Good news from Iceland

The recently resigned Prime Minister of Iceland, conservative Geir Haarde, is being widely described as the first government victim of the financial crisis. Since the economy collapsed last year, weekly riots have rocked the government until it was no longer viable. Early elections have been called for May, and the interim Prime Minister is to be Johanna Sigurdardottir of the Social Democratic Alliance.

The fact that she will be the first openly gay Prime Minister in the world is one in the eye for global homophobes. But although she's considered slightly to the left of her party, the Social Democrats have been in coalition with with Haarde's Independence Party since 2007, and therefore bear some responsibility for the neoliberal financial-deregulation-and-privatisation which turned out to be a house built on sand.

The Social Democrats' new coalition partner is the Left-Green Movement, which has 9 of the Icelandic Parliament's 63 seats. Although solidly green, they're not aligned with other global Green Parties, but rather with the Nordic Green Left, the alliance of left-wing parties across Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. Polls now put them on 28%, which would make them the biggest party if nothing changes before the election.

The Financial Times explains their appeal: "The Left-Greens – an anti-big business, pro-environment party – have benefited from a dramatic rise in anti-capitalist sentiment in Iceland following the crisis as people expressed disgust at prominent and flashy young businessmen known as the ‘Viking raiders’."

Of course, a Left-Green led government would not be a panacea. It is calling for the renegotiation of Iceland's recent bailout deal with the IMF, but even if it manages to do this, the better terms it negotiates are unlikely to include ensuring that ordinary people don't pay for the financial crisis through job losses and reposessions. If people resist this, which they may well do given the evidence of the protests so far, the Left-Green Movement could end up enforcing the interests of capital rather than fighting them.

But perhaps I'm judging them by the standards of your average Social Democrat. If the Left-Greens maintain a close connection to the social movements which emerge in response to the crisis, and those movements maintain their self activity rather than leaving it all to the Left-Greens, something rather exciting could emerge in Iceland. And in the meantime, we can be heartened by the fact that Iceland seems to be lurching left rather than right in response to their economic crisis.

For further reading (all in English) see the Left-Green Movement's website, Aftaka (an anarchist site) and the Guardian's Iceland section.

'My name is Harvey Milk, and I'm here to recruit you'

Last week I went to see 'Milk' and I can heartily recommend it. Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the US when he became a Supervisor of San Francisco in 1977. Although this was no mean feat, given that his constituency covered the city's gay district (the Castro) it was perhaps another campaign that was more astonishing. Milk was at the centre of the defeat of Proposition 6 which would have made the dismissal of gay teachers mandatory across California. Rather than hide behind mealy-mouthed assertions about human rights as some of the moderates in the campaign would have prefered, Milk took the bigots head on in public debates, and urged gay Californians to come out to friends and family.

The defeat of Proposition 6 was a turning point in the battle for gay rights in the US. Up to that point a wave of homophobia was sweeping the country, not least due to the efforts of evangelical Christian singer Anita Bryant. Milk's achievement was not so much to get elected, although that helped, but to build a movement. Thus it was that when both he and the Mayor of San Francisco were shot dead by a fellow Supervisor in 1978, 30,000 people turned out on the streets to mourn.

On Newsnight Review the day the film came out, Tony Parsons complained that the film was sanitised for a straight audience. This was San Francisco in the 70s, he said, where were the bath houses, the depravity? He even went so far to compare it to Philadelphia, the supposedly groundbreaking 1993 film with Tom Hanks as a gay man with AIDS who never so much as kisses his boyfriend on screen. In fact, I think Tony entirely missed the point. This was not a film primarily about gay life in 70s Frisco, but about political activism. The kissing, and indeed sex, was there in appropriate amounts to tell the story.

The generally excellent director Gus Van Sant made the right call here, and does a great job of invoking the excitement of the movement at the time (at one point an angry crowd of protesters chant "civil rights or civil war, gay rights now!"). Sean Penn's performance is also great, as a number of reviewers have commented. But perhaps the best recommendation is that despite the fact that though Harvey dies at the end of the film, you're still left with a sense of hope and optimism.

Being both gay and an activist, this was perhaps an obvious film for me to go see, but I'm pretty sure that anyone who isn't a thorough reactionary will enjoy it!