Cheeky Old Git

According to the news reports the Pope cracked off his visit to Britain by attacking "Atheist extremism". A bit rich coming from someone who was a member of the Hitler Youth and who represents a "State" that only exists because of a deal it did with the fascist Mussolini! A roll call of the grotesque, reactionary beliefs that this Pope and his Church wish to foist on its members, and anyone else who they can bamboozle, or frighten into submitting to, shows just who the extremists are.

If that wasn't bad enough one of this old blokes associates the other day talked about Britain being like a Third World country. This from an organisation still mired in Medieval mysticism and obscurantism. What was interesting, of course, was that this organisation that still lies openly to its members to try to keep up that mysticism, for example in lying about the transformation of the wine into blood, cannot rely on such magic in order to achieve a simple thing such as transporting the Pope from Rome to Scotland, or even from one part of Scotland. On the contrary, he is quite happy it appears to be transported by jet airliner, and Jaguar, both the products of that atheistic science he condemns.

The nonsense and crawling to this relic of the Middle Ages, by Alex Salmond ought to be enough to dispose of any credibility as some kind of radical that he might have had. At least Clegg admits his Atheism, which ought to make him feel uncomfortable by the fact that the Tories have taken the opportunity of the Pope's visit to attack the previous Government's atheism - really, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are athesists! - and to declare that "they do God"! Baroness Warsi, interviewed on the BBC's Daily Politics declared that they beleive that the religious leaders ought to be given more power and responsibility in policy making. Really? So does that mean then that they would support the idea that Muslim Leaders ought to be able to establish policy in Muslim areas to introduce Sharia Law, to go along with the Tories proposals for extending Faith Schools as another form of indoctrtination?

That the Churches are going on the offensive against secularism, and that they are being supported by the Tories, is no surprise. In part it is the logical conclusion arising from the fawning of sections of the left at the feet of religion. Its not just that sections of the left crawled into bed with the most reactionary elements of Political Islam, describing any criticism as "Islamaphobia", or that when free speech was threatened by such religious extremists over things like the cartoons affair, the Liberal elite lacked any bacbone to stand up to them, it is the long standing fawning of sections of the Left towards "Faith Groups" in various Popular Fronts.

In fact, Newsnight's Paul Mason has an excellent blog about the self-same phenomenon in the US - Delaware To Planet Earth. In it he speaks about the latest success of the extreme Right Teaparty movement in the US, whose leader is becoming Sarah Palin, a woman who makes the religious leanings of George Bush look modest. Palin is a member of a Church which preaches the doctrines of the "Endtimers" who look forward to the imminent second coming, to be announced by a war in the Middle East. But Paul is right to describe this movement as "plebeian". It is not a movement of the more enlightened sections of Big Capital in the US, whose interests are more aligned to the policies of Obama and the Democrats, but of those same backward layers of society from within the middle class, and working class that I have described as explaining the current politics of the Tories.

"The Teaparty movement was born out of the rightwing populist-led protests against the original plan to bail out Wall Street, the TARP, in October 2008. As the bailout morphed into a $787bn fiscal stimulus, the demands of the movement coalesced around an agenda of tax cuts, lower public spending and a balanced budget (America's national debt is $13.5 trillion). Then it moved on again to migration, abortion, gun-control and challenges to US Federal law."

That is exactly the description I would use of the Tories - right-wing populism, and it has emerged and based itself on exactly the same ground as the teaparty movement. It is no wonder that it is following them in the drive towards those other reactionary areas of religion. The contrast between that movement of the Tories and the real interests of Big Capital could be glimpsed in comments by Digby Jones when he was reviewing the day's papers late last night on the BBC's News Channel. The pope should be free to come here, he said, because that is a sign of our support for freedom. But, especially at a time when workers are being asked to make sacrifices, he said, why should the cost of it be borne out of the public purse? And he then went on to make the statement, which sets out the clear interests of Big Capital, when he said that, of course the deficit had to be brought under control, but it had to be done in such a way as not to send the economy into a renewed recession. To make his point he condemned the Tories scrapping of the Schools Building Programme, which he said not only threatened future education, but here and now had a devastating effect on construction activity and the economy.

In a way, we have a similar situation to that analysed by Marx and Engels, and by Trotsky in the Theory of Permanent Revolution. Then it was the bourgeoisie whose modernising and revolutionising ideas stood in opposition to the old ideas of feudal society. But, they could only win support for those ideas if they could mobilise the workers behind them. But, when the workers themselves became powerful enough to advance their own interests going beyond those of the bourgeoisie, that bourgeoisie was led to sell-out for fear of the workers. In the end, it won as its own economic and social power became so great that they could suborinate the old ruling classes, politically and ideologically, and as Engels points out, that Big Bouregoisie was then able to incorporate the working-class by adopting its political programme, by establishing that "Social Democratic Consensus", I described in my blogs A Tale Of Contradictions. Today, that is manifest by the fact that in the US, Big Capital, was the driving force behind Obama's Health reforms - indeed it had pressed the republicans to introduce some socialisation of healthcare, and they transfered $750 billion of health costs off the books of companies and on to those of the State - and who demanded the massive Keynesian stimulus programmes to prevent the US economy from collapsing. Big Capital needs similar policies by the UK and European governments, and for the same reasons. It also needs more liberal social policies as recent statements by its representatives have set out that reduce tensions from racism etc. The opponents of such policies today are not those old ruling classes, but those sections of society that were never dragged along into the modern world, because of their economic and social position within it. The Church of England was once described as the Tory Party at prayer, but the shared membership were those layers of the middle class whose narrow mindedness is reflected in the papers that feed their bigotry like the Daily Express and Daily Mail. But, in addition they aree supported by those layers of the working-class who have also missed out on the liberating, and secularising aspects of Education - even in its limited Capitalist form, and its own schizophrenic attitude towards religion (I was once told by one of my old teachers later in life that without all the Christmas activities in school the teachers would have to think up something to cover the two or three weeeks leading up to the holiday) - the same layers who also have missed out on the organised labour movement, and its ability to encourage free thought.

Today, those modernising elements of Big Capital should form an alliance with the radical sections of society, with the Labour Movement to push for those ideas, and against the dangers being presented by the growing religious, obscurantist, populist Right - the same forces that lead ultimately to fascism - but it won't, for the same reason it would not ally with the workers in the past. It would mean an open break with sections of its own class, an open conflict which would expose its weakness to the working class. And, it will not do so for fear of really unleashing the power of the working-class, which might simply roll over it. Instead, it will do what it has done for the last 100 years. It will act through its back channels in the State, it will push its interests via bureaucratic means. In doing so, it risks simply feeding the reactionary forces even more in the way that Paul mason outlines in his blog.