Losing the North?

Why Labour is losing the north

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

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

By Alex Niven

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

**********

Danczuk: Exit stage Right

by Les May

SO the ‘Danczuk Saga’ has finally come to an end. In just two years he has managed to convert a 12,400 majority in 2015 into a total vote of just 883. Clearly people vote for the party not the man because Labour’s Tony Lloyd has a majority of more than 14,000.  What went wrong for Danczuk?

I have been chronicling Danczuk antics on the Northern Voices blog since he published his book about Cyril Smith, ‘Smile for the Camera’, in April 2014.  But the Danczuk story goes back much further than that. In fact I could push it back to 1992 which is when I believe Danczuk found out about Cyril’s spanking of young men at Cambridge House hostel after reading the story published in a copy of the May 1979 edition of the Rochdale Alternative Paper (RAP) which is archived in Rochdale Reference Library.  It is a reasonable assumption that he would have come across copies of RAP whilst undertaking sociological research about the town.

In November 2006, the Labour magazine Tribune published the results of an investigation into what it called ‘allegations of irregularities, which point to a concerted effort to oust non-Blairites from standing’ which it said ‘raise serious questions over whether the choice of prospective MPs is being conducted in a free and fair manner.’  And who was one of those prospective MPs?  Surprise, surprise, it was none other than Simon Danczuk!

This is what Tribune went on to say about the shenanigans:  The selection for the Rochdale constituency, due end on January 22, has been described by one NEC member as "a debacle".  Before the selection began, a regional officer was accused of assisting Simon Danzcuk by allowing his company Vision 21 to conduct a survey of the attitudes of Rochdale members.  The shortlisting meeting was halted when a vote of no confidence was passed in the selection process.  Several branch nomination meetings had to be re-held after irregularities were discovered.  At the reconvened shortlisting meeting, an all-male shortlist of eight was agreed, despite this being contrary to party rules. All members were issued with a postal ballot, after it was discovered that the original postal votes had been opened prematurely.

(The www link which carried the Tribune article is now dead. If you wish to check it out for yourself I will send you a copy I downloaded earlier this year if you contact an NV editor.)

Then there was the strange story ‘Would-be MP victim of death threats’

which appeared in the Lancashire Telegraph in January 2007.  The would be MP was Simon Danczuk who was of course the source for the story. Caveat emptor!

http://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/1116230.wouldbe_mp_victim_of_death_threats/

Or how about the story which appeared on Rochdale Online in May 2008, ‘Danczuk linked to developer threatening legal action against Council!’  The link was via the company Vision 21 set up by Danczuk with Anna McNamara and Ruth Turner, founders of the Big Issue in the North magazine for the homeless.  It is surely just coincidence that the name Ruth Turner figures prominently in the Tribune article and she went on to work in Blair’s office. http://www.rochdaleonline.co.uk/news-features/2/news/8581/danczuk-linked-to-developer-threatening-legal-action-against-council

Now at this point Simon isn’t an MP. But there’s more to come before we get to the election in May 2010.  There’s the little matter of the Spanish Holiday which went wrong.  That’s the first one in 2006 not the second one in 2016 which went even more wrong.

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

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

What all these stories amount to is that nothing to do with the public image of Simon Danczuk is straightforward.  The RAP story about Smith from 1979 was about the abuse of power and was based on affidavits by the young men concerned. (I know this is true, I have copies.)  The really interesting question is why the media ignored it back then.

The Danczuk version in the book involves Smith the repeatedly offending sexual predator, the Security Services protecting him, a false story about Northamptonshire police stopping him and finding a boot load of child porn, then letting him free after a ‘phone call to London’, tries to implicate him in the murky happenings at Knowl View special school because he was a Governor, and has a supposed ‘whistleblower’ who saw absolutely nothing and whose story when published in 1995 made no mention of Smith.

What amazes me is that so many people were taken in by this book.  All you have to do to spot the problem is to note the absence of sources in the bibliography then ask Danczuk how many men he interviewed who claim to have been assaulted by Smith.   I have tried on several occasions and he has never replied.  So as an editor of N.V. I drew my own conclusions

Once Danczuk had set his hares running, the police were duty bound to investigate.   If you add up the cost of all the police investigations which resulted from Danczuk’s claims it runs into the millions of pounds.  And when the police found insufficient evidence for the CPS to prosecute, according to Danczuk it was their fault!  But that does not excuse Leicestershire police discussing aspects of the investigation into Greville Janner with Danczuk.  Aspects which later appeared in a national newspaper. (See Appendix).

Since the last day of December 2015, Danczuk has been the political equivalent of ‘dead meat’.  The proximate cause of his undoing was the so called ‘sexting’ incident involving a 17 years old ‘financial dominatrix’.   From then on it was a bad year for him. But as I said earlier nothing is straightforward with Danczuk and his own antics ensured that things went from bad to worse.

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/simon-danczuks-snare-of-self-delusion.html

We may not have heard the last of Simon.  I don’t think that a decision has yet been made on whether the overpayment of £11,000 in accommodation expenses for the two of his children constituted fraud.

Now that Rochdale is bidding adieu to Mr D. what sort of reputation will he leave behind?  With the best will in the world I find it difficult to see him as anything other than a man who milked his position as an MP for his own ends and who even in adversity never missed an opportunity to line his own pockets.  All perfectly legally of course.  But that does not take away the smell.

Appendix

25 August 2015

Chief Constable

Leicestershire Police
Force Headquarters
St Johns
Enderby
Leicester.
LE19 2BX

Dear Sir,

I refer to statements made by Simon Danczuk MP in the House of Commons on 23 June 2015 and recorded in Hansard Column 214WH.  I have extracted below the portion of his statement which I believe raises matters of concern about the actions of your force.

Quotation starts:

'I know the police are furious about this, and rightly so.  Anyone who has heard the accusations would be similarly outraged.  I have met Leicestershire police and discussed the allegations in some detail: children being violated, raped and tortured, some in the very building in which we now sit.  The official charges are: 14 indecent assaults on a male under 16 between 1969 and 1988; two indecent assaults between ’84 and ’88; four counts of buggery of a male under 16 between ’72 and ’87; and two counts of buggery between 1977 and 1988.  My office has spoken to a number of the alleged victims and heard their stories.'

Quotation ends.

Taken at its face value this suggests that Leicestershire police discussed with a third party, who though an MP, does not represent a constituency within the Leicestershire police area, matters of a confidential nature relating to a police investigation.  I draw attention to the fact that Mr Danczuk specifically used the word 'discussed' suggesting that information was passed to him by the police service rather than that he was simply questioned about information which he might hold which was relevant to the police investigation.  The detailed information regarding the nature of the charges in the remainder of the statement suggests that this interpretation is correct.

Even if it is considered appropriate to discuss these matters with Mr Danczuk the question arises as to why he was apparently not instructed that these matters were confidential.  Mr Danczuk's choice of words in the first two sentences of the above extract could leave the impression that by not instructing him that the matter was confidential the police service was attempting to use an extra-judicial method to bring pressure to bear upon the Director of Public Prosecutions. I stress that I am not making such an allegation.

The apparent failure to instruct Mr Danczuk that the discussions were confidential extends to an article in the Sun newspaper of 24 June 2015 headed 'Lord Janner "Raped kids in Parliament" claims Labour MP Simon Danczuk', and in which the matters discussed with him by Leicestershire police were repeated. As Mr Danczuk had made his claims under Parliamentary privilege he gave himself, and the Sun, protection against being sued for libel.

On 24 July 2015 Mr Danczuk received a payment of £10,000 from the owners of the Sun for an article he had contributed to.  He declined to say which article the cash related to.

If this payment does relate to the Sun article I believe it raises further questions about the wisdom of discussing material relating to the Janner case with Mr Danczuk without instructing him that the matter was confidential.

I am arranging for a copy of this letter to be sent to the Home Office because I think the concerns raised are applicable to similar discussions between other police forces and MPs who may use parliamentary privilege to make the discussions public.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Les May

In Defence of Comrade Corbyn

& the decline of New Labour 

THIS month the journalist, Nick Cohen, in STANDPOINT magazine, has address the issue of the Labour leadership campaign, and explained the success of Jeremy Corbyn by arguing that 'Tony Blair has discredited Blairism, enabling a far-left ideologue to gain control of the party despite his grotesque world-view'. 

Mr Cohen essay is perceptive in defining the rise of what he calls 'grotesque' Corbynism as a simple reaction to the monstrosities of the Blairites.  His point is that 'Jeremy Corbyn has never pocketed thirty pieces of silver [and that]  He says what he says because he means it, not because he has been paid to say it.'   On the other hand, some leading proponents of New Labour have moved in a world that most Labour people deplore: for example David Blunkett 'has joined the board of Oracle Capital, a group “dedicated to providing personalised services to high-net-worth individuals and their families,” with particular emphasis on offering advice to Russian and Chinese multimillionaires.'   

New Labour fanatic Lord Mandelson, for example, left office in the Labour government to found a lobbying company named Global Counsel, and its clients include Putin's pally oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska.  Nick Cohen writes: 'Lord Mandelson himself goes to St Petersberg to add what credibility he possesses to the propagandistic conferences Putin stages.'   

Of Blair himself, Mr Cohen writes that 'By hiring himself out to Egypt, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, Blair has destroyed his democratic “legacy” more thoroughly than his enemies ever could.'  After the Western financial crisis, these countries were the big spenders and Cohen writes that 'Blair, Mandelson and dozens of others sucked long and heartily at their teats.'   

To the Labour Party membership generally this kind of thing is appalling, and Mr Cohen insists: 'They will not allow another generation of centrist politicians to use the Labour Party as a stepping-stone to careers helping the rich maximise their fortunes.' 

Hence the rise of Comrade Corbyn in the polls for the Labour leadership.

There is another reason why Corbyn is more acceptable than the other three candidates to many Labour members: he's much clearer about where he stands on most things and at a time of focus groups this is refreshing for most of us. 

Yet, Corbyn is part of what Cohen calls 'the malaise on the modern Left' in that he often tilts to the Russian side of the argument on foreign policy.  In the Autumn of 1947, George Orwell wrote an essay entitled 'The Defence of Comrade Zilliacus' in which he responded to a letter to the Labour weeklyTribune from Mr. K. Zilliacus then a Labour M.P. on foreign policy:

'...I do not believe the mass of the people in this country are anti-American politically, and certainly they are not so culturally,  But politico-literary intellectuals are not usually frightened of mass opinion.  What that are frightened of is the prevailing opinion within there own group.  At any given moment there is always an orthodoxy, a parrot-cry which must be repeated and in the more active section of the Left the orthodoxy of the moment is anti-Americanism.'  

Just as Zilliacus had affection for the Soviet Union in the 1940s, so now Corbyn has told the old Communist daily, the Morning Star, 'the  EU and NATO have now become the tools of US policy in Europe'.  Corbyn says:  'The expansion of NATO into Poland and the Czech Republic has particularly increased tensions with Russia.' 

 Jaruzelski:  last Communist leader of Poland

In the last century the Poles preferred military rule by their own General Wojciech Witold Jaruzelski (see photo), rather than have another Russian invasion, and many Ukrainians fear Russia more than anything.   But this is Russia of the 21^st Century not the Soviet Union of the last century, what Nick Cohen calls 'a dictatorial kleptocracy, whose oligarchs stash their stolen money in Mayfair, Saint-Tropez and Palm Beach, and whose leader sends his armies over Russia's borders to grab territory of neighbouring states.  Putin boasts to the world that he wants to be the leader of its reactionary and illiberal forces.... the repression of minorities, particularly homosexuals.' 

This seems to be a kind of political hangover from the last century which, even though Russia is now clearly a reactionary regime, for some reason the British Left still can't rid itself of. 

The community of political parrots that composed a dominant chunk of the British Left was an anti-American foreign policy position when George Orwell was writing in 1947, but now as Nick Cohen writes 'Opposition to the West is the first, last and only foreign policy priority of many on the Left.'   This is a lazy kind of cookbook politics that requires the participant to sing in chorus with the fashionable in-crowd.  In his day George Orwell call this political in-crowd 'a mob'  in which there is 'an attempt to keep in with fashionable opinion' and to be 'anti-American is to shout with the mob'.  This kind of fashionable interpretive community which so influences much of our thinking on the liberal-Left is in a way reactionary and prevents clear thinking: I often catch it in myself and I notice it others close to me.  It results in a kind of humbug and hypocrisy's, and Nick Cohen captures this when he writes:

'Not just Corbyn and his supporters but much of the liberal Left announce their political correctness and seize on the smallest sexist or racist “gaffe” of their opponents.  Without pausing for breath, they move on to defend radical Islamist movements which believe in the subjugation of women and the murder of homosexuals.' 

Makes you think doesn't it?

Tribune in 1945 vs Freedom in 2014!

Writing Reviews & Obituaries  

SOMEONE told me recently that there are no rules for writing reviews or obituaries, but Alex Dennis, the sociologist, squirmed when I told him some years ago that the anarchist intellectual, Nicolas Walter, had placed a number of obituaries of political individuals on the spike before he died; in readiness for publication when it became their turn to go.  Once Vernon Richards, a Freedom editor, took hold of Albert Meltzer by his lapels at a London Anarchist Book Fair, and told him that he was going to outlive him, promising him that he was writing Albert's obituary and that it was going to be a good one:  this obituary was ultimately to appear in Freedom and proved very contentious. 

Since I wrote the Bob Miller obituary in Northern Voices 13, in April 2012, I have come to feel a bit sorry for Bob whose nearest and dearest have describe as 'grumpy'; I didn't find him grumpy in the least, indeed he was a bit of a softy who was often bullied by being at the mercy of the people around him, and was ultimately a victim of his choice of career and circumstances – yet I still remain confident that the facts in the original obituary are basically correct and nothing has been put forward to contradict anything in the substance of the text.  Poor Bob, when I interviewed him over the police investigation into the Brimar case he tried to say that he had little to tell them, but just as he uttered this he was subjected to a bout of hectoring abuse from a third party who was trying to stop him speaking to me, and above the din he struggled to say that he only knew one woman involved  – a well known and respected activist in the Manchester area, but he didn't say if he gave her name to the police and I didn't ask him.  I don't know if anyone else in his own political organisation debriefed him over his experience with the police.  The only specific rational complaint about a detail of the obituary came in a long friendly telephone conversation I had from Tom, Bob's son, at the end of November 2012, when he claimed that unlike Mike Ballard, he had actually said Bob was an 'anarchist' in his eulogy at his father's funeral; at my invite he agreed to write a 400-word letter explaining this for publication in the Voices, but the next day Barry Woodling was excluded from the Manchester Anarchist Book Fair, accused of 'anti-Semitism' despite the fact that his ancestors died in the gas chambers, and perhaps as a result of this Tom never sent us his letter correcting our account.  

 

The policy of the printed publication of Northern Voices was established in 2003, and was to be based on the editorial panel which would supply support, but that the detailed editorship would rest with a single individual rather than a committee.  From the first issue the 48-page journal was divided into two with news and politics at the front, and with the back half devoted to northern arts, literature, food and drink, and even something on northern gardens and films.  Initially, in the first few issues we published some historical academic stuff on Peterloo, and some imaginative short stories by a talented writer called Mike Fielding.  Chris Draper, who has written illuminating essays in every issue of Northern Voices since it began, used to complain passionately about the strict apartheid between politics and the arts with a bias to the former.  Mr. Draper has occasionally accused us of being too 'workerist' or 'municipal' or in the case of Mike Fielding's imaginative short stories 'ladish'.   Some have even criticised our extensive coverage of the discovery of the blacklist and our support for the electricians in the construction industry.  Yet, looking back perhaps over half of each issue of the journal has been dedicated to the arts, history and literature, and even some of our leading stories such as the interview with Sophie Lancaster's mother in N.V.13 are human interest based.  

 

Years ago, a criticism of N.V. by a reviewer in Freedom, reported in N.V.8 in 2007, was:  'Another major criticism of the magazine... is that it doesn't seem to carry any anarchist content', though the writer does admit that Northern Voices is 'appealing to a broad canvas ideal of northern working class community and history...'

 

Against those who want us to be more artistic and culturally based it is worth considering what George Orwell wrote when he was literary editor of Tribune in 1945: 

'We can assume that our public is intelligent, but not that it is primary interests are  literary or artistic, still less that our readers have been educated in the same way and will know the same jokes and recognise the same allusions. The smaller literary magazines tend to develop a sort of family atmosphere – almost, indeed, a private language unintelligible to outsiders – and, at the risk of offending a contributor now and then, we have made efforts to prevent that kind of thing from being imported into Tribune.  We never, for instance, review books written in foreign languages, and we try to cut out avoidable foreign quotations and obscure literary allusions.  Nor will we print anything unintelligible.  I have had several angry letters because of this, but I refuse to be responsible for printing anything I don't understand..' 

One example of what Orwell means by a smaller arty type magazine would be The Cunningham Amendment edited by Peter Good who was one of the founders of Northern Voices in the Summer of 2003, it is the kind of publication which has what Orwell calls a 'private language' and with a readership which sociologists would describe as being part of the adherents of an 'interpretive community'.  Another publication of this type would perhaps have been The Booster, which appeared in French and English and was published in Paris between September 1937 and  Easter 1939, in which Henry Miller, Abe Ratter, Alfred Perlès, Lawrence Durrell, William Saroyan, and Anaĭs Nin participated.  This is not the kind of thing that would appeal to the kind of person who reads Northern Voices.  

 

And yet, recently Steve from down South wrote us a letter saying:  'What I like about Northern Voices is its mixed content, it's very accessible and readable...'  

 

Before the ship went down at Freedom, ending the life of perhaps the oldest left-wing publication, Freedom agreed to publish a review by the northern historian and Labour councillor Paul Salveson.  The current editor Charlotte Dingle sent out an e-mail agreeing this in October 2013, but this decision was reversed in November 2013 on the grounds that Mr. Salveson's review was 'patronising'.  Now apart from the editor not knowing her arse from her elbow, one would have thought that it is in the very nature of a review to be patronising in the sense that as George Orwell says about Tribune which contrasts with the position adopted by Freedom before it died: 

'(What) is particularly important in the case of book reviews, in which it is often difficult for the reviewer to avoid indicating his own opinions...  We hold that the reviewers job is to say what he thinks of the book he is dealing with, and not what we think our readers ought to think.  And if, as a result, unorthodox opinions are expressed from time to time – even, on occasion, opinions that contradict some editorial statement at the other end of the paper – we believe that our readers are tough enough to stand a certain amount of diversity.  We hold that the most perverse human being is more interesting than the most orthodox gramophone record.'   

Donald Rouum and Charlotte Dingle, and other anarchists on the Freedom collective in 2014, would do well to ponder the contents of this statement put out by Orwell as literary editor of Tribune in his New Year message in 1945 .  And the pedantic and rather dogmatic Mr. Anonymous who wrote in a comment on the Northern Voices Blog: 'Why would an anarchist newspaper publish something written by a Labour Party hack? exactly! They wouldn't.... Grow up and get over yourself...' would do well to consider what Orwell's has to say below on reviews and the arts: 

'Obviously we cannot print contributions that grossly violate Tribune's policy.  Even in the name of free speech a Socialist paper cannot, for instance throw open its columns to antisemitic propaganda.  Looking through the list of our contributors, I find among them Catholics, Communists, Trotsktists, Anarchists, Pacifists, left-wing Conservatives, and Labour Party supporters of all colours.  All of them knew, of course, what kind of paper they were writing for and what topics were best left alone, but I think it is true to say that none of them has ever been asked to modify what he had written on the grounds that it was “not policy”.'   

Northern Voices has strongly supported Freedom for years, particularly when it was under attack from David Hoffman over theft of intellectual property and copywrite issues, but over a year ago we were told of crude threats to Freedom: 'don't publish or else' from a leading member of the Anarchist Federation (AF) in London this is clearly unhealthy in a libertarian publication.  This contrasts with Orwell's more mature editorial approach at Tribune, and whose journalism has been described by Timothy Garton Ash as a 'Gold Standard' for us all to aspire to.   Of late this doesn't seem to have been the case at Freedom Press and in 2012, the manager of the Freedom Bookshop, Andy, even took Northern Voices off the shelf and refused to sell NV13 after an approach from Nick Heath, the AF leader.  This in itself suggests a certain intellectual and moral bankruptcy, but in the case of the recent Paul Salveson review of Northern Voices' decade of publication, the editor Charlotte, had at first agreed to publish the review and later withdrawn this offer.  This time there is no indication that any external threats were applied.  This is only the latest in a long series of cases of clumsy decisions of this kind going back over a decade in which it often seemed the different editors of Freedom didn't know their arse from their elbow.   When a publication founded in 1886 by the geologist Peter Kropotkin begins to look like it is being managed by Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs it begins to look like English anarchism has begun to outlive its mission.