Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£10/4 p a. £30 p.a.)     [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]                                                            No 0874 October 08 1996                                                                                                                                      10p 

EPSR readers Southwest. Sat 2pm.Rcpts. S/bags

Rule-Britannia desertions won't stop the embarrassing harlotry in politics or solve British imperialism's weak position in the Common Market rat race. Bent freemasonries and mafias of all kinds will screw the system.

The ruling-class bourgeois system, up to its neck in sleaze, faces more back-stabbing splits this week at the Tory conference.

Capitalism's problems, both at the local corruption level and the international trade-war level, now loom so large that blaming each other, and deserting sinking ships, is becoming routine, two resigning this week.

Labour managed to sweep most of its divisions and crookedness under the carpet at last week's Blackpool conference largely due to the appallingly smug opportunism and stifling conservatism of its new middle-class individual membership recruits, and to the petty-bourgeois fascist regimentation that the insecure self-righteous are universally such stooges for.

But the political prostitution scandal, - the catastrophically failed cover-up of which is so adding to Tory fears this week of treacherous indisciplined misconduct piled on top of imperialist betrayal over Europe, - is heaping filth on all parties.

The hiring of safe seats in the Commons to do any dubious business that comes along has revealed that corrupt lobbyists expect to find political whores on the 'Opposition' benches just the same as on the Government's side of openly commercial graft.

And the most monstrous aspect of this exposure of Smith, Hoyle, and Beith alongside the insatiable Hamilton and the Tory mob with their snouts firmly in the trough, was the cheekily attempted bland reassurance that such big business donations to MPs re-election funds are "perfectly ordinary, perfectly normal".

The rottenness of this cynical hypocrisy is best illustrated by the placing on necessary record of some of the capitalist press's own revelations of what really goes on within 'parliamentary democracy' where the public are played for idiots, getting the chance to vote once every five years for one of three major parties of fulltime professional mountebanks:

'That Neil Hamilton, he'd **** his mother for a penny!' - Mohammed al Fayed

When you meet the Egyptian-born boss of Harrods in his eyrie at the top of the Knightsbridge store, it rarely takes long before the air turns blue.

Mohammed al Fayed's distasteful turn of phrase is all of a piece with the gamey quality of the drama of ministerial corruption which exploded last week. It is a morality tale of the Eighties and Nineties when Tory rule seemed endlessly safe, a detective story set in the get-rich-quick scratch-my-back house of cards at Westminster.

Fayed is certainly a fox. A Middle East middleman, he has the reputation that if he follows you into a revolving door, he'll emerge in front. He bested Tiny Rowland, boss of Lonrho and then owner of the Observer, by beating him to the purchase of Harrods.

As a result, Fayed in the mid-Eighties faced a daily barrage of insults and complaints from Lonrho.

Fayed's problem was the danger that, to shut up Rowland, the Government might order an inquiry into the Harrods owner's true background. He was not a distinguished industrialist, with vast family money, as he claimed, but came from the slums of Alexandria. Fayed's takeover of Harrods had been waved through by the Government because he claimed his family background proved he was financially sound.

In this fable, Ian Greer was the fly. This busily buzzing creature, a former Tory agent, was hired by the Harrods boss in 1985 to ease his political problems. Greer liked lovely lunches at Wiltons in Jermyn Street or Mark's Club in Mayfair; he might be seen treating himself in Asprey's to a pair of opera glasses. 

As well as indulging himself, Greer regularly pressed treats and sweeteners - pretty sizeable ones at times - on politicians who could be useful to him. Ian Greer Associates sold political influence - for cash.

His clients included tobacco firms, arms companies, big brewers and the Serbs. Lord King of British Airways, who had used him to help the airline retain its monopoly on certain routes, privately recommended Greer. Fayed signed him up for £25,000 a year, plus mysterious 'extras'.

The barking dog Greer produced to sound off for Fayed in Parliament was Neil Hamilton: a recently-elected Tory rightwinger from the old Sixties' Monday Club with a line in brutal invective. Hamilton wanted money. Over the next few years, accompanied by a group of paid MPs, he was to bombard Ministers and civil servants with parliamentary questions, letters and delegations pressing the Fayed cause.

Department of Trade and Industry officials believed that Hamilton's interest, like that of others in the deputations, stemmed from his post with the Tory trade and industry committee, the main route by which backbench views on commercial matters are conveyed to Ministers. In fact, the whole delegation was in Greer's pocket on the Harrods issue.

• The trade committee chairman, Sir Michael Grylls, MP for Surrey North-west, got undeclared, frequent cash payments from the lobbyist: the first was handed over on 1 November 1985, the day the Fayed contract began.

•  The committee secretary, Tim Smith, MP for Beaconsfield, received secret money directly from Fayed.

• The delegation leader, Sir Peter Hordern, MP for Horsham, was a paid consultant to Harrods, which he always declared.

• A fifth supporter throughout 1987, Sir Andrew Bowden, received undisclosed campaign funds of more than £5,000 from Fayed via Greer to fight his marginal seat at Brighton Kemptown. Curiously, this was more than the £4,426 he declared as his total 1987 election spending.

Hamilton was eventually to become a Minister in charge of the most commercially sensitive department of all - company affairs. So the truth about his role became an unexploded bomb at the heart of John Major's administration.

Hamilton took cash and benefits in all sorts of ways from Greer and Fayed while pursuing their interests in Parliament. Greer continued to get favours from Hamilton the Minister.

The money came as cash bribes in envelopes; a Paris holiday; thousands of pounds' worth of 'gifts' of watercolours, furniture and plane tickets. Although Conservative Party chairman Brian Mawhinney still sought to describe the Hamilton disclosures as 'unproven' on Friday, evidence for the different types of payment ranges from strong to utterly conclusive.

At the height of the lobbying campaign, the 1987 election was called. Fayed secretly gave £250,000 to Tory Central Office. Greer wrote and asked Fayed to slip him another £18,000 to 'assist one or two Conservative MPs' with their campaign funds.

Greer used the money, plus £11,250 from the courier firm DHL, to refresh the election funds of 26 politicians, mostly Tory, but some Labour and Liberal. A Central Office memo subsequently identified the most embarrassing name on the list as that of Michael Portillo, then a Whip, now spoken of as a future Tory leader.

The Observer has identified 34 MPs to whom Greer has given cash, election funding or research assistance. They range from Major himself to Lady Olga Maitland. Payments were kept secret. A loophole in company law allowed Greer not to declare the donations in 1987, claiming exemption from reporting under newly-legislated 'small-company' clauses. In 1992, when he made further donations, he declared them as £2,750 to 'various political parties'.

A further loophole allowed MPs not to declare the election payments on the Register of MPs' interests. Only election 'sponsorship' payments of more than 25 per cent of the cost must be declared. Two MPs, however, may have been required to declare but did not: Bowden, who appeared to have more than the whole of his election expenses paid for, and Norman Lamont, in Greer's own Kingston constituency, whose £2,000 was something like 40 per cent of the total.

There is one curious aspect to the spider's web of secret obligations that Greer sought to build up: it had a marked homosexual flavour. Greer made no secret that he was gay, and it was considered an asset in the firm to be gay too.

Hamilton and his wife's circle also included Harvey Proctor, the far-right ex-MP convicted of homosexual offences, and Michael Brown, a now also openly gay Tory MP, who got payments from Greer. Another gay connection whom Greer paid after he stepped down from the Commons was Peter Morrison, Margaret Thatcher's former campaign manager. Greer's otherwise mysterious attempt to ingratiate himself with conspicuously honest Labour front-bencher Chris Smith by making a small election payment to his constituency may be explained by this: Smith too is gay.

Obviously, many of Greer's connections were not gay. Equally obviously, homosexuals are no less ethical than anyone else. But a sense of commonly shared secrets may have made a bond between Greer and some of his contacts.

The one thing all of this clearly is not, - is "straightforward", the word Alan Beith tried to use to describe this racketeering.

The politically-correct bourgeois press would also like to pretend that homosexual sufferers of retarded emotional-sexual development are not more vulnerable to the attractions of bent freemasonries of various kinds when the whole of social history would indicate the opposite. 

Queers figure prominently in this activity as they did in the Monday Club mafiosi who built up this far-right political lobbying inside the decadent ruling-class party, goings-on hinted at in earlier Observer revelations around the homosexual influence career of Derek Laud, and the like.

Perverted sexual activity is a phenomenon of a troubled society to start with, where human and family roles suffer such alienation that natural instincts and behaviour become corrupted by psychotic drives of all descriptions, from such criminally-weird antics as pyromania and Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome to the more self-injuring varieties of masochism, bulimia, and self-mutilation disorders. 

Sexual deviations like sadism, paedophilia, and homosexualism are obviously more widespread, and clamour more insistently for 'acceptability', but their sickness is self-evident, and it is an unhealthy society which itself ignores the potential mischief-making of such strong perverted drives.

Clandestine homosexual freemasonries can attach themselves to almost any social activity, and it is to that perceived influence that the Observer is obviously referring in describing 

"a sense of commonly shared secrets../making/...a bond between Greer and some of his contacts."

In a weak society, one destined for historical demise, - such abnormal social behaviour can then potentially become aggressively dominant to a certain extent, as in this case. Part of the Greer-Monday Club bent freemasonry is now out in the open, but it has had a cancerous influence for more than ten years and has somehow persuaded the rest of parliament and bourgeois political society to not blow the whistle on it, - until the wronged chancer Al Fayed decided to put the boot in, and a section of the bourgeois press decided to strike a "fearless, uncompromising, honest" stance for a change, - themselves signs of a society which is going to the dogs.

The capitalist media keep hinting at even more ambitious and menacing bent-freemasonry tie-ups inside the ruling-class party around touted future Tory leaders which show every sign of having utter contempt for the 'normal' bumbling decadent incompetence of British bourgeois society which is seen as on its last legs unless some self-appointed exceptional elite or other can grab the reins.

Such subjective-psychotic drives seem to be routine Monday Club behaviour, and they stand out, of course, in all fascist history, where, notoriously, homosexual weirdos also played a prominent role in early Nazi-party camaraderie.

To correct the Observer, the homosexual disorder is not unethical as such, but its demonic drives can lay sufferers open to a more conspiratorial prevalence of such behaviour, - in this case (of House of Commons sleaze) helping to provide the specific vehicle for the generally degenerate condition of decadent capitalist society.

More concealed vice is now alleged against another Tory-dominated Commons body, the Committee on Members Interests which is accused of not only not properly investigating the crook Hamilton's misconduct in 1994 but of then conspiring with a Tory highflyer David Willetts, then in the Whips Office, to help Hamilton find the best way of escaping any further investigation.

And as Tory conference week stumbles on with the tentacles of corruption spreading ever wider, the quickly disowned and humiliated Greer, a former Tory Central Office bureaucrat, has started sniping back at his fair-weather former political colleagues:

IAN GREER, the parliamentary lobbyist at the centre of the cash for questions scandal involving disgraced ex-minister Neil Hamilton, last night revealed that Tory MPs, including junior ministers, had approached him for money to fight the next general election.

In a vengeful interview in the Times, Mr Greer raised the stakes when he said he had provided offices for John Major during his 1990 leadership campaign. He had also supplied Mr Major with a Daimler.

Mr Greer, who clearly felt he had been abandoned in the wake of his and Mr Hamilton's decision to drop their libel actions against the Guardian, said he had raised £750,000 for the Conservative Party over the past 10 years. "I raised the money directly or indirectly by encouraging businessmen and many of my clients to make donations. It seemed the right thing to do. I now regret being so enthusiastic."

His interview, on the eve of the Conservative Party conference in Bournemouth, dragged the Prime Minister, a long-time friend, centre-stage.

It came as concern was mounting that the Parliamentary ombudsman, Sir Gordon Downey, will not have the resources to thoroughly investigate the affair.

The only thing preventing this scandal from going all the way to bringing down the entire corrupt racket which is government of capitalism by a professional House of Commons, - is the guilty, treacherous cowardice of the Labour Party 'Opposition' which is obviously as up to its rotten neck in all the back-hander filth and sleaze as is the current ruling parliamentary party. This whole crooked game could not possibly work unless all of the 'democracy' rogues were in on it together.

The majority of Labour's most notorious scandals have taken place in local government, but that is only because Labour has been mostly confined to Town Hall politics by its invariable capitalist-stooge role of 'Loyal Opposition'. When in national government, Labour's racketeering has always been well up to the most despicable Tory standards, of nepotism, graft and corruption.

Even when pretending to be doing its best, Labour's remoteness from down-to-earth practical working-class interests and attitudes, - too wrapped up in their careerist posturing Labourite opportunism, - has created a petty-bourgeois domineering culture where self-righteous "political correctness" has made nonsense of proper local government concerns, - as even the most liberal of the bourgeois press has been obliged to admit in spite of some readiness to support Blairism at the next general election to give the semblance of a "change" from Tory corruption:

SIXTEEN Labour members of Hackney council resigned from the party yesterday claiming that the council leadership's proposals for an inquiry into the activities of Mark Trotter, an alleged paedophile who ran a children's home in the London borough, were grossly inadequate. The Labour rebels allege that maladministration, corruption, and secrecy have been endemic in the council for years.

They want public exposure of the activities of Trotter, a Labour activist who was employed as a children's care worker for 12 years by the social services department, and who died last year. They also supported the borough's director of housing, Bernard Crofton, who was sacked and then reinstated for his allegations concerning recruitment fraud. They make many other allegations about the improper conduct of council business.

Labour nationally has tried hard to suppress the divisions in Hackney. Five of the rebels were barred in July from holding council office after an inquiry into allegations that the group, referred to then as the Manifesto Group, were a party within a party.

THE chief executive of one of London's poorest and most politically troubled boroughs has recommended an independent inquiry into allegations that a social worker may have sexually abused children in his care, and accusations that the council either mishandled or tried to cover up the affair.

Mark Trotter died of Aids-related pneumonia in July last year, aged 34. Had he lived, Merseyside police say they would have prosecuted him for sexually abusing five boys in 1980-81 when he was  living and working in a children's home in Liverpool.

Trotter left Liverpool for Hackney, east London, where he became a residential social worker at the Trowbridge House children's home. He lived on the premises with his partner, Bob Barthram, until the home was closed in 1985 under the council's policy of getting children out of institutions and into foster homes. He then became a field social worker — still with contact with children — until his death.

In December 1981, months after Trotter joined Hackney, and again in January 1982, he was investigated by the social services department following separate allegations of interference and indecent assault. In December 1984 and January 1989 there were more sexual allegations.

Nothing was proved, and Trotter, a Labour Party activist well known to many councillors, was allowed to continue working with children. Some considered the charges no more than "gay-bashing".

Trotter's name had meanwhile come up in Merseyside, where police were involved in a big child abuse inquiry with Cheshire. They found paedophilia was rife in children's homes in both areas. Detective Superintendent Albert Kirby, who led the Jamie Bulger inquiry, is proud of the way they worked closely with social services and the fact that three former care workers from Liverpool were jailed for 15, 13 and 10 years.

In July 1995, two weeks after Trotter's death, Merseyside police traced him to London. "We had five very serious allegations of sexual abuse, gross indecency and buggery," said Superintendent Kirby.

The police passed the information in August 1995 to Hackney social services. "On our side we had set about giving all possible help and advice with regard to victims, including having Aids tests," he said. "We never heard anything from Hackney at all. It was absolutely a dead duck."

If Hackney's full council meeting next week gives the go-ahead to the investigation recommended by the chief executive, Tony Elliston, it will also look at the handling of the case after the letter arrived. Trotter had contact with at least 350 children at the home and others afterwards. A social work manager called Ken Redley, who had resigned after criticism of his management style and was working out his notice, was given the job of tracing them.

By the time he left in February, his report was not complete. Eventually it arrived last month. He had found only 58 and spoken to 43. The job of tracing the rest has now been given to the NSPCC, helped by four senior social services officers. Opposition councillors and rebel members of the fractured ruling Labour group — five have been disciplined by the national executive committee for forming a party within a party — have been clamouring for an inquiry, accusing their opponents of mismanagement and worse.

Trotter was a union representative, and at one time on a shortlist to be a council candidate. Thanks to a council nomination, he became governor and chairman of governors at Wentworth nursery school. In 1985, when Trowbridge House closed and before he was redeployed, he was seconded to the council's campaigns unit as an information officer.

He lived in council property for the 12 years he spent in Hackney, first at Trowbridge House and then in a flat above a family support centre. Then with Bob Barthram, his 26-year-old partner who died of Aids in 1994, he took on a council flat-share. In 1992, Barthram complained to the council that Trotter had beaten him and thrown him out for another man, Andrew Mulvey, who died of Aids in April 1994, aged 29.

Yesterday Julie Grimble, group secretary of the Labour group on Hackney council, rejected allegations that council members had dragged their feet over the investigation.

"There is no evidence whatsoever that there has been a political cover-up," she said.

"Those who are seeking to make political capital out of this tragic affair should be ashamed. Our first priority has always been, and remains, acting in the best interests of young people who may have been abused whilst in our care."

Mr Elliston said the council had a duty to trace young people who might have been abused by Trotter. "We also need to know whether others apart from Trotter may have been involved in child abuse in Hackney. Although at this stage we have no first hand evidence that there has been abuse in Hackney, there is sufficient information for the council to be deeply concerned."

"There have also been serious allegations of mismanagement and a cover-up and we have a duty to investigate this fully to maintain public confidence in the authority."

Liverpool social services took him on at the age of 19 as an unqualified social worker with no experience — he had previously worked as a firefighter. It may now seem shocking, but it was then far from unusual and even now it still happens, that such an untested young lad should have been employed as a live-in carer. He moved in to the New Heyes assessment centre in February 1981, looking after children in care, some for their own protection from abusing families.

He stayed for 22 months. "During that time it was recognised he needed support in his work." says a Liverpool city council officer. "He worked in a supervised group." But when Merseyside and Cheshire police began investigating children's homes across the area, believing at first they were trailing a paedophile ring, Trotter's was one of the names that came up. Three former care workers were jailed as a result of the investigation, but they were not part of a ring. Sexual abuse was endemic in the institutions. Paedophiles sought out jobs in homes, knowing few people cared what happened to those children. in the meantime, Trotter had moved to London. In November 1981, with two references from Liverpool and the usual Home Office check that he had no convictions, he started work as a residential social worker in Hackney's Trowbridge House. The first warning signal — and there were several — came just the next month. In December, there were allegations of interference by Trotter from a boy at the home. An officer from social services investigated but found there was insufficient evidence.

The very next month there was a more serious allegation of indecent assault by a Trowbridge boy. Trotter was suspended while police investigated. He faced a disciplinary hearing but it found there was no case to answer. Trotter went back to his job. Astonishingly. Hackney council says no note of either accusation was left on his file. He had been in their employ for only two months.

It was around this time that Trotter joined the Labour Party — all-powerful in Hackney at that time. He was soon an active and popular regular at meetings and later his enthusiasm and political acceptability saw him seconded to the council's campaigns unit, where he worked as an information officer on rate-capping.

But in December 1984 came the first rumblings from New Heyes. Liverpool social services contacted Hackney. There were allegations that Trotter had made improper suggestions to children in his former job.

In March, the council got a letter from Liverpool's social services saying they were taking no further action on the complaint. For the third time Trotter had been cleared, and in April he began work as a field social worker, dealing with families — and of course, their children.

The last complaint against Trotter came in January 1989, when a girl from Trowbridge alleged he had improperly touched her while they were on a camping trip, back in 1982. The police were called but the girl refused to speak to them through mistrust or fear. Police raided Trotter's flat, looking for pornography, but found nothing. His union branch passed a resolution protesting against police harassment of gays. His Hackney pedigree was perfect Labour, a social worker, a Nalgo officer representing young people. And he was openly gay. In the fearsomely politically correct climate of Hackney in the eighties, when questions about him surfaced, they were dismissed as homophobia.

Paedophiles, says Bruce Clark of the NSPCC, which is now charged with tracing the children, cannot be safely written off as misfits and no-hopers. He cites the recently published research of Professor Celia Brackenndge, of Cheltenham's Institute of Higher Education, which has called into question the old assumptions. "Abusers are not all weak, pathetic saddos, but widely respected, clever and have influence and power. They are highly skilful and manipulative," he says.

Even now, teachers and staff at Wentworth nursery school, where Trotter was appointed by Hackney Labour Party to the board of governors in November 1989, are reluctant to believe the worst.
 
There was insufficient evidence to act against Trotter, who vehemently denied the accusation. But Dinah Morley, deputy social services director, was concerned enough to note the allegation on Trotter's personal file — and to warn a female councillor who sometimes used Trotter as a babysitter.

These are the sexual allegations against Trotter — and the NSPCC may by now have turned up more — but there are other matters that throw up questions about his probity and his powers of manipulation. Even before Trowbridge House closed its doors, Trotter had moved his then partner, Bob Barthram, into his flat on the premises. Barthram was only 20, a student nursery nurse. Hackney College organised him a placement, coincidentally or not, at Wentworth nursery school. There is no suggestion that young, very camp, Bob was a paedophile. "He was perhaps younger than his chronological age. He was unworldly and naïve," says Maples. If anything, Bob was a victim.

Trotter and Barthram stayed on in the empty Trowbridge House until January 1989, when they were given one of three flats above a family day centre in Cazenove Road which had also once been a children's home. All the day centre clients and staff went home at around 6pm or so, leaving the building to the upstairs tenants. Staff rarely went up to the flats but Trotter's phone was routed through the day centre switchboard — part of the building's legacy. One member of staff now says she voiced concerns at the time about some of the phone calls for Trotter. And there was something else. One day she had occasion to go looking for the man upstairs: she was surprised and concerned to see the floor of one of the flats covered with 5ft mattresses.

Trotter was there until May 1990, when he moved into a flat with Barthram in Granard House, on the Gascoyne estate. This was a council tenancy under Hackney's then flat-share scheme, where two single men with sufficient points might get a hard-to-let property — a "Band 5". But Trotter's new home was no rundown eighth-floor flat but a two-bedroom maisonette from Band 3. Hackney's housing department is now investigating how he came to get the tenancy of one of its better properties.

Something else was wrong. It was a joint tenancy, so Barthram should have signed the lease with Trotter. He did not. In July 1992, Trotter threw Barthram out. Because his name was not on the document, Barthram could not complain to the council that he had been illegally evicted. Little notice was taken of Barthram's plight, though he was interviewed by Hackney council officers in August 1992, when he alleged that Trotter had beaten him up. He asked, as a homeless person, to be housed, but the Wick ward office decided he was not a priority. There are those who wonder whether his time sleeping on the streets thereafter hastened his death of Aids-related pneumonia in January 1994.

Trotter moved his new lover, Andrew Mulvey, into the maisonette. They lived there until Trotter became ill. He retired on grounds of ill-health in December 1993 and died in a council flat in Moresby Road in July 1995. Mulvey also died, in April this year.

Somebody, probably relatives, cleared out the flat before investigations into Trotter could get underway. But they had not touched the basement. There was not much but there were some photographs. One of them showed Trotter with three small children on his lap. Then there was a postcard. On one side it showed a picture of a child. On the other side, it read: "Preparing for our rituals this year. Mark and Andrew."

The independent inquiry that councillors of all political persuasions have now backed will look not only at Trotter's activities but also at Hackney's response. Merseyside's Det. Supt. Kirby has been outspoken about the lack of response, as he sees it, to his warning in August last year. He told Hackney social services about the allegations against Trotter, expecting them to investigate urgently in order to help any abused children. "We never heard anything from Hackney at all. It was a dead duck," he says.

IN FACT there was an investigation going on — a confidential tracing exercise put in the hands of a social services manager called Len Redley. He was considered to get on well with young people and, like most of the children in Trowbridge, he was black. But Hackney social services department seems to have under-estimated the scale and difficulty of the task. Children who leave care scatter to the far ends of the Earth and leave fewer traces than most.

Questions are now being asked also about Redley's suitability for the task. The year before, there had been questions over his handling of his budget and his management of staff. Shortly before he was given the Trowbridge dossier, he had resigned his post and was working his notice. He was asked to report by December 1995. By the time he left, in February this year, nothing had appeared. The council then, astonishingly, lost touch with him.

Not until June did it get Redley's report, which ran to just seven pages. He had traced some 58 children and discovered that one had indeed died of Aids, although there is no proof of any link to Trotter.

Mark Trotter is the rock upon which Hackney council's troubled political cohesion has finally split asunder. Two factions of the local Labour party have been vying with each other to clamour more vociferously for an independent inquiry. Old Labour — the councillors led by John McCafferty who have been backed in the squabbles by Walworth Road — were thrown on the defensive. They had favoured a measured, confidential approach but were accused of cover-up. New Labour — those, led by the veteran Gerry Ross, who have now been ousted from the party — saw mismanagement in the slowness of the council's response to the scandal. Since 1994 they have campaigned against inefficiencies, bad practice and corruption in scandal-ridden Hackney.

But in spite of the jumpiness of councillors on both sides who knew Trotter, it was not so much individuals as a wider culture that allowed him to thrive and perhaps damage children. It was a culture where, possibly because Labour local government felt so embattled during the eighties, certain things went unquestioned. Criticism of a homosexual was gay-bashing, of a black was racism and of a Jew was anti-Semitic. Accusations that were not proven must be scrubbed off files as if they never existed. 

Labour's reaction to scandals has frequently been complacent. Margaret Hodge MP, now a rising star in the parliamentary party, was the leader of Islington council during the period when children in its residential homes were abused. She originally dismissed the allegations as 'sensationalist gutter journalism'. 

Now she accepts responsibility for what happened, but blames her officials for misleading her by telling her there was no substance to the allegations. However, she rejects the charge that her own equal opportunities recruitment policies were at fault. Asked about the restrictions placed on interviewers in inquiring about job applicants' backgrounds, she says: 'I just can't remember, but I can't believe that could have been the case.'

Hodge's reaction has caused outrage among social services administrators. One London director of social services says: 'I don't understand how she couldn't have known. We were all forbidden in those years to ask job applicants about their previous employment. These issues of race and so on were taboo. And, of course, it did black and gay workers such a disservice because we were unable to talk to them properly if they were doing anything wrong until they had got themselves into serious difficulties.'

One social work tutor in the Midlands says: 'This problem stretches beyond the cities and into the shires. The troops are so thoroughly indoctrinated that the managers, who are beginning to see that they helped create a monster, are realising with horror that they have a problem they can't deal with.'

For Labour, the problems of ideological zealotry exacerbate other unrelated local government running sores. In Birmingham, local constituency parties were suspended and an inquiry launched after The Observer revealed that party members had been helped to jump the queue for housing grants. In Leicester, the Labour group is split by personal feuding, which includes allegations of corruption and racism.

In Tower Hamlets in east London, the new Labour administration has been paralysed by allegations that £100,000 of grant money is missing and a row over a woman-only, black-only shortlist for the succession to Peter Shore as the MP for Bethnal Green and Stepney.

In Monklands council in Lanarkshire, there have been claims that a Catholic mafia on the council has been giving jobs to relatives, allegations that the late John Smith, MP for the area, was reluctant to grapple with. In Renfrewshire, three Labour constituency parties have been shut down over an expose in Scotland on Sunday of claims of drug dealing, money lending and vote rigging centering on the Ferguslie Park housing estate in Paisley.

The report into Islington's child-care policies by Ian White, Oxfordshire's Director of Social Services, was commissioned by the council after persistent allegations that social services staff had not only failed to protect children in residential care from paedophiles and other abusers, but in some cases had been directly responsible for their abuse.

In 1992 the London Evening Standard claimed that children in care were working as prostitutes and using council homes to entertain clients, that they were seduced into drugs and homosexuality, and that some were abused, gang-raped and knifed.

Out of 32 staff under suspicion, only four were disciplined. One was prosecuted for child sex abuse and he was acquitted. 'Some 61 children in the council's care were thought to have been the victims of a paedophile ring involving council staff and abusers from outside, but the police told White there was insufficient evidence to bring successful prosecutions.

 White warns that Islington's failure to deal with a further set of allegations of child abuse in the early 1990s means that staff who may have abused children may now be working with children in care elsewhere in the country.

White's report puts Islington Labour councillors, as well as its employees, in the dock. Not only were grossly unsuitable child care staff recruited as a result of equal opportunities policies, but managers were then too terrified to deal with them for fear of being labelled homophobic or racist. They believed councillors would not support them if they disciplined gay or black people.

The report says that the council's chaotic decentralised organisation bred the conditions for dangerous and negligent child-care practices. But the council was also 'paralysed by equal opportunity and race issues'. Recruitment practices were subverted to favour applicants from minorities. Officers, said White, could not require a reference from a previous employer, or challenge the status of any referee: so references were provided by friends. Interview panels could not ask about any previous disciplinary action or absence records. The reasoning was that minority applicants may have had poor past records that, for reasons of positive discrimination, ought to be overlooked.

In next-door Hackney Council, where Labour is also in power, officers who challenged staff were themselves victimised. Bernard Crofton, the white director of housing and Dennis Bartholomew, the black head of the council's race unit were both accused of racism and then sacked after separately uncovering what they claimed was fraud and corruption among African council employees.

Crofton, widely admired before he came to Hackney for his work in Ealing council in dealing with racist council tenants, was dismissed last March for racial harassment against the council's head of personnel, Sam Yeboah, whom he accused of dragging his feet over allegations of housing frauds and bogus job references.

Crofton says political correctness in Hackney is out of control. Managers were terrified to criticise black workers. The definition of racism seemed to be any instruction given to a black worker — even if the manager giving the instruction was black.

Bartholomew, the Afro-Caribbean head of the race unit (who appears with Crofton in Taking Liberties on BBC2 on Tuesday), says he was the victim of precisely that assumption. His offence was to accuse an African officer in his unit of falsifying his references and work record.

Some of the greatest advocates of equal opportunities policies introduced by Labour councils in the early 1980s now fear their ideals have been subverted. Ken Livingstone, the left-wing MP for Brent East in north London, is one of few Labour MPs to have spoken out in defence of Crofton.

'I have not the slightest doubt that there is an extensive network of nepotism and fraud in Hackney Council. The leadership knew full well that as soon as they tried to investigate it they would be accused of racism. This is not unique in London: there are other cases where the same thing is happening.'

It was the Greater London Council, under Livingstone, that gave anti-racist and anti-sexist recruitment policies their high profile. But Livingstone has since been engaged in a campaign against, in the course of which he too has been accused of racism. Brent is now Tory-run, but Livingstone's efforts to expose an elaborate housing fraud with a Nigerian connection go back several years.

Anti-racism, says Livingstone, has taken a wrong turning. 'A lot of councils have vague aspirations but no detailed knowledge or the ability not to proceed in a tokenistic fashion. In a borough council now you might have only three or four councillors of talent and that isn't enough. Good councillors and officers have been driven out of local government.'

Asking about sexual orientation or using tests that might disadvantage gays or people from ethnic minorities is seen as discriminatory. In some places asking all candidates exactly the same questions at interview and preventing any improvised follow-up has been seen as a badge of good equal opportunities policies to be worn with pride.

Protecting the rights of minorities has become more important in some places than protecting children against potential abusers.

Many public sector employers have a far better track record on equal opportunities than their equivalents in the private sector.

However, some local authorities have allowed "thought" police to capture their personnel policies and departments and to apply rigid rules in the name of equal opportunities. The result has been some foolish appointments, an unwillingness to challenge them when evidence of misconduct comes to light and vulnerable young people being endangered.

Labour's worse-than-useless phony moral posturing is the sole sordid reality of its lifelong fake 'reformist' fantasies, with even those now largely abandoned so as to opportunistically pursue the Tory bandwagon even further and faster down the road of consumerist market freedom and self-help domestic discipline.

While new burdens on the working class like the Job Seekers Allowance measures go through on the nod (with MPs from all parties too busy counting their lobbying and consultancy extra income on top of their monstrous salaries and expense accounts), Labour makes no promises to repeal this imposition but carries on working up its own variety of wretched carrot-and-stick disciplines so that the working class can continue to be blamed for the country's ills and at the same time be punished for it.

Central to the JSA tyranny, of course, is its grotesque failure to remotely grasp or address the fact that a society and economy which is incapable of making a progressive career-structure available to every member of society, or even faintly encouraging it, or even wanting it (preferring the disciplining scourge of unemployment to keep employed workers noses to the grindstone), - is a society which will endlessly be held back by the unsatisfactory contradictions of a claimants culture and welfarism. Minorities will always take the view that in an elitist ruling-class system which is self-evidently corrupt from top to bottom, it only pays to outsmart the authorities for as much and as long as possible.

The divisive and hate-making persecution from 'anti-scrounger' campaigns reveals nothing about the unlucky, the ill-educated, the poor, or the sick at the bottom of society, but everything about the stupid heartless, wasteful injustices of the corruption-riddled capitalist 'free market' fraud. A rare amount of subjective-individualist conceit and self-serving greed must be required to be incapable of envisaging or devising a vastly superior and infinitely more humane and socially-desirable way of planning an economy and its political, cultural, and environmental development than the terrible results and consequences that capitalist anarchy leaves mankind with; — but the whole of parliamentary and local government, - Tories, Labour, Liberals, and Nationalists, - routinely manages to achieve unimaginative deserts effortlessly.

The bourgeois press itself can make few of the correct connections, but it at least does occasionally provide the evidence of what devastating destruction capitalism's hire-and-fire anarchy leads to, even while failing to draw the conclusion that the Job Seekers Allowance measures are about as much use as a flagellation and an emetic to a manic-depressive cancer patient:

By day, Grimethorpe, a village of some 5,000 people, is a scar of post-industrial decay: boarded-up houses in the bleak so-called Seaside Estate where the streets are named after places such as Brighton, Cornwall and Margate, an impoverishment of shops and the one bank gone. The pithead works, coking plant and old National Coal Board repair works have all been flattened. Only the use of heroin is on the rise: up 300 per cent from 1992 to 1995 in the Barnsley area as a whole. 'It's cheaper and quicker to get out of your mind on heroin than it is on beer,' said one former miner in Grimethorpe.

It is hard to judge what is more depressing: the official figures, the depression of law enforcement or the stories the Grimeys tell about 'brown'.

The problem for the law enforcement agencies is that with no other source of wealth or jobs in the old pit village, there are always more former miners and their families who are ready to take the risks of heroin-dealing to earn some money.

One police officer admitted: "These people aren't bad. Only a few years back these communities were a byword for decency, respect for each other's properties and a real sense of community. That's gone, and it has been replaced by heroin. There is little else for them to do.'

Police admit they are losing the battle against the dealers: 'We are like a pimple on an elephant's backside,' said one detective. Inspector Robin Caulfield put it less crudely: 'Barnsley and its outlying pit villages are awash with heroin.' 

Simon Weldon, director of Barnsley's drug and alcohol services, said: 'The drug of choice in Barnsley is heroin. We are being buried in it.' Danny Gillespie worked down Grimethorpe pit for 36 years and helped to start the local Neighbourhood Watch, a reaction to the big rise in crime after the pit closed. From 1992 to 1994 recorded burglary in Grimethorpe rose by more than 300 per cent. 'They call Grimey the heroin capital of South Yorkshire,' he said. 'If a man's got a job it's like finding an antique in your attic — it's that rare.' Male unemployment is around 40 per cent, peaking in some pockets at 80 or 90 per cent.

'The dealers are a terrible plague,' Mr Gillespie added. 'They're ruining that many people's lives. When they closed the pit, they took away everything we had. The gala was stopped. The bank closed four weeks ago. There used to be a fireworks display on Bonfire Night, organised by the pit. That's gone. The Co-op was burnt down.

'And what do we have in its place? Syringes in the cemetery. You can see no hope for the kids at Willowgarth High [the local state school]. There are no jobs. The children say: "Why should I do owt at school?" No one can plan their lives.'

Willowgarth High has more than 100 children out of 900 on the special needs register the worst figures of all 14 high schools in the Barnsley council district. Teachers said they had been told that heroin in Grimethorpe was cheaper than cannabis. Headmaster Tony Dorney said: 'Pupils' behaviour in the afternoon has surprised us. Uncontrolled temper tantrums, absolute refusal to discuss bad behaviour. We are seeing behavioural problems the like of which we have never seen before. We suspect drug abuse.'

Derek the junkie knew of one boy who became hooked on heroin at 13; he is now 14, he says, and has a £40-a-day habit. Mr Weldon confirms Derek's story: 'The average age of the heroin users is dropping. The age of experimentation is falling to 12 or 13.'

This year Mr Gillespie and others in a Grimethorpe community group asked for £52,000 for a youth centre and a youth worker's salary from the National Lottery. 'They gave all that money to the opera and for Eton College's playing fields. We reckoned it was Grimey's turn,' he said.

Their application was rejected.

The smashing of the mining industry was, of course, a deliberate act of political and economic class war by the Tories which the Labour 'opposition' was not only incapable of doing anything about, but totally unwilling to do anything about anyway, - hating the organised threat of working-class power as represented by the great 1984-85 miners strike and its tremendous echo in the proletariat, - as much as the Tories do, implying as it does an end to the easy corrupt life of capitalism's political stooges in local government and at the luxury exclusive club on the Thames at Westminster.

The mining communities may have taken a hammering. But however slowly, abundant lessons about the incurably rotten crookedness of every aspect of capitalist society will have started sinking further into working-class consciousness.

Labour's now total dedication to meaningless advertising slogans instead of any policy at all, is helping to prepare the way for the worldwide phenomenon shortly of the rebirth of revolutionary politics, - as well as providing the bourgeois press with some of the best ridicule of pompous idiocy in a long while:

At every point, Mr Blair claimed a link with destiny. After the next election, he said, we would have 1,000 days to prepare for the next 1,000 years. We knew he wanted two terms, but this was ridiculous.

The speech started hesitantly. The barrage of camera flashes was clearly causing him real distress. But he scored a good ad lib—"Be careful, they're making my eyes red"—and he had won them over. To be fair they were so keen to applaud that they'd have cheered if he had read out the Tory manifesto.

Some dinosaurs would claim he had read out the Tory manifesto.

This was one of the few speeches I recall which consisted almost entirely of perorations. Indeed, every Blair speech these days becomes more of a parody of itself. He is Tony Blair imitating Rory Bremner imitating Tony Blair.

For instance his habit of dropping verbs has now become a pathology. I counted 115 verb-free sentences in the speech, some of quite sensational vacuity. "New challenges, new ideas",  "the future, not the punt"; "New Labour, new members"; "the age of achievement, at home and abroad." A verb, as our teachers always told us, is a "doing word" and these verbless phrases convey atmospherics without action, plausibility without promises.

Feeling good. Looking forward. Rampant sex with no strings attached. (I invented the last bit to make it more interesting.)

The climax came with his salute to the England football team's performance in Euro '96 (another sign that New Labour has written Scotland off).

"Labour's coming home. Seventeen years of hurt. Never stopped us dreaming. Three Bambis on my shirt. Never stopped us screaming." (I must stop making this stuff up).

But even before this staggeringly inept echo of a thousand-year-reich, another 'reformist' opportunist was likening Labour's disturbingly maniacal propaganda to that of Hitler and Goebbels:

TONY Blair yesterday opened his heart as a country-loving family man whose ambitions had been spurred by the sudden and early death of his mother. But he did so in the face of lurid competition from a former Labour colleague, who came close to accusing him of being a potential fascist.

Leo Abse, leftwing MP for Pontypool from 1958 to 1987, is not quite that blunt in his diagnosis. But he insists that Mr Blair's "ageist" obsession with youth, rebirth and renewal for New Labour buttressed by a passion for "consensus by dictat" - is reminiscent of the late Sir Oswald Mosley. "It is exactly this type of myth, which invaded the politics of the 20th century, notably in Nazi Germany, that wreaked havoc," he writes in his new book, The Man Behind The Smile: Tony Blair And The Politics of Perversion.

The only answer to Blair's increasingly scatterbrained rubbish is to get on and build the revolutionary party as rapidly as possible and by all means possible. Build Leninism. Spread the Economic and Philosophic Science Review.JH

Letters.

Socialist News puts complacent petty-bourgeois defeatism on the spot.  

Mild and incomplete as is Socialist News's editorial call to electoral arms against Labourism, it stands in start contrast to the appeasement policy being sneaked into some local branches, under the 'democratic' guise of resistance to bureaucratic elitism.

Last week's EPSR pointed out how self-defeating it is for would be communists to allow the necessary resistance to bureaucratic witch-hunts to postpone a serious grappling with the live political issues which capitalist crisis is driving to the surface right now. Political education is what is urgently required, and can't be put off until all have shed the entirely predictable habits of years of class-collaboration politics. Anti-Leninist philistinism is not going to be overcome via reform of the SLP constitution and a campaign against bans and proscriptions, necessary though both are. The fight for understanding is what must transform practice, carried on in the indispensable context of worsening economic and political crisis.

One bad side-effect of communists making the fight against inner-party bureaucracy the central political focus is the improved opportunities this then offers Trot mentalities to dress up their own reluctance to challenge Labourism (through elections, through the national paper, through regular open public meetings etc.) as 'plucky grass roots resistance to policy being imposed by an unelected editorial board' etc.

This kneejerk response, cynically limiting discussion to the question of democratic FORM, just wants to mesmerise attention away from the political CONTENT of the lead being given by Socialist News. Trying to duck the half-challenge to Trot defeatism contained in the SN editorial by whingeing 'who elected you to say that anyway?' is the most shallow deceitful cowardice. It will be the sooner exposed the more relentlessly the focus is kept an explaining capitalist crisis developments.

But the SN editorial adopted a clear position of suspending the political crusade against Labourism 'in the higher interests of not splitting the anti-Tory vote', no such hue-and-cry about 'unelected policy' would have been heard from these defeatist quarters. Once it became clear that the cosy old love-hate Trot relationship with Labour was to be allowed to slumber on unmolested, there wouldn't have been a squeak.

But because the editorial, despite failing to advise workers everywhere NOT to vote Labour, nevertheless blew a loud raspberry at the whole idea of toning down the fight against Labour until the return of a Blair government supposedly permits the 'left' to 'mount a serious fight for socialist principles and policies', the cry at once goes up: 'who elected you to say that?'

It is noticeable in some branches that the same voices which earlier criticized as 'premature' calls for the foundation of a national paper (insisting that the deadly routinism associated with their own sectarian past was the only road of development such a paper could take, and philistinely hostile to any suggestion that the paper could function as a forum for political discussion, drawing the branches into full democratic participation through exchange of information, shared experiences, and polemics) are now the first to moan about the (undoubted) lack of democratic consultation over the function of the paper, its editorial policy, distribution etc.
All this sudden enthusiasm for elected editorial boards really adds up to is middle-class pique at any leadership that threatens to disrupt its 'left' cover under the old class collaboration arrangements.

These who recognize the weakness and inconsistency of SN's call to electoral arms against Labourism, understanding that what the situation requires is a clear call to NOT vote Labour, should have no hesitation in taking up the polemic with Socialist News not against the 'unelected' nature of the views expressed, or their 'bureaucratic imposition' on the branches, or the 'unconstitutional' propriety of airing them in the first place, but against SN's failure to grasp the crisis-driven nature of the epoch and its current impact on British political existence.

Conversely, let those in the SLP who find aspects of their own gloomy defeatism (wanting to offer selective SUPPORT to Labour) flatly contradicted by the national paper's editorial line, have the guts to argue their political corner in front of the working class, in the pages of Socialist News if possible, and at all events in public. Such an approach world be a thousand times more 'democratic' than any amount of the endless cynical foot dragging and hole-in-corner defeatist whispering which immediately screeches 'bureaucratic elitism' as soon as someone lifts up its stone. P. M.

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. VI Lenin
South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications (South West), BOX 32, 82 Colstom St., Bristol BS1 5BB]
No. 190.  Sunday 6th October 1996

 Taliban 'victory' is another nail in the coffin of 'new world order' fantasy.

In the very moment that blackest reaction tramples on the legacy of Afghanistan's socialist revolution, imperialism's problems in the region intensify.

So long as the corpse of modern Afghanistan remained torn between five rival bandit factions, the US could at least pay lip-service to the vague pretence that, at some point in the future, some kind of UN-brokered 'reconciliation' deal would be setting the country back on the path of modernisation, minus the communists. 

Meanwhile, as the country plunged ever deeper into bloody chaotic backwardness, Washington, felt able to look on with cynical indifference.

But now that the Taliban are demonstrating that finally the alternative to communist progress is not the eventual resumption of 'normal' capitalist progress, but an unsustainable lunatic retreat from any kind of development at all, dangerous lessons are being taught to anyone else whose claim to full participation in modern world productive development is getting systematically bilked by imperialism - i.e. most of the population of the planet.

It was imperialist crisis which prompted Moscow revisionism to walk away from proletarian dictatorship, undoing the USSR's internationalist solidarity with the Afghan workers' state as it went.

But it is likewise imperialism's trade-war crisis which is shoving the Taliban into prominence now. Pakistani society was left to deal with the drug-dealing, gun-running bandit chaos bequeathed by the US-organized sabotage of Afghan socialism. If America was to turn its back on the Cold War mess it had imposed on the region, concentrating its attention instead on dealing with its key imperialist rivals, Pakistan too had to learn to care for itself.

It is unclear at this stage how far Pakistan's support of Taliban is still a post-Cold-War extension of its traditional stooging for US interests in the region (reports of a Saudi-US pipeline project may support this interpretation), or how far Pakistani capitalism is already being driven primarily by the need to independently protect its own trading markets, routes and alliances in the region.

What is certain is that US imperialism cannot expect the rest of the 'free world' to go on snapping to attention every time the old Pax Americana buttons are pressed, conveniently leaving Washington free to fight its trade war corner at its "allies'" expense. Signs of disturbing independent life from former stooges (Iraq, Egypt, Turkey) are symptomatic of more profound antagonisms between the key imperialist players themselves, as stood revealed, not only in the recent lack of 'coalition' support for Clinton's vote-begging half-cock stumble in Iraq, but also in rows over the US-promoted Bosnian election fraud, over Washington's crass cheering on of Zionism's latest indefensible provocations, over the Helms-Burton extension of anti-communist boycott into open interference with third country trade, and over a whole string of trade disputes tabled with the WTO.

Trying to 'stabilize' Afghanistan on the basis of just slamming the door on all modern development is hopeless, an open counsel of despair. The whole superiority of Pax Americana neo-colonialism over its brutal European colonial predecessors was always supposed to lie in the better opportunities for modern democratic national development it could promise once all the anti-communism and 'structural adjustment' hoops had been jumped through. Trying to slam the door now on all of Afghani society's modern aspirations (roused by imperialism itself, but then given concrete historical form within the Afghan revolution) has no chance whatever of bringing back the middle ages, however hard the veil is pulled over the eyes. What it does do, however, is give the lie to US imperialism's whole postwar pose as the guardian of all future 'free democratic progress', and make plain the real choice ultimately facing all of world society: advance to proletarian dictatorship, or retreat into warmongering barbarism. 

As last week's EPS Review put it: 

Fanatical extremism reigning in Kabul will only add another headache to US domination's insurmountable problems, and Taliban's White-Terror pointless savagery against Najibullah will only remind revolutionaries of why Red Terror was born historically, to make sure such outbreak of atavistic vengeance-barbarism never gets a chance to raise its ugly head. 

Once in power, the dictatorship of the proletariat wants to make certain that it stays there until a communist world of total scientific education and unrationed relative plenty has been built. It only confirms one of the greatest paradoxes of history that in the long run, the dominant characteristic of the Stalinist inheritance was being too soft.

The temporary triumph of the Taliban, so far from being another 'hot spot' successfully resolved in imperialism's favour, is further proof of the growing uncontrollability of imperialist crisis, and the unsustainability of all attempts to manage that crisis. 

If seeing the reactionary mullahs steal the Iranian revolution from the working class was only the start of imperialism's problems, not the end, then what reliable longterm assistance can imperialism expect from the Taliban especially given the interesting tendency already observed elsewhere for yesterday's anti-Soviet bandits to reappear as today's anti-imperialist rebels, under the mew conditions imposed by imperialist crisis.

Not least important among these changed conditions is the doomed reinvention, egged on by the nervous West, of the Soviet Union as a latter-day capitalist colonial empire. Only the durability of (once fraternal) ties formed under seventy years of proletarian dictatorship development, plus gigantic and unsustainable cash transfusions from the West, prevented this Prison House of Nations Mk.II from collapsing from the first. The ease with which the tiny Chechen revolt was able to bring the Russian state into near paralysis spoke volumes about the instability of the counter-revolution. And now a much more serious destabilization is roaring ahead on the southern borders.
Where once all imperialists could agree on the 'free world's' absolute right to send in death squads, bombers and arsonists against socialist Afghanistan's hospitals, schools, literacy centres, crèches etc., in order to prevent the masses of the whole region from observing what social progress could be made under proletarian dictatorship (and following suit), and in order to put a spoke in the wheel of the USSR itself by creating a destabilising mess on its borders, now the situation is much different. What is being destabilised now is the very counter-revolution for which Cold liar warriors so long prayed, as the capitalist press here details:

'The sweeping military success of the Taliban Islamic movement in Afghanistan has upset the strategic balance in the surrounding region and sent a shock wave through the Commonwealth of Independent States. The government of Kazakhstan yesterday confirmed that an emergency summit of ex-Soviet republics, first proposed by Russia, would be convened in Almaty at the end of this week in the hope of co-ordinating a response to the crisis:

The Taliban victory is bound to alter the odds in the grinding border war that Russia and other ex-Soviet forces have waged in Tajikistan since 1992. 

"The situation in Afghanistan greatly worries us, and it obliges us to reinforce our external border" said President Imamali Rakhmonov the Moscow-backed leader of Tajikistan, as the Taliban leaders tightened their grip on Kabul. So far, the most dramatic comment on the Taliban victory has come from Mr Alexander Lebed, the Russian national security adviser, who suggested that the ancient city of Bokhara in Uzbekistan could come under threat.

"If Taliban, backed by Pakistan, reaches the borders with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan...they will wipe away the Russian border posts and see the road to the north set free," he said. 

With Central Asian and Balkan oil and gas acting like a magnet for every monopoly capitalist in the world, there will be no automatic obedience to US wishes, and no universal imperialist agenda to which all subscribe, but rather an increasingly murky and ruthless gutter-brawl, the authentic flavour of which is best conveyed in this capitalist press account of Bulgaria's new 'free market paradise':

Bulgaria faces a new crisis of confidence following the mafia-style killing yesterday of Mr Andrei Lukanov, a former, prime minister who became one of Bulgaria's most influential businessmen. 

Mr. Lukanov, 58, a Moscow born former communist who ousted the veteran dictator Todor Zhivkov in 1989, was shot in the head and heart outside his front door in a murder without witnesses that bore the hallmarks of a professional assassination.

Two months ago, Mr Lukanov who had close former party and business connections with powerful figures in the Russian oil and gas industry, was suddenly removed from the chairmanship of Topenergy a Bulgarian-Russian joint venture for the transport of Russian gas and oil through Bulgaria to Turkey and the southern Balkans. 

After Mr Lukanov's removal, concession terms were agreed and Russian gas recently started to flow through Bulgaria along a new pipeline into Greece. 

This is part of a planned $500m investment in new pipelines and pumping stations to transit more than 300bn cu metres of Russian gas through Bulgaria to Turkey and the southern Balkans.

The 'victory' of the Taliban is not a victory for an imperialist 'new world order', but damning new evidence that this dream is further than ever from Washington's grasp. Build Leninism.  PC

Before the counter-revolution: Schoolchildren at their youth centre in Jelalabad.

There was no holding these children of the revolution back, so long as proletarian dictatorship kept White Terror at bay. Imperialism will come to regret the hard lessons it is teaching the world's masses.