Dear Adam Lawrence-Barr,
NICE to hear from you.
I only became aware of you after someone drew my attention to your spat
with Nick Heath over your interview with the Catholic Worker. I think he accused you of returning to the
'Big Tent' approach to anarchism, and you humbly said that Freedom had no
intention of returning to the 'Big Tent' approach. I don't know what the alternative is perhaps
it amounts to proclaiming what Orwell called the 'smelly little orthodoxy' of
left wing politics. Whatever is the
case, Northern Voices would be more than happy to publish your ideas on the NV
Blog.
You mention a few
groups or tenants of Freedom that are doing 'work', implying that by offering
rooms or collecting rents and standing in their shadows Freedom is somehow made
more significant by its proximity to these bodies. It's a curious argument to pursue, especially
when at the last meeting of the Friends of Freedom you revealed that the
inmates at Freedom had managed to 'squander' a large sum of money left to
Freedom by a benefactor some 7-years ago.
You did say 'squander' didn't you?
And did you go on to absolve yourself by saying: 'It was before my time'? Also, is it true that a member of the Friends
has been financing the Collective out of their own pocket?
None of these misdemeanours seems to inhibit you from taking
that moral high ground in your e-mail and accusing Northern Voices an 'attempt
to steal away the means of production from the workers using it by a bunch of
old irrelevant white men'. I'm glad you
raised the matter in this for it suggests that you have not read a word of the
Freedom archives or even of Northern Voices.
By couching your profound critique in such terms I suppose that you are
claiming that you are more in touch with the shop-floor and the world of
work? And that your record in anarchist
politics is somehow superior to mine and the other three supporters of the
'Modest program'?
Well, that is interesting:
how long have you been involved in Freedom? The problem is that you seem to be
representing the Metropolitan elite, and apart from David Goodway from
Yorkshire, who is on the Friends of Freedom to represent the provinces? Your own name sounds like something from the
Home Counties and the middle-class, it doesn't have a proletarian ring to it
does it? It doesn't sound owt like
someone who has been apprenticed in a factory, or has worked in the shipyards
in Gibraltar like me, or has been a weighman in a Lancashire textile mill. Or someone who has done time in Strangeways,
or been detained in a dungeon in the province of Segovia in the summer of 1963,
before even Stuart Christie went to Franco's Spain. I'll not mention about the interviews I did
for Freedom during the pyramid sales riots in Albania in 1997, and in Belgrade
during the general elections there in December 2000. What today seems to be held to be
'irrelevant' on the left of politics is the concerns of the blue-collar
worker: take the lack of interest in
many quarters in the recent High Court case over blacklisting - that is the
elephant which has somehow been left outside the room. Where are the representatives of North &
South Wales on the Friends of Freedom? Where
is the Scottish connection? Where are
the Northerners? Where are the genuine
Proles and blue-collar workers?
Come-on Adam
Lawrence-Barr, who are you kidding?
Kind regards,
Brian Bamford
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