mutley said:
What she tried to do was to find a way to give her response on that a subversive edge. I don't think it worked too well but there you go.
Salma could well evolve in directions that are not positive in the future. It partly depends (among many other things like the level of struggle) on whether she continues to find that Socialists are people who are willing to work with her and other like her for common ends, without demanding that she subscribes to every shibboleth that some of us are obsessed about. The abolition of the family being just one example. Any Socialist who made that a central part of their agitation in an attempt at an electoral intervention would need their head testing.
Frankly, the sanctimonious holier than thou way you've approached her politics is just the sort of thing that has led to virtually zero influence by some Socialists in the past. She has been 'well briefed', she 'borrows' bits of feminist ideology. You patronising idiot. I've no doubt that if she had to lock horns intellectually with you she'd chew you up and spit you out.
If she ever does get coopted by another party, it will be a tragedy and a sign of failure by us. But I don't think she will.
Mutley rather misses the point or rather misses several points. First of all my argument concerned the claim by Udo that Yaqoob is a socialist and had nothing to do with the rather anodyne Socialist Alliance manifesto which document did not in any case outline a socialist politics but was populist. To take that rotten compromise document as representing a principled expression of socialist politics is just plain daft.
That Yaqoob sees fit to quote Lenin means absolutely nothing too. Are you unaware that, in the words of the Christians, even the Devil may quote scripture? The point is that whatever her politics may or may not be they are not socialist as Udo wrongly asserted. Unless of course you can provide proof that she is in favour of a planned economy, workers power, etc?
On the question of prostitution Mutley again misses the point. Udo claimed that Yaqoob gave a socialist analysis of prostitution and my response was to point out that any socialist analysis must start with the question of the family or else it is not socialist. Yaqoob by contrast does not hold such a socialist position. The positions held by Crow, Wedgewood Benn or Evo Morales are besides the point.
(As an aside the difference between say Crow and Yaqoob is that the former represents real forces within the workers movement and the latter does not. Nor does Wedgewood Benn for that matter and as such is of no interest. He’ll be dead soon anyway and I’ll not mourn the man whose actions in part caused the defeat of the NUM.)
It is true that, as Mutley writes, that if one wishes to work with others that one must be willing to accept that they may hold different views on many questions. Fair enough but is that good reason to describe such allies as holding socialist views when all the evidence suggests that they are not? Is it reason to describe the fundamental position of the socialist movement of opposition to the bourgeois family form as a shibboleth? Frankly this seems more like a poor attempt to paint your ally as more left wing than she actually is and a cowardly disavowal of a principle you presumably subscribe to in private.
It is similarly dishonest to claim that when Yaqoob was discussing sanctions against punters looking for trade that she was making reference to ‘community action. From the context of her remarks, that is a TV panel show with other career politicians, it is very clear that she was making reference to legislation that would empower the police to enforce it. That is she is in favour of granting new powers to a repressive institutionally racist arm of the bourgeois state. Is that a socialist position I wonder?
Mutley would appear to think that in pointing out that Yaqoob was well briefed that I was in some way insulting his heroine. Actually I thought I was being complimentary! What can possibly be insulting about remarking that a person has properly prepared herself prior to a public appearance of some importance? Obviously Mutley who is happy to describe others as ‘wankers’ is a skilled and prepared debater and as such I take his comment that Yaqoob could best me intellectually with all the seriousness a remark made by such a person merits.
That Yaqoob will in the fullness of time quit Respect is a given. Whether or not she quits prior to its complete collapse is perhaps the real question. In any case if she chooses to remain as a career politician a few harsh remarks concerning the Lib Dems would be no barrier to joining them. In the near future the results of the may elections might be of some importance to her career choices.
