The DISHONOUR'S LIST by Christopher Draper

“Ye see yon birkie, c’ad a Lord,

Wha struts, and stares, and a’ that;

Though hundreds worship at his word,

He’s but a coof for a’ that”

His riband star and a’ that:

The man of independent mind,

He looks and laughs at a’ that!”

Robert Burns

OUR ABSURD SOCIETY is awash with champagne socialists courting popularity by railing against privilege and inequality whilst brown-nosing their way onto the Honours List…

1) Bea Campbell – Officer of the Order of the British Empire – Ms Campbell claimed that, 'The survival of an honours system clothed in royalism and imperialism is a reproach to New Labour' and insisted that 'every morsel, every cameo, scandal and chapter in the story of the Spencers, the Windsors, their servants, their scribes and us, confirms the case for a Republic'. Marking Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee, in 2002 she wrote, 'My republican hope is that when she dies, she takes the monarchy with her.' As the daughter of communist parents Bea joined the CP as a teenager, married a party member and joined him as a journalist on The Morning Star. Subsequently divorced, in 2009 she described herself in the Guardian as 'republican with politics rooted in Marxism and feminism' and accepted an OBE from the Queen!

2) Clement Attlee – Companion of Honour 1945, Order of Merit 1951, Earl 1955, Knight of the Order of the Garter 1956, – When the iconic Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee offered an Earldom to R H Tawney, the historian declined, expressing surprise “that Labour still valued such baubles” yet, pathetically, Attlee considered his bauble collection his career validation, boasting in a 1956 letter to his son;

'Few thought he was ever a starter –

There were many who thought themselves smarter –

But he ended PM

CH and OM

An Earl and a Knight of the Garter.'

3) Janet Street-Porter – Commander of the Order of the British Empire – Extravagantly vulgar and rebellious, JSP was born to unmarried working-class parents, had an illegal abortion as a schoolgirl and famously carved out a media career as the unbridled 'Voice of Yoof'. She famously described TV management as, 'male, middle-class, middle-aged and mediocre' and in 2015 called the BBC, 'a cosy middle-class' club prone to 'creeping fucking paralysis' yet having achieved fame upsetting establishment apple carts, in 2016 Janet Street Porter graciously accepted a CBE.

4) Paul Kenny – Knighthood – after spending most of his life employed as a full-time GMB union official in 2005 he was appointed acting General Secretary and elected unopposed the following year and again in 2010. At the 2012 GMB Conference he accused the Labour Party of elitism, 'Even good trade unionists don’t engage with the Labour Party. Everyone agrees it looks too much like a political elite'. In 2015 Paul Kenny knelt before the Queen and was Knighted.

5) Vanessa Redgrave – Commander of the Order of the British Empire – Acclaimed actor, from 1971 key member of the Troskyist Workers Revolutionary Party until expelled in the late 1980’s, has been a constant critic of British State policy from treatment of asylum seekers to 'the war on terror'. Curiously, this erstwhile revolutionary having accepted a CBE, declined being ennobled as a 'Dame' in 1999 although, 'I’m not agains't the royal family, they do many good things' but because she objected to being nominated by Tony Blair.

6) David Olusoga – Officer of the Order of the British Empire – brought up on a Gateshead council estate his family were forced to move after repeated racist attacks on their home. After studying the history of slavery at Liverpool University, Olusoga worked in television, first as a researcher and then a presenter. His authoritative, sustained criticism of British Imperialism has brought him fame and fortune; in 2019 he accepted appointment as an, 'Officer of the Order of the British Empire.'

7) Claire Fox – Peerage – Broadcaster and political panellist Fox joined the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1980 and for more than two decades was a key RCP activist, organiser and co-publisher of “Living Marxism”. She continued to work with former RCP associates after the Party, in the 2000’s, morphed into 'The Institute for Ideas'. Having called for abolition of the Lords and in 2015 tweeted congratulations to the Liberal Democrats for not taking up Peerages, in 2020 Claire Fox accepted the title 'Baroness' and membership of the House of Lords

.

8) John Prescott – Peerage – Trade union official and Labour Minister who played the role of pantomime 'working class hero'. In 2009 he boasted to the BBC, 'I’ve always felt very proud of Wales and being Welsh…I was born in Wales, went to school in Wales and my mother was Welsh. I’m Welsh. It’s my place of birth, my country' despite leaving Wales in 1942, aged four! Having previously described members of the House of Lords as 'The vermin in ermine' in 2010 he was delighted to join them as 'Baron Prescott of Kingston-Upon-Hull” insisting, “I need a peerage to save the planet!'

9) Shami Chakrabarti – Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Peerage – The daughter of Bengali parents, a human-rights lawyer with a long and honourable record of opposing the State’s excessive use of anti-terror legislation, its control orders and attempted imposition of identity cards. Committed to social equality, against privilege and the expansion of grammar schools she sent her own son to Dulwich College (annual fees £18,000) and in 2007 accepted a CBE followed in 2016 by a peerage when Baroness Chakrabarti joined the House of Lords.

10) Neil Kinnock – Peerage – after working for just three years as a WEA tutor in 1970 Kinnock began his long career as a professional, nominally left-wing, politician. On 19th November 1977 he wrote in Tribune, 'The House of Lords must go. Not to be replaced, not to be reformed in some life-after-death patronage paradise, just closed down, abolished, finished' In 2005 Kinnock accepted a peerage, becoming a 'Baron' and entered the House of Lords, where in 2009 he was joined by his equally 'left-wing' wife, who similarly accepted a Peerage and the title, Baroness!

Fortunately, amidst all the flotsam and jetsom of washed up politicians and media luvvies there are still people with integrity who refuse to bend the knee. Next time on NV I’ll unveil the REAL HONOURS LIST and identify honourable individuals who spurned these tawdry titles…

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Just A Few Minor Details

by Les May

BETWEEN 10 May 1940 and 23 May 1945 Labour MPs were part of a coalition led by Winston Churchill.   Initially Clement Attlee was a member of the five man Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal.  From February 1942 Attlee was also Deputy Prime Minister.

In other words any planning for the post war world, including planning for an overhaul of the health care system, was as much done by Labour politicians as it was by those from other parties.   Labour didn’t just ‘get lucky’, implement existing plans drawn up by someone else and take all the credit for the formation of the NHS, as two recent contributors would have us believe.

Listening to Jeremy Hunt this morning I was left with the impression that one of the responses to the staggering number of deaths in Care Homes and similar facilities is likely to be a coming together of the Care Services and the NHS. This has been a long term ambition of Andy Burnham who has written and spoken about this since he was Health Secretary 2009-2010.   If, as I expect, legislation to bring this about will be in a future Queen’s Speech will the two recent contributors who are so keen to deny Labour credit for establishing the NHS be demanding that Burnham receives a share of the credit for a coming together of the care and health services?  Personally I am happy to give credit for this to whatever government brings it about.

As for the ‘Libertarian Left’ if it does not like the ‘statist’ model we have now it has had 73 years to bring into existence a viable alternative to the NHS and has done precisely nothing.   It is always ready to snipe from the sidelines, but never wants to devote time and energy to giving some thought to exactly how an alternative system would deliver specialist as well as routine care; how it would deal with epidemics of, for example, winter flu; provide a vaccination service for children which by its nature relies on ‘herd immunity’ to be fully effective; or how it would be funded.  What would its response to the Covid19 pandemic look like? How much thought has it given to international trade or international terrorism, cyber hacking or effective strategies to combat climate change?

Any answers to questions like this will be a long time coming, not least because so many of those who sail under the flag of the ‘Libertarian Left’ have lost themselves on the barren shores of ‘trans issues’, both for and against. 

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From whence did social welfare come?

 State Control or Social Initiatives?

 by Brian Bamford

LES MAY engaging with Carl Faulkner's comment and considering the founding of the NHS, writes:

'As my Libertarian friends endlessly remind me there were other schemes in operation even before the NHS was a gleam in anyone’s eye.

'Bevan would have been familiar with the Tredegar Medical Aid Society as he was the local MP. In return for contributions from its members it provided health care free at the point of use. (my emphasis)

'This model of funding was rejected by Bevan.'


Les clearly admires the Attlee government of 1945, which formed the first Labour majority government and in particular he favours its Keynesian approach to economic management aimed to maintain full employment, a mixed economy and a greatly enlarged system of social services provided by the state.  This amounts to a supreme faith in what in the 20th century amounted to Fabian managerialism.  It is a view that after the Second World War prevailed in which it was considered that as George Orwell observed in 1946:  'For quite fifty years past the general drift has almost certainly been towards oligarchy'*   (James Burnham & the Managerial Revolution [1946]).

At that time after the war it must have seemed that big government was onto a winner, and Orwell then felt able to write:  'The ever increasing concentration of industrial and financial power; the diminishing importance of the individual capitalist or shareholder, and the growth of the "managerial" class of scientists, technicians, and bureaucrats; the weakness of the proletariat against the centralized state; the increasing helplessness of small countries against big ones; the decay of representative institutions and the importance of one-party regimes...'

The problem with this approach is that it represented a shift from the capitalist and the dividend grabbers to a 'new boss class' of the technical elite functionaries blessed with cushy jobs and all on a generous state stipend.  As Orwell observed above it became 'the weakness of the proletariat against the centralized state'.  There was still the spirit of entitlement of the elite and the dependency of the working-class.

The difficulty is still that this analysis is too mechanical as well as managerial and top-down.  It lacks an evolutionary grasp of how the concept of social welfare entered and developed inside our culture.

Colin Ward described how the social concepts permeated sociologically:  'Anarchists are frequently told that their antipathy to the state is historically outmoded, since a main function of the modern state is the provision of social welfare.  They respond by stressing that social welfare in Britain did not originate from government, nor from the post-war National Insurance laws, nor with the the initiation of the National Health Service in 1948.'   **
 

Rather as Mr Ward argues:  'It evolved from the vast network of friendly societies and mutual aid organizations that sprung up through working-class self-help in the 19th century.'

This is what is implied by Carl Faulkner in his perceptive comment on this Blog:  'It could be argued that is was predictable that the NHS was established by a Labour government due to it being elected in 1945 - when plans for what was to be called the NHS were well advanced but lost in the mists of time.'

Indeed it was 'lost in the midst of time', as the anarchist Mr Ward explains:
'The founding father of the NHS was the then member of parliament for Tredegar in South Wales, Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Government's Minister of Health.  His constituency was the home of the Tredegar Medical Aid Society, founded in1870 and surviving until 1995.'

It gave medical care for the local employed workers, who were mostly miners and steelworkers, but also (unlike the pre-1948 National Health Insurance) for the needs of dependents, children, the old, the non-employed: everyone living in the district.

A retired miner told Peter Hennessey that when Bevan initiated the National Health Service, 'We thought he was turning the country into one big Tredegar.'  Alas, it was not to be, and as Mr. Ward observes in his brief book:  'In practice the Health Service has been in a state of continuous reorganization ever since its foundation, but has never submitted to a local and federalized approach to medical care.'

More seriously Ward argues 'ever since full employment and the system of PAYE (automatic deduction of tax as a duty of employers) was introduced during the Second World War, the central government's Treasury has creamed off the cash that once supported local initiatives.' 

Furthermore, in keeping with the spirit of local spontaneity Colin Ward suggests:   
'If the pattern of local self-taxation on the Tredegar model had become the general pattern for health provision, this permanent daily need would not have become the plaything of central government financial policy.'

There is a price to pay for the pattern of State funding medical care applied by Nye Bevan and approved by Les May, and it now being played out as different governments enact various outsourcing schemes promote what Ward called 'the virtues of profit-making private enterprise.'


What follows from this debate is what will be the consequences of the pandemic for the psychology of the general population?  Will people look to the state for salvation in fear of a repeat performance of another potential pandemic threat or second wave?  If so, I suspect it will represent a reactionary response to the politics of the pandemic.




* Oligarchy, government by the few, especially despotic power exercised by a small and privileged group for corrupt or selfish purposes. Oligarchies in which members of the ruling group are wealthy or exercise their power through their wealth are known as plutocracies.

**  'ANARCHISM: A Very Short Introduction' by Colin Ward (Oxford) 2004.

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BRING BACK KROPOTKIN!

by Christopher Draper

MANCHESTER’s People’s History Museum aims to depict all political strands that comprise Britain’s rich labour tradition but one aspect is notably absent. There’s more to politics than voting and the anti-Parliamentary ideas and artifacts of the hugely influential anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) have been exiled to the museum’s storeroom. 

When the institution opened in London in 1975 Kropotkin’s desk and chair were prominently displayed and visitors learnt from attached brass plaques that they’d previously belonged to radical campaigner Richard Cobden but when the collection moved to Manchester these exhibits were curiously removed.  Curiously because Cobden is strongly associated with Manchester, where he founded the 'Anti Corn Law League', was MP for Stockport then for Rochdale, lived for years at nearby 19, Quay Street, has a statue erected to his memory in St Anne’s Square and a bust on view in the Town Hall.  As activists have successfully campaigned for blue plaques memorialising Kropotkin’s former homes in Bromley and Brighton, so now with the approaching centenary of his death on 8th, February 1921, what better time to restore these key exhibits to public view?

                                  WHOSE HERITAGE?

'HERITAGE' in Britain generally promotes a ruling class perspective with stately homes, art galleries and statues of the “Great and Good” predominant.  Since the 1893 foundation of the Independent Labour Party Britain’s official labour movement directed most its time, money and energy into getting Labour governments elected and few resources were spared for independent working class education and preserving, recording and presenting the artifacts and history of workers’ struggles.

To secure adequate resources the Manchester museum treads a perilous path between faithfully recording campaigns for freedom and equality whilst not upsetting establishment sources of funding. From its roots in the labour movement the museum has over the years moved into the heritage industry, successfully widening its popular appeal and funding-base but along the way it’s quietly succumbed to 'ideological cleansing', gently edging anarchism out of the picture in order to
represent Parliamentary power as the ultimate goal of past struggles. 

There’s no denying that Parliamentary politics dominate the labour movement but revolutionary ideas and movements were and remain a vital thread in the tapestry.  There’s more to labour history than campaigns for the franchise and it’s essential that displays also reflect the continuing battle for ideas within the movement.  With the Cobden connection and the fast approaching centenary (Feb 2021), it’s time Kropotkin’s artifacts along with an explanation of anarchism’s political significance were restored to the museum’s public galleries.

                Slippery Slope from Limehouse to Manchester

THE collection was begun in the 1960’s by enthusiastic members of the 'Trade Union, Labour and Co-operative History Society' who eventually secured exhibition space at Limehouse Town Hall.  The museum’s moving spirit and founding curator was Harold Fry who’d started work in a brush factory at the tender age of eleven before campaigning for years to persuade the Labour movement to value its own history, 'because it is not yet history conscious.  The movement must know where it has been to know where it is going… we want to educate the public, to balance the history of the ruling classes, which they are taught, with the people’s history'.

On 19th Monday 1975 Prime Minister Harold Wilson officially opened the 'National Museum of Labour History', accompanied by Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Hugh Scanlon and Clive Jenkins, and in an ominous gesture of vacuous popularism donated his pipe for exhibition, 'but not the famous clogs in which he is said in some speeches to have trudged as a ragged urchin to Milnsbridge Council School' (Clement Attlee’s pipe is on reverent display in the current museum). 

The museum remained in Limehouse until 1985 when it was promised a new, larger home at the
redundant Mile End Baths. In the course of conversion it was discovered that the baths was contaminated with asbestos and on so the collection was packed away and remained in storage until a funding offer was made by Greater Manchester authorities.  A new trust was formed and in 1990 the collection went on display again, initially occupying part of the old 'Manchester Mechanics Institute' in Princess Street, in 1868 the first meeting place of the Trade Union Congress. In 1994 the collection moved into its present home in a beautifully restored hydraulic pumping station on the banks of Manchester’s river Irwell.

Still officially registered as the 'National Museum of Labour History' on moving north the institution re-opened under the new, establishment-friendly title of the 'People’s History Museum'.  In an apparently continuing quest for ever greater de-politicisation and vacuity, the collection now bills itself as the 'National Museum of Democracy'.  If this trend continues perhaps Clement Attlee’s pipe will soon be confined to storage lest it be viewed as an incitement to revolution!

                                      The Anarchist Prince

IRONICALLY, throughout the three decades Kropotkin lived in England he was welcomed rather than feared by 'civilised society'.  As an internationally respected geographer and scientist as well as an acknowledged, if alienated, member of Russia’s aristocracy his ideas and activities were even sympathetically reported by the London Times.  'Mutual Aid', Kropotkin’s classic rejoinder to T. H. Huxley’s interpretation of the social consequences of Darwinism will forever serve as eloquent testimony to the cooperative impulse that underlies anarchism and indeed all progressive politics.
Sadly for Kropotkin’s last years in England he alienated former anarchist comrades by supporting the war against Germany but retained friendships with local members of the Brighton labour movement. When he departed for Russia in 1917 he took with him seventy tea chests of books and papers but presented his desk to Brighton Trades Council (who subsequently donated it to the museum). 

This episode in itself  offers any museum worth its salt an ideal opportunity to pose important questions of political loyalty to interested visitors.  Finally returning to Russia on 12th June 1917 Kropotkin’s support for the revolution but opposition to the Bolsheviks might similarly raise critical questions in the mind of anyone viewing Kropotkin exhibits, and reading interpretive boards about his life.  
       
                        - 'Labour History Museum'  –  
             - Lively Debating Chamber or Necropolis? -

Despite my reservations about the some of the innovations, the museum’s administrators have worked wonders keeping the collection together, conserving the artefacts, providing imaginative attractive displays and continuing to offer free admission.   Everyone involved deserves to be heartily congratulated.  This year (2019) the “Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair” returned to the museum increasing the impetus to restore anarchist content to the galleries.  'People’s History' isn’t a
lost world of clog dancing,  Hovis adverts and chimney sweeps, it should stimulate political questions about the past, present and future.  It is a vital debate that recognises Parliament may be a political preoccupation for many but it’s not the realisation of labour’s 'New Jerusalem'.  The return to public view of Kropotkin’s furniture won’t change the world or frighten the horses but it might stimulate debate and attract the interest of a younger generation turned off by traditional politics. 

Why not visit the museum yourself, hand in a card (or email - Katy.Ashton@phm.org.uk) requesting the return of Kropotkin’s desk before the 8th, February 2021 centenary of his death?  Refusing to vote isn’t anarchy in action if you do nothing to promote positive alternatives - Stand up for Kropotkin’s chair!

                                                                                                       Christopher Draper (Dec 2019)

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