Trotsky, the Bolshevik Revolution & me

Today is the 142nd birthday of Leon Trotsky and the 104th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution (aka as the October Revolution due to the Russian Gregorian calendar). 

A great music video from my misspent youth.

By coincidence it is also my birthday. Many thanks to all the kind comments on Facebook. 

Happy Birthday Bolshevik Revolution, Trotsky &... Grayee!

Today is the 102nd anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution (also known as the October Revolution due to the Russian Gregorian Calendar ) and it is also Leon Trotsky's 140th birthday as well.

This morning at the start of a 5 hour budget meeting the elected representatives of the Peoples Republic of Newham also offered Grayee birthday best wishes (in return for cream cakes)

Hat tip Red Army Choir. Echelon's song (Song for Voroshilov). A civil war classic. 

My Tweet Cloud Bot @tweetcloudbot

Love it. NEWHAM GREAT HOUSING COUNCIL. Way to go

If you tweet check out @tweetcloudbot

Hat tip Martin Warne

Labour Party Leadership discourse

Last Saturday I was in North Wales and went out for an evening meal and family get together in a small bistro restaurant in Ruthin, Denbighshire called "On the Hill". There was 6 of us aged 25 to 74 sitting in a private table in the corner away from other diners.

We had not met since Easter and there was lots of news, reminisces and gossip to exchange. The food was excellent and the wine flowed.

The subject of the Labour Party leadership came up and I was asked what I thought of the candidates and who was likely to win. Three of us present would be eligible to vote in the election. I went through what I thought were the strengths and weaknesses of the leadership contenders. There followed some polite questions and comments. I mentioned to everyone that I was pleased that we were discussing the issue because it showed that people thought it was important. Everyone nodded their heads in agreement but I felt that people's attention was starting to wonder.

When suddenly someone mentioned "Liz Kendall used to go out with Greg Davies". "Really!" was one immediate excited response. "Greg Davies, the comedian from the telly?" was another. There then followed an animated and wide ranging discussion about the funniest things he had appeared in. The pros and cons of his alternative comedy act and even heated comparisons of Greg with other favourite comedians.

Alas, I never got my chance to say who I thought would actually become Labour leader but never mind. The food was gorgeous and the wine good. Personally I had always thought that Greg Davies was rather overrated. Now if Liz Kendall had been going out with Jack Dee....

(Picture taken this year in Labour Headquarters in Victoria during an agent training session. Who will be the 13th leader of the Party since 1945? Hope he or she is not superstitious)

Goodbye-ee says Gray-ee

Great First World War song and YouTube video. Just saying. Picture on far right reminds me of someone?

Labour Party Conference 2014 #Lab14

On the train back to the "Smoke" after 5 days away at this year's Labour Conference in Manchester.

I was not a delegate and went in my "ex-officio" capacity as a Councillor. This meant I could have a late start (no early morning delegation meetings) and go for a jog in the morning to clear the head around the lovely city centre canals.

Best of all I could pick and choose which parts of conference business I wanted to see and also go to the fringes that took my fancy.

I'll post on some of the fringes and debates I attended during the next few days.

I must admit that I thought the conference was a little flat considering we are only 7 months away from a General election but the reason was I think that many in the Party were still knackered after the Scottish referendum.

Politically I think it went very well, the Party is united and determined to get rid of the Tories next May. While I think we ought to have gone further on a number of policies and announcements, we have enough to win and "win big" as guest international speaker, New York Mayor, Bill De Blasio, put it so effectively today.

I'll post more on Ed's speech but it passed the grayee litmus test (I rang my Mum who watched it on the telly and she said he came over well.).

94th Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution

Today is the 94th anniversity of the Bolshevik (aka October) Revolution; the 132nd Birthday of a certain Lev Davidovich Bronstein (and some other bloke's birthday).

I thought I would mark the occasion with the Red Army Choir - The song about the 27th division. "The song describes history of the 27th division from Civil war to the end of the Great patriotic war.
Visit http://english.pobediteli.ru/"

I am an innocent man...

Once upon a time, in the strange twilight LaLa world of Newham Toryland, there was an extremely unpleasant anonymous smear blog called Newhamtoryminitrue. Now, this horrid, horrid blog, apart from being typically Tory misogynic and homophobic, was also run by very incompetent Goblins called the cry-babies.

One night the cry-babies were up very late carrying out their evil works and were very, very tired. So tired and emotional, that they went to bed without remembering to back up their site properly. When they woke up the next morning, they realised that they had been really, really naughty and had lost for ever and ever a number of their very worse smear posts.

Fearing the wrath of their evil master, the skinhead Ogre, Big Bad Mikey, they pretended that some very wicked wizard called grayee had cast a magic spell on their blog and had set mystical “spammers to scrape IP addresses from our website and set up spiders to trawl it”!  Such was the power of this magical spell by grayee that they lost all their smear posts! Poor old Big Bad Mikey believes everything he is told and said to them not to worry. He will get his long lost cousin to write hundreds of mysterious letters to the local paper and FOI requests in pretend names exposing the wicked wizard grayee and all will be well.....  

(I think only 36 people in the entire world have a clue what I am going on about so apologies to everyone else.  Enjoy the video.  Great song.)

Blogging for Labour: How social media can drive a wedge into the Coalition.

Hope those of you who are going to this years Labour Party conference will come to this fringe on the Monday evening.

"Blogging for Labour: How social media can drive a wedge into the Coalition". 

I think that anyone going to conference and reading this blog - will be somewhat interested!

Mary Honeyball MEP will chair and the panelists are Jessica Asato; Alex Smith Labour list, Tom Harris MP and moi.

Monday 27 September 18:00 - 19.30. Manchester Central - Charter 1.

UPDATE: see report of the actual fringe here

Jack of Kent on "Kaschke v. you know who" case

Top legal blogger (and all round nice guy) Jack of Kent reports on the latest round of legal nonsense and complete waste of public funds here.

As usual he cuts to the quick to make complicated legal matters clear to (nearly) everyone.

"Assistant Solicitor of the Year" at this year's Lawyer Awards (June 2010) and The Times "Lawyer of the week" Robert Dougans is also doing his very best to sort out this utter mess.

See what happens tomorrow I suppose. 

This is purely coincidental and nothing to do whatsoever of course with the present case - but can anyone advise me what would happen to a claimant, who let us say, happened to blatantly lie repeatedly about a significant issue to a High Court Judge in a pre trail hearing?

I assume something pretty 'orrible?

Hat tip thingy for the above Jack of Kent caption to Science, Reason and Critical thinking

UPDATE:

The classic Battle of Cressy Poem:

"...Ha! cried the Prince, is it thou my gallant Jack of Kent,

Now charge with me my brave lad for thou has been sent

By God, to aid me in the midst of the fight,

So forward, and wield your cudgel with all your might...."

Dear Branch Secretary...nomination request for Community SGE

Dear Branch Secretary

I am writing to ask your branch to consider nominating me for the General Seat on the new Community Service Group Executive.

I am a lifelong trade unionist and have been a member of UNISON for nearly 17 years. I am a member of the UNISON Housing Associations Branch where I am a steward, Health & Safety Officer and Labour Link Officer.

My first paid job was as a welfare rights advisor in an inner city community centre. I am now employed as a Housing Officer for a large Housing Association after being TUPE’d from the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.

Members working in the community and voluntary sector know all too well about job insecurity and instability. More often than not jobs are reliant on public funding and are only renewed if and when funding has been secured. Most members in our sector have had to deal with numerous reorganisations and being TUPE’d time and time again due to cuts in funding.

Across the sector there are a wide range of employers from the very small employing just 1 or 2 staff to the very large. Some of the smaller employers are inexperienced and whilst they want to do the right thing for social justice – this doesn’t always apply to how they treat and manage their staff. We need to support our members that feel isolated at work and ensure that they know that UNISON can support them and how they can access this support.

I believe we must build better organisation for our members and stewards. We need to build stewards’ networks so that they can support each other and share knowledge, ideas and experiences. I would like to see more training introduced on issues that are of particular concern to UNISON members in the Community Service Group – like funding cuts, re-structuring, and dealing with poor management.

I hope your branch will consider nominating me to represent your members in this sector. I am committed to listening to their views, making their voices heard and ensuring they get better support and the resources they deserve.

If you would like to discuss this statement please give me a ring or contact me on john.m.grayATntlworldDOTcom.

Yours faithfully

John Gray

Community is the brand new “Service Group” in UNISON for those of us who work in the community and voluntary sector. It will be the third biggest “Service Group” in UNISON with already over 60,000 members.

Wannabe hunter gatherer at work

This is something that I hunted, killed, prepared, cooked and served earlier.

...in my dreams!

In reality with lots of help from Tesco's.

I have a cousin whose husband will go off and hunt deer, shoot them, butcher them and then make sausages out of them!

One of my many New Year resolutions this time will be to track, capture, slaughter and make my own haggis for Burns night.

Watch this space!

Live twittering on Gordon's speech

This is live from the Labour Party conference floor. Waiting for the "big event" - the speech of Prime Minister Gordon Brown to conference.

People are still rushing around trying to get to their seats, there is loud lively music (Levellers "Beautiful Day"). I am with Rachel from West Ham delegation. Charlene the other delegate is sitting with Sarah Brown.

I am going to try and tweet for the first time. Not the best time to start but I have been inspired by last nights "Twinge"" (twitter at the fringe).

Check out "grayee" at #Lab09. Here goes....