Text of Presentation at the TEAM EU Counter Summit London, November 7th, 2015

I am on the Advisory Board of the Democracy Movement which is a long standing critic of the anti-democratic nature of the European Union and I attended the first meeting of the Leave.EU Advisory Board last month. This was a contribution to the discussion on the coming British Referendum of whether or not to leave the European Union which was held at a useful one day Summit [1] convened by TEAM [The European Alliance of Euro-Critical Movements] on Saturday. 

First of all, I must make clear that, today, I am speaking for the Democracy Movement and not for Leave.EU. The difference is important as I shall make clear. 

I am going to try and do three things in the limited time at my disposal and I will welcome questions later.

First, I want to inform you of what the Democracy Movement is doing in the great cause and re-cap a little on its history to explain how it has got to where it is.

Second, I want to give my impressions of what Leave.EU, one of no less than two [major] euro-realist or euro-sceptic organisations that have emerged in recent weeks and months, is and why I think it is potentially very important.

Third, I want to thread the two themes together as I speak and show why the Democracy Movement is minded to support Leave.Eu while not yet having made its absolutely final decision although it is a decision expected very soon.

I cannot emphasise enough that not only DM but Leave.EU and the socialist and democratic organisations operating in this space consider themselves internationalists and true Europeans.

To be a true European is to stand for democracy and the self-determination of the European peoples collaborating as nation-states on equal terms. This is the legacy of the European Enlightenment and is also resolutely anti-imperialist.

This commitment to being European but firmly against the European Union is something that must be stated again and again in British contexts because the lie being perpetrated about the ‘leave’ camp is that it is anti-European, xenophobic or ‘little Englander’ (a very useful lie when mobilising our Celtic brothers and sisters). [2] 

Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the modern British Eurosceptic craves a deeper and firmer cultural connection with Europeans.

What he or she will not accept is being dictated to by Eurocrats when we have a perfectly good sovereign Parliament and ancient liberties at home.

I will go further and say that, while some Eurosceptics are stuck in the old Atlanticist model, the modern British Eurosceptic is very much an internationalist at a much more global level.

If he is a Eurosceptic of the Left, he wants to ensure that global trade and Western power are used to better the lives of the vast majority of humanity that still lives in dire conditions across the world.

If she is a Eurosceptic of the Right, the emphasis may be on global trade and the betterment of humanity through that means.

Both Right and Left will disagree profoundly on means and, in some respects, ends but what they have in common is that freedom can only be offered by example, by a free people freely determining its laws through sovereign institutions.

Having given that cultural background, let me move on to the Democracy Movement which has one of the longest continuous records as defender of national sovereignty from a non-partisan point of view in this country.

It was founded as all-party, as the voice of those who wanted to have the risks to democracy of technocracy brought to public notice. Over subsequent decades it came to link traditional right of centre concerns about the European Union with those of the Left.

It was central to the creation of the People’s Pledge, a non-partisan movement which included both Euro-sceptics and Euro-philes, which demanded and got a Referendum – something the elite of our country would happily have denied us.

Tony Blair himself clearly loathed the very idea of the people making a choice for themselves about the future destiny within the European Union.

He said in his Durham constituency in April: “Think of the chaos produced by the possibility, never mind the reality, of Britain quitting Europe.” 

Well, I see no chaos in the streets or the markets but I am too polite to endorse Boris Johnson’s assertion that Blair was an ‘epic, patronising tosser’ for making his remarks.

The point is that the Democracy Movement and People’s Pledge helped to make a Referendum happen against the massed ranks of the old elite. Now that the Referendum is assured, we will see the same determination to see the matter through to final victory – to leave, leave, LEAVE!

The strategy of the Democracy Movement in recent months has been to husband its resources which include its substantial mailing list and campaigning experience and ensure that those resources are used correctly and to maximum effect when the time comes.

This is an asset that must not be wasted and the activists on its lists must be treated with the utmost respect as fellow soldiers in a shared battle.

But the most important aspect of DM (to use its shortened acronym) is that it has long acted as clearing house for contacts between otherwise mutually suspicious Left and Right Euro-sceptics. This now becomes invaluable in ensuring that the two wings remain united as we get closer to the vote.

The obvious tactic of the Eurocrats is to try to set Left and Right Eurosceptics off against each other in the street.  This must not be allowed to happen. 

For the Eurocrats, given their base-line of centre-right, State and big business support for the pro-European position, the game is to silence the Left and have the old pre-Corbyn elite of the Labour Movement and the Labour Party speak as one voice for the European Union.

But it is not going to happen like that for a number of reasons.

The first is that the numbers of Euro-sceptical left-wingers are much higher than the mainstream Press would like you to believe. They have simply been overwhelmed [in the past] by the group-think of those who purport to speak for them. They simply need leadership and to know they are not alone.

Some became frustrated enough that they drifted across to so-called ‘Red UKIP’ as working class people who felt their concerns were not being addressed by New Labour.

I am reliably informed that many of these people – who are not racists or xenophobes – are now going home to Labour with the arrival of a new Leader, in Jeremy Corbyn, who is clearly more open to the concerns of working people and to open debate on difficult issues such as Europe, TRIDENT and even migration.

However, I am not here to speak of the Left since our Chairman, John Boyd, and Brian Denny of CAEF can do so with more authority than I can.

The Democracy Movement has, however, been helping to prepare the ground for a resurgence of Left Euroscepticism in very difficult times and now the Left can be assured that they are not alone and need not be embarrassed (or as little as possible) by the more rabid nationalist elements on the Right who can sometimes lose more votes than they secure in British contexts.

I am personally very much of the Left with a long track record of activist organisation in the Labour Movement. My long two decades or more association with DM has caused me no problems whatsoever.

There are issues, of course. This is politics. Many on the Left will not sit on a platform with some on the Right. Democratic socialists will not always sit with democratic nationalists but issues like TTIP, the incompetence of the European External Action Service in Ukraine (which has exposed the lie of the European Union as instrument of peace) and the appalling treatment of the Greek people are bringing activists together for this critical vote.

Without a functioning representative democracy answerable to the people, a people with a common history and struggle, there is no opportunity for Left and Right to contest a constitutional space if the only constitutional space available is one dictated by lawyers and technocrats.

Which leads to the final independent initiative of DM alongside maintaining its campaigning asset and increasing understanding between Left and Right democrats –the promotion of the ideal of democracy itself.

What happened in Greece and is now happening in Portugal is a sharp reminder that we are faced by a post-modern Imperial Power that hides its brute corporatist economic force under a velvet glove of liberal ideology.

DM is actively pulling together a second wave of British groups on the theme of national sovereign democracy. These are wholly committed to a ‘leave’ vote when it comes.

Now, at last, let me speak of Leave.EU. As you know there are two ‘leave’ organisations in Britain. I can characterise ‘Leave.EU’ as the mass-orientated one that seeks to mobilise the street to reach the people who really matter here, the voters.

The other ‘camp’, originated by Business For Britain, is a far more elite operation dominated by Members of Parliament of all parties and conservative business interests.

My own view is that there is room for both. Although they may be rivals for funding and attention, there is room for the elite and the mass to have their own organisations.  I see no virtue in public quarrels.

We are on the cusp of a major change in politics where power shifts from the old elite politics to the new politics represented by the power of social media and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn.

The radical new politics straddles party lines – Labour’s Tom Watson is matched by the Tory Zac Goldsmith – and both Douglas Carswell and the Bennite Left see the Levellers, the radicals of the old English Republic, as part of their inheritance.

Yet the old politics still has strong residual power. Some people will still be persuaded to their position by the leadership role of ‘big beasts’. The elite is still part of the game.

So which way will DM jump?

Leave.EU is much closer to the new politics model and DM was a pioneer of this approach. DM shares with Leave.EU a belief in the ultimate wisdom of the people and the need to communicate with them in a two-way dialogue. 

Although no final commitment has been made (since DM, perfectly reasonably, wants to know that its carefully acquired campaigning asset will be managed appropriately and effectively) DM, like so many radical democratic organisations in this country, is minded to give its wholehearted commitment to Leave.EU at the right time.

At some stage, the Eurosceptical arguments are going to have to be put to the people within the funding and other restrictions of the Electoral Commission.

We trust this body. It is not partisan. In our judgment, faced with an elite or a mass offer where the latter has a significant track record of campaigning over decades, it must, if it is to be fair, go with the people and not the big beasts. 

But what I personally like about Leave.EU is that it is not allowing itself to be the rabbit in the headlights of officialdom and not relying on that outcome.

It knows that the pro-European Union lobby has been planning its campaigning for years, has accumulated massive resources and will have the same devious forces working for it as those who stole the first Referendum vote in 1975.

There is no advantage in hanging around until everything is perfect. Battle must be joined sooner rather than later. Leave.EU has simply decided to by-pass the old system of what it calls the ‘Westminster bubble’ and go into the struggle regardless. And we think that is entirely the right strategy.

Notes

[1] Delegates included, in addition to the host nation, Danes, Germans, Greeks, Irish, Norwegians and Slovenians amongst others with a supportive statement from Austria.

[2] A question from the floor by an Irish member of the international delegations raised the point that many of our Celtic brothers and sisters would not mind so much a 'Little Englander' approach if it meant that the people of England would free themselves of an imperial mind-set and commit to their own self-determination alongside that of the peoples of Eire, Wales and Scotland. However, the point stands because, in an English context, the phrase is used by critics of the 'leave' campaign to suggest that their opponents have no understanding or empathy with European culture. Having just finished reading a short story about hope under conditions of institutionalisation by Wolfgang Borchert written in 1947 just before writing this note, I am confident that we can argue that it is our love of Europe and European culture that makes us determined to resist its bureaucratisation, corporatisation and institutionalisation.

The Labour Party Today - Impressions of a Rejoiner

Returning to the Labour Party after a decade away has been a fascinating experience, Naturally things have changed a lot since 'my day'. The emergence of genuine popular demand within the party for something akin to democratic socialism would have been unthinkable in 2004/2005. So how about some preliminary impressions and some analysis to keep the debate going?

The first comment is how impressed I am with the organisation and good will of our local Constituency Labour Party in Tunbridge Wells. It has seen over a doubling of membership from re-joiners and new members. Its positive response to this was to hold a reception for all party members which saw an excellent turn-out, much comradely good humour and, above all, an effective mini-education on how the local party worked for newcomers. I have heard similar anecdotal stories across the South and West but depressing countervailing stories of near-dormant and depressed CLPs in some of the Labour heartlands. It is as if some traditional Labour areas are exhausted and shell-shocked.

The surge of energy that we have seen arriving with the Corbynistas seems to be happening, paradoxically, in the very areas that Blairism claimed for its own at the end of the 1990s. What is becoming clearer is that a lot of this new support is coming from those disillusioned with New Labour and then with the Coalition (after a drift from Labour to the LibDems who have royally screwed up here). They like an honest if slightly chaotic 'new politics' that gives a voice to 'ordinary people'. They are unimpressed with the mainstream media, with big corporations, pontificating leaders and austerity.

The second comment is that the more things change, the more things seem the same. Within days of rejoining the Party, I was back with my old crew who ran the original Centre Left Grassroots Alliance debating the future of the soft Left, the possibilities for the sensible Left and how moderate democratic socialists should respond to Corbyn. I tend to the collaboration camp, others do not perhaps so easily. But, again, the debates on e-mail are comradely. There is a meeting at mid-month in London where we will thrash out our differences (if there are any) and develop a strategy geared to the possibility of a sensible democratic socialist Britain under a Labour Prime minister by contesting or collaborating with Corbynista populism to the degree that we think it is in the interests of the country and our value system.

The third comment is much more negative. The aggressive irrationality of a few Labour activists on social media is shocking but not surprising. Sentiment and emotion are ruling over realism on social media and against evidence-based policy discussion. One suspects that some of these trolls will chase off some of the people who joined the Party if they are not brought to heel in some way. They are often, and this is a taboo within the Left to say such things, amazingly stupid. Stupid people are to be found in all parties but it is time that the Labour Party stopped believing its own propaganda about intellectual equality and realised the damage stupid people do to policy debate in forums and platforms. The issue here is the collapse of political education within the Party because the Blairites preferred to give orders rather than listen to people. The lid has been taken off a boiling pot. The new Leader is going to have to find a way of encouraging and then imposing his own standards of decent behaviour on his own followers, showing respect for all members equally as persons but judging ideas by agreed standards of evidence and coherence.

The Party has changed in other more fundamental ways - it is not only more active, mostly more decent (though infected with some trolls online) and filled with more lively debate than a decade ago, it is also on the way to becoming something very different again over the next few years. We can see elements of this change happening across the West - Bernie Sanders, Podemos and Syriza all represent variants of a change that is based on a new breed of intellectual, new communications technologies and a new determination by people affected by State policies to be heard. I tried to analyse this for Party friends based on our many shared observations and came up with the following model, based on a simple difference between the old politics and the new politics rather than the traditional difference between right and left.

The starting point is to say that, though there is a hard core at the centre of Corbynism that is derived from the 1970s and 1980s Left, the Corbynista Left is definitely not to be identified with the history of their elders. Many of them were small children during the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. Others would be politicised by Iraq, Anonymous, Occupy and Fracking which all happened long after New Labour came to power . The ones who stuck with the Hard Left turned into people more like Livingstone and McDonnell … pragmatists.


The Old Politics

• A hard core of post-Trotskyist Marxists – capable but working within a system that works against them more decisively than is possible for them to defeat alone.
• An aging activist heartland which is loyalist but confused by the revolution, even a little depressed, and might tend to see the new members and re-joiners as potential threats to their hegemony. It is very different in different parts of the country. Based on what has come in to my circle to date, the growth in the Party seems to be skewed to the South, West, university and small towns rather than the old heartlands.
• A middling sort of political operator who cannot really understand the new politics and thinks it will all die away and normal business will be resumed – the traditional union activist is in here as possibly is the loyal but confused MP (from Cruddas to Burnham perhaps but I may be unjust here)
• A grumbly New Labour elite that wants to speed up the counter-revolution but has no significant base in the country and is finally getting it that Blairism is as busted a flush as Thatcherism and Wilsonian Socialism before it.
• A tiny minority of hard line Blairite Atlanticists who plot and scheme and pretty openly would rather see defeat in 2020 than a Corbyn Government.
• An old intellectual class that is completely at sea because its world is falling apart – mainstream journalism is losing its grip, the Guardian and NS are disconnected from the change in wider sentiment and social media creates world views that are both hyper-critical of intellectual authority and highly emotive.

The New Politics

• An enthusiastic and unstable liberal left re-joiner and young claque for Corbyn, some of whom might as easily be in the Greens or Lib Dems and many of whom have come from those camps
• A group of Labour voters angry about the way the country is going, drifting to the national-populist Right and being courted by UKIP - some of these hate Corbyn as allegedly anti-patriotic, others love him for backing the working population and are drifting back to Labour. These have to be accommodated but are in permanent creative tension with the Southern and university Corbynistas.
• A split in the trades union movement between public sector unions (who are inclined to Corbyn or the soft end of the old guard according to situation) and ‘industrial’ and general unions who are being driven by sentiment to become either Labour Firsters/workerists or Leftists according to taste and position. The intellectual struggle within the Labour Movement over issues such as Europe, Trident and socialism is the unreported key to the future of the Labour Party. What all trades union are united on is their intense dislike of Cameron's union-busting and austerity as an intrument of policy.
• A new academic-based intellectual class that is interested in the failed Syriza experiment and new forms of politics that sometimes blend into anarcho-socialism. They certainly are fundamentally critical of the neo-liberalism of New Labour (and, above all, the ‘State’).

And Then There Are The Opportunists ...

In addition, we have noisy special interest constituencies created by Blairism (after Marx got revised in the mid-1990s) and are now trying to find a way to exploit the new situation and ensure the maintenance of their various minor hegemonies – feminism, ethnic minorities, LGBT, university activists.

These have actually done quite well out of Blairism but they are also part of the back-bone of Corbynism. They also provide a lot of the trolling, often aggressively placing right thought and right behaviour before evidence-based policy and even open discussion. They want their cake and eat it: business as usual only more so against the pressures emerging from the anti-identity politics of the workerists and the new anarcho-socialists.

This is just a rough picture - a work in progress - but it gives a sense of the complexity of the Corbyn revolution, partly the revenge of the Old Hard Left, partly a genuine upsurge of the vulnerable end of the Southern educated, partly a response to the world from young academics from a generation who were the first to suffer in 2008, partly a serious self-organising worry about the effects of austerity on working people and partly a response to the rise of a populism of the Right led by an adaptable UKIP with some quasi-socialist characteristics.

Trying to come to terms with this or opposing it are the bulk of professional political class who owed their jobs to the democratic centralism of Blair, confused longstanding activists who stuck it out for a Labour Government no matter what and know in their hearts that the Corbynistas will walk away if they do not get what they want, the heavyweight anti-socialist Atlanticist beasts and a cosmopolitan and intellectually arrogant liberal intellectual class that is watching power and influence slip from its grasp as a new form of the Left emerges.

Yes, a counter-revolution is theoretically possible but I think it increasingly unlikely. The old guard hold the high ground by inheritance but they are surrounded by hordes of insurgents, some slightly potty but most very sensible and committed, who just want a better world and think it is possible. The old guard's political model looks increasingly shaky as liberals, greens, returning 'Red UKIP' and previously despairing democratic socialists give the new model some critical mass and as it becomes clear that the trades unions have more to gain than lose from the new politics after the utter failure of New Labour to guarantee their position against an incoming Tory Government.

The trades unions have got more support out of Corbyn in a few weeks than they got from Blair in thirteen years. The clever element in the Old Guard is now accommodating Corbyn but putting in the systems of control that will hold things together for the long haul - Prescott and Burnham sent a signal that the new politics and traditional Labour values were perfectly compatible and the hard boys of Labour's radical middle class Right have been left dangling. Watson is a radical but not a Leftist and it is he who will be at the heart of reform of the party organisation, not the Leftists. So long as Corbyn and Watson can work together, so long as the 'Trot' element at the top retains its pragmatic approach and so long as the trades union feel that the new Leadership structure can deliver a Labour Government eventually, this revolution will hold together despite all the swinish lies in the mainstream Press, the bleating of the political class and plots by Atlanticist dinosaurs.

Poor Journalism & The Art of Innuendo - A Second Personal Statement

A few days back, I made a Personal Statement about my involvement in Exaro that I had hoped would be decisive in telling the truth of the matter for those interested in the current child abuse scandal - remember that I cannot and do not speak for Exaro or for the other shareholders but only for myself. As before, this has to be a Personal Statement.

In essence, I stated that I had founded Exaro but that I had no influence whatsoever over the editorial content and that, in particular, I certainly had no say in the editorial decision to get involved in the allegations about child abuse and its alleged cover-up in the British Establishment. I expressed my continued support, however, for the investigation of allegations. One of the grounds for this was that the campaign of vilification against me, the Editor and the main shareholder in Exaro (who also has no say over editorial decision-making as a result of a decision when the Company was founded, enshrined in a shareholders' agreement) which started some months ago in the back waters of the internet appeared to demonstrate that 'Exaro was on to something'. Based on long experience (see below), this indicated that there seemed to be murky forces interested in discrediting Exaro and perhaps 'killing it off' and, in killing it off, killing off the investigations by the Metropolitan Police. I have been struck since then by the extremely robust responses of the Met to the wide campaign of denigration of the investigations that has been mounted in recent weeks. I am also keen to emphasise that not all critics of Exaro can be tarred with the same brush. There are sincere and questioning people who are right to be concerned that the investigations remain on the right side of decency and do not descend into a witch hunt - so far, I do not believe that Exaro has done this.

I came to the view that there was no point in responding to the bottom feeders in the further reaches of the internet. The opinions of people who post on forums connected to David Icke might reasonably be ignored. I referred to the fact, however, that private investigators had been used to compile a 'dossier' on me and on Exaro. Having seen that part which related to me, it was in the grand tradition of third rate research without analysis and with content riddled with opportunities for innuendo, the art of which I shall return to later. This sump of rumour and half-truths did not avoid dragging in my family but my decision stood - there was no merit in giving the oxygen of publicity to what appeared to be an extreme right wing campaign of vilification or a psychological warfare operation masquerading as such. I have no idea who initiated or was interested in undertaking this campaign. Long experience in the defence of individuals against such online campaigns of vilification have taught me that these operations are best regarded as one of the unfortunate costs of a free society - like trolls in social media. One should be bigger than this.

So far so good but the denigration has recently moved up the line on the internet in a way I should have come to expect until it has reached the point where comment has to be made or lies and half-truths will become part of the mythology of my reputation. There is no necessary connection between the innuendo of the bottom-feeders and the higher level innuendo of the more 'respectable' blogger or mainstream media - none whatsoever - but the fact of reporting or campaigning through innuendo ironically demonstrates why Exaro existed in the first place. It was created in direct reaction to experience of the worst of British journalism - the automatic publication of material provided in dossiers whether by the 'secret state' or others, the failure to give adequate background, analysis or detail on stories and the failure to check stories at source. I am not going to defend Exaro in this context - it has to defend its own conduct. If mistakes have been made (by me as by others), there should be apology but any apology should not be the cause of the destruction of a major project which may offer to uncover something of what the ESRC-funded academics in History Today this month have called the 'hidden history' of official handling of child abuse in our country.

So, do I have anything to apologise for? Absolutely not. I have made it clear that I founded Exaro - for which I have absolutely no reason to apologise - and have no, repeat no, influence over editorial decision-making. Even if the Editor was proven to be politically motivated, had lied or had engaged in fearful misconduct (none of which is the case to date), my role would be limited to agreeing with Board Members to his removal on the evidence and only on the evidence. There would be no justification for such an act if the matter was one of the editorial material being inconvenient for us personally or our business interests.

But what is the response of the media to this in my case? It is not acceptance of the facts as outlined in my clear and unequivocal blog posting but, instead, an exercise in the sort of innuendo abhorrence of which had led to the creation of Exaro in the first place. Innuendo is the natural tool of the British Press in full hunting mode because it is an art learned within the confines of English defamation law and it usefully means that not too much resource need be spent on the expensive business of fact-checking and contextualisation. There is certainly no need to defame if you can select facts and use them to suggest something that is not actually true.

There are two key items of innuendo in my case and I am not afraid to confront them directly: that because I am left-wing and radical therefore Exaro must be part of some political conspiracy; and, second, that because my company, TPPR, undertook media relations and speech writing support for Asma Al-Assad, that I am in some way a 'bad person' whose implicit evil casts a shadow over Exaro. So I am going to deal with these two items of innuendo head on.

In both cases, these items have been variously used by campaigning bloggers and, latterly, by the so-called mainstream Press. Let me be crystal clear - in no case other than one has any journalist tried to contact me personally and directly in order to verify facts or discuss the implications. I note that the common trick with colleagues is to pose apparently devastating questions (less so with close analysis) only hours before a claimed deadline in that typical game of being able to say that the target had been contacted for a comment. In my case, I hold to a simple rule. Any respectable journalist may ask me any question on my own affairs in writing and I will undertake to try - as a busy person - to give a full written response if I think it appropriate within 36 hours. The one journalist who did try to contact me did so by leaving a message on Twitter which I did not see for several days - unlike the frenetic denizens of the Westminster Bubble, I only look at Twitter once a week at most!

The first innuendo about a left-wing political conspiracy is easily handled. I simply have to point to the previous blog posting and ask a journalist to read it. It clearly states the simple truth that Exaro was created with clear rules about editorial interference. I can add that the Editor was chosen in good part because of his lack of political affiliation and none of the other Directors to my knowledge have any particular affiliation themselves. In my case, I was actually estranged from the Labour Party from around 2004/2005 until only a few weeks ago. I am more radical and more left-wing in politics than those who controlled the Party until very recently and, like many, was uncomfortable with the forward foreign policy and the lack of democracy inside the Party. It is important to note that when Exaro was founded my regard for New Labour was probably at its lowest ebb.

This brings me to two specific claims - that I am a friend of Jeremy Corbyn and that I am in any way close to Tom Watson. Maybe I will be one day but I am not now. How about some basic facts. Let us start with Mr. Corbyn. I knew Jeremy in Islington in the 1990s for the simple reason that he was my Constituency MP.  I believe my wife (I had forgotten this but can thank the private investigators for reminding us) was on a local charitable board with him. I recall, unconnected to Islington party affairs, that I brought the attention of a Tory MP to some brutalised conservative-minded South East Asian dissidents who I had been asked to assist pro bono. That Conservative picked up the house phone at the Commons saying that Jeremy was the man to deal with this and, sure enough, with his usual moral integrity, Jeremy did what he could. In 1996, I attended meetings of the Campaign Group of MPs as Co-ordinator of the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance which was trying to democratise the Labour Party but I am not sure I even recall him in the room. I recall Jeremy turned up at one of our street parties. In other words, I knew him only a little more than the equally personally likeable Tory MP, Greg Clarke, in my current home of Tunbridge Wells. After I left London in 2000 - fifteen years ago - although we are 'Facebook Friends', I recall no communication between us other than one brief note of recognition when we connected. I certainly have not seen him since the late-1990s. So to claim some conspiratorial friendship is absurd. In fact, I respect and personally like him and he is part of the reason I rejoined the Labour Party but the 'conspiracy' is no more than that and I know a lot of prominent Conservatives better than I know the Leader of my own Party.

There is even less of a connection with Tom Watson. He was (I recall) my 'opposition' during the attempt to democratise the Party in 1995/1996 before he was an MP. I am not sure I even met him at that time. I may have done in passing but my dealings tended to be with Jon Cruddas amongst the Political Officers of the Trades Unions and with the Leader's Office. I am connected on Twitter and that is that. I have come to admire him for his stand on private rights over institutional force but then I equally admire the Tories Zac Goldsmith and David Davies in that respect. His election as Deputy Leader of the Party was undoubtedly a factor in my rejoining the Party as a private citizen, a decision I do not in the least regret. So, let us be clear, there is no left-wing conspiracy behind Exaro. I am the only left-winger involved, there was no Labour Party connection to my initiation of the Project (quite the opposite) and even if I had that conspiratorial intent, there is no mechanism by which I could influence policy. In short, any claim that Exaro is a left-wing plot should be regarded as the manufactured innuendo of fevered and desperate minds and this would have been made clear to any journalist who had bothered to contact me directly.

Now let us move on to the Asma al-Assad issue. The implication is that I should be ashamed in some way of my Company acting as adviser in the early 2000s to Mrs Al-Assad. Not only am I not ashamed but I am proud of the work done by my colleague - since, in fact, I cannot take credit for her sterling work. So, in the interests of dealing with innuendo and half-truths, let me tell you what one of my companies (TPPR) does in general and why our extensive work in the Syrian context was valuable and worthwhile.

I never speak of the details of the work I do for clients because of a commitment to client confidentiality but it is reasonable to write of the types of work we have done and why we do it. TPPR was founded in the late-1990s after I removed myself from domestic politics with a specific brief to defend individuals and others from the effects of unwarranted political warfare operations and also to advise on behaviour change and best practice to ensure that there was no room for future attacks in the future. It is rather interesting and amusing in some ways to be the one under attack now but at least I am well prepared with a correct and cool response to strategies of innuendo and to dossier-based psychological warfare operations.

I certainly have no need to justify our work to the British media - a lot of it was trying to educate lazy journalists on how to fact-check and ask the right questions. Sometimes we undertook pro bono or low paid work for the 'voiceless'. We were non-partisan and we might work indirectly alongside the State Department (in one case) or alongside Arab individuals wrongly accused of terrorism. With one exception, I do not recall we ever acted directly for Governments and that exception is outlined below. The details of our work, if we were permitted to reveal them, would be an advertisement for a fine and honourable little company that was at the heart of events during the so-called 'war on terror' and became expert in countering online psychological warfare operations during a dark period where collateral reputational damage was regarded as acceptable, using a supine media and even some NGOs as 'useful idiots' in campaigns to pervert and manipulate public opinion for political purposes.

Perhaps I am particularly proud of our first project which was the defence of the personal reputation of the owner of the Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals works in Sudan whose plant was bombed out of existence (its last shift of women workers almost slaughtered in consequence) because of a classic dodgy dossier, of our work to raise awareness in the Arab World of the appalling condition of the Marsh Arabs in Iraq in the run-up to the US invasion of 2003 and the forensic uncovering of the forged evidence used to try to remove George Galloway from the political scene. We never took sides or acted as agents of influence outside the limited parameters of specific initiatives which were ethically scrutinised with considerable care and usually related to our assessment of natural justice.

Now to Syria. Our involvement in Syria extended from approximately 2001 to approximately 2005. It certainly ended as soon as the Civil War broke out. Our Syrian friends, deeply distressed, split into their respective camps and it was ethically axiomatic that TPPR could not act for any Client in a war situation. Our relationship with Syria was complex and expressed as a series of projects in which senior and significant politicians of both main Parties might be involved and which were very much associated with the attempt to assist in the internal reform of the Government through dialogue. This was the only case where, at one point, we acted directly for an overseas Government when we agreed to assist the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in acting as liaison with the Foreign Office and in managing media relations during the Presidential Visit of 2002. We broke our rule on working with Governments in part because it was clear that it was in the British national interest to have a competent cultural liaison working with the Embassy answerable to the Embassy. During that period we had an excellent relationship with our FCO counterparts who proved, as you would expect, administratively competent under conditions where Syrian administrators were definitely not used to Western media and cultural habits.

Our other involvements were less direct. We agreed to help set up the British Syrian Society [''BSS'] with a number of highly respected British-Syrian businessmen and UK politicians as a friendship society designed to assist in the reform process that was widely assumed to be under way at the time. Incidentally, we introduced democracy to the BSS with a general vote of members to elect its Chairman. We managed the media relations for Syrian Culture Week and, through the BSS, we got to know the President's father-in-law who asked us to assist his daughter with some rather anodyne speech writing and a Press Visit by the Sunday Times. We were more than happy to do this and have no regrets. The intention was to build bridges in order to assist in modernisation. In that context, we undertook some confidential work with the London Embassy attempting (unsuccessfully) to change attitudes through educating Ministry officials on the cultural expectations of Syria in the West. Our work may reasonably be regarded as an honourable failure but it gave us a deep understanding of at least one aspect of Middle Eastern affairs. We had no connection with the Syrian Media Centre which was the State-directed communications unit in London. The specialist and educated journalists in the West covering the region were a pleasure to work with and never once were they pressurised by us to write (as if we could) anything but what they saw ... the spin and manipulation by the usual suspects was another matter. I have personal views on the responsibility for the slaughter and mayhem that subsequently appeared and I remain horrified by the ambiguities of Western association with faith-based obscurantists but that is a matter of personal politics and not the official view of TPPR.

In this second lengthy piece, I hope I have managed to make clear that not only do I have no editorial influence over Exaro which is wholly managed in that respect by the Editor but that Exaro never was, is not and never will be a political conspiracy, that the innuendo about me, about my family (if that is ever used as a tactic beyond the sump of bottom-feeders) and about my work needs cross-checking rather than accepting. My historic work in a Syrian context was mainstream, honourable and something of which I am actually rather proud.

The deeper public policy issues remain. They represent precisely the reasons I founded Exaro in 2011. Exaro may prove inadequate to the task or fail but the original impetus has been proved to be more correct than ever. When it comes to a national journalism based on dossiers, innuendo, half-truths, lack of analysis, sensationalism, partisan misinformation and disinformation, then if not Exaro ... who?

Shifting Position - On Rejoining the Labour Party

Two weeks ago, I decided to rejoin the Labour Party, I had left the Party in 2004 in growing disgust at the 'imperial' expansion by force of allegedly liberal values and the lack of progress in building a case with the public for a moderate and sensible democratic socialism in one country able to collaborate constructively with socialists, democratic socialists and liberals elsewhere in the world.

As recently as May of this year, I produced a fairly blunt analysis of why Labour had failed to win the 2015 General Election. This turned out to be one of my most widely circulated posts. Only last month I gave a similarly pessimistic view of politics under the two 'bourgeois' factions of one centrist liberal and increasingly culturally totalitarian 'National Party'. This latter piece had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the importance (to me) of transparency - I wanted readers to know where my biases and prejudices came from so that they could winnow them out when taking what they could from my work. Unusually, I am not trying to persuade anyone of anything. All I am trying to do is to get my readers to think for themselves and challenge their own assumptions as they challenge mine.

Last month, I hinted that I could rejoin the Labour Party but I was pessimistic: " ... the Labour Party is so appallingly decadent that the Tories now look relatively competent. How did that happen? ... The British Labour Party is little more than the defensive manouevre of conservative special interest groups terrified by the onward march of history. I may join it again if Corbyn wins even though his politics are not mine (though I know and respect the person)"  

Because of that pessimism, I declined to do what I considered to be dishonourable and send in my £3 to join a bandwagon, vote for Jezza and then claim to be one of the faithful. What I underestimated was not only the level of discontent within the Party (whose activists I had prematurely dismissed as variants of Orwell's cart horse in 1984) but the impressive personal performance of Corbyn and the radical shift of opinion within huge stretches of the trades union movement persuaded me that I was wrong to stand aside. The trades unions seemed to have finally got that being the servant of urban liberals was demeaning, that the union gift of power to the Blairites in the 1990s had achieved little and that trying to regain power through a quasi-Leftist intellectual Blairite like Miliband was not going to work.

I took time to decide whether to rejoin the Party but when the decision came, it seemed right even though much of the pessimism remains. It was helped by the estimable old Labour Right winger Tom Watson being elected as ballast (as Deputy Leader) and John Prescott's statesmanlike call for Party Members to respect the decision of the Members and rally round the new Leader. 

Meanwhile, the brutal negativity of the media, of the Blairite Right and of all but the most humanely civilised of Tories such as David Davis showed us that Corbyn would have an uphill struggle. His fundamentally decent principles may stand little chance against the crude sociopathy of the radical centre with its little trotters dug firmly in the pork barrel of late capitalism and its brute determination that its sty not be cleaned out. But I was wrong about Corbyn's victory as Leader (I thought up to the wire that Burnham would get it on second votes) and I could yet be wrong about him being Prime Minister. But perhaps it is time to drop my 'cold realism' and show a little faith in the democratic socialist dream.

I said in my August posting that Corbyn's politics were not mine - I am probably an edge more nationalist, more libertarian, more aware of market reality and more wary of some of the ideological Marxists in his advisory circle - so the question arises - why? Why rejoin now as a moderate democratic socialist when a lot of middle class intellectual non-Marxist democratic socialists are running for cover. There are five core reasons other than blind sentiment to my old tribe and a mad desire to make an absurd existentialist commitment to something decent:-

1. The man matters. I knew him as my Constituency MP in Islington North in the 1990s and I was struck then by his fundamental integrity, decency and intelligence. I saw him at close quarters act on a sensitive human rights issue and discovered how much senior Conservatives respected him as the 'go to' man in this area. Everything he did during the weeks of election campaigning confirmed that integrity and also his courage, courage in standing up to stupid and biaised journalists and for what he believed.
2. I don't like fools and bullies and much of the attack on him (not admittedly by the competing candidates who conducted themselves well throughout) was either intellectually stupid or sheer thuggery. The attacks made me look more deeply into what he was actually saying and not what he was reported as saying. I was impressed
3. The attack dog mentality on his economics was worse than overdone, it was criminally ignorant. There is, in fact, more in common between serious financial market practitioners and Shadow Chancellor McDonnell than there is between either of these and the fools who have run our country into the ground. The pragmatism of Corbyn was ignored - there was no absurd rhetoric from him in the end but only a systematic commitment to the betterment of the mass of the British people which became even more clear in the notes of Ann Black, elected NEC constituency representative of the first NEC meeting held under his auspices as Leader,
4. I persist in seeing the Party as it is currently structured as decadent. This is a direct function of the democratic centralism of Tony Blair and his refusal to have an intelligent debate about party engagement at the 1996 Party Conference. An internal revolution ensuring that a democratic socialist was in control of the democrat centralism created by Blair would show up its internal contradictions and force some form of democratic reform and mobilisation on the Party. The rival candidates to Corbyn were remarkably lack-lustre and the brutes of 1997-2010 had clearly failed to create their own succession for the sake of country and party - liberal egoism at its worst.
5. Although he had to undertake something of a u-turn because of the demands of the party elite that he had inherited and of the system of forums and fixing at the top, Corbyn was prepared to open the door to important debate on key isues where the Party had previously closed off debate - the European Union, Trident, the Monarchical Constitution and the State, and socialist economics. I would disagree with important aspects of Corbyn's position, including his u-turns on some of them, but what he was doing was opening up ground for serious discussion and political education in a way unseen in three decades. This was not an excuse for disunity and internal party warfare but an opportunity for serious debate and discussion on the facts.

So, on all these grounds - the man, the frightened negativity of the failed old guard, the pragmatism underlying the policies of the man, the opportunity to transform the Party into an agent of national debate and mobilisation and the fact that new ideas were being permitted to be heard even if they may later be rejected - the re-joining of the Labour Party became a 'no-brainer'.

What next? The first thing to recognise is that, once a field general in the struggles of the 1990s, I am now no more than a foot soldier in a back water so it behoves me to watch and wait for at least six months while I understand how this party has changed since I was last a member in 2004. I also have businesses to run and a hinterland of my own - interests that have nothing to do with politics. 

This does not mean I won't be involved in politics but my instinct is to show solidarity and support for the New Leader and for the Party while it negotiates the vicious attacks of the dim and lazy low lives in the Press and from cynical and opportunist political opponents from inside and outside. If a successful coup is mounted against him by Blairites before he has had a chance to prove that he is the wrong person for the job, then my pessimism returns - I shall just bugger off to a private life again - but the long haul is the reconstruction of a democratic socialist Party capable of reaching a mass base and winning an election in 2020 without falling into the hands of loopy ideologues, becoming authoritarian on private life under the influence of post-Marxists or showing weakness when faced by serious challenges like mass economic migration or the blow-back from the petty wars of the previous Labour administrations. Be in no doubt, the Party is never anything other than a means to an end - a better Britain - and loyalty to any other end such as office for the sake of office is sheer simple-mindedness.

My one political commitment is to a 'leave' vote in the British European Referendum that must take place before the end of 2017. My opposition to the European Union has been consistent since the first Referendum of 1975. It is based on a a rational critique of the sheer danger of its aspirations to become a liberal super-state based on bureaucratic centralism, the suppression of national self-determination and, ultimately, on the economics of the free market at the expense of welfarism in a 'competitive world'. It is German-dominated (albeit with France as junior partner) and I find this a problem. 

The appalling management of the Ukraine crisis (which might have brought us to war), incompetence in the handling of the refugee crisis and the morally repugnant treatment of Greek democracy by neo-liberal ideologues are only elements of my wider outrage at the presumption of this system which is designed to ensure that democratic socialism is impossible from the Atlantic to the Urals and from the Mediterranean to the Arctic. Take a look at the TTIP and that should be enough to know that the destiny they have chosen for us is to be happy serfs and little more except that we will get to vote for our serfdom every few years or so. I expect to say more on these issues in due course. 

Meanwhile, this blog may change tone a little. The Frontiers series will continue (and will eventually be packaged in a separate blog as we have done with the Tantra and Basic British History series) and there will be occasional essays on culture as before but you may see more politics. Let us leave it there ...