STOP THE WAR LOBBY
WEDNESDAY 6 JUNE, 4.45pm
CONGRESS HOUSE
GREAT RUSSELL STREET WC1B 3LS
Nearest tube Tottenham Court Road
Gordon Brown and the six candidates for the Labour deputy leadership are speaking at a hustings meeting in London on Wednesday 6 June. This is the first London hustings meeting and it is essential that there is a large anti-war lobby calling for troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, opposition to any attack on Iran and a break with US foreign policy.
After reading your recent post on Britishness, with which I concur, I looked up some of Gordon Brown's statements on the subject. There are some fine quotations in this one (e.g. Colonel Rainsborough in the Putney Debates) but the Milton quotation is entertaining – it's from a speech of Satan in Book V of Paradise Lost.
Gordon Brown strikes me as even more of an imperialist than Blair. See, for instance:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/ne…
k
Slightly off-topic but I finally managed to get a copy of Murder in Samarkand in my local Waterstones. Disappointed that although it was in a 3 or 2 section, they had displayed this section as far away from the entrance as possible, on the first floor. Other "controversial" authors like John Pilger were also found in this faraway part of the store.
This isn't quite censorship, but it is getting close to telling people what to think, and I can't see it getting any better under Gordon Brown. No doubt they do this for marketing reasons, but marketing is usually driven by money, not principle.
Fascinating section in the book about a report about Blair (eight days after "shock and awe" started) saying that he knew the people were in favour of the Iraq war all along, but just needed the war to start to show their support. How deluded was this!!!
I think the only deputy leader candidate that sounds at all "about the people" is John Cruddas – maybe because he hasn't been polluted too much as a result of not being in Blair's "war cabinet".
Apparently Brown had to creep in the back door of the TUC for the London Labour "hustings" meeting this evening. After having been heckled by Rose Gentle outside the Glasgow hustings, he clearly didn't fancy going head to head with the Stop the War protest outside the front door. What a coward.