If you need someone to support your right to freedom of speech, forget the teaching unions. Don’t look to the commentariat. And don’t even bother with the Labour party, many of whose younger, angrier members will often be found in the ranks of cancel-culture mobs calling for someone or other to be erased from polite society for having blasphemed against a trendy new orthodoxy.
No, it’s the binmen you want to turn to. It’s the nation’s fine refuse collectors who will back you up when your liberty to speak is being pummelled.
Consider the case of the Batley Grammar schoolteacher who was suspended for showing his pupils an image of Muhammad during a religious studies lesson. Alarmingly, that teacher is still in hiding, fearing for his life. He has received death threats simply for doing what all good teachers should do: challenge their students to consider difficult moral questions.
The supposedly liberal establishment behaved shamefully in response to the demonisation and harassment of the teacher. Batley Grammar itself, in the face of angry protests outside the school gates, suspended him. The school essentially ‘threw him under a bus’, the teacher’s family said.
The teaching unions stayed almost entirely schtum about the case for ages. ‘It would not be appropriate to make any further comment’ while the school is investigating the incident, said the National Education Union. Not appropriate for a teaching union to comment on the fact that a teacher had received threats to his life and is now, according to his father, ‘devastated and crushed’, an ‘emotional wreck’?
In which case, why do teaching unions even exist?
The political class wasn’t much better. Tracy Brabin, then the Labour MP for Batley, now the Mayor of West Yorkshire, praised the school for dealing swiftly with this incident that had caused so much ‘offence' and 'upset’. She essentially sided with the protesters who wanted a teacher punished for blasphemy — these days referred to as ‘offence' and 'upset’ — rather than with the teacher and his right to free expression.
But not everyone has turned their backs on this persecuted teacher. Enter the binmen of Bury. Shaming the intellectual elites, these workers have taken a principled stand on behalf of the teacher and his right to free speech in the classroom.
The Bury branch of Unite, which represents refuse collectors, has put forward a motion championing the Batley teacher. The emergency motion, submitted for consideration at the National Conference of Trade Union Councils in June, urges all unions to back the teacher.
The motion points out that England’s blasphemy laws were formally abolished more than a decade ago and insists there should be no ‘dogmatic restraints’ on our right to discuss religious matters, including Islamic matters.
The proponent of the motion is Brian Bamford, secretary of Tameside Trade Union Council and a retired electrician. He says:
‘This is a motion which has come in from binmen, from ordinary working people… Freedom of expression is very important. I don’t feel guilty in any way for taking a stand on this issue.’
Bamford says an NEU official contacted him and asked him to consider withdrawing the motion. Apparently the official told him the motion ‘risks inflaming what is an extremely sensitive and very complex situation’. An NEU spokesperson said: 'It is a sensitive issue and the NEU did ask for the motion to be withdrawn. With every viewpoint that is expressed our members face yet more public exposure.'
Got that? Binmen and other working-class union members want to express support for a teacher who has been hounded into hiding for a supposed speechcrime, and a teaching union official is reportedly saying to them, ‘Please don’t do this’. This is bonkers.
These binmen have shown us what true solidarity looks like. Their support for the Batley teacher is in keeping with the best traditions of working-class activism. They saw someone being harried and silenced merely for displaying a religious image and they’re not having it. More power to their elbow, and their motion.
They have also shown up what passes for the liberal establishment these days. Too many people in positions of power treat freedom of speech as a negotiable commodity rather than as a core principle of democratic life. Too many turn away — or nod along — as people are shunted out of polite society merely for criticising Islam, or asking questions about transgenderism, or making an un-PC joke.
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Many so-called liberals now consider the right not to be offended to be more important than the right to free expression. So when they saw that fuss outside Batley Grammar, they instinctively sided with the right of the protesters to glide through life without ever having their religious beliefs called into question, rather than with the right of a teacher in a pluralistic democracy to use his freedom of expression to challenge and enlighten his pupils.
Thankfully, there are still people, like those Bury binmen – and of course like the Free Speech Union – who understand that no one has the right not to be offended. Who understand that freedom of expression is more important than any individual’s feelings or any religion’s diktats? Binmen for Free Speech — it’s exactly the campaign we need right now.
Written by Brendan O’Neill
Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked, the online magazine.
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by Camilla Turner, Daily Telegraph, Education Editor
When a teacher was suspended from his school after showing a picture of the Prophet Mohammed in class, he reportedly felt as though he had been “thrown under a bus”.
The National Education Union (NEU), was accused of failing to stand up for its own member after it did not immediately condemn the threats of violence and intimidation he faced in the wake of the row.
But now, the Batley Grammar School religious studies teacher has found unlikely support from a Bury branch of Unite, which largely represents binmen.
Brian Bamford, secretary of Tameside Trade Union Council, has submitted an emergency motion for the National Conference of Trade Union Councils in June to champion the cause of the suspended teacher.
The motion urges the NEU and all other unions to support the teacher and to publicly condemn those demanding his dismissal.
It notes that blasphemy laws were abolished more than a decade ago, and adds that “dogmatic restraints” should not be imposed on the religious education curriculum.
Mr Bamford is also secretary of Bury Unite commercial branch in the North West, which represents binmen across the borough, and the motion’s wording had to be approved by the branch committee before being passed up to the Tameside TUC which it is affiliated to.
"This is a motion which has come in from bin men, from ordinary working people," said Mr Bamford, a retired electrician who has been active in the trade union movement since the 1970s.
“As far as I can see, staying silent goes contrary to what we believe in at our branch, and especially in the trade congress.
“We are affiliated to the Orwell Society and freedom of expression is very important. I don’t feel guilty in any way for taking a stand on this issue.”
Mr Bamford claimed that an NEU official attempted to pressurise him into withdrawing the motion on the basis that it was “unhelpful” to draw further attention to the issue.
He said he was phoned by the official who asked him to "reconsider" the motion since it "risks inflaming what is an extremely sensitive and very complex situation" for members.
Mr Bamford was told that the NEU has an obligation to the “wider community in Batley" and that any further attention on the matter would "set back quite sensitive negotiations".
But he said he has no intention of abandoning the motion, adding that the school curriculum should not be “dictated by an indignant mob” who congregated outside Batley Grammar School just before the Easter break.
“We are troubled that a teacher can be suspended following protests about his teaching methods and use of materials,” Mr Bamford said.
“We are outraged that the teachers involved are being challenged for trying to broaden their students' horizons and encourage their critical thought.
“We don't believe that the determination of the use of teaching resources in a school should be influenced by people taking offence, and using intimidation and threats.”
Batley Grammar School sent pupils home early for the Easter holidays and issued an apology after a group of Muslims gathered at the gates to protest. The headmaster announced that the religious studies teacher had been suspended while the school looked into what happened.
The 29-year-old teacher and his family went into hiding after reportedly receiving death threats in the wake of the protests. The academy trust that runs Batley Grammar School announced at the end of March that it would carry out an “independent” investigation into the context in which the cartoon was shown.
A by-election has been triggered in Batley after Tracy Brabin stepped down as MP when she was elected as West Yorkshire's first metro mayor.
Ms Brabin, 60, replaced Jo Cox as Batley and Spen MP in a by-election in 2016 after Ms Cox was murdered by a far-right extremist. The seat will be seen as a key test for Labour after the party lost the Hartlepool by-election to the Conservatives earlier this month.
An NEU spokesperson said: "It is a sensitive issue and the NEU did ask for the motion to be withdrawn. With every viewpoint that is expressed our members face yet more public exposure."
They added that "speculation is unhelpful, not least for our members who the NEU are fully supporting throughout this investigation and will be doing so beyond the investigation".
ANARCHISM IS not a very well understood doctrine in British politics. I realised this when Tameside Trade Union Council first published a booklet commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War in 2006 with Durruti on the cover. The then delegates of the Greater Manchester County Association of Trade Union Council clearly didn't appreciate the publication at the time, but during the meeting a large party of French trade unionists from the CGT [communist] happened to be present and while many of the local English trade unionists held back the French delegation waded-in to buy up most of the commemorative booklets we had to hand, and even later following me to the toilets to get extra copies.
It struck us at the time how utterly frigid the English trade unionists were compared to their French 'communist' CGT comrades.
This thought occurs to me now as I now with sadness write my friend and comrade, Stuart Christie's obituary. I remember that sometime after Stuart wrote the first volume of his autobiography 'GRANNY MADE ME AN ANARCHIST', I wrote a critique of it entitled 'God Help the Anarchist movement that Needs Heroes'. This in turn led to a bitter altercation between me and Stuart on the website 'Libcom' in which I believe he labelled me 'an arsehole'. However, in 2006, it was a measure of Stuart's nobility that when I invited him to write an introduction to Tameside TUC's Spanish commemorative booklet he had no hesitation in agreeing to do the job.
He probably did it because he knew me from when I first met him in Paris in August 1964, when he was about to go on to embrace the risky venture in his ill-fated journey to Madrid and ultimately to a Spanish jail for his part in a proposed attempt to assassinate General Franco. At that time we were all staying in a 'safe house' with Germinal Garcia at his apartment near Place de la République*. My wife Joan and I were returning from Spain, having first worked in Denia, Alicante throughout 1963, and later on in early 1964 moved on to La Linea on the border with Gibraltar where I worked for the MOD at the Gibraltar airport. While in Denia my eldest lad was born at the clinica there in September 1963. While in Spain and later Gib. we had taken photos of the conditions in the shanty towns in Barcelona and we sent back reports on working conditions over there for the FIJL publication Nueva Senda. At that time we were being debriefed, and thought Stuart may have been on a similar mission to us, but soon found out that they had other plans for him. At one stage he asked for our advice and was naturally interested in our own experiences.
Stuart was still in Carabanchel jail [Madrid] when my family again returned to Spain in early 1967 on our way to work in Gibraltar having had difficulties working as an electrician in Rochdale following my involvement supporting the national engineering apprentice strikes in November 1964 and February 1964. Having been blacklisted by the British MOD and throughout Gibraltar with private companies with contracts with the MOD and other contracts with the British authorities the only place on the Rock that I had a serious chance of work was with the Gibraltar City Council, supported by the Transport & General Worker's Union and Albert Risso who had close links with Sir Joshua Hassan the Chief Minister.
The anarchists on Gibraltar at that time were active within the Transport & General Workers Union and were basically anarcho-syndicalists. Stuart identified with the syndicalists, and had fallen under the influence of Bobby Lynn who he says 'had become the backbone of the Glasgow anarchist movement'. I'd stayed with Bobby Lynn in the Gorbals in 1961 and he gave me his copy of 'The Sexual Revolution' by Wilhelm Reich. Bobby was a member of the Syndicalist Worker's Federation when I stayed with him in 1961. As news leaked of Stuart's arrest Peter Turner [FREEDOM EDITOR] had contacted Bobby Lynn in Glasgow and up there they had assured him that Stuart was so dedicated to the peace movement and that it was not likely that he was guilty as claimed by the Spanish authorities. This may have influenced the report in the syndicalist Direct Action which took the line that he must be innocent, and Wynford Hicks on behalf of the anarchists argued on TV news that he was probably the victim of an 'agent-provocateur'. Another Freedom editor Vernon Richards argued more sensibly that it mattered little whether Stuart was innocent or guilty the anarchist position should be to support him.
For my part I knew what had taken place, but anticipating returning to work in Spain and expecting to continue to help the group of young Spanish exiles of the FIJL involved with the failed attempt, I decided to remain silent. Stuart himself had not been prudent before his departure for Spain and had actually participated in a BBC2 program entitled 'Let Me Speak' hosted by Malcolm Muggeridge. Muggeridge, who had been a friend of George Orwell, had often identified morally and intellectually with Tolstoy and anarchism.
In his autobiography 'MY GRANNY MADE ME AN ANARCHIST'[2004] Stuart documents the sequence of events in the summer of 1964:
'In mid-July Salvador and Bernado [Gurucharri] told me I should be ready to leave for Paris by the end of the month. Everything was now in hand for my trip to Spain. Shortly before I left... I was invited to appear on what later turned out to be, for me, an almost disastrous chat show called Let Me Speak, on ...BBC2. Having a small spectrum of anarchists, with me and another young lad called Vincent Johnson representing the "revolutionary anarchists" Muggeridge asked me if I was sincere in my revolutionary aims...would I, for instance, given the opportunity, assassinate Franco?" It was an unlucky shot in the dark, for that was pretty damn close to what I was hoping to do. What could I say but yes?.'
It is an extraordinary admission for a revolutionary anarchist to make! I doubt that the Spaniards I knew in Paris or in Spain in the 1960s would have made such a confession on the BBC or before going on a mission such as Stuart anticipated. It's almost as if he had a death wish or secretly wanted to get caught. When we knew him in Paris in August 1964 he was hopelessly naive and clearly knew little of the reality of everyday Spanish life or working conditions. He struggled to pronounce the Spanish word for 'workers'.
On page 107 of his autobiography he writes: 'I may not have been wise or competent in what I did or the way I went about it, but I did not have the benefit of hindsight'.
Never mind 'hindsight' given what he had done did he have the benefit of foresight or even a glimpse of common sense? I say this knowing, as Stuart did, that other people suffered as a consequence of what he did and the mistakes that he and his handlers made at the time. I also say this as a friend of Stuart who exchanged correspondence with him regularly over the last few years, and had documented and detailed our differences in my earlier pamphlet. One thing that troubles me is not that he wore a kilt, but that he sported a war resister badge of a broken rifle on his chest while walking around Paris in 1964 as he carried our one-year-old son Deon. He told us that he'd visited Paris the year before in the Spring; it was more 'romantic' than in August. Being romantic was probably what attracted most people to Stuart as it was part on his charm.
Yet, when we had visited Ken Hawkes, then secretary of the Syndicalist Workers Fed., and his wife before we went to Spain in February 1963, the worst winter since 1947, they treated us to a bottle of Champagne as we'd just got married and reminded us to remove our Ban the Bomb badges before we left their house on Parliament Hill for Spain. I wonder why none of us thought to urged Stuart Christie to take off his tell-tale War resister badge?
I suppose that in August 1964, we were all a bit intoxicated by the atmosphere of a time in which Franco had just celebrated 25-years of peace, and a pale-faced Salvador Gurucharri and others had just been released from jail. In Paris, at that time, we were all in high spirits as things seemed to be moving in the right direction.
While there Stuart met other major figures in the exiled Spanish anarchist movement, the organised FIJL [Fed. of young libertarians] around the Internal Defence (DI), and including militants of long standing like Octavio Alberola* and Luis Andres Edo.
In his autobiography he describes what he did as 'the act of an adolescent' and he quotes a verse from Longfellow:
'A boy's will is the wind's will,
and the thoughts of
youth are long, long thoughts.' [page 120]
On reflection he goes on to admit: 'Now it will seem like to many a foolish, naive, impulsive act...'
and
'I cannot claim, either, that it was entirely altruistic - my motives were certainly in part a desire for excitement and adventure.'
On reflection he goes on to admit: 'Now it will seem like to many a foolish, naive, impulsive act...'
Essentially he was doing what we had done a year earlier when we went to Spain to escape from what then seemed like dreary Manchester; he was he says not satisfied with what would now be called 'gesture politics' of petitions and protests, and sought to engage directly with a struggle in Spain. Foresight or prudence would make cowards of us all; it was not part of his engaging personality at that time. It set Stuart outside the smelly little left wing orthodoxies which he left behind. Yet it led him to get a 'GO TO JAIL' card to a Madrid prison cell, and was for him a life changing event.
Once in Paris Stuart had made contact with the action groups of the exiled Spanish anarchist movement, organised around Internal Defence (DI) and involving militants of long standing like Octavio Alberola and Luis Andres Edo. As such during his disastrous mission he was later arrested in Madrid and charged with the possession of explosives. These were intended for an attempt on Franco’s life and he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. Thanks to a continuing international pressure he was freed after 3 years.
Why was General Franco and the Francoist regime so susceptible to international public opinion in the 1960s?
I think it was in his book 'The Face of Spain' [1950] that Gerald Brenan tried to explain the mellowing of the Franco regime. In that book he explained how the Falange and those who adhered to Franco began invest in real estate and escape the relative poverty of the 1940s and 1950s. We too quickly forget that it was not just the Spanish working-class that suffered after the Civil War, but the Spanish middle-classes experienced insecurity also. My boss Senor Such told me of how in the 1940s everyone in the fishing village where I lived and worked in 1963-4 had suffered depravation after the war and some had to eat cats. Later on it had become possible to make some progress and by the time we got there in the early 1960s things were looking up as the tourists began to arrive and with the development building work on the costas things were much more prosperous for many including the low-level Falangists. This allowed some softening of the regime which may some helped Stuart Christie escape with what turned out to be a relatively short sentence of 3-years in the end. Had he been arrested some ten years earlier for the same offence it may have been an altogether different story, but by the mid-1960s the supporters of the Franco regime felt much more secure than they had been during the Second World War or in its aftermath when to some extent Spain had been isolated internationally.
* FOOTNOTE: In the early hours of 11 May 2011, 86-year-old Germinal García, a militant of the Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL) and the Paris Local Federation of the CNT in the 1950s and 1960s, passed away (in Paris). At the end of the Spanish Civil War, 13-year old Germinal had been interned in Argeles-sur-Mer concentration camp where an unknown English woman, to whom he was ever grateful, cared for him. Stowing away on a Danish freighter, the Kitty Skov, from the port of Barcelona, he escaped to the United States, where he remained for a time in New York, passing himself off as a French citizen, returning later to France to became active in the anti-Francoist struggle. Shunning the limelight, but always in the background with his strong sense of solidarity, Germinal’s apartment in the Rue Lancry was a safe haven for comrades who had escaped from Franco’s Spain — and for guerrillas such as Quico Sabaté whenever he was in Paris (it was also used by Stuart Christie prior to his trip to Spain in 1964). For that and for his ongoing service to the libertarian movement, Germinal won the respect and friendship of all who knew him. With his passing, we have the satisfying memories and the privilege of having known the friendship of a good comrade. Germinal’s remains were cremated in Paris on 17 May 2011.
Octavio Alberola, May 12, 2011
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by Brian Bamford NORTHERN VOICES has covered story of the Carillion collapse extensively, and based on reports in the Financial Times and Construction News, had been warning of the dangers for the best part of a year before the collapse happened.
The trade union body, Tameside Trade Union Council, had been asking for explanations of Tameside Metropolitan Council's close involvement and partnership with the backlisting company Carillion since August 2011. Reply came there none!
For years before the crisis the Labour leader of Tameside MBC, Kieran Quinn, continually ignored all the concerns expressed from Tameside Trade's Council and Northern Voices. Indeed shortly before his sudden death he called for more collaboration.
*********
THE disastrous collapse of construction giant Carillion in January
hit the headlines and sent shock waves throughout the country.
Building work ground to a halt across the country.
Sites were mothballed and the future of £1bn-worth of projects was placed in jeopardy.
Nowhere in Greater Manchester has the impact of the firm's demise been more keenly felt than in Tameside .
From
CCTV upgrades and making public spaces safe from terror, to improved
playgrounds and a proposed children’s home, a string of vital local
services could all end up becoming collateral damage in the wake of
Carillion’s downfall.
All face being sacrificed to foot the scandal’s unexpected bill.
The
extra millions it has already cost to get projects back on track are
set to have wide-reaching ramifications for the 220,000 people who live
and work in the borough.
DAVID J. TAYLOR, sheltering from the blazing sun in the patio of The Garden House Studio at the Holt Festival on the 24th, July, addressed the logistics of George Orwell’s love life. At one point he reminded us that Orwell had once asked a friend if he had ever had a woman in a park? When the reply that came was ‘No!’; Orwell said ‘I have; no where else to go’.
Malcolm Muggeridge in his essay on Orwell entitled ‘A Knight of the Woeful Countenance’ writes:
‘Orwell characteristically held forth on the logistic difficulties which dogged the penurious amorist. Where was he to go if he could not afford a hotel room and had no private accommodation at his disposal? He himself, he said, had been forced through poverty to avail himself of public parks and recreation grounds.’
In The Garden House Studio
The occasion of this talk in Holt, Norfolk by Orwell’s award winning biographer David Taylor was an exhibition of the hitherto unpublished love letters from George Orwell to Eleanor Jacques in Southwold. The letters involved a correspondence between them which began in mid-1931, and continued until the 13th, January 1936, after he had married Eileen. According to Taylor their sexual relationship concluded around the end of 1932.
In one earlier letter already published and written in October 1932, Orwell recalled old times:
'It was so nice of you to say that you looked back to your days with me with pleasure. I hope you will let me make love to you again sometime, but if you don't it doesn't matter. I shall always be grateful to your kindness to me.'
Another reminisces about ‘that day in the wood along past Blythbugh Lodge – you remember, where the deep beds of moss were – I shall always remember that, & your nice white body in the dark green moss.’
'The Blyth Estuary-A Creative Haven'
The title of the Holt event in the pictureses patio of the Garden Studio was 'The Blyth Estuary-A Creative Haven' stems from an area called Blythburgh located on the main A12, about 4 miles west of Southwold in Suffolk. It was a place where Orwell and Eleanor used to go bird nesting, and he was later to refer to these trips together in his letters.
Mr. Taylor said 'Orwell's novels reveal a fondness for plein air frolics: they probably had their origin here.' The situation between Eleanor and Orwell was immensely complicated because she was also involved with Dennis Collings, who she later married, and who was a close friend of Orwell. Taylor describes their situation in Southwold as a classic 'Jules et Jim' kind of ménage à trois.
Bernard Crick in his own biography 'George Orwell: A Life' wrote:
'Eric (Blair or George Orwell) was soon to enjoy what may have been his first serious affaire. It is not without its difficulties, geographical and economic as well as the need to avoid hurting his friend Dennis Collings.'
Another aspect of Orwell, not dwelled upon by Taylor, is that he had an obsessive sense of being physically unattractive, and according to Malcolm Muggeridge 'Orwell did not find relations with the opposite sex easy (who, by the way does?)'
In a sense his early life was spent in a matriarchal pit smothered by the women around him. An isolated passage from a notebook, quoted by Crick (page 55), shows this:
'The conversations he overheard as a small boy, between his Mother, his aunt, his elder sister and their feminist friends. The way in which, without ever hearing any direct statement to that effect, and without more than a very dim idea of the relationship between the sexes, he derived a firm impression that women did not like men, that they looked upon them as a sort of large ugly, smelly and ridiculous animal, who maltreated women in every way, above all by forcing their attentions on them.'
Questions of Copyright
Introducing the topic Mr. Taylor pointed to Richard Blair (the adopted son of George Orwell and Eileen Blair) sitting near the back, and members of Eleanor Jacques' family. It's not clear who will have the copyright to the letters, as Richard is Orwell's beneficiary, but the letters are presently in the possession of the Jacques family.
On July 10th, 2018, The Sunday Times ran a story by D.J. Taylor no less, reporting that: 'Major literary finds rarely come more dramatic than the one uncovered at 23 Station Road, Southwold, Suffolk. While the relatives of the late owner were clearing the house of her effects, they decided to explore the garden shed. Here, amid piles of detritus going back half a century, they turned up a stout, buff envelope bearing the pencilled message “Letters to be destroyed EC”. Stuffed inside, and clearly extant, were 19 letters dating from the 1930s, some handwritten, a few carefully typed, each addressed to “Dearest Eleanor” and signed “Eric”. “Eric”, it instantly became clear, was George Orwell.'
Mr. Taylor concluded his talk by justifying his role as a biographer, the search for details like the love letters. He said biographers have no hesitation in grabbing every morsel of information about their subject.
After the talk by Mr. Taylor, we chatted with Richard Blair about the event and Tameside Trade Union Council's decision to take out corporate affiliation to THE ORWELL SOCIETY. The Tameside Trades Council had had its eyes wide-open when it took the decision to identify with Orwell and common decency at a time when politics is at a low ebb.
A few days before we were in Holt the Daily Mail had reported that students at Manchester University had painted over Rudyard Kipling's venerated poem 'If'. Bernard Crick claims Orwell drew upon Kipling's work when he wrote '1984'. We mentioned the relevance of Orwell to the reports about the attacks on Kipling by the Manchester students as we bought a copy of David Taylor's biography.
In the exhibition of Orwell's letters to Eleanor we noted one that was typed that talked about him tutoring 'an imbecile', reading a book on poisonings in the USA which he said was psychologically interesting and Plutarch*, who he recommends to her. Curiously, Plutarch born Greek and later became a Roman citizen was also a biographer, and among his quotes is this one which is vintage Orwell:
Plutarch wrote: 'I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.' Which is of course vintage Orwell, and something these politically- correct students in Manchester could do well to consider.
* Plutarch, later named, upon becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, was a Greek biographer and essayist, known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia. He is classified as a Middle Platonist.
North West trade unionists merge with poet of common decency by Brian Bamford
THIS year, Tameside Trade Union Council [TUC] in Greater Manchester became the first corporate affiliate of the ORWELL SOCIETY. This SOCIETY is dedicated to the understanding and appreciation of George Orwell's life and work as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
The Society is a registered charity in the UK and it aims to keep the study of Orwell alive through its educational activities. The Orwell Society is without political affiliation,and was founded in 2011, and though it is based in the UK its membership is worldwide. George Orwell (the pen-name for Eric Blair; 1903-1950), was the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The Society's intention is to embrace a grasp of Orwell's life and writings, from his literary criticism to his diaries, and from his political writings to his poetry. .
Last Friday, the President of Tameside, Derek Pattison, announcing this said: 'In an Age of Post Truth, Fake News, and Alternative Facts, we need George Orwell's guidance more than ever.'
When I attended the Annual General Meeting of the Orwell Society on the 28th, April this year, I spoke to Richard Blair, the son of George Orwell, and to Quintin Kopp, the son of George Kopp Orwell's commander as captain in the general staff of the 45th Mixed Brigade of the Spanish Republican Army. Both were anxious to get more participation in the Society from trade unionists such as ourselves.
Since Tameside TUC first published our booklet commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War in 2006, and followed this up with the unveiling of a blue plaque for James Keogh in 2011 who died fighting with the republicans in the Spanish Civil War, this trade union council has had a special interest in both George Orwell and his experiences of the Spanish Civil War.
Malcolm Muggeridge in his essay 'A Knight of the Woeful Countenance' wrote about this: 'I FIRST became aware of the existence of George Orwell in the middle thirties when I read some articles of his on the Spanish Civil War which appeared in the New English Weekly, a publication founded by A.R. Orage to expound the principles of Social Credit. They provided the basis for Homage to Catalonia, one of his best books. These articles made a great impression on me. I liked their clear, simple style, and the obvious honesty of purpose which informed them, They touched a chord of personal sympathy, too. I saw in Orwell's strong reaction to the villainies of Communist apparat in Spain a compatible experience to my own disgust some years previously with the Soviet regime and its fawning admirers among the intelligentsia of the West as a result of a stint as Moscow correspondent of the Manchester Guardian....'
When we at Tameside TUC began to produce and publish a balanced account of the Spanish Civil War in 2006, we were confronted with resistance from some elements within the more narrow-minded political left of the trade union movement in Greater Manchester. These people deliberately tried to stiffle our efforts and those of other local trade unionists to bring about publication. Both Orwell and Muggeridge had had difficultes getting their articles published by the so-called progressive publishers like Kingsley Martin at the New Statesman and C.P. Scott at the Manchester Guardian, and perhaps even more absurd, was the Victor Gollancz rejection of Animal Farm.
Muggeridge relates how when Orwell and he were lunching together in a Greek restaurant in Percy Street, Orwell asked if he would mind changing places? When Muggeridge asked him why? Orwell just said 'he just couldn't bear to look at Kingsley Martin's corrupt face, which, as Kingsley was lunching at an adjoining table, was unavoidable from where he had been sitting before.'
I feel much the same when I am forced to gaze into the faces of Ronald Marsden and his friend Mike Luft of the International Brigade Memorial Trust: two people who did their utmost to undermine the production of the Tameside TUC memorial booklet about the Spanish Civil War.
SHADES of GEORGE ORWELL's 'MINISTRY OF LOVE' by Brian Bamford
ARRIVING at the Black-E at 11,45am for last Saturday's Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair, I was greeted by the organiser 'Maria' of the 'News From Nowhere'Radical & Community Bookshop. She set about scolding me saying severely: 'We sent you an e-mail and you can't attend!' Then up pops Pablito from Salamanca, who works in 'hospitality', who asks me 'Are you going to leave!' I comply but only after noting down their utterances and swallowing a blood pressure pill.
As I picked up the bookfair program I observe on the front page the cheerful words 'Have a happy bookfair!'
Not so happy!
One of the local activists who came to address the talk on blacklisting at 3 o'clock, ended up saying that he would never attend an event 'like this again'. The spokesman from the Merseyside Trades Union Council, who came in a personal capacity to speak on blacklisting told me that he was'disappointed at (the) lack of comradeship'at the event, and that regarding 'The individual concerned from the Blacklist Support Group'it was time to 'move on and make progress'.
The blacklist talk had been broken-up after a man was asked to leave because he supported Helen Steel in her dispute with the trans community. At this point Pablito from Salamanca, as part of the squad for the defence of safer spaces, ended up with a kick in his backside flank.
Others at the blacklist meeting complained that the bloke had been chucked out without proper consultation about the leaflet he had been distributing, and to which some people had objected. The justification for excluding the individual was presumably rooted in the 'Safer spaces policy' of the 'Liverpool Anarchist Book Fair' which naively claims 'aims to be a welcoming, inclusive and safe space'. What presents itself as a 'Safer spaces policy' is a charming catechism which innocently enunciates a programme worthy of Big Brother and his thought policemen with beautiful elegance. What is demanded in the text of this scheme is a censorship of language and thought such as Orwell's 'Newspeak' predicted in the 1940s. To survive the trauma of such linguistic cesspit one would have to bleach all natural thought processes of any original ideas to sink into the realm of stunted dialogue thus squeezing out all human passions and originality, for fear of making an odd unorthodox remark or stuttering some unintended outburst.
Conversational Analysis of 'Safer Space' & 'Thought Crime'
A conversational analyst would be delighted with the text offered by the Liverpool Anarchist Book Fair 'Safer Spaces Policy'. The text is rich in the straight-jacket of thought control.
The 'Safer spaces policy' states 'Abusive, violent, threatening or harassing behaviour will not be tollerated'.
It then gives some examples: 'Oppressive language, literature or attitudes that insult, express prejudices or reinforce preconceptions about a group of people that are marginalised, disadvantaged or oppressed by mainstream society are not welcome.'
Then the organisers typically offer us a list of taboo topics: 'racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and classism' .
The dogma of what can only be defined as a totalitarian epistle to the glories of 'thought crime' is delightfully documentedin the final paragraph where it says: 'Don't make assumptions (based on, for example, race, pronouns, class, sexual orientation etc.)
One would be tempted to say all this is characteristic of medieval thinking that one might find in the Catholic Church before Martin Luther to having waywardand sinful thoughts, but it is more totalitarian than that in that it seeks to extend its bans and gags in a style of Soviet proportions in which the required terminology may change from overnight if not sooner.
The Safer spaces document says 'we refuse to normalise prejudice, reinforce oppression or recreate hierarchies' but instead on the ground yesterday Pablito and Maria engineering an good impression of a Fred Karno's Circus or the Keystone Cops* with the thought-policemen / women / transgender / creatures or whatever wading-in to exclude folk without any fair trial or due process. Where is the justice in that comrade Pablito (the hospitality worker) or Compañera Maria (from News from Nowhere bookshop)? Of course, justice is not what is going on here.
What's going on? Anarcho-Bossism!
What's going on here is 'Malas linguas' (bad mouthing); false accusations; victimsation and yes, if you like blacklisting. We could call this anarcho-Bossism and Blacklisting.
At one point as I stood outside looking like a drowned rat in the Liverpool rain, Compañera Maria suggested I go a cafe to warm-up. I told her that in Manchester we were used to standing in the rain on picket lines with Steve Acheson to combat blacklisting at sites like MRI (Manchester Royal Imfirmary) or Fiddler's Ferry. She said this is not the same kind of blacklisting! I asked her to please explain how this differs from the blacklisting by the bosses?
Compañera Maria didn't reply but looked very uncomfortable. Later Maria told Milan Rai, the editor of Peace News, that the Liverpool Anarchist Collective had decided to ban me because of an obituary I wrote in 2012 about the former AF member, the teacher Bob Miller in 2011, and something about putting Simon Saunders from the Morning Star / Freedom in a neck-lock on the 22nd, June 2016, following having been dragged out of the Freedom Bookshop by him and Andy Meinke and then being pinned to the wall in Angel Alley by Compañero Saunders and ten other comrades. The trouble with this argument is that the original application to do a talk on blacklisting came from me as Secretary of Tameside TUC, and by banning me they Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair is blissfully unaware that it is blocking the participation of a North West trade union body. In short, the Liverpoll Anarchist Bookfair Collective failed to cover itself with glory yesterday.
* The Keystone Cops (often spelled "Keystone Kops") were fictional, humorously incompetent policemen, featured in several silent film slapstick comedies produced by Mack Sennett for his Keystone Film Company between 1912 and 1917.
Cavalier attitude by Manchester Anarchists to trade unionists
by Barry Woodling
I
have to inform readers that a resolution requesting a substantial
grant of £1,000 from Unite the Union was not passed at a recent
meeting of the Manchester Unite Area Activists in February after issues were raised
concerning the events at the Manchester Anarchist Book fair on the 2nd, December 2017. A
meeting requested on the blacklist by Tameside TUC was turned down
and 2 anti blacklist campaigners were forcibly ejected from the
building. This meeting was hosted by the Partisan Collective who
have a duty of care to its users.
I am still awaiting a reply to my
numerous e-mails asking for a proper investigation of the shocking
events at that book fair which have studiously been ignored. It is a
serious matter when members of a trade union are denied access to a
public event. I sincerely hope that in the name of natural justice I
am least given the courtesy of a reply.
N,V.
Editor: A few days ago Quentin Kopp, son of George
Kopp the commander of the POUM military unit in the Spanish civil
war, mentioned the contraversial death of Bob Smillie at the the hands of the communists when he wrote to Tameside Trade Union Council, which is now
affiliated to The ORWELL SOCIETY, to relate the following news:
'We
have been informed that Barcelona wants to make 2018 the year of
Orwell and will be arranging a special series of plaques, which will
comemorate his time there. Despite
the political uproar in Catalonia it appears to be still going ahead.
Since we received this invitation we have learned that a Spanish
researcher has found the graves and a lot of the records relating to
the death of Bob Smillie. We plan to incorporate taking a small
scuplture to Valencia to put in the Cemetry at the same time, which
will be between the 14thand 18thApril.'
Below is a report in THE SCOTSMAN in 2003 about Bob Smillie and George Orwell:
THE
SCOTSMAN
It's time the Left faced up to the truth about Orwell
Published: 01:00 Monday 23 June 2003
Read more at:
https://www.scotsman.com/news/it-is-time-left-faced-up-to-the-truth-about-orwell-1-653034
FEW people in
Scotland today remember Bob Smillie, but there was a time when his
political murder by Communist Party agents during the Spanish Civil
War was a cause célèbre. During his lifetime, Orwell - otherwise
Eric Blair, hence the silly Guardian pun - was vilified and lied
about by the left-wing establishment for denouncing communism and its
British fellow travellers as totalitarian enemies. He came in for
personal attack for two reasons. First, he had been a leftist himself
and had put his life on the line fighting against Franco in Spain: he
was wounded and nearly killed. If there is one thing the Marxist left
can’t abide it’s one of their own exposing where the dead bodies
are buried - literally, in Smillie’s case. Second, Orwell’s
brilliant prose - spare, honest, gripping - is some of the best
anti-totalitarian propaganda ever written, be it the satire of Animal
Farm or the Blade Runner world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. So much so,
that his works remain permanently in print and, more importantly,
read. That’s why I think Orwell, from the grave, will be proud that
he is still upsetting the unthinking left.
However, it is ironic that
today’s character assassination is being led by the Guardian, which
Orwell singled out for praise in his Spanish Civil War memoir, Homage
to Catalonia, for its exposure of the lies being spread about the
democratic Spanish left during the war (they were accused of being
fascists) by the manipulative communists. Sixty-five years later, the
Guardian is claiming that Orwell secretly informed on fellow writers
and academics, including the Scots poet Hugh McDiarmid, whom he
thought might be communist sympathisers. And all because he was
besotted by a woman called Celia Kirwan, who worked for the shady
information research department at the Foreign Office. Thus, says the
Guardian, did the inventor of Big Brother turn into the monster he
created (much like the liberal, free-market Manchester Guardian of
Orwell’s day has become a public-sector advertising sheet).
The
Guardian’s innuendo is false - which brings us back to murdered Bob
Smillie. He was the 22-year-old grandson of Robert Smillie, the
leader of the Scottish miners. The younger Smillie was a member of
the radical Independent Labour Party (ILP). Under its charismatic
leader James Maxton (a hero of Gordon Brown), the ILP was resolutely
pacifist. But Franco’s attempt to overthrow the democratically
elected left-wing government in Spain in 1936 changed all that.
Thousands of idealistic foreign volunteers, including Orwell and
Smillie (then a student at Glasgow University), went to Spain to join
the International Brigades to fight fascism. There was only one
problem - the communists. While Stalin was prepared to arm the
Spanish republican government against Franco, he was not in favour of
a radical Spain, lest it got in the way of his plans for an
anti-Hitler alliance with France and Britain. The Soviet secret
service (NKVD), including in its ranks many foreign communist
militants, effectively took over republican Spain. Anyone on their
own side who got in the way was labelled a fascist, arrested, then
shot. That included supporters of the largest left-wing party in
Spain, the Anarchist CNT. But it also included the Catalan
nationalists and ordinary social democrats, whose party was forcibly
merged with the communists. When, in May 1937, the Anarchists and the
POUM - the Spanish partners of the ILP - objected to all this, the
communists concocted the lie that these organisations were in league
with Franco, and used military force in Barcelona to suppress them.
Orwell, who had been recovering from a bullet wound in the neck,
escaped to France. But Smillie was arrested by the NKVD at the border
while on his way home to conduct an anti-fascist speaking tour. He
was taken to a prison in Valencia and held incommunicado despite
protests from the ILP in Britain. Subsequently, the communists
announced Smillie had died on 13 June, 1937, from peritonitis. His
body was immediately buried before anyone could see it.
Leading
ILPers, such as John McNair, who was the party’s general secretary
for 20 years, believed he had been deliberately shot (as were many
POUM leaders). Maxton went to Valencia to try to find out, but to no
avail - the local communist press called him a fascist too. Whether
Smillie was executed, or died of deliberate neglect, he was the first
foreigner associated with the International Brigades to become a
mortal victim of Stalinist repression. He should be a Scottish hero,
but decades of Stalinist propaganda in the Scottish Labour movement
have buried his memory. Smillie’s death led Orwell to break with
the romantic left of his day and denounce Stalinism, and with it the
closed, self-certain mentality that supports such false utopias. As a
result, he was excoriated by the left. Even today, the Guardian is
happy to run a front-page story implying that one of the 20th
century’s greatest writers was merely a British equivalent of
Senator McCarthy, and only then because he wanted to get his leg
over. The truth is that Orwell had seen his friends murdered and,
unlike lazy, middle-class intellectuals in Britain, he was prepared
to defend democracy in a typically robust way. By the way, that
supposedly shady Foreign Office unit was actually set up in 1948 by
the Labour foreign minister Ernest Bevin to counter Soviet propaganda
- there were numerous communist agents inside the Parliamentary
Labour Party. Orwell was advising on who would make a poor choice as
a counter-propagandist. As to his assessments, consider McDiarmid,
whom Orwell calls "reliably pro-Russian". Orwell died in
1950. In 1956, as Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising and
there were mass defections from the British Communist Party,
McDiarmid rejoined it. Is this not all ancient history? No: Orwell’s
warning that "totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of
intellectuals everywhere" is still in force as long as there are
those happily inventing utopias to impose on the rest of us. We need
to remain robust in defending freedom, and that is done best by
remembering people such as Bob Smillie.
In Spain in the
past few years, there has emerged a popular movement to uncover the
true facts about those who disappeared during the civil war. The
Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory wants the Spanish
government to dig up and identify the corpses of the 30,000 people
believed to have been executed by the fascists. Why stop there? What
about the executions in Spain by the communist secret police? The
time has come to solve the mystery of Bob Smillie’s death. Where is
he buried? Was he shot in the back of the head with a Mauser machine
pistol, the method of choice of the NKVD? Or was he just allowed to
die in agony of peritonitis? And who were the Scottish Comintern
agents who informed on him? Perhaps the Guardian has started a
trend.
Northern trade unionists confront police at Roberts Arundel
IN Nov 2006,the anarchist historian, Nick Heath* reflected upon his experiences in the UK anarchist movement since the 1960s, and the lessons on organisation and politics he finds valid for anarchists today. His observations include the idea that '[o]rganisational responsibility and discipline should not be
controversial'. [see 'The UK anarchist movement - Looking back and forward'posted on libcom].
Part
way through his long account he ponders the problems of the failures of
anarchists since its high point in the early to mid-1960s
during the rise of the peace movement: 'One of the shortcomings that they had highlighted was the lack of
industrial activity. As Brian Bamford, whom I do not often agree
with, has pointed out: “At the time of disputes at Roberts-Arundel
in Stockport**, Pilkington’s Glassworks in St Helens***, the strikes and
stay-in occupations at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and in engineering,
the miners struggles in the 1970s, the anarchist influence was tiny”
(Freedom 6 August 1994)'
This year it is the 50th anniversary of the Roberts Arundel strike in Stockport, and Stockport Trade Union Council has put on an exhibition to commemorate the occasion.
At the time of the strike at Roberts-Arundel in 1966, mentioned in the above quote from Freedom, the Manchester Anarchist Group [MAG] was far bigger than the small International Socialist body with only 20 members locally and most of whom were students. Both Colin Barker and his then friend and fellow sociologist John Lee, who later like me became an ethnomethodologist, were anxious to engage with me and some of the local working-class anarchists. They knew that I had been involved in the national strikes of the engineering apprentices in the early 1960s, and still edited the apprentice paper Industrial Youth that came out of those disputes; both Colin and John were keen to collaborate with us with a view of building up their own I.S. group. The trouble then was that most of the Manchester anarchists in the MAG didn't have any affinity with factory workers and trade unionists. They were good on peace demos etc. waving their black and red flags, but it was as if they were frightened of engaging with genuine workers at their places of work.
When I was sacked for supporting the apprentices at Robinsons in Rochdale in 1965, the MAG refused to come down because they said they didn't want to be 'authoritarian', and tell the apprentices what to do! Again in 1966, when I was given my marching orders at Tomlinsons up Milnrow the MAG held aloof yet again steering clear of the factory gates. In similar circumstances I doubt that Colin Barker and I.S. would have been so timid, but by that time I had already decided to return to Spain, where I had a job waiting among the more practical and proletarian Gibraltar anarchists.
Under the influence of Ron Marsden, and Alan Barlow**** when the Manchester anarchists discussed the Roberts-Arundel dispute at a meeting at Mother Macs pub in central Manchester, the meeting was swayed and persuaded to not attend a support meeting called by the International Socialists [IS] to support the Roberts-Arundel strikers, the reasoning at that time being that they didn't want to swell the support for the trotskyists in IS. This is significant and relevant to what Mr. Heath is saying, yet I believe both he and Colin Barker draw the wrong conclusions in arguing that the anarchists and international socialists needed a national organisation or party.
In an interview with Colin Barker, now a retired sociology lecturer, in 2015 in the publication RS21 (Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century) vividly describes the situation he found himself with the IS in 1966 at the time of the Roberts-Arundel dispute: 'We
were a group of about twenty people. We’d got the building workers,
and we were talking on very friendly terms with one or two CP
engineers. By then I think we’d recruited one or two. We look as if
we’re going to recruit significant numbers of militant workers to
the branch – I don’t want to exaggerate, but we’re a little bit
confident, a little bit rooted. We’re distinctive. We don’t know
that you can’t do things – that’s quite important, we don’t
know of any limits to what we can do. So we take initiatives, try
things out, sometimes they don’t work and sometimes they do. This
is in ’67 – the next year of course everything changed.' (rs21on
Clearly the advantage that the Manchester International Socialist had in 1965 was not that of a mass organised party, but rather that of disciplined organised body but rather an imaginative tendency that was willing to act on its own initiative. By acting outside the box the IS was enabled to have a great impact in regional industrial disputes such as Roberts-Arundel in Stockpost and at Pilkingtons in St Helens.Meanwhile, the Manchsester anarchists who were so heroic in the peace demos in central Manchester were too timid when it came to turning up at the factory gates.
Drawing up a neat historical narrative
Like all historians
Mr. Heath provides us with neat narrative to explain what was wrong, and
how the anarchist decline could have been avoided in the past, but also
how its continuing fall in the present and in the future can be
stemmed: i] The historic issue, according to Mr. Heath, was that there was 'The increasing frustration with the swamp of pacifism, liberalism
and vague humanism'.
ii] Two now
defunct bodies entitled ASA (Anarchist Syndicalist Alliance) and ORA
(Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists) were potentially Mr. Heath's
ideal tools for social change, but he writes the 'ASA ran
out of steam pretty quickly'.
[I personally was one of the
founding members of this short-lived ASA organisation, which was set-up
around 1970 from remnants of the old Manchester Syndicalist Workers
Federation, and went on to play a role in the Courtaulds Arrow Mill
strike involving mainly Asian workers in Rochdale, and later to successful campaign for shop stewards in
textiles inside the National Union of Textile & Allied
Workers*****]. iii}On the other hand, Heath writes that 'The ORA had started moving away from
the swamp as a result of the dockers and miners struggles and the
influences of French libertarian communists.'
Mr. Heath quotes from an ORA booklet entitled 'Towards a history and critique of the anarchist movement in
recent times' by K. Nathan. R. Atkins, C. Williams [ORA pamphlet no1.
1971]to support his diagnoses about the rise of Trotskyism and the fall of anarchism in the late 1960s and earlier 1970s: 'The IS [the International Socialists which later became the SWP] would
not have attained their size and influence such as it is if a decent
libertarian organisation had existed. It is an unholy mixture of
libertarian and Leninist groups. The attempt by Cliffe (sic) to
compete with IMG by out-trotting Mandel will make this alliance
increasingly unstable. BUT do we have any capacity to attract these
comrades? In fact, the flow has been the other way. Good comrades
(for the most part industrial militants rather than students) have
been lost without anyone attempting to understand why.'
He argues that that was a
true analysis and remains so today. Hence, he claims, that in
spite of what he calls 'the decline of Leninism' it was a 'lack of effective organisation', that has meant that anarchism will be at a standstill
until we rectify this problem of organisation.
What
this shows is that Nick Heath has a mechanistic Marxist approach to
organisation that is rooted in a form of deterministic thinking that is
part of the problem. The main problem among the anarchists, which has
been amply demonstrated in most recent times at the London Anarchist
Bookfair etc., is a psychological inability to engage with real people
in the real world. Some of the left don't have an engaging relationship
with working people. This has been a long term problem which no amount
of management, membership cards, statements aims and principle, mission
statements, or tick lists can solve.
Because Mr.
Heath has been a white-collar office worker (a librarian) for much of
his life he looks at the problem in a top-down way so that all he comes
up with are cookbook solutions. In the same way his close colleague
Mike Ballard - now a retired local authority housing manager - has a similar
cultural problem. Commenting in another essay entitled 'Anarchist communism in Britain, 1870-1919', on the libertarian organisation founded in 1960 called 'SOLIDARITY', Mr. Heath writes: 'Their wilful failure to translate this into the establishment of a
national organisation was a disaster, as International Socialism (the
precursor of the Socialist Workers Party) was able to build on this
territory abandoned by Solidarity (and by the Anarchist Federation of
Britain). They failed to engage as fully with the Anarchist movement as
much as they could have, as their contributions at meetings and
conferences could have considerably strengthened the class struggle
current within it.'
Thoughts on aspects of northern anarchism
There were some protests from southerners and Mr. Heath's type of 'organisational anarchists', when on November 2011, Sidney Huffman wrote his interesting 'Message from a North East Anarchists' on libcom:
'We believe the anarchists may actually be the single largest radical
tendency in the North-East and wider North, yet we remain largely
invisible, rarely initiating action ourselves and instead just tagging
along in ones and twos with events organised by the left and liberals.
We have repeatedly found anarchists who have joined Trotskyist parties
simply because they couldn't find an organised anarchist presence here.
Older comrades coming out of premature retirement spend 6 months looking
for political anarchists and cannot find any during that time. It is
not good enough. If we are serious about change, we have to step up and
make ourselves visible.'
What's interesting
about this statement and some of the protesting comments that followed
it, is the implied organisational and activist nature of what is being
proclaimed. Sidney Huffmann writes about 'tagging along in ones and twos' on other people's events tail-ending other left protests.
In response to Mr. Huffman, Tom Harrison wrote on libcom that the 'SF [Solidarity Federation] and AF [Anarchist Federation] have been turning out regularly at the sparks
strikes/demos/blockades in London, bolstering picket lines and generally
providing the much needed solidarity for these workers. There was a
particularly good SF turnout at the sparks demo on November 9th ... just
watch this vid
and you can see their placards at many point. We're also organising and
attempting to link student militancy with worker militancy.'
Mr.
Heath will recognise from this that despite his efforts nothing has
changed today from the stagnant pond from which anarchists seems unable
to escape. Of course, anarchists in London may have put out more flags
as seen on the video on the electrician's demo, but that is not news.
What would have been news would have been if like Tameside Trade Union
Council they had been in the forefront of the campaign against the
blacklist moving motions to the TUC, manning lonely picket lines in the
early hours since 2003, in the DAF dispute or at the Manchester Royal
Infirmary in 2009. If Mr. Harrison is saying the anarchists are a kind
of rent-a-mob available on street demos well that is part of the problem, because
despite all the talk of organisating they don't seem to have the
initiative to build serious enterprises themselves apart from bookfairs.Now because of narrow-mindedness of some anarchists even bookfairs are becoming a problem for the anarchiststo organise.
What Mr. Heath failed to grasp when he considered the Roberts Arundel strike (in his quote from Freedom
above) was that the lesson from that strike was that the Manchester
anarchists in 1967 failed to engage with the workers in dispute because
they were afraid of real workers at the factory gate. They didn't know
how to address a real worker then, and they still have problems today.
Even in the run up to the campaign against the blacklist in the
naughties people like Nick Heath's mate Mike Ballard, a former housing
manager at Manchester City Council, was describing the Manchester
electricians as not being involved in class struggle because they were
taking 'individualuist' actions by setting up pickets
rather than collectivist actions. Mr. Ballard came up with that claim
at a meeting of the NAN in Burnley, of course it was before the
Information Commissioner made his successful raid on Ian Kerr's office
in 2009, and before Kerr pleaded guilty for keeping an illegal data-base
at his trial at Knutsford Crown Court.
Abstract Anarchists & the ethnographic approach
The
folly of the mechanistic managerialist approach of both Mr. Heath and
Mr. Ballard is evident given that the subsequent development of the
struggle of the 'Boys on the Blacklist' in Manchester,
which Tameside TUC has been in the forefront of since 2003: had this
handful of electricians often acting in opposition to the official
union, using their own initiative not engaged in a series of small
pickets around Manchester after 2003, the office of the Consulting
Association, managed by Ian Kerr, would never have been raided by the
Information Commissioner in Droitwich Spa in 2009. Consequently, the
blacklist with over 3,000 names of building workers would never have
been exposed.
In the mid-1970s, the criminologist Ian Smith and other anarchists used to talk about the contrast between the 'sectarian syndicalists' and 'shop-floor syndicalists' in the ASA, Now we have very opportunistic 'abstract anarchists' like Mr. Heath and Mr. Ballard to contrast with more ethnographic approaches of others anxious to listen to the public.
What
Nick Heath may have in mind when he envisages a future anarchist
organisation is something like what Ken Weller and member of SOLIDARITY, talked about when he described the influence of the British Communist Party in 1956: 'People can’t realise how big an apparatus it was. There were the
embassies, the Friendship Societies, the printshops, the front
organisations, the unions; 120 were employed by the Electrical Trades
Union alone. There were all the agencies of the Soviet government, Tass
[the Soviet news agency], the Moscow Narodny Bank, all these sorts of
things were full of people; I mean, the Soviet Weekly alone employed a
network of people who were distributing agents for the paper, and so on.'
It
must have been exactly like George Orwell said in the 1930s about it
paying some folk to adopt a commie position, but to accomplish that kind
of body among the anarchists would require something more substantial
than what Nick Health has to offer with his own small-scale Anarchist
Federation (AF) with all of its one hundred members paying their fees,
and with perhaps a possible trans-gender platform to stand upon with its
own estimated constituency of 0.1% of the national populous. That
would in any case be a very different approach from that experienced by
anarchists in the early 1960s, when anarchism was at last part of a
genuine social movement; that is the peace movement and the Committee of
100.
With the 'People in the Streets', as Vernon Richards described the peace movement in Freedom in the 1960s, the anarchists had a significant role to play on Ban the Bomb demos and in the Committee of 100 sit downs. Yet
when the social struggle moved to the picket lines, trade unions and
factories after the Roberts Arundel strike in 1967, where the communists
had the great advantage, the Manchester anarchists had very little
grasp of what was required. Only in the struggles for shop stewards up
in Oldham and Rochdale in the failing textile industry such as at
Courtaulds Arrow Mill in 1972, did the anarchists of Manchester have an
impact, and then again in London in the building workers' struggles,
anarchists like Peter Turner had a role to play. None-the-less, in the
significant disputes of the late 1960s at Pilkington Glassworks in St
Helens, Upper Clyde Shipbuilding [UCS] and in engineering sit-ins,
the miners struggles in the 1970s, the anarchist influence was tiny.
* Nick Heath leader of the Anarchist Federation.
** Roberts Arundel strike from 1966-68 of engineering workers against dilution and cheap labour.
*** Pilkington strike in St Helens of glass-workers in the Municipal & General Workers Union [now GMB] in which the workers, frustrated by both the union and the bosses, attempted to set up an independent union.
**** Ron Marsden and Alan Barlow came to Manchester in 1964 and joined the Manchester Anarchist group [MAG], which was then meeting st that meeting in the Lord Nelson in Salford. The MAG had been founded earlier by Graham Lee and James Pinkerton, then International Secretary of the Syndicalist Workers Federation [SWF]. Marsden from Preston, and Barlow originally from Liverpool, had recently become members of the SWF, and were hoping with the help of the Liverpudlian Vincent Johnson also of the SWF, to form a faction within the MAG and drive it in a 'class struggle' direction.
***** COURTAULDS INSIDE OUT: CIS ANTI REPORT No.10. Produced in co-operation with The Transitional Institute. ******
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