OBITUARY: TED GRANT

Ted Grant, Trotskyist guru of the Revolutionary Socialist League (aka the Militant Tendency) has died at the age of 93. Thanks to Hak Mao for the link to this oddly moving obit by his long-time comrade in arms Alan Woods.

TOMMY SHERIDAN LATEST

"Of all the things about me the worst thing said was that I had sex on my wife's bed with another woman behind my wife's back." Does this involve a particularly painful feat of contortionism? Or have I missed the point?

GEORGE GALLOWAY, STALINIST SCUMBAG – 2,453

My thanks to Ken Weller for alerting me to this, a nasty little piece by Galloway in Alexander Cockburn’s cretino-leftist Counterpunch to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the Spanish civil war. It purports to be an appreciation of John Cornford, the communist poet who died while fighting for the International Brigade in Spain at the age of 21 – but it is laced with venom.

“But for a bullet in the brain on the Ebro,” he declares, “Rupert John Cornford might have loomed as large as George Orwell in the British left-wing lexicon.” Fair enough. I’m not a great fan of Cornford as a poet, but he’s undoubtedly worth reading (and Orwell thought so too). But then Galloway goes on:

Orwell would probably have informed on him to his bosses in British Intelligence. For Cornford was a Communist.

And he continues, a propos the volunteers for the International Brigades:

their memory has been sullied by Orwell's slanders, unfortunately reinforced by Ken Loach's film Land and Freedom.

This is disgusting Stalinist drivel. Orwell did not have “bosses in British Intelligence”, and he did not inform on anyone: the famous list he handed over in the late 1940s to his friend Celia Kirwan, then working for a Foreign Office propaganda operation set up by a democratic socialist Labour government, was of people he considered should not be approached to write for it because of their pro-Soviet sympathies. Big deal.

And Orwell did nothing to sully the memory of the International Brigade volunteers. He did expose the vile role of the Stalinists in suppressing the Spanish revolution in 1937 – and his disgust at the failure of the British left to recognise what they did remained with him throughout his life. But that is not the same thing. There is not a word against the International Brigades volunteers anywhere in his work. Indeed, he became friendly with at least two veterans of the brigades, Hugh Slater and Tom Wintringham – both of whom parted company with the Communist Party soon after their experience in Spain and played key roles in the Home Guard in 1940-41 when the CP was defending the Hitler-Stalin pact. In the leftist jargon of the time, which of course Orwell hated and would never have used, his attitude to the International Brigades was that they were lions led by jackals. Which is a bit like the ordinary members of the Respect coalition.

LORD LEVY ARRESTED

Well, what are they going to do about this? I think it's the fabled tipping point. Blair cannot go on.

FITBA DAFT - 5

Well, what about that? Italy-France is rather a good prospect. Come on you blues, as they say in Ipswich. But I'm going for the balder team. Who have Italy to compare with Zizou when it comes to out-and-out slapheads?

FITBA DAFT - 4

OK, so all my bets were wrong, and England turned out at last OK – a battling Scotland-style performance against Portugal, who cheated as if they were England in disguise. Rooney should not have been sent off, and when he was it turned into a scrap in which England acquitted themselves well. I was almost proud to be British again. But you needed a Gordon Strachan or a John Wark to turn it round. Or a Duncan Ferguson.

MARKING - 1

I teach a History of Journalism course. Best so far from the exams:

John Spargo's expose ... of child labour in the sweetshops.

FITBA DAFT - 3

Manchester United 2-0 Scunthorpe United.

They didn't score until the 83rd minute, and they were lucky not to have gone down 1-0 in the 44th. What a load of rubbish. Let's hope the Parsnips turn them over 6-0.

GOOD NEWS

Google reports:

Your search – "put the muselman to the sword"– did not match any documents.

FITBA DAFT – 2

All right, I know I said no more posts for a fortnight. But England were such a giant heap of steaming ordure today (for reasons I spelt out earlier) that I can't resist it. They would have been tonked 5-0 by either the Argies or Ivory Coast on today's performances and would struggle against Trinidad and Tobago.

My original scenario has, however, been falsified by events, so here's another (taking into account England 1-0 Paraguay and Sweden 0-0 Trinidad):

Sweden 4-0 Paraguay
England 0-0 Trinidad
Paraguay 0-2 Trinidad
England 1-1 Sweden

Final group table:

Sweden p3 w1 d2 l0 pts5 gd4
Trinidad p3 w1 d2 l0 pts5 gd2
England p3 w1 d2 l0 pts5 gd1
Paraguay p3 w0 d0 l0 pts0 gd-7

AND THERE WE WERE, ABOUT TO STORM THE BARRICADES

So the university lecturers' pay dispute has been settled, it seems. Damn. We were just about to get into postponing exam boards. Now I've got to mark all those bloody exams in double-quick time. No posts for a fortnight, even jokey ones on football or femdom ;-)

SUPER JIM MAGILTON

The Town have got a new boss, and he says: "They knew what I was like as a player, but they have no idea what I'll be like as a manager." Er, quite.

FITBA DAFT – 1

I was born in Scotland and my dad was an anyone-but-England Scot, so although my mum is a Londoner and I sound as English as they come - we moved to East Anglia when I was three - I've never been able to give enthusiastic support to English sports teams. I'm not going to get all Nick Hornby, but one of my first football memories is of us beating England in 1967, and I've stuck to a shamelessly nationalist position ever since. (Some dubiously Scots lefties say they're revolutionary defeatists: I'm just a sweaty at heart.)

This is not a particularly sensible position, particularly among England fans when strong drink has been taken. I shall never forget the abuse I got for cheering on Argentina in 1986, a friend of a friend has never spoken to me since I supported West Germany against England in 1990, and I came close to being beaten up in a pub when when I celebrated Dan Petrescu's 90th minute goal for Romania in 1998.

But, what the hell, I'm not supporting England in the World Cup this time either. My ideal scenario goes something like this:

England 1-1 Paraguay
Trinidad 0-3 Sweden
Sweden 1-0 Paraguay
England 2-0 Trinidad
Paraguay 3-0 Trinidad
England 1-1 Sweden

Final group table:
Sweden p3 w2 d1 l0 pts7 gd4
Paraguay p3 w1 d2 l0 pts5 gd3
England p3 w1 d2 l0 pts5 gd2
Trinidad p3 w0 d0 l0 pts0 gd-8

That's not crazy. All right, I accept that England should do better, but the England team is not as good as we're being told by the press, and they could easily come a cropper simply by not winning games. Without Rooney, the forward line is seriously shonky: I can't see Crouch scoring many against serious defences, and Owen is not what he was. Six-nil against Jamaica looks good until you reflect that England v Jamaica was Manchester United v Oldham Athletic and Oldham had nothing to play for. The England midfield is great if it's given the space but Beckham/Gerard/Lampard/Cole lacks width and pace - neither Beckham nor Cole plays wide enough - and the shape gets lost badly when Lennon or Downing come on as wingers. I could see the midfield (good as it is) being closed down well by technically inferior players who force them into the centre of the park. I was also underwhelmed by the England defence in the Jamaica game: against a more potent strike force than Ricardo Fuller and Deon Burton, Campbell and Carragher would struggle. True, Terry and Neville will be back, but...

For what it's worth, my money's on Brazil to win (boring), for Spain to be best European team and for an African side to get to the semis (not sure which one). But that's enough crystal balls.

CHE WAS A STALINIST DISASTER

I'm sick and tired of cretino-leftists whingeing that the Victoria and Albert museum is exploiting the image of Che Guevara, turning revolution into a commodity and so forth. Guevara should be no one's hero. He was a Stalinist scumbag who played a major role in the creation of a police state in Cuba, and his political strategy of guerrilla warfare set the left in Latin America back two generations. OK, he was good-looking - but so were Oswald Mosley and Eva Braun.

NUBILE NIHILISTS OF THE NORTH CIRCULAR

OK, I know I promised no more sexist postings in the small hours, but John Cooper Clarke was on my train home tonight.

The boys are on the wagon
The girls are on the shelf
Their common problem is
that they're not someone else
The dirt blows out
The dust blows in
You can't keep it neat
It's a fully furnished dustbin,
Sixteen Beasley Street

He got out at Colchester and did not give a performance.

OVERDUE SELF-CRITICISM

Well yeah, I’m a man – but I’m not aged 21, and the pistol in my pocket ain’t keeping lots of folks alive. I’ve been “Say it loud, I’m bald and I’m proud” for 15 years, I reckon. I’m a pathetic specimen. So I compensate by blogging.

That’s what Catherine Bennett says (I summarise) in the Guardian today in a column on middle-aged male bloggers – Gauche even gets a name-check for posting a couple of lines last weekend about the death of Desmond Dekker – and it’s so true.

Like a lot of bloggers, I’m a sad and lonely middle-aged bloke with no friends who never meets anyone apart from other similar blokes. I spend my time with them talking politics and football and music and birds. I know no one from an ethnic minority, I have spent the whole of my life running away from strong independent women, and my main priority now is to escape my domestic responsibilities. I have never grown up, I have an entirely callous attitude to feminism and I often have sexist thoughts.

Aaaargh! I have confessed! How did you get it out of me? I’ll never post in the small hours again, I promise! I’ll stop caring about football and rock’n’roll! I’ll do the housework! I’ll stop listening to the Rolling Stones! I’ll never use rude words again!

And so on.

RUDEBOY A WEEP AND A WAIL

Desmond Dekker is dead, and that's sad. In the early nineties he lived in the same road as me in Forest Hill, and I used to see him around a lot. I only ever spoke to him once, in a scuzzy pub, when I was drunk and he was very drunk indeed. I can't remember the conversation. But his music was great. RIP.

THE GUARDIAN VERSUS AARONOVITCH, KAMM AND WHEEN

So the boys lost, but apropos Chomsky's apologist stance on Srebrenica I was reminded of this:

He says he is not a 'crypto-communist'. But of course he does! What else could he say? A pickpocket does not go to the races wearing a label 'pickpocket' on his coat-lapel, and a propagandist does not describe himself as a propagandist.

Orwell on Konni Zilliacus in Tribune, 17 January 1947.

SO YOU THINK YOU KNOW TRIBUNE?

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 19 May 2006

OK, and now for something to cheer you all up. It’s this magazine’s 70th birthday in six months and I’ve been spending some time beefing up on the history for a collection of George Orwell’s columns for Tribune that — with a bit of luck — should be appearing in time for the celebrations. In the meantime, here’s a quiz, and the first two correct answers to me get free copies of the Orwell book. Answers by snail-mail to Tribune Quiz, Tribune, 9 Arkwright Road, London NW3 6AN or (preferably) by email to tribunequiz@yahoo.co.uk.

1. Which Tribune editor had a younger brother who became the head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency?

2. When was the Tribune Group set up?

3. George Orwell was literary editor of Tribune from 1943 to 1945. What was his next job after he left the staff?

4. Which Tribune editor became news editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Times?

5. Which founder member of the Tribune board was interned as a Nazi sympathiser during the second world war?

6. Why did the headline “Lower than Kemsley” nearly put Tribune out of business?

7. Which former Tribune editors have been accused by the Sunday Times of being Soviet “agents of influence”?

8. How long was Sheila Noble the person who really ran Tribune — I mean editorial secretary and then production manager?

9. Which senior Tribune journalist of the 1940s became a regular contributor to the pornographic magazine Penthouse in the 1970s?

10. Who was the lover of Tribune’s first editor, William Mellor?

11. Which two Labour MPs put up the money to launch Tribune in 1937 and how much did they lose in their first year?

12. What did Douglas Hill do when he was not editing the Tribune reviews pages?

13. Five people who at Tribune’s launch were either journalists on the paper or members of its board became Labour cabinet ministers. Name them.

14. Three Tribune editors also edited Fleet Street newspapers at different times of their lives. Name them.

15. Which Tribune editor founded the Good Food Guide?

16. Three Tribune editors were MPs before, during or after their spells as editor. Name them.

17. Two Tribune editors also worked on the staff of the New Statesman. Name them.

18. In which year did the headline “DON’T LET THIS BE THE LAST ISSUE OF TRIBUNE” appear on the front page?

19. Which Tribune editor now works for Al-Jazeera in New York?

20. Who was Thomas Rainsboro’?

Right, that’s enough fun: on to the real business, which of course is Gordon and Tony. No, I don’t mean it. I’m sick of the pair of them, bored with the endless wrangling, can’t see the difference between them. Whether GB has shafted TB or TB has shafted GB doesn’t mean very much to me. What I want to see is a coherent left-of-centre Labour Party with some sense of where it’s going, and I’m not getting a lot of it.

But TB/GB is unavoidable. Now Charles Clarke is out of the running, I’m reluctantly prepared to accept that there is no alternative to Brown as Labour leader after Blair. But Brown can’t take over now: he’s not up to it. And he has got to get his act up to speed pretty fast if he is going to be more than a Jim Callaghan, hanging on for a couple of years before losing to the Tories. He has the numbers in the party to be a shoo-in as leader when Blair goes (I always said 2007, incidentally) but the numbers aren’t what matter now: he needs to inspire the voters with a programme for what happens next.

He’s fine on the vision thing with the party — African babies are lovely — but it all looks too much like a 1980s Anti-Apartheid photo-call run by the Communist Party. So far, he’s probably done enough to retain or regain the “Bush is evil” crew for Labour. But he hasn’t so far worked out how to woo middle-class mums who aren’t averse to doing the right thing in Africa but worry about getting little Jemima into a decent school. Nor does he ring the bell for geezers in the boozer cheering for England.

I’m not bashing Gordon: I’m reconciled, really I am. The point is that he’s got to become much more of a man of the people if he’s going to make a success of it. The idiotic way of doing that would be to echo the law-and-ordure slogans that are the last resort of the Blair claque. But that would just piss off the party. I hope he finds an alternative.

FOOTBALL CHANTS

Bad luck to the Arse and all that, but what struck me last night was the revival of an old song:

One-nil to the Arsenal
One-nil to the Arsenal
One-nil to the Arsenal

and so on ad nauseam or a brilliant goal. I remember a few old songs myself as an Ipswich supporter (and "One-nil to the Ipswich Town" went down pretty well at the 1978 cup final) but most of them are shockingly racist or make libellous claims about rival players or teams:

John Bond, John Bond shags his son
John Bond shags his son

sung by the North Stand when Bond was managing Norwich and his son Kevin was playing for them, and then:

Jigger, jigger, jigger
Kill that nigger!

which was probably from the same game; it was certainly directed at Justin Fashanu, then the Norwich number nine and in the frame to take over as England's centre-forward from our own Paul Mariner. Fashanu subsequently bombed as a player and committed suicide after being outed as gay.

Then there was:

What's it like
What's it like
What's it like to have no jobs?

directed at Liverpool every time we met them in the early 1980s.

I always loved:

We can't read
We can't write
That don't really matter

We come down form Ipswich town
Riding on our tractors

Oooh-aaargh, oooh-aaargh, oooh-aaargh, oooh-aaargh
Oooh-aaargh, Oooh-aaargh

Oooh-aaargh, oooh-aaargh, oooh-aaargh, oooh-aaargh
Oooh-aaargh, Oooh-aaargh

but that was a bit of a one-off self-parody. Does anyone have any footie chants that go beyond the obvious, the reactionary or the self-deprecatory?