Labour is in electoral meltdown. The newspaper headlines are screaming ‘We’re all doomed’ on account of the world economic crisis. But they were desperately trying not to allow the real world to impinge on the surreal world inside Labour Party Conference. 

“The weirdest conference I’ve ever attended,” so said one experienced political commentator in reviewing this year’s Labour Party conference in Manchester. With Labour trailing badly in the opinion polls and having faced a series of bad to awful results in successive by elections, local council elections and the London Mayoral election, you might have expected the mood to be depressed and flat. And so for most it was.

Supporters of the Hands Off Venezuela Campaign in Edinburgh held a stall at the two day long Societies’ Fair at Edinburgh University.

Last week US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson unveiled a dramatic plan to arrest the present financial crisis and prevent future economic catastrophe. It is to cost $700bn.

Eleanor Marx was the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, the greatest philosophical, political and social thinker of our times. She was born in Soho in London in 1855 and, not surprisingly, was a precocious child mixing with adults who were the most advanced political thinkers of their day. But her place in history isn't because of her name and who she was related to. Her work, commitment to the cause and self sacrifice earned her that place in her own right. From the time of her father’s death in 1883 until her own untimely death in 1898 the workload she undertook in the labour and trade union movement of the day was phenomenal.

“I like thieves. Some of my best friends are thieves. Why, just last week we had the president of the bank over for dinner.”  W.C. Fields.

The capitalist system is in the throes of the worse financial crisis since the Great Depression. This is the view not only of the billionaire George Soros, but also of the International Monetary Fund, the custodian of the capitalist system, and all the serious capitalist commentators.