WITCH-HUNTS! or WHICH-CUNTS?

Echoing Big Mick Bakunin, JOHN COOPER CLARK might say:  
'Distruction is a Creative Urge 
'Transgender is the way of the World! 
'August is the silly season,
'So do away with the patriarchal penis, 
'Cultivate a matriarchal cunny-become a Cool Dude!
'Distruction is a Creative Urge!
'So let's have a bit of a Purge!'
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CONSTRUCTIVE DISMISSAL ON THE FREEDOM CENTRAL COMMITTEE
Trans-maniac Trauma Grips Friends of Freedom
by Brian Bamford

THE WEEKEND in the run-up to the Glorious Twelfth day of August, and the start of the shooting season for red grouse (Lagopus lagopus scotica), was this year a busy and anxious time for the secretary of the Friends of Freedom Press Steve Sorba.  On Friday  the 9th, August Secrretary Sorba sent out a message to all of his fellow directors urging them all to give some thought to some facebook comments of one of their colleagues which he thought 'transphobic'.

 Here Comes a Dynamic Duo: Batman & Robin

FREEDOM since the departure of the wayward, Andy Meinke last year, has been run as a kind of Sorba and Saunders' show, with seemingly Simon Saunders pulling the Director of the Friends of Freedom, Steve Sorba's strings.   They could be likened to Batman and Robin staring in a matinee Comic Opera, the problem for the average commentator is deciding which is which.  

It this latest case the allegations of 'transphobia' against the distinguished former militant miner, Dave Douglass, has been made by the posh East Anglian former public schoolboy (in the USA this means 'private schoolboy') Simon Saunders, who now presides over the so-called 'Freedom collective', which busies itself with day-to-day management at Freedom Press.  Some both here and abroad will think this odd.   On the 9th, August an e-mail from Secretary Sorba, based on a complaint from posh boy Simon Saunders, spells out the dilemma in Steve Sorba's communique to his fellow Freedom Friends of Freedom Directors: 

'Hi Everyone,'

'I have received a message from Simon [Saunders] that we may well need to reflect on over the weekend. Sorry for the short notice.

'Apologies to David as I would have liked to speak to him in advance but there is no time now so I pass it on below.

'I don’t pick up work emails at the weekend but copy me in using my personal email above if you need to.

'I paraphrase:

'It has been brought to my attention that Dave Douglas has made public comments supporting a pamphlet which is fundamentally transphobic (and in places homophobic as well). Describing trans people as "cocks in frocks", and all just men with mental health issues etc and describes their supporters as a "gang of ponces", which rather than encouraging nuanced or sensitive debate, actively undermines it. (https://tinyurl.com/y3msflq6 )

'The Freedom Collective has a public pro-trans position and has committed to defending trans people against what has become increasingly a form of moral panic where even rights which have already stood for years without comment are being attacked. Having someone who agrees with that pamphlet's approach, which blames trans people for the sum of recent bookfair confrontations and finds transphobic bullying funny elected to the board would place us in an extremely difficult situation.

'Dave's post has been picked up by trans people and he's been accused of having a transphobic position. This means that if he's elected to a Freedom-related post there is every chance the Friends will come in for a lot of criticism and it will stir up yet another useless argument to no good end that I can see. This topic is an extremely febrile one in the movement at large, and essentially by appointing him we'd be causing enormous drama that we (and probably Dave too) really don't need right now.

'No doubt David would like to reply to these comments as I am sure that he is being misrepresented.

I suggest that we await this reply and discuss the matter further on Monday when we all meet up.'

 Readers must judge for themselves who is pulling the strings here?

********

 Saddle Skedaddlers Squeeze Thoughtful Analysis

THE significant paragraph (underlined by me) that gives away Secretary Sorba's own attitude and character is the next to the last one in which he shows his own clear lack of personality:  How can an anarchist with a true spirit of independence run away from a drama or a moral controversy, as Secretary Sorba is proposing here?  It is the spirit of the skedaddler rather than the political radical.  Sorba's own facebook interests show a fondness for cycling, which he shares with his fellow 'Director Friend' Carolyn Wilson.  The Saddle Skedaddlers, if you like are far from noble.

Ofcourse, Mr. Sorba is first and foremost a publisher, a businessman, and not an anarchist, his main relationship with Vernon Richards seems to have been that they both shared a passion for Italian opera.  Sorba  it turned out had the most to gain by the closure of Freedom as a hard copy publication and it is he who wants to keep the premises in Angel Alley as it fits better with his own business interests as a publisher

Posh boy Simon Saunders, who provoked the dismissal and no-platforming of Dave Douglass a retired miner from South Sheilds, has acted in a similar way to the recent pressure put on Hong Kong business community by China's ruling communist party in Beijing when on August 9th (the same day Sorba sent out his message) the Chinese aviation authority [CAAC] accused management at Cathay Pacific of not doing enough to discipline their employees who have been alleged to have been involved in the demos that have hit the territory over the last couple of months.  

The warning from CAAC came shortly after John Slosar, Cathay's non executive chairman, said the airline 'wouldn't dream of telling [employees] what they have to think about something' as it reported profits of HK$1.35 billion ($172m) after two years of losses.

The latest reports from Hong Kong suggest that the pilot, 30-year old Liu Chung-yin, who was arrested with 16 others for allegedly having participated in a violent demo on the 28th, July, has now been detained. 

“If you’re a boss, you’re thinking, ‘Oh my God!’” said Carol Ng of the Hong Kong Cabin Crew Federation, a union that represents airline workers. “‘I just want to do business here.  Now they’re screening my staff.’”

This kind of fear could do real damage to Hong Kong’s economy, Ms. Ng said, “much more than the protests or rallies themselves.” 

The attentive reader will detect the parallels between the Freedom episode with Dave Douglass, a tough northern workingman living in South Shields being witch-hunted and no-platformed by a self righteous middle-class southerner, to the mind control now being applied by the Beijing communists bosses on the workers on Hong Kong.  This may be giving Mr. Saunders at Freedom, a little too much credit, because he merely spends most of his time fiddling with his smart phone and going on Face book like some demented Internet Nosey Parker who is on record of creating a blacklist of veteran anarchists who he thinks should be declared persona-non-grata.  Yet he has been quick to complain when others have described him as a paid Morning Star hack.

I use these terms advisably based both on my own observations of Simon Saunders' body language behaviour when he aided Andy Meinke in bungling me into Angel Alley outside the Anarchist HQ, while the Friends of Freedom sat on their butts upstairs, on reports of his general attitude of entitlement, and overall pushy demeanour in which he comes over as a bit of a boss, and also as a conversational analyst I'm curious about his form of language.  But when considering the recent predilection at Freedom Press for appointing folk who to put bluntly are 'a slate short'.  Readers here and in the USA, should consider the history of Freedom as presented by Chris Draper in his history of Freedom*:  Toby Crowe took the editor's chair around 2000 when Charles Crute (apprenticed by Vernon Richards) was forced out, Mr Crute had looked to involve the Northern Anarchist Network in Freedom so as to broaden both the paper's geographical appeal or to as the anarchist Peter Neville said handing over part of Freedom to the writings and reports of 'Northern workingmen'.  In the end Toby, who was for a time Secretary of the Marxist Socialist Party of Great Britain soon fell-out with the NAN and the solidly northern writers like Derek Pattison; Harold Sculthorpe (a Friend of Freedom); me (Brian Bamford) who was at the time the Northern Editor of Freedom, and quite separately with Chris Draper in North Wales.  In truth Toby came over as a bit supercillious he'd been an infant school teacher giving stars to toddlers, and he eventually moved on and took to the cloth, perhaps the editors that followed Charles Crute felt a little insecure in the editor's chair because monomania seemed to become a feature of the these later editors.  They seemed to be uncomfortable in their own skin  Later when he realised that people in the Anarchist Federation like Gerry Spenser, a civil servant in Liverpool, couldn't deliver the reports or stories from the North he came back to me and begged me to send his stuff:  as Harold Sculthorpe told me at the time: 'Toby wants to be friends, Brian'.  Chris Draper had similar appeals from Toby Crowe to deliver him material. By that time we had lost confidence in him as an editor and Northern Voices was by then being produced by the anarchists up North.

What followed the departure of Toby Crowe has been generally agreed to be a poor editorial effort.  So what began with Toby Crowe ended up with Charlotte Dingle as editor, who at one time boasted that she had 'a border-line personality disorder'.   One of the current Freedom Friends who knew her told me a little while ago that Charlotte was indeed really being modest in describing her condition as 'border-line'.  When recently I described Simon Saunders as having 'a totalitarian mind set' the historian, Dave Goodway, another Freedom Friend director, said: 'many anarchists have totalitarian mind sets'.  Simon too with the aid of his mum has used his somewhat disoriented condition to advance his career.  First at the Ipswich Star and later at the communist Morning Star.* 


During the Spanish Civil War the Spanish communists accused the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist CNT of admitting anyone into their organisation including Fascist sympathisers.  Well, after 2000 Freedom under the influence of Donald Rooum began an open doors policy which quickly led to its decline as a serious publication.   Vernon Richards who had retired to Suffolk told the anarchist carpenter Peter Turner that he was impressed by Toby owing to his IT skills.  These events have been well documented on the NV Blog by Chris Draper.**   

All this reminds me of what Malcolm Muggeridge had said about people like Kim Philby, the Russian spy, when he helped him get a job on The Observer in the 1950s. Of this the journalist Clive Irving wrote:

'Malcolm Muggeridge, a highly entertaining political commentator in print and on television, who had worked with Philby at MI6 during the war. Muggeridge advised Philby to contact the editor of The Observer, a left-leaning Sunday paper that, Muggeridge told Philby, “is that Salvation Army for the ideological drunks and bums of our time”.'

Has Freedom Press in the end become a kind of rest home for 'the ideological drunks and bums of our time'?  Andy Meinke memorably described Freedom as a 'hangout' declaring boastfully that 'Kropotkin started it (Freedom), but we fucking finished it!' 

Why is Secretary Sorba so enslaved by Posh Simon?

Why did he make such a fuss over 'a storm in a teacup'?

SECRETARY Sorba desperately wants to hang onto the Freedom property at 84A, Angel Alley because he wants an address in central London that he can use to promote own business interests in publishing.  Some would regard this as conflict of interest.  But unless one of the other Directors question this he is safe in his key position at the top.  Thus the Freedom show will stay on the road because there is no sign of any challenge from the rather subservient Directors.

None-the-less it is understood that a new Director Nick Heath failed to turn-up at the crucial Freedom Friends meeting dealing with Dave Douglass on the Glorious Twelfth, and it is understood that he stayed away because he resents how he was previously hounded-out as leader of the Anarchist Federation by his Trans community critics only last year.***

Furthermore it seems that three other Friends had concluded before the meeting the the whole complaint about Dave Douglass Facebook comment was 'a storm in a teacup'.  Yet the prime movers on this occasion challenging Dave Douglass was Simon Saunders and his Trans mates, and Steve Sorba wants to keep-in with Simon so what we had here in trade union terms is a case of 'Constructive Dismissal' in which Dave Douglass was elbowed out by Secretary Sorba who told Dave that he had 'Embarassed the Committee (Friends) by his "transphobic remarks".'

Dave in response said that he refuted the claim that he was not 'transphobic', but said that as he didn't want to embarrass the committee of anyone.  Hence he agreed to stand down.

    

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

*  

https://www.ipswichstar.co.uk › news › my-struggle-with-adhd-1-110117

**

northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com › 2016/08 › a-year-in-death-of-freedom

***
northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com › 2018/01 › anarchist-federation-splits

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Not A Clever Idea

by Les May

Just after the 2016 Referendum I met a someone who is a member of the Heywood and Middleton Constituency Labour party. He was not impressed that our MP, Liz McInnes, had resigned from her shadow post as communities and local government minister as a gesture of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn.

Now Liz is one of the few MPs who have ‘had a proper job’ before becoming an MP so I am happy to vote for her. (I also have it from an impeccable source that a political opponent once said admiringly of her that she was known as ‘The Rottweiler’ for her determination to defend workers’ rights.)

A little lamely I muttered something that she would have come under a lot of pressure to join the herd who were calling for Corbyn to go.

An enthusiastic Corbyn supporter he was having none of it! He argued that Labour MPs should listen to the views of members of the local party and could not expect members to do the leg work for them at election time if they didn’t. And he was quite right of course.

I remembered this conversation last night when I read the response of Joan Ryan, the chair of Labour Friends of Israel, to losing a vote of no confidence at her local constituency party where she was accused of smearing Jeremy Corbyn.

So what was Ms Ryan’s response? She called the people who had voted against her ‘Trots, Stalinists, Communists and assorted hard left’.

Given that just over half of the people who attended the meeting voted against her, 94 out of 186, this may not have been the cleverest idea.  Why would any of these people who she has attacked in this unpleasant way want to go round the streets at the next election trying to persuade people to vote for her?

Joan Ryan is not a woman who is meticulous in checking her facts as you will see in this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3dn-VV3czc

The video is about 26 minutes long.  The incident involving Joan Ryan starts at about 7 minutes and 40 seconds.

Chuka Ummuna’s recent comments are thought to have been prompted by the votes of no confidence in Joan Ryan and Chris Leslie.  It may just be a coincidence that both these MPs are members of the ‘Friends of Israel’ group. It may also be just a coincidence that Chuka Ummuna (and Angela Eagle) are seen in the video at the Friends of Israel stall asking to be updated. 

******** 

George Orwell event in Red Shed

A crowd of 41 people packed into the meeting room of the Red Shed on the afternoon of Saturday the 16th, September, to discuss 'George Orwell & Socialism'.
The opening speaker, Alan Stewart (Convenor of Wakefield Socialist History Group) spoke about Orwell's time in Barnsley researching material for his book, 'Road to Wigan Pier'.  Orwell went down the pit, inspected housing and wittnessed a Mosley rally in the Civic Hall.
Brian Bamford (Secretary of Tameside TUC) made a spirited defence of Orwell against the criticism of Paul Preston.  Brian insisted that 'Homage to Catalonia' showed the 'true nature of war as a participant.'
Robin Stocks (author of 'Hidden Heros of Easter Week') focused in particular on the Barcelona May Days.  He noted that Orwell had been barricaded in the Hotel Falcon with the POUM leadership.  He added that POUM was an anti-Stalinist party that wanted the revolution to be 'continued, not watered down'.  It had links with the ILP in Britain and Orwell had had joined them after being given a letter of introduction by Fenner Brockway.
Granville Williams (former Editor of 'Free Press') argued that Orwell had been committed to a classless, egalitarian society to the very end.  His attachment to socialism was undiminished.  But he was appropriated by the right during the Cold War.  They used Orwell to bolster their argument that socialism inevitably led to totalitarianism.
Les Hurst (Orwell Society) noted that, despite attacks from the Communist arty, even in the 1930s many people wanted to read Orwell.  There was 'so much reality in what he wrote.'
The final speaker, Quitin Kopp, spoke movingly about his father, George Kopp, who was Orwell's POUM commander in Spain.  George Kopp went to Spain to fight fascism and did so bravely.
However he was then imprisoned by the NKVD in appalling conditions.

******

POUM & THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

ON Saturday 11 March 2017, 1pm at the Red Shed, Vicarage Street, Wakefield both Granville Williams and Bob Mitchell will be speaking about the Spanish Civil War at an event organised by Wakefield Socialist History Group.  Admission is free and all are welcome.  Below are some comments about the organisation POUM.

POUM was formed in 1935 by a fusion of the Trotskyist Communist Left of Spain (ICE) and the quasi-Trotskyist Workers and Peasants' Bloc (BOC).  It was led by Andreu Nin and Joaquin Maurin.
It took an independent communist position (it was anti-Stalinist) and was critical of the Popular Front strategy.  So much so that communists denounced it in the most vehement terms.  Santiago Carrillo for instance went "down the road of linking POUM to the Francoists" (Preston 2014).
Despite this POUM did participated in the Popular Front government initiated by Manuel Azana, leader of Accion Republicana, in the hope of advancing some of its' own policies.
In 1937 however POUM was repressed during the Barcelona May Days. It was outlawed by central government and its' leaders arrested.  Nin himself was detained, tortured and "disappeared" by NKVD agents.
Carrillo (1977) wrote that POUM and anarchists had launched a "putsch" which was "treason."  But Nin's death was an "abominable and unjustifiable act."
POUM remained proscribed during the Franco years but was legalised in 1977.  POUM then split but part of it stood as the Workers' Unity Front in elections, demanding the restoration of a republic.
It was finally wound up in 1980/81 although there is still an Andreu Nin Foundation.
Orwell famously joined the POUM militia and wrote of it in his book HOMAGE TO CATALONIA.

Fraternally

Alan Stewart (Convenor, Wakefield Socialist History Group)

Richard Blair on Legacy of George Orwell

In February 1937, an idealistic and ungainly Englishman in his thirties traveled to Spain to take his place in the trenches at the Aragón front to defend the Republic. His name was Eric Arthur Blair, remembered by history as George Orwell. This month, 80 years after the start of that adventure, Richard Blair, the writer’s only son, now a 72-year-old retired agricultural engineer, visited Huesca to take part in the opening of a major exhibition about his father.

TALKING to EL PAÍS during his brief stopover in Madrid on his way back to London, Richard Blair evoked the figure of Orwell and commented on the relevance of his legacy and the enormous interest in his final novel, 1984, which has become an international best-seller since Donald Trump became US president.
“It’s true that in recent weeks, with the references in the United States to ‘alternative facts’ [cited by Kellyanne Conway, one of the president’s top advisors], there has been increased interest in his book. But my father has never gone out of fashion.” The book was not so much a prophecy as a fable about Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism, says Blair, although as he points out, some details from the novel that once seemed like science fiction have been part of our everyday life for some time, such as security cameras that watch our movements, or what some companies know about us from our internet activity, or how we use our credit cards. “Society has evolved toward what he saw. The world is becoming Orwellian,” he says.
Blair is patron of the Orwell society, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to spreading knowledge about the life and work of the writer, as well as debate about ideas, and that remains scrupulously neutral about politics. Which might explain why he is so careful in choosing his words when talking about Trump.
“I think that there is a lot of tension and compression in the White House right now. It is true that Trump is attacking the press, but he is a complete enigma, they are all maneuvering and learning to live with each other,” he says.
Nevertheless, he says he cannot help but be happy at the hike in sales of his father’s books, particularly as he inherited the publishing rights (“which expire in 2020,” he points out). But he recognizes concerns that this has been due to the public finding parallels between the current situation and the dystopia Orwell described.
Orwell and his wife Eileen adopted Richard in 1944. Ten months later, Eileen died on the operating table. Some of the friends of the tuberculous-stricken writer suggested that he give up custody of the child but he ruled out the possibility. The relationship between Orwell and his adopted son became closer when the two of them moved to the Scottish island of Jura, chosen because it was a healthier location for Orwell to overcome his illness and where it was so cold that “if you move six feet away from the fireplace, you freeze.”
Blair’s memories from those days are of a loving father who made wooden toys, who had a strange sense of humor, and whose parenting style had none of the political correctness of modern upbringings. On one occasion he allowed the three-year-old Richard to smoke from a pipe filled with tobacco collected from his cigarette butts. The result, aside from a vomiting fit, was that the child saw himself temporarily vaccinated against the vice of smoking.
It was on Jura that Orwell finished 1984, writing in his room during the day and spending the evenings with the child. One of their favorite activities was fishing, especially for the lobsters that filled out a diet otherwise made frugal by post-war rationing. One weekend in August 1947, however, on a journey back from a weekend of relaxation on the west side of Jura, their boat sank and they almost drowned. Blair says Orwell’s health suffered as a result. David Astor, owner of The Observer newspaper, which published the writer’s work, asked to be allowed import the newly discovered antibiotic streptomycin from the United States, with which he was treated between December 1947 and July 1948 in a hospital near Glasgow. But his efforts were in vain: Orwell developed an allergy to the medication. “His nails fell out and blisters appeared on his lips,” Richard recalls. The writer died in January 1950 at age of 46, when his son was about to celebrate his sixth birthday.
What is the most important lesson that Orwell taught us? For journalists, says Blair, there are many. “To be honest. The most important things are facts which can be corroborated, not reality as you want it to be. Journalists today do not have time to check facts, and errors are perpetuated and multiplied on the internet until they become true.” The writer’s son also recalls Orwell’s six rules for clear writing from his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print; Never use a long word where a short one will do; If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out; Never use the passive where you can use the active; Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent; Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.”
Blair finished up with his father’s definition of liberty: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Blair is particularly concerned about the lack of dialogue in contemporary society. “All people do is shout at one another, without actually listening.” And he is surprised to see young people who, instead of speaking face to face, spend all day staring into their smartphones. “Even couples in restaurants! Are they communicating with each other via text messages?!” he jokes. And what would Orwell make of the 21st century, the era of the internet, great scientific advances and post-truth?
“Ah, now that’s the million-dollar question. But it’s impossible to get into anyone’s head. Nor to come up with the answer by reading his books. If he were still alive he would be 113, and would have had a lot of new influences… There’s no point in speculating.” As such, we don’t know, and we can’t know. But he does go as far as to assume one thing: whatever his thoughts, they would be characterized by common sense.