinguish Islam and political Islam, Muslims for him are a political grouping (oh, whose sole intention is to destroy the United States) and thus not worthy of the term religion, safeguarded under the first amendment.

Islam, for Fischer, could not respect the laws of the land in the US and are thus a threat – informing his opinion that all Muslim immigrants are a “toxic cancer”.

But let’s not trust Fischer with the facts on Islam and law; why not consult an expert on the subject.

Professor Shaheen Ali of Warwick University in 2008 waded into the debate about Sharia Law and the UK, as caused by comments by Rowan Williams on the (“unavoidable”) role sharia law has in UK law.

With regards to what Islamic Law has to say about how a Muslim is to conduct oneself in a non-Muslim country, Shaheen Ali notes that:

• there is already a code of practice on how a Muslim conducts themselves and what their obligations viz-a-viz the country to which they now call home

• Britain affords a legal system to all its habitants and is therefore congruent with Islam and social justice

• Britain does not put a curb on the practice of the 5 pillars of Islam (Shahada – the professing of oneself to be a Muslim; Salat – prayer;Zakat – to give to charity; Sawm – the ritual fasting; Hajj – the pilgrimage to Mecca), therefore the laws here must be respected by Muslims, stipulated, Professor Ali states, by “Islamic law”.

The same applies to the US; providing the law does not prohibit Muslims from carrying out their religious practices there is nothing within Islamic Law that says it must distrust the law of the land in which the Muslim finds him/herself.

On first sight Fischer is clearly a crazed right wing nut job, but on closer examination he’s a crazed right wing nut job who doesn’t bother doing his research.

What I find lacking in today’s conversation about electoral reform is the merits of AV itself. Instead we skip straight to its effects. Consider this from Martin Linton, former Labour MP, recently:

The leader of the Australian answer to the BNP, Pauline Hanson, campaigned this month (April) for election to the New South Wales parliament and won 36% of the vote – and would have been declared elected under our British first-past-the-post system. Fortunately it was held under the Australian preferential voting system – and she lost. The seat went to the Greens instead.

What I gather from this is whether we’ve found the perfect electoral system which causes problems for the far right – not how far my vote counts in an election.

Chris Dillow, discussing how difficult it would be to go from AV to PR (many people’s real electoral system of choice), noted:

To get from AV to PR would require there to be dissatisfaction with how AV works, as it is very unlikely that people would agree to ditch something that works tolerably well. But such dissatisfaction would discredit many of those who had argued for AV – and these are the people who are likely to be the ones campaigning for PR. In this sense, moving towards AV might actually delay the adoption of PR.

A week is a long time in politics, and today’s coalition politicians are changing their minds radically on a weekly basis – it would not be unimaginable that those who argued for AV could support a more proportional system later on.

As for those who will be dissatisfied with AV, you can count on those for whom AV was supposed to be radically different – proof of which is slim at best.

Peter Willsman, for Left Futures, recently said:

Coalitions can occasionally occur under First-Past-The-Post but under AV they’d become the norm in Britain rather than the exception.

Dull, centrist politics is already woven into the political landscape today, and future coalition-based governments could have more to do with the dissatisfaction of the major parties than the electoral system.

Aside from all this guff all we really need to know is the following:

What is AV?

AV is the electoral system under which a candidate wins only if they’ve secured the majority of votes.

Is it difficult to understand?

No, it is as Jimmy Carr recently said “snog, marry and avoid with politicians” – voters list the candidates in order of preference.

Is it better than First Past The Post (FPTP)?

Yes. FPTP allows candidates to win on relative majorities, whereas under AV if no candidate secures 50% of the vote, then second preferences are taken into consideration. In other words, instead of letting someone very unrepresentative win, AV allows voters to choose who they’d settle for in the event that no overall winner is decided.

The key thing here is that listing second, third etc preferences is optional – so if you seriously hate all other candidates, you don’t have to vote towards allowing someone you really dislike getting into office.

Is AV proportional?

No. In fact as far as proportionality is concerned it isn’t too different from FPTP, but your vote counts for slightly more.

*

I’m going to vote yes to AV on Thursday, in spite of party loyalty, because it gives the voter a marginally better deal than FPTP. But I look forward to supporting a system of proportional representation next time this conversation comes up.

What a difference a week makes.

Vince Cable, 27th April 2011:

If you drill beneath the overall growth figures this morning, you’ll see that manufacturing growth is being sustained, which is exactly how it should be.

Reuters, 3rd May 2011:

British manufacturing activity grew less robustly than expected in April, at its weakest pace in 7 months, and a sharp slowdown in new orders cast a cloud over what has been a rare bright spot in the UK economy.

I’ll make this quick.  Few people will be interested in why I’ve postally voted #No2AV but I feel bound to record my reasons for posterity, what with the likelihood of me being famous and people wanting good biographic detail and that.

I”m voting No to AV because I think what we get out of voting is, on balance, more important than what we put in. 

We put in our votes, and we get out our duly elected politicians.

So while I agree there’s a legitimacy in the Yes to AV argument that less votes will be ‘wasted’ under AV, and that AV might even increase turnout on this basis, I just don’t think that carries enough weight.  That’s all about individual voters feeling valued.  It’s not about how the country is run.

More important to me than whether my vote ‘counts’ relative to someone else’s is the risk that, under AV, you will get politicians elected not primarily because voters like their political principles and their (party or personal) manifesto, but because they have done just enough not alienate their second preference voters.  

Over time this will create anodyne candidates, grouping towards what they perceive to be the middle ground, not candidates who are prepared to speak out about their political principles and vision, seeking to persuade people that what they are offering is the right way forward.  

I want politicians who aren’t afraid to lose some votes, especially from those whose interests they do NOT represent, because they know they’re picking up enough to win from those whose interests they do.

And yes, in the short term I know that a Yes to AV vote would damage Cameron, but this vote is not just about now.  It’s about what will happen in the long term. 

In the long term, socialists should be able to win under any system, because we should be able to represent, and be seen to represent, the interests of the majority.

Most of us are grown up enough to realise the killing of Osama Bin Laden will not end the war in Afghanistan (in fact, it could flair it up again – also relations with Pakistan could be tense in the future) or spell the end for al-Qaeda.

In fact bets are on as to whether Anwar Al-Awlaki will throw his hat in the ring for the top job.

Terrorism, believe it or not, didn’t end with a bullet through a Saudi’s head.

However many of us are quietly pleased that Bin Laden is history.

That is, of course, with the exception of the Stop the War Coalition, who today put out a statement which had the following to say (authored by Lindsey German):

The US and Britain should remind themselves of the grievances which bin Laden claimed in 2001: the presence of US troops in the Middle East; the treatment of the Palestinians; and the continued sanctions against Iraq. All of these grievances have worsened in the last ten years. There are now western troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, US bases all over the region, and an intervention including troops and airstrikes in Libya. The Palestinians suffer even more, and have been subject to aerial attack by Israel. Iraq suffers full scale occupation as a result of the war in 2003.

Why have they chosen to dignify the grievances of Bin Laden? Granted these include worthy grievances, but to put Bin Laden’s name next them, on this day of all days, comes dangerously close to saying “Bin Laden was right” – in the same way the National Front would say Enoch Powell was right.

The way they’ve juxtaposed the name of an evil terrorist with legitimate concerns is tasteless – and should be retracted, and reworded.

I’ll conclude with the words of David Allen Green:

On the face of it, there is no legal basis for an American President to order the killing of anyone.

[...]

But it is not a problem which many of us will lose sleep over tonight.

May Day this year could have gone either way; on the one hand it was possible trade unionists up and and down the country got all their marching needs out the way on 26 March during the TUC march. Though on the other hand of course activists have mobilised somewhat in the last year, particularly in anticipation of the pinch at the hands of Tory-LibDem cuts.

A woman I was speaking to at Clerkenwell Green told me she had counted around 100 police officers on her way to the square, which made her concerned about the nature of today’s march. Recent events have made some rather nervous (that, or more determined to act). 15 activists in Bristol were arrested recently as protests ripped through the stokes croft area, an individual arrested during the royal wedding event had been singing “we all live in a fascist regime”, and the activist Chris Knight was pre-emptively arrested – taking police power into Minority Report territory.

The same women also opined that May Day be returned to its original roots – that of celebrating the labour force in a more relaxed showing of solidarity, as opposed to the exclusive, family un-friendly event it has possibly become.

As the march started, however, it was clear that nowhere near the same numbers had come out as previous years – trouble was reduced to zero, and there was no presence of blac bloc activists at all (at least not in Trafalgar Square). The police numbers seemed almost irrelevant.

May Day is an important show of worker strength – which is all the more important now David Cameron has threatened to remove it as a public holiday (just another stab in the back for the most vulnerable in society, and a signal of things to come). But today all the energy seemed to be sapped out. And the woman I spoke to appeared to be right; generally the message has been lost (one half of Trafalgar Square seemed almost exclusively filled with banners of Stalin).

Aside from campaigning for speeches without shouting, those who have high regard for May Day should see that it returns to its traditional message – labor day, not Stalinist Labour bashing!

(For some of the best photos of the day, see Louise).