Andy Wastling's Response to Chris Draper's Post

Response to Chris Drapers recent and extremely timely article on Northern Voices , Guess Who Is Reading Your Census ? by Andrew Wastling

IN response to Chris Drapers recent and extremely timely article on Northern Voices 'Guess Who Is Reading Your Census?'

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Readers might also like to have a read of 'Demilitarise the 2021 census' in Peace News: Demilitarise the 2021 census Peace News

There is also an extremely helpful template PRESS RELEASE for campaigners to send to their local media to explain why they are taking such action - though as we know unfortunately the likelihood of such a letter being published locally is indeed slim!

Milan Rai, editor of Peace News, which is circulating a guide to creative resistance to the census, commented: ‘Lots of British people are likely to feel uncomfortable adding to the profits of a giant US arms company developing weapons of death and providing IT services to those who’ve been waging war in Afghanistan and around the world for decades.’

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GUESS WHO IS READING YOUR CENSUS? by Christopher Draper

YOU are legally compelled to complete a census form this Sunday 21 March 2021. According to the form and advice booklet this information gathering is conducted by the “Office for National Statistics” but it’s been privatised with the 2021 contract run by “LEIDOS” (HQ Reston, Virginia, USA). LEIDOS is listed by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute as the 19th biggest arms and military services company in the world.

LEIDOS Who?

In 2019 the military IT and support service contracts operated by LEIDOS were worth $5.3bn. Last year LEIDOS spent $1.65bn of their profits acquiring Dynetics - a military hardware company. Dynetics is a developer of “future defence technologies” for the US military, including long-range hypersonic missiles, ground-based laser weapons and the Gunsmoke battlefield intelligence microsatellite.

Assisting Warmongers

If you don’t accurately complete your census form you can be fined £1,000 and given a criminal record but some peace-loving hippy types aren’t keen to assist LEIDOS in maximising their profits and have devised an imaginative response.

Completing the census online saves LEIDOS the time and trouble of processing the paper alternative. The more LEIDOS is able to use machines to open, scan, read and record information from paper census forms the more profit it makes on the contract. The more you frustrate this process, the more LEIDOS have to employ and pay people to manually record information, cutting into its profits and minimising its ability to develop ever more deadly weapons of war.

Unfortunate Errors

Courageous individuals might simply refuse to complete any census form and suffer the legal consequences but many more might wish to minimise LEIDOS profits whilst complying with the law. Of course, even those of us anxious to complete the form with the utmost accuracy might inadvertently make mistakes and regrettably such errors might cost LEIDOS time and money to rectify, for example you might;

a) Phone 0800-328-2021 and demand a paper form “as I can’t cope with this modern technology”.

b) Perhaps you might inadvertently enter some answers upside down making the information unreadable by machine.

c) Or fail to properly locate answers in the boxes provided.

d) You might even correct a serious error by stapling an amended version onto the form.

e) Perhaps a page might accidentally get torn and you clumsily mismatch the writing as you sellotape it together again

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f) If like me, you’re addicted to doodling you might casually fill in some of the white gaps in the bar-codes that make each page uniquely identifiable to electronic scanners.

g) Finally, when you put your completed form into the census envelope be careful that you don’t get it back-to-front because if the return address isn’t clearly visible in the little window you might cause unnecessary delay and expense.

h) NB Under no circumstances should you indicate on the outside of the envelope that;

THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT IS PAYING LEIDOS – AN AMERICAN MILITARY CONTRACTOR £65.1m TO PROCESS THESE CENSUS FORMS!

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PEACE NEWS & THE TRUMP COUP?

Where was the activist army when it was needed, Milan?

MILAN RAI in PEACE NEWS (December 2020 - January 2021) wrote an editorial entitled 'Countering Trump's Coup':

'As we went to press, Donald Trump had just sent a tweet which was the closest thing to conceeding that he lost the US presidential election that we're probably going to get.'

There had been speculation for some time that Trump would not accept the election result, and well before the US election Milan Rai's friend, Noam Chomsky, had been predicting that Trump supporters would stage a 'Coup' in the event that he lost the election.

Thus in last month's editorial Mr. Rai suggested investigative journalist Alan Nairn put it well on Democracy Now!:

'...in the crucial hours after late election night, when Trump went into his tent and started sulking like a bully who had been thwarted, I think he may have missed his moment, because that was the key moment to call his people on to the streets and start stopping and trashing the votes, and he failed to do that.'

Milan Rai then felt it necessary to claim: 'If Trump had seized his moment for creating chaos, his forces would have been met by a national nonviolent mobilisation against the coup attempt. Tens of thousands of US activists had been preparing for that exact situation. They had been organised by dozens of groups specifically to opose a Trump coup.'

Indeed Mr Rai argued: 'Choose Democracy, one of the new groups, held online anti-coup trainings with over 1,000 participants at a time' and that '(o)ver 37,000 people signed the Choose Democracy pledge of resistance, committing themselves to civil disobedience in event of an attempted coup.'

However, when the coup attempt actually came on Wednesday I may have overlooked their manifestaion of resistance, but I didn't see much of the non-violent resistance in evidence on Capitol Hill. Perhaps despite all their earlier forcasts and predictions, they were genuinely taken by surprise?

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Regarding Stuart Christie by Martin Gilbert

I ONLY met him once. It was outside the gates of Speakers Corner, Hyde Park, in 1963, Stuart had only been in London a short while. His accent was so thick I had difficulty understanding him. We were both selling papers. I had PEACE NEWS, and SANITY, (now long-gone, published by national CND). Also, we were both selling FREEDOM, a very different paper from what it has declined into. Stuart indicated that the papers were selling very well. Soon, we were were both busy chatting with different people and I never saw him again.

When he was arrested [in August 1964] reactions were very mixed. Predictabley, the media’s response was something like”….typical anarchists...”. Young CNDers and our fellow travellers showed 100% solidarity with Stuart. We had an old motor coach to aid our campaigning, so drove to Blackpool for the Labour party conference.

Readers may know that back then CND was much more establishment oriented. The line was only to approve of traditional methods of getting our messages across. This was years before national CND voted to support non violent direct action; thanks to the women at Greenham Common in 1980. So instead of following the (then) strict line we lobbied for Stuart’s release. Old campaigners were furious with us. In mitigation we claimed, incorrectly, that he was only carrying literature; which was also illegal in Franco’s Spain.

Lessons were gained from it all. One was awareness of the extent of Franco’s spies. Also, how open we and other groups were to infiltration from different kinds of Cops. But too much caution can only lead to quietism.

martin gilbert Sept. ‘20

Free Speech: Heretical, Unwelcome, Provocative!

by Les May

I WROTE the article italicised below in October last year. I thought that the topic and the approach would make it suitable for Peace News.   It would not be correct to say that the editor refused to publish it, he simply did not acknowledge it.

Given the recent ruling by Mr Justice Julian Knowles in a case brought by Harry Miller.  I have included it below this link to a Guardian article.  In his ruling Knowles stressed 'the vital importance of free speech”, saying it included “not only the inoffensive, but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative.'

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/14/transgender-tweet-police-acted-unlawfully

In one of this year’s Reith lectures Jonathan Sumption, who between 2012 and 2018 sat as a member of the Supreme Court, raised the question of whether the law may be returning to its earlier role as a means of enforcing social conformity. As instances of how it had exercised this function in the past he cited the use of the law to enforce a single pattern of religious worship in the 17^th century and the continued discrimination between denominations into the 19^th century.

To act as a mechanism for social conformity it is not necessary that this be exercised by the state, only that the state passes laws which allow individuals to use the law in a way which forces others to conform to their views.

In October of last year a case came before the Supreme Court in which a Gareth Lee had placed an order for a cake decorated with the words ‘Support Gay Marriage’.  The owners of the bakery, Daniel and Amy McArthur declined the order because as Christians they were being expected to express a view that they disagreed with. Lee argued that they were discriminating against him because he is a homosexual. Two lower courts had accepted this argument but the Supreme Court did not.

The president of the Court Lady Hale said:

‘It is deeply humiliating to deny someone a service because of that person’s race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, religion or belief’.

‘But that is not what happened in this case. As to Mr Lee’s claim based on sexual discrimination, the bakers did not refuse to fulfil his order because of his sexual orientation’.

The court accepted the argument of the McArthur’s lawyer that forcing them to bake the cake would be forcing them to go against their religious beliefs.

Lee was trying to use the Courts to force the McArthur’s to accept his view of the world.  His mistake was to argue that the couple were being ‘homophobic’ when they simply had a different view about the world.  A view to which he took exception.

But, as I have argued previously in Peace News, Lee’s approach is far from uncommon.

https://peacenews.info/node/9175/no-right-not-be-offended

Increasingly we see people who express a view which the listener or reader does not like being labelled as antisemitic, homophobic, islamophobic, mysoginistic or some similar pejorative epithet.

The court’s ruling means that provided we do not discriminate against someone because of what they ARE, we will not find ourselves in court for expressing our dissent from the views they hold. In other words such an expression of dissent is not ‘judiciable’, to use a word which has recently been rediscovered.

I would not expect to find it a matter for a court to consider if I decline to call someone who says they are transgender, ‘she’ or ‘her’, if I sincerely believe them to be a man. If however referring to such a person as ‘he’ or ‘him’ becomes seen as ‘hate speech’, as some people wish it to be, then it could be claimed that this is a matter for the courts.

Commenting on the ruling in the wedding cake case the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission said:

‘Freedom of expression – including the right not to express a view – and freedom of belief are rightfully protected in a democratic society and this case demonstrates the need for a more nuanced debate about how we balance competing rights’.

Debate, nuanced or otherwise, has been noticeably absent from anything surrounding what have become known as ‘trans’ issues.   Are claims of being cis, trans, non-binary and gender-fluid simply ephemeral affectations as some people see them or do they go to the core of an individual’s being and identity?  Unless we are willing to discuss the question we will never resolve the matter.

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Bookfair 2020: Trans Totalitarian Anarchism?

Editorial Note:

IN January 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay entitled 'The Prevention of Literature' in which he addressed the indifference of the public to the promotion of free expression and what Orwell calls 'the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers'.

 The reader will observe the humility here in Orwell's tone and will no doubt contrast it with the self confidence and even arrogance of much contemporary  commentary.  

'If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion.  In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.'

This lack of guts, this fear to challenge the latest orthodoxy still prevails in the anglo-saxon countries today.  But it's not the general public that are setting the agenda for acceptable opinions, it is a kind of fashionable elite view which bullies and bamboozles dissidents who either refuse, or are slow to swallow the latest flavour of the month.

2020 BOOKFAIR

The charming Tweets below from the proponents of the 2020 BOOKFAIR in London beautifully illustrate a naive mentality which is all too prevalent today.  In a way I feel sorry for the poor souls who churn out such stuff.  Do they really believe that they can silence criticism of Trans mania by such crude bans at Bookfairs?  All they have accomplished so far is to close down successful bookfairs as in London or to be forced to do deals as at the recent Manchester People's History Museum Bookfair.  Their every ban or censorious step tottering with the 'cocks in frocks' creates more opposition.

George Orwell, in the preface intended to accompany his book Animal Farm, which was not published in the first edition and remained undiscovered until 1971, wrote:
If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

The 2020 Bookfair organisers are desperately trying to keep the debate over the business of the Cocks in Frocks off the agenda.   It seems they can't cope with having to defend their curiosities of their position.  

Freedom & Professor Chomsky

When we had to take on Professor Chomsky in 2001, with our publication of the Alternative Raven, entitled 'Language, Mind & Society: Chomsky & His Critics' (2001)*, we were met with a more serious and subtle resistance.  In that case pressure was applied slyly through Milan Rai to get Freedom Press to block publication, after the great man Chomsky became aware that we were going to publish some essays challenging to his linguistic ideas on the universal grammar in what was then The Raven.  Milan Rai had been for a time closely associated with Chomsky and now edits Peace News. 
Milan worked behind the scenes on Professor Chomsky's behalf to get the then editor of Freedom to prevent the agreed publication of The Raven critical of his theory on language.   In the end a group of northern anarchists and academics brought out an Alternative Raven, which included the articles challenging Chomsky's theories.  Later Freedom even refused to review the Alternative Raven. when Donald Rooum over-ruled the then editor Toby Crowe.  Later in a letter to me, Chomsky came to admit that he had throughout been in touch with with Milan Rai over that issue, but in mitigation said he only contacted him as a friend.

None of the people involved in trying to suppress the criticism of Chomsky's linguistics at Freedom covered themselves with glory over this matter, and Freedom lost some of its integrity by first agreeing to publish The Raven on Chomsky's linguistics, and to later when Milan Rai got involved to withdraw its offer.  

Self-censorship & 'uncomfortable truths'

When Orwell writes about the 'discomfort' of intellectual honesty, he meant that even during the Second World War, with the Ministry of Information’s often ham-fisted attempts at press censorship, 'the sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.'   Self-censorship came down to matters of decorum, Orwell argues—or as we would put it today, 'civility.'   Obedience to 'an orthodoxy' meant that while 'it is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other… it is "not done" to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was "not done" to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.  Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness,' not by government agents, but by a critical backlash aimed at preserving a sense of 'normalcy' at all costs.


At stake for Orwell in the 1940s was no less than the fundamental liberal principle of free speech, in defense of which he invokes the famous quote from Voltaire as well as Rosa Luxembourg’s definition of freedom as 'freedom for the other fellow'.  'Liberty of speech and of the press,' Orwell writes, does not demand 'absolute liberty'—though he stops short of defining its limits.  But it does demand the courage to tell uncomfortable truths, even such truths as are, perhaps, politically inexpedient or detrimental to the prospects of a lucrative career.  'If liberty means anything at all,' Orwell concludes, 'it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.'

Unlike in the 1940s, when Orwell was around trying to get Animal Farm published, we are not being nudged into a vulgar Marxist or pro-Soviet totalitarianism.  The kind of totalitarianism of the Trans mania we are now expected to civilly swallow is the decorum of the Cocks in Frocks.

*  http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/class_text_117.pdf

 

Democracy & the anarchists

by Brian Bamford

REVIEWING a recent interview involving the academic Ruth Kinna, the critic Les May asks on this blog about the way she tackles the question about the attitudes of English anarchists to democracy. Here Les May suggests that she hesitated and appeared to stumble when the interviewer asked her whether anarchists believed in democracy.   Mr. May puts this down to the abysmal way in which some modern anarchists have handled themselves when confronted with political, moral and intellectual differences.  He probably has in mind people being roughed-up, shoved around and sent packing at anarchist  book fairs and other events.  The list is long but the recent exclusions of Helen Steel has excited interest, and not just on Mums Net.  This raised another issue: the crude hierarchical nature of the anarchist's methodology in so far as some of them seem more than willing to defend minor celebrities like Ms. Steel but hold back from backing 'lesser' figures who fall foul on some political point of order.

At the Liverpool Anarchist Book fair last year, where a blacklist was in operation and tolerated, even by Milan Rai, the editor of Peace News failed to give his full backing to people who were blacklisted there.  Mr. Rai who accepts that the practice of a blacklist was unfair in Liverpool, non-the-less he didn't let it get in the way or prevent him from doing his own book promotion at the same event.  Political expediency seems to be name of the game among the political libertarians of all shapes and sizes.  Moral compass, it seems, takes a back seat.at all levels among the English, particularly when it gets in the way of business.  The New from Nowhere set who were organising the Liverpool Bookfair, were more worried about losing business through the bad publicity that ensued than upholding any moral standards.

Les May writes:  'Democracy isn’t just about voting, it’s also about how we treat people we disagree with.'

What is democracy, we might ask?

The book 'School for Dictators' by the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone, has a character called Thomas: the Cynic who declares:  'Democracy is universal sufferage plus certain conditions.  The Greeks who were the first to experience it, [and] described four of them as follows: isonomia, or equality of rights before the law; liberty (which is a word plain enough in itself); isocratia or political equality; and isegoria, or freedom of speech.'

Mr. May asks:  'Why is it that people who claim to follow a political philosophy which extols personal freedom, trust in the individual, working for the collective good and personal responsibility, so often turn out to be authoritarian when they band together in groups?'

What maybe puzzling Mr. May, who has been around the English anarchists at least since the Freedom Anarchist Ball in the early 1960s, is that some anarchists today are actively repressing others and trying to prevent them presenting alternative viewpoints.  


But it is not only Milan Rai at Peace News who has fallen short and failed to be consistent in his stand against the persistent censorship, bullying and gagging among the adherents of anarchism in this country.  Pensioned-off academics like David Goodway and Peter Marshall who wrote 'Demanding the Impossible:  A History of Anarchism', both sit on a committee 'Friends of Freedom Press' which oversees a blacklist which named several northern anarchists.  This blacklist was compiled by a Freedom incomer from East Anglia Simon Saunders who also works as a hack for the Morning Star.

As Les May writes in his article:   'There’s no shortage of examples of such authoritarian behaviour which have been recorded on the Northern Voices blog, some in recent weeks.   Why do they do it?'

We live in troubling times in which politics on all fronts in this country has now been generally discredited by a degree of intolerance.  It is surprising that in some respects it is at its worst among the anarchists and among the readers at book fairs.  

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Justifying Reviews on the NV Blog

We have taken the unusual step of publishing two reviews of the controversial booklet 'Shit Wigs and Steroids: Anarchism's (and the left's) Tolerance of Delusion'.  We have done this because in the current climate we believe this publication, whatever its flaws, offers a valuable insight into developments on the strange shores of the British political left and beyond.  It needs to be read, because too many people are what we would call 'skedaddlers', ducking and dodging all requirements for moral compass in a social context like the current trends and fashions encouraged by the Gender Recognition Act.

The authors of the two reviews on this Blog offer different perspectives in their approach to the text.  Both are experienced reviewers; Les May reviewed 'Smile for the Camera: The Double Life of Cyril Smith'* and Chris Draper wrote 'Who Killed Freedom?: an unauthorised history'**.  

In the past Freedom newspaper would have had the courage to run alternative assessments together with follow-up correspondence, always encouraging controversy.  Nowadays, Freedom in all its forms offers a less challenging body of work both intellectually and in propaganda terms.  One might have thought that Milan Rai, the editor of Peace News, who was at the Liverpool Bookfair when the incident described in the book occured, and its author was accosted, detained and roughly expelled, would be willing to review it, and certainly it might be expected that it would be a worthy subject of debate on a thread on Libcom?

Any problems in the contents ought to be left to the readers to access its value.  Whatever it shouldn't be censored by the supercillious southern anarchists who think they can decide what is suitable for us northerners to consume.

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* 

N.V. Review of 'Smile for the Camer - Northern Voices

northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2015/10/nv-review-of-smile-for-camera.html

**  Who Killed Freedom?: an unauthorised history 4. - Northern Voices

northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/.../who-killed-freedom-unauthorised-history_7.html

Another Anarchist Bookfair Drama in Manchester

by Brian Bamford

JUST beyond  the wrestling crowds of the Manchester Xmas Markets and the site of the current play 'The Producers' featuring 'Springtime for Hitler' at the Royal Exchange, in down town Salford on Saturday the 1st, December another knock-about farce took place seemingly provoked by a bunch of political drama-Queens at the Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair.

Based on the info on the Twitter, the website MUMSNET at around teatime on the night of the Manchester Bookfair, set up a thread which opened with the following:

Reports that Helen Steel and another woman were surrounded and physically dragged out of (another) anarchist bookfair for wrongthink

Since the night of the Manchester 'anarchist' bookfair not much else has been in evidence explaining why Helen Steel and the other woman were excluded from this event.  Northern Voices approached the bookfair organisers, and others questioned the Partisan Collective, the managers of the bookfair venue for an explanation, but answers came there none.  What we know of what happened comes mostly from comments on Twitter and MUMSNET.

This year's incident in Manchester follows the series of conflicts at bookfairs that started at the London Anarchist Bookfair in October 2017, when a dispute ensued between certain transexuals and some feminists over the distribution of leaflets criticising proposals in the new legislation on the Gender Recognition Act.  During that case Helen Steel somehow became involved arguing for free speech and the right to debate the issues.

Since that time Helen Steel and others who think like her have been labeled 'TERF's', and it is understood that the Manchester venue 'The Partisan' does not allow space for TERF's.

After the disaster of the 2017 London Bookfair and the later conflicts at other 'anarchist' bookfair's like Manchester, Milan Rai the editor of Peace News wrote an editorial in the December-January 2018 issue entitled 'How to destroy our own movements':
'Activists need to find better ways to struggle with each other and to fight with each other, argues Milan Rai

"People ask me how we would defend the bookfair from a fascist attack, but I’m not worried about them out there. I worry about what we might do to each other in here." – one of the organisers of the London Anarchist Bookfair, on 28 October.
'A few hours later, a group of trans rights activists stopped some feminists handing out leaflets that they found oppressive to trans women. A nontrans woman, Helen Steel, objected to this censorship. 'About 30 trans rights activists then surrounded Helen Steel and shouted at her for having stood up for the leafleters.
'The confrontation went on for a long time. Some people (including members of the bookfair collective) surrounded Helen Steel to protect her from possible assault. An unknown person then tripped the fire alarm, leading to an evacuation of the building.'

The consequences of this conflict between trans-rights activists and feminists still prevails as was evident in Manchester earlier this month.  But it is a symptom of a wider problem of the inability of the broader left to communicate owing to a righteous arrogance which has developed within its ranks.  It is inevitably that today an ideology which roots itself in an orthodoxies such as political correctness and identity politics was bound to suffer from the inconsistencies of its own contradictions.

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Peace News, Free Speech & 'Hate Speech'

by Brian Bamford

PEACE NEWS has been continuing its splendid coverage of the controversial transgender issue and its impact on free expression since the beginning of this year; the latest edition carries a thoughtful comment piece from the Manchester peace campaigner Cath Bann and a letter from the biologist Les May.  Northern Voices particularly applauds its editorial stand on free speech.


Both Cath Bann and Les May are responding to a letter in the previous edition of Peace News from Clare Bonetree who claimed that the paper was confusing free speech with 'hate speech'.

Cath Bann writes:  'So few left-wing publications have been courageous enough to print opinions which question the prevailing thought on trans issues, and the fact that you have featured articles from both sides of the divide, as well as offering your own take (as a free speech issue) is commendable.'

Les May in his letter writes:   'Increasingly we have people trying to grab the moral high ground by claiming that something they read or hear, and do not like, is racist, anti-semitic, Islamophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, homophobic, patriarchal or in the latest catch all phrase, "hate speech", and should not be said.'

Ms. Bann in her comment piece argues:   'While I appreciate that Clare’s motivations likely stem from the desire (which I and presumably all in the peace movement share) to stand up for minority communities, I believe there is a failure to see that there is an overreach in trans rights ideology that is causing genuine concern.  To label this concern, and Peace News’ article, as transphobic is drawing the parameters of what counts as transphobia too widely.'

This topical broad brush approach employed by Ms. Bonetree and much of the anglo-saxon left is both lazy and dangerous.  As Les May is well aware that in Rochdale and elsewhere in the North it has led to a kind of inverted racism in which tend to turn a blind eye to ethnic grooming gangs or more recently cases of multiple voting by people of Asian ethnicity which the authorities seem reluctant to investigate for fear of being accused of 'institutional racism'.

Peace News in their current editorial commenting on the ongoing disputes surrounding both transgender and free speech declare:

'Last issue, we published a letter from Clare Bonetree explaining why she was ending her subscription to PN over our coverage of recent conflicts over trans rights.  The last straw for her was our description of the conflict at the Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair (over an anti-trans leaflet) as a question of free speech. Clare’s letter prompted a response from another reader, Cath Bann, which is published below.  We welcome responses to both Cath’s and Clare’s letters – we want to represent the diversity of views in grassroots movements for change, and be a forum for debate.'

It's refreshing to see a publication like Peace News that is encouraging intelligent debate on these issues.

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Anarchy in Action?

by Chris Draper

ANARCHIST Bookfairs once demonstrated ‘Anarchy in Action’ – intellectually stimulating, friendly and welcoming to all-comers.  Now “Anarchist Bookfairs” routinely exemplify prejudice, bans, ejections and violence. First the London Bookfair was cancelled now Sheffield’s gone the same way. Manchester lost its prestigious “People’s History Museum” venue because of the blacklisting behaviour of its organisers and the 2018 Liverpool Bookfair first banned one anarchist and then physically ejected another. In an attempt to restore open-minds and open-access I recently emailed one of the ‘Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair’ organisers and I invite YOU dear reader to evaluate the response for yourself...

(a copy of the email sent by me to Maria, one of the Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair organisers)

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Dear Maria,

I email you as one of the organisers of the recent Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair.

Whilst I appreciate that organising such an event is a thankless task you would probably agree that several aspects of what transpired were rather negative. As an aged, lifelong anarchist who devoutly believes ‘The Personal is Political’ it is almost anathema to me to ban people from anarchist events. We should practice what we preach and live the society we advocate. Would we ban people from a post-revolution anarchist world?

Three people were to some extent subject to bans; Barry Woodling, Brian Bamford and another unnamed male. Whilst Woodling was almost immediately reinstated, Bamford was left outside in the rain and the third character was ejected late in the day. In none of these three cases was any open, democratic, ‘due-process’ evident. The Woodling example underlines the quixotic nature of such bans as he had previously been refused entry to the Manchester fair and was informed on arriving at Liverpool he was again banned and then for no apparent reason this decision was quashed and he was allowed in to no ill effect. You surely recognise that such conduct betrays an absence of justice and consistency. Anarchism should model improved relationships not exemplify irrational prejudice.

Moving on from the Woodling example, I realise that some comrades disagree with views expressed by the other two individuals, in fact in both cases I expressed my own criticisms to them personally, BUT one of the defining aspects of anarchism is that we relish disagreement and win over critics by exemplary argument and behaviour rather than repression and exclusion. Of course, we have a right to physically defend ourselves but where is the evidence that any of these three individuals had to be excluded to prevent them physically attacking anyone? I can only presume Mr Bamford was banned on the basis of prejudicial testimony as the objective account of a violent attack upon him at a previous book-fair given by respected bookseller, Ross Bradshaw (and available on his own website), makes clear that Bamford was the victim. (Ironically I noted the presence of the perpetrator of that particular violent act inside the Liverpool fair).

I appreciate your efforts in organising the bookfair, of which many aspects were admirable, but I don’t think such injustice should be brushed aside and then repeated next year (you have doubtless seen the negative publicity in Peace News etc). I don’t claim to have all the answers but I would ask you and the other organisers to constructively address this problem and would be happy to correspond about possible solutions.

For Peace, Love & Anarchy

Christopher Draper

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Dear Christopher,

Thanks for your email, which Maria has forwarded to the rest of us.  We are happy to clarify that there was no ban on Barry Woodling attending.  We are not sure who told him to leave, but one of us

stepped in to say that he did not have to leave.  We did not discuss him or communicate with him prior to the bookfair because there simply was no reason to, and most of us did not even know of him.

We emailed Brian Bamford in advance of our bookfair as follows, after some correspondence with him:

"Dear Brian,

We appreciate that blacklisting is an important issue to you, and we

wish you all the best in your own campaigning efforts against it.

However, unfortunately we have to ask you to not attend the Liverpool

Anarchist Bookfair. It has come to our attention that that there is a

history of disruption and conflict associated with yourself at

bookfairs and other occasions elsewhere, so we have decided that in

the interests of all concerned - including yourself - and the smooth

and peaceful running of our event, it is best that you do not attend.

Thank you in advance for respecting this. Our decision is final."

Therefore when Brian arrived, we peacefully but firmly insisted that

he leave, in accordance with our prior decision. Brian chose to stay

outside the venue to talk to people coming into the building, rather

than to do something else elswhere; there were plenty of places he

could have gone to be much more comfortable and sheltered, such as a

cafe, pub, shop, or the cathedral or a museum for example.

The other person asked to leave during the bookfair was someone who

was distributing a transphobic leaflet, literature that expressed

prejudice against an oppressed group, against our safer spaces policy

https://liverpoolanarchistbookfair.wordpress.com/2018/03/22/safer-spaces/

. We asked him to step out of a workshop to talk with us, but he

refused and escalated the situation. This resulted in him being asked

to leave, and we escorted him out of the building with the support of

the venue staff. On the way out this person kicked someone hard in the

back from behind on a flight of stairs - very fortunately the person

they kicked was not seriously injured.

A one day event like the bookfair is not a situation where you can

hold some kind of in-depth process to resolve a conflict or address

harmful behaviour. As organisers we have a great many practical issues

to manage on the day to keep the event running smoothly. We expect

that the vast majority of people will behave in a reasonable and

respectful way towards others, but we have the right, and

responsibility, to ask anyone to leave if they do not. We took care to

think about and plan for dealing with possible problems and we

publicised the safer spaces policy, in advance online and in the

printed programmes on the day,  to make it clear what was not

acceptable.

Our decision to ask Brian in advance not to attend was not due to

disagreement with his views, and was not at the behest of anyone else,

but was informed by learning of various conflicts and difficulties

involving him, in particular his threats to sue one of the Manchester

bookfair venues, the People's History Museum, and his behaviour at the

Freedom Press Friends meeting in June 2016. Since the bookfair he has

emailed Maria making a threat to block trade union bodies from

supporting any future financial appeals by News From Nowhere bookshop,

where she works but which had absolutely no involvement itself in

organising the bookfair. This only confirms to us that Brian can be a

difficult person who is very focused on pursuing grudges.

It's very understandable why Brian and his friends like yourself feel

that he should be given some sort of hearing for his side of what

seems to be very complicated history of conflicts, but as Liverpool

event organisers we have no obligation or capacity to somehow attempt

to adjudicate on any past events and incidents that took place

elsewhere. We simply were not and are not interested in being drawn

into these conflicts, nor for our event to be used as an occasion to

pursue such conflicts.

best wishes

Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair collective

********

Peace News on the Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair

June - July 2018 | Issue 2618 - 2619

Anarchists barred from bookfair

One person barred and a second ejected from Liverpool event.

Septuagenarian Anarchist - Brian Bamford

ON 7 April, the organisers of the Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair excluded two people from the gathering, which was taking place in the huge Black-E community arts centre near the city centre.

Brian Bamford, a member of the Northern Anarchist Network, was told in advance that he would not be allowed in, and was stopped at the door.  Another man (whose name is not known) was taken from a workshop by organisers and thrown out of the bookfair. (The workshop was about employers barring trade unionists from jobs.)

I was told by bookfair organisers that Bamford had a history of causing disturbances, and they were determined to avoid such problems at their event.  The other man was apparently thrown out for circulating an offensive anti-trans leaflet.

Read more:

https://peacenews.info/node/9046/anarchists-barred-bookfair

PEACE NEWS DEFENDS FREE SPEECH!

ACTIVISTS need to find better ways to struggle with each other and to fight with each other, argues Milan Rai

'People ask me how we would defend the bookfair from a fascist attack, but I’m not worried about them out there.  I worry about what we might do to each other in here.’ – one of the organisers of the London Anarchist Bookfair, [said] on 28 October.
A few hours later, a group of trans rights activists stopped some feminists handing out leaflets that they found oppressive to trans women.  A nontrans woman, Helen Steel, objected to this censorship. About 30 trans rights activists then surrounded Helen Steel and shouted at her for having stood up for the leafleters.
The confrontation went on for a long time.  Some people (including members of the bookfair collective) surrounded Helen Steel to protect her from possible assault.  An unknown person then tripped the fire alarm, leading to an evacuation of the building.

After the bookfair, there was sharp criticism of the organisers.  The collective have decided not to organise the London Anarchist Bookfair next year.  We’ve published lots of relevant documents in this issue, in full or (in one case) nearly in full, to give PN readers the chance to make up your own minds about what’s happened at one of the most important radical gatherings in Britain.

We believe this conflict has wider significance for grassroots movements for change, not just in Britain,

Steel by name

Our starting point is that standing up for free speech is necessary and important.  It is appalling that 30 activists gathered to threaten someone for standing up for the right to leaflet. It is shocking that people in the crowd shouted ‘ugly TERF’, ‘fucking TERF scum’, ‘bitch’, and ‘fascist’ at her because she refused to accept their harassment of two women leafleters.  This kind of bullying is completely unacceptable. (The word ‘TERF’ is now mostly used as a derogatory term meaning ‘someone with transphobic views’.   It originally stood for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’.)   It’s shameful that groups have issued statements of solidarity with the trans rights activists without criticising this intimidation.

When Helen Steel stood up for freedom of speech, when organisers of the bookfair helped to protect her, these were courageous and principled acts.

We shouldn’t allow anyone, whether the government or any activist group, the right to dictate what ideas should be allowed to circulate.  Freedom of speech is deeply connected to freedom of thought. Most of us discover what we really think by talking with others, by expressing ourselves, and then hearing other people’s responses.  Everyone should have the chance to find their own political truths, to make mistakes, to grow and to stand on their own feet intellectually.

There is an old slogan: the answer to bad speech is more speech. In 1969, US anarchist Noam Chomsky wrote: ‘a movement of the left condemns itself to failure and irrelevance if it does not create an intellectual culture that becomes dominant by virtue of its excellence and that is meaningful to the masses of people who, in an advanced industrial society, can participate in creating and deepening it’.

Our arguments should become dominant by virtue of their excellence, not because we have shouted down the other side.

Shutting down debate – by shouting people down or blockading a talk or triggering a fire alarm – can be seen as a lack of confidence, a lack of belief that you have the arguments to win the argument.

Free speech

Defending someone’s freedom of expression is not the same as approving of what they are saying. Chomsky points out:  ‘If you’re in favour of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favour of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.  Otherwise you’re not in favour of freedom of speech.’

When should free speech be limited?  Chomsky stands with the US supreme court ruling of 1969 which said that speech should always be protected from legal punishment except when people are trying to incite, and likely to produce, ‘imminent lawless action’ with their words.  According to this standard, the law should not be used to stop or punish speech that justifies or advocates oppressive violence in general.  The law should only be used against speech when those words are being used to try to start an actual violent attack right here, right now (‘imminently’).

Whatever else you might say about them, none of the gender-related leaflets passed out at the bookfair either justified or tried to incite anti-trans violence.  The nearest the bookfair came to imminent violence was when 30 people surrounded Helen Steel.

It has been claimed that what was written in these leaflets was a form of violence.  This is to bend the meaning of words completely out of shape.  Offensive or oppressive speech is not violence.

If you choose to define oppressive speech as violence, and if you accept the right of violent self-defence, then it is justified to carry out violence against pretty much everyone, because we all say things that are oppressive or that can be seen as oppressive.

Yes, hate speech can help create a climate of intolerance and hatred which encourages violent attacks. That doesn’t mean hate speech is violence or that it should be subject to legal punishment. (We’re not saying the leaflets were hate speech.)

How to destroy ourselves

In our last editorial, we described how conservatives, liberals, socialists and communists all helped to create an authoritarian climate in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, paving the way for Nazism (PN 2610–2611).

The socialist SPD banned meetings, newspapers and demos.  The communist KPD broke up meetings.  Together, they undermined democratic habits and independent thinking within German working-class movements, leaving them paralysed when the Nazis came to power.

When we stop public discussions, either through the law or through some kind of force (like a fire alarm), we move politics away from debate and persuasion, what pagan activist Starhawk calls ‘power with’, towards the world of force and compulsion, what Starhawk calls ‘power over' others.  If politics turns into a ‘power over’ game, the winners will be those who are most brutal.  That outcome won’t favour any kind of feminist.

Every time disruption or threats make it impossible to hold a public meeting – whoever is speaking, whatever their views – we undermine free speech and we weaken our already weak movements for change.

We need to find better ways to struggle with each other and to fight with each other, to disagree deeply while continuing to work together where we can.  We need to create bigger, stronger activist organisations, independent media, radical publishers and bookfairs.  We need to support the London Anarchist Bookfair, not destroy it.  We should be inspired how it makes freedom work.

Editorial note: In five articles ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5]), Peace News is documenting the free speech conflict at this year’s (2017) London Anarchist Bookfair. The origins of the Anarchist Bookfair are briefly recounted here, and the issues concerning free speech are the subject of this issue's editorial above.