As some oif you have been aware, I've been forced to take anti-psychotic medication of one form or another, in tablet or injection form, for virtually all of the last ten years since I first became a political prisoner after the 1998 European School of the CWI. I have sometimes come off briefly while AWOL, but there have been terrible withdrawal symptoms from all except olanzapine (my most recent which is also a mood stabiliser and has the main drawback of weight gain [not making you hungry but putting on more weight for the same amount of food]). I have now been off antyi-psychotics consistently for at least three weeks and thinking much more clearly. It has become obvious why those devious psychiatrists have never previously let me get away with coming off them. [Obama's victory has the main reason I've finally got away with it, but even now I have to refuse it every medication time and take a mood satabiliser (carbomazepine, that has no noticeable effect; Deapakote was awful).] With forced medication in the community as well as hospital now, in the whole of Britain, a revolution is necessary to get patients out of this quagmire! [Incidentally, a hospital I was at briefly in Barcelona had wonderful hallucinogenic medication that made a croissant taste of fruit, and they got people so well very quickly that everyone seemed to speak and understand English in a country where the natural language is Catalan! Whenever I asked, they also told me it was "medication", and I have never been able to find out what they get there, but maybe putting this message out far and wide can help radically transform the medication regime in the UK based on Barcelona practices![

 

[An aside about the politics: The CWI linked the Militant Tendency (later becoming Militant Labour and the Socialist Party of England and Wales) to like-thinkers in 30-40 countries of the world. Miltiant had a serious history, inflicting both major defeats suffered by Margaret Thatcher (leading Liverpool City Council that won large amounts of extra money for that city from the Tory government in the first year before disastrously sending out redundnancy notices to the entire workforce in the second year, and later leading the mass non-payment campaign involving 18 million who hadn't paid a penny or were in arrears at its height, which defeated the poll tax and ultimately brought Thatcher down). I joined Militant in 1990 after it proved itself serious at defending non-payers. Some of the other CWI secions had led mass actions too. At the 1998 European School, the main debate was between leaders of Scottish Militant Labour who had achieved some success building the Scottish Socialist Alliance, notably carrying out mass non-violent direct action against a motorway extension in the run-down Pollok area of Glasgow, which notably recruited the brilliant socialist Rosie Kane (later a Member of the Scottish Parliament and now winner of The Factual Radio Prize at the Mental Health Media Awards for her BBC Radio Scotland show "Tales From The Flip Side" focussing on mental health issues - Rosie, if you read this, congratulations and please let me know if it is on again since I'd like to phone in to discuss such issues live on-line with you!), who were argued against by the British and International leadership, when proposing transforming the alliance into a party, becoming the Scottish Socialist Party. One of the arguments by the opponents were that the alliance hardly consisted of anybody apart from Scottish Militant Labour, but I had heard quite a bit about Rosie and reckoned that even if it was just SML plus Rosie herself (which it wasn't) that could actually be quite a strong argument in favour! Many criticise the project of uniting revolutionary socialists and reformists in such a broad party because it ultimately collapsed, but the six Members of the Scottish Parliament it achieved in the meantime weren't a pointless achievement and people won't forget! A socialist solution to Scotland and Britain's problems now can't occur partly at least through the Labour Party, but a split in that party as a result of its efforts to deal with the credit crunch (and inevitable bankruptcy of UK plc when it literally can't borrow any more debt through issuing bonds), but the successes in Scotland will help a real good socialist party come out of the mess able to lead some sort of vital revolution of one sort or another (ethical capitalist if not socialist). Anyway, at the European School, I was the only member from England or Wales to speak in support of the proposal (but we did have majority support for it in my region Manchester/Lancashire with my help),on which my main point was the demise of left reformism (an excerpt from the speech is on my socialist website www.socialiststeve.me.uk). I came under a lot of pressure not to make my speech, and make a muck up of it otherwise, which I did somewhat by running out of time, having a tussle with the chair and storming off the platform.]

 

The circumstances around my first and later incarcerations are too complex to go into here, but you will soon be able to read the full account in my on-going autobiograhpy "Revolution Destroyed? Have I ensured that a world socialist revolution will never happen?", which I will hopefully soon complete and publish on-line free of charge (although I also intend to seek a commercial publisher because I am over £8000 in debt and currently homeless, but I will insist it remains free to download and sold at such a price that it is cheaper to buy in book form than download and print out oneself); you will find the full version as a PDF file (for viewing on-line or printing out) on the website www.revolutiondestroyed.net, that currently contains several early chapters and an old overview. I intend to be upbeat after Obama's victory - while there are still many problems to be solved, the consequences of a McCain win would have been terrible as seen by the Mumbai bombings (it is no accident tha al Qaeda supported McCain, tactically waiting until after the election to tell the world this, since it would have been the excuse for many Mumbais the world over - and the excuse for such a massive clampdown on civil liberties that socialism would become impossible!)

 

My sone "I Wish Cath Was A Folk Rocker (with flowers in her hair)" predicted revolution again in the air in 2007. OK, I was rather optimistic, but surely it will be back in the air with a vengeance in 2009!

 

Happy New Year to all other good people!