Honorary Proletarian

Today of course is Remembrance Sunday, and Oxford’s annual service thankfully passed off well.   The approach of the occasion made me think of the poetry written by participants in the First World War, taught in all schools and sold in most bookshops, but which I hadn’t read since sixth form.  It seemed appropriate yesterday to buy a new anthology of war poetry.

Why do we still read the poetry of conflict, especially of the First World War, and why is it still taught in our schools?  After all, today the contents of any anthology of war poetry must appear variously imperialist bombast, grim satire or really pretty horrible.  A poem like Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est is genuinely difficult to read, and that of course is a measure of its effectiveness.  But why is it still read?

Not, I think, to warn ourselves of the dangers of repeating the mistakes of the past – real as they are.  In the Middle Ages people were encouraged to read or listen to gruesome stories to remind them of the perils of sin, and it never worked.

In considering what lies at the heart of war poetry, and of its continued appeal, let us begin with an example – not a well-known example, but an anonymous soldiers’ song of the trenches.  It starts as a comic sketch of a drunken NCO:

If you want to find the Sergeant,

I know where he is, I know where he is,

I know where he is.

If you want to find the Sergeant,

I know where he is –

He’s lying on the Canteen floor.

I’ve seen him, I’ve seen him,

Lying on the canteen floor.

If you want to find the old Battalion,

I know where they are, I know where they are,

I know where they are.

If you want to find the old Batallion,

I know where they are -

They’re hanging on the old barbed wire.

I’ve seen ‘em, I’ve seen ‘em,

Hanging on the old barbed wire.

This is effective – and as effective as any war poem I know – because it brings to us with an almost physical shock that the people who fought and died in that war were people like us – neither myriad victims nor tragic heroes, but people who like a laugh and one or two pints, and would probably have watched Never Mind The Buzzcocks had it been invented.

Perhaps war poetry is still read because it helps us, not to understand war, but to understand that the people involved in it really are people.  When confronted by a statistic such as the number of people killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, or in Bosnia, Congo or Iraq, or in any conflict, it is almost impossible to understand, even if you relate it to the population of your home town.

Proportionately to population, more people were killed in one day at Towton in the fifteenth century than on the bloodiest day of the Somme, but this is meaningless, because tragedy is not proportionate to population.  Tragedy is not statistical but individual, and collective because individual.  Capitalism, with greater propulation and greater resources, found ways of killing more people, and in its mechanised slaughter it brought a new kind of horror into the world.  Tragedy has no meaning apart from individual human beings.

So when (for example) Richard Aldington tells us about looking at the “untroubled blue” of the sky after four days’ murderous bombardment, we are moved because this is one human being’s view of a horrible, miserable, senseless war – this is someone like us looking at it from inside and recording his impressiopns.  The indescribable is described, the inhuman humanised.  Humanity is asserted in the face of tragedy, it emerges from the chaos, and only by a return of humanity can war ever be ended.  Thus all war poetry, however horrible, contains a message of home.  This, I believe, is why we still read it.

W. B. Yeats, a great poet who said a number of silly things in the course of his life, thought that “psssive suffering was not a fit subject for poetry”.  But I don’t think he understood.  The subject is not “passive suffering”, but human beings – those who suffer, those who wrote then and those who read now.  For Wilfred Owen “the Poetry was in the Pity”, and pity is a human emotion.  It connects one human being to another and thus promotes humanity, because this is what humanity is.

“Humanity is a social animal”, both politically and, if you will pardon nthe word, spiritually, and the human race is a collective composed of individuals in which both individual and collective are essential and inseparable.  Perhaps by promoting humanity, we really can put an end to war.  Let us hope so – and let us work for it.  Making war poetry better known is not a bad place to start.

…that I’ve seen or read recently:

- a man walking down Cornmarket wearing a business suit, but no shoes or socks.  Some kind of tribute to that Beatles album cover?  In any case, weird.

- “Penguin Books (may the god Nabû bless them)”

- This video

- “In the Nuts (Unground) (Other Than Ground Nuts) Order, the expression nuts (unground) (other than ground nuts) shall have reference to such nuts (other than ground nuts) as would but for this amending Order not qualify tfor the description nuts (unground) (other than ground nuts) by reason of their being nuts (unground)”.

No, I haven’t turned into the Daily Mail!  I’m prompted to write this by the shocking, though at the same time unsurprising, news that Oxford is now by some way the most difficult place in Britain to buy a house, with house prices up to 13.5 times annual income.  The findings haven’t been published online yet but I’ll link to them when they are.

Oxford has long been one of the most expensive places in Oxford to live: back in 2003 the Joseph Rowntree Foundation named it as one of the 40 most difficult places in the country for key workers to find anywhere to live, and a couple of years ago the Oxford Mail revealed that to get a typical mortgage here, you had to be paid at least £78,000 a year.  Now it seems Oxford has overtaken even London in terms of the disparity between average income and average house price – and given the impact of this on the rental market, this affects not just people with steady jobs trying to get a mortgage, but everyone.

So why is Oxford so bad?  Two words: green belt.  At least, that’s what the sort of people who put their so-called rural amenities before  the welfare of the majority of people call it.  Personally, I see nothing particularly green in the disused sewage works and fly-tipping site the City Council wants to build on off Grenoble Road opposite Greater Leys, nor in the pesticide-covered fields next to the ring road North-West of Barton.

So why build an “urban extension” rather than “infill”?  Oxford is horribly overcrowded and has been “filled in” as much as it can stand.  Quality of life is affected by the disappearance of gardens and the multiplication of cars in a confined area.  Pressure is put on transport and local facilities.

There are about 700 unoccupied homes in Oxford that the Council is strenuously trying to bring back into use with its new legal powers, but thousands, not hundreds of new homes are needed.  Put simply, we can’t squeeze any more people inside the ring road, so we’re going to have to expand outside it, willy-nilly.

Permission has been given by the Government to build four thousand desperately needed new homes off Grenoble Road.  The usual suspects are trying to stall this using Britain’s absurd legal processes until, they hope, a Tory government gets in and decided it doesn’t give a shit about the people of Oxford.  This is immoral and must be stopped, just as the similar campaigns against wind turbines that are holding up Britain’s commitment to fighting climate change must be stopped (and yes, it’s the same people who are objecting to the building of Britain’s first Council-sponsored wind turbine here as well.  Nowhere near houses, by the way).

A couple of weeks ago I met a lovely couple, the wife heavily pregnant, who live in one room in a grotty HMO (thats House in Multiple Occupation, for those not familiar with the jargon of overcrowding).  The baby is due about now so may have been born into a place where fresh air is  a rare commodity and as for a green space to play – well, thanks to my comrades on the Council there is at least still a playground nearby, due to be thoroughly refurbised.  Of course, the family have little chance of getting a Council house in the immediate future – Oxford has not sold off its Council houses (hurray!) and still has over 8,000 of them, but there’s also more then 5,000 families and individuals on the waiting list.

I believe, as a socialist, that people have a right to a decent standard of living, and this includes gardens, play areas, fresh air, parks and community facilities where they live.  Environmentalists may prattle about the value of the countryside as an amenity.  But preserving the countryside on one hand and packing human beings like sardines into a can on the other isn’t sustainable.  One of this country’s earliest socialists and environmentalists, William Morris, dreamed of abolisihing the distinction between town and country by enabling the population to distribute itself more evenly across the landscape.  Human beings, after all, are the central and most important part of the environment, however strongly we feel about the rest of it.

So come on, Labour Government.  Maybe you reckon you’re going to lose to the Tories.  Even if you are, you can do something useful by pushing through new development where it’s needed, giving Councils the powers to regulate HMOs properly and bring empty homes back into use, allowing Councils to build new Council houses, without condition (the scheme to allow some in overcrowded cities like Oxford, under which the City Council is currently applying, is a good start but not nearly enough) and stop any part of Council tenants’ rent going to central government.

People keep telling me they miss this blog, which is not what I’d say, but I suppose there’s no accounting for taste.  I thought, therefore, that I’d better sit down and write something, though I have more to do now than I used to.  Unto everything there is a season, and unto staring at a computer screen listening to (of all things) Denis Healey on YouTube and wondering what the hell I’m taking about, there is today.

Yes, you can tell, can’t you.  I’m bored.

I tend to think about elections a lot (yes, I’m not only bored, I can also be boring).  So bored I read recently that archaeologists think democracy may be a very ancient idea  – though I suppose it’s their job to think that things are very ancient.  Apparently even the Mesopotamians may originally have had elections of a kind, five thousand years ago.  I wonder what sort of elections?  Did they produce campaign leaflets (on clay, of course)?

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SHITTI-MARDUK FOR GOVERNOR!*

Good reasons to vote tomorrow:

Shitti-Marduk is an experienced warlord. In the last battle against the accursed Elamites, he was responsible for collecting the hands of enemy corpses.

If elected, he will redecorate the temple of Ishtar with gold plate and inaugurate a new law code containing at least ten different forms of mutilation.

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OK, time to stop being silly now.  I look outside and see that the sun is shining, so it’s time to go out and enjoy the fresh air.  Best wishes to everyone doing Workers’ Beer at Reading, I hope the sunshine dries out some of the mud…and see you soon.  I shall be back at the keyboard in due course.

*Yes, there really was someone called Shitti-Marduk.

Exactly 360 years ago today, on 30th January 1649(*), Charles Stuart, Kind of England, was publicly beheaded in Whitehall for high treason to his country.  This marked an epoch in the history of Britain, and for that matter of Europe – although kings had of course been murdered, imprisoned and deposed before, never had a sovereign been openly tried by a court appointed by representatives of (some of) his subjects, and sentenced to death according to the law of the land.

Charles and his supporters were utterly bewildered.  At the beginning of the trial and even on the scaffold the King denied that the court had any authority to try him – he simply did not understand where such authority could come from.  “A sovereign and a subject”, he said, ” are plain different things”.  His insistence on hisfeudal world-view is almost tragic, for a new world had dawned.  The full significance of the event lies in the fact that unlike the French National Assembly a century and a half later, Parliament did not abolish the monarchy and then commit the former King to trial as a common citizen – they acknowledged Charles’ title and indicted him as King, in order to emphasise that in future no-one, whatever his or her position, could be above the law.  Feudalism and feudal privilege were thus dealt their quietus in the person of their representative, and the subsequent abolition of the monarchy, on 17th March, was merely a formality.

 It is right, therefore, to call the execution of Charles Stuart a revolutionary act, and a foundation stone of our democratic rights.  However, we republicans are prone to exaggerate the modernity of the Parliament of the 1640s and the Commonwealth.  It was the 17th Century, after all – there was no example of any bourgeois democracy in the world, no example of a democratic movement apart from elements within the German and Dutch uprisings of the previous century, and no example of sovereign elected institutions unless you could read Livy (for the Roman oligarchic version) or Aristotle (for the Greek version that depended on slavery).  The Parliament that put Charles on trial wasn’t elected on anything like a democratic franchise, and some of its members had been arbitrarily excluded by the army.  It had far more legitimacy than the King, but by no means did it represent the people!

The fact that there was no popular democratic theory makes the emergence of democratic currents within the English Revolution all the more remarkable.  The best-known such current is the Levellers, an organised party that demanded a parliamentary republic with much wider suffrage (not though, in the case of their “mainstream”, for women, servants, apprentices or people dependent on poor relief) regular parliaments, absolute rule of the elected Parliament subject to the rule of law and certain absolute rights (freedom of religion and freedom from conscription).  To their left were groups like the Diggers (or “True Levellers” as they called themselves), who fought for a truly egalitarian society and agrarian communism in the countryside.  The Levellers organised soldiers’ committees in the army and drew up a proposed constitution for an English Commonwealth, which was debated in the democratically elected Army Council at Putney, against the elitist constitution proposed by the Generals and their supporters in Parliament.

The Diggers were before their time in social philosophy and unable to formulate a programme for the whole of society because the material basis for a socialist society did not yet exist.  The Levellers were defeated because they could not keep their radical coalition of urban artisans and traders, yeoman farmers and soldiers from a similar class background together, while the wealthy, who had been split between Parliament and King, reunited in defence of their property.  Two Levellers were shot by Cromwell in Oxford and three in nearby Burford (hence Levellers’ Day in that picturesque Tory village).  Most of the Levellers’ basic programme was actually achieved in the course of the nineteenth century, by people a lot less “radical” in their methods and rhetoric than the Levellers were (though, of course, under pressure from the growing trade union movement and at times in fear of revolutionary action from mass movements like the Chartists).

This doesn’t mean, however, that the Levellers and their demands were not revolutionary in their time.  Theirs was a world dominated by the remnants of feudalism and emerging mercantile capital, in which the “middling sort” – artisans, traders, yeoman farmers – constituted a revolutionary class against the big landowners and established merchants whose power and wealth depended at least partly on privilege as well as mere possession of capital.  Even when making limited demands, the Levellers based their philosophy on universal equality (“The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he”, sald Rainborough at the Putney Debates – and Cromwell’s son-in-law Ireton taxed him with wanting to share out property equally).  In the nineteenth century, by contrast, Britain became a capitalist society in which the main cleavage was between the owners of capital and the providers of labour.  In the Levellers’ time, the wealthy were sure that the implementation of the Leveller programme would fatally undermine their position.  Two centuries later that was no longer the case.  Universal suffrage no longer automaticall had socialistic implications, although it still represented huge progress and, of course, a sine qua non of labour and socialist political representation.

The pioneer socialist William Morris noted “how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes about it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name”.  Even within fundamentally similar societies the content of a political programme can change while its form remains the same – in the 1840s, when both state bureaucracy and civil society were much less developed than they are now, the Chartists’ demands were revolutionary and it would have taken a revolution to achieve them, but most of them have long since been incorporated into our political constitution without any fundamental disturbance, though again it required the existence of a militant labour movement to bring this about.

Today socialists and trade unionists can follow in the footsteps of the Levellers – and the Parlaimentarians who called Charles Stuart to account – not by congratulating ourselves that we live in a society where their demands have been made reality, but by formulating a programme that will provide a rough equivalent in our own society of the revolutionary mobilising impact the Agreement of the People had in theirs.  We may not achieve it, but we will not have to wait another 360 years.  Human beings now have exponentially more knowledge and mastery of nature than our ancestors did in 1649.  With its unprecedented power to destroy both human beings and the environment in which we live, and its unprecedented capacity for mass communication of ideas – good, bad indifferent and some purely evil – modern industrial capitalist society has to choose between the two options Rosa Luxemburg identified nearly a century ago – socialism or barbarism.  The human race has the ability to shape its own destiny in this world.  Our activity, our articulations of hope and determination to build a better world for our descendants to live in, can move society in the right direction.

(*)  In the 17th Century Britain used a different calendar from the Gregorian calendar of Catholic Europe, and celebrated the New Year in March: so to most of the rest of Europe the execution took place on 9th February 1649, while in Britain it was 30th January 1648.  Subsequent calendar reform kept the original dating but changed the date of the New Year, so in modern parlance the date is 30th January 1649.  In any case, Janus, Roman god of doorways and changes, seems a more suitable patron for a revolutionary event than the month of fevers.

Thankfully, the war in Gaza is over – for now.  Since both sides have declared “unilateral” ceasefires and there is no actual agreement, the situation is unstable, but there is actually some hope, and at least people aren’t facing the imminent danger of violent death.

This is probably a good time to write something calm about my own view of the situation.  Socialists have a duty to take action against unnecessary war; but protests against the policies of the Israeli government are often seen as anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic – and there is no doubt that there are anti-Semites out there who want to take advantage of them.  For this reason we must be vary careful to make two things clear: that we are protesting only against Israeli government policies, not against Israel per se; and that we do not consider Israel in some way exceptionally bad.  I’m always uncomfortable when people chant slogans like “Israel is a terror state”, because this implies that there is something in the nature of Israel which makes it “terrorist”.  This idea must be rejected.  If Israel’s military has committed terrorist acts, then so has the military of Britain, the USA, Russia, Indonesia and in fact virtually every state in the world at on time or another.

Having said that, we can get on to opposing the specific war.  The response of the Israeli government to Hamas terrorism was grossly disproportionate; civilians were targetted and infrastructure destroyed; people who had nothing to do with Hamas were maimed and killed.  Israeli people cannot be expected to endure rocket attacks by terrorists who want to destroy their country, but the very worst way to fight terrorism is by bombing someone else’s country indiscriminately.  Apart from the terrible death and destruction, this merely makes people so desperate and hopeless that a few of them join the terrorists.  And although it’s a cliche, I really don’t see any moral difference between killing civilians with a Qassam rocket and killing civilians with a Merkava tank.  The government of Israel has sunk to Hamas’ level, and it has done so with an arsenal far bigger and more destructive than any terrorist group’s.

There is also the underlying issue of the continued occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza by the Israel Defence Forces.  I am, as the above should make clear, one of those ho always insists that Israel is a country like any other, the Israeli people have an unquestionable right to their own state and to deny that the Israeli people should have the same rights as any other nation is wrong and dangerous.  But the Palestinian people have the same rights.  Their right to their own state is being denied by military occupation, and this is the major problem in Israel-Palestine.  I know that Hamas denies the right of Israel to exist; I know that the surrounding Arab states have a history of denying Israel’s right to exist; but the Israeli govermnet has the power to bring a Palestinian state into beng by withdrawing its forces from the West Bank and ending the blockade of Gaza, and it should do so.  Two wrongs don’t make a right.

The Israeli people are understandably concerned about security, but so are the Palestinian people, and with more immediate day-to-day reason.  Here, the geography of Israel-Palestine plays a major role in the insecurity and instability of the situation.  It’s surprising that people often discuss the situation without realising how small the area they’re discussing is.  From the Mediterranean at Tel Aviv to the nearest town in the West Bank is nine miles.  The Gaza Strip is only five miles wide.  Israelis and Palestinians live cheek-by-jowl, and while there is hostility people living in such close proximity understandably have a tendency to look over their shoulder.  In such a situation, as long as there is not a sustainable peace, not just between Israel and Palestine but across the region, there will be permanent hostility and occasional wars.  Terrorism, extremism, war, occupation and blockade are all major obstacles to reaching a sustainable peace.  More than this, occupation and blockade are unjust and undemocratic.  The government of Israel must withdraw from the West Bank and lift the blockade of Gaza, as much for its own good as for that of the Palestinian people.

Socialists have, as I said, a duty to oppose unnecessary war.  We also have a duty of international solidarity with all peoples against those who oppress and misgovern them.  The peoples of Palestine, Israel and the neighbouring countries, their labour movements and their peace movements, are the only hope for peace in the region.  A quotation my friend Sacha has highlighted says it all: “The despots of all countries are our enemies; the workers of all countries are our friends”.

See here: http://occupiedoxford.wordpress.com.

That takes me back a bit…running down St. Giles with a long chain wrapped round me.  On the negative side, it was heavy and uncomfortable and the rattling could be heard a mile off, but on the positive side I was probably impervious to bullets.  The Uni management’s incompetent barrister.  Sleeping in the Uni fundraising office and not showering for several days.  Everyone going for a fry-up at St. Giles Cafe at 8am when we finally left (it was a lot cheaper then!)

Happy days…!

I think Tony Woodley is essentially right here (thanks Ian): “The Labour party, the first major socialist party to embrace neoliberalism, now has to let go of it to have any future”.

Now, there are two possible explanations for the current unpopularity of the government in its long-neglected “core” areas of support (and yes, my choice of adjective kind of gives away my conclusion).  One is that everyone loved Tony Blair and everyone hates Gordon Brown, thinking him  much worse.  This is obviously nonsense.  After all, Brown was very popular during his first few months in office, Blair was scarcely well-liked, and as for the Brown government adopting worse policies, or indeed many different policies at all…I don’t believe that voters are stupid.

The second explanation is that the lack of difference is prcisely the problem.  Many people, especially among working-class “natural” Labour supporters, genuinely thought Brown’s takeover, however unsatisfactory in its details, would bring the change necessary to the Labour government, getting rid of all the disastrous Thatcherite elements of “New Labour” ideology.  People expected an end to the obsession with “market solutions”.  They didn’t get it.  And now they’re fed up: they’ve lost hope in politics.

It follows that the only thing that can rekindle that hope in politics, and save the country from the Tories, is a dramatic change in the whole policy agenda - considerably more dramatic, by the way, than Brown would have needed to enact to keep his popularity.  “New Labour” is dead – unsalvageable – defunct – kaput.  Do you get it now, you blithering gaggle of political strategists?  The post-Thatcher consensus, in which Labour economic policy sought to be the social-democratic face of the free market, is dead, and you killed it with your ideological inflexibility.

You may have done the Labour Party and the labour movement a big favour.  Because now the choice is stark: real change, and a reinvigorated Labour Party genuinely responsive to the labour movement, and setting the agenda with sweeping new reforms; or a Tory government, and unbridled Thatcherism without any attempt at social responsibility.

Make your choice.  Go forward or step aside.

It will only last as long as there are folks left with the faith to fight for it – Nye Bevan

Sixty years ago today, every household in Britain got a leaflet from the Labour Government.  This leaflet explained that:

Your new National Health Service begins on 5th July.  What is it?  How do you get it?

It will provide you with all medical, dental and nursing care.  Everyone – rich or poor, man, woman or child – can use it or any part of it.  There are no charges, except for a few specific items.  There are no insurance qualifications.  But it is not a ‘charity’.  You are all paying for it, mainly as taxpayers, and it will relieve your money worries in time of illness.

Until the 5th July 1948 there had been nothing worthy of the name of a health care system in Britain.  Doctors, chemists, hospitals and laboratories were privately owned and run, uncoordinated and for most of them patients had to pay.  Even the limited medical “insurance” scheme introduced by the Liberal Government of Lloyd George covered only workers who could afford to pay into it and not their families – so the poor health of working-class women was one of the worst aspects of gender inequality, and class discrimination began before birth.

All this was changed by a combination of events and people.  In 1945 the people of Britain, mainly the working class, determined to build a just societyafter six years of war, elected the Labour Government of Clement Attlee by a landslide.  In 1944 the Party Conference had voted for a policy of wholesale nationalisation that the right wing of the party had immediately condemned as sure to lose Labour the election.  Attlee had the vision, or perhaps just the political nous, to appoint as Secretary of State for Health Aneurin Bevan, a man that same right wing had spent most of the previous decade trying to expel.

The result was a comprehensive revolution in health care.  The statement quoted above doesn’t sound revolutionary to people who have grown up with the NHS, but it is.  There is no question here of “means testing” or even a “safety net” for people failed by capitalism.  The service is universal; and far from the rich getting undeserved benefit from (which is today’s usual “progressive” argument for means testing) they are paying for it through graduated general taxation, and not deriving any great benefit from it since they could afford health care already.  Neither is there any idea of “qualifying” for benefits by one’s actions, any of that division between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor which is actually a vicious form of class discrimination (since the rich don’t have to be “deserving”).  Rather, everyone gives according to their means and receives according to their need.  If the capitalist class don’t like it they will be prosecuted for tax evasion.

Today, though, the NHS and the socialist principles embodies in it are under threat.  The attacks on the NHS perpetrated by the Tories have been perpetuated by a Labour Government.  Although this government has invested huge sums of money in the NHS, in contrast to Tory neglect, they have continued and even extended the creeping privatisation of health services the Tories planned and initiated.

“The NHS,” said Thatcher, “is safe in our hands” - but she struck the worst blow right at the start by compelling NHS institutions to function as if they were part of a capitalist “market”, even in relation to each other.  Since then the logic of this “market” has resulted in the introduction of private finance and private norms to more and more of the public health service.  The government insists that there is no danger to the public nature of the NHS, since “only” 8% of services involve private finance; but the NHS being the biggest employer in Europe, that 8% represents a huge field of play for profiteering scum, and that field is growing.

Government spending restrictions, based on “market” imperatives that insist on a predictable balance of income and outgoings and expenditure being set for each type of medical procedure, threaten the future of specialist units like the Nuffield Orthopaedic Hospital here in Oxford, where obviously a high proportion of procedures with many complications are carried out.  Similar market dogmatism has caused the decline in the number of NHS dentists.  The Department of Health restricted expenditure per procedure, and greedy dentists decided that rather than offer what they said was a second-rate service to everyone, they would offer a first-rate service to those who could afford to pay.  here i am afraid the government is to be condemned on two grounds – first for cutting services and then, having made that bad decision, for compounding their error by not compelling all dentists to accept it.

It is not scaremongering to say that the NHS faces the ultimate question.  With the real prospect that there might be a Tory government in a couple of years, a government committed to a Thatcherism of teeth and claws, no current promise of investment in the universal public service, or restriction on privatisation, can be guaranteed.  In such circumstances to play a game of public-private brinkmanship with the country’s most vital public service is nothing short of grossly irresponsible.  Ultimately, since a universal service cannot be profitable or anywhere near profitable – as amply demonstrated by the state of health care in Britain before 1948, and in the USA now – the involvement of profit-making corporations and, more generally, of “market” norms, threatens the very existence of the NHS.

As Nye Bevan rightly said, then, it is as necessary to fight for the NHS now as it was in 1948.  Thankfully there are many “folks left with the faith” to do so.  I’ve just come from an NHS birthday party organised by the Labour Lord Mayor of Oxford, Susanna Pressel, and the local branch of Keep Our NHS Public.  Attending were trade unionists from across the NHS who, whatever the cowardice of their leaders, are determined to fight for patients, fellow-workers and their own jobs; campaigners who have saved the Horton Hospital in nearby Banbury from the threat of closure; and others in solidarity.

There is a danger that people are so used to the NHS that they don’t notice any threat to it.  However, awareness of the threat is growing and campaigns to defend it are growing in step: thousands of people demonstrated in Banbury.  Ultimately we will save the NHS if we see it, and can make the labour movement and the public at large see it, not only as a great public asset to be kept out of rapacious hands, but also as a platform for even greater and more far-reaching change in the future.  The NHS is one of the few achievements of the 1945-51 Labour Government to remain more or less intact, and the commitment of NHS workers over the past sixty years and today is a great inspiration.  Nye Bevan, thinking of the workers’ self-organised health scheme in Tredegar, said he wanted to “Tredegarise” the whole health service of Britain.  Let us adopt as our ambition the “NHSisation” of the whole of society.

Welcome to a British summer!  I just have to mention the dedication of a group of local schoolkids who not only put on a good brass band performance on the Lord Mayor’s Parade this lunchtime, but kept it up for an hour while walking through the streets of Oxford under a real barrage of water.  I think they deserve the rest of the week off school for that!

Nothing like awful weather to produce a feeling of solidarity with all the gowned, feathered and belly-dancing-costumed participants in the fun run to the beer tent at the end; the man with the Heath Robinson music machine built on a pram, that reminded me of a similar device the British branch of the PKK take on demos; and the two functionaries who took turns carrying the Mace (which is bigger than either of them) a mile and a half, before collecting the Councillors’ sopping wet gowns to take back to the Town Hall.  And well done to the rickshaw drivers – not a job I’d want myself (I remember a late-night ride in a rickshaw with Volty, with a growing conviction that the poor guy was about to drop dead of heart failure).

Here’s hoping for better weather…