DOPE: An Anarchist 'Big Issue'?

by Brian Bamford

ON 'START the WEEK', on Radio 4 this week, Tom Sutcliffe discussed a world without work with Daniel Susskind, Suzi Gage, Anoosh Chakelian and Sir John Strang.

Journalist Anoosh Chakelian of the New Statesman, had gone behind the scenes at a new magazines set up to rival the Big Issue, as she explored Britain's homelessness crisis.

The journal called DOPE is run voluntarily as a radical publishing 'affinity group', and all the money they make from sales and subscriptions goes back into the cooperative’s efforts, in particular printing more solidarity copies of the DOPE Magazine for street-vendors.

Following the pattern of The Big Issue, these new journals enable rough sleepers to earn money rather than beg, and creates respectable employment opportunities.  But also Chakelian troubled about the way in which a country with growing numbers of homeless people is now evolving these  industries based upon their suffering.

On a daily basis the homeless vendors turn up keen to sell for more copies, to the point where affinity group has had to limit the number they give to individuals to ensure there are enough to share around. Starting out printing 1000 copies per issue back in 2016, the last issue (Autumn 2019) went up to 5000 copies.  Next they want to print 10,000.

The Whitechapel premises has in the past been describe as 'an anarchist hangout', and it has long been used as a premise for all sorts of odds and sods to shack-up.  Historically it was the base of British anarchism in times when it was run by traditional anarchists to publish Freedom, perhaps one of the oldest anarchist publications in the world, which was first established in 1884.


DOPE is funded by people buying a copy online, or taking out a subscription, or supporting them on Patreon.  It is a direct way of contributing to autonomous and political support of homeless and imprisoned people.

 The affinity group claim:
'We’ve reached the point in the economies of scale now where it only costs £75 to print an extra 1000 copies. The cover price is £3, so that equates to £3000 to the people selling it on the street. To us that seems like a pretty good (and cheap!) win-win – anarchist propaganda in the hands of people who might not otherwise have read it, and money in the pocket of people who need it most.'

In 1987, in the town of La Línea de la Concepción at the anarchist branch of the CNT trade union in the Bay of Gibraltar in Andalucia, Spain, a similar attempt was made to help the locals find homes, as I recall the venture was egged-on by the La Línea Social Democratic Party [PSOE]; it turned out to be a bit of a con and the local CNT suffered in consequence.  

The new publication, DOPE Magazine is a quarterly newspaper called, is produced by an anarchist publisher called Dog Section Press in London since spring 2018, and is now being sold by homeless people in cities around the country, from Bristol to Edinburgh.

Stylishly designed with edgy cover illustrations, its contributors include the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, musicians Sleaford Mods and Drillminister, and artists Laura Grace Ford, Cat Sims and Liv Wynter.  It already has a circulation of over 5,000.

DOPE is not the only new publication to rival the Big Issue.  Another non-profit underground paper called Nervemeter started up in 2011 under the coalition government, for 'people who may have found that their benefits have been cut: they are skint, they may be sick, they desperately need to make some cash', according to the introduction of its first issue.

Still running, this is a bit different because the vendors ask for donations from recipients for the magazine, with a suggestion of £3 minimum.  Yet part of its appeal is also as a Big Issue alternative. 'Nervemeter is not a registered charity,' reads its website.  'We don’t trust registered charities and you shouldn’t either. We are a charitable organisation and are 100 per cent transparent, which means every penny you give us goes on printing and nothing else.' 

There have always been grassroots responses to homelessness, but trends like this reflect its scale in the country.  The latest count for the whole of England, in January last year, showed a 165 per cent increase in rough sleeping overall since 2010.

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

Losing the North?

Why Labour is losing the north

 This article appears in the 21 August 2019 issue of the New Statesman
 Republished from Tribune, a socialist magazine of politics since 1937. Read Tribune here

The party’s urgent fight for its traditional heartlands in an era of evaporating loyalties.

By Alex Niven

ON 28 September 2018, the annual South Shields Lecture took place in a school on the River Tyne. Previous speakers at the event had included local lad Sting, and the directors Danny Boyle and Sam Mendes; but this year it took the form of a conversation between an interesting pairing.

On the one hand, Blairite passionara David Miliband, who was MP for South Shields between 2001 and 2013, was a fairly obvious choice. But joining Miliband was the former Tory Prime Minister John Major, a man responsible for the “Thatcherism on autopilot” of the early 1990s, when the shipbuilding and mining industries that sustained north-east towns like South Shields were finally liquidated by a remorseless Conservative government.

In this strange spectacle of a London-based Tory grandee uniting with a New York-based policy analyst in order to, among other things, lecture an overwhelmingly Leave-voting constituency that Brexit would make it “poorer and weaker”, the 40-year neoliberal relationship with the north of England stands summarised in starkly poetic terms.

More specifically, viewed through the lens of recent Labour Party history, the sight of Miliband showing tacit sympathy with the Thatcherite tendencies that destroyed South Shields, while blithely ignoring the experiences and attitudes of his former constituents, highlights the sangfroid with which Labour has severed itself from its northern heartlands over the past four decades.

If it is not quite true that Labour has lost the north – or at least not yet – it is certainly the case that it is losing key northern demographics at a rapid rate, even in the wake of a recent Corbynite takeover that promised to check the London-centric managerialism of New Labourites like David Miliband. While the causes of this shift are deep-seated and long-running, it is only now, as we come to the end of the 2010s, that Labour’s fractured marriage with post-industrial communities is reaching breaking point.

Indeed, it is eminently possible that the loss of a tranche of northern seats at the next general election will lead to the defeat of the Corbyn project, and the return of another botched centre-right coalition to power. In light of this looming catastrophe, there is some urgency in the need to assess the extent of Labour’s northern problem, and to point to ways of halting the defection of “left behind” northern Labour voters to apathy, the Brexit Party, or worse.


Examining Labour’s history underlines that there have always been deep structural weaknesses in its dependency on the relationship between place and political loyalty. As Tom Nairn commented in 1964, the Labour Party “did not come into being in response to any theory about what a socialist party should be; it arose empirically, in a quite piece-meal fashion”. In the context of the English north – as in the parallel cases of industrial Wales and Scotland – this meant that Labour developed more or less organically, as the ultimate expression of the vernacular trade union movements of the 19th century.

In the territorial pattern that guided Labour’s formation, local associations would spring up in industrial areas as a means of empowering communities of workers and their families. As the century wore on, they gradually federalised into a national network of disparate political factions, which was united by a simple, empirical sense that, for its ideological diversity, it always embodied the cause of labour.


The English north played a starring role in this narrative. From the inauguration of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in Manchester in 1868, to the rash of local organisations in places such as Colne Valley and Salford that would amalgamate to form the Independent Labour Party in the 1890s, and finally to the historic proposal in 1900 by a Doncaster railway worker that a conference should be held to allow the TUC to establish a parliamentary front in the form of the Labour Representation Committee, Labour was in its early years very much an outgrowth of northern industrial consciousness.

Subsequently, as Labour became an established parliamentary force from the 1920s on, a familiar electoral picture began to emerge. While the vast majority of English rural constituencies – especially in the south – shaded Tory blue in the aftermath of the Liberal Party’s demise, substantial red heartlands started to coagulate in north-east England, South and West Yorkshire, Lancashire, west Cumbria, and north Staffordshire.

On the one hand, it is important not to view “the north” as a monolithic Labour fiefdom. It has always been a politically various region, subject to multiple and continual shifts of allegiance, even after the rise of the Parliamentary Labour Party in the wake of the First World War. Indeed, Labour has never quite been able to rely on its so-called northern heartlands. Even discounting the many solidly Tory northern rural seats, Liverpool returned Tory MPs up to the 1960s, for instance, and even during the polarised 1980s, seats such as Newcastle Central in the north-east could briefly turn blue as a result of local quirks.

But it is true that in the textile districts of Manchester, the port towns of west Cumbria, and especially the vast coalfield areas scattered across the north that nurtured such a large portion of its population and culture, voting Labour was something that was done without a second thought, from the time of the General Strike through the postwar years and the Thatcher nadir, up to the Blairite millennium.
Aside from the brief, partial upturn of the postwar years, this was mostly a period of slow, unchecked decline for the region from its Victorian heyday, when it had resembled hyper-developed modern locales like Shanghai and Silicon Valley. But despite and perhaps partly because of this backdrop of downturn and depression, the Labour Party was throughout this period, for the vast majority of people in the mining districts of County Durham or South Yorkshire, less a political party than a secular church, with all the sense of emotional attachment and injunctions against non-attendance that implies.


But Labour’s foundation in communitarian organisation also offers a good starting point for understanding its tragic drift away from its northern bedrock over the millennial period. For while traditionalist tendencies such as Blue Labour have argued recently for a return to the emphasis on faith, family and localism that sustained the party in its years of formation and maturation, an obvious flaw in this idea is that when families and local communities change irrevocably, as they have done over the past half-century of deindustrialisation, their institutions and places of worship must follow suit, or risk extinction.

To an extent, Labour’s changing relationship with its heartlands from the 1980s on has been shaped by this fundamental truth – the fact that, in an increasingly desocialised and privatised society, the industrial areas of the north no longer have the community infrastructure to connect individuals to the party hierarchy as they did in Labour’s “heroic age” through local union branches and social clubs, national bodies like the NUM and TUC, and parliamentary party proper.

More pointedly, for all that the heritage of the Labour movement lives on – and is even undergoing something of a revival in the form of events like the Durham Miners’ Gala – the industries of the 19th and 20th centuries are now gone forever. This is, obviously, a pretty formidable problem for a historically “empirical” party founded on the experience of workers attached to specific workplaces.

**********

Banker's Bargain Booze at Labour Conference

THE current issue of Private Eye reports that 'For all the talk of socialism at the Labour Conference in Liverpool, some bankers were still on hand to spread largesse:  the New Statesmen's invitation-only reception was sponsored by Nat West-a subsidary of state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland.'

According to The Eye though RBS was nationalised and bailed out by the public it 'continued to act like a bad private bank paying big bonuses at the top and squeezing small business.'   But at the Liverpool Labour Party Conference it dished-up the drinks for the party members at a party held at the  bar with a Guevara-chic theme catering in a 'pretend revolutionary cocktail bar?'  

Meanwhile, Shadow City Minister Jonathan Reynolds also enjoyed a private party with the bankers at the conference.  The Eye says:  'He was star guest at the invitation-only Lansons Financial Reception, also held in the REVOLUCIÓN DE CUBA BAR.'   Lansons is a lobbying firm which specialises in city clients, which The Eye claims represents 'overshore financial centres and tax havens like Jersey.'

*******

Corbyn & his Woman's Hour Horror Story

EMMA Barnett, a Woman's Hour presenter, gave Corbo a grim time yesterday as he giggled and fiddled with his i-phone desperately trying to to put a cost on Labour's plan for free childcare for 1.3m youngsters during an interview with BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour.
'It will cost... it will obviously cost a lot to do so, we accept that,' he said, before agreeing with host Emma Barnett that the figure was £5.3bn.

Stephen Bush, in the New Statesman, says:
'The interview is great radio – you can read the transcript here but it’s better heard than read – but is it a good way to cover politics?'

But should a professional politician be so ill-prepared that he doesn't have a note handy with the figures covering his party's flagship policy on? 

Perhaps Corbo thought he would have an easy ride, and didn't need to prpare himself properly to tackle Ms. Barnett, who after all is not an old hand like Jenny Murray.  I thought perhaps she was a new girl on the block, but Ms. Barnett was educated at Manchester High School for Girls and had an Orthodox Jewish background.

After the interview one tweeter declared:  'Zionist Emma Barnett (family lived off the proceeds of brothels) attacks Jeremy Corbyn on R4 this morning.'

In response to these attacks, Mr. Corbyn has said that she was only doing her job.

Threat to Labour Leader in Unite's Election?

LEN McCluskey stepped down early as general secretary of Unite, Britain’s biggest trade union, so as to stand again for a third term.  The New Statesman writer, Stephen Bush wrote in January that 'The contest has potentially far-reaching consequences for the Labour party. McCluskey was elected in 2013 to serve a five-year term; but his supporters hope that the move will allow him to stay in post until the next general election.'

Unite is the largest affiliate to the Labour Party. That makes it a power player in the party’s internal politics, although, writes Bush in the New Statesman of Unites leadership 'their reach and influence may often be overstated.  It is the GMB, a trade union from the party’s centre, which has dominated parliamentary selections so far in this parliament.'
McCluskey, who is 66, has some believe been handicapped by the idea, which Unite's press officers briskly deny, that he favoured Andy Burnham, not Jeremy Corbyn, in the 2015 Labour leadership election:  see the New Statesman, 6th, December 2016.  In the end Unite backed Corbyn.
In the last leadership election for Unite's top job, it was the left-wing candidate, Jerry Hicks, that threatened McCluskey most, and since then McCluskey has been a solid supporter of Corbyn, and it seems Unite 'underwrote much of the Islington MP's second leadership bid' last year.
Yet, according to the journalist Stephen Bush:  'the perception that he is a fairweather friend of the Corbyn project still lingers in some circles'.
The great hope for Labour’s Corbynsceptics and the right-wing centre is Gerard Coyne, the regional secretary in the west Midlands.  It has been said that allies of McCluskey hoped he could be bought off with a parliamentary seat, but  that hasn't happened and some are worried that a victory for Coyne would upset the current political complexion of the Labour Party.
We now know on the left, that Jerry Hicks will not be a contender in the current election for Unite General Secretary, but he has promised that he will support the new left-wing candidate Ian Allinson for the job.
Ian Allinson is Fujitsu's Unite convenor in Manchester, and has been involved in Unite and its forerunners for 25 years. He also has a blog, which records his union activities since 2007.  Whereas Len and Gerard are both entrenched in the union bureaucracy, Ian Allinson makes a claim to being the closest to trade union rank and file membership.  Here is the shop-floor Manchester lad to take on the tired union establishment. men.
The result of this election could well have wider consequences for British politics.

Simon Danczuk: 'MPs with real life experience'!

YESTRDAY, the Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk, a veteran of sex scandals, told Julia Rampen in The New Statesman that Keith Vaz should ignore calls to resign after allegations about his private life.
Danczuk believes it was right Vaz resigned from his select committee.  He said: “I think he is going to discuss it in more detail with the members of the committee. You have got to remember he is elected by MPs. There should be a discussion about conflict of interest. I think Keith would admit it himself.
“But let’s put it into perspective. As far as we know he hasn’t done anything illegal. We have different moral judgements.”

Danczuk, who has remained MP for Rochdale, despite his suspension, dismissed calls for Vaz to resign his seat.  He said: “I don’t think this will have any effect on Keith’s constituency. He is very well regarded and I understand he is a very good constituency MP.

"In my experience, the reaction in the constituency can be very different from social media.  The benefit of being the MP for Rochdale is people come up to you and tell you exactly what they think. This little old Irish lady came up to me and said: ‘I see you’re up to your old tricks again.’  But then she said: 'I wish the papers would leave you alone. You get on with your day job.’
 "We don’t want cosseted MPs that meet a certain moral standard, we want people who have real life experience and bring it to inform policy. Britain’s a better place by having politicians in parliament who are from colourful backgrounds."
Mr. Danczuk, given his own vivid 'real life experiences', has a vested interest in promoting this tolerant point of view with regard to politicians.

Rochdale's United Party or Labour Party Gulag?

by Les May

'WE are a very united party in Rochdale and have been for a number of years now … ', were Simon Danczuk's words in an article by Paul Waugh carried by the Huffington Post a few days ago.  So how was this marvellous unity achieved then Simon?  And if the local party is so united why did council leader Richard Farnell have to warn Labour councillors in October not to criticise Mr Danczuk on social media.

Private Eye's HP Sauce column recently carried an article reminding the world that while Simon Danczuk likes to posture as a 'Labour Rebel' ever in danger of being booted out of the party, his own record in accepting dissenting voices in the Rochdale Constituency Labour party leaves rather a lot to be desired.

As the Eye pointed out in 2009 he complained that seven members of Rochdale Labour Party had undermined him in seeking an investigation into his conduct towards his then partner Karen Burke during a holiday in Spain. Of these five were expelled and two suspended.

But the quest to get rid of dissenter's didn't stop there.  In December 2011, Danczuk wrote to the then Labour Leader Colin Lambert, who was himself later ousted after delivering a stunning Labour victory at the council elections in 2014, and himself the victim of a smear campaign in 2012, complaining about Councillor Farooq Ahmed the cabinet member for finance.

Danczuk is reported to have said:
'I supplied a letter to the council leader on December 19 about a variety of issues relating to Councillor Ahmed's behaviour.
'When serious concerns about a councillor's conduct are brought to my attention, no matter what party they belong to, it is my duty to ensure that action is taken.
'I am disappointed the council leader has dithered and has been indecisive but I am pleased the group nationally has acted.'
Note the word 'dithered' here. Danczuk clearly expects everyone to immediately dance to his tune. When Colin Lambert did not do what Danczuk expected he took his complaint to the national party claiming he 'had a duty' to ensure action was taken.  Note also the similarity between this and Danczuk's attack on Ed Milliband for failing to suspend Janner on his say so.
In an interview reported in the Manchester Evening News Councillor Ahmed said:
'I have decided to step down from council due to continuous attacks, false allegations targeted to my professional and private life channelled by Mr Danczuk.'
Councillor Ahmed seems to have had the overwhelming support of Labour group and later reversed his decision.
In the subsequent investigation Councillor Ahmed was completely exonerated, but the damage to his reputation and standing in the community had already been done.
Now the interesting thing about the media reports of this spat is that they start to appear on or after 10 January 2012.  This was the day a commercial media company, CavendishPressAgency uploaded a video to YouTube with the title 'Pot-ted! Labour boss quits over "cannabis film". '
How this video clip came into the hands of CavendishPressAgency we do not know but Farooq Ahmed is on record as saying that the sudden emergence of the video was part of a 'smear campaign orchestrated by Simon Danczuk.'
Interviewed by New Statesman Chris Mullins said:
'Now collaborating with the nastier elements of the Murdoch press to do down the party is quite a high crime in my book, and if I was in Simon Danczuk’s CLP, I would certainly be sharpening my sword. He might well go away to Ukip or somewhere in the end, but good riddance to him, I say.'
Richard Farnell's writ runs only so far.  He may be able to control any anti-Danczuk stirrings in the hearts of Labour councillors.  But there are some party members who are wondering if Danczuk
should be in the Labour party at all.  They may well be emboldened by the fact that Danczuk's record of bringing the party into disrepute is being added to by every article he writes for the Mail on Sunday, so he would look like a hypocrite if he claimed that any dissenting voices were doing just that.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/11/04/simon-danczuk-hits-back-a_n_8470872.html

http://www.rochdaleonline.co.uk/news-features/2/news-headlines/98697/labour-councillors-warned-not-to-criticise-simon-danczuk

http://www.rochdaleonline.co.uk/news-features/2/news/29600/former-mayor-threatens-to-quit-labour-party

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/local-news/whitewash-claims-as-party-expels-five-930407

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/will-labour-suspend-mr-damczuk.html

http://danczuk.tripod.com/domestic-behaviour.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3157459/Disturbing-questions-Simon-Danczuk-crusades-against-abuse.html

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/danczuks-victim-of-2009-breaks-silence.html

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/colin-lambert-brands-labour-bullies.html

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/orginal-source-for-story-of-dodgy-e-mail.html

http://www.rochdaleonline.co.uk/news-features/2/news-headlines/98147/former-danczuk-spin-doctor-matt-baker-accused-of-vile-attack-and-smear-campaign

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/22/labour-lord-janner-danczuk-miliband

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/local-news/rochdale-councillor-farooq-ahmed-to-resign-679314

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-16510098

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBcxZIWltJA

http://www.rochdaleonline.co.uk/news-features/2/news-headlines/66932/councillor-farooq-ahmed-reinstated

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2015/11/chris-mullin-i-think-there-are-one-or-two-people-who-are-riding-fall

Best Wishes to N.V. from John Walker

Well, a year to remember, certainly.

Not sure if you caught last night's News at Ten, on the convicted paedophile who was sent down for activities in public schools in the 60s and 70s yesterday - half brother of Tory MP John Wittingdale, I believe. 

They interviewed one of his victims from the past - Francis Wheen.  Francis has always been hugely supportive of the stuff we (NV & Rap) have done on Smith, from the piece he wrote in New Statesman, 35 years ago, to the time and space he has given in the last couple of years in the Eye. Perhaps his experience as a victim helps explain his support.
 

Anyway, on a lighter note. All the very best for an enjoyable festive season, and here's to another roller coaster year in 2015! 
 

John Walker:  Former editor of the Rochdale Alternative Paper