Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Tuesday, 15 September 2015

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au

CEC’s Isherwood: “Congratulations, Jeremy Corbyn!”

Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood today issued the following statement on Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom:

On behalf of all CEC members and supporters, I wish to extend my heartfelt congratulations to Jeremy Corbyn for his election as leader of the UK Labour Party.

Among many other things, the CEC applauds Jeremy for:

his commitment to what his new Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer John McDonnell has termed a “full-blown Glass-Steagall”: the complete separation of necessary retail banking from speculative investment banking, which is the only solution to the new phase of the global financial crisis now erupting;
his proposal for a National Investment Bank that will use “People’s Quantitative Easing” to invest in public projects that grow the physical economy and provide well-paid, skilled jobs for all;
his longstanding opposition, as the leader of the Stop the War coalition, to the policies of Obama and the British Crown that are driving the world towards nuclear war.

We were honoured to have Jeremy deliver a video address to the CEC’s international conference in Melbourne in March, “The World Land-Bridge: Peace on Earth, Good Will towards All Men”, on his support for Glass-Steagall and opposition to war.

I also congratulate the UK trade unions for having the guts and policy insight to back Corbyn in the way they have. For too long, trade unions in both the UK and Australia have accommodated their respective labour parties’ lurch to extreme right-wing monetarist economic and social policies, which have smashed the industrial base and working families of both countries. In Australia, beginning in 1983 with Prime Minister Bob Hawke and his treasurer and successor as PM Paul Keating—well before Tony Blair’s New Labour “Tory-lite” abomination—the Australian Labor Party pioneered Blairite policies. The Queen herself enabled that shift when, acting through her Governor-General, former MI5 officer Sir John Kerr, she directed the sacking of the Whitlam Labor government in 1975. Contrary to the myth that “Her Majesty did not know” what her notoriously boot-licking Governor-General was doing, subsequent revelations have established that she herself directed the whole thing, and that Prince Charles was on top of the process throughout. She sacked Whitlam not because his government was somehow incompetent or could not secure “supply”, but because it represented the last vestiges of “old Labor’s” commitment to national banking and sovereign control of resources. These policies were a direct threat to the power of the Queen’s real constituency—the City of London and Wall Street, and the Anglo-Dutch raw materials cartel in which the Queen herself is a major stakeholder, notably as the long time largest private shareholder in Rio Tinto, which pioneered many of the anti-labour policies that have savaged Australia’s unions.

Hawke and Keating unleashed Australia’s version of Thatcherism with a series of monetarist so-called “reforms”. These included: the float of the dollar; radical deregulation of banking; drastic tariff cuts; naked union-busting; and the two great swindles of “competition” policy and superannuation. This agenda unleashed wild financial speculation; decimated Australia’s once-great manufacturing base; and destroyed thousands of family farms and small businesses, concentrating the domestic economy in a handful of mega-corporations. It also gravely weakened the unions, and turned workers, willingly or not, into financial speculators whose retirement incomes are now at the mercy of stock market manipulators, all this while saddling the nation with a massive, and ever-expanding foreign debt.

In our 1998 pamphlet, “Stop the British Crown plot to crush Australian’s unions”, and in many subsequent publications, we in the CEC have documented chapter-and-verse how all of the anti-labour Hawke-Keating policies are identical to those of the Liberal Party under former PM John Howard (1996-2007), and that all of these policies were designed by the very same think tanks which also directed Margaret Thatcher’s, and then Blair’s, economic vandalism in the UK. These all emanated from a single source: the Crown-backed Mont Pelerin Society and its chief think tank, the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs. The Mont Pelerin gang set up the IEA, and all of Australia’s radical right-wing think tanks, such as the Centre for Independent Studies, the former Tasman Institute, and the HR Nicholls Society. IEA head Lord Harris of High Cross boasted already in a 1996 interview that this network had created Thatcher. Moreover, he emphasised, “We weren’t Thatcherites; she was an IEA-ite,” adding, “Tony Blair … is Mrs Thatcher’s best legacy.” Indeed, the IEA—and the Crown and City of London which sponsored it—was central to launching Thatcher’s political career. Before becoming PM she had co-founded and served as vice-chair of the IEA-spinoff known as the Centre for Policy Studies. Its chairman Sir Keith Joseph had for over a decade been involved in the IEA and Harris served as his mentor in launching the CPS as the political/operational arm of the IEA. In that same interview Harris profusely lauded Australia’s Hawke and Keating for their “free market reforms”.

And, as Thatcher’s chief political fundraiser, Conservative Party treasurer Lord Alistair McAlpine, who befriended Paul Keating on his regular trips to Australia, revealed in his autobiography Once a Jolly Bagman, soon after the ALP took government in 1983 Keating declared to him, “I’m going to tear the trade unions apart, tear them up.” Many of the top union leaders of this era were complicit in this treachery: The 21 July 2015 editorial in The Australian quoted former Australian Council of Trade Unions presidents Martin Ferguson, Simon Crean, and Jennie George, and former ACTU secretaries Bill Kelty and Greg Combet, all condemning the “excessive” union influence in the ALP. In The Latham Diaries, former ALP leader Mark Latham demonstrated how this supposed influence works: in 2004, after Latham addressed an AWU protest rally against the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, at the invitation of then AWU boss Bill Shorten, he was shocked when Shorten privately told him that the ALP must support the agreement, and that the protest had just been for show, to placate the union members!

By contrast, the UK unions, after years of British workers suffering similarly under the policies of New Labour, have now manifested a burning desire to shake off the “grip of the Blairites” and return the Labour Party to its activist, idealist roots of social justice and a decent living standard for all. Hence their support for Corbyn. “There is a virus within the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn is the antidote,” Communications Workers Union general secretary Dave Ward told the 30 July London Telegraph.

And that antidote has arrived just in time. Just yesterday, 14 September, the Trade Union Bill was given its second reading in the House of Commons. Trades Union Congress head Frances O’Grady has characterised the bill as “the worst or biggest attack on trade unions and the right to strike for 30 years”, which “in some ways goes further than Mrs. Thatcher”. Corbyn himself described it as “draconian”, with its provisions to criminalise the right to strike and to strip the Labour Party of much of its union funding. And it is the same old IEA gang at work: its sponsor Sajid Javid is a former investment banker who held a top post at Chase Manhattan and then specialised in derivatives speculation at Deutsche Bank before becoming personal private secretary to Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. He is now the Secretary of State for Business, but was a cofounder in 2011 of the Free Enterprise Group, a parliamentary front for the IEA, which set up and still administers the FEG’s website, and at whose headquarters the FEG hosts private lunches. Bad as it presently is, Javid’s department is consulting on still more draconian measures not presently featured in the bill. Indicative of the nature of the City of London crowd he serves, is the demand by his de facto boss, the IEA’s director general Mark Littlewood, to scrap the minimum wage.

Meanwhile, back in Australia…

Absent a Corbyn-type revolution in the ALP, only the CEC today represents old Labor’s commitment to economic policies grounded in the principle of the common good. Concretely, that means Glass-Steagall banking separation, national banking for the public good, and great infrastructure projects to develop Australia. This reality of the CEC’s role was acknowledged by the legendary icons of old Labor, Jim Cairns and Clyde Cameron, who in their last years collaborated closely with us for national banking and related old Labor policies. They joined us in rejecting the ALP’s post-1983 economic direction as emphatically as Corbyn’s hundreds of thousands of supporters have rejected Blair’s New Labour.

The hysterical editorials in the 12 September Australian Financial Review and 14 September The Australian (“Jeremy Corbyn: too dangerous to be a bad joke”) betray the terror of Australia’s corporate and political elites that a similar revolution could occur here. It is the intention of the CEC to make it happen. So, inspired by the revolution which Jeremy Corbyn has helped unleash in the UK, you should join us.

Click here for free copy of the CEC’s 1998 pamphlet which exposed how the Crown-backed Mont Pelerin Society has hijacked Australia’s two major political parties to unleash their radical free market, union-busting agenda: Stop the British Crown plot to crush Australia’s unions.

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

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