I couldn’t make the Newham UNISON rally tonight with Guest speaker, Tony Benn, in support of their sacked branch Chair, Michael Gavan, (I’m laid up and off work with a dodgy Achilles heal). However, I was able to visit the brand new on-line “Union Island” on “Second Life” to listen to an on-line debate on “union busters”.
I had registered for a Second Life account yesterday, but I couldn’t work out how to enter the site. Tonight, I just followed the links from the SLUnions blog; it took me about 15 minutes to work out how to travel inside the site. It was actually quite logical and straight forward, since they had 4 short compulsory training modules. Then I was teleported to” Union Island” (just like in Star Track!).
I would urge any delegates wondering why the move by Gordon Brown to stop voting on contemporary resolutions at Party Conference is such a bad idea to read today's piece by Tony Benn on Guardian Comment Is Free. Here's an extract......
I don't know if anyone else has seen this, but there was a 'comment is free' section, I believe for the Guardian, in which Tony Benn as PM was invisaged. It was a bit too optomistic, but Paul Linford added a different scenario. What if Gould had agreed to a pact with Smith in 1992? Smith offered him a pact, which would see Gould as deputy leader. Now if Gould as acting leader, could have managed to win, it would have been he, not Blair, who entered Downing Street on 2nd May 1997.
I was very chuffed indeed to be invited to Tony Benn's house to record Observer Political Editor Nicholas Watt interviewing Hilary and Tony Benn in their first interview together. They even made me a cup of tea!
Is it hypocritical to support one military action and not the other? I'm actually not sure. I'm not old enough to remember UK going into Kosovo, but I think I would have been for military intervention in the Balkans. There are some who are always against these interventions, people like Tony Benn etc. There are also conservitives like Malcolm Rifkind who was against intervention in Kosovo and Iraq. There are others who shared the views of Robin Cook, for the first war, not the other. Another Hitchenesque school of thought is always confusing, defining missiling Sudan as a war crime, but, defending the intervention of Iraq. I was against intervention in Iraq from the start. Does it make me hypocritical? I think on the basis that Milosovic was threatning other countries and ethnic blocs. But I didn't believe Iraq was threatning other countries, the failiure to get a second UN resoloution, the faulty intelligance etc. were the reasons for my opposition. Hussein was obviously lots of things which I won't choose to say on a Sunday morning. If the 'Blairesque' school of thought is to be believed, then we would also have to intervene in Belarus, Burma, Zimbabwe, China, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and many other countries. And I'm sure, that many bloggers would like to see intervention in some of these countries, but not others.
Quick post on the email no doubt many of us received today from Peter Watt, the Labour Party General Secretary, urging us to encourage Labour Party supporters to join the Party by June 1 and still get a vote for the Labour Party Leadership and Deputy Leadership.
By co-incidence, I spoke today to a GMB steward who lives in West Ham (my CLP). I asked him if he was a member of the Party. He said no, he gave some reasons why – including the cost! When I told him that trade union members can pay £1 per month he was astonished and said he would consider joining.
The public meeting used to be the way for politicians to get their message across, but increasingly - through the 20th century - it was replaced by the soundbite on the broadcast media. In many ways this was a bad development (though undoubtedly the 6 o'clock news reaches more ears than the biggest of public meetings). Today, new developments in the media - particularly the internet and the existence of 'blogs' - opens up new possibilities. It can, indeed, bring the public meeting back into focus and bring it to a bigger audience. The website 'Youtube' has primarily made headlines because of its potential copyright breaches of pop music videos, etc. But the site includes home produced videos of all sorts of things and that is increasingly including political videos. Sometimes that includes short films and documentaries that individuals have made to push for a particular cause. At other times, it is home videos of speeches at public meetings. It is this development that might represent a renaissance for the public meeting.
I include a selection here. They are mainly from anti-war demonstrations. Of course, one thing about public meetings is that they are of the moment, and watching them back sometimes a month later you are a surreal and unintended audience. But we can make a great deal of use of this technology in the future. When we talk about what happened at a meeting, why not include part of that meeting itself.
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