The government couldn’t move him. In the end only cancer could. A symbol of peace and freedom, an icon of the anti-war movement and a picture of stalwart self-sacrifice for the cause of right.

Regardless of what anyone on the left thought of his tactics, I don’t think anyone could argue that he gave anything less than all of himself to ideals so many of us share. For all of us who struggle to find time to give a Saturday afternoon to protest, Brian Haw, who spent ten years camped outside the seat of power of a bankrupt ex-empire still bent on playing policeman to the world showing them the visceral evidence in bloody still-frames of all they were doing wrong, should stand as an inspiration.

While the evangelical Christian beliefs of some turned them into neo-conservative warmongers, Haw’s told him to stand up for peace and human life.

He fought a good fight, he finished his course, he kept the faith.

As the Labour leadership contest enters its final leg, party members will be receiving their ballots in the post today. But while the national media is zooming in on a two-horse race between the two Milibands – one the candidate of continuity, the other of modest change – The Third Estate talks to Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, sofa star of This Week and the only contender for Brown’s vacant throne offering genuine left-wing reform.

“I am running for the leadership because I am the best candidate for the job,” Diane Abbott confidently declares. “The most immediate task is to rebuild and revitalise the party and no other candidate has my experience of the party.”

Drawing on her experience as a trade union official, a councillor, an MP, a member of the national executive and a veteran of many grassroots campaigns, Abbott believes she is better placed to engage with ordinary Labour party members than any of her rivals.

“I want to build on the best of the New Labour years, but I am the only candidate offering a fresh vision for the party,” Abbott says. It’s a vision that ranges from greater internal democracy to putting civil liberties back at the heart of its politics. At home, she wants to challenge, not just to the timing of government cuts but their scale, while abroad she wants to see new thinking about Britain’s place in the world by scrapping the Trident nuclear deterrent and withdrawing British troops from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, advocating bringing the railways back into public ownership, Abbott seeks to address one of the core failures of New Labour. “We need to admit that the market is not the answer for everything,” she says.

Labour’s defeat in May’s election has ushered in a new period of reflection for the party. But while most of her rivals are seeking to trim around the edges, pushing for centrist reform, Abbot is clear about her party’s mistakes and how they must be addressed.

“Ordinary people thought that New Labour was not on their side,” Abbot says. “Increasingly it seemed like an elitist project trapped in a Westminster bubble. New Labour became increasingly undemocratic. The Prime Minister was not listening to his cabinet and the Parliamentary leadership was not listening to its own members and supporters or the general public.”

Abbott argues that if ordinary party members had had a real say, Labour could have avoided some of its most damaging mistakes.

“Scrapping the 10p tax rate, the introduction of tuition fees, the failure to regulate the banks properly, the attempt to introduce 90 days detention without trial, locking up children in immigration detention centres, the failure to bring the railways back into public ownership, creeping privatisation in the NHS, and, above all, the Iraq War. These are all things that contributed to our defeat at the last election.”

It has been fifteen years since Clause IV was famously re-written and Labour became New Labour. But after thirteen years of New Labour government, on the day that Tony Blair’s memoir hits the shelves defending his decision on Iraq and urging Labour not to return to the left, what would Abbott say to disaffected left-wingers who have abandoned a party they feel abandoned them long ago?

“I cannot defend the many right-wing decisions that were taken over the past thirteen years and I never have,” Abbot says. “But I can offer an alternative. Under my leadership we will get back to the business of being the Labour party that delivers for the people of this country. Being in opposition gives us a chance to have a real look at the state of the party, and get back to the principles we were built on.”

While a spell in opposition may well be what the party needs to reflect on its many mistakes in government, the conclusions it draws will depend largely on who it selects as its next leader. Abbott’s candidacy, like those of Ed Balls and Andy Burnham, has been overshadowed somewhat by the Miliband brothers, and in particular the elder front-runner. But if David Miliband wins, will it prove the party has learnt nothing from the failings of New Labour?

“David Miliband is the New Labour continuity candidate, the heir to Blair,” Abbott says. “The majority of ordinary Labour party members were against many decisions of the New Labour project. However they see the desperate times we face under the coalition and some think that David Miliband is the quickest way out of it and back to power.”

Abbott believes voters will naturally return to Labour, but the sell will be a hard one. “My view is that the general public are not fools,” she says. “When the Lib-Cons have finished destroying our country we will certainly have voters that will naturally come back, but the rest will take convincing. There is nothing convincing about the same old, New Labour rhetoric, which offers no real alternative to the status quo.”

As a left-winger, and as the country’s first female black MP, Abbott neither sounds nor looks like the status quo of British politics. Her place on the ballot paper was far from secure, however, until fellow Socialist Campaign Group MP, John McDonnell, withdrew his leadership candidacy. By doing so, he said he hoped he could help ensure that a woman got onto the ballot paper of an otherwise testosterone dominated contest. But should politics be about gender, or race, or should it be about having the right ideas and the right policies?

“I am most grateful to John McDonnell, because his withdrawing did ensure that a woman made it on to the ballot,” Abbott says. “However he is a staunch socialist and would not have withdrawn for another principled progressive.”

Abbott agrees that politics is all about policies, but argues that in the 21st century, a winning progressive movement in any country has to reflect the views and concerns of women and minorities. “If we do not have a political leadership which looks like the community around us then it will lack the legitimacy we want to represent,” she says. “Politics should be about representing the needs of people and people come in many different forms. A lack of diversity and a lack of representation in any institution are instantly reflected in debate, policies and implementation.”

One policy that Abbott keenly supports is electoral reform which, more than any other, threatens to split the coalition government. A referendum on introducing the Alternative Vote (AV) system was, albeit rather too little rather too late, included in Labour’s manifesto and Abbott has pledged to back the key coalition proposal.

“It may not be the ultimate solution, but will certainly be fairer than the first past the post system we currently use,” she says. “It is more proportional, reduces the need for tactical voting and will help to reflect true public opinion of fascist parties. Groups like the BNP are very unlikely to get 2nd or even 3rd preferences.”

Like many of her fellow party members, however, she is somewhat less keen on the government’s decision to link the referendum on voting reform with boundary changes.

“I am appalled at the Lib-Cons attempts to use voting reform to bring about boundary changes,” Abbott says. “These are clearly designed to ensure that they maintain and gain more seats in further elections. Tainting the reforms with trying to maintain power is highly inappropriate and may mean that people will not vote for AV reform despite believing this is the best system. This in effect defeats the point of the entire reform.”

This last comment perhaps best reflects Abbott’s philosophy. A socialist, a democrat, a thorn in the side of the Blairite establishment, but Labour through and through.

“We have difficult times ahead,” Abbott says. “I love my party and believe that we will rise to this challenge. But to do this we need every disaffected activist in the Labour movement behind us. They are a group of people who understand solidarity and I am certain they see the importance of uniting against the Lib-Cons.”

The task ahead for Abbott, and for her party, will not be an easy one. In less than a month it will choose which direction it will take. And contrary to the retired rhetoric of the Mandelsons of this world, that choice is not between backwards and forwards, but between left and right. If, after thirteen years of Blair and Brown, after Iraq and Afghanistan, after the systematic rollback of civil liberties and human rights and the stark betrayal of its socialist roots for a market-orientated philosophy, Labour elects David Miliband, it will have learnt nothing from the failings of a leadership that sacrificed genuine progressive principles for power for power’s sake. If, on the other hand, it chooses Diane Abbott, reported to be the favoured candidate of Miliband’s Marxist mother, voters may once again find themselves faced with a genuine choice at the next election and the Labour Party may find itself saying out with the New and in with the old.

Ok, false alarm, it’s not quite breaking news. People have known this for years. But I think, following today’s little outburst in The Independent, it’s worth reiterating. Julie Burchill is an idiot. Quite why a paper which is, by and large, aimed at intelligent, liberal minded progressives, chooses to print the journalistic equivalent of an explosive wet fart after a dodgy vindaloo from the mind (or lack thereof) of an idiotic Iraq war apologist who once declared Israel the only country she would “fucking die for”, is beyond me. So what brainless, sputum-laced drivel did she have to offer us today? Three short pieces, each wetter and fartier than the last. Thusly summarised, they go like this:

1) People who oppose the war in Afghanistan are Taliban appeasers and there’s absolutely no chance they could have any genuine moral or political objections to the war, like the deaths of Afghan civilians, or a principled opposition to imperialism. People who criticise the war without ever having fought in it are cowards, don’t deserve to have an opinion and should just shut up. Anti-war activists would be cheering Chamberlain if he were around today because it’s absolutely impossible that two completely different wars could be fought for two completely different reasons and that one might be slightly more defensible than the other. It’s much better to be an armchair warmonger than an armchair peacenik.

2) Julie belittles the plight of millions of Pakistanis whose lives have been ruined by the floods. She then admits she doesn’t know much about Islam (does she know much about anything?) before bringing up the fact that a Saudi billionaire was profligate enough so spend millions on a number plate as evidence that Muslims are probably hypocrites if they’re not sending aid to Pakistan. I’d suggest that Ms. Burchill is rather tenuously conflating two separate issues – one of extreme importance, the other of large irrelevance – because she’s running out of things to write about. This, I think, is evidenced by wet fart number three.

3) Naomi Campbell is pretty, but miserable. Kate Moss is pretty, clever and full of the joys of life. Well, Julie, if either of them had had their brain extracted and replaced by a monkey’s anus, they could have come up with a more interesting piece than this. You cretin.

A few highly representative (quite honestly) comments on Burchill’s article from the Independent’s website:

Tony: The Indy’s bosses could save themselves a few bob by just getting a random cabbie to rant incoherently about the problems of the day, and transcribing the results thereof. At least that might be entertaining.

Giordano Bruno: Islamophobia infiltrating the Independent! Funny how one can feel Burchill’s contempt if not hatred towards Islamic “umma”. Usual suspects like JB always come back with same rusty and dusty arguments. I’ve just wasted 5 minutes of my precious time.

Christopher: Being a columnist is just a little more than your IQ can manage. I suggest you switch to covering horse shows, which I expect you could do well.

Meles: Wow! Three items, all poorly-judged, offensive and ill-informed. I have learned to treat JB’s writing with… well, let’s call it scepticism… but this has to be an all time low.

Ian1: I was doing a spot of gardening this morning when I accidentally put my hand in a turd left in one of my borders by a neighbour’s cat. Unpleasant as that experience was, it pales into insignificance alongside the trauma associated with reading yet another ill-considered, poorly-constructed column by the worthless sack of crap that is Julie Burchill.

R. Broxted: Julie, couldn’t Lebedev afford Rod Liddle?

There’s an excellent piece by Andy Newman on Socialist Unity about why Afghanistan could prove to be a bigger defeat for America than Vietnam.

The key point is his identification of Iraq and Afghanistan as being part of the same conflict. It’s easy to forget about Iraq with the media’s eye so focussed on Afghanistan. Remember five years ago when Afghanistan was barely mentioned and violence in Iraq was in the news every day? Now the focus has shifted, it’s not hard to buy into the idea that Iraq has been an eventual success (if you can call over a million civillians dead a success) and Afghanistan is a failure. But part of the reason Afghanistan is failing now is because of the Iraq war. Any successes in the latter have to be weighed against the failings in the former.

No one should cheer the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But these failures are a necessary lesson for America. The Afghan insurgents may not be about to topple their second superpower. But they may have given the US pause for thought about its role in the world. And America has long been due a good period of reflection.

In the 1960s and 70s, two ultra leftist groups, the Weathermen in the USA, and the Red Army Faction in West Germany, used the same slogan to clarify the motivation for their violent response to the US invasion of Vietnam: ‘bringing the war home.’

There are two movements we can describe as ‘bringing the war home’ at the moment in the UK. One if the EDL, the other is the Palestine movement. Neither is intrinsically progressive, and both have huge potential. Obviously, however, we have no interest in helping the potential of the EDL, and every interest in furthering the progressive elements within the pro-Palestine movement.

The EDL are indeed the ‘cutting edge of racism’, but this doesn’t mean they are outsiders. Rather, they are exaggerating ideas at the heart of the British state’s war rhetoric. The recent investigations by the Guardian and the BBC have shown clearly that there is (at least for now) a few black and asian supporters among the EDL. The key here is not that the EDL aren’t racist: but simply that skin is no longer the locus of their struggle. Instead, perceptions of Islam (fundamentalist and otherwise), those same perceptions peddled by all three political parties over the years, have taken centre stage. There has been a movement away from skin and towards faith: note the prevalence of crosses, both on the English flags and on necklaces worn by EDL members. And surely this is the same kind of religion-baiting adopted by Richard Dawkins and other populist atheists.

On the other side, the Palestinian movement seems also to be shifting (growing up, perhaps): no longer are there the cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ outside the Israeli embassy, and anti-Zionist jews are welcome at the demonstrations. Here the locus of struggle is still within the realm of religion, but not exclusively – it still also remains in that of nationality. The cries of ‘Viva Viva Palestina’ are increasingly joined by ‘In our thousands in our million, we are all Palestinians’, and the even more the disturbing ‘from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free’.

The first of these is a cry of support, the last a promise of revolutionary justice, with a potential for veiled anti-semitism. The middle slogan, however, is one of the creation of a political subjectivity, and one based very much around nationality. Just as the Proletariat, the Indigenous, the Global South or the Multitude are the naming of a global resisting mass, through which a common identity can be formed, so the “thousands and millions of Palestinians” attempts to invoke a mass movement around Palestine. However, here the name is given by a nation. Israel was created in a similar way, through the invocation of a nation as a unifying call for a political movement to support an oppressed people, a call which did create a political subjectivity, one which still survives.

The EDL are similarly attempting to create a political subjectivity around the notion of England, a subjectivity which includes non-white skin, but still supports a base Nationalism. The different levels of capital and power employed by England and Palestine, neither of which are sovereign states, does not make a difference to the nationalism within them. And this is the bringing home of the war, the resort to nationalism as a mode of struggle.

I do find this worrying. No, it’s not something we can easily change and yes, there are more important immediate aspects within the Gaza movement (as I would rather call it) to be addressed. But we shouldn’t abandon the political subjectivities we form for ourselves in order to show solidarity, so I won’t be claiming to be a Palestinian any time soon.

What I think we are doing here is bringing the war home – but not in a useful way, and not in its physically violent form (as the Weathermen did), but in its structurally violent one. And in doing so, we risk replicating the discourse of their war, rather than our own.

Ok, perhaps he’s not wrong about everything, but Reuben wrote an article yesterday with which I have several significant disagreements. My main problem with his assertions stem from this cringe-worthy little paragraph:

In places like Cambridge – where they grabbed a seat last time – they seemed to get the vote of those who treated voting as an exercize [sic] in political self expression, or a parade of their moral conscience, rather than a practical attempt to determine the future. You know, those self indulgent tossers opine, with great moral gravity, “I couldn’t possible vote labour”. With a change of government on the cards – and at a time when politics will really save people of [sic] fuck people – I expect people to really, actually vote for who might form the next government – i.e. Labour or the Tories.

Whilst Reuben is right to say that the Lib Dems, perhaps unfairly, capitalised on an anti-war vote which will be far less pronounced in this election, I believe he is gravely wrong to characterise people who refuse to vote Labour for moral reasons as “self indulgent tossers”. Aside from being patronising, he is missing out on the bigger picture. Firstly, if we ever want the political system to change, and for long-term progressive reform to take place, we cannot afford to blindly follow a system which forces us to choose between the lesser of two evils. Politics should not be about who we don’t want to run the country, but about who we do. It is not, in my view, wrong to vote Labour in all cases. There are some very good Labour MPs and candidates out there who, despite the transgressions of their party, despite the wars, the privatisations and the systematic crackdown on civil liberties, deserve the support of left-wing activists. Nor, in all cases, is tactical voting a bad move. However, by telling people that they must vote Labour simply to keep the Tories out, we blunt a powerful tool for reforming the political system. Moreover, we reinforce the sense of disenfranchisement that is precisely the problem with politics at the moment – a sense of alientation in which people perceive they have very little choice in who runs the country and that their views are not being represented in a so-called representative democracy – a disenchantment which, far more than immigration figures and tabloid scare stories about asylum seekers eating our hamsters, has led to the rise of the BNP. As George Monbiot told me in an interview with The Third Estate last year: “As much as I dislike and am disgusted with the Tories, I think you have to vote for what you think is right. And if you cling onto something bad for fear of something worse, no one will end up with the government they want.”

Secondly, Reuben’s thinking relies on a similar faith to Tony Benn’s, that New Labour is a transient thorn that can be plucked if socialists re-join the party and work for change from within. I respect this view, but in translating this to a call to back Labour in an election regardless of circumstance, I think it only exacerbates the problem. New Labour is not a transient thorn. Its intelligent, educated and very middle class architects made a calculated, and very correct, decision that they can afford a sharp swing to the middle ground because whatever they do, their core support of left-wing voters will back them come what may. As long as they believe they can get away with that, New Labour will remain entrenched and the British working class will find nothing more than a few empty platitudes, whilst internationally it will continue to follow a line that is dangerously neo-conservative confident that as long as they remain moderately better than the Tories domestically, their left-wing supporters, who turned up on every demonstration opposing invasions and ID cards, will continue to put their cross in the right box come election time. Yes, you heard it here first folks, the Iraq war was Reuben’s fault! This is precisely why moral decisions must play a part in deciding who to vote for. This is why cold pragmatism gives everything we have struggled to resist in the last decade an easy ride. It’s not self-righteous to say I can’t, in good conscience, vote Labour. It’s just self-aware. Nor is it a matter of placing my own morality above the good of the many. There are a great many Iraqi orphans who would agree with me. By voting for who I want to run the country, rather than who is most likely to run the country, I am thinking of the bigger picture.

So you see, this is why Reuben is wrong about everything. Also, and this is perhaps the most fundamental point of all, whilst kids up and down the country were running round the playground playing ‘It’, Reuben was playing a game called ‘Had.’ I rest my case…

I will always remember where I was when I heard that Britain and America had invaded Iraq. I was eighteen years old, sitting in the car, on my way to school. And I will always remember how I felt that day. I felt betrayed, disillusioned, disheartened that all the might we had mobilised in the months before on the streets of London and all across the country could come to nothing. Most of all, I felt angry. I heard the results of the latest opinion poll, showing that the majority of the country had, as Blair had cockily predicted, swung behind the war when it started, and I felt angry that that brazen liar would get away with it.

Seven years, no weapons of mass destruction and a devastating war later, and still no one has answered for the fiasco. Today was the moment everyone had been waiting for. Tony Blair, by all accounts visibly shaken, sitting before a panel and answering for the lies he spun which took us into a war that has cost the lives of as many as a million Iraqis. Blair, however, is a master manipulator, a used car salesman trading in platitudes, image and his own place in history. I never expected much from the Chilcot Inquiry, despite a strong public campaign demanding tough questions. I could pick the proceedings apart, but the time for analysing past mistakes is over. I have only one demand.

Tony Blair must be charged as a war criminal.

US President Barack Obama (right) holds his Nobel Peace Prize next to Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjoern Jagland Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Barack Obama received his much debated Nobel Peace Prize in Norway today. One has to wonder exactly what part of sending 30,000 additional troops into a destitute nation, which has been occupied by the world’s greatest superpower for the last eight years, constitutes peace. Obama himself recognised the irony of receiving the prize whilst his country is engaged in two major conflicts. It’s fair to say that he was not the one who took his country to war, but for all the A grade essays I wrote at school, I can’t remember ever earning a gold star by rubbing out someone else’s mistakes. Or, for that matter, copying them. No one can doubt that Obama is a better president than Bush. But he has an awful lot left to prove if he’s to retroactively earn the award that was repeatedly denied Gandhi.

Michael Moore says absolutely everything that needs to be said on Obama’s decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

Hat tip here goes to Leon on Pickled Politics. Sunny, writing on the same website, makes some good points, but I continue to believe his support for the war and for the additional troops is misguided. Time will tell which of us is right (and I sincerely hope he is), but I have an eight year head start.

Earlier this month, Reuben wrote an article examining the media’s newfound war-weariness and how, owing to the fact that almost every major newspaper backed the invasion of Afghanistan, it can only express itself in impotent calls for better equipment.

Now of course, the Iraq war was much more divisive. Many journalists were critical of the plans to invade Iraq from day one and some left-leaning newspapers even actively threw themselves behind the anti-war movement. Needless to say, the Mail was not one of these papers. Pick any good cause, and you can guarantee it’ll be cheering for the other side. Which – six years on, zero weapons of mass destruction found, a million Iraqis dead and billions of pounds blown – puts the Mail and the other right-wing papers in a rather difficult position. How to criticise the war now without admitting to their own mistake in backing it?

The Chilcote Inquiry provides the perfect opportunity. As more and more evidence comes to light showing what the anti-war movement knew all along – the war was never about weapons of mass destruction or humanitarian intervention, it was about regime change and had been planned a year in advance – the hitherto pro-war media can plead ignorance. Not only this, but since the right-wing tabloids are swinging towards the Conservatives for the coming election, it provides them a handy (and wholly deserved) stick with which to beat a crippled Labour government.

Of all the papers, the Mail, more than any other, is going down the ‘we were lied to’ route. Today’s Mail on Sunday wrings its hands with glee at Lord Goldsmith’s secret letter revealing Blair’s deception.”The disclosures deal a massive blow to Mr Blair’s hopes of proving he acted in good faith when he and George Bush declared war on Iraq. And they are likely to fuel further calls for Mr Blair to be charged with war crimes,” writes political editor, Simon Walters.

They’re right, of course, we were lied to, and Blair should be charged with war crimes. But as Obi Wan Kenobi once said: ‘Who’s more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?’