A day's leafletting

Most of the ward was leafletted yesterday by 5 of us. Only about 400 or 500 of the 3000 leaflets remain and a few streets near suicide bridge to cover. We met a Green canvasser and a Labour one and saw some LibDem leaflets but no sign of the Tories or the BNP. The Green leaflet called for a 20mph speed limit on Holloway Road, but as Holloway Road is the A1, the main road out of London to the North and three lanes both ways in some parts, this seems a bit nimbyish. The Labour man said that he had explained to his fellow Labourites that we were not trotskyists. We thanked him. After the leafletting we went to a local pub for a drink just in time to see the start of the Ireland-France rugby match. It turned out to be an Irish pub and when the Irish national anthem (the Soldiers' Song) was played a couple of the customers stood up to attention, the ejeets. A reminder that this used to be an Irish area with an Irish MP.

Green austerity

In his blog on Saturday the Green Party candidate for Vauxhall, Joseph Healey, inadvertently reminded people that in Ireland the Green Party is part of the coalition government and so is responible for imposing the increased austerity on the workers there demanded by the current world economic crisis. Green parties have assumed responsibility for governing capitalism not just in Ireland but also, though not at the moment, in Germany, France, Belgium and Italy.

As we have always said, the Green Party is just as much a party of capitalism as Labour, the Tories and the Liberals. They only want to try to give it a green tinge. Not that this can work except on a miniscule scale since capitalism's priority of priorities always must be allowing profits to be made.

This means that any party which takes on responsibility for running capitalism must sooner or later end up acting against the interests of the majority wage and salary working class, as Healey's counterparts in Ireland have found out (and accepted).