The Community of Scholars & Satanic Verses:

CLASH OF CULTURES UP NORTH AT BATLEY GRAMMAR?

THE Telegraph & Argus on the 27th February 2019 ran a story by its Chief Reporter, Tim Quantrill, claiming that 'Thirty years on from the Satanic Verse book burning in Bradford, a community leader has said he couldn't see a similar protest erupting today.'

In the 1980s, the book burning in Bradford led to protests, which began in the north of England, and soon spread across the UK and to the rest of the Islamic world, culminating in February 1989 with Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa - a death sentence on the writer Salman Ruskie.

That was more than two years ago and at that time Ishtiaq Ahmed, the then business officer for the Bradford Council of Mosques, said that society had moved on arguing:

"We did what we needed to do to have our concerns registered in the public domain.

"The Muslim community has evolved in terms of political participation and is more integrated in British society which is hopefully more sensitive to Muslims and, particularly in writing about Muslims, more understanding.

"In terms of our struggle for equality and values recognised, it is an iconic milestone. In terms of a wider society, it is an important event in Bradford.

"Bradford is a place we feel positive about. I have five children and eight grandchildren, Bradford is our home and in our blood.

"There is a different mindset to the 1980s when we trying to decide whether we belong here."

Now this optimistic conclusion has been thrown into question as last Thursday and Friday, angry parents descended on Batley Grammar School (just down the road from Bradford) to make their voices heard and insisting that they will not stop gathering until a teacher is sacked for displaying a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed during one of his lectures on religous education.

The passionate allegation of the parents is that the teacher is guilty of blasphemy.

To which the comedian Ricky Gervais, who is an atheist, has jumped in to back the teacher in a tweet which saw him mock the protesters.

He wrote: "Blasphemy? F***ing Blasphemy? It's 2021 for f***'s sake. What next? People being punished for insulting unicorns?."

Mr Gervais, who is an atheist, was also backed by BBC broadcaster Nicky Campbell, who said his tweet was about the 'lunacy of blasphemy'.

He added blasphemy was a "victimless crime " and also hit out at a critic of the comedian.

However, Mr Gervais' tweet enraged some on social media, with one angry social media user labelling his words "an insult to the Islamic community worldwide".

The Salman Rushdie book opened up a clash between what is seen as the enlightenment thinking and divided the islamic world. Wikipedia says:

(It) "Muslims... Westerners along the fault line of culture,"[4][5] and to have pitted a core Western value of freedom of expression—that no one "should be killed, or face a serious threat of being killed, for what they say or write"[6]—against the view of many Muslims that no one should be free to "insult and malign Muslims" by disparaging the "honour of the Prophet".[7] English writer Hanif Kureishi called the fatwa "one of the most significant events in postwar literary history".

Many Muslims accused Rushdie of blasphemy or unbelief and in 1989 the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. Numerous killings, attempted killings, and bombings resulted in response to the novel.

I was told back in the 1980s by a Islamic critic of Salman Rusdie, that the orginal suggestion to burn Satanic Verses came from an English solicitor in Bradford. And the rest we all know has followed on in its wake, because now we are getting the those on the outlook for blasphemy parading their protests outside Batley Grammar School.

Some hopes for the Community of Scholars if this carries on.

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Petition Backing Batley Teacher Hits 50,000

THE petition in support of a suspended teacher who showed students a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed has passed more than 50,000 signatures.

The Batley Grammar School teacher had apologised after showing the cartoon, widely reported as taken from the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, during a religious studies lesson earlier this week.

He was suspended on Thursday pending an investigation.

The school, in Batley, near Bradford West Yorkshire is facing calls to reinstate the teacher after a petition in support of him reached more than 50,000 signatures in two days, hitting the figure just after 2.00am on Sunday.

Protesters gathered outside the school gates on Thursday and Friday, claiming the school has not taken the issue seriously.

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WORST 20 VIRUS OUTBREAKS IN ENGLAND

A digital billboard in Bradford city centre warns the public about keeping safe.

The government has drawn up a list of 20 councils facing the worst coronavirus outbreaks in England, with Bradford, Sheffield and Kirklees identified as areas needing “enhanced support”, according to a classified document leaked to the Observer and the Guardian.

As evidence mounts that the relaxation of lockdown rules is leading to a resurgence of Covid-19 in some of England’s most deprived and ethnically mixed areas, officials have ordered the army to deploy extra mobile testing units, which will be sent into a series of hotspots around the country from this weekend.

Public Health England (PHE), the country’s lead infection control agency, 

briefed local government health chiefs last week that ministers were considering publishing a ranking of the 10 councils most affected by new outbreaks, which could be released within days. Councils fear the data will be used to enforce more local lockdowns of the kind imposed in Leicester, where all but essential shops must stay shut, schoolchildren have been sent home, and pubs and restaurants remain closed.

The top 10 ranking is likely to be based on a document circulated to local health chiefs on Thursday, headed “official sensitive”. The chart, compiled by PHE and reproduced here, ranks the 20 councils with the highest proportion of positive cases. Leicester remains at its head, with 5.7% of individuals who underwent a test found to have the virus. Kirklees, in West Yorkshire, was not far behind, with a 5% rate. Bradford, and Blackburn with Darwen in Lancashire, were the next highest.

Titled “local authority areas of interest”, the table is based on testing between 21 June and 4 July. It identifies six areas of “concern”. More serious cases are labelled as needing “enhanced support”, with three councils in this category. One – Leicester – is listed as requiring “intervention”.

The document states “these areas are currently under investigation by the local public health protection teams”. “Testing access is being increased in areas including Bradford”, it says, and the areas listed are “associated with workplace outbreaks which have contributed to the increase in infection rates”.

Last month, 164 workers at a meat factory in Kirklees tested positive, and at the beginning of July, a bed factory in Batley, which is administered by Kirklees Council, was closed after eight workers were found to have the virus.The communities most affected have several factors in common: poverty, poor health and a high proportion of non-white residents.

The top 10 is likely to change daily, although some areas will remain severely affected for weeks, health directors believe.

 

 

“Those on the list are going to be characterised by higher deprivation, higher black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities and denser housing,” said a public health director briefed on the plans.

“Some are going to be in the list for the whole period of the pandemic. The drivers are structural and demographic, so the pattern of spread will reflect the inequalities that already existed. Some of the most strapped-for-cash councils are going to be dealing with some of the worst outbreaks.”

Areas with large south Asian populations, particularly where several generations may share a home and live in crowded conditions, are among those emerging as particularly at risk.

Hand sanitiser at Kober meat processing plant in Cleckheaton, confirmed as the location of a localised coronavirus outbreak.

Bradford has the highest proportion of people of Pakistani origin in England.

The council has today deployed testing units, staffed by the armed forces, to its Bowling and Keighley districts. Residents will be able to be tested without an appointment. Similar units will be deployed in Blackburn and Sheffield.

“Bradford has a higher infection rate than most but it’s coming down due to action we’ve taken,” said council leader Susan Hinchcliffe.  “We welcome the dialogue with government.  We’re already doing more testing than any other authority in the region, but want to do more.”

Bradford has asked for its own mobile testing units, more environmental health officers, support to pay full wages to low-paid workers having to self-isolate, and funding to develop its own local test-and-trace system.

Officials have not yet outlined what metrics will be used to impose further lockdowns, but it is understood a system based on the German model is under discussion.  This would involve a threshold of 50 weekly positive tests per 100,000 of the population in any given council.  Once that is breached, special measures could be triggered.

Data made public on Thursday shows Leicester is currently on 116 new cases per 100,000 of population per week, down from 140 two weeks ago.

Rochdale is in second place, with nearly 33 cases, down from over 50 three weeks ago.  Kirklees is also suffering high rates, as are Bradford, Blackburn with Darwen, Rotherham and Bedford.

The health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced the UK’s first local lockdown on 29 June as Leicester reported 944 new cases in a fortnight.  Non-essential shops and schools were shut, and pubs and restaurants were unable to reopen. 

Legislation to enforce the restrictions was pushed through parliament.

Desperate to avoid Leicester’s fate, councils are lobbying for a “graded response”, the local public health director said, with a rolling back of some elements of lockdown, such as larger gatherings, rather than closure of whole sectors. “What we want to avoid is the secretary of state making clumsy, unhelpful interventions, so we are getting ahead of the curve, understanding what our problem is and acting to address it.  But we are hampered by slow reporting of data and absence of data,” they added.

Councils have only just begun to receive a breakdown of new cases by postcode, and this is arriving weekly.  Health chiefs say they need the information daily if they are to spot outbreaks in time to stop them spreading.

The plans to publish a top 10 were discussed on a regional call with Public Health England, two public health directors confirmed.  “They seem to be intent on putting it into the public domain,” said one of those on the call.  “We have expressed some concerns over how they do it, as the data does need to be interpreted. Nonetheless, I welcome transparency.”

The classified list of 20 at-risk councils uses six metrics including number of cases per 100,000 of population per week and per day, percentage of individuals testing positive as a proportion of all tests, and “exceedances”.  This is where councils are issued with a red light because they consistently have more positive cases than forecast by a government algorithm. A slightly lower number of exceedances leads to an amber light.

The chart also shows the number of community outbreaks per council over the last week. Outbreaks are classed as two or more positive tests in a single setting, such as a workplace, school or prison.

The Department of Health and Social Care said it did not have a set trigger, but would use a range of data to decide where and how to act, stating:  “We have been transparent about our response to coronavirus and are always looking to improve the data we publish, including the way we update testing statistics.

“The list of the 10 local authorities with the highest weekly incidence of coronavirus is already publicly available in PHE’s weekly surveillance report.

“All councils in England now have the ability to access testing data, right down to an individual and postcode level.  If councils feel they require more assistance with data, of course, PHE is able to help them.”

Kirklees and Sheffield councils were approached for comment.

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Your Building Society ???

by Christopher Draper

BUILDING societies, like most good things, were invented in the North.

Founded by workers as mutual aid organisations, building societies provided a safe home for meagre savings so that in the long term members could secure homes for themselves and their families.  Over the decades the money men and city spivs moved in, privatised many societies and subverted democratic control of the rest.  You won’t see many millionaire money men walking the streets of Bradford these days but you’ll find a fair few if you pop into the Boardroom of the Yorkshire Building Society (YBS), a mutual aid for the wealthy.

Hell and Halifax

YBS isn’t the only example of the hollowing-out of the mutualist ideas and working class ideals of the original building societies.  The capitalist feeding frenzy that privatised the ‘Halifax Building Society’ (then Britain’s biggest) and then almost destroyed it shows YBS and other remaining ‘mutuals’ have further to fall from their idealistic origins.  A comprehensive analysis of every surviving mutual would be onerous to compile and boring to read so I’ll concentrate on contrasting the professed ideals of YBS with the actualite but the critique applies across the board.

'Our Society'

YBS ‘members’ who legally own the ‘society’ nowadays play no greater role in the business than they do in MacDonalds, Google, Asda or any other retailer yet YBS, like the other fake mutuals, constantly claims we do. ‘Our Society a Place Where We Belong', “Members…at the heart of everything we do’, ‘As a building society we are set up specifically to help people rather than make money from them’.  In the last few years YBS wasted millions of pounds of members’ savings settling fines and compensation claims imposed as a consequence of negligent and cynical trading practices. 

The Financial Conduct Authority discovered YBS indulged in mis-selling PPI; YBS neglected and improperly overcharged mortgage customers experiencing repayment difficulties and YBS promoted and sold bonds that promised financial returns that were virtually impossible to achieve.

Even a cursory examination of YBS documents reveals a focus on growth and expansion rather than member involvement. The truth is that bigger businesses bring bigger bonuses for bosses and for Mike Regnier, YBS CEO, this year’s bonus added a further £275,000 to his already massive salary. A YBS survey of “customer experience” over an identical period recorded a drop from 27^th to 87^th place (comparable organisations) yet had no negative impact on Mike’s bonus.

Once Upon a Time in Huddersfield

YBS started in the nineteenth century with the creation of 'The Huddersfield Equitable Permanent Benefit Building Society' by a handful of workers and tradesmen in a small building on the corner of King Street and Queen Street. In the twentieth century the 'Huddersfield' amalgamated with Dewsbury’s 'West Yorkshire' and then Bradford’s 'Self Help' to, in 1982, form the 'YBS'. 

 

From its foundation in 1864 until 1896 none of the Directors of the ‘Huddersfield’ drew any salary from the Society’s funds now the YBS Director’s trough is lavishly swilled with members’ savings.

The YBS Board comprises 9 directors and includes 6 non-executive directors. In 2017, the executive directors received a total remuneration of two million and fifty-six thousand pounds with CEO Mike Regnier alone getting almost a million (£930,000). As the average local wage is £20,929, Mike gets more every year than a Bradford worker would earn in a lifetime!

Keeping Members Informed

You’ve doubtless received one of those booklets that building societies send out to members as an annual report.  The first thing to note is that these documents are not actually ‘Annual Reports’ but selective, propaganda pamphlets that Directors employ to bamboozle members into thinking they’re involved.  For YBS the official 2017 ‘Annual Report’ is double the page size (A4 rather than A5) and six times the length of the ‘Annual Review’ sent out to members.  Both documents are essentially sales brochures boasting of how brilliantly the ‘business’ is being run but occasionally key details can be gleaned from the full document omitted from the dumbed-down version.   This year (2017/18) the YBS members’ pamphlet made no mention of the gender pay gap that all big organisations are legally obliged to publicly report but tucked away at the foot of the inner column of the ‘full’ document on page 71 we find that YBS operates a 31% gender pay gap but of course even here there’s no admission of guilt rather a statement of pious bullshit, ‘The Group strives to create an environment where diversity in all forms is encouraged and barriers in the way of colleagues fulfilling their potential are removed.’

The full 190 page Report includes lovely full-page, full-colour pictures of Chairman John (Uriah) Heaps and CEO Mike Regnier yet still doesn’t fully report YBS’s legally required analysis of its gender pay-gap (it’s available online).  This records women are very much in the minority among its highest paid employees (top quartile: 42% women/58% men) whilst down at the bottom end (quartile) the lowest paid YBS employees are overwhelmingly female (80% women/20% men).  In place of these facts the Report obfuscates:

‘In simple terms there are more females occupying less senior roles. It is this imbalance that results in the gender pay gap’.

YBS Democracy

Like all fake democracies YBS have the problem of manufacturing consent.  Pictures of people of all types and colour are an essential ingredient of all YBS booklets, sites and propaganda accompanied by slogans asserting ‘inclusivity’.   The aim is to make members think everyone else is involved and if you’re not it’s your lazy fault.  The truth is that YBS is as mutual as the Co-op is cooperative, it’s been captured and run by money men with no radical, socialist or even cooperative agenda.  Any claims to mutualism are utterly superficial.

In 1864, there was a plumber amongst the originators of the Huddersfield Building Society but you won’t find a ‘butcher, baker or candlestick maker’ amongst the directors now, most come from the banking world with a leavening of hotels, pubs and gambling directorships.

Directors know few members turn up at the AGM and there’s little likelihood they’ll be challenged.  Even if they were the Chairman wields thousands of proxy votes from members who returned their voting paper in response to whatever gimmicky inducement YBS offers that particular year (in 2018 it’s a donation to charity).  Few notice or understand the import of the inconspicuous phrase, ‘The Chairman will be your proxy unless you choose someone else by completing the box on the back of this form’.  Although almost fifteen thousand members voted against last years lavish directors’ emoluments with a further three thousand withholding their agreement the Chairman claimed the backing of 128,159 proxies as authorisation for the Board to stuff their wallets.  Business as usual and triples all round, Cheers!

Some more Equitable than Others

In 1864, the Huddersfield Equitable offered members the prospect of a home and interest on their savings of 5% interest (at a time that inflation was zero).  In 2018 Chairman Heaps claims YBS 'are proud of our 150 year commitment to our mutual values – delivering long term value' but consider what has been delivered by Heaps and his fellow buildings society money men.  'Our mortgage customers face average house prices that are almost eight times average earnings – an all-time high…By 2020 only a quarter of 30-year olds will own their own home, in contrast, more than half the generation currently approaching retirement were homeowners by their thirtieth birthday.'   Whilst consumer price inflation is running at around 3% per annum YBS savers are offered only 0.85% so even labelling them 'savings accounts' smacks of 'mis-selling'.

 

Branch closures reduce the service to members, increase centralisation and bring banks bad publicity but YBS is equally guilty with 48 branches closed last year with a further 18 closures already planned for 2018.

Progress?

YBS isn’t doing anything illegal and is typical of the building society sector and that’s precisely the problem, the rot is endemic.  What started as local mutual-aid societies founded by workers and tradesmen to shelter themselves and their families from the ravages of the marketplace have been gradually infiltrated by the values and personnel of commercialism.  Poorly paid, largely female, workers are welcomed at YBS to do the donkey work at the counters and computers but money-men run the show on classic capitalist lines. 

In 1994 YBS was the first building society to operate its own share-dealing service (subsequently sold) and members were encouraged to redirect their mutual saving into stock market speculation.

In 2018, as ordinary YBS members suffer miserable, below inflation, returns on their savings there’s rich pickings for the boys in the boardroom.  The members 'Annual Review' prominently boasts of £1.5m'contributed to our local communities' but fails to mention that this is less than the amount 'contributed' to board members Mike Regnier and Stephen White.

Re-building Society

The nineteenth century working class created a rich variety of mutual aid organisations, Building Societies, Benefit Societies, Trade Unions, Political Parties, Burial Clubs, Reading Rooms and much more.  Like YBS, most are now ideologically moribund zombies with some appearance of the original but devoid of humanity and political idealism.  The causes are complex but in almost every case a tendency to apathy and materialism amongst workers was exploited by lawyers and city slickers to gain control and extract value.  Hierarchies and huge pay differentials replaced equitable ideals and egalitarian practice. 

 

There’s no quick solution but we can all do a bit to reclaim our moribund organisations.  If you’re a building society member don’t ever return the paper giving the Chairman your vote, either tick all the 'against' or 'vote withheld' boxes. 

 

It’s optimistic to dream of reversing the decline in building societies and similar mutual aid organisations but we can at least try to stop the rot.  Recognise the rips-offs and speak out, don’t be complicit, expose the injustice and ridicule the rapacious.  Even YBS is not entirely immune to activism, every creative act of protest supports, encourages and incites others – You’d Be Surprised…

Freedom Press Cartoons at Bradford*

Freedom Press cartoons on exhibition in Bradford
from Donald Rooum (former Friend of Freedom Press)

THE Peace Museum in Bradford is currently hosting an exhibition ‘Cartoons For Peace’ including at least two Freedom Press books.

The March to Death, a book of anti-war cartoons was first published by Freedom Press in defiance of war-time censorship in 1943. The drawings are by John Olday illustrating quotations chosen anonymous by Marie-Louise Berneri. The edition on display, with an introduction and notes, was published in 1995.

Wildcat Anarchists Against Bombs, by Donald Rooum, was published by Freedom Press in 2003 for the Defence and Security Exhibition International (arms trade) fair.

Anti-war and anarchist cartoons, by many artists from around the world include original drawings of Donald Rooum’s cartoons for Peace News in the 1960s.

The Peace Museum is at 10 Piece Hall Yard, Bradford BD1 1PJ,           

telephone 01274 770 241,  info@peacemuseum.org.uk
open Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, 10am to 4pm, admission free.
‘Cartoons For Peace’, a temporary exhibition, opened on 18 October 2017.
No closing date has yet been announced. 

*   The cartoonist and former Friend of Freedom Press, Donald Rooum, who sent us the above e-mail may not be aware that his colleagues on the Freedom Press Collective  issued the statement below on the 23th, June 2016.  This statement apparently drafted by Simon Saunders, the one-time East Anglian privately educated schoolboy, who now juggles his job as part-time Freedom Editor with his real career as a Morning Star hired hack,  attempts to blacklist the 'Northern Four', Martin Gilbert, Barry Woodling, Brian Bamford and Chris Draper, who are all heavily associated with Northern Voices.
This doesn't say much for the ability of Freedom Press and Simon Saunders to influence 'progressive outlets' yo ban us, or for the coherence of the comrade anarchists in carrying out Simon Saunder's wishes.

Freedom Collective Statement on Brian Bamford | Freedom Press

https://freedompress.org.uk/freedom-collective-statement-on-brian-bamford/ Their brand of disruptive, bullying, self-aggrandising tantrum-throwing is unacceptable and should not be given any support by anarchist or progressive organisations. In our view they should not be welcome in anarchist spaces nor published in the anarchist outlets – they are persona non grata in our eyes. We hope other organisations will support us in rejecting their toxic approach.

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Guido Fawkes & Jewish News gang-up on David Ward

David Ward and Baroness Jenny Tonge

 ON the 25^th, April 2017, the Tory commentator Guido Fawkes wrote on his Blog:
'You’d have hoped David “The Jews” Ward’s career was over when he lost his seat at the last election. Alas not.  The LibDems, shamelessly even by their low standards, refused to boot him out of the party.  Knowing Ward’s views on ‘Zionists’ are popular among sections of the Bradford electorate, the LibDems – while criticising Labour over their anti-Semitism scandal – quietly appointed him as their parliamentary spokesman for the city.  Now they have selected him as their candidate there.  If Labour get completely creamed it is not impossible that Ward could make it back to parliament. Remember this the next time the LibDems ever take a stand on discrimination… '

On April 26th, 2017, the Jewish News publishesd the following story:

'Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron has barred controversial former MP David Ward from running for his old seat in Bradford East, after he was selected as the local party’s candidate.'

It went on to trumpet:

'The dramatic move came just hours after a high-profile backlash from the prime minister, the Jewish community and senior figures within party, who were left appalled at the prospect of him once again becoming an MP.'

After his dismissal, David Ward said he believed he was being targeted because of his criticism of Israel.  'The antisemitic thing is a nonsense,' he said. 'It is just used, it’s a well-known tactic.  How do you avoid conversation or any criticism about Israel?  Just say people are antisemitic.  I am certainly not antisemitic.' 

  

Asked why he believed Tim Farron, the Lib Dem leader, had axed him, he said: 

'Just the pressure that they come under, all the party’s come under, and it works. The pressure works. It’s the fear of the electoral damage that can be done by being seen to oppose Israel.  It’s contaminating and infecting our own political system.'

Mr. Ward’s reselection appeared to take Lib Dem headquarters by surprise when news of it emerged on Tuesday night.  The party had selected the vast majority of its candidates over the past year in preparation for a snap election, but Bradford East was not among them.

Walk Round Radical Bradford

Comrades

*Bradford began as a village by a ford.  "Brad" means "broad."
*By the time of the Domesday Book (1086) the village by the broad ford had grown large -by standards of the time- and had some 300 inhabitants.
*It was turned into a town when villagers were allowed to hold a weekly market; craftsmen then moved in.
*Medieval Bradford grew to a population of several hundred.  It had three streets -Kirkgate, Westgate and Ivegate.  The word "gate" in this context does not mean gate in a wall.  Rather it is derived from the Danish word "gate" meaning street.
*In 1642 with the onset of the Civil War, local people supported Parliament though the surrounding countryside sided with the King. Royalists sacked the town in 1643.
*The town recovered by the 17th century and was then transformed by the Industrial Revolution. The first bank opened in 1771.  The Bradford Canal was built in 1774 and in 1777 it was connected to the Leeds-Liverpool canal.
*By 1851 the population was 103,000 making it the seventh largest urban centre in England.  The town was notorious also for its' "dreadful urban squalor" (James 1990).
*Houses in particular were built in a haphazard fashion.  There were no building regulations until 1854 and most working class housing was overcrowded with neither sewers nor drains.  Many families lived in poorly ventilated cellars and in 1848-49 some 420 people perished in a cholera epidemic that hit the town.
*The Bradford Corporation was founded in 1847.  It was not until 1862 that the first mile of piping for a new sewage system was completed.  The first public park -Peel Park- opened in 1863.  The first public library opened in 1872. The first council houses weren't built until 1907.

Alan Stewart
Convenor, Wakefield Socialist History Group
..................................

p.s. our guided walk round RADICAL BRADFORD is being held on Saturday 13 June.  Meet 2pm at the "Independent Labour Party" wall mural at the junction of Leeds Road and Chapel Street (approximately 10 minutes walk from the bus/train station).  All welcome.  Free bottled water provided.  The walk will be approximately 2 miles and involve some inclines.
(organised in conjunction with Ford Maguire Society)

Ernest Rodker on Radical Action

Commonweal Lecture 2015

VETERAN activist and cabinet-maker, Ernest Rodker, addressed the problems and opportunities for those of us who regarded ourselves as radicals in the last half of the 20^th century, last Tuesday night, at Bradford University.  It was pointed out that this Commonweal lecture was being held on the precise anniversary on the 17^th, February 1958, of a meeting of CND which ultimately resulted in Cannon Collins calling on those present to go down to Downing Street to protest against, what was then known as 'the Bomb'.   Mike 'Randle', who was introducing the talk by Ernest described how while he was outside Number 10, he saw Ernest on the ground being beaten by the police and was told to 'Shut up!', when he questioned their conduct.

Later, in 1961, Mike and Ernest renewed their friendship when they spent time in prison together.  By that time Cannon Collins, who had initiated the provocative Downing Street protest in 1958, was to oppose Bertrand Russell's proposals for civil disobedience and direct action which had led to the formation of the Committee of 100.   

Ernest used graphic images of news reports and pictures to show events and historic posters of the time by people like the poster-designer Robin Field.  This continued later when he came to deal with  the 'Stop the 70s Tour' of the South African rugby and cricket teams.  At that time sport became an issue of protest in a way it hadn't previously, except perhaps for the rare case of suffragettes before the First World War.   Despite all the challenges the Labour Government's Home Secretary, James Callaghan, assured us that 'the tour is going to go ahead!'   

The Springboks arrived in November 1969 and stayed in the Park Lane Hotel, and the tour ended following protests in February 1970.  At the time of the cricket tour John Arlott, the then famous cricket commentator, announced that he would not cover the tour, and on the 22^nd, May the tour was cancelled.

Ernest mentioned that had at the time,  had contact with Peter Hain and his family.  Peter Hain was later to write of the protests:
'I, along with many others, was outraged at their moral cowardice and hypocrisy, and helped form the Stop The Seventy Tour (STST) campaign to organise non-violent direct action protests against the tour.  These initially focused on country wide demonstrations against 25 matches of a South African rugby tour to Britain in the winter of 1969-70.  The campaign against the racism of South African sport took off with mass protests that quickly escalated to become a national and international controversy.  Eventually the pressure caused the MCC to cancel the cricket tour - by far the biggest victory the anti-apartheid movement had achieved. Australia and New Zealand soon followed suit in rugby as well as cricket, and white South Africa was expelled from the Olympics. ' 

On the 1^st, April 1990, the Poll Tax was launched by the Thatcher government, initially in Scotland, where about 1 million refused to pay the tax.  This was merely the springboard to what was to happen on its introduction in England, where ultimately a riot ensured in London as well as mass refusals to pay the tax.  The consequences of this were that Margaret Thatcher left office in 1991, and John Major proclaimed:  'The Poll Tax is un-collectable!'   

Ernest described a  local campaign to save from closure the local school of Chestnut Grove in Balham as part of a series of school closures.   This was successful, as for the most part was his part in the scheme pursued between 1971 and 1981 to convert Dormobiles into vehicles to smuggle literature and duplicators into Czechoslovakia, which functioned until they got rumbled in 1981.  Less successful was Ernest's role in the campaign against pit closures and open-cast mining, culminated in digging holes looking for coal protests on Michael Heseltine's paddock.  

E.P. Thompson & 'The Making of "The Making of the English Working Class".'

The 4th Northern Radical History Network meeting to be held on Saturday 20 April 2013, in Bradford at the The Equity Centre, 1 Longlands Street, Bradford

THIS year marks 50 years since the publication of E. P. Thompson’s 'The Making of the English Working Class', and the book, its author and the book’s impact and legacy will be the focus of our meeting.

We are delighted to be joined by David Goodway, a social and cultural historian who has become increasingly known as an authority on anarchism. Between 1969 and 2005, David worked in Continuing Education at the University of Leeds, and he was Helen Cam Visiting Fellow in History at Girton College, Cambridge, for 2006- 07.

His publications include London Chartism, 1838-1848 (1982), Talking Anarchy (with Colin Ward) (2003) and 'Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward' (2006). David will present a paper entitled 'The Making of "The Making of the English Working Class".'

The meeting will take place at The Equity Centre, 1 Longlands Street, Bradford, on Saturday 20th April 2013 from 11am – 3pm. ALL WELCOME. Hope to see you there!

For further details, please see http://northernradicalhistory.wordpress.com/

The Northern Radical History Network (NRHN) is a network of individuals across the north of England who are enthusiastic about the value of history as a radical activity in its own right. We welcome anyone who shares this basic belief. For more information about NRHN and to get involved, please see http://northernradicalhistory.wordpress.com/ , or email nrhnet2012 [AT] gmail.com

Manchester's Liberal Myth & Liverpool's Hidden History

3rd Northern Radical History Meeting

York, Nottingham, Bradford, Liverpool and Greater Manchester were represented at the 3rd meeting of NRHN:  participant interests and research included syndicalism; Chaplin and clog dancing in Liverpool; the Luddites and next year's anniversary of their executions in York; the election riots of the 1830s; the endgame of the Indian Empire; Jews and other foreigners in Manchester and the Wigan Diggers.

Bill Williams in his talk, asked the question as to what extent is Manchester justified in calling itself a 'liberal city' or indeed, how strong is England's claim to be a tolerant society?  He began by examining the history of immigration in the 1930s and the impact of British immigration laws between 1933 and 1938:  capital and skills useful to Britain were permitted to be imported, and jobs were available to immigrants so long as they could not be taken by British workers, Jews who could find a guarantor who was willing to put up £50 were enabled to enter and there were a few industrial trainee-ships available to foreigners.  Following Kristalnacht, or Night of Broken Glass in November 1938, when the Nazi SA attacked Jewish shops in Germany and Austria, the immigration policy in Britain was relaxed somewhat, but it was still not easy for the  less educated  Ostjuden from eastern Europe who were resident in Germany and Austria to access or grasp the intricacies of these laws.

Bill Williams has been able to trace the development of this phenomena of the Ostjuden in microcosm through his access to a hundred or so letters from the parents of a Ostjuden girl, who had herself been allowed to come to Manchester as a refugee through the program of 'Kinder transport' that prevailed while her parents were left to fend for themselves in Austria.  Her parents later moved illegally from Austria to what they regarded as the relative safety of Zagreb in what is now Croatia, but as the political situation developed they were later shot in the street by Croatian Fascists.  Yet, in the same way that the Ostjuden failed to appreciate the international situation in Europe, so the island people of England demonstrated both institutional blindness and anti-Semitism as Roman Catholics, Quakers, and even some leading Jews resisted the immigration of Jews into this country, in some cases owing to the fear that it would lead to more local anti-Semitism.  Bill concluded his lecture by saying that the claim to a liberal tradition in Manchester was really largely 'empty rhetoric'.

Steve Higginson, a former Liverpool postal worker and union official, described what was meant by 'Writing on the Wall' in Liverpool as being hidden history from below.  He explained how it had developed out of the Liverpool Docker's Dispute in the 1990s, and through the involvement of the playwright Jimmy McGovern.  He said that he had been influenced by E.P. Thompson's essay 'Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism', published in 1967, about the imposition of the time discipline on the English working class through the changes brought in by the industrial revolution.  Steve argued that Liverpool as a port city, had escaped to some degree this time neurosis owing to it being dominated more by nature rather than the factor of time, and as a consequence he felt that the culture there was distinct and different from that of the industrial inland towns and cities in the UK.  The appreciation of this distinction was leading the 'Writing on the Wall' group to reassess and reinterpret the 1911 Great Transport Strike; to reconsider the origins of the shop steward's movement and to examine ideas about anarchist influences in Liverpool on the 1911 dispute in the light of this.  He seemed to be saying that a kind of unconscious 'anarchism' was at work here which 'chimed' with the local workforce and was particularly best represented among the dockers.  He referred to a sympathetic strike that had taken place in Liverpool at the time of the execution of the anarchist educationalist, Francisco Ferrer, in Barcelona following the riots there that became known as the 'Semana Tragica' (Tragic Week).  A play is now understood to be a work in progress dealing with these events. 

Steve Higginson said that he had been influenced by Tom Nairn's book 'The Break-up of Britain' (1977), and saw in it a reflection of the 19th Century 'Council of the North', he felt that this should lead to a 'Northern Parliament'.   He argued that the North/ South Divide was now a significant reality and would have to be tackled.  This would seem to chime with the comments of Paul Salvison, a speaker at the previous Northern Radical History Network meeting in June.  It was reported that this coming Thursday, at the Adephi Hotel in Liverpool, there will be a meeting entitled 'Austerity!  My arse!' which will be addressed by Len McClusky and Ricky Tomlinson.

The next meeting of the NRHN is expected to be in January 2013, the venue is likely to be Bradford.

The Ayatollahs & a Free Press!

Salman Rushdie & the Medieval Mind

EVERY job must have its own risk assessment!  Just as the miner risks being crushed; just as an electrician, like me, risks electrocution; so the writer must take his chances.  Salman Rushdie, in 1988, published his fourth novel 'The Satanic Verses', which on the 14th, February 1989 became the subject of a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, because it was alleged that it was mocking the Muslim faith and he was accused of blasphemy.  The book was burnt in Bradford, after an English solicitor told some of his Muslim clients that they would have little hope of bringing a case against the book in the English Courts, but had suggested that they may draw attention to their anger by burning the book in public.  It was after this that a chain reaction was set in force across the world amid accusations that it offended against Islam.

Political rivalry between Saudie Arabia and Iran for influence in the Islamic world, allowed Iran to get the edge over the Saudie regime, after Ayatoller Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the 'Satanic Verses'.  At that time, in the late 1980s, I was working closely with a group of Kashmiri Muslims, who were campaigning for an independent Kashmir; so I was very aware of what was happening.  In the book itself, Rushdie used magical realism and depended on contemporary events and people to create his characters; which is partly inspired by the life of Muhammad.  The fatwa issued by the Iranian leader, Ayatoller Khomeini, publicly condemned the book and declared what amounted to a death-bed fatwa against Rushdie, with a bounty for anyone who executed him. 

This month, Mr. Rushdie has published his latest book - a memoir entitled 'Joseph Anton' - which he describes as 'a non-fiction novel'.  The book is written in the third person, and the form and language is that of a novel except that it is true.  Joseph Anton was Rushdie's alias during his years in hiding before the fatwa was lifted.

Recently, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, there has been some optimism about some the possibility of change in the Arab world, but now, following the over-reaction to the anti-Islamic film 'Innocence of Muslims', which was posted on YouTube and triggered protests in the region, more concerns have arisen.  Salman Rushdie told Ginny Dougary in the FT Weekend Magazine, last Saturday, that:  'The trouble is that what's happening in those countries since the so-called Arab Spring is the rise of this very organised extremist group, which is Salafi Islam, and the Salafists are so fanatical that they frighten other Muslims'.

Rushdie added:  'It's easier for people to grasp what happened to me because it's not just my story now, it's everyone's story.  It's the story of our time, rather than of an individual.'   Interestingly Mr. Rushdie asserts:  'This odd idea that there is a right not to be offended is nonsense - None of us has that right - If  you're offended it's your probem'.

Salman Rushdie took a risk in 1988, and any decent writer should be willing to take a risk today, otherwise he or she would never be able to embrace the 'literary vitamin'.  Rushdie knows this and that is why he told Ginny Dougary:  '... it was very clear to me, almost from the beginning, that there were ... elephant traps that I really needed to avoid.  One was fear - as a writer, to end up writing frightened, timid little books that say, "Please don't be upset with me for doing this".'  Rushdie says, 'such books would probably be worthless and uninteresting for anyone to read'.  It is hard to believe that anyone from the fanatical Salafist Islam faction could ever write a novel that anyone would want to read. 

Sallying forth against a Free Press in Manchester

But we don't need to go to the Middle East to find the Medieval mentality, outlandish concepts and politically perverse ideas, which seem to rail against freedom.  In Manchester, on what describes itself as the left there are some rum folk:  these last few weeks a group that has been nick-named 'The Gang of Four' has been sallying forth bent upon damaging Northern Voices by interferring with our outlets for the publication.  Indeed, they are very nearly as dangerous as Dad's Army:  they have fancy nick-names like 'Madam Mao' (Schoolmistress), the 'Manchester Toad' (psychiatric social worker), Spikymike (retired civil servant & housing manager) and David (not Dave) under-the-Pavement (unknown profession).  Their justification for what they have been about is Northern Voices' publication of an obituary for Robert Miller; a former Oldham schoolmaster, who seemed to lead a double-life as a respectable figure of the community in his day job and as a 'class struggle anarchist' in his time off.  This obituary drew on the Mr. Miller's superb ability to have the strength to live a double-life by contrasting his efforts with those of Ken Keating, a colourful Mack-the-Knife figure from Salford, who who died in the same month as Mr. Miller in June 2011, and also claimed to be an anarchist:  my own contribution to this obituary, which had 'many hands' in its assembly and production, was to try to make sense of Mr. Miller's political double-life alongside Jean Paul Sartre's idea of authenticity and 'bad faith' - I made reference to Sartre's famous waiter doing his job at the pavement cafe while his 'real' thoughts are elsewhere.  This is the kind of comment that is liable to lead to trouble among lefties in England just as tormented as those that fanatical Muslims have for Salman Rushdie's  'Satanic Verses'. 

It just goes to show that there is nowt so queer as folk, comrades!.
_________________________________________________________
The printed version of NORTHERN VOICES No.13, now on sale with all sorts of stuff others won't touch. NORTHERN VOICES No.12 with the Cyril Smith 'Instead of an Obituary' is also still available and may be obtained as follows:
Postal subscription: £5 for the next two issues (post included). Cheques payable to 'Northern Voices' at c/o 52, Todmorden Road, Burnley, Lancashire BB10 4AH.
Tel.: 0161 793 5122.
email: northernvoices@hotmail.com

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Calamity Kate Caught With Her Tits Hanging Out!

A Free Press:  Are there limits to the Enlightenment?

IS IT a cruel irony that those who live by celebrity die by celebrity?  In an age in which Simon Cowell and the 'X-Factor' has replaced Hughie Green and the more homely 'Opportunity Knocks', are we now in an era in which Bread and Circuses rage, and one in which we snigger and sneer at inept contestants lured onto TV, we might well ask if the spirit of the Enlightenment has now overstepped the mark?  Each day the weight of evidence seems to grow:  with Kate Middleton caught on camera with her tits hanging out, Prince Harry photographed philandering with good-time girls while playing strip-poker in a Los Angeles hotel room, and now riots around the world following a feeble You-Tube film desecrating the good name of the prophet Mohammed.  Have we in the West, now indulged in too much freedom of choice in our consumer society?

As a poet said in the middle of the last Century:  'Property, property, let us expand soul and body without end!'

This is a serious problem for western intellectuals, not least those of us around the Northern Voices publication and NV Blog where we too are under criticism from a small local sect or at the anarchist paper Freedom in London, where they have been under attack from David Hoffman, the Copyright Kid, a freelance journalist who seems intent on suing almost everything that moves, and has been labeled 'writ-happy'.  The philosopher, Mary Midgley, has written (see her 'Evolution as a Religion' in 1985):  'Internalized in each of us is a voice which speaks with accents of Voltaire and Rousseau, of Mill, Hulme, Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft:  a voice which says, "Was it for this that we defied the priests, the fathers, and the Kings?  Can anything be more important than individual liberty?".' 

The thing is that since the Renaissance, it may even have begun with the Greeks, it has broadly been the aim of western civilisation to free up individuals from the chains of their social backgrounds so as to help people to escape and stand on their own feet, free from family, the state, the Church etc.  Even western Christianity, with its focus on the separate, irreplaceable value of each human soul, helped to play a role in this flowering of the enlightenment.  In a way, this spirit of the Enlightenment has been the engine of all that is good and wonderful in western society today, and it is in the blending of liberalism and socialism that is present in the writings of such anarchist thinkers as Rudolf Rocker and more recently Noam Chomsky, the linguist, who openly describes himself as a 'Child of the Enlightenment'.

For my part, I confess that lately I have been regularly taking Mary Midgley to bed with me, and she persuasively writes:  'The careful separating out of each soul from its social background has of course been responsible for an immense amount that is distinctive and valuable in the achievements of our civilization.'  It has never been carried so far by any other culture,  and Mary adds that it is 'No wonder that to many people it never looked, until lately, as if we could have too much of that good thing, individualism.'

As I write this I have before me a copy of last Saturday's International Herald Tribune, with a headline story entitled 'A Parisian avenue far from romantic', in which the writer recalls that the French Culture Minister and novelist, Andre Malraux, in the 1960s told a journalist 'that the Champs-Élysées - then considered the most beautiful avenue in the world - had "an American basement".'  Today, we learn from the writer, Steven Erlanger, that America is no longer confined to the basement, 'but American business and its brands are prominently above ground on a Champs-Élysées that has become increasingly commercialized and globalized.'

What Mary Midgley said in 1985, was that while there were still tyrants, 'what [in 1985] chiefly confronts us ... is not an Easter Island row of ossified traditional patriarchs, but a chaotic mob of dollar-snatching cormorants, doing damage of an order undreamed of in previous ages.'  Indeed, there are many 'dollar-snatching cormorants' today, as the Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton) was quick to point out this week, after the snaps of her were published, but there are also many genuine tyrants and enemies of freedom, not just on the right but also on the left.

I want to agree with Mary Midgley in everything she says about 'dollar snatching cormorants' and because she challenges the pretensions of some modern scientists like Richard Dawkins, but here Ms. Midgley is writing in 1985, at a time of the softening in the Cold War when Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachyov had just arrived in the Kremlin and before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more importantly before the rise of Islam as an international political force, before the Salman Rushdie case and the burning of his book 'Satanic Verses' by Pakistanis in Bradford, before 9/ 11 and before 7/ 7 and other dramatic features of the post-post-modern era.  As I write this, I am listening to Andrew Marr interviewing Salman Rushdie on Radio 4's 'Start the Week', and Mr. Rushdie says that when we 'self-censor' to please a publisher or even a public 'a little part of us dies' inside.

Like Chomsky, we in the West are all 'Children of the Enlightenment', and this is a project that began even earlier than the Renaissance with the Ancient Greeks.  And yet, some of us are bastard children of the Enlightenment:  witness Adolf Hitler, of whom George Orwell wrote, that in the 1930s Germany represented a version of modern science in the service of ideas rooted in the Stone Age.   What protects us against this outcome, I would argue, is the presence of something that can be represented as a free media with all its faults and blemishes:  the likes of Julian Assange, and Wikileaks and even an old tin-pot anarchist publication like Freedom Press in Whitechapel.  If this means we have to put up with the Irish Star, Berlusconi  in Italy and 'Closer' in France so be it.  I don't want to appear pompous, but so long as I am an editor at Northern Voices, I will be anxious to oppose self-censorship and to stick to the Enlightenment project..

Bradford: 'The traditional parties have failed this city!'

George Galloway has won a convincing victory in the Bradford West Bye-Election. Last Sunday, Soledad Gallego-Diaz in the influential Spanish daily EL PAIS asked in its Domingo supplement: 'Hay futuro para la socialdemocracia?' ('Is there a future for Social Democracy?'). The writer, Senor Gallego-Diaz wrote: 'The worst crisis of capitalism had resulted in a problem not for the Right, but for the Left.' He continues: 'European Social Democracy has paid for the economic and financial crisis of 2008 much more than the Right-Wing, and the social democrats must now prepare for the next decisive few months.' Consequently, Gallego-Diaz writes: 'European Social Democracy seeks Green Shoots.'

If this is so, last night's victory for George Galloway must be an ill omen for the British Labour Party which had planned a victory celebration that had to be called off at the last minute. This morning David Blunkett put it down to the 'Bradford effect' claiming that Bradford may be a special case, and the Deputy leader of the Labour Party refused to explain this disappointing Northern outcome from her office in London.

Could it have been Galloway's clever networking and manipulation of the Asian Clan system ('Braderies') in Bradford? Some reports suggest that the rank and file Asians ignored the pleas of their tribal elders to vote Labour, and one Bradford lad this morning said: 'With bad education statistics and high unemployment in Bradford; we needed someone who can think outside the box!' Other commentators see wider symptoms at work in British society as witnessed by Scottish National Party's success over the Labour Party north of the border, and the failure of the Tories to gain an overall majority at the last General Election. Others are arguing that people are disillusioned with the main stream parties and are looking for summat different up North.

BRADFORD ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR

TODAY the Bradford bookfair took place at the 1-in-12, with about seven stalls including Bob Jones' Northern Herald Books; the Cunningham Amendment & Anarchist Voices; AK Press; SolFed; AF; Antifa; Northern Voices & Northern Anarchist Network. A good response and atmosphere: sales bucked-up in the afternoon with NV going well and the Spanish memorabilia doing best. A flyer was distributed advertising the prospect of a forthcoming NAN at the 1-in-12 in June.