La Liberté guidant le peuple

Today is Bastille Day which is a National holiday in France which celebrates the storming of the Royalist Prison in 1789 and is seen  as the start of the French Revolution.

This famous picture of revolution by  Eugène Delacroix "Liberty Leading the People" actually refers to a later French July revolution in 1830.

I hate to say on the anniversary of the birth of the Republic that I agree with the ultra left blogger Liam Macuaid that it was a disgrace that yesterday the French Parliament voted to ban the wearing of the Burka by a tiny number of Muslim woman in France.

While personally I would perfer women not to wear such garment and support the punishment of any male relatives that forced a women to wear a Burka against their will (and recognise that in airport security or inside schools they are not appropriate) if a grown women genuinely wants to wear it in public - it is their choice and nobody else's.  It's called Liberté.

Ironically (I love history) this decision to ban Burka would have been without doubt warmly welcomed by the stormers of the Bastille and all sorts of so-called "revolutionaries" until perhaps relatively recent times.  The French in particular tended to be fanatically anti-religious during revolution and would have not understood wannabe modern day revolutionary Liam's no doubt principled (but Petite bourgeoisie?) opposition.

Good Trot on Bad Trots in Good Cause

My favourite Respect snout Mac Liam says it as it is - Check out the link to his post here . But why does he put up with such morons?

And those pricks are?

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Liam

Did you know that Simon Hughes is not a Trotskyist.? I can exclusively reveal tonight that the Liberal Democrat MP is not in favour of nationalising stuff under workers’ control and that this is the view of his party.

Who’d have predicted that? Eh?

Shocked I was. Shocked and stunned.

The Campaign Against Climate Change (CACC) organised a pretty good impromptu demo in support of the Vesta occupation this evening outside the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Phil Thornhill kicked off by explaining that the ice up around the North Pole is melting rapidly and that this might cause a very sudden increase in the planet’s temperature. To this he added that wind turbines are one of the ways which will allow us to generate electricity without throwing millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere and that the CCC had been down to speak to the workers and support their occupation of their factory.

Next up was Darren Johnson on behalf of the Greens. He gave his full support to the workers and gave the sort of speech that Tony Benn would have given. He was followed by a spectrum of Trots pretending to be random punters while accidentally holding a copy of a left wing paper they’d accidentally just bought for the first time ever.

The only political figure with any national profile who thought it worth giving up an hour of his time to support a group of workers occupying a factory was Simon Hughes. The cops had decreed that no megaphones were to be used and I can’t claim to have heard too much of what he said but there was something about the importance of skills, something about windpower being a good thing and global warming being a bad thing. Not quite the revolutionary programme but not worth getting your knickers in a twist about. Applaud mildly and see who’s up next is the sensible reaction.

Gosh no!

“It’s a popular front!” “He’s just grandstanding!” “Let’s occupy the ministry!” “Are you in favour of nationalisation???”

This was a bunch of Trots flashing back to the time they’d given Heseltine, Hurd, Prescott or Straw a rough time in their students’ union except this time it was a real campaign in defence of real workers’ jobs. So instead of Simon Hughes speaking for three or four minutes the revolutionary vanguard spent twenty minutes exposing him as a dreadful reformist in front of the revolutionary vanguard. Then, when he was finished, some tried to carry on the argument convinced that the one of the best known Lib Dems could be won over to Trotskyism by a five minute hectoring. It must work sometimes.

CACC done good. It worked out how totemic this dispute is and organised a demo in support of the occupation. A chunk of the far left pursued its mission of convincing the world that nothing is more important than selling a couple of papers and getting one of your people on the microphone.

Derek Wall, who has a more positive outlook on life has given a slightly different account here.
Support the Factory Occupation

Public meeting

Speakers: Vestas Worker, Chris Baugh (PCS Ass. Gen. Sec, pc), Seamus Milne, Jonathan Neale

Friday 24th July, 6pm, ULU Malet Street, London WC1E 7HY

Called by the Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Group

(last night my UNISON branch Executive agreed to send a message of support to the factory occupation).