Caroline Lucas Green MP Resigns from Stop the War Coalition

An Act of Surrender to Media and Tory/New Labour Pressure

In happier days

Caroline Lucas, the only Green MP, has bowed to intense media and Tory/New Labour pressure and resigned as a patron of Stop the War Coalition.   Her purported reasons include 2 articles on the StWC website, which were subsequently taken down and the apparent refusal to allow pro-war Syrians to speak at a meeting at the House of Commons.

Caroline Lucas speaking in parliament

StWC was set up by the Socialist Workers Party and is now, effectively controlled by the Counterfire group (which was expelled from the SWP or resigned – Linday German and John Rees) and supporters of the Communist Party of Britain such as Andrew Murray.

I have a number of political differences with StWC, not least over their crass refusal to allow Hands Off the People of Iran, an anti-imperialist group, to affiliate to them.  Coupled with their tacit support for the Iranian regime and their failure to give any solidarity with the oppressed of Iran.  No doubt much the same method is true with respect to Syria.  But Caroline Lucas has always been a member/patron regardless of this, including being its Vice-President.

racist German Greens

StWC is an anti-war group above all.  It is there to oppose western and in particular British involvement in the war in Syria and the pretext of bombing Isis, which is really about the reconfiguring of Syria in the West’s image, i.e. a confessional fragmentation of Syria.  It is this which accounts for the failure to speak out about Russia’s bombing.  Russia’s actions in defence of the Assad regime, are aimed at keeping Syria united.  Britain, France and the USA are happy to see a fragmented Syria to accompany a de facto fragmented Iraq.

Beck prefers to defend paedophiles than Palestinians

What is particularly shameful about Caroline Lucas’s actions is that StWC has been coming under severe criticism in recent months because its previous Chair, Jeremy Corbyn, has become leader of the Labour Party.  Nonentities like Tristram Hunt MP have called on Jeremy not to attend its fundraising dinner.

Stop the War Coalition Have Refused to Criticise the Iranian Regime Which is Executing Up to 1,000 prisoners this year - Caroline has always remained silent over this

The excuses Caroline has given for resigning as patron and thereby dissociating herself from the organisation were an article saying that the West and France were reaping in Paris what they had sown with their bloody wars in Syria.  Seems reasonable to me.

Another article comparing Isis to those who fought with the Spanish republicans was crass and has fortunately been taken down.  Neither are resigning matters though.

Mistakes such as these are no reason for Caroline’s act of cowardice.  It  echoes what Die Grunen the German Green Party has done.  They first presided over the use of German troops in a war, the first time ever since WW2, in Afghanistan.   And today they are the most Zionist party of all in the German Bundestag.  See Germany’s Racist Green MP Volker Beck Calls for theRepression of Palestinian supporters

In Germany Beck called on the German state to investigate supporters of BDS for ‘anti-Semitism’.  To their credit, Angela Merkl’s admiinstration refused.

Volker Beck - Die Grunen's racist Zionist member of parliament

The Greens are a petit-bourgeois party.  They are not, contrary to many people’s belief socialist.  They don’t oppose capitalism or the market economy.  Rather they believe capitalism can be tamed and ‘greened’.  A nicer capitalism.   A less exploitative capitalism forgetting that if capitalism isn’t exploitative it isn’t capitalism!

It is no surprise therefore that the Greens, who are really Green Liberals, buckle under pressure and that Caroline has dissociated herself from StWC.  We saw exactly the same thing under the Green administration in Brighton & Hove.  Despite having the best policy of any party on Palestine, when Palestine Solidarity Campaign called on the Green Party to twin Brighton & Hove with a Palestinian city they ran a mile.  That is the price of running a small part of the capitalist state.

As the Tory Guido Fawkes site said, this is a ‘Body blow for STW, which will now up the pressure on Corbyn to distance himself too…’  

Tony Greenstein 

Press Statement from Caroline Lucas

Caroline and the Stop the War Coalition

"I listened carefully to the Prime Minister make his case for why the UK should join the bombing campaign against Isis. The debate in the House of Commons was thorough, and the horror and revulsion at recent atrocities in Syria, Paris, Beirut and elsewhere is shared by MPs from across the political divide.

"Yet I have still to see any evidence to suggest that UK bombing Isis targets in Syria is likely to increase our security here in Britain or help bring about a lasting peace in the region in question - to the contrary, the evidence appears to suggest it would make matters worse."

A spokesperson for Caroline Lucas MP said:

“Caroline stepped back from the Stop the War Coalition a few weeks ago. Her busy parliamentary and constituency schedule means that she doesn’t have time to fully engage with the role of a Patron and, in light of some recent StWC positions that she didn’t support, she felt standing down was the responsible thing to do. Like the Stop the War Coalition, Caroline is opposed to British bombing in Syria because it will neither keep Britain safe nor help bring about a lasting peace in Syria.”

The Spokesperson went on to say:

“Caroline was specifically troubled by some Stop the War Coalition statements after the Paris atrocities. Though the pieces were subsequently taken down she felt unable to associate herself with them.  

“She was also concerned that some Syrian voices were not given an opportunity to speak at a recent meeting organised by the StWC in Parliament.

“StWC has played an important role in building the anti-war movement in Britain, and Caroline will continue to work in support of peace.”

Below is one of the 2 articles that led Caroline Lucas to resign.  It seems a perfectly good and incisive article to me.  I can’t imagine why StWC panicked and took it off its site.

Age of Despair: Reaping the Whirlwind of Western Support for Extremist Violence

Chris Floyd

Published: 14 November 2015

We, the West, overthrew Saddam by violence. We overthrew Gadafy by violence. We are trying to overthrow Assad by violence. Harsh regimes all — but far less draconian than our Saudi allies, and other tyrannies around the world. What has been the result of these interventions? A hell on earth, one that grows wider and more virulent year after year.

Without the American crime of aggressive war against Iraq — which, by the measurements used by Western governments themselves, left more than a million innocent people dead — there would be no ISIS, no “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” Without the Saudi and Western funding and arming of an amalgam of extremist Sunni groups across the Middle East, used as proxies to strike at Iran and its allies, there would be no ISIS. Let’s go back further. Without the direct, extensive and deliberate creation by the United States and its Saudi ally of a world-wide movement of armed Sunni extremists during the Carter and Reagan administrations (in order to draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan), there would have been no “War on Terror” — and no terrorist attacks in Paris tonight.

Again, let’s be as clear as possible: the hellish world we live in today is the result of deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and its allies over the past decades. It was Washington that led and/or supported the quashing of secular political resistance across the Middle East, in order to bring recalcitrant leaders like Nasser to heel and to back corrupt and brutal dictators who would advance the US agenda of political domination and resource exploitation.

The open history of the last half-century is very clear in this regard. Going all the way back to the overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953, the United States has deliberately and consciously pushed the most extreme sectarian groups in order to undermine a broader-based secular resistance to its domination agenda.

Why bring up this “ancient history” when fresh blood is running in the streets of Paris? Because that blood would not be running if not for this ancient history; and because the reaction to this latest reverberation of Washington’s decades-long, bipartisan cultivation of religious extremism will certainly be more bloodshed, more repression and more violent intervention. Which will, in turn, inevitably, produce yet more atrocities and upheaval as we are seeing in Paris tonight.

I write in despair. Despair of course at the depravity displayed by the murderers of innocents in Paris tonight; but an even deeper despair at the depravity of the egregious murderers who have brought us to this ghastly place in human history: those gilded figures who have strode the halls of power for decades in the high chambers of the West, killing innocent people by the hundreds of thousands, crushing secular opposition to their favored dictators — and again, again and again — supporting, funding and arming some of the most virulent sectarians on earth.

And one further cause of despair: that although this historical record is there in the open, readily available from the most mainstream sources, it is and will continue to be completely ignored, both by the power-gamers and by the public. The latter will continue to support the former as they replicate and regurgitate the same old policies of intervention, the same old agendas of domination and greed, over and over and over again — creating ever-more fresh hells for us all to live in, and poisoning the lives of our children, and of all those who come after us.