Western liberals’ weakness on blasphemy is letting down Muslim dissenters

Posted on the National Secular Society website by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid on Wed, 31 Mar 2021

The hand-wringing in the face of a vicious campaign against a teacher sends a demoralising message to those fighting for free speech on religion globally and in British Muslim communities, says Kunwar Khuldune Shahid.

The Batley Grammar School teacher who has been suspended, and gone into hiding, after showing a caricature of Islam's prophet Muhammad in class last week, now understandably worries that he might be killed. While the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) worries that the teacher may have shown an image that "plays into" an "Islamophobic trope", and many on the Western left similarly wring their hands, it remains unclear if fearing for one's life over offending Islam also constitutes a phobia. Others, graciously, have responded by quickly condemning 'extremists on both sides', as if the defence of liberal principles were equivalent to Islamist intimidation.

After the satirical French publication Charlie Hebdo was targeted in a jihadist attack, the gruesome murder of its journalists was rationalised through the 'Islamophobia' that it was guilty of, for treating Islam like any other religion. When French schoolteacher Samuel Paty was decapitated after showing Charlie Hebdo's caricatures in school, 'Islamophobia' once again became the rallying cry.

At first it was a publication's act of satirising Islam that translated into asking to be murdered. Now it's teachers showing those cartoons in lessons on blasphemy that is translating into 'asking for it'. Next it may well be critics of this blatant endorsement of Islamic blasphemy laws in the West who might 'ask for it'.

This gruesome eventuality has long been a reality in Muslim-majority countries, where individuals have been killed for mere criticism of the blasphemy laws. A dozen Muslim states sanction death for blasphemy and apostasy, and 20 mandate prison sentences. The day the Batley Grammar School teacher was suspended, and left at the mercy of radical Islamists, yet another man was killed for blasphemy in Pakistan. Since then, over the past week, radical Islamists have initiated violent protests in Bangladesh demanding, among other means of institutionalised persecution, capital punishment for blasphemy against Islam. On Tuesday, a man was burnt to death in Nigeria for 'insulting prophet Muhammad'.

It is impossible to separate the Islamist blasphemy laws in Muslim-majority countries and the demands to silence critique, caricaturing and satire of Islam by Muslim minorities. It shouldn't need saying but it is actually possible to uncompromisingly defend the rights of minorities, and shield them from majoritarian groups, without mollycoddling them over regressive and often downright bigoted beliefs.

Similarly, drawing cartoons or mocking religious beliefs as satire, or exposing believers to ideas completely antipodal to their beliefs in critical learning settings, do not constitute persecution. An offence, or its gravity, needs to be universally applicable and cannot be determined by the reaction of a group. Otherwise, we're a Hindutva attack on a steakhouse away from equating beef cuisine with persecution of Hindus.

Sketches or depictions of Muhammad are no more prohibited in Islam than cow slaughter is in Hinduism; or more poignantly, no more offensive than Hindu wives outliving husbands was two centuries ago. Europe consumed centuries over 'religion wars' between Christian sects which found one another's beliefs offensive. The rise of a radical, and puritanical, literalist brand of Islam, impacting Muslim majorities and minorities alike, is a corollary of a similar sectarian warfare within Islam today.

Some interpretations of Islam have long incorporated the tradition of drawing Muhammad, which means that the ubiquitous claims masquerading as fact that 'Islam prohibits depictions of Muhammad' or that 'Muslims are offended' by such illustrations paints all Muslims with a monolithic, and arguably regressive, brush.

However, even if there is a 'true' version of religion that might uphold certain beliefs, and even if every single one of its billions of adherents were to endorse them identically, that still cannot be used as justification to suppress rights, including the fundamental freedom of speech. And the only legal asterisk on this right should be explicit incitement to violence.

Again, to hold offended sensibilities as the limit of free speech is to not only fail miserably in understanding the very need for protection of such a freedom — since what is acceptable by all doesn't have to be guarded. It is also to constantly lower the threshold of what is 'offensive'. Even more critically, it can shield ideologues from countering viewpoints, which often is the raison d'etre of protests undertaken by those believing their ideas to be the ultimate truth.

Perhaps most pungently, endorsement of this censorship on the part of Western liberals makes it harder to normalise criticism of religion and undermines the fight against Islamic blasphemy laws that hang like a sword over millions in Muslim-majority countries. More than just an ideological regression on the part of the left, such upholding of Islamist ideas has even translated into European courts upholding blasphemy laws that many from Muslim majority countries are escaping from. And in acquiescing to the Islamist narrative in the garb of 'protecting Muslims', liberals in the West have not only abandoned dissidents in Muslim-majority countries, they have also helped facilitate regression of Muslim minorities in their own countries.

When the MCB's first ever female leader was asked questions that would be considered extremely basic for any other community, those otherwise unflinching in their quest for gender quality instinctively shouted 'Islamophobia'. Much of the western left embraces the MCB's calls for 'inclusivity' and 'care' when faced with cartoons. It showed less interest when, for example, an Ahmadi Muslim shopkeeper was killed in an Islamist attack in 2016 – and the Muslim Council of Britain's focus was declaring that 'Ahmadis are not Muslims'.

Shouldn't such marginalisation or violence committed for Islam, or the fear of one's life over cartoons on Islam, be the bigger concern here?

Shouldn't more energy be dedicated towards elimination of this widespread belief, codified in many Muslim-majority countries, but also preached in many mosques in the West, that blasphemy against Islam merits death?

One doesn't have to be a linguist to discern the contrast between statements issued by many Muslim community groups over killings in the name of Islam, and satire of Islam.

Indeed, Western liberals are complicit in facilitating these Islamic blasphemy narratives around the world. For, when states otherwise upholding free speech on religion start backtracking, those living in countries where blasphemy still mandates death will have little hope.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid is a writer and social commentator based in Pakistan. The views expressed in our blogs are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the NSS.

The Working Class & Leftist Delusion

 by Andrew Wallace

LEFTISM gets itself into bogged down into certain delusional mythologies, one of which concerns the romanticisation of the working work, the heroic proletarian toilers and tillers of the earth,  preordained by Marxist gospel to act as the historical revolutionary agent to overthrow capitalism.  Marx had been pretty disparaging about peasants and 'rural idiocy', instead he and his fellow 19th century socialists felt that a newly emergent class of industrial labourers would shape up as the critical agents of modernity.

Alas some 140 years after Marx's death the working classes across the globe remain as distant from this pre-ordained enterprise as they ever were.  Indeed it seems quite the converse; the working class as hitherto constituted has played a most passive if indeed not reactionary role.

Leftist pretensions to scientific rigour can no longer disguise the romantic fallacy and cognitive bias of 'The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed'. As Bertrand Russell tartly observed 'Marx was the Wordsworth of the proletariat; its Freud is still to come."

David Selbourne has dissected this fallacious intellectual cul-de-sac as:

'prodigies of useless intellectual labour, whose largely metaphysical character is determined  by the metaphysical nature of the problems to which they seek a solution At the lowest political level, however masked by intellectual sophistication, they can descend to disappointed abuse of the working class for having failed to live up to middle-class socialist expectation. Theories, as we have seen, of 'consumerism', of the 'deferential' working class, of the 'long catalepsy' of the British working-class movement, of a class consciousness 'subordinate' in its very 'texture' to the 'hegemony of the bourgeois', all have silently inscribed within them the figure of a politically defective proletarian who is the obverse of the archetypally active class hero of socialist romance, first cousin to Dyden's noble savage.'

A truth which can still barely be alighted upon in progressive circles, 'socialism' is a not a product of the working class worldview, instead it is a quixotic interloper of sorts, a radical import of déclassé intellectuals who had reason to take issue with the corrosive workings and hardships of industrial capitalism. The wage labourers of course bore the brunt of the exploitative economics that coerced them to work in the most degrading of conditions and had active interests in agitating for improvements in their lot. However 'labourism' isn't 'socialism', whereby the former is to be realised in seeking redress to particular grievances and privations rather than the latter politically undefined and radical goal of usurping the settlement of the day.  Conservatism presented itself in the passivity of the general population and the consequent isolation and containment of dangerous radicals and agitators who threatened to bring anarchy to social order.

Marxism has had the unenviable task of confronting this conspicuous turd in a swimming pool with a battery of impressive rationalisations. Chief amongst these is the infamous idea of false consciousness which has been taken as an unfortunate slur on character in the same way ignorance as a descriptor is taken as an insult even though a concise definition isn't morally pejorative.

Marxists have also proved adept at accounting for a multitude of countervailing tendencies that militate against economic immiseration, such as the co-opting of 'bourgeois' sociology's 'embourgeoisment thesis' of middle class expansion, thereby muddying the waters of class conflict via a bought off 'aristocracy of labour'.

Leftist intellectuals then have erred in projecting a radical telos onto the working class arena, ignoring the utilitarian and individualistic basis to labour politics and the voluntarist and anti-statist ethos that marked these communities. They have also been oblivious to the deep structural incorporation of working class material resources into the capitalist system through mortgage and hire purchase.

However other sociologists have attempted to sidestep the theoretical travails of working class conservatism and the 'deviant' class voter by pointing out the not unsurprising reality of hegemony by way of the deep state ancien regime of a living museum pageantry (monarchy, parliament, church, armed forces, public schools, civil service, BBC) which naturally defaults us all to the dominant culture. Ironically this confinement to functionalist observation and impotent commentary rather nullifies Marx's famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach which implored for more action and less philosophical windbaggery!

It's the culture, stupid

The class voting sociology (Marxism ‘lite’) of the post war years is now having to contend with the other belated but uncontroversial driver of voting behaviour - culture!  As analysists are now recognising, voters are motivated by cultural issues which may not easily be subsumed within an economic paradigm and furthermore may actually be oppositional to the traditional material class interests.  Bourdieu's ideas on social and cultural capital have helped to redress the balance by giving due prominence to education and the cognitive repertoire that help to constitute social class in the modern era.

Many left revisionists had already discerned that traditional class based politics were becoming problematic with declining working class vote share from the 1960s onwards alongside a new counter cultural zeitgeist. With deindustrialisation poised to pulp much of manufacturing and decimate organised labour, Hobsbawm and Gorz wrote in unflinching terms of the likely recalibration of socialist politics. Gorz talked of moving away from class politics in favour of the 'new social movements'. This turn to identity and culture politics followed in the wake of disenchantment with the 'backward' working class. However such doubling down on the new politics exacerbated the cultural and intellectual chasm between the liberal campus radicals and the more socially conservative blue collar workers, leading to a further breakdown of the previous broad based social alliances between the classes.

Working class Hobbesian attitudes to the Welfare State

Fern Brady writing for The Guardian was taken aback by the distinctive authoritarian attitudes towards benefit claimants, particularly the unemployed and disabled.  Those without obvious physical markers of disability were often the target of an inglorious brutalism unveiled in her interviewees who amply demonstrated

(an) 'internalised...Thatcherite every-man-for-himself mentality, wanting benefits for themselves but resenting anyone else getting a handout...it went in a circle, anger constantly directed at other victims of the coalition government's Welfare Reform  Act instead of the politicians and policymakers responsible.'

Houtman et al drawing on Bourdieu’s work discerned the recourse to a 'deserving/undeserving' criteria in relationship to limited social capital and associated authoritarian attitudes which also were marked by penalising attitudes for 'out-groups' and fringe communities.

So ought we really to be surprised at this abundance of working class authoritarianism?  Again Selbourne is illuminative on precisely this point:

‘...any form of illiberalism in the human-as worker can come to be discounted or recycled as an aberration from the norm of a supposedly instinctive or class, predilection for progressive, fraternal and democratic solutions to social and economic problems. That history does not reveal the latter unequivocally, to put it mildly, is inconvenient. Indeed, illiberalism is as much an ideological choice of direction as any other and more explicable, in conditions of insecurity or fear of unemployment, than many’

In critically disabusing leftism of its ludicrous 'salt of the earth' workerism, it is not my intention to deny the very real and toxic nature of capitalism and I continue to desire even if without much hope that a saner politics emerge to reign in the excesses of our times.  However we need to face up to the increasing intellectual bankruptcy of the left.  We are now very much at the whims of the political right who continue to exploit the post liberal environment in their canny take on working class sensitivities.  'White van conservatism' and Boris's new 'Workers' Party' are set to run the show into the distant future.

I have drawn on the following essays/books/articles during the writing of this article:

• The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed, (1937) Bertrand Russell
• Against Socialist Illusion (1985), David Selbourne
• http://www.leninology.co.uk/2010/10/working-class-tory-is-something-to-be.html
• Working Class Conservatives: A Theory of Political Deviance (1967), Frank Parkin
• Social Class in the 21^st Century (2015), Mike Savage
• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/12/anti-welfare-rhetoric-families
• https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9966722/Welfare-reform-Its-class-war-but-not-in-the-way-youd-expect.html
• Farewell to the Leftist Working Class (2008), Houtman, Achterberg & Derks
• The Forward March of Labour Halted? (1978) Eric Hobsbawm
• Farewell to the Working Class (1980), Andre Gorz
• National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy (2018), Matthew Goodwin

John Walker challenges Les May's analysis

DEAR LES (MAY),

I defer to nobody in my admiration for your dogged and forensic analysis of Danczuk and his book. Were others more aware of it, we could have been spared the adulation that he received as he dragged his collecting tin around TV studios and newspaper offices promoting both it and himself.

However, I would disagree with your analysis in this article - and, for once, think that Danczuk called it right about the role of prominent Liberals, nationally and locally - in their silence over the matters that the Child Abuse inquiry examined.  Indeed, the inquiry itself was critical of the role of later LibDem MP Paul Rowen, when he was leader of Rochdale council.

Where I think Danczuk hit the nail on the head, in particular, is about David (now Lord) Steel.

Steel was leader of the Liberal Party at the time RAP published its allegations about Smith in May 1979.  We (I was co-editor of the paper), on legal advice, wrote to Steel for his comments on the story, prior to publication.  We published the response of his press secretary - 'nothing much to see here - move on' was a paraphrase of that response.

I have challenged Steel about this publicly, over recent years - on the airwaves (World At One) and in print (Private Eye).  His responses have wavered between: 'I didn't know', to 'nobody else took the matter up, so it couldn't have been important', to it 'it was just tittle tattle that didn't merit investigation'.

Well, clearly all three of those explanations can't be right.

At the time RAP published the story, the Liberals former leader Jeremy Thorpe was facing trial on conspiracy to murder (a docu-drama on this will be shown by the BBC soon), and another of the handful of Liberal MPs (Peter Bessel) was in severe financial and other difficulties, on both sides of the Atlantic, that eventually caused him to stand down from Parliament.  There was not a national political journalist in Westminster who was not aware of the RAP story.

It is inconceivable that the leader of a party with only a dozen or so MPs, with two of them up to their neck in serious trouble would not have taken rumours about a third very seriously and attempted to establish what was going on.  Either that, or Steel was a seriously deficient party leader - and few people have accused him of that.

Two postumous biographies of Jeremy Thorpe have made it very clear that Thorpe's solicitor was very aware of the RAP/Smith story and were fearful that it would adversely impact on their client at his trial.  They went to considerable ends to ensure that Fleet Street did not touch the story - including using the considerable weight and influence of Harold Wilson's then 'Lord - fixit' Arnold Goodman to keep the papers quiet.

So in in a calculated gamble - Steel just braved it out.  Nobody picked up the story, and his party was saved further embarrassment.

One result of no action being taken against Smith is that others with deviant interests in under age boys would have been emboldend to think that they too could get away with inappropriate behaviour. The terrible trail of abuse at Knowl View is one possible outcome.

To return to David Steel. The Child Abuse inquiry is critical of the process by which Smith was knighted in 1988, and is critical of Thatcher (the awarding Prime Minister), and the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee - PHSC - (the body responsible for vetting the appropriateness of nominees)for allowing his name to go forward to the queen, to appoint.

I have written elsewhere ('The Queen Has Been Pleased - 500 years of corruption in the British Honours System' - Secker and Warburg 1986) of the supine, establishment white-washing nature of the Committee.  So their turning a blind eye to the Smith knighthood was simply par for the course for them at the time.

The Child Abuse Inquiry rather missed the point about Smith's knighthood.  The nomination for a political honour - for that is what it was - would have had to have come from the recipient's party leader. In this case - David Steel. Despite what was known in the Liberal Party about Smith and Cambridge House - Steel was still prepared to nominate Smith.  The inquiry's opprobrium about Smith's knighthood should have been directed at Steel and not Thatcher or the PHSC.

Why should Steel have nominated Smith at that time, for that award? Well, his party was in a delicate stage of negotiations with the SDP about a merger - Smith was always a loud mouthed maverick.  The offer and award of a knighthood could be used to shut him up and get one potential obstacle our of the way for Steel, as he sought to cement the merger.  And as we know: Smith got his knighthood, his silence was achieved and the Liberal Democratic Party was born.

David Steel was the teflon man as far as the Child Abuse Inquiry was concerned - not a witness, nor a feature of its report.

I think the report had many deficiencies - and the void around Steel was one of them.

For once - I agree with Danczuk on the Liberals escaping blame. But I won't be taking up his offer of a drink, to celebrate!

John Walker:  former joint editor of Rochdale's Alternative Paper (RAP)

NOAM CHOMSKY & ANTIFA

Back in 2010 Noam Chomsky discussed the parallels between the Tea-Party and the pre-Nazi period in Germany.  Chomsky noted that after the Weimar Republic failed to handle the nation's economic woes, mainstream political parties lost support and the Nazis emerged.  Chomsky warned that the Left would need to take this as a sign that much better organizing was in order to combat the likes of the Tea-Party.  Mocking and threatening the far-right group to Chomsky served no real purpose and was a severe error in principle, tactics, and philosophy.

Chomsky added that, “If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response.”

Don’t get me wrong, many of my friends on the Left admire Antifa’s resistance of neo-Nazis.  And like me they express deep concerns about our persistently fascist leaning country that has devolved in terms of climate, the economy, as well as a variety of social issues.  I am not however, a “soft-fascist,” or “typical liberal,” for supporting Chomsky’s views.  Nor are Chomsky critics all members of a Stalinist cult because they may support Antifa through and through.

Believe me, I’d love to punch Nazis and you can count me in to be an eternal member of resistance to both fringe and mainstream hate, but I’m not sure it would yield any positive result to use my progressive thought as a literal battering ram.  Despite the horrors of this nation’s past and present on so many issues, resorting to violence against a group that thrives on violence seems counterproductive.

Could it be that Chomsky is wrong and his detractors are right?  Could it be that there’s no time for supplicant MLK type resolve in 2017?  I think the broader Left has history on their side.

President Trump made dangerous and inaccurate remarks concerning the “many sides” of Charlottesville.  At the same time, Chomsky correctly asserted that Antifa’s actions served as “a major gift to the Right, including the militant Right, who [are] exuberant.”

He asserted that Antifa "generally [proves] self-destructive."  Furthermore, Chomsky remarked that Antifa indicates “a minuscule fringe of the Left,” and that "[W]hat they do is often wrong in principle — like blocking talks."

This positioning is very consistent with most of his career.  After taking off as a world-renowned linguist Chomsky first gained prominence as a political writer during the Vietnam Era and one of his main sources of inspiration was the famed revolutionary pacifist A.J. Muste.

Muste is famous for articulating,  “There is no way to peace for peace is the way. Peace is the starting place, and you can not end with it if you do not begin with it.”  This helps to explain why Chomsky says that the "toughest and most brutal" always win, which are of course the white supremacists, militarized police forces, government forces, and fascists.

When Chomsky recognizes that there are “opportunity costs [and a] loss of the opportunity for education, organizing, and serious and constructive activism,” it doesn’t mean he is a pure pacifist either.  He holds that force is only an option after you fully exhaust peaceful means, and one must try every peaceable mean.  Any use of violence on the Left must follow this trajectory since violence in combatting fascist elements and their support networks require massive organizing efforts and highly trained insurgency techniques.  At the moment however Chomsky holds that Antifa is not even remotely related to anarchism.

He is not mistaken to ask Antifa to think through their actions along with the consequences.  This does not equate to showing any patience for the racist right. Chris Hedges, who took even more heat for his commentary, is simply asking for the same amount of introspection regarding tactics.
Tony DiMaggio has managed to stay out of the Left’s crosshairs unlike Chomsky and Hedges, but I believe he too is correct in his assertions.  DiMaggio knows that violence is a part of the real world but remarks that “violence is never something one should actively seek out.”

Fascists, neo-Nazis and right wing terrorists do indeed try to fuse first amendment assembly rights of know-nothings to justifications for violence.  In many ways the mainstream Alt-Right acts much like ISIS, another by-product of failed policies.  Of course, the Left and Antifa is not the same as the Alt-Right, for there is no such thing as an “Alt-Left.”  But this is however precisely why it’s harmful to entertain violence and the fascist playbook. Similar to Osama bin Laden wanting Bush 43 to engage in a crusade, the Alt-Right wants the Left in a violent war to destroy constructive engagement within the Left internally.

Todd Gitlin is correct when he asserts that, “In truth, there is no symmetry between the “alt-right” and “antifa.”  Antifa is the backlash to the backlash, a defensive response to the growing presence of right-wing extremism.”  Gitlin goes on to add however that, “many antifa activists do not think strategically about whom they alienate.”

John Halle is another person who took principled positions on Antifa. He agrees with the politics of the Left but sees a problem with tactics.  Halle simply states that violence, for instance on a university campus in the protest of a speaker, has boiled over when a moderator is assaulted and sustains injuries.
Chomsky told me that although he received some support for his comments on Antifa, he mostly received furious opposition.  Anarchism is of course not some vague, ill-organized and unclassifiable group like Antifa demonstrated.  Chomsky stated that Antifa might be operating on a romanticized vision of muscularity.  It’s certainly possible.

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Jeremy’s Promised Land!

by Christopher Draper

I’ve just come back from a day-school on the Balfour declaration where no-one mentioned the elephant in the room.  Speakers gave Arthur Balfour, Lloyd George and Lord Rothschild a well deserved kicking but ignored those ultimately responsible for handing Palestine over to the gang of Zionist thugs who concocted the apartheid State of Israel.

The Spirit of ‘45

On 26th July 1945 a British Labour government took office with an overwhelming majority, a popular mandate for Socialism and legal responsibility for the administration of Palestine.  Despite Jews being a in minority, owning just 6% of the land, Zionist terrorists launched a murderous campaign to drive the Arab population from their homeland and transform Palestine into an ethnically-cleansed State of Israel.
As well as attacks on Palestinians, Clement Attlee and his Labour chums were left in no doubt of the Zionist’s systematic savagery after 91 people were murdered at the King David Hotel, the British Embassy in Rome was blown up, a bomb was planted in the Colonial Office and Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin himself received a letter bomb but instead of defending the Palestinians from colonisation Labour opted for expediency. In 1947, even before the government’s mandate had expired, this most left-wing of Labour Governments announced its intention to walk away, leaving Palestine to the Zionists.

Ignorance is Bliss

This utter betrayal characterises the record of the 1945-51 Labour regime so revered by activists who imagine Jeremy might lead us back to that Garden of Eden. This is a fiction apparent to anyone who takes the trouble to examine the real record of that government though many lazily prefer the myth. I don’t want to bludgeon readers with endless argument but instead offer a few pointers you can investigate and decide upon for yourself.

Conscription

Post-war Labour was expected to rapidly demilitarise but instead Attlee established permanent peace-time conscription that continued throughout Labour’s reign until it was finally abolished in 1960 by a Tory administration. It soon became apparent that Labour required a conscript army to carry out its industrial and colonial policies.

Labouring Under Labour

· July 1945, within a week of taking office Labour sent strikebreaking troops into London’s Surrey Docks. The strike was defeated and 900 dockers suspended.
· October 1945 - 21,000 conscript troops broke national port strike
· Aug 1947 - 40 Grimethorpe miners taken to court for striking
· Jan 1948 - 191 Durham miners summonsed for striking
· March 1948 - 2 Neath miners prosecuted for stay-down strike
· May 1949 - troops defeated Avonmouth strike
· Sep 1950 - 10 members of gasworkers strike committee charged with conspiracy
· February 1951 – 7 London and Mersey dockers charged with conspiracy
Between 1945 and 1951 Labour ordered troops across picket lines 18 times. It retained Wartime Order 1305 to make strikes illegal and twice invoked the Emergency Powers Act of 1920. Labour even revived the secret Supply & Transport Organisation the Tories had used to break the 1926 General Strike. Ever ready to act against workers Labour never once invoked the 1305 clause that prohibited employers from imposing “lock-outs”. Printworkers locked-out by the London Master Printers Federation in August 1950 got no support from Attlee’s government but successfully defended their jobs and conditions through their own collective action.

Pacifying the Natives

Pacifying the Natives
In 1924 J H Thomas, foreign minister of Britain’s first Labour government reassuringly declared; “I am here to see there is no mucking about with the British Empire”.  On the day of Labour’s 1945 election victory his successor, Ernest Bevin announced, “British foreign policy will not be altered in any way under the Labour Government”. In practice this meant;
· 1945 September Vietnam – bloody suppression of popular uprising
· 1945 October Java - Seaforth Highlanders crush popular uprising
· 1945 December Greece - 5-year military campaign against socialists
· 1946 Albania - naval action and confiscation of gold reserves
· 1946 January Cyprus – 18 trade unionists imprisoned
· 1947 Kenya - troops shoot “uncooperative” Kenyans
· 1947 Aden – brutal suppression of “civil disturbances”
· 1947 August India – abandoned to partition and violence
· 1948 Malaya – brutal colonial war against insurgency
· 1948 February Ghana - Nkrumah jailed and 29 killed
· 1949 April Uganda - 8 demonstrators killed many arrested
· 1949 November Nigeria – 21 strikers shot dead at Enugu Colliery
· 1950 Korea – troops sent to support US intervention
· 1950 March Botswana – exiled Seretse Khama for marrying a white woman
· 1951 June Persia – “Gunboat diplomacy” of cruiser Mauritius

In Bed With Fascists

Whilst continuing to wield the big stick in the colonies Labour kow-towed to its new best friend, the United States. Bevin created NATO as an anti-communist alliance to facilitate American hegemony in Europe.  Alliances with fascists proved preferable to friendship with socialists soft on communism. After the war Labour kept interned at Chorley concentration camp 226 Spanish anti-fascists who’d fought against both Franco and the Nazis.  An even worse fate awaited their 136 comrades who Labour deported back to Franco’s torture chambers.  Attlee’s government then proceeded to grant Franco’s fascist regime official recognition as it did to Fascist Portugal, a fellow member of NATO, an organisation supposedly founded to defend freedom!

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Following Attlee’s agreement on the 1945 nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he insisted that Britain must now have its own nuclear bomb.  Bevin agreed, with obscene enthusiasm, “We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs…We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it”.

MP’s & Pensioners

With wages averaging around £5 a week Labour raised the Old Age Pension to just a quarter of this amount, 26 shillings, but they managed more for themselves, increasing MP’s salaries from £600 a year to £1000 with £5,000 for the Postmaster General.

Ethel’s Prescience

Despite this shameful record Labour loyalists cling to the legacy of the NHS, but this was a Liberal scheme and would have been introduced by them if they’d been elected in 1945.  After all it was Lloyd George who started the Welfare State by introducing Old Age Pensions in 1908 and Liberals Beveridge and Keynes who drafted the welfare measures Labour carried out (Labour’s education system was devised by a Tory, Rab Butler).   As the Guardian noted, even “the Tory manifesto pledges were not all that different from Labour’s”.   Labour’s NHS used the same top-down, hierarchical model as in its other Nationalisations. Just before Labour government took office, in 1944, the writer Ethel Mannin presciently identified “ersatz socialism”, “Socialism without tears, an attempt at pacifying the capitalist with compensation for his confiscated property – a sort of social appeasement, which will leave a class system of society, and which offers no new
approach to life and no recognition of “the soul of man”… “Coarse comfort, like petted animals” is exactly the aim of such palliatives as the Beveridge Plan.
What sort of fool imagines the rich would simply relinquish their power and wealth on the vote of a Parliamentary majority?  Only by organising and educating ourselves at work and in our own communities could we ever hope to wrest control from the powerful and manipulative. Jeremy might well lead us down the Parliamentary road but it won’t, never did and never could, lead us into the Garden of Eden.

CD November 2017 

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Guilty by Association!

by John Wilkins

ON reading Andrew Wastling's character assassination of Rochdale Councillors in Northern Voices, I was inclined to make a plea of mitigating circumstances for a tiny minority of them. However I, like several thousand residents, have already told the Council Leader in a petition and many in letters, how concerned we were to hear they (the councillors) had agreed to accept pay rises between 34 & 51%.  Basic Maths (without the need for a calculator) shows that equates to a rise of 4.25% pa. rise over the eight years when there has been minimal change in allowances. Surely a compromise of 8% now and implementing the full rise in allowances when the number of councillors is reduced from 60 to 40 might have been acceptable to residents.

Sorry I used a 'C' word there, compromise, which along with other 'C' words consultation, co-operation and compassion appear missing from the vocabulary of many councillors.  The 'd' word, democracy, is also missing from the Council Leader's vocabulary.  Why else would he stifle his Labour colleagues opinion on the issue by imposing a whip to make them vote for the rises without even the option of abstaining?  Andrew's description was more colourful “bullying air of entitlement & arrogant self justification.”   The word arrogant is an appellation is one which does fit some, but not all councillors, perhaps spineless at worst or lacking an independent mind fits a few others though.

I will make a case for the defence of some councillors because it is oh so easy for us to criticise people in public office when, as with myself, they have not tried to get elected.  Two Liberal Councillors voted against the rises. I understand four Labour councillors were 'indisposed' and one, there may be more, councillor has told me he voted on party lines but has informed the leader he would not be taking the increase personally.

Ability to listen to residents and even seek out their views should be a requirement for all politicians.  When have canvassed in the past for would - be councillors, the candidate and myself always sought out resident's views and used questionnaires as a tool to find out their concerns. In nearly 10 years residing in Middleton South Ward I think I might have seen just one leaflet asking for my views. This has not stopped me asking THEM questions and inviting them to meetings on important issues such as TTIP and Inequality. Possibly too complicated for them to have an opinion! One of my councillors has never replied to 6/7 letters I have sent, another responded once after I visited his constituent's surgery. The third, bless him naively being new, replied to me when asked if if the immense cost of developing Rochdale Town Centre was warranted and if so would Middleton, Heywood and other satellite towns have similar funding for projects. He also quickly responded to a more mundane request for leaves to be cleared in a stretch of pavement used by the elderly.

A Community hub in Middleton Town Centre called the Lighthouse Project had to re-locate twice in 12 months firstly from the Warwick Mill and then from the Cromer Mill in North Middleton. The Lighthouse offers activities for a variety of people from elderly, single dads through to unemployed. The latter have benefited hugely from the free use of computers to do their job searches, getting a warm welcome (including a cuppa!) and advice. The Lighthouse along with other community centres in the town means there has been less strain on social services and fewer 'I Daniel Blakes'.  Why is this relevant you ask. Well its original location was in my ward and none of the councillors I mentioned have been of any real help to the enterprise and surprise, surprise, none of them replied to my letters of concern nor to other Middleton residents I know. Common courtesy would say these councillors should at least acknowledge receipt of correspondence, even if they feel unable to help or disagree with comments. There I go again I used a 'C' word Courtesy.

Fast forward to the recent Open Day to show the facilities in the Lighthouse plus the Foodbank and a wheelchair hire facility which share their premises.  The only councillors I saw there during the 4 hours I was there were two of the councillors I previously said were indisposed for the vote on allowances.  One of these showed his vocabulary had the 'c' word compassion, spending time advising a woman who had been made homeless.  The other renewed his commitment to raise money for the venture.  The Monday afterwards this councillor attended an open meeting on Mental Health organised by our non politically aligned campaign group.  The councillor who said he would not take up his increased allowance also fulfilled a promise to attend. For Andrew's benefit all three of these councillors also work full time so they are not 'de-skilled' as he puts it.

Andrew said:  'Many (Councillors) appear to  have little or no respect for anyone but themselves and their evident contempt for the voters will without a doubt cost many of them their seats to independents in the next local elections'.

Sorry Andrew, Richard Farnell does not agree with you, as he thinks the electorate have short memories and will have forgotten about the issue by next May's elections.

Andrew you and I and other like minded residents need to find suitable candidates whether independents, or from parties other than the current ruling elite.  They need to be supported then to rid the Council of some of the 'dead wood' there at the moment.  I hope we can find candidates who can LISTEN and can claim to have most of the c' s: compassion, ability to co-operate, a belief in consultation, blessed with courtesy and the ability to compromise.

Cyril Smith on the Council Stipend

TODAY's Rochdale Observer has letters attacking last week's decision by Councillors to increase councilor's allowances.  Both the Vice Chair of UKIP in the Rochdale area and Dale Mulgrew a former Liberal Dem. Councillor have letters in the paper condemning to decision.
Years ago councilors got only allowance for expenses, and at that time they had greater responsibilities.  Today many of the tasks they use to hold have been eroded by central government.
Yet today some of them treat it like a career, and as a consequence have lost touch with the people they serve.
About quarter of a century ago in the Rochdale Observer on the 30th, May 1992, Rochdale's former MP, Cyril Smith suggested that all payments to councilors should be abolished.  He then said:
'ABOLISH all payments to councilors except to reimburse them for expenses incurred. 
'Why?
'I believe the concept of voluntary services is being swiftly eroded.  Society is worse off for that.  This is especially true in local government.  It used to be an honour to be of service as a councillor to one's fellow citizens.  Sadly, that is no longer the case.'
Furthermore, Cyril Smith added:
'I would decree that all councilors cease being administrators, and abolish titles such as "Leader of the council".  That would expose it for the nonsense it is.  The office bestows false authority whose only base is the regimentation of fellow councillors in the leader's political party.'*
It is suggested that Richard Farnell threatened to withdraw the party whip from any Labour Party councillors who failed to support the proposal to increase councilor's allowances last week.  Perhaps because of this, some Labour councillors sent their apologies and didn't attend the Council meeting to give their vote.
*  Cyril Smith served more than 40 years as a councilor, alderman or MP for Rochdale.  He served as a Labour councilor in Rochdale from 1950 and became mayor in 1966, then he subsequently switched parties again and entered Parliament as a Liberal in 1972, and won his Rochdale seat on five further occasions.

Media Lens: Filtering The Election

18 November 2016

Introduction:

WHEN the likes of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar Assad, and now Donald Trump, are declared the latest 'New Hitler', we learn little except that they are enemies of the establishment.  It means the 'On' button has been pressed on a propaganda machine designed for maximal demonisation, leaving no room for public doubt.  This inevitably drives comparisons in the direction of Hitler and the Nazis.

The rationale is well-understood by the public relations community.  Phil Lesley, author of a handbook on PR and communications, explained the spectacularly successful strategy for obstructing action on environmental issues:

'People generally do not favour action on a non-alarming situation when arguments seem to be balanced on both sides and there is a clear doubt... Nurturing public doubts by demonstrating that this is not a clear-cut situation in support of the opponents usually is all that is necessary.' (Lesly, 'Coping with Opposition Groups,' Public Relations Review 18, 1992, p.331)

Conversely, when action is required, the issue must be presented as one-sided, clear-cut, black-and-white.

This doesn't mean that Saddam Hussein wasn't a tyrant, and it doesn't mean that Trump isn't a grave threat to uncivilisation; it means that establishment enemies are described as 'New Hitlers' for reasons that have little or nothing to do with any threat they might pose.

In Trump's case, the public was not being softened up for invasion, bombing and murder, although his liberal opponents have often 'joked', with complete unawareness of the irony, about assaulting and assassinating him.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal Declares:

The idea that journalism should offer a neutral 'spectrum' of views was unceremoniously dumped during the US presidential election. Hillary Clinton was endorsed by the 500 largest US newspapers and magazines; Trump by 20 of the smallest, with the most significant of these – something called the Las Vegas Review-Journal - reaching some 100,000 readers.

As with Jeremy Corbyn, from the moment Trump became a genuine contender, he was drenched in vitriol by virtually the entire US-UK corporate press. The smear campaign was epitomised by the baseless, Ian Fleming-like suggestion that Trump was in cahoots with the establishment's other great bête noire, Putin – a propaganda-perfect marriage of Evil and Pure Evil.

Ironically, Trump may well turn out to be the final nail in the coffin of the manifestly stalled human attempt to become civilised. As leading climate scientist Michael Mann has noted, Trump's stance on climate stability may mean 'game over' for it and us. 

But elite media did not oppose Trump because of his climate views – no question was raised on the issue during the presidential debates and, as Noam Chomsky observes (below), the issue was of no interest to journalists. On the other hand, Edward Herman comments, a declared lack of enthusiasm for foreign conflict, notably with Russia, 'may help explain the intensity of media hostility to Trump'.

Inevitably, our drawing attention to the awesome level of media bias drew accusations that Media Lens was an unlikely 'apologist' for Trump's far-right declarations promoting racism, misogyny and climate denial. When we asked Guardian commentator Hadley Freeman why, in comparing Trump and Clinton, she mentioned Clinton's email server scandal but not her war crimes, she interpreted this as an endorsement of Trump: 

'You're right:  the racist, war-endorsing misogynist multiply accused of sexual assault was the better option.  Thanks for clarity.'

Telegraph columnist Helena Horton dismissed discussion of Clinton's devastating wars as 'whataboutery': 

'your whataboutery is detracting from the fact there is a far-right misogynist racist in the White House.'

She added:

'im shocked idiot men who pushed a fascist into power because HRC not perfect enough haven't shut up... and gosh they're foul aren't they'

Comedian Robert Webb of Peep Show fame agreed, describing us as 'pricks'.

Again, there is much irony in ostensible anti-fascists insisting that a tiny website should 'shut up' and leave Big Media to steamroll their candidate into the White House.

To be fair to our abusers, it is of course true that criticising Clinton risked, to a microscopically tiny degree in our case, supplying ammunition for the Trump cause.  But in reality Trump is only part of the problem.  Chomsky comments on the Republican Party's stance on climate change:

'And notice it's not Trump; it's 100 percent of the Republican candidates taking essentially the same position. What they're saying... "It's all a joke. It's a liberal hoax."'

Chomsky is talking about the imminent breakdown of climate stability:

'It is hard to find words to capture the fact that humans are facing the most important question in their history – whether organized human life will survive in anything like the form we know – and are answering it by accelerating the race to disaster...

'It is no less difficult to find words to capture the utterly astonishing fact that in all of the massive coverage of the electoral extravaganza, none of this receives more than passing mention. At least I am at a loss to find appropriate words.'

As this makes very clear, the problem does not begin and end with Trump.  The roots of the Clinton-Trump fiasco lie in decades of 'liberal' media refusal to challenge the increasing venality, violence and suicidal climate indifference at the supposedly rational end of the political spectrum. Virtually the entire 'liberal' journalistic community saw great hope in Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, while treating genuinely honest and compassionate political commentators like Chomsky, Edward Herman, John Pilger, Howard Zinn, Harold Pinter, Chris Hedges, Jonathan Cook and many others as quixotic freaks who may be mentioned in passing, published once in a supermoon, but otherwise ignored.

As Slavoj Zizek observed: 'The real catastrophe is the status quo.'  When liberal journalism slams the door on reasoned arguments and authentic compassion, other doors swing wide for the likes of Trump.

The default corporate media excuse for ignoring 'our' crimes is that elected politicians have been chosen to serve by the people, and it is the task of journalism to support, not subvert, democracy. But of course democracy is profoundly subverted by a lack of honest media scrutiny. Structural media distortion is so extreme that, despite bombing seven countries, Barack Obama continues to be depicted and perceived as an almost saintly figure.

Which is why it was important to challenge the notion that Hillary Clinton was a benevolent force for democracy, justice and the climate before she attained power.  And after all, as Secretary of State, she had held one of the most important positions within the US regime. 

The risk of boosting Trump was thus balanced by the need to take advantage of a limited period when mass media are, or ought to be, obliged to honestly compare the words and deeds of the leading candidates.  In other words, despite Trump's awfulness, there was a strong moral case for drawing attention to Clinton's record of reducing Libya to a ruin – a war crime known in Washington as 'Hillary's war' – of fuelling a hideous war in Syria, supporting the overthrow of the Honduran government, and so on.

As author Frank Morgan noted, pretty much the entire media system depicted Clinton as 'a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice'.

Morgan added: 

'With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station.'

It was difficult to imagine these words appearing in a national newspaper before the vote, and ironic indeed that they appeared in the Guardian. Happily for Britain's 'leading liberal-left newspaper', the linked examples of media bias embedded in Morgan's piece led to the New York Times rather than to equivalent or better examples on the website hosting his article.

In fact, Morgan's piece mocking media performance is part of a trend indicating that filters suppressing media honesty have been partially lifted now that a clear-cut, black-and-white version of reality is no longer so crucial.

Two further examples should help clarify this intriguing phenomenon.

Nick Bryant And The Lear Jet Liberals

On November 8, the BBC's New York correspondent, Nick Bryant, published a last comment on the election before voting began.  On November 9, in the aftermath of the result, he published a second piece.

In his pre-vote piece, Bryant wrote blandly:

'The post-industrial wastelands of the rustbelt, with their skeletal remains and carcass-like old steel mills, are hardly a new feature of the topography in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. But to view them again was to look at the seedbeds of Trumpism - rubble-strewn but seedbeds nonetheless.'

After the vote, Bryant's tone had changed: 

'So many people I spoke to during this campaign - especially in the old steel towns of the Rust Belt - wanted a businessman in the White House rather than a career politician. Their hatred of Washington was palpable.

'So, too, was their hatred of her. It was visceral. I vividly remember talking to a middle-aged woman in Tennessee, who oozed southern charm, who could not have been more polite. But when the subject of Hillary Clinton came up her whole demeanour changed.'

Visceral hatred of Clinton, no less, with a woman's opinion offered as an example.  Remarkable.

Bryant's damning summation: 'few people personify the political establishment more than Hillary Clinton.  During this campaign, for millions of angry voters, she became the face of America's broken politics'.

Before the vote, Bryant commented:

'the rule of thumb in this election, in non-urban settings especially, was the more impoverished the landscape, the more likely its inhabitants were to support the billionaire.'

After the vote:

'Hillary Clinton has long had a trust problem, which is why the email scandal loomed so large. She had an authenticity problem. She was seen as the high priestess of an east coast elite that looked down, sneeringly, on working people.

'The vast riches that the Clintons accumulated since leaving the White House did not help. The former first couple were seen not just as limousine liberals but Lear Jet liberals.'

This was excoriating, unlike anything we'd seen from a BBC journalist during the election.

Before the vote, like virtually every other corporate media reporter, Bryant was casually damning of Trump:

'I have tried to learn more about narcissistic personality disorder.

'Many commentators from both sides believe having a basic grasp of the condition was important in making sense of the behaviour of Donald Trump.'

He also focused on the idea that Clinton's 'personality is endlessly intriguing. Why, for instance, does she struggle to convey the warmth and spontaneity in public that many of us have witnessed in private?'

Bryant's post-vote piece dispensed with such pleasantries:

'Hillary Clinton is not a natural campaigner. Her speeches are often flat and somewhat robotic. Her sound-bites sound like sound-bites - prefabricated and, to some ears, insincere.'

And consider that, as discussed, before the election numerous commentators compared Trump to Hitler, the United States to Germany in the 1930s, and so on. Despite these terrifying claims, we saw little or no discussion of just how much power a triumphant Trump would actually have. Some analysis arrived after the vote on November 15 with Anthony Zurcher's piece, 'Can Donald Trump get what he wants?'

Zurcher immediately notes that popular support, in fact, is not enough: Trump will require the backing of 'the Washington powers that populate Congress and [that] are necessary to successfully implement his agenda'.

What of Trump's infamous US-Mexico border wall? It would cost $20bn, for which the Mexican government is clearly unwilling to pay, and would in some parts be downgraded to a fence. But actually: 'Chances of a monumental Great Wall of Trump ever becoming a reality... seem slim.'

What about Trump's shocking plan to deport 11 million undocumented workers from the US?

'He's since walked back such sweeping pronouncements... In the face of reluctance from Congress and financial obstacles... it will be tough for him to make the numbers add up.'

What about dismantling Obamacare?

'Republicans likely lack the political will to fully pull the plug... in the end "reform" looks considerably more attractive than "repeal".'

And so on. Accurate or not, serious, high-profile attention is finally being paid to the existence of checks and balances that will likely prevent a Trump tyranny. This kind of rational discussion conflicted with the establishment need to block Trump by presenting him as a Saddam- or Gaddafi-like figure, a Hitlerian threat. The fact that Trump's stance on climate means he really is a serious threat to humanity may turn out to be an unhappy coincidence.

Conclusion:

Hillary Clinton was indisputably the preferred establishment candidate, backed by virtually the entire US-UK corporate press.

'Mainstream' media did not merely support Clinton, they declared propaganda war on Trump. As we have seen in this brief sample, even BBC journalists thought nothing of ridiculing Trump's 'narcissistic personality disorder' – unthinkable language from a BBC reporter describing an Obama, a Cameron, or indeed a Clinton.

The intensity of establishment support for Clinton meant that journalistic performance was filtered by host media and self-censorship. As the former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger told us in an interview: 

'[T]he whole thing works by a kind of osmosis.  If you ask anybody who works in newspapers, they will quite rightly say, "Rupert Murdoch," or whoever, "never tells me what to write", which is beside the point: they don't have to be told what to write. It's understood.'

The moment the vote was cast, pressures filtering out criticisms of Clinton and less hysterical coverage of Trump were lifted. The result is a semblance of balance that allows stunningly extreme 'mainstream' media to enhance their ill-deserved reputation for 'fairness' and 'impartiality'.

DE

Sheffield Anarchist on Trial

by Christopher Draper

“At the Yorkshire Winter Assize, before Mr Justice Grantham, Robert Sykes Bingham, 40 years of age, provision merchant, a respectably-dressed and intelligent looking man, was indicted for having at Sheffield, on December 22, 1889, encouraged and persuaded divers persons to murder one James M’Loughlin.”

Nobbling the Nobsticks

BINGHAM was an anarchist whilst M’Loughlin, his alleged target, was a 'nobstick', the local term for a blackleg. Sheffield had a tradition of deterring blacklegging by violent direct action, frequently involving the use of explosives. Although 1889 was two decades since the end of the 'Sheffield Outrages' the authorities were determined to prevent a resurgence of militant unionism.

Robert’s Story

Born in 1849, Robert Bingham’s birthplace of Norton was still very rural although just five miles south-east of the smoke blackened centre of Sheffield. Small scale workshops had sprung up in the area, powered by the rivers and streams flowing down from the Peak District and this unique blend of small-scale workshops amidst sublime natural beauty persuaded John Ruskin to back a cooperative scheme enabling skilled craftsmen to continue to work the land.

Established in 1877, Ruskin’s 'St George’s Farm' colony attracted practical socialists. Although living nearby, the youthful Robert Sykes Bingham was initially more impressed by the republican ideas of the radical Liberal MP, Charles Dilkes.  In 1871, Bingham organised Dilkes’ security for a huge public meeting held at Leeds’ Victoria Hall.  When determined royalists tried to disrupt and wreck the meeting, in the words of the Sheffield Independent, 'He called on the Stewards to follow him into the crowd but they did not. He went alone. He was seriously manhandled.'  It was Robert Bingham’s baptism of fire.

No Hammer or Sickle

As a scythemaker, Robert’s dad was exactly the sort of skilled craft worker that Ruskin hoped to attract to his 'Guild of St George' social reform movement but Ruskin’s ideas proved more attractive to Robert and his siblings for both his brother John and sister Louisa, also became anarchists. Although all three shared advanced social ideas none was attracted to either making or wielding scythes, and all three settled for retailing groceries.

Robert was most entrepreneurial and at various times all three worked together at branches of a chain of grocery stores that he owned and managed.  Of course it wasn’t all plain sailing and in 1873 Robert was in trouble with the law and fined £10 and costs for selling adulterated lard. In 1876 he was back in court and forced to hand over another tenner, this time in damages to labourer William Ollerenshaw whom he’d carelessly run over in his horse drawn delivery cart.

In 1881 Robert’s grocery empire was in dire financial straits and he was pursued by creditors. Fortunately he found suitable backers, continued in business and remained a grocer for the rest of his life.

The Grocer and the Carpenter

Edward Carpenter, the pioneering gay libertarian, who lived nearby was a friend of Robert’s.  In 1885, the pair campaigned together for an independent radical candidate, Mervyn Hawkes, who stood for Irish Home Rule, free education and “root and branch land reform”.

The following year the nucleus of this group started the 'Sheffield Socialist Club' with a libertarian manifesto composed by Carpenter but with Robert as one of the original signatories. John and Louisa, by then married to a drunken bully named George Usher, joined soon after. 

Café Society

To promote the cause, Bingham and his comrades persuaded William Morris to visit Sheffield and deliver two lectures in the Secularist Hall, on Sunday 28th February 1886. Morris was pleased with the result though the Sheffield comrades resolved to remain independent and not affiliate to Morris’ 'Socialist League'. In March 1887 club members invited Kropotkin to Sheffield and he lectured, “to a considerable audience, which consisted mainly of the working classes”. 

Initially Robert and his chums met at the Wentworth Café in Holly Street and hired halls for public meetings but with Carpenter’s backing they were able to acquire their own spacious premises, the old debtors’ jail in Scotland Street.  They created a 'Commonwealth Café' on the ground floor and a meeting hall on the floor above.

Carpenter fondly recalled these early SSC years:
'We organized lectures, addresses, pamphlets, with a street-corner propaganda which soon brought us in amusing and exciting incidents in the way of wrangles with the police and the town-crowds… A dozen or twenty at most formed the moving and active element of our society - though its membership may have been a hundred or more; and these disposed themselves to their various functions.  Mrs. Usher, large-bosomed and large-hearted, would move on the outskirts of our open-air meetings, armed with a bundle of literature.  She was an excellent saleswoman and few could resist her hearty appeal "Buy this pamphlet, love, it will do you good!"  Even in the streets or the tramcars the most solemn and substantial old gentlemen fell a prey to her.  Her brothers, the two Binghams, were among our two speakers, and both of them pretty effective, the one in a logical, the other (Robert) in a more oratorical way.  They were provision merchants in the town; and their business suffered at first, but afterwards gained, by the connection.'

Anarchy in the Air

In those halcyon days the Sheffield comrades marched happily together towards common goals but as the decade advanced political paths began to diverge. As late as the summer of 1889 Robert’s own politics were still fluid, as fellow club member, George Hukin frustratedly observed “(Robert) first of all goes in strong on one thing – say the eight hour day – and just when you think the meeting is going to settle about what’s to be done, he suddenly remembers that after all the 8 hours is only a palliative and it’s doubtful whether it’s worth our while to bother about it.” 

Everywhere miltant unionism was advancing, the successful strike action of the London gas-workers was rapidly followed by that of the dockers, lifting the spirit and ambition of the whole working class. In June 1889 it was the turn of the Leeds gas-workers.  When Leeds Council brought in scabs and the military to break the strike, workers fought back attacking both blacklegs and local worthies.

Whilst Carpenter’s closest confidants were chastened by the workers’ militancy, Robert was exhilarated.  All three Binghams, Robert, John and Louisa, along with the majority of club members were moving ever closer to anarchism. As propaganda activities intensified, more strident speakers were invited.  In November 1889 the fiery London anarchist Charles Mowbray came to Sheffield but, as Commonweal reported, William Morris was also invited.

'Comrade Mowbray addressed large meetings on Saturday (16th Nov.) at Penistone Street, West Bar, Gower Street, the Monolith, assisted by Bulas, Bingham, Carpenter and Sketchley.  Mowbray also addressed a meeting at the Hall of Science. At the monolith a police inspector wanted his name and address.  On Sunday evening we had a tea and social meeting, after which Mowbray lectured on “Revolution and Reform”.  On Monday a meeting was held at Gower Street of the workmen at Cammel’s Ironworks and also at the Monolith, Fargate.  No police interruption. At 8pm William Morris lectured to a good audience at the Cambridge Hall.  Commonweal sold out; 7s worth of literature; good collections.'

A Comrade in Need

When Fred Charles, an unemployed anarchist arrived in Sheffield in the autumn of 1889 Robert offered him a clerking job in one of his grocery shops. Charles enthusiastically joined Bingham’s band of militants and submitted this ominously revealing report to December’s Commonweal: 'Things are moving splendidly in this district. In addition to several meetings held during the week we have good meetings on Sunday – at the Monolith in the morning, Gower Street in the afternoon and the Pump, Westbar, at night. This morning a reporter was specially sent down to report our speeches to the Watch Committee of the Corporation and several rumours are about of various impending prosecutions by the police authorities…'

A speech about a local strike recently delivered at the Monolith by Robert received particularly close attention.  Twenty-eight men had downed tools at 'John Brown and Company’s' Sheffield works and the management replaced them with blacklegs.  The strikers responded by resurrecting Sheffield’s traditional treatment of “nobsticks” and the scabs complained to the police of being beaten up.   The reporter Fred Charles mentioned claimed Bingham had incited the strikers’ violence by his incendiary speech.

Confounding the Constabulary

The following February the reporter’s notes were read out in court and there was no disputing their accuracy;
'There is a little strike going on at Brown’s. These men are making a very just fight…The men who prevent them from winning, who are making the fight a difficult and unequal fight are the “scabs”…They are traitors to the cause . Men who did this sort of thing in war…would be taken and shot…it is not murder, it is killing a traitor.'

Unfortunately for the authorities, the reporter fingered the wrong Bingham brother and the charges against John were formally dismissed after witnesses established that John Bingham did not make the claimed speech nor had he ever delivered any public speech at the Monolith! 

The prosecutors were unabashed. It was conceded that, unlike his brother, Robert Sykes Bingham did regularly speak at the Monolith so the authorities simply substituted his name on an identical charge sheet and proceeded with the prosecution.  The judge gave the jury no doubt that it was their duty to convict, 'Mr Justice Grantham in summing up characterised the speech as strong, clear and positive incentive to murder, observing that if it was not so he did not understand the English language.'  The jury defied the judge and declared Robert, 'Not Guilty!'

1891 –the Year of Living Dangerously

Sheffield was fast gaining a reputation for anarchist militancy and Robert Bingham was encouraged rather than quieted by his failed prosecution. On the 15th of November 1890 William Morris, utterly frustrated by the absurd revolutionary posturing of the anarchist-communist faction, abandoned the Socialist League, warning, 'Men absorbed in a movement are apt to surround themselves with a kind of artificial atmosphere which distorts the proportions of things outside, and prevents them from seeing what is really going on' but Robert Bingham and his anarchist comrades were in no mood to listen.

There had long been ideological tension between Sheffield comrades but the final straw arrived just before Morris’s announcement in the form of roving Irish adventurer and insurrectionary anarchist, Doctor John O’Dwyer Creaghe.  Although Creaghe had only landed in London on 15th October, en voyage from the River Plate, he was immediately installed in the Sheffield anarchist group. Creaghe’s name, alongside Robert Bingham, appears on printed handbills advertising a public commemoration of the Chicago Martyrs held at Hallamshire Hall on 11th November 1890.  His impact on Bingham and Sheffield was immediate. 

By the end of January 1891, exhorted by Creaghe, Robert Bingham’s anarchist faction boycotted their old clubrooms, denounced their former socialist comrades and started their own anarchist club at Creaghe’s Westbar premises. They held their fiery propaganda meetings at the Monolith beneath a banner declaring, 'NO GOD, NO MASTER!'. 

Prior to Creaghe’s arrival, Bingham’s brand of miltant anarchism resonated with local trade union direct action tradition and sustained practical comradely cooperation with fellow Sheffield socialists. Robert, along with his brother and sister, was well known and respected in Yorkshire – which explains why he was acquitted by a jury despite being condemned by a judge. Under the incendiary influence of Creaghe all that went up in smoke.  In 1891 Creaghe initiated a series of campaigns that although nominally anarchist demonstrated contempt for the everyday opinions and underlying political consciousness of local workers

Aided by two other anarchist incomers, Auguste Coulon and Cyril Bell, in 1891 Creaghe published eight editions of 'The Sheffield Anarchist' .  A propaganda sheet that makes 'Class War'  appear moderate and sensible.  Where Bingham’s incitement was focussed, purposeful and rooted in local conditions, Creaghe’s propaganda was sweeping, arrogant and ultimately authoritarian.  Unfortunately Bingham and his otherwise sensible comrades were swept along by Creaghe’s sincere but inappropriate, devil-may-care attitude and ineluctably drawn into an illegalist political net.

Within a year Creaghe was drummed out of town by local workers who in August 1891 physically attacked and besieged the Anarchist Club.  The incumbents embarrassingly relied on police protection to save them from a working class mob who had smashed every single window in the building. 

Creaghe returned to Argentina leaving Bingham to lick his wounds and repair relationships with local workers but Fred Charles was not so lucky. Encouraged by Coulon, now proved to have been a police spy and agent provocateur, he’d been drawn into a bomb plot and jailed for ten years.  My own research leads me to conclude that Cyril Bell was also a state agent who curiously also departed for Argentina before the end of 1891. 

Voice in the Wilderness

From 1885 until 1891 the British anarchist movement had developed and grown until hubris caused anarchist-communists like Robert Bingham to promote tactics devised by the State and served up by agents like Coulon and Bell.  After 1891 British workers distrusted anarchists and direct action and backed labourism and electioneering.

Robert’s immediate task was to liberate Fred Charles and his fellow 'conspirators' from jail.  He energetically campaigned in Walsall and other Midland and Northern towns on behalf of the imprisoned anarchists but despite gaining widespread support from the labour movement the authorities were unmoved.  Shamefully, Robert received little support from local Marxists who told the local paper:  'In our judgement the Walsall prisoners had been properly convicted and we the Sheffield branch of the Social Democratic Federation, have no sympathy with the conduct of the prisoners'!

Fred Charles remained inside for 7½ years before his eventual release.  When Robert travelled down to Portland Prison, Dorset in November 1894 to visit Fred, the authorities refused him admission. 

Bingham doggedly continued to argue for anarchism and was grudgingly recognised by the local press as 'Mr Anarchist Bingham'.  When anarchist journalist David Nicoll was released from prison, Robert offered him a home in Sheffield.  Nicoll was incarcerated for accusing the police of framing the 'Walsall Conspirators' and revealing Coulon’s role in the affair.  With Robert’s support David Nicoll was enabled to publish several invaluable anarchist pamphlets during the three years he lived in Sheffield.

Let them Eat Bacon!

As an anarchist grocer, Robert attracted mocking comments from critics who thought anarchists should only survive in the impoverished cracks and crevices of society.  In 1894, a correspondent to the Sheffield Daily Telegraph ridiculed Robert’s anarchist-communism by suggesting, “Mr Bingham, by way of example, begin the sharing-out system by distributing his stock of bacon, hams and other provisions among his comrades.”  The sarcasm was unwarranted as Robert showed when police prosecuted the manager of the Mexborough branch of his grocery chain after he absconded with money out of the till.   Apprehended by Sergeant Forman, the prisoner, who expressed his sorrow for the offence, said, “I have been horse racing and mixing up in bad company”…  As the prisoner admitted his guilt, Mr Bingham did not wish to press the case.”

Pillar of the Community

Robert’s last libertarian campaign came in 1898 when he organised the UK speaking tour of the American libertarian, William Francis Barnard. Reporting on Barnard’s Bradford engagement, at Laycock’s Coffee House Lecture Hall, the anarchist journal Freedom observed that, 'his lecture on Government proved that government per se is exploitation'.  Enquirers were directed to Robert’s shop premises at Lady’s Bridge Buildings, Wicker, Sheffield.

Anarchism in England and Sheffield was by then but a pale shadow of its former self. Fred Charles and David Nicoll had returned to London and Creaghe’s adventurism had alienated Edward Carpenter who’d shifted into the state socialist camp and started a new Sheffield Socialist Club free from of anarchist taint. 

Robert Bingham eschewed the political manoeuvrings of the Sheffield Labourites and instead worked with the 'Young Liberals'.  When Robert died in July 1934 he was granted an accolade given to few other English anarchists, a lengthy positive obituary in his local newspaper, of which this is but an extract;
“The death has occurred of Mr Robert Sykes Bingham, known as the father of the Sheffield provision trade, also known as an ardent enthusiastic and determined political worker.
In his early days he experienced a great deal of the rough and tumble of politics. He regularly stood near the Monolith in Town Hall Square and talked advanced views to the crowds until the Monolith actually became to be known as Bingham’s Monolith…
He was a friend of many prominent people including William Morris, the poet and Prince Kropotkin, the Russian social worker (sic)…”

Christopher Draper – November 2016

(The eleventh in a monthly series of “Northern Anarchist Lives.”)