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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Russian Revolution in Somerset

Subject: The Russian Revolution in Somerset

Friends,
Bridgwater Trades Union Council is hosting a special public discussion to mark the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

Date: Tuesday October 31st. Time: 7pm. Venue: The Engine Room, 50-52 High St, Bridgwater, Somerset, TA6 3BL

The meeting is part of the Engine Room's "Bridgwater Together" celebrations, running from Saturday October 28th to Saturday 4th November.

From Tuesday 31st to Saturday November 4th, the Russian Revolution theme continues with an Engine Room exhibition of rare and original Soviet Posters and photographic magazines, organised and curated by Bridgwater's Irena Brezowski.

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Dave Chapple, Bridgwater TUC Secretary, said:

‘For millions of people throughout the twentieth century, and for many thousands of socialists in our country today, the overthrow of Kerensky's Government by the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, Trotsky, and Kamenev in October 1917, was a world-changing, inspiring and liberating event.

‘October 1917 was hailed by most shades of left-wing opinion in Britain: the militant shop stewards and syndicalists, South Wales miners, Glasgow engineers, the Socialist Labour Party, the British Socialist Party, Sylvia Pankhurst, John Maclean, and many like George Lansbury in the Independent Labour Party. During the next few years it was British Labour's strike threats against Lloyd George's war-mongering  that helped to ensure that the besieged fledgling "soviet" state survived.

‘However, even before Lenin's death in 1924, many previous admirers world-wide, begun to have doubts about the policies and direction of the new state.

‘As Lenin and Trotsky gave way to Joseph Stalin's murderous dictatorship, and right down until 1989, millions of workers in the Soviet Union and its satellites developed negative, critical or hostile attitudes to communist state authority, attitudes which led some Russians and Eastern Europeans after 1989 to seek intellectual consolation or refuge in the bright lights of western consumer capitalism.

‘In Bridgwater today, still Somerset's premier working-class town, live hundreds of unrepentant and dedicated local socialists, and they are working alongside hundreds of migrant workers from Eastern Europe, including many Russian speakers from Lithuania. Local trades unions have welcomed migrant workers into membership and some are already shop stewards. Of course, many migrant workers retain personal or family memories of pre-1989 days, and so will have their own views on communism and October 1917. 

‘This is why Bridgwater TUC's  public meeting on October  31st is being organised as a serious discussion between different opinions and perspectives,  and not a celebration.’

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Speakers are Liz Payne, President of the Communist Party of Britain; Dave Chapple, Secretary of Bridgwater TUC; and Irena Brezowski, a Bridgwater College lecturer who has family and personal links to the old Soviet Union.

Tuesday October 31st, 7pm, The Engine Room, 50-52 High St, Bridgwater, Somerset, TA6 3BL

Please pass this invite onto any of your contacts who might be interested.

ALL WELCOME!

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British Syndicalism Talk in Wakefield

Comrades
British syndicalism emerged in the years after 1900 in response, Holton (1976) says, to "urgent economic and political problems facing the working class."
Firstly, British capitalism was still struggling -despite the end of the "Great Depression"- and real wages fell some 10% between 1900 and 1912.
Secondly, capitalist industry was increasingly concentrated.  Businesses were amalgamating.  Employers associations were being set up.  "Federated capital" was more visible (Holton 1976).
Thirdly, technological change was displacing/downgrading certain craft skills.
And finally labour leaders were increasingly being incorporated into state sponsored collective bargaining structures and into the bourgeois parliamentary system.  Trade union officials now seemed increasingly remote from the rank and file.  And Lloyd George would boast in 1912 that parliamentary socialists were the "best policemen" when it came to managing and diffusing industrial unrest.
Face with all this -falling wages, deskilling, larger units of capitalist production and conservatism on the part of traditional labour leaders- workers began to look beyond sectionalism and reformism to class unity, direct action and industrial unionism.
This syndicalist sentiment was influenced by what had been going on in Europe, the US and Australia.  But it also drew from domestic traditions of workplace militancy and what Holton (1976) describes as "anti-State socialism."
On Saturday 13 May at 1pm at the Red Shed, Vicarage Street, Wakefield WF1, the Wakefield Socialist History Group are holding an event, SYNDICALISM AND THE GREAT UNREST.  The speakers are Robin Stocks and Alan Brooke.  Other speakers tbc. The chair is Adrian Cruden.  Admission is free and all are welcome.  A free light buffet will be provided.

Fraternally

Alan Stewart

Convenor, Wakefield Socialist History Group

ALICE WHEELDON: DAUGHTER OF DERBY!

Talk about Derby's Suffragette, sentenced for an 'assassination threat'

In August, the descendants of Alice Wheeldon will be visiting Derby. As part of their itinerary there will be a lecture at Derby Central Library, plus a short play.

Alice Wheeldon, Derby's Suffragette


For almost a century, Derby's Alice Wheeldon and her family have been vilified as the Peartree conspirators. Accused of attempting to murder Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, they were imprisoned and Alice herself died soon afterwards.


But didn't they campaign for workers' and women's rights, as well as support conscientious objectors to the slaughter of WW1? And were they innocent or guilty?


This meeting will review significant new evidence and ask whether we should, in fact, be proud of this Daughter of Derby.


Venue Derby Central Library,
Derby DE1
Time 7:30 pm to 9:30 pm
Date Thursday 30 August 2012
How to book: Cost £6. Early booking is advised. Please contact Derby Local Studies Library on 01332 642240 or email localstudies.library@derby.gov.uk Minicom 01332 380712.

Web link http:// www.derby.gov.uk/leisure-and-culture/derby-libraries/local-studies-library/

derby.gov.uk/leisure-and-culture/libraries/derby-libraries/local-studies-library/