Murdoch does not back losers
So the SUN has set on New Labour. Rupert Murdoch's News International's reactionary newspaper, the SUN, which sells nearly 3 million copies a day and boasts a readership of nearly 8 million has stopped, after 12 years, supporting the Labour Party.
JAMES THOMSON considers the prospects for New Labour and the Conservatives after their parties' annual conferences.
Good riddance! The fact that such a right-wing paper, which rails every day against "hard left loonies, should support the Labour Party was for many in the Labour and trade union movement a mark of how embarrassingly far to the right Labour had journeyed under the New Labour leadership of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson.
Does the right wing SUN's ditching of New Labour in favour of the Conservatives mean Labour has now lurched to the left? Not a bit of it. Blair may have gone, forced out by Brown, but the other two architects of New Labour are still at the helm: one is the Prime Minister and the other is a Peer of the realm - Baron Mandelson. New Labour is still what it was when it won its first General Election in 1997.
Scotland and the Spanish Civil War
Coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the end of the Spanish Civil War a new book has been published which examines the contribution of Scots to the defence of the Spanish Republic.
HELEN CHRISTOPHER reviews the book,
HOMAGE TO CALEDONIA by Daniel Gray.
Homage to Caledonia is a concise and highly readable account which covers many aspects of the war, not just the hostilities but the life and reflections of Scots volunteers.
Why Scotland? The Scottish contribution to the war was hugely disproportionate to the nation's size relative to the rest of Britain.
Although only 10% of the population, 23% of those who went from Britain to Spain were Scots - 549 men and women in all. On the home front too the contribution in aid for Spain was massive and the book quotes Harry Pollitt writing in the Daily Worker in 1937 as saying:
"Scotland does better than any other part of the country in its contribution to our fund".
US-led conspiracy to conceal the truth
I'm convinced the occupants of the White House and No 10 Downing Street these past 21 years knew that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi - the so-called Lockerbie bomber - is innocent.
Go to - http://www.megrahimystory.net/ - for al-Megrahi's own story.
JAMES THOMSON analyses the US, British and Scottish governments' political manoeuvring over the release of the Libyan prisoner.
Those occupants were:
US Presidents
Ronald Reagan (1981-89),
George H.W. Bush (1989-93),
Bill Clinton (1993-2001),
George W. Bush (2001-09), and
Barack Obama.
UK Prime Ministers
Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990),
John Major (1990-97),
Tony Blair (1997-2007), and
Gordon Brown.
They will all have read the top secret files and been briefed by their secret services on who blew up Pan Am Flight 103 on 21 December 1988 some 30,000 feet above the small border town of Lockerbie in Scotland. 270 people from 21 different countries were killed: 190 of them were American, 31 British 11 of whom were residents of Lockerbie.
I'm also convinced that all the Presidents' and Prime Ministers' secret files and narratives will have come to roughly the same conclusion. Like many others, including Dr. Jim Swire, whose daughter died at Lockerbie, my conviction is that al-Megrahi is innocent of the crime for which he was found guilty on 31 January 2001 and sentenced to a lifetime in a Scottish prison.
60th anniversary of the GDR's foundation
'Risen from ruins' were the opening words of the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic. It did rise, from the devastation of the Second World War, and twelve years of Nazism.
PAT TURNBULL reflects on the foundation of the GDR 60 years ago and the pre and post-World War II events that led to its formation and the construction of the Berlin Wall.
The Yalta joint declaration of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in February 1945 is a testament to the powerful position of the Soviet Union at that point in history:
'We are determined to disarm and disband all German armed forces; break up for all time the German General Staff that has repeatedly contrived the resurgence of German militarism; remove or destroy all German military equipment; eliminate or control all German industry that could be used for military production; bring all war criminals to just and swift punishment, and exact reparations in kind for the destruction wrought by the Germans; wipe out the Nazi party, Nazi laws, organisations and institutions, remove all Nazi and militarist influences from public office and from the cultural and economic life of the German people; and take in harmony such other measures in Germany as may be necessary to the future peace and safety of the world'.
The Berlin Wall
The German Democratic Republic referred to the Berlin Wall as the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall - with good reason.
PAT TURNBULL continues her focus on the foundation of GDR and investigates the reasons for constructing the Berlin Wall.
The principles of the Potsdam Agreement, concluded at the end of the war by the USA, USSR and Britain and later by France, were that a demilitarised Germany should never again threaten its neighbours or the peace of the world, that the Nazi Party and its affiliated organisations should be completely rooted out to ensure that they were not revived in any form, that the German monopolies, which had financed Hitler, should be liquidated, and that a peace treaty with Germany should be prepared and concluded.
In the Soviet zone (the area which was to become the German Democratic Republic), in implementation of the Potsdam Agreement, the German armed forces and quasi-military organisations were completely abolished even before the end of 1945.
China and the recent unrest in Xinjiang
The rioting in the north-west Chinese province of Xinjiang in early July this year left 184 dead and 1500 injured.
SIMON KORNER provides the background to the unrest and analyses its causes.
The majority of dead and wounded were Han Chinese, killed by separatist crowds of Uighurs a Turkic, predominantly Sunni Muslim, people who form the bulk of the region's population.
This was the second recent outbreak of unrest from a minority population in China, following the Tibetan disturbances, which took place just before the Beijing Olympics.
It appears that the Uighar separatists had learned from the Tibetans about how to gain maximum media coverage, with the protests taking place during a high profile G8 summit, attended by the Chinese president Hu Jintao, in the glare of the international media.
Like the Tibetans, they "phrased the issues in terms that would appeal to western sensibilities: religious freedom; cultural and linguistic preservation..." according to one reporter, whose relatives live in Xinjiang, (New York Times website).
Global recession and developing countries
The media in the UK - and indeed across Europe - has focused extensively on the impact of the global financial and economic crisis at home.
GAIL HURLEY of the European Network on Debt and Development (EURODAD) asks who cares about the impact the global recession is having on developing countries?
Everyday, we are confronted with fresh figures which confirm record new highs in the number of unemployed or in the number of homes which have been repossessed. In the UK, unemployment currently stands at almost 8%, the highest in over 10 years.
Elsewhere in Europe, the situation is even more critical; in Spain unemployment stands at over 18% and some analysts predict that house prices will decline by a further 20% over 2009 - 2010.
Across Europe, central governments have been forced to intervene to guarantee the deposits of major domestic banks in order to reassure concerned savers and prevent the collapse of the domestic financial system. The incomes of millions of pensioners have declined substantially as interest rates have plummeted and pension funds post large losses.
THE SOCIALIST CORRESPONDENT CONFERENCE
Saturday 6 March 2010 10am - 5.30pm
University of London Union Malet St London
The Socialist Correspondent conference takes place at a time of global capitalist recession, climate change, war and threats of other wars.
Discussion will include the capitalist economic crisis and imperialism's strategy of re-stabilisation.
Examples of resistance to imperialism's aims including that of Venezuela and other South American countries will be looked at.
Politics in Britain including the upcoming General Election, Tory austerity plans, state of the trade unions and the future of the Labour Party will also form part of the discussion.
Torture and the future
On 25 June, 2009, at the Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf in Germany, African National Congress veteran and Rivonia Trialist Denis Goldberg presented a paper titled, "South Africa, the transition to democracy and the banning of torture".
Denis, along with Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and others was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiring to overthrow the apartheid state by armed force. Denis spent 22 years in prison. We are pleased to publish his paper in full.
A prisoner at Abu Ghraib
The title of this paper was suggested to me by Professor Goerling and I have approached it in the context of the title of this conference: Torture and the Future.
Torture has been in the news lately because of the revelations of the use of torture by the United States in its so-called 'war on terror'. Security forces say there is no future without torture!
Human rights activists say that with torture there is no future worth striving for, that torture by security forces destroys the very society we wish to protect. Therefore we who believe in the development of society to protect the rights of every human being, have to care about putting an end to torture and the general atmosphere of social violence that goes with it.
READER'S LETTER to The Socialist Correspondent
DARWIN AND COMPLEXITY FROM SIMPLICITY - A. B. Cairns
I read with interest 'Darwin's magnum opus' published in issue 5 of The Socialist Correspondent and wish to draw attention to what I believe was Darwin's greatest contribution to human thinking.
A fundamental question throughout human history has been: how does complexity arise from simplicity? By what mechanism could complex life arise from simple molecules? Fred Hoyle likened it to a wind blowing through a scrapyard and creating a jumbo jet.
Evolution by natural selection provides the only rational mechanism anyone has ever come up with that explains this development of complexity. Genetics allows us actually to examine the history of that development, to look at both its successes and failures; these are written in the cell chemistry.
