Kmflett's Blog

21 years on: could the 2003 Iraq War have been stopped?

At 21 years the run up to and the start of the 2003 Iraq War is on the cusp of moving into history. Yet of course it is still very current. So much so that the 20^th anniversary of the start of the war in 2023 warranted Editorials (Guardian) and features (New Statesman).

The march against the war organised by the Stop the War Coalition on 15^th February 2003 remains the largest ever in British history. There are still very large numbers of people who were on the march around and who can remember why they were on it. Many will have been marching for Palestine in recent months (if their knees are up to it)along with new generations too young to have been involved in 2003.

That march was a part of a global anti-war movement, yet the war went ahead.

The Foreign Secretary Robin Cook resigned and made a powerful Commons speech arguing that he could not support a war that did not have the support of Britain’s international allies and indeed the UN. Alastair Campbell notes in his diaries that a ‘second resolution’ which is what Cook was speaking about was not needed for the war to go ahead. Clearly he was right, the war went ahead. That however did not make it legal.

139 Labour MPs voted against the war in the Commons:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/mar/19/uk.houseofcommons3?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

On the day war started there were protests by school students across the country. Those who protested will now be in their thirties and no doubt remember what they did. The idea however was to encourage workplace walkouts and stoppages against the war. It didn’t happen on a sufficiently significant scale.

15^th February 2003 was a sufficient mobilisation to make sure the Iraq War remains not just nearly history but also very much a current issue. Sadly it wasn’t enough to get the Government to pull back from supporting the war. The death and destruction that followed in Iraq are a reminder of why the effort to stop the war was important.

The reality that the war wasn’t stopped reminds again that huge demonstrations are key to mobilising and organising but that is just one stage. It has to be followed through into workplaces and communities. There are signs that is happening over Palestine but it is a work in urgent progress

Gramsci summarised a political crisis as one where the old was dying but the new could not be born. He went on to argue that in the space created morbid symptoms appeared, or if you prefer another translation from the Italian, its the time of monsters

The Sunday Times reported (17th March) that as the Tories lurch from crisis to crisis caught between calling an Election before things get even worse and changing leader yet again to see if that helps, that the Tory hard right are organising.

On Wednesday 13th March there was an evening drinks reception in the Commons organised by Sir John Hayes who leads the self styled ‘Common Sense’ group of Tory MPs. Hayes is Braverman’s speech writer and she was sacked on one occasion (before her most recent sacking) for leaking documents to him

Around 20 Tory MPs attended including Liz Truss, paying a rare visit to the UK.

The latest Culture War agenda according to the report revolves around ‘biological sex and Rwanda’. Truss tried and failed to introduce a Bill on the former subject in Parliament last week.

Whether this group have the ability to seize the Tory leadership seems doubtful, but they are disrupters with plenty of media outlets ready to carry their latest rants.

They currently seem to have become fixated on the method of selection for a new Chancellor of Oxford University (Times letters 26th March). They are concerned that there is an effort being made to avoid an old white male Tory for the job. It does not seem on the face of it to be a subject which would motivate red wall voters.

A survey of Tory Councillors has found they’d prefer Penny Mordaunt as the next Tory leader possibly because she is ostensibly the least mad and malignant of the potential choices.

However 26th March also saw two more Tory Ministers James Heappey and Robert Halfon step down from their roles and signify their intent to stand down as MPs at the Election. The number of Tory MPs standing down is now well into the sixties.

The crisis as yet remains unresolved but when it is (up to a point) and the new is eventually born it may not look so very different

North London Culture Wars: Crouch End v Muswell Hill

Poll result Crouch End 35%, Muswell Hill 20%, Sarf London 44%

According to the Sunday Times survey of the best places to live in London, Crouch End N8 is up there. The cultural scene is mentioned as is the presence of an M&S and Waitrose and (rightly) Dunn’s Bakery. Pubs don’t feature but Crouch End with the Railway, the Queens and Small Bar is certainly better although Muswell Hill does have one of the better Wetherspoons, the Mossy Well.

There is of course no tube or rail station (the W7 will take you to Finsbury Park) The same applies to Muswell Hill where the W7 starts. The 41 and W3 will take you from Crouch End to Tottenham but the survey is really about house prices combined with nice places to live. Tottenham where I live is great and house prices are increasing (unfortunately, although I own one). It also has lots of the kind of working people who keep London going (Crouch End has some but less now).

The bigger puzzle though is why Crouch End features and Muswell Hill does not. There is a mention of Alexandra Palace, which is actually mostly in Muswell Hill. What though of the Kinks,Fairport Convention Toffs Fish & Chip restaurant, the presence (again) of an M&S and a Waitrose and some of the very best views in London. Not forgetting W. Martyn on the Broadway which roasts its own coffee and sells preserves, pickles and other interesting edibles.

Crouch End has a Waterstones but Muswell Hill has an independent bookshop and a children’s bookshop. The Sunday Times mentions the two good art focused cinemas in Crouch End but Muswell Hill has an Everyman

Perhaps the issue is the famous people who have resided over time in Crouch End:

Ho Chi Minh the revolutionary with a distinctive beard style was born on 18 May 1890. He was in the UK working in hospitality between 1913 and 1919 including at a Fullers pub in West Ealing. At some point he lived in Crouch End

Between July and October 1967 Young Boris lived in Crouch End as Stanley and Charlotte moved across London.

In neither case of Ho Chi Minh or Johnson is the Crouch End location known, so far. Perhaps a collective blue plaque on the clock tower is in order.

Muswell Hill supporters will no doubt point to the presence of ANC leader Oliver Tambo in Alexandra Park Rd for many years and a statue of him in Albert Rd Rec.

Meanwhile I cant help thinking that the preference for Crouch End over Muswell Hill is some kind of only partly declared class war. Or as the Tories would no doubt say, which is the more Woke?

17th March

Aldridge v Elliott: the Ambridge Ruling Class at War

Spending a day at the Cheltenham Races, Brian Aldridge runs into Miranda Elliott the ex-wife of Justin. He ends up going for coffee with her in Borchester the following day and agreeing to meet up further. Justin is annoyed about the re-appearance of his former partner. However he has contacted Stella, Brian’s farm manager who he has previously worked with. Another episode of a band of warring brothers is starting

Emma & Ed & Capitalism

Emma and Ed have shared their business plan for their tree business with Will. The plan having already been rejected by a bank Will is looking to put up money by remortgaging his house. Will knows nothing about business so asked Brian Aldridge to review the plan. There was talk of KPIs and amendments. Subsequently Emma got a revised plan checked by Justin who suggested it needed ‘focus’. Tbc

A Day at the Races

Brian and Alice spent the day at Cheltenham. A topical insert even if they didn’t bump into Kate Middleton

Chris and Alistair. Men.

Alistair is still recovering from his cupboard liaison with Denise while Chris is being bad tempered with Alice again. Are there any sane and sensible men in Ambridge?

In Other News

Dissent over the cow hides at the Tea Rooms is growing. They’ve taken down

Brian has been dead heading the daffodils

I’m not always the biggest fan of the social historian Dominic Sandbrook but his piece in the Times (16th March 2024) on Keith Richards and Mick Jagger’s drugs bust in West Wittering in February 1967 is interesting. Both men were found guilty and despatched to jail except they weren’t. Rees Mogg Senior then editing the Times produced an Editorial supporting them and they were in effect let off.

The reason for Sandbrook’s interest is that a film and a play were produced in 2024 about the drugs bust.

My interest stems from checking to see if Keith Richards still owns Redlands, the Grade 11 listed mansion he brought in 1966 in Chichester. The answer is that 58 years on he does and still spends some time there.

Indeed in recent years he has complained about a public footpath that runs in his view too close to the property. The local planning authority was not impressed.

As Sandbrook notes the judge in the original trial of RIchards and Jaggers was biased against them because he didn’t think they were fit and proper persons to own such a property. They were after all just pop stars not part of the traditional ruling orders.

It was and is a matter of class and touches upon the thesis that Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson put forward in New Left Review in the 1960s that Britain had had an incomplete bourgeois revolution leaving landowners and the aristocracy with much power.

But what happens when the Rolling Stones Keith Richards becomes and stays one of those landowners?

Are Anti-Woke elements cancelling Marmite?

16^th March

The Marmite Defence League which exists to defend the use of Marmite in a wide range of applications against haters has expressed concern that Anti-Woke elements are trying to cancel Marmite.

Several much loved Marmite applications seem to have disappeared.

These include:

Marmite Easter Eggs

Marmite & Cheese hot cross buns (M&S)

Organiser Keith Flett said, while Marmite or a similar product is manufactured and eaten elsewhere in the world it is a quintessentially British item associated with the country’s brewing heritage. We think it may be under threat from anti-Woke elements who do not want to see experimentation and development in traditional cuisine. How often for example is Marmite praised on GB News? Hardly ever if at all it would seem

Where we stand on Marmite

Marmite is a natural product deriving from brewer’s yeast. It is historically a by-product of brewing

It was ‘invented’ by a German scientist Justus von Liebig

Originally Marmite was derived from the Bass brewery in Burton on Trent.

Marmite is salty but also has some health enhancing elements to it including vitamins.

Its recent marketing focuses on a ‘love it or hate it’ element to Marmite, and it is a ‘which side are you on’ food.

With the reporting of the disgusting racist words of Frank Hester about DIane Abbott, a campaign developed anew to demand that the Labour Whip be restored so that she could stand as a Labour candidate for Hackney North at the General Election. She has a very large majority and would likely win if she stood as an independent. However there is a point of principle at stake.

The suspension of the Whip came after she wrote a letter to the Observer which at best provided a very muddled perspective on what is known as the ‘hierarchy of the oppressed’. The letter was in a response to an earlier tendentious article the paper had published but that was and is not the point. She rightly immediately apologised and withdrew her comments.

Other Labour MPs who have transgressed in various ways, some more worrying, have in due course had the Whip restored. Diane Abbott said that she didnt think this would happen in her case because she is, rightly, critical of the leadership.

Now reportedly five months after an investigation into the Observer letter was concluded and the matter dealt with via a warning, Diane Abbott has finally had the whip restored. Its unclear whether she will stand as a Labour candidate at the Election or even if she now wants to.

Contrasts with the Starmer open arms welcome that hard right former Tory MP Natalie Elphicke had are entirely appropriate.

Does all this mean that Starmer has finally disbanded Labour as a broad church? Here is what Ralph Miliband the author of Parliamentary Socialism (1961) the definitive history of the early decades of the Labour Party had to say:

Pious references to the Labour Party being a ‘broad church’ which has always incorporated many different strands of thought fail to take account of a crucial fact, namely that the ‘broad church’ of Labour only functioned effectively in the past because one side – the Right and Centre – determined the nature of the services that were to be held, and excluded or threatened with exclusion any clergy too deviant in its dissent.

In short Starmer is not the exception to the behaviour of the Labour right but very much in line with it. If there is a difference his inadequacies as a politician mean he appears more unpleasant when he attacks the left then say Hugh Gaitskell or even Harold Wilson did.

Their Mobs & Our Protests

The right-wing media is full of bellicose Tories including the Prime Minister saying that Palestinian protests are ‘aggressive mobs’ that are apparently threatening democracy. Yet more measures are planned to ‘crack down’ on protest, except for ones that the Tories support such as farmers of course

Before she was sacked as Home Secretary Suella Braverman said Palestinian protests were ‘hate marches’ and protesters an ‘intimidating mob’, which is also what the reactionary thinker Edmund Burke said about the French Revolution. She then summoned up far right and fascist groups who duly appeared and attacked police at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day.

Meanwhile crowds of many hundreds of thousands have continued to march peacefully calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in central London.

Historically speaking, not a phrase likely to be found on the lips of Braverman or Sunak, one person’s mob is another person’s crowd

For example protesting outside the house of someone who has transgressed many people’s understanding of what might be termed a ‘moral economy’ is a British tradition stretching back over many centuries. It was not however by any means always politically progressive, so controversy over it is also something not recent. An anti-war crowd was to be found protesting outside President Biden’s private house recently reflecting deep tensions being caused by Gaza in the US.

As the great historian of nineteenth century protest George Rude underlined what reactionaries thought was a mob was in many cases simply a peaceful crowd making reasonable points. If one wants to look for a mob, the activities of the Bullingdon Club are a good place to start.

While George Rude saw in protests, up to and including riots, the work of the crowd, with broadly progressive intentions and outcomes, E.P. Thompson was less happy with this formulation. He suggested that riots could also contain reactionary elements and the crowd involved in the Gordon Riots in 1780 would be an obvious example.

Thompson’s work on food riots points to the reality that the threat of a protest was often more effective than an actual riot. It could cause a reduction in the price of bread or the distribution of hoarded food. When riots did, quite rarely, occur very much the same impact was to be found. Hidden food was seized and distributed at low price.

There were other, more obviously political riots, often associated with the Chartists in the 1840s. The Chartists were an organised political force that most certainly did not support riots. It was rather the wider Chartist crowd that participated in such activities, often after provocation from the authorities.

There has been a lot more research and wider perspectives on the crowd since Thompson and Rude looked at the matter in the 1960s and 1970s. Crowds are viewed from the perspective of safety risk management and from psychology as well as history.

Historical research however can provide useful context by looking at who the individuals involved in mob or crowd protests

This post first appeared in the Morning Star