Niall McCrae
[Speech at the rally by No to NATO, No to War at Downing Street, 6th August 2023]
Citizens, lend me your ears. I want to talk about how we build a unified movement against the war in Ukraine. Left-right, left-right is how soldiers march. Just as they march in unison, the political Left and Right goes in the same direction. The establishment exploits this dichotomy to divide and rule. But in reality, Labour and Conservative are a uniparty, working in unison for a global agenda.
Opposing war is not the exclusive preserve of socialists. It’s also a concern for libertarians and social conservatives. And for any decent people. The warmongers are not on the hard Left or far Right, but in the so-called centre.
This is the Third Way of Tony Blair. It’s the politically-correct orthodoxy, the progressive, virtue-signalling intelligentsia, who portay themselves as rational, responsible, caring and green. They are none of these things. This is the domain of snobbery, ignorance and hypocrisy. The real middle-ground is in the common people, who want peace and liberty in a cohesive society.
Back in 2016 during the EU referendum campaign I first realised that the Left-Right paradigm was becoming meaningless. Pro-Brexit rallies had communists standing alongside UKIP supporters. As conceptualised by David Goodhart, we were the Somewheres, rooted in our communities, versus the cosmopolitan Anywheres.
In the EU campaign the BBC and most cultural and educational institutions were blatantly biased, but it’s much worse with Ukraine. It’s not merely imbalanced coverage. Nobody is allowed to utter a contrary opinion, or to state inconvenient truths. The moral narrative – or rather, immoral narrative – is never challenged.
Yet people are waking up. Particularly in the USA, where the spectre of the Vietnam War has risen. A CNN poll this week showed a majority of Americans want no further military supplies to Ukraine.
Unlike in Westminster, where not one of 650 MPs has spoken out against war or pushed for peace, two leading presidential candidates are on our side. Donald Trump pledges to remove his country from NATO. But do you think the Deep State will allow that? They’ll jail him, if they can get away with it. And then the main challenger will be RFK Junior. He’s against the globalists too. But they don’t just jail Ke nnedys – they shoot them dead.
The real divide ids not Left versus Right but ordinary folk against the totalitarian elite and the professional-managerial class that supports them. Sending more and more public money to the military-industrial complex is stealing from the poor to give to the rich.
We don’t need a Labour landslide ot Tory revival – we need a Robin Hood.
Epilogue
After this event, which also featured speeches by Tony Gosling, Patrick Henningsen, Chris Williamson and Piers Corbyn, I found a political pamphlet that validated my argument. The glossy journal Communist Fight, published by the obscure Consistent Democrats, had a five-page article opposing the rally. I later heard that flyers were distributed too, although I did not see any counter-demonstration.
The article personally targeted David Clews. The statement on the cover declared that ‘No2NATO, No2War is not a viable vehicle for fighting fascism and imperialist war’. Inside is a colour screen shot of Clews interviewing Mark Collett and Laura Towler, leader and deputy of Patriotic Alternative, on his Unity News Network show. .
The lengthy article explains: –
When No2NATO No2War was formed, we were enthusiastic about it as it not only included former Labour MPs George Galloway and Chris Williamson as its initiators it also had a conference line-up of left-wing activist speakers of various different shades. We welcomed it as a step forward to building a movement in solidarity with the struggle against fascism and imperialism…..Galloway’s weaknesses for right-wing populism in recent years are not exactly a secret, his standing on platforms with Nigel Farage during the Brexit campaign, but nevertheless in standing up for Ukraine against NATO and its Nazi tools he was at least on the right side of a major conflict with far-right tools of imperialism, the biggest since WWII.
Unfortunately, it was not to be. The attempt by David Clews, a white nationalist and crypto-Nazi to build a chauvinistic movement against the Ukraine war mobilising the fringe of Covid ‘anti-vaxxers’ and anti-lockdown ‘activists’ supposedly against the war based on a refusal to engage with ‘foreigners’, has led Galloway, unfortunately f=dragging Chris Williamson behind him, desperate for support from somewhere, to jump on the Clews bandwagon.
The article concludes by comparing Clews to the mass-murdering Nazis. His interviewing controversial figures on his show is a breath of fresh air: he is not a member or supporter of Patriotic Alternative, but uses his platform as an outlet for freedom of speech denied by mainstream media.
Who are the Consistent Democrats? It seems that they comprise Ian Donovan, plus one or two others. It’s a Trotskyite group, with policies such as:-
- We condemn Brexit as fundamentally anti-immigrant
- We endorse Trotsky’s 1923 essay calling for a United States of Europe
- We reject male chauvinist, homophobic and transphobic ideology and stand for the liberation of women and also oppressed sexual minorities through socialist revolution
- We stand for the abolition of all anti-immigrant laws and controls
- We reject both all kinds of sexual abuse of youth, and moral guardianship of youth by bourgeois and reactionary moralists
In other words, they are Cultural Marxists. So they got one thing right in their bulletin: we are enemies.
