Saturday, May 04, 2019

London schoolgirl Ella Kissi-Debrah could become first person to have "air pollution" listed as cause of death in the UK





London — A court ruling could lead to a 9-year-old London girl becoming the first person to have "air pollution" listed as a cause of death in the United Kingdom, her legal team says.

Ella Kissi-Debrah died in 2013 after three years of having severe asthma attacks, her mother Rosamund Kissi-Debrah told CBS News Friday. When Ella died, the cause of her death was determined to be a severe asthma attack that led to respiratory failure. New evidence, her legal team claims, shows her death was caused by pollution in the air she breathed.

"When she was alive, we couldn't get to the bottom of what was triggering her asthma, so I thought I would give it my best shot (to find out), as her mother, although she's no longer here," Kissi-Debrah told CBS News. "I didn't have any plans or any ideas what I was going to find out, all I knew was it was to do with something in the air."

A report put together for Kissi-Debrah by Stephen Holgate, the former chair of the U.K. government's advisory committee on air pollution and a professor at Britain's University of Southampton, found that Ella's asthma attacks coincided with years of air pollution levels near her home that were above the legal limit. On the basis of that report, on Thursday, the High Court allowed Ella's previous cause of death to be scrapped and a new inquest to be opened.

"There is a real prospect that without unlawful levels of air pollution Ella would not have died," the report was cited as saying in a memorandum provided by Kissi-Debrah's legal team. If a new cause of death is linked to air pollution, Ella's lawyers argue the British government could have failed to comply with its duties under the European Convention of Human Rights.

The World Health Organization estimates that around 4.2 million premature deaths a year are the result of air pollution, much of which comes from cars and trucks. In the U.K., regulations came into effect in 2010 requiring the government to keep this pollution below certain levels, but limits have been consistently breached, despite some efforts by authorities.



Air pollution is widely acknowledged to be a trigger for asthma attacks, and "the dramatic worsening of (Ella's) asthma in relation to air pollution episodes would go a long way to explain the timing of her exacerbations across her last 4 years," Holgate's report is cited as saying.

"Whilst we are debating, there will be a child who is being rushed to hospital somewhere in the United Kingdom or in the United States or somewhere in the world," Kissi-Debrah told CBS News. "Now that one truly understands the impact of air pollution, and especially on children's lungs, the picture seems to be so very clear."

Ella lived near a busy street where pollution levels were consistently recorded at above the legal limit between 2010 and her death in 2013. A new inquest into her death means "the Government and other public bodies will have to answer difficult questions about why they have ignored the overwhelming evidence about the detrimental health impact of air pollution and allowed illegal levels to persist for more than a decade," her lawyers said in a statement.

"There is now momentum for change and it is fundamental that air pollution is brought down to within lawful limits," the statement continued.

Kissi-Debrah noted to CBS News that her daughter would be 15 years old if she were alive today, roughly the same age as teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg.

"What Greta is saying, my daughter is proving it," she said.

First published on May 3, 2019 / 4:50 PM

© 2019 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.


SEE: Capitalism Creates Global Warming










John Kelly joins board of company operating largest shelter for unaccompanied migrant children

BY GRAHAM KATES

UPDATED ON: MAY 3, 2019 / 10:39 PM / CBS NEWS


In April, protesters outside the nation's largest facility for unaccompanied migrant children noticed a familiar face enter the massive, fenced site in Homestead, Florida: former White House chief of staff John Kelly. Soon after, a local television station recorded footage of him riding on the back of a golf cart as he toured the grounds.

It wasn't clear why he was there, but Friday, Caliburn International confirmed to CBS News that Kelly had joined its board of directors. Caliburn is the parent company of Comprehensive Health Services, which operates Homestead and three other shelters for unaccompanied migrant children in Texas.

Prior to joining the Trump administration in January 2017, Kelly had been on the board of advisors of DC Capital Partners, an investment firm that now owns Caliburn.

The Caliburn board includes other former high-ranking military personnel, including retired General Anthony C. Zinni, Admiral James G. Stavridis and Rear Admiral Kathleen Martin. The company's portfolio includes work in a variety of defense sectors.

"With four decades of military and humanitarian leadership, in-depth understanding of international affairs and knowledge of current economic drivers around the world, General Kelly is a strong strategic addition to our team," said James Van Dusen, Caliburn's CEO. "Our board remains acutely focused on advising on the safety and welfare of unaccompanied minors who have been entrusted to our care and custody by the Department of Health and Human Services to address a very urgent need in caring for and helping to find appropriate sponsors for these unaccompanied minors."

Kelly joined DC Capital's board in February 2016 and stepped down in January 2017 when he was confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security. Kelly switched jobs in July 2017 to become President Trump's chief of staff, a position he left at the end of 2018.

During Kelly's tenure, the administration pursued ambitious changes to immigration enforcement, and the average length of stay for an unaccompanied migrant child in U.S. custody skyrocketed.

In the past year, Comprehensive Health Services, the only private company operating shelters, became one of the most dominant players in the industry. Last August, it secured three licenses for facilities in Texas, totaling 500 beds, and in December, the Homestead facility began expanding from a capacity of 1,250 beds to 3,200.

Located on several acres of federal land adjacent to an Air Reserve Base, the facility is the nation's only site not subject to routine inspections by state child welfare experts.

Teens sleep in bunk-bed-lined dorm rooms, ranging in size from small rooms that fit 12 younger children to enormous halls shared by as many as 200 17-year-old boys, in rows of beds about shoulder-width apart.


During a tour in February, a program coordinator told CBS News that the older children prefer the cavernous digs. "They say it's like a slumber party," she said.

The days begin at 6 a.m. and follow a strict schedule, as children proceed in single-file lines from building to building, supervised by a staff of more than 2,300.

Under a federal court agreement known as the Flores settlement, unaccompanied migrant are supposed to be housed in "non-secure" facilities, which means the children cannot be prevented from coming and going as they please. The facility's administrator said that is technically the case in Homestead, but acknowledged that the facility is surrounded by a tall covered fence and monitored by a large team of private security contractors.

The heavy security is one of a slew of issues repeatedly raised by lawyers tasked with monitoring compliance with Flores. They flagged Homestead, as well as a dozen other facilities, in a Dec. 31 letter to the Department of Justice outlining what they say are violations of the agreement.

Last October, Caliburn filed paperwork with regulators announcing an IPO, but cancelled those plans in March. On April 14, The Financial Times reported that DC Capital was instead seeking to sell 75 percent of the company. The company did not comment on the reported sale offer.

Federal contract records show Comprehensive received at least $222 million to operate Homestead between July 7, 2018 and April 20, 2019, and could receive much more — up to $341 million in payments between now and November for continued operation of the expanded site.

While Comprehensive and DC Capital appear to have reaped financial benefits through government contracts during and after Kelly's tenure as White House chief of staff, Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor, said Kelly may not have broken any rules.

"It sounds like he's running between the raindrops. It doesn't sound great, but most likely he's not directly violating any policies," Briffault told CBS News. Briffault said government officials are barred from benefiting from their involvement in matters that involve specific parties, meaning that while serving at the White House, Kelly could not directly influence any decision to award a contract to a DC Capital company.

Delaney Marsco, ethics counsel at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, said her first question would be to ask whether Kelly ever consulted ethics officials about any involvement in formulating any policies surrounding unaccompanied minors.

"The fact is that when he was in the White House, the government took action that swelled the population of people that were in these facilities, and that benefited his former employer. That's the exact kind of situation that is why we have the ethics clause," Marsco said.

Now that he's left the White House, Kelly is barred from lobbying for five years, but is free to return to his old company. During that time, he cannot attempt to influence government policies that might benefit the company.

"This is classic revolving door," Briffault said. "Our system is designed in some ways to have that revolving door. We do assume, and we've been doing this for a long time, that (some public sector officials) are coming from the private sector, and that they'll eventually go back."

Omar Blames U.S. For Devastation In Venezuela




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World·Analysis

Despite Trump's scaremongering, socialism is gaining a foothold in America

Recent Chicago election featured strong showing from democratic socialists

New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become one of the faces of socialism in the U.S.(Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)
Caitlin Brady speaks of socialism as though it's the only rational response to 21st-century America.
"I work full time, I work 40 hours a week, and I qualify for food stamps," the 31-year-old said, explaining why she volunteered for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) campaign in Chicago's municipal elections last month.
To get food stamps in Illinois means Brady makes no more than $1,670 US a month. She pays no income tax on that — but neither did tech behemoth Amazon pay tax on the reported $10.8 billion it made last year.
"The richest country in the history of the world," Brady said, "and I'm not able to put a roof over my head and eat."
Like many toiling in the trenches of the DSA campaign, Brady is a millennial. Born between the early 1980s and 2000, theirs is the biggest generation since the baby boom and the most likely to think the American Dream — success equals prosperity — is dead.
Chicago is a historically big "D" Democratic city, and for years it has operated a bit like a one-party state. Republicans don't figure much in its politics. Political offices are sometimes passed between generations of the same Democratic families.
But in recent years, the socialists have spotted weaknesses on the Democrats' left flank: unaffordable urban housing and unkept promises of rent control. They struck, painting the Democrats as sellouts to big real estate developers.
Caitlyn Brady, right, was one of the volunteers for the Democratic Socialists of America campaign in Chicago’s elections last month. (CBC)
On election night, the media clucked and fussed over Democrat Lori Lightfoot, the openly gay black woman chosen to replace Chicago's unbeloved Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
But underneath that headline was the news that the socialists running for a handful of city council seats had won them all. Granted, that's only four. But it means they now have six spots out of 50 in the government of the third-largest metropolis in the country — socialism's biggest victory in modern American history.
There are varieties of socialism around the world, but in the American context, it is fundamentally about ensuring that the health and welfare of the people does not depend on the incentives of capitalism.
"People over profits" was a popular rallying cry among Chicago's DSA. But the DSA did not insist that workers should control the means of production and promise to take over Amazon. They ran on affordable housing, universal health care and returning government to the people.

'It's back'

The results in Chicago were preceded by a tsunami of speculation about the resurrection of the American left— why and where in the land it might or might not pop up.
In March, New York magazine churned out several thousand words trying to answer its own question: When did everyone become a socialist? On the right, The Weekly Standard (just before it folded in December) took aim at what it called "the illusory dream of democratic socialism" in a piece called "Up from the Grave," which began: "It's back."
In between, countless think pieces have analyzed what's going on, usually making a link to the unexpected successes of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a.k.a. AOC). But the truth is the warming trend for socialism began before any of that.
Chicago alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, middle, is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and led a demonstration in favour of rent control in Chicago on April 1. (Tiffany Foxcroft/CBC)
Nearly a decade ago, the Pew Research Center reported that American millennials, a generation with growing political clout, saw the world differently than their forebears. A 2010 Pew study found that, as a whole, Americans strongly favoured capitalism over socialism, but millennials slightly favoured socialism over capitalism.
Perhaps because they had no memory of the Cold War, they didn't see socialism as a bogeyman. They were open to it.
A few years later, the political scientist and writer Peter Beinart took the Pew study and contextualized it in a widely read essay in the Daily BeastUnder the headline "The Rise of the New New Left," he tried to unpack how a promise to make the rich pay for universal childcare turned lefty Democrat Bill de Blasio into the mayor of New York. Priorities were disrupted, thought Beinart.

Response to 'fail decade'

With a hat tip to the sociologist Karl Mannheim, Beinart argued that only certain generations disrupt the status quo, and they do it because something irregular and meaningful happens during their formative years — late teens, early twenties — that forever colours their worldview.
The political coming of age for the first American millennials wasn't at all like the decades that preceded it. The 21st century opened with the catastrophes of what some describe as "the fail decade" — as Beinart wrote, "the decade of the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and the financial crisis."
With striking prescience, he warned that both Republicans and Democrats had something to fear from a maturing generation that believes government should play an expanded role in their lives, and that status quo politics had failed.
More than three years ahead of the fateful 2016 election, Beinart predicted that in the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton would be "vulnerable to a candidate who can inspire passion and embody fundamental change, especially on the subject of economic inequality and corporate power."
Beinart saw Senator Elizabeth Warren as that candidate. The eventual challenger turned out to be Bernie Sanders, but other than that, it seems Beinart was right.
Both Warren and Sanders are vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination saying corporate power needs stronger guardrails. Sanders describes himself sometimes as a socialist, sometimes as a democratic socialist — probably to avoid persnickety arguments about whether there's a difference between them.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has been a big proponent of Medicare for All and other progressive causes. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Warren eschews both labels and claims that ideologically, she's "a capitalist to my bones." But her skepticism about unrestrained markets is as defiant as Sanders'. She's against what she calls "shareholder value maximization ideology."
For instance, she has proposed an "Accountable Capitalism Act" about corporate governance. If it were law, it would force certain big corporations to have federal charters and allow their shareholders to sue company directors if they act contrary to the interests of "all corporate stakeholders" — meaning running afoul of employee rights and environmental impacts.
That sounds like a shout-out to the socialists that, whether they want to or not, Democrats are hosting in their party.

Legacy tied to FDR, LBJ

"We're being the real Democrats, that's how I like to view it," said 30-year-old Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, now in his second term as a DSA city alderman in Chicago.
"We're being truer to the history of the party, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to Lyndon Baines Johnson."
One of the key planks of Sen. Elizabeth Warren's presidential platform is holding corporations accountable.(Brian Snyder/Reuters)
There is truth to that. FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society are monumental figures in the history of the Democratic Party. They established unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, financial regulatory reforms and other programs that conservatives still dream of trying to roll back.
But the Democratic Party of FDR and LBJ was not the party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both of whom extolled the virtues of leaner government. Clinton and Obama largely conceded to the economic arguments of the Reagan revolution, which conflated market freedom with personal freedom.
In his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton famously declared "the era of big government is over." Obama's autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, has grudging respect for Reagan scattered throughout it.
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has wrestled with the ambitious vision of the socialists in her caucus, and she's unequivocal about where she stands. "That is not the view of the Democratic Party," she told CBS's 60 Minutes recently.
Nor, from a strictly utilitarian perspective, could it be. Pelosi became Speaker after the Democrats took back the House in the 2018 midterm elections. Their margin of victory had little to do with democratic socialist AOC winning her seat in the reliably Democratic district of the Bronx. It had everything to do with candidates such as Abby Finkenauer, who overturned a Republican in swing state Iowa's First District.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently told 60 Minutes that socialism 'is not the view of the Democratic Party.' (J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)
Put another way, the number of degrees Democrats can safely shift to the left in 2020 is probably less than AOC and some others elected in safe Democratic districts would like.
No one knows that better than President Donald Trump, who used his State of the Union speech in February to kick off his campaign against an imagined red menace.
"We are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country," he said, and then went on to define socialism as the monster that ate Venezuela. "America will never be a socialist country," he pledged, implying the nation could bank on that only as long as he was in the White House.
DSA members often say that when they think socialism, they think Denmark, not Venezuela. But Democrats won't get to argue that case in the 2020 election debate when Trump is already winding up his base with wild stories about a socialist dystopia. He recently warned that the Green New Deal means people will have to give up their cows.
There are many reasons that this is a watershed moment for Democrats.
Not only do they want to beat Trump in 2020; many feel it's their moral responsibility. But socialist talk is unnerving to those who fear ideological flirtations are better put on hold — at least until they've dealt with job one.

HERE IS ANOTHER BLOG THAT PUBLISHED A CRITIQUE OF THE MYTH THAT PRUSSIAN STATE SOCIALISM IS SOCIALISM 
REAL SOCIALISM COMES FROM BELOW 
IT IS CALLED  STATELESS SOCIALISM AS I DISCUSS HERE 
I THOUGHT I WOULD SHAMELESSLY STEAL 
AND REPRINT THIS SINCE THE BLOG IS NO 
LONGER PUBLISHING UNFORTUNATELY

Socialism- the s-word…

Just a thought…
I really wish I could be either enthused or appalled by the fact that Ed Miliband is now leader of the Labour Party. I know the ultra-Blairites, with their fellow travellers in the BBC and on the Murdoch Death Star, who rallied around his brother David as the next best thing to The World’s Favourite Money Grabbing War Monger, are shocked that their cunning plan failed (‘if it hadn’t been for you meddlin’ trade unions…’) Best make the best of a bad job chaps… and go and join the Conservative Party- Education Secretary Michael Gove for one seems pretty keen on embracing the Blair Legacy.
Anyway, ‘Red Ed’? Do me a favour! You may have heard the comment that his father Ralph Miliband claimed that socialism could not come through Parliamentary means and his two sons have gone around proving it in practice. Only in a country where most mainstream politicians are in such awe of a handful of  mindlessly Thatcherite newspapers with declining circulations could someone like Ed Miliband be called a ‘Red’.  It is a bit like Business Secretary Vince ‘privatise the Post Office’ Cable being called a ‘Marxist’ for criticising the City of  London. If there is any sort of ‘Marxist’ class war in this country it is the City of London and its patsies in the mainstream media and the main political parties  against the rest of us…
Now if Vince had walked  around the Square Mile with this placard…
Anyway, socialism is a real political swear word isn’t it? Sometimes I try and think if anything has not been tagged with the ‘s-word’ at some point. I realise that for a lot of people, ‘socialism’ is any form of state intervention in the economy. Sometimes this is expanded to include any state intervention in wider social life or state interventions abroad. I then wonder how it got to this. After all, most of the original socialists were often extremely anti-state…
Every couple of years or so I seem to repost this blogpost written in 2006 by Larry Gambone, a Canadian evolutionary anarchist who now lives in Nanaimo (that’s right isn’t it, Larry?), largely as a quick refresher for those who automatically think socialism = the state:
The Myth Of Socialism As Statism [May 6th 2006]
What did the original socialists envision to be the owner and controller of the economy? Did they think it ought to be the state? Did they favor nationalization? Or did they want something else entirely? Let’s have a look, going right back to the late 18th Century, through the 19th and into the 20th, and see what important socialists and socialist organizations thought.
*Thomas Spence – farm land and industry owned by join stock companies, all farmers and workers as voting shareholders.
* St. Simon – a system of voluntary corporations
* Ricardian Socialists – worker coops
* Owen – industrial coops and cooperative intentional communities
* Fourier – the Phlanistery – an intentional community
* Cabet – industry owned by the municipality (‘commune’ in French, hence commune-ism)
* Flora Tristan – worker coops
* Proudhon – worker coops financed by Peoples Bank – a kind of credit union that issued money.
* Greene – mutualist banking system allowing farmers and workers to own means of production.
* Lasalle – worker coops financed by the state – for which he was excoriated by Marx as a ‘state socialist’
* Marx – a ‘national system of cooperative production’
Would that sound better on ‘The Apprentice’ or ‘The Dragon’s Den’, Karl?
* Tucker – mutualist banking system allowing farmers and workers to own means of production.
* Dietzgen – cooperative production
* Knights of Labor – worker coops
* Parsons – workers ownership and control of production
* Vanderveldt – socialist society as a ‘giant cooperative’
* Socialist Labor Party – industry owned and run democratically through the Socialist Industrial Unions
* Socialist Party USA – until late 1920’s emphasized workers control of production.
* CGT France, 1919 Program – mixed economy with large industry owned by stakeholder coops.
* IWW – democratically run through the industrial unions.
* Socialist Party of Canada, Socialist Party of Great Britain, 1904-05 program – common ownership, democratically run – both parties, to this very day, bitterly opposed to nationalization.
* SDP – Erfurt Program 1892 – Minimum program includes a mixed economy of state, cooperative and municipal industries. While often considered a state socialist document, in reality it does not give predominance to state ownership.
Well? Where’s the statism? All these socialisms have one thing in common, a desire to create an economy where everyone has a share and a say.
Why The Confusion
The state did play a role in the Marxist parties of the Second International. But its role was not to nationalize industry and create a vast bureaucratic state socialist economy. Put simply, the workers parties were to be elected to the national government, and backed by the trade unions, cooperative movement and other popular organizations, would expropriate the big capitalist enterprises. Three things would then happen:
1. The expropriated enterprises handed over to the workers organizations, coops and municipalities.
2.The army and police disbanded and replaced by worker and municipal militias.
3. Political power decentralized to the cantonal and municipal level and direct democracy and federalism introduced.
These three aspects are the famous ‘withering away of the state’ that Marx and Engels talked about.
The first problem with this scenario was that the workers parties never got a majority in parliament. So they began to water-down their program and adopt a lot of the statist reformism of the liberal reformers. Due to the Iron Law of Oligarchy the parties themselves became sclerotic and conservative. Then WW1 intervened, splitting the workers parties into hostile factions. Finally, under the baleful influence of the Fabians, the Bolsheviks and the ‘success’ of state capitalism in the belligerent nations, the definition of socialism began to change from one of democratic and worker ownership and control to nationalization and statism. The new post-war social democracy began to pretend that state ownership/control was economic democracy since the state was democratic. This, as we see from the list above, was not anything like the economic democracy envisaged by the previous generations of socialists and labor militants.
So there are ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ forms of socialism. I definitely identify with the latter type, while the former attracts the power hungry ‘socialist’, whatever his or her professed stripe (notice how many erstwhile ‘Bennites’ in the Labour Party thirty years ago became evangelicals for ‘Blairism’?). ‘Top-down’ socialists who identify with the Big State are a bit like ‘free marketeers’ who excuse Big Business rather than support independent trades people and the self-employed because, to use Kevin Carson’s mocking phrase, ‘Them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get.’ (Kevin A. Carson Studies in Mutualist Politcal Economyi, p.116)
Of course, to talk about a Non-Statist or Libertarian form of  Socialism throws a lot of people. Well, here another phrase to throw about: ‘market collectivism.’ That is:
a community of producer cooperatives. Each cooperative is owned and run by the workers themselves. Their products are sold on a market. They purchase the required raw materials themselves. There is little or no central planning….a market collectivist society is not capitalist because….workers are self-managed; they do not work under the direct or indirect control of a capitalist. In addition the workers (collectively) own the product of their labour, which they bring to the market for sale.’ Geoff Hodgson The Democratic Economy, p.177.
The nearest to a ‘market collectivist’ economy any of us have seen is Yugoslavia under Tito. Now that eventually collapsed in the wars of the 1990s but how much did market collectivism have to do with it? I suspect the lack of political freedom and the plunging of the whole country into deep debt during the 1970s and 1980s had a much more profound effect in bringing about the death of Yugoslavia.
The main theorist of market collectivism is Jaroslav Vanek. An interview with him from the early 1990s, in which he says why it has been hard for co-operatives to take off in the West, can be found here.
So what is a pore ole Market Collectivist to do? I cannot think of a British political party that is opposed to co-operatives per se. However, are any of them likely to say in the foreseeable future that co-operatives should be the dominant enterprise model for the economy? I doubt it. Even the Co-operative Party is hobbled by its links to the Labour Party. Perhaps one should just keep plugging away and things will change.  It is worth noting that the economic situation in recent years seems to have encouraged the growth of co-operatives in the US. This ‘bottom-up socialism’  is definitely better than the top-down ‘War Socialism’ which is encouraged by the Republican Party in the US:
The U.S. economy increasingly resembles the dual economy of the Soviet Union, with an overfunded military sector and a chronically weak, dysfunctional civilian sector. Like the Soviet Union in its decline, we are bogged down in an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan. The Soviet system was supported to the end, however, by Soviet military and intelligence personnel and defense factory workers and managers. Their equivalents exist in America. Conservatives are not being irrational, when they ignore the civilian economy while fostering the military economy that provides orders and jobs to many of their constituents. Theirs is the logic of Soviet-style conservatism.
‘Watch what we say, not what we do,’ Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell famously remarked. Out of power, the Republican Party preaches Ron Paul-style libertarianism. In power, the party practices Martin Feldstein-style military Keynesianism and military socialism — and Hank Paulson-style financial sector Keynesianism and socialism.
Anyway, I’ll leave it there. I do not expect to quickly change the minds of those who think socialism must always = the state, but I’ll give it a go!
I have vague recollections of the Milibands thousands of years ago when I worked at Marxism Today. There were many young men around who made the tran­sition from Communist Party backgrounds to New Labour without much trouble. It ­simply required a degree of faith and opportunism.
There is still to be a good book written on how a load of erstwhile self-proclaimed ‘Marxists’ (whether from a Communist or Trotskyite background) and/or ‘Hard Left’ activists (Freud would have a field day) ended up supporting the largely pro-City of London/Big Business agenda of New Labour. They took on different ideals and goals but used the similar methods to achieve them. Discuss.