Blah Blah Flowers

There's an interesting article from Nick Cohen in the New Statesman on The RESPECT party, a number of reasons he gives for why they shouldn't be supported in the upcoming elections are reasons why I didn't when filling in my ballot papers. But I disagree with him when it comes to the anti-war marches. A high majority of the people who went on them didn't go because it was organised by the SWP but because it was against the war. And I doubt the SWP made much money out of it. There is an obvious difference between going on a march for a cause you believe in organised by a group of people, and giving them your vote in an election. I don't believe that anything I have done has given the SWP or the RESPECT party one iota of support. From his leafy Hampstead (I'm guessing here) home Cohen is taking the Aaronovitch line, better the Iraqis are killed by Allied bullets than live under Saddam's reign. It works on a fallacy that there were only two ways the world works, either we invade or we don't. And this has been the fault all along, we decide what Government Iraqis get, we invade on our timetable and we get angry about the Iraqis being 'ungrateful', or as someone on Barbelith put it, 'are they ready for democracy?'.