Tini Owens and Cliff Richards

Tini Owens and Cliff Richards

By Les May

That’s not the sort of juxtaposition of names you would expect. In case you don’t know who Tini Owens is, I will explain that she is a 68 years old lady who has separated herself from her husband for the past three and a half years, and wishes to be divorced from him without further delay. Under the present law she will have to wait another 18 months or so. Refusing her application to the Supreme Court the judges commented that the decision was made ‘with reluctance’ and was ‘very troubling’ but that it was not for judges to make the law, that responsibility lies with Parliament.

The news that Parliament makes the laws and the judiciary interprets them came as surprise news to some journalists who evidently thought that in matters of privacy they made the rules. As the BBC has learned to its cost, £800,000 and counting, they don’t.

The reaction to both these cases display our broadcast and print media at their worst. Columnists and editorial writers have suddenly discovered the UK’s divorce laws are ‘archaic’. One can almost hear the chant, ‘We want no fault divorce: when do we want it? Now!’

Where were these same columnists and editorial writers last year or the year before that, as the accumulated evidence of the past forty years pointed to the fact that one of the unintended consequences of ‘fault’ based divorce was that it frequently increased animosity between the parties?

As well it might. If the you can persuade a court to rule that other party is to blame all sorts of goodies fall into your lap. You get the moral high ground. You’ll get your legal costs paid. If you have children and you are so inclined, you have the perfect excuse for demonising their other parent and shutting them out of their and your children’s lives.

Although I have written the above in a ‘gender neutral’ fashion the reality is that for much of that forty years it was usually men who paid the legal costs and lost contact with their children. To stand beside the Trini Owens case I will mention that a man I have known all his life has not seen his son for forty years and when the bill for the costs of his wife’s lawyers fell through his door he literally shit himself because he did not know where he was going to find the money.

To judge by some of comments I have read about the decision in the High Court by Mr Justice Mann to rule against the BBC and in favour of Cliff Richards one would think that we are moving to an era of secrecy where nothing about an individual can be reported, and governments and corporations can hide their dastardly deeds.

It is being argued that the Mann decision rebalances the two articles in the European convention on human rights that deal with ‘respect for private life’ (Article 8) and ‘freedom of expression’ (Article 10). But this interpretation relies upon equating ‘freedom of expression’ with the public’s ‘right to know’. Not at all the same thing!

It should not be forgotten that had the BBC simply reported that the police had executed a search warrant at a Cliff Richards property it is unlikely that he would have taken the matter to the courts. As is so often the case the intent seems to have been not to report the news, but to make it.

I lost any faith I had in the BBC as a news organisation in 2014 and 2015 as I watched how it dealt with the fallout from Simon Danczuk’s book ‘Smile for the Camera’. Anyone who has actually read the book with a mildly critical eye soon realises that it is a very unreliable document and, as we now know, contains material that is untrue. But that did not stop the BBC seemingly taking it at face value and running a story which made it appear that RMBC had tried to cover up a report about unsavoury goings on at Knowl View school by Aids worker Philip Shepherd. Anyone seeing the BBC TV piece would not have known that the report largely refers to sexual activity between the boys.

Seemingly the media’s belief about ‘the public’s right to know’ did not include reporting Cyril Smith’s antics at Cambridge House which came to light in May 1979 in a long and well researched article in Rochdale Alternative Paper (RAP). To the best of my knowledge only the Rochdale Observer has had the good grace to apologise for this failure.

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2015/10/our-long-running-crique-of-smile-for.html

Attempting to equate ‘freedom of expression’ with ‘the public’s right to know’ is treading on dangerous ground. Freedom of expression applies to an individual’s right to tell others what they do not wish to hear. It applies to things that are true, e.g. ‘the Nazis murdered six million Jews’, and to things that are false, e.g. ‘the Holocaust never happened’.

It is implicit in the media claim about ‘the public’s right to know’, that what is being disseminated is true. I don’t want to know things about Cliff Richards, police raids or MPs, which are not true. But if the print and broadcast media are going to rely upon ‘freedom of expression’ as their justification for publishing a story they should not be surprised if we begin to think they are using it as a guise for pushing fake news.

QUEENS OF THE COAL AGE - ‘Nor, a cross word!’

Maxine Peake

LAST week Anne Scargill told the director of the play ‘Queens of the Coal Age’, Maxine Peake, now showing at the Manchester Royal Exchange, that the women who occupied Parkside Pit in 1993 as part of the campaign ‘Women Against Pit Closures’ endured their experience cheerfully.  During a public interview at the Salford Art Gallery, Anne told Ms. Peake:  ‘Nor, a cross word passed between us!’
Singing on the Tannoy to the miners down the pit, playing I-Spy, shuffling packs of cards, even sharing talcum powder and chocolates sent in by the miner’s wives.  
The pit bosses were less amused, but when the lasses threatened to take them to the Court of Human Rights, a supply of mineral water was sent down.  
Yet the play, written by Maxine Peake and based on the former radio drama for BBC Radio Four, soon demonstrated the there was much more friction between the participants in pit floor direct action than Anne Scargill had previously claimed in her Salford interview.  
At one stage one of the women was mocked for not having kids.  Anne herself was later challenged for doing the protest only to promote herself and satisfy her own ego.  She admitted this claiming that she was sick of always living in Arthur’s shadow.  
Dot Kelly, one of the participants, has said elsewhere in an interview in the show’s program:  ‘They portrayed us as someone at the kitchen sink all the time – I mean, I went through three strikes. ‘72, ‘74 and ‘84.  Even if there weren’t a strike, that was me;...’
But there was a feistiness about the play which I feel was brought about by the dialogue introduced by Maxine Peake.  One of the women is presented as being ultra-randy in the sense that she was actually turned-on by the erotic concept of the sweaty grubby miner as a phenomena.  It has been suggested to me that Ms. Peake herself may have a taste for the down-to-earth spirit.  
This lack of the Mrs. Grundy syndrome is refreshing and now seems to belong to another age, yet it was not just in the dialogue produced by Madam Peake, that set me thinking about this.  The story doesn’t have the muckiness of Zola’s ‘Germinal’ yet it does seem to snub the snottiness of the fashionable vogue for political correctness.  We get a flavour of this in the show’s program, which indulges us with with an account of the journalist Triana Holden’s book ‘QUEEN COAL: WOMEN OF THE MINERS’ STRIKE’, in which she gives an account of the scene at Orgreave Colliery in 1984:

‘I was standing to the side in between the volatile miners and the equally aggressive police …  The pickets started shouting “get yer tits out for the lads”.  I was horrified and began to run away from the chanting or face a lifetime of embarrassment about having a famous bosom.  I must have resembled a scared rabbit as some of the men chased me; suddenly I was grabbed from behind and carried off.  I was furious when I was plonked down in a muddy field, denting my pride, ruining my broadcast but worse still destroying my lovely boots.  It turned out that my abductor was a sergeant from the Metropolitan police who was putting me out of harm’s way.  I shouted blue fury at him but he just laughed and said, “Is that the thanks I get for saving your neck?  Typical woman!”’
How very English!  
What we get here at Orgreave Colliery, is an English Bobbie, a few cheeky pickets, some muddy boots and dented female pride; tame-stuff! compared to Zola’s uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers' strike in northern France in the 1860s, in which a local money-lender had one woman tear his testicles off.
This play itself dwells upon the curious clostrophobia of everday life in a setting in which the ordinary is made extraordinary by introducing the disrupive element of four women.  Maxine Peake herself has just spent the best part of a month performing as Winnie by sitting on top Willie in a heap on sand in Samuel Beckett's play 'Happy Days' at Manchester's Royal Exchange, and in 2016, she played the role of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ masterwork, 'A Streetcar Named Desire', who invades her sister’s marriage and ignites a dark and violent conflict finishing-up in tears.  There's something rather earthy about Maxine Peake which she seems to get away with, while all the time she's snapping at the heels of all those dreadful modern day Mrs Grundy's and half-baked puritans.

Anarchy in Action?

by Chris Draper

ANARCHIST Bookfairs once demonstrated ‘Anarchy in Action’ – intellectually stimulating, friendly and welcoming to all-comers.  Now “Anarchist Bookfairs” routinely exemplify prejudice, bans, ejections and violence. First the London Bookfair was cancelled now Sheffield’s gone the same way. Manchester lost its prestigious “People’s History Museum” venue because of the blacklisting behaviour of its organisers and the 2018 Liverpool Bookfair first banned one anarchist and then physically ejected another. In an attempt to restore open-minds and open-access I recently emailed one of the ‘Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair’ organisers and I invite YOU dear reader to evaluate the response for yourself...

(a copy of the email sent by me to Maria, one of the Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair organisers)

*******

Dear Maria,

I email you as one of the organisers of the recent Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair.

Whilst I appreciate that organising such an event is a thankless task you would probably agree that several aspects of what transpired were rather negative. As an aged, lifelong anarchist who devoutly believes ‘The Personal is Political’ it is almost anathema to me to ban people from anarchist events. We should practice what we preach and live the society we advocate. Would we ban people from a post-revolution anarchist world?

Three people were to some extent subject to bans; Barry Woodling, Brian Bamford and another unnamed male. Whilst Woodling was almost immediately reinstated, Bamford was left outside in the rain and the third character was ejected late in the day. In none of these three cases was any open, democratic, ‘due-process’ evident. The Woodling example underlines the quixotic nature of such bans as he had previously been refused entry to the Manchester fair and was informed on arriving at Liverpool he was again banned and then for no apparent reason this decision was quashed and he was allowed in to no ill effect. You surely recognise that such conduct betrays an absence of justice and consistency. Anarchism should model improved relationships not exemplify irrational prejudice.

Moving on from the Woodling example, I realise that some comrades disagree with views expressed by the other two individuals, in fact in both cases I expressed my own criticisms to them personally, BUT one of the defining aspects of anarchism is that we relish disagreement and win over critics by exemplary argument and behaviour rather than repression and exclusion. Of course, we have a right to physically defend ourselves but where is the evidence that any of these three individuals had to be excluded to prevent them physically attacking anyone? I can only presume Mr Bamford was banned on the basis of prejudicial testimony as the objective account of a violent attack upon him at a previous book-fair given by respected bookseller, Ross Bradshaw (and available on his own website), makes clear that Bamford was the victim. (Ironically I noted the presence of the perpetrator of that particular violent act inside the Liverpool fair).

I appreciate your efforts in organising the bookfair, of which many aspects were admirable, but I don’t think such injustice should be brushed aside and then repeated next year (you have doubtless seen the negative publicity in Peace News etc). I don’t claim to have all the answers but I would ask you and the other organisers to constructively address this problem and would be happy to correspond about possible solutions.

For Peace, Love & Anarchy

Christopher Draper

********************************************************************************

Dear Christopher,

Thanks for your email, which Maria has forwarded to the rest of us.  We are happy to clarify that there was no ban on Barry Woodling attending.  We are not sure who told him to leave, but one of us

stepped in to say that he did not have to leave.  We did not discuss him or communicate with him prior to the bookfair because there simply was no reason to, and most of us did not even know of him.

We emailed Brian Bamford in advance of our bookfair as follows, after some correspondence with him:

"Dear Brian,

We appreciate that blacklisting is an important issue to you, and we

wish you all the best in your own campaigning efforts against it.

However, unfortunately we have to ask you to not attend the Liverpool

Anarchist Bookfair. It has come to our attention that that there is a

history of disruption and conflict associated with yourself at

bookfairs and other occasions elsewhere, so we have decided that in

the interests of all concerned - including yourself - and the smooth

and peaceful running of our event, it is best that you do not attend.

Thank you in advance for respecting this. Our decision is final."

Therefore when Brian arrived, we peacefully but firmly insisted that

he leave, in accordance with our prior decision. Brian chose to stay

outside the venue to talk to people coming into the building, rather

than to do something else elswhere; there were plenty of places he

could have gone to be much more comfortable and sheltered, such as a

cafe, pub, shop, or the cathedral or a museum for example.

The other person asked to leave during the bookfair was someone who

was distributing a transphobic leaflet, literature that expressed

prejudice against an oppressed group, against our safer spaces policy

https://liverpoolanarchistbookfair.wordpress.com/2018/03/22/safer-spaces/

. We asked him to step out of a workshop to talk with us, but he

refused and escalated the situation. This resulted in him being asked

to leave, and we escorted him out of the building with the support of

the venue staff. On the way out this person kicked someone hard in the

back from behind on a flight of stairs - very fortunately the person

they kicked was not seriously injured.

A one day event like the bookfair is not a situation where you can

hold some kind of in-depth process to resolve a conflict or address

harmful behaviour. As organisers we have a great many practical issues

to manage on the day to keep the event running smoothly. We expect

that the vast majority of people will behave in a reasonable and

respectful way towards others, but we have the right, and

responsibility, to ask anyone to leave if they do not. We took care to

think about and plan for dealing with possible problems and we

publicised the safer spaces policy, in advance online and in the

printed programmes on the day,  to make it clear what was not

acceptable.

Our decision to ask Brian in advance not to attend was not due to

disagreement with his views, and was not at the behest of anyone else,

but was informed by learning of various conflicts and difficulties

involving him, in particular his threats to sue one of the Manchester

bookfair venues, the People's History Museum, and his behaviour at the

Freedom Press Friends meeting in June 2016. Since the bookfair he has

emailed Maria making a threat to block trade union bodies from

supporting any future financial appeals by News From Nowhere bookshop,

where she works but which had absolutely no involvement itself in

organising the bookfair. This only confirms to us that Brian can be a

difficult person who is very focused on pursuing grudges.

It's very understandable why Brian and his friends like yourself feel

that he should be given some sort of hearing for his side of what

seems to be very complicated history of conflicts, but as Liverpool

event organisers we have no obligation or capacity to somehow attempt

to adjudicate on any past events and incidents that took place

elsewhere. We simply were not and are not interested in being drawn

into these conflicts, nor for our event to be used as an occasion to

pursue such conflicts.

best wishes

Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair collective

********

Unions meet Sir John Mitting on blacklisting!

On Wednesday 11th July, blacklisted workers and lawyers representing the FBU and UNITE the union held a 2 hour private meeting with Sir John Mitting, the judge in charge of the undercover policing public inquiry. There are legal restrictions on what can be disclosed about the discussions. 

Dave Smith, Blacklist Support Group co-secretary commented:

'We had a frank exchange of views about the future direction of the public inquiry. We hope that Mitting is now fully aware of our serious concerns about a number of issues that we feel will impede the truth about the activities of the UK's undercover political police units being fully investigated. We continue to have fundamental disagreements with many of the decisions being taken by the Chair and believe that the Home Secretary should set up a panel that will allow for a greater understanding of issues such as sex, race and class bias that are at the heart of the public inquiry. However, for a number of our specific concerns relating to state spying on trade unions, we were given assurances that we view as positive. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating and until we see concrete action rather than fine words, our view of the public inquiry remains highly skeptical.'  

Blacklist Support Group

book: http://newint.org/books/politics/blacklisted-secret-war/

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNcgrNs6pB8

facebook: http://www.facebook.com/groups/blacklistSG/

blog: www.hazards.org/blacklistblog

'Fuck May 1968'.& Anthropological Illiteracy

by Brian Bamford
THE distinguished historian A.J.P. Taylor once wrote that he was a vain rather than ambitious historian. Radical historians, one would have thought would be vain rather than ambitious, yet my dealings with the radical historians recently suggests that they are both vain and ambitious. My review below reflects upon how the new wave radical historians may have become corrupted in their own studies to a degree in which they are now becoming part of the problem:

******

ACADEMIC righteousness prevails most among those of us to whom the truth is revealed.  So many PhD's doing papers on this and that, so many historians in receipt of grants and bursaries. Vernon Richards, the former editor of Freedom - 'the anarchist weekly', once called for exporting the PhD's.

Ian Gwinn, who was organising the event Liverpool on the 8th, June which was rather coyly entitled 'F*ck May 1968, Fight Now: Exploring the Uses of the Past from 1968 to Today', welcomed participants at the CASA Club. The first session was 'History is a Weapon' addressed by Christopher Garland on 'Circumnavigating the past, foreclosing the future: commemoration of the radical past in the amnesiac present'. The title of the event, I learnt, was based on a bit of graffiti from Athens in 2008.

In his book 'DEMANDING THE IMPOSSIBLE: A history of Anarchism', Peter Marshall talked of graffiti on the walls of Paris in 1968 declaring: 'NEITHER GODS NOR MASTERS; THE MORE YOU CONSUME THE LESS YOU LIVE; ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION; IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID; BE REALISTIC DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE.'

Marshall claimed that unlike other French revolutions, which had been mainly concerned with overcoming economic scarcity, 'the French revolutionaries in a society of abundance [in 1968] were preoccupied with the transformation of everyday life.'

As General De Gaulle correctly noted, they were 'in revolt against modern society, against consumer society, against technological society, whether communist in the East or capitalist in the West'.

The then editor of The Times, William Rees Mogg, came to the same conclusions in his editorials at that time, and had supported the Rolling Stones, who according to Keith Richards, would have been destroyed at the height of their notoriety more than 40 years ago if The Times under William Rees Mogg had not not launched its famous attack on their jail sentences for drugs offences.'

The program for the Liverpool event quotes Walter Benjamin’s maxim that ‘nothing that has ever happened can be regarded as lost for history...’.  With in Spain the ‘Memoria Historico’ movement drawing on evidence from the Spanish Civil War that the families of victims of that war are still trying to recover.

Eric Azera from Barcelona talked about the recent threats to squatting in Catalonia and elsewhere. Tim Briedis addressed the 1994 National University occupations in Australia, and student radicalism which had developed beyond the 1960s.

Piotr Paszynski and Joaquin Armanet spoke on Jacques Ranciere’s concept of ‘Radical History and Proletarian Experience’. Jacques Ranciere was a student of the Marxist thinker Althusser, but clashed with his teacher over the events of May ’68. While Althusser and other Marxists were asserting the importance of Marxist academia in the French student revolts, Ranciere began to break away from this traditional mode of thought. Marxist intellectuals accused the revolts of being bourgeois and undisciplined. To which Ranciere accused Marxists of being a bunch of little shits.

From a criticism of Althusser and orthodox Marxism, Ranciere’s message soon became ‘Philosophy – it’s a big bag of dicks.’ Writing Hatred of Democracy, Ranciere attacks the Platonic tradition and ties it to practically every Marxist philosopher. He argues that everyone in the Western tradition, from Plato to Marx, wants to become a philosopher king to shovel Truth into the mouths of the blind ignorant masses. Ranciere carries this line of thought to his other books such as “Disagreement” where he accuses every theorists of democracy of being a Platonic saboteur.

Hannah Arendt in an essay entitled ‘Communicative Power’ wrote: ‘We have recently witnessed how it did not take more than a the relatively harmless, essentially nonviolent French students’ rebellion to reveal the vulnerability of the whole political system, which rapidly disintegrated before the astonished eyes of the young rebels…. they intended only only to challenge the ossified university system of government power, together with that of the huge party bureaucracies - ‘une sorte de desintergration de toutes les hierarchies”. It was a text-book case of a revolutionary situation.’

Roger Ball of the Bristol Radical History Group seems to be always trying to turn history into agitprop, and capture the headlines. His latest offering is based on an old theme: Unseating the local influence of the Society of Merchant Venturers and pointing to their trade in slavery: ‘Kick over the statues: using history as a weapon’. More recently their efforts have led to a ‘Countering Colston campaign’ in Bristol, which in turn has inevitably resulted in a doctoral paper ‘IS IT WRONG TO TOPPLE STATUES & RENAME SCHOOLS?’ by - Dr. Joanna Burch-Brown* Perhaps radical history has now itself become an industry from which various academic hangers-on are now profiting: even my friend Roger Ball a pioneer of radical history has now been anointed Dr. Roger Ball, and is currently employed as a Research Fellow at Sussex University.

Kerrie McGiveron discussed the part played by the New Left and the rise of Big Flame in the early 1970s, with particular reference to the Kirby Rent Strike (1972-73). She gave an ethographic account of the Rent Strike with the help of a film documentary produced by Nicholas Broomfield. At one point in the film a woman interviewee between puffs on her cigarette in the setting of what appeared to be her front-room, said:

‘

You can take your film, but the position of the working class won’t change’

To which the interviewer responded: ‘Why do you think I’m making this?’

She then said: ‘Just for your personal satisfaction!’

Ms. McGiveron, when questioned about this exchange in which it was suggested that the woman was displaying ‘apathy’ and a claim to ‘privacy’, claimed to have background information in which it was suggested that the interviewee was a member of a far-left party and was in fact very active. Ms. McGiveron had already made clear she was conscious of the dangers of post-facto rationalisation in doing this research. So can we take this special claim to background knowledge seriously?

Terry Wragg of Leeds Animation Workshop showed an animated film which was designed to portrayed male sexism. What began with building site banter, randy pestering and innuendo, concluding with more full-on approaches of the #Me Too variety. What was important here about the animated film was that a picture of reality is much more powerful than saying something; that’s why a docu-drama film like ‘Three Girls’ about the grooming scandal in Rochdale was so effective. But while one can do a feminist-take on predatory men in a social context, it would be just as anthropologically appropriate to do an animated film on ‘Pancake Tuesday’ and the initiation ceremonies, the ritual ‘de-bagging's’ and ‘ball greasing’ of apprentices, that were indulged in widely in the factories and mills in the North of England by both working-men and women in the last two

centuries. But when we talk about radical history in this context we are really, I suspect, joining the bandwagon of the fashionable addicts and the politically correct crowd.

The case of Geoff Brown who took part in the Round-table discussion ‘Remembering 1968 & After’ is significant in this respect. Geoff claims he is ‘active as a historian of Manchester “from below” ’, a softly-spoken Southerner and someone who moved up North in 1972. The jury must still be out over his claim to be a historian ‘working from below’. His publication record as presented in the program for the Liverpool event is rather sparse, he has written something for International Socialism entitled ‘John Tocher and the limits of commitment’ for the North West History Journal (2017/2018); ‘Il Principe, a handbook for career-makers in further education’ and ‘Pakistan, failing state or neoliberalism in crisis’ in International Socialism.

What we are getting here in the sphere of the fad for radical history is something like what Proust showed us in Sodome et Gomorrhe, and what Wyndham Lewis described in ‘The Art of Being Ruled’ as ‘an analysis of the powerful instinctive freemasonery of the pederast’. Dr. Ball wants us to kick over the statues to cleanse the architecture of Bristol and beyond of former historical adventurers, Penguin Random House want to diversify to the nth degree to take care of talented minorities such as the trans community this year, and, who knows, perhaps the necrophiliacs next year.

* Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Bristol.