Not just about chlorine chicken

This isn’t just about chlorine chicken

 by Brian Bamford

GEORGE ORWELL wrote an essay 'In Defence of English Cooking' that:
'It will be seen that we have no cause to be ashamed of our cookery, so far as originality goes or so far as the ingredients go.  And yet it must be admitted that there is a serious snag from the foreign visitor's point of view.  This is that you practically don't find good English cooking outside a private house....  It is a fact that restaurants which are distinctively English are hard to find.' [1945]

Over half a century later in the Caterer & Hotelkeeper Millennium Supplement, on the 23 December 1999 claimed:
'Rationing was reintroduced in 1940, a year after the outbreak of the Second World War.  It continued until 1954, casting a shadow over any real culinary progression. Post-war London's leading restaurants were almost entirely run by Continental Europeans.'

And yet it goes on to argue:

'Outside the capital, though, the general state of food being served in most restaurants was abysmal, apart from rare exceptions such as Sharrow Bay in Ullswater (which opened in 1949) and the Bell at Aston Clinton.'


Raymond Postgate who went on to jointly write The Common People with G.D.H.Cole, helped to found The Good Food Guide.  Postgate a socialist, who helped to found the Communist Party of Great Britain, laid down some rules for fighting a war for English food wrote:



'Navigating a British restaurant during the middle of the twentieth century was in its way not so different from scoring a drink in Sweden before the outbreak of hostilities.  Postgate likened it to war.  The “Rules for Eating Out” published in the first Guide , from 1951-52, refer to restaurant staff as “the Enemy” and recommend battle tactics.'  And he advises:

“Take a long time reading the bill of fare, and see that your wife decides what she wants first. If the Enemy hears one of you say: ‘I’ll have whatever you do, dear’, he immediately decides he has no serious foe to encounter. What you want to impress on the establishment is that it has to deal with a pair of people who know exactly what they want, and are implacable.” ( GFG 19)

Adding in his recommendations:  'While diners and waiters were engaged in conflict, rules of war did apply, and the encounter should be civil even if it was not yet civilized. “You wish to give the impression not that you are angry with this particular restaurant, but that you are suspicious, after a lifetime of suffering.” ( GFG 19)'

His basic justification for the founding of The Guide is clear:
 'The Guide had become necessary because the suffering had lasted longer even than the lifetime of many GFG users: “For fifty years now complaints have been made against British cooking, and no improvement has resulted.” ( GFG 7)'


Serious entertaining was more likely to be done in private houses, where most professional chefs were employed, or in gentlemen's clubs - there were 200 at the turn of the century, compared with about 40 today.  Restaurants were frequented mostly by aristocrats and the gentry.  Women, of whatever class, were rarely seen in such establishments.

Derek Pattison & the 'Veblen good'

In response to the recent news that members of the US Congress have written to the US negotiator, calling on him to get rid of the UK’s ban on chlorinated chicken ‘once and for all’ DEREK PATTISON writes:
'I think it is true to say that people are economic maximizers and though we can make choices, our choices are always constrained for a variety of reasons.  This could be economic and also due to our social/class position in society .'

So speaks Pattsion, the economist, on behalf of the most miserable of sciences; forever labouring the price of everything and the value of nothing.  What would Raymond Postgate, founder of the Good Food Guide have to say about that?

When I did my degree in sociology at Manchester Poly. it was structured around economics, because at that time it was considered  that of all of the social sciences it was the closest to a 'natural science' like physics etc.  Do we want to eat cheap chlorine chicken suitably swilled with the chemical from the USA?  Yet when we considered this science of economics our attention was drawn to 'inverted demand curves'  and the effect of what came to be called a Veblen good as a type of luxury good for which demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. A higher price may make a product desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.  A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own. *

This is a sociological consequence which determines a price according to a snob value.   Here the effect on demand depends on the range of other goods available, their prices, and whether they serve as substitutes for the goods in question.  The effects are anomalies within demand theory, because the theory normally assumes that preferences are independent of price or the number of units being sold. They are therefore collectively referred to as interaction effects.

We can imagine that after Brexit cheap chlorine chicken will quickly become the food of the poor.

Another writer John Wilkins writes:  'And so we have the climb down.  The ban will be dropped and low animal welfare, chlorinated chicken will be UP on our supermarket shelves.'


The concession in this case has been that low welfare products will pay a higher tariff (the tax charged on imports) than high welfare products.  But even if the US agrees to this, there is no guarantee that the tariffs rate won’t be cut later on.

Mr. Wilkins adds:  'This is fundamentally about the right of our government or any government to set standards and regulations on things that people care about, whether on animal welfare, climate standards, workers rights, public health, environmental standards or anything else.'



Worryingly, the government is trying to present this as a win for the environment minister, because even though the promise that a ban would be maintained has been broken, it turns out that what the trade minister, Liz Truss, actually wanted to do was not only overturn the ban but also reduce all tariffs on chicken to zero! 

The Decline of English Food 

When George Orwell was writing in the post-war years there was rationing, and as he says 'Pubs, as a rule, sell no food at all, other than potato crisps and tasteless sandwiches.'  Meanwhile, at that time, the 'expensive restaurants  and hotels almost all imitate French cookery ... while if you want a good cheap meal you gravitate naturally towards a Greek, Italian or Chinese restaurant.'

Raymond Postgate believed that the decline in English cuisine went back to the Industrial Revolution, when he claimed that the young migrant women from the rural areas who moved into the cities had lost contact with their grandmothers thus distancing them from their traditional recipes and ingredients. 

The concession is that low welfare products will pay a higher tariff (the tax charged on imports) than high welfare products.

But we know agribusiness has been lobbying hard on this, and 47 members of the US Congress have written to the US negotiator, calling on him to get rid of the UK’s ban on chlorinated chicken ‘once and for all’.  Former trade minister, Liam Fox, said last month that “the US would walk” if it had to comply with the UK’s animal welfare standards.[5]

And so now John Wilkins says 'we have the climb down and the ban will be dropped and low animal welfare, chlorinated chicken will be UP on our supermarket shelves.  The concession is that low welfare products will pay a higher tariff (the tax charged on imports) than high welfare products.  But even if the US agrees to this, there is no guarantee that the tariffs rate won’t be cut later on.

'Worryingly, the present government is trying to represent this as a win for the environment minister, because even though the promise that a ban would be maintained has been broken, it turns out that what the trade minister, Liz Truss, actually wanted to do was not only overturn the ban but also reduce all tariffs on chicken to zero!' 


It is hard to believe that the quality of English cuisine will improve as a result of these recent developments in UK-US trade relations and animal welfare.

************************* 

*   Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).^[1] A corollary of the Veblen effect is that lowering the price decreases the quantity demanded.^[2]

A Veblen good is a type of luxury good for which demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. A higher price may make a product desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.

Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).^[1] A corollary of the Veblen effect is that lowering the price decreases the quantity demanded.

Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).^[1] A corollary of the Veblen effect is that lowering the price decreases the quantity demanded.^[2]

A reply to Derek Pattison on class

by Andrew Wallace

THANKS for Mr Pattison’s reply on my article which raises some interesting issues, particularly concerning what he considers to be my penchant for ‘pretentious academic verbiage’ along with the social philosopher David Selbourne whose writings I drew upon.

His beef at the outset seems to be with my perceived stylistic idiosyncrasies and resort to pedantry, which he considers ‘barely comprehensible to most people’.  This seems to be an ad hominem attack and a disingenuous slice of anti-intellectualism.  Northern Voices amongst other things is a forum for literate and stimulating thought-pieces of various complexity and for employing a ‘highbrow’ discourse I make no apologies.  I suggest my vocabulary is hardly a radical departure from the general tenor and house style of NV.

Leftists struggle to push this faux anti-intellectualism because it is so obviously built on contradiction.  Leftists are often the chattering classes incarnate.  Only in the discredited regimes of ‘actually existing socialism’ did intellectuals face real persecution, but of course those societies had a very different dynamic in contrast to their Western European counterparts.

However even thinkers like Selbourne has taken issue with the “incomprehensible scholasticism, emanating from the nether darkness of academia where nothing grows”, so it seems a certain ‘anti-intellectual intellectualism’ is justified.  Certainly Selbourne and other writers of his ilk have largely avoided the dense impenetrable obscurantism of post-modernism that was so successfully lampooned and deservedly so in the Sokal Affair. So Selbourne might be galled to learn his former student accuse him of this very vice that has been so assiduously critiqued in his life work.

Dan Fox seems to have the measure of this ‘Prolier-than-thou’ trolling in his book (see below) even references Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ –

' “pretentiousness” is the put-down of choice for a certain sort of bluff, meat-and-potatoes Englishman who distrusts foreign words and complicated ideas'.

I do plead guilty to neglecting the newer, more ‘liberal’ cohort of the working class as depicted by Guy Standing in his work on the Precariat.  My admittedly non-scientific anecdotal observations are largely based on the older, traditional working class, based around the factories and textile mills that gave brief sustenance in the post war era.

Working class autodidacts are often deeply impressive and imposing figures, yet their comparative rarity makes them extra-ordinary individuals and a far cry from being representative of the working class.

Regards

Andrew Wallace

References

How the left was lost: the need to relearn what true progress means, New Statesman, 24.07.14. – David Selbourne

Pretentiousness by Dan Fox – (11.02.16.) Guardian review by Steven Poole

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/11/pretentiousness-why-it-matters-dan-fox-review

Pretentiousness by Dan Fox review – why anti-intellectualism is the real snobbery | Books | The Guardian

CUMBERBATCH & BREXIT MADE SEXY

Review:  'Brexit: The Uncivil War' on C4
by Brian Bamford

Dominic Cummings

ON Monday the 25th, April 2016, Derek Pattison put a post up on the NV Blog entitled 'Vote Leaves' Campaign Director tells select committee: "Accuracy is for snake-oil pussies".'  It accused Dominic Cummings, the newly appointed to run Vote Leave campaigner, of being the 'Vote Leave silly Ass - Dominic Cummings'.  In last night's Channel 4’s drama Brexit: The Uncivil War, Dominic Cummings, as portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch was presented as a genius.  So much so that this morning I took a closer look at Mr. Cummings's arguments for how he succeeded in his campaign against the EU, Cameron and Osbourne.

When asked Cummings claims that three things helped his Leave campaign:  immigration; the public's anger about the 2008 financial crisis; and the pubic awareness that the Euro was causing problems in other countries like Greece.

Indeed it was these three factors plus the NHS that perhaps did more than the MPs to help Leave win.  According to Cummings, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove came on aboard later after the campaign was in full swing.

Cummings had to keep the politicians, who he does not trust, at a distance from the core management of the operation.  Farage and the speculator Aron Banks are both sidelined, and left to run their own campaign dedicated more to resisting immigration.

Basically Cummings adopts the theme to 'Take Back Control' for the British public, both from Brussels and from the British establishment system itself.: that is the London elite who were perceived as having been responsible for the financial crisis of 2008.

The idea is to engage and energise that fraction of the public who do not normally vote in elections and to discourage those favouring the status quo of Remain.  This involve mathematical targeting based on algorithms and large-scale data analysis.  Then hit them on social media.

'Hit them with £350m and Turkey' proclaims Cummings, addressing his staff from the office table..

Elsewhere, Cummings has argued that the dominant mental model of the Left / Right axis is no longer valid and empirically false.  Particularly among swing voters who he says are both more Left-wing and at the same time more Right wing than most politicians.  Simultaneously they will support more money for the NHS and favour confiscation of property, while favouring harsher action against terrorism or crime than the vast majority of MPs would support.

In last night's Channel Four production Benedict Cumberbatch's Cummings realises that a monster has escaped out of the bottle when Joe Cox was murdered.  Somehow it seems that Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall, and British culture is now in pieces.  Cumberbatch's performance was both stunning and sexy.

Meanwhile, Cummings was right to avoid talking about the single market, as no one would understand that because in the end the Brexit vote was sociological rather than economic.  It wasn't a repeat of Clinton's 'It's the economy stupid!'.  It was about seizing control.

*********** 

Tameside TUC joins THE ORWELL SOCIETY

North West trade unionists merge with poet of common decency
by Brian Bamford

THIS year, Tameside Trade Union Council [TUC] in Greater Manchester became the first corporate affiliate of the ORWELL SOCIETY.  This SOCIETY is dedicated to the understanding and appreciation of George Orwell's life and work as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

The Society is a registered charity in the UK and it aims to keep the study of Orwell alive through its educational activities.  The Orwell Society is without political affiliation,and was founded in 2011, and though it is based in the UK its membership is worldwide.  George Orwell (the pen-name for Eric Blair; 1903-1950), was the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Society's intention is to embrace a grasp of Orwell's life and writings, from his literary criticism to his diaries, and from his political writings to his poetry. . 

Last Friday, the President of Tameside, Derek Pattison, announcing this said:  'In an Age of Post Truth, Fake News, and Alternative Facts, we need George Orwell's guidance more than ever.'  

When I attended the Annual General Meeting of the Orwell Society on the 28th, April this year, I spoke to Richard Blair, the son of George Orwell, and to Quintin Kopp, the son of George Kopp Orwell's commander as captain in the general staff of the 45th Mixed Brigade of the Spanish Republican Army.  Both were anxious to get more participation in the Society from trade unionists such as ourselves.

Since Tameside TUC  first published our booklet commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War in 2006, and followed this up with the unveiling of a blue plaque for James Keogh in 2011 who died fighting with the republicans in the Spanish Civil War, this trade union council has had a special interest in both George Orwell and his experiences of the Spanish Civil War.

Malcolm Muggeridge in his essay 'A Knight of the Woeful Countenance' wrote about this:
'I FIRST became aware of the existence of George Orwell in the middle thirties when I read some articles of his on the Spanish Civil War which appeared in the New English Weekly, a publication founded by A.R. Orage to expound the principles of Social Credit.  They provided the basis for Homage to Catalonia, one of his best books.  These articles made a great impression on me.  I liked their clear, simple style, and the obvious honesty of purpose which informed them,  They touched a chord of personal sympathy, too.  I saw in Orwell's strong reaction to the villainies of Communist apparat in Spain a compatible experience to my own disgust some years previously with the Soviet regime and its fawning admirers among the intelligentsia of the West as a result of a stint as Moscow correspondent of the Manchester Guardian....'

When we at Tameside TUC began to produce and publish a balanced account of the Spanish Civil War  in 2006, we were confronted with resistance from some elements within the more narrow-minded political left of the trade union movement in Greater Manchester.   These people deliberately tried to stiffle our efforts and those of other local trade unionists to bring about publication.  Both Orwell and Muggeridge had had difficultes getting their articles published by the so-called progressive publishers like Kingsley Martin at the New Statesman and C.P. Scott at the Manchester Guardian, and perhaps even more absurd, was the Victor Gollancz rejection of Animal Farm.

Muggeridge relates how when Orwell and he were lunching together in a Greek restaurant in Percy Street, Orwell asked if he would mind changing places?  When Muggeridge asked him why?  Orwell just said 'he just couldn't bear to look at Kingsley Martin's corrupt face, which, as Kingsley was lunching at an adjoining table, was unavoidable from where he had been sitting before.'

I feel much the same when I am forced to gaze into the faces of Ronald Marsden and his friend Mike Luft of the International Brigade Memorial Trust:  two people who did their utmost to undermine the production of the Tameside TUC memorial booklet about the Spanish Civil War.

******

Tameside Tories see RED over Communist Party funeral flag!

Tameside Health Campaigner - Rod McCord

A major row has erupted over a families right to display in public, the Communist Party flag, in memory of their father, who was a lifelong communist. 

Last Thursday, over 300 people attended the memorial service to Rodney (Rod) McCord at the Stalybridge Civic Hall.  A local health campaigner and member of Stalybridge Labour Party, Rod died in Willow Wood Hospice, on  Wednesday 15th February 2018, aged 67. Later in the afternoon, a service took place at the Dukinfield Crematorium.

Originally from Openshaw, Manchester, Rod was one of three children of Phyllis and Charles McCord. Along with their father, Rod and his two sisters, Christine and Marilyn, were all members of the Communist Party (CPGB). Rod left instructions that the Communist Party flag was to be draped over his coffin and a communist  banner with the hammer and sickle and "RIP COMRADE", was displayed in the civic hall. The Red Flag and The Internationale were also played at the service and relayed out into the street.

Afterwards, family and friends retired to the Stalybridge Labour Club, where £1,348.94 was collected for Willow Wood Hospice. To show honour and respect to their father, the McCord family, decided to display the CP flag on the flagppole at Stalybridge Labour Club to "mark our Dad's passing."

A local busybody Stalybridge councillor, called Doreen Dickenson, a kind of priggish, parochial, Mrs Grundy type of character, got wind that something rather communist and lefty was going on in her own backyard of Stalybridge.  Even before, Mr McCord had been laid to rest, she was scurrilously tweeting about how un-English and alien it was to display communist flags and play communist songs, in this little northern cotton town. Although Dickenson, later removed the offending tweet, after being contacted by the McCord family, she said she'd received complaints from constituents about the 'Communist Party Flag' and communist music being relayed outside by loudspeakers that she found disgusting. She also seemed to think that because the event took place in a public building (which the family had hired for the occasion), they had no right to fly the flag or play music.

Many Tameside Labour members appear to have been either unaware of the incident, indifferent,  or in support of the kind gesture to honour Mr. McCord, who was held in high regard.  Jonathan Reynolds MP, who represents Stalybridge & Hyde, said:

"Rod was a truly lovely person, generous, intelligent and warm. Many people will know him in particular for his work with Tameside Hospital Action Group... I always thought he was one of the most well read and informed people I ever met. There was a great turnout today, and Rod's sons and grandchildren all gave magnificent tributes to him. Dave Ormsby gave a brilliant eulogy, which was funny as well as poignant. Rest in Peace Rod."

Councillor Jan Jackson, who chairs the Stalybridge Town Council, said the flag was a family matter and was "not aligned or associated in any way with the New Stalybridge Labour Club." she said:

"It has gone viral and caused a furore on social media, something that should not have happened. It was the funeral of a very stalwart person who sat on the Tameside Hospital Action Board (sic) and did a lot of good work in the community. People are dying all over the world and struggling to put a loaf of bread on the table, yet flying the flag has caused all this fuss.  There are more important issues."

The McCord family later issued a statement saying that it was not their intention to cause offence, upset, or to associate the flag with the Labour Party.

I don't suppose that any of us should be surprised at the foul antics that the Tories and the far right are prepared to stoop to in order to make political capital over their opponents. Even the death of a truly decent man, and the respect his family paid to him, is something that cannot take place without controversy or be exploited for political gain.  Some have even tried to connect this flag incident with the recent poisonings of Yulia and Sergei Skripal.  But what should one expect from a party that snatched milk off the school kids and now threatens to take their free school meals off them, if their family earns more than £7,000 per year.

We understand that the manager of Stalybridge Labour Club received death threats following this incident.  We also understand that someone in the office of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, contacted one of Mr McCord's son's, demanding that the communist flag be taken down and that when he asked to speak to 'Jeremy', he was told he was out at a meeting.  This seems rather cowardly and gutless action from a party that proclaims itself to be socialist.  Needless to say, the party must have found it a political embarrassment.

Despite being embarrassed by a red flag, the Labour Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell, says in his 'Who's Who' entry, that his hobbies include "fermenting (sic) the downfall of capitalism."  In 2011, he called on unhappy workers to spit in their bosses tea.  Clearly, the pragmatic politician lies behind many of these hard men on the left.

And what would my dear friend Rod McCord, be making of this right now?  I bet he'd be laughing his little red socks off. He certainly went out with a bang! RIP mate.

Derek Pattison,

Joint Editor Northern Voices.

Reflections on Easter Rising 1916. Book Review.

Hidden Heroes of Easter Week – Memoirs of Volunteers from England who joined the Easter Rising.
By Robin Stocks

Review: by Derek Pattison

TO this day, the armed rebellion that took place during Easter Week of 1916 in Dublin, known as the ‘Easter Rising’, remains controversial.  Some see it as a courageous and brave act that led to the birth of the Irish Republic, whereas, others, see it as a reckless act of folly, an attempted revolt against Britain while we were at war with Germany.  British intelligence was certainly aware of the planned rising and the armed shipments from Germany, which also went to the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), formed in 1913.

Most of the people, who died during the six days of the rebellion, which was supported by Germany, were Irish, mostly civilians, and the poor of Dublin.  And they died for a cause that they hardly understood or supported.  Moreover, many Irish people were aware in 1916 that Irish Home Rule was on the cards and that partition was inevitable.   In January 1913, the Third Reading of the Home Rule Bill had been carried in Parliament and the Government of Ireland Act 1914, provide home rule for Ireland.

According to the author of this book, nearly a hundred Irish rebels travelled to Ireland from cities in England and Scotland during the early months of 1916 to participate in an armed uprising which they had heard about.  Those from England were frequently described as ‘London Irish’ despite being from other parts of England, such as the city of Liverpool.  Some of those who participated during Easter Week also came from the Manchester area and Stockport and this book, is largely about four of those Manchester volunteers.  Only two of the volunteers were born in Ireland. These are Liam Parr and Redmond Cox. Gilbert Lynch, was from Reddish in Stockport and Larry Ryan, was born in Salford. 

Liam Parr had left Dublin about 1910 when he was 19-years-old and had settled in West Didsbury, in South Manchester.  He left Manchester in February 1916 to travel to Dublin and undertook military and munitions training at Kimmage Mill, Larkfield, Dublin.  On Easter Monday 1916, Parr was in the Liberty Hall office, the headquarters of the Irish Transport & General Workers Union (ITGWU) and was one of the first to take over the GPO office on Sackville Street, on Monday afternoon.  After the surrender on Saturday afternoon, he was arrested and returned to England where he was interned in a camp in Frongoch, Wales. 

Redmond Cox was born in Boyle County, Roscommon, in 1893.  As a 22-year-old, he’d been living in Cheetham, Manchester, with his sister.  He travelled to Dublin in February 1916. Before surrendering, Cox had been in ‘Four Courts’ and he was later arrested and returned to England.  He was released from imprisonment after a fortnight. 

Gilbert Lynch had been born in Reddish, Stockport, in 1892.  A devout Catholic, he joined the National League of Young Liberals in 1908 and was involved with the Clarion in 1916.  He claimed to have been a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (Fenians) in 1913 and to have joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1917.  A member of Stockport Trades Council, he said that his political outlook had been influenced by reading “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist.”  A gun-runner, Lynch arrived in Dublin the week before Easter with 500 rounds of .303 ammunition and had been carrying small-arms.  During Easter week he had been based in Father Matthew Hall, which was being used as a first-aid station and to detain prisoners and spies.  Lynch escaped arrest because he had been in hospital having 'twisted his ankle getting over a barricade.'   He later made his way back to Stockport.

Laurence (Larry) Ryan was born in Salford in 1894. His mother lived in Seedley in Salford.  Unlike the others, it is not known when Ryan travelled to Dublin, but he did train at Kimmage Mill and was one of the first, to take up a position in the GPO building.  After the surrender, Ryan was arrested and returned to England. He was interned until Christmas in Frongoch camp in Wales.

On Easter Monday 1916, the rebel’s had planned to occupy the General Post Office building on Sackville Street, Dublin, and to use this building as their headquarters.  Many of the leaders including James Connolly, a socialist who had been born in Cowgate, Edinburgh, mistakenly believed that the English imperialists would not use artillery because they would not bomb their own property. Therefore, they expected an infantry attack on the GPO building and posted battalions in four main positions outside the city centre to command the routes that British soldiers would take to attack the GPO. The rebel plan also involved armed risings in the rest of the country.  Bolands Bakery, the Marrowbone Lane Distillery, the South Dublin Union Workhouse and the Jacobs factory, were all sites of revolt.  Some of the rebels did use Mauser rifles that had been provided by the Germans and brought to Ireland by Erskine and Molly Childers in their yacht ‘Asgard’ in July 1914.  The Easter Rising lasted six days before the rebels on the instructions of their leaders, surrendered on the Saturday.

On the third day of the rebellion, Patrick Pearse, a barrister, writer, schoolteacher and nationalist mystic with a martyr complex, had told the rebels in the GPO building that the country was steadily rising and that volunteers were marching from Dundalk on Dublin and that reinforcements would arrive and release them.  'They were later told by a visitor of the despondency in the city as well as the news that the country had not risen.'  Connolly was certainly aware, that after the surrender, all those who had signed the proclamation of the Irish Republic, would be shot by the British and that this was a cause he was happy to die for.  He told others that they were likely to be imprisoned and should keep quiet about what they had done. 

After the surrender, many volunteers recalled the hostility and abuse they had encountered from many Dubliners. Con Colbert, who was later shot in Kilmainham Gaol, said after the surrender: 'the people who we have tried to emancipate have demonstrated nothing but hate and contempt for us.'

Hidden Heroes of Easter Week is a book that is well worth reading.   Robin Stocks has done a great deal research on this book and many of the accounts given by the volunteers who took part during Easter Week in Dublin are based on witness statements, interviews with family members and research done in archives and libraries in England and Ireland.  Where I think this book is at its weakest, is in its lack of analysis of the rising itself and what effect it had on Irish society.

This book does not mention that 450 people were killed and 2,500 injured during the rising and nine reported missing.  Among the dead, were 117 soldiers, 41 of them Irish, plus 16 armed and unarmed policeman, all Irish. Some 64 volunteers out of a total of 1,500, who played some part in the rising, were also killed.  However, alongside 205 combatants who died, 245 wholly innocent civilians also died. The dead were mostly Irish civilians and Dublin’s poor, who died for a cause they barely understood or supported or were even hostile to.  Some saw it as an opportunity for looting.  Many of the civilians were killed by British forces using machine-gun fire, incendiary shells and artillery. 

As Robin Stocks makes clear, not all leading Republicans were in favour of the insurrection. Bulmer Hobson, a leading Fenian, considered it a reckless adventure.  Speaking after the rising, Hobson said that towards the end of 1915, Connolly (who had served in the British army in Ireland), had decided to have a 'little insurrection' with the citizen army. 

'His conversation was full of clichés derived from the earlier days of the socialist movement in Europe.  He told me that the working-class was always revolutionary, that Ireland was powder magazine and that what was necessary was for someone to apply the match.  I replied that if he must talk in metaphors, Ireland was a wet bog and the match would fall in the puddle.'

He described Patrick Pearse as a 'sentimental egoist, full of curious Old Testament theories about being the scapegoat of the people who had become convinced of the necessity for a periodic blood sacrifice to keep the national spirit alive.  There was a certain strain of abnormality in all this.'

Before leading his men out of Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU), on Easter Monday, to start a rebellion, we are told that Connolly had said ‘smilingly’: 'Well girls, we start operations at noon today.  This is the proclamation of the republic.'  What we are not told in this book, is that on the way out of the building,  Connolly halted at the bottom of the stairs to speak with his friend and colleague William O’Brien. Connolly told him:

'Bill, we are going out to be slaughtered.  Is there any chance?', asked O’Brien.  'None whatsoever', said Connolly.  He then marched his men out of the building along with his fifteen year old son, Roderick (Roddy ) Connolly, who would survive the rising.

Although fifteen of the rebel leaders were executed, many of those who took part in the rising were treated with surprising leniency by the British authorities, including the four Manchester volunteers. Some 3,430 men and 79 women were arrested after the rising and 1,424 men and 73 women were subsequently released.  Of almost 2,000 men who were interned in England, over 1,200 were quickly released and most of the others were home by Christmas 1916.  All were freed under a general amnesty in July 1917.  Those who faced a court martial, included 170 men and one woman, Constance Markievicz.  Ninety death sentences were passed and fifteen carried out.  Those sentenced to life imprisonment, were released within 18-months.

Today, many Republican groups and trade unions in Ireland, have adopted James Connolly as their patron saint or founding father.  While it is true to say that the execution of the rebel leaders produced sympathy for the cause and turned the men into martyrs,  Connolly’s influence was marginalised after the rising – all of Connolly’s children took the anti-Treaty side. Ireland did not become the workers socialist republic that Connolly had wished for.  What emerged triumphant from the Easter Rising was Irish Catholic Nationalism and it was Pearse’s vision of Ireland, which was elevated.  There was little support for Marxism in Ireland before the rising and afterwards and many Sinn Fein and IRA members were fiercely anti-Communist.  Indeed, in the 1960s, communists were banned from the Republican movement. Ireland under Eamonn de Valera’s, Fianna Fail, was protectionist, isolationist, and obedient to the Catholic hierarchy.  Divorce, contraception and abortion, were all illegal.  It was a world of secrecy and obedience with its Magdalene laundries and the subordination of women. It survived by exporting its young, mainly to Britain, where they could earn a living.  The Irish Catholic Church supported Franco during the Spanish Civil War and some Irish Catholic’s, fought with the Blueshirt’s on the nationalist side under Eoin O’Duffy.  Others supported the Republican side. 

None of the Manchester volunteers fought in the civil war which broke out in Ireland in 1922 following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, which was supported by a majority of Irish people.  It had been estimated that six times more nationalists were killed in the war than had been killed by the British forces between 1916-1922. 

Tragically, we now know that Admiralty SIGINT Unit, Room 40, had been intercepting decrypted messages dealing with German support for the Irish nationalists between the outbreak of WW1 and the eve of the Easter Rising in 1916.  Under interrogation at Scotland Yard, Sir Roger Casement, asked to be allowed to call for the rising to be called off to avoid a blood bath, but this was refused. Sir Reginald (Blinker) Hall is reputed to have told Casement – 'It is better that a cankering sore like this should be cut out.'

******

Loneliness of the Longdistance Whistleblower!

by Brian Bamford

Derek Pattison - Joint Editor wrote on 9th, March 2017:

'I feel compelled to comment. There is no doubt that Mr. Wainwright's help in exposing this blacklisting scandal, was absolutely invaluable to many building workers.  This was because he was a 'blacklister' turned 'whistleblower' and had valuable inside information.  However, when he gave evidence to the Scottish Affairs Select Committee, he was asked at what point he realised that there was something reprehensible or immoral about blacklisting construction workers.
'Many people (including those on the Scottish Affairs Select Ccommittee) felt that he did not act as he did, because his conscious pricked him, but because he had been shit on by the company he worked for when he raised the issue of alleged corrupt practices and they took detrimental action against him. Some people feel that he really blew the whistle because he was a disgruntled employee who wanted to get back at the company that he worked for.
'There is nothing surprising about this and people often do blow the whistle for similar and not unrelated reasons, rather than acting in the public interest.
'Mr Wainwright refers to his meeting with Ian Kerr.  As I understand it, Kerr said in his evidence to the SASC, that Mr. Wainwright had said that Tarmac (the company he worked for, now Carillion) did not need his services because they had their own information about construction workers and could operate their own blacklist.
'Understandably, Mr Wainwright will now want to minimise his involvement in this scandalous practice of blacklisting, and engage in ex-post facto rationalisations.  No doubt, Alan will be happy to expand on these matters and answer questions about this, when he meets trades unionist to talk about his role in the blacklisting of construction workers.'

Derek Pattison, the joint-editor of Northern Voices, wrote the comment above earlier this month in response to an appeal from the whistle-blower and former costruction industry boss, Alan Wainwright in a legal case against Balfour Beatty.  Derek, in his account below, was clearly anxious to show that there is much that is complicated in the affairs of men and women:  the line between morality and expediency may well be a fine one.  It is now worth reminding ourselves by re-reading what the journalist Rob Evans had to say in The Guardian on Friday the 15th, May 2009:

Alan Wainwright: The lonely life of a construction industry whistleblower 

by Rob Evans Friday 15 May 2009 01.00 BST

Blacklist whistleblower, Alan Wainwright. Photograph: Christopher Thomond 

How former manager exposed how workers were being secretly blacklisted. 

ALAN WAINWRIGHT is a whistleblower who appears to have had a significant hand in changing government policy. The one-time construction manager used his inside knowledge to expose the clandestine use by companies of blacklisting that has prevented trade unionists and alleged "troublemakers" getting jobs.

By going public, he set off a chain of events which resulted, on Monday, in an announcement from the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, that the government was finally going to outlaw covert blacklists. Mandelson had been forced to act after a watchdog closed down a private investigator allegedly at the heart of blacklisting in the construction industry. Wainwright played a key role in helping to unmask the investigator, who is due to be prosecuted for breaking the data protection act on 27 May. This week he is pleased, but keen to stress that others, including trade unionists and politicians, deserve the credit as well.
He has trodden the familiar path of a whistleblower – battling for a long time in obscurity while being ignored by those in power: "It was demoralising not to be believed." Like other whistleblowers, he suffered for going public – losing his job, having no income, using up all his savings to live, experiencing a lot of stress, and fearing he would be evicted from his home: "It affects your relationship with your children, who are the most important thing in my life."

Industrial strife

Wainwright, 45, grew up in Deeside, north Wales. He started off as an electrician then ran a recruitment agency before being recruited by the Tarmac construction firm.
His whistleblowing story starts in 1997 when he was the national labour manager at an engineering company, Crown House (then a Tarmac subsidiary). He had been told by a senior manager that construction companies paid a private investigator, Ian Kerr, for information to "ensure that certain workers did not gain employment on their projects". He was told to meet Kerr because the vetting was being extended to Crown House's labour force.

"He [Kerr] definitely made it clear that they were undesirable people who had a history of causing disruption to projects," Wainwright says.
He had two meetings with Kerr, who said that many construction firms supplied him with details of workers on his database. As an example, Wainwright was shown a list of more than 100 names. According to Wainwright, Kerr said that when someone applied for a job, the company would forward their name to him so he could check his database. Wainwright said that if a worker was rejected, a simple "no" would come back, with no other explanation.
Wainwright's department faxed a weekly list of names to Kerr; later the lists went to Tarmac's head office: "It was very discreet, a closely guarded secret. It was made clear to me that I was not to discuss it with anybody, and I didn't." However, something was stirring in his mind: "I knew deep down that there was something wrong with it."
Yesterday, Laing O'Rourke, which now owns Crown House, said that in recent years it had bought companies which had paid Kerr, but this had been stopped.  In 2000, Wainwright briefly worked for the Drake and Scull construction firm. He said his managers sent him a list of 500 workers, with their national insurance numbers, which it had received from rival construction firm Balfour Beatty.  He said the listed workers had been employed on three large construction projects that had seen a lot of industrial strife, and that the list was distributed to managers to ensure some workers were not employed.  The memo, dated August 2000, advised him to "keep this information confidential".
The Emcor construction company, which owns Drake and Scull, said it was aware of the list described by Wainwright: "We have employed individuals named on that list, at the time and subsequently. We do not condone blacklists."
By 2004, Wainwright was a manager for Haden Young, a subsidiary of Balfour Beatty. Within a year, he came across what he thought was fraud by employees, but says his bosses were not interested in finding out the truth – a claim they deny. "The management shunned me," he says. "It got to the point where I felt very isolated, alone and alienated. It was one of the most distressing periods of my life."  He initiated a grievance complaint against the company, but began to worry that he himself would be branded a troublemaker.

In a letter to his head office in July 2005, he wrote: "The company operates a blacklisting procedure for new recruits and hired temporary agency workers to check for any previous history of union militancy, troublemaking."
Copies of Haden Young faxes from the time show lists of names being faxed to head office so that, he believes, they could be vetted.
Yesterday Balfour Beatty said it did "not condone the use of 'blacklists' in any circumstances and has taken steps to ensure that none of our companies use such services."  In 2006, Wainwright quit Haden Young but lost an employment tribunal claim. He was by then convinced that he had been blacklisted as he had applied unsuccessfully for more than 150 jobs.  He believed he had to make a concerted effort to expose the blacklisting if he were ever going to get work. He set up a website and posted names of hundreds of workers he believed had been blacklisted to alert them.

Unfair dismissal

He linked up with workers who thought they were being blacklisted, shared his inside information with them and gave evidence for them in industrial tribunals.  Three workers won their case in 2007 for unfair dismissal when a tribunal concluded that a "disgraceful" blacklist did exist in the construction industry.  A Guardian article on the cases last June caught the attention of the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, the official privacy watchdog.  He investigated because he was worried that workers were unfairly being denied jobs.  As Wainwright had met Kerr and still had documents concerning the alleged blacklisting, he was able to help him.  Investigators raided Haden Young premises and tracked down the elusive Kerr to a nondescript office in Droitwich, Worcestershire. In February, they raided Kerr's premises and seized a secret database of 3,200 workers, effectively finishing the 66-year-old's business.
Thomas then named 40 construction firms including Balfour Beatty, Sir Robert McAlpine, Laing O'Rourke, Emcor and Crown House, which he said had been clandestinely using the database to vet potential workers. According to Thomas, the firms bought details of the individuals' trade union activities and work record from Kerr. Workers were said to be labelled, for example, as "Communist party", "lazy and a trouble-stirrer", "Do not touch" and "Irish ex-army bad egg".  Among the entries was one on Wainwright recording how he had helped blacklisted workers.
Now the jovial Wainwright is happily out of the construction industry and working for a concert ticket business.
He is animated about who are the ultimate culprits –  the directors of the construction companies. "Ian Kerr is not the primary cause of this.  The companies set him up in business, funded his existence from the start, and each name on the list would have been provided by the companies.  The directors took the decisions to join the system."

He is not ready to celebrate the end of blacklisting yet as he is waiting to see if Mandelson manages to draw up a proper law to eradicate it. "I am cautiously optimistic, however," he says.
Alan Wainwright's new blog on the construction industry blacklist is now live

Alan Wainwright: the CV

Born Chester 1963.
Career 1979-1989, qualified electrician; 1989-1993, managing director of own recruitment business; 1993-2000, national labour manager, Crown House; 2000, business improvement director at Emcor Drake & Scull; 2001-2004, human resources consultancy work; 2004-2005, production manager, Haden Young; 2006-present, concert ticket buyer, after 200 unsuccessful job applications.
Family Divorced, son 21 and daughter 19.
Interests Writing, performing and watching live music.