Dump the shits

 

 

 

Dump the shits, join Enough is Enough

and don't despair

read  this  and  this

Enough is Enough

British Gas announces £1.3 billion profit between January & June 2022

BT announces £6.96 billion profit between April & June

Shell makes £9.4 billion profit per year

Meanwhile:

National Grid’s John Pettigrew, received a £6.5 million bonus on top of his salary

British Gas and Centrica CEO, Chris O’Shea, received £2 million last year in salary and benefits. Centrica’s non-exec directors were paid almost £1 million last year in bonuses

Thames Water’s Sarah Bentley, received a £727,000 bonus on top of her £2 million salary

Scottish Power’s, Keith Anderson, is paid £1.15 million

Eon boss, Michael Lewis, is on £1 million

EDF’s Simon Ross, gets £1 million, and their top execs shared £4.65 million last year

Anglia Water’s Peter Simpson, is on £1.3 million

Seven Trent bosses shared a £5.56 million bonus and Welsh Water bosses shared £930,000

Meanwhile 

There are more foodbanks than McDonalds in the UK

Oh and energy costs are set to rise by up to 75% in October. Or are they?

Add your name to the 250,000 who responded to Enough is Enough in first two days

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My World Café's illustrator

My World Café is now with the publishers, Riversmeet, and the book designer, Roelof Bakker. My collaborator, artist Laura Davis, has completed her drawings for the book and they are so good that maybe the title should be "illustrations by Laura Davis, with some words by David Wilson." Check these out.

 

 

more information here ...

 

Letter to Jeremy Corbyn

 

Dear Jeremy,

You have said that, “My election as leader in 2015 was a major shock in British politics. It wasn’t about me, but a popular demand for anti-austerity politics following the 2008 financial crisis and 35 years of market fundamentalism.”

Yes Jeremy, and I was one of the many who joined the Labour Party to support you. You had seized the spirit of the time and were toppled from the leadership by a ghoulish gang of back-stabbers, ably supported by the media, from the BBC to The Guardian.

The much delayed Forde Report lays this out in detail.

- The secret diversion of campaign funds by senior HQ staff in the 2017 election to right-wing candidates.
- The purge of socialist party members.
- The rigging of internal votes.
- A ‘hierarchy of racism and discrimination’.
- Disgusting accusations of anti-semitism against you which resulted in the expulsion, not of anti-semites, but of many Jewish members.

You rightly conclude that, “this report should help us see a path forward. The politics of the many, not the few, are more needed in this country than ever. We suffer a cost of living scandal while billionaire wealth soars and climate breakdown accelerates while fossil fuel companies boast record profits.”

They tried to break you, but they failed. You have personal strength and the knowledge that you speak for the many. You have rightly invoked the. words of Percy Bysshe Shelley for your, and our, inspiration,

Rise like lions after slumber
In unfathomable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep have fallen on you –
Ye are many, they are few.

Living with Shadows

 

Living with Shadows by Merilyn Moos

I am delighted that Socialist History Journal are publishing my review of this book

On the cover of this book is a photo of Ossip Zadkine’s statue in Rotterdam called The Destroyed City. Merilyn’s parents took her to see it as a ten-year-old child. She was never quite sure why they had crossed a stormy sea and walked through a rainy city to reach it, but it showed “screaming defiance against those who had torn out its heart”. To her, it also appeared to be holding up an invisible world. These are two determining factors in the author’s own life: defiance and the struggle to build a better world.

Merilyn Moos has spent her life haunted by shadows. “Not,” she writes, “B-movie ghosts in gothic hallways, but something emanating a sense of death.”

A distant relative of Albert Einstein and daughter of German refugees, she was born into a home of secrecy and paranoia. Her parents had lived under Nazism and Stalinism. Her father, Siegi, was a member of the Red Front and was a leading figure in anti-fascist agit-prop. He witnessed sailors declaring a Soviet on the steps of Munich Town Hall in 1918. After the Reichstag fire, he escaped the Gestapo by walking across Germany. 

Her mother, Lotte, followed her Irish communist lover to the USSR and felt guilty that she may have contributed to his death. He was sent to Spain at the time of the Civil War there. In a postcard she wrote to him, she praised the leftist, anti-Stalinist POUM. He was kidnapped, sent back for ‘trial’ in the Soviet Union, accused of Trotskyism and died in the gulags. She never stopped mourning him, or blaming herself, for what she had innocently written.

Her parents arrived separately in the UK where, in 1940, Lotte was incarcerated in Holloway Prison as a German spy.

Merilyn’s parents were burdened with regret and guilt. Her mother shut her bedroom door and found refuge in writing plays and poems, while her father expressed himself with painting.

This short memoir is a penetrating and personal reflection on her early life in Durham. She communicates to the reader how much of our lives are determined by the cultural and political shadows we inhabit and absorb. 

“For my father culture and politics were inseparable . . . our house was a bit like an expressionist museum. On one wall was a relief bust of the revolutionary, Alexandra Kollontai . . . over other walls hung my father’s paintings. Dark and dramatic . . . they were clarion calls against injustice and inequality.”

Of her mother she writes, “If annoyed my mother would not speak to me for days, sometimes weeks . . . she did this without telling me what she was upset about. I was terrified . . . I felt unreal and without any right to exist . . . I learned not to speak to her. Sometimes, as the three of us sat eating a meal, she said to my father, ‘Tell Merilyn,’ and then he would.” 

Merilyn found her own comfort in books and, as an adult, in her sculptures and her own political activism. She thought she was rebelling against her parents’ politics, only to discover how similar hers were to theirs. She acknowledges that she has spent her life carrying the baton passed to her by her parents. 

After many years as a trade union militant in further education, Merilyn started to write about her family history. She first wrote about her parents in an earlier book, The Language of Silence, but in recent years, she has dealt with the history of anti-Nazism within the German working class to help counter the view there was no significant German resistance. 

This book has photos of Siegi’s paintings and Merilyn’s sculptures.

I have known Merilyn for fifty years and have solidarity for her politics, activism and determination to face painful truths.

David Wilson

David Wilson, author of Left Field and co-founder of War Child

Buy Living With Shadows

When is evacuation surrender?

 

'I don’t lose my hope', says wife of Azov soldier

Sky News, along with the BBC, The Guardian and much of the MSM, are reporting (17 May) that the Ukrainian soldiers inside the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, have been 'evacuated' and that the area has been 'ceded' to the Russians. Evacuation is a new word for surrender and ceded a new word for defeated. Sky News sympathetically interviews the wife of one of the Ukrainian fighters and clearly identify her as the wife of a member of the Azov Regiment. In the words of Wikipedia these are "The Special Operations Detachment "Azov", also known as the Azov Regiment and the Azov Battalion, is a neo-Nazi unit of the National Guard of Ukraine based in Mariupol in the coastal region of the Sea of Azov, from where it derives its name.”

I will be accused of being a Putin-supporter for writing this, but as a leftist, I trace my politics back to those who Putin hates. The irony being that us leftists used to be accused of taking Russian gold. Today our politicians are weighed down with the stuff, while at the same time arming Nazis and misinforming the public as to what is going on.

SKY NEWS REPORT …

Charlie Ain't My Darling

 

Charlie ain't My Darling

(with apologies to Robert Burns)

Twas on a Tuesday morning,
With Johnson’s words in ear,
When Charlie came to Parliament
The Old Chevalier

Charlie ain’t my darling, my darling, my darling.
Charlie ain’t my darling, the Old Chevalier.

As he came marchin' in the House,
His medals clanging loud and clear.
All the folk came out online
To laugh at Old Chevalier.

Charlie ain’t my darling, my darling, my darling.
Charlie ain’t my darling, the Old Chevalier.

Wi' highland bonnets on their heads
And claymores bright and clear,
They cam' to fight for Liberty
Against Old Chevalier.

Charlie ain’t my darling, my darling, my darling.
Charlie ain’t my darling, the Old Chevalier.

They left their bonnie highland hills,
Their wives and bairnies dear,
To draw the sword for Justice Now,
Against Old Chevalier.

Charlie ain’t my darling, my darling, my darling.
Charlie ain’t my darling, the Old Chevalier.

Oh, there are many beating hearts,
And many hopes and fears,
And many are the prayers put up,
To rid us of Old Chevalier.

Charlie ain’t my darling, my darling, my darling.
Charlie ain’t my darling, the Old Chevalier.