Blessed Be the Bigots!

How Northern Voices gives space to opposing views

by Brian Bamford (Joint Editor)

IN a recent critical comment on this Blogg Tony Greenstein, a blogger who is a descendant of Jewish immigrants, proclaims that 'it is a pity that the Northern Voices Blog does not have an anti-racist or anti-fascist politics.'

Let's be clear, Northern Voices doesn't have a party-line or what might be called a politically correct platform

Let me offer some personal history; in February 1963, I met with members of the FIJL (Iberian Federation of Young Libertarians) in the Belleville working-class area of Paris: the refugees from the Spanish Civil War had begun arriving there in 1938.  In 1963, we were keen to involve ourselves in the struggle against the dictatorship of General Franco and were about to be dispatched for the shanty towns of Barcelona.  So if we consider Franco to be a 'Fascist', I suppose I was an anti-Fsscist over 50-years ago.  But what does Mr. Greenstein really mean when he accuses Northern Voices not having 'anti-racist or anti-fascist politics'?

It is not so easy to answer this question because even in 1944, in the journal Tribune, George Orwell struggled to tackle this puzzle in an essay 'What is Fascism' thus:

"Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: ‘What is Fascism?’

One of the social survey organizations in America recently asked this question of a hundred different people, and got answers ranging from ‘pure democracy’ to ‘pure diabolism’. In this country if you ask the average thinking person to define Fascism, he usually answers by pointing to the German and Italian régimes. But this is very unsatisfactory, because even the major Fascist states differ from one another a good deal in structure and ideology."

Finally Orwell concluded that:
 "Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’.  That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.  ....All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword."

Mr. Greenstein makes free use of the word 'fascist' describing Greenswiper thus:  "The little fascist Greenswipe tells us that Robinson or Yaxley-Lennon is ‘a beacon of light.'  And goes on to tell us:
'Here you see the bigot and racist in all his glory. It may be gloomy for this poundshop bigot but not for most people.  Whether it is food or music multi culturalism has triumphed over British marching bands!  Or maybe what he means is that he doesn’t like mixing with Black people but doesn’t like to put it in those words."

But perhaps Greenstein forgets that we had our own 'Bigotgate' in Rochdale in the General Election campaign in 2010.  The then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, on the election campaign trail, was faced with a disastrous turn of events after a Labour supporter, Gillian Duffy, confronted him about his party’s plans to cut the deficit and its stance on immigration as he was interviewed live on TV in Rochdale. 

Later Gordon Brown went on to regret calling Mrs. Gillian Duffy a 'bigoted woman' when he was recorded calling her in such disparaging tones.  To a Northerner this language all comes over as being a bit snobbish about people who take a different view like Tommy Robinson and Greenswiper himself.  Greenswiper is clearly wrong when he claims 'Tommy Robinson represents about 90% of people', but the instincts of Greenswiper and Mrs. Duffy can't be ignored because they do represent a certain tendency, call it an impatience, among white working people.  Some are arguing that the phenomena of political correctness and identity politics is fueling the rise of people like Trump, Tommy Robinson and the Brexit Party.

No amount of smug sneers about 'racism' and 'fascism' from Tony Greenstein will change what is the deeply embeded xenophobia in our culture.  Nor will implying that because English people like to eat Indian food or aren't still fond of brass bands must therefore mean that they have accepted the triumph of multi-culturalism as a political entity.

One can still enjoy a jitterbug dance, and the same person could delight in 'traditions' on a local scale, like the annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at the chapel of King's College, Cambridge on Christmas eve.    

Fascism is often identified with nationalism and tradition, but this is not always the case.  In the book 'The Inventon of Tradition',  edited by the Marxist Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, HUGH TREVOR-ROPER wrote:

"It is ironical that if the Highland dress had been banned after 'the Fifteen' instead of after 'the Forty Five', the kilt, which is now regarded as one of the ancient traditions of Scotland, would probably never have come into existence. It came into existence a few years after Burt wrote, and very close to the area in which he wrote. Unknown in 1726, it suddenly appeared a few years later; and by 1746 it was sufficiently well established to be explicitly named in the act of parliament which then forbade the Highland dress. The actual inventor, I understand was an English Quaker from Lancashire, Thomas Rawlinson. The Rawlinsons were a long-established family of Quaker iron-masters in Furness."

So even the iconic Highland kilt so central to the Scottish nationalists was originally made in Lancashire by an English Quaker?
 
Meanwhile, Mr. Greenstein rages on about Greenswiper's complaints of an England in the 21st century shrouded in an ‘Alien multicultural gloom’; to whichTony Greenstein is nothing if not pompous:   'Here you see the bigot and racist in all his glory. It may be gloomy for this poundshop bigot but not for most people. Whether it is food or music multi culturalism has triumphed over British marching bands! Or maybe what he means is that he doesn’t like mixing with Black people but doesn’t like to put it in those words.'

Here we may be experiencing bigotry from both Greenstein and Greenswiper, yet in some ways it  is the canary in the coal mine that warns us of approaching disaster. 

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

Mrs Duffy confronts Nick Clegg

NEWS reports at lunchtime today say that Nick Clegg was confronted by the now famous Rochdalian pensioner, Gillian Duffy, when, this morning, he visited Holroyds engineering factory up Milnrow, near Rochdale this morning. It will be remembered that it was Mrs Duffy who stuck up to Gordon Brown in the run up to the General Election last May when he later called her a 'bigot' and made her a news item in the international media. With Cyril Smith now dead and under the sod, and 'Our Gracie' having passed a way long ago it is being left to the new spirit of Rochdale, in the form of Mrs. Gillian Duffy to carry the torch of 'non-conformism' in the town. She certainly gave Lib Dem and Coalition Deputy, Nick Clegg, a run for his money today, having all but crucified Gordon Brown last year.

Anthropology of British Hypocrisy continued

Did Rochdalian Duffy Duff-up politics?

LAST SATURDAY, Shakespeare's shortest play The Comedy of Errors was performed before a packed audience of hundreds at Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre, while over in Peace Square a May Day Rally of all of a hundred and odd, assembled in the sun beneath a sprinkling of red flags to hear someone called Ian Allenson, and a few others, tell us how awful the Tories and the BNP are. The play is about the chaotic consequences that occur when two pairs of twins are brought together: the politics of today is about what happens when you get political triplets in suits with only different coloured ties to distinguish them.

On Sunday, in The Observer, Nick Cohen, after asking Douglas Alexander and Ed Balls, 'why left-of-centre voters should stick with Labour rather than vote Liberal-democrat' was told: 'Well, if you vote Liberal Democrat you could let the Tories take power.' Nick Cohen went on to write: 'No appeal to idealism. No vision of the future, or offer of hope. No assertion that Labour had the vitality to govern Britain for another five years, and possessed better ideas and stronger morals than the superficially plausible Mr Clegg.' This morning, both Peter Hain and Ed Balls, two leading Labour strategists, have now come out and asked voters to vote tactically to keep the Tories out.

Damage limitation is all that seems to matter now, together with sound-bites and spin, and avoidance of gaffes. Principles, standards, ideas and ideals are not being given the time of day.

Two blokes I respect at the Manchester May Day Rally, last Saturday, told me that bumbler Brown made a mistake when he apologised to Gillian Duffy for describing her as a 'bigot'. Can they have read what she said?

Gillian Duffy from up Healey in Rochdale declared: 'The three main things what I had drummed in when I was a child was education, health service and looking after people who are vulnerable. But there are too many people now who aren't vulnerable but they can claim, and people who are vulnerable can't claim, can't get it.'


Gordon Brown responded: 'but they shouldn't be doing that, there is no life on the dole for people any more. If you are unemployed you've got to work.'

Gillian Duffy: 'You can't say anything about the immigrants because you're saying that you're ... but all these eastern Europeans what are coming in, where are they flocking from?'

Since these words were uttered I've spoken to local women on the 471 & 17 buses that run between Bury and Manchester to Rochdale, and they have insisted that Mrs Duffy 'is only saying what others round here are thinking' or words to that effect.

Yet once in the 'privacy' of his car Gordon Brown's aide asked: 'What did she [Mrs Duffy] say?', to which Mr Brown replied: 'Everything, she was just a sort of bigoted woman who said she used to vote Labour.'

But it turns out that Mrs Duffy wasn't so much offended by being called a 'bigot', as when Mr Brown referred to her as 'that woman'. To the middle-classes 'bigot' is an ugly word of French origin, but 'that woman' is a categorisation device which the English white working-classes in the North of England feel profoundly, because it puts them down or as Mrs Duffy has it: 'It's as if I'm to be brushed away.' 'BRUSHED AWAY', that is what has happened to the white working-classes in the North in recent decades. The word 'bigot' is just an insult and English workers are use to insults, they insult each other all the time with great glee: yet, 'that woman' does something fundamental by packaging her and reducing Mrs Duffy to a category to be disposed of, and in the same way, as a boy, I soon learned that women up North don't like being referred to as 'she' - they will say 'Who's She? The Cat's Mother?' Mr Brown is the son of a Presbyterian minister and those kind of middle-class people with their wagging fingers often refer to others in the third-person: it gives them a sense of superiority and control. One aspect of this is those fashionable political correct people on the left who say as one bloke, who I also respect in many ways, did recently that Northern Voices by publishing a portrait of a nude by the Rochdale artist Walter Kershaw on our current front cover was, in some way, exploiting women. He didn't say we were exploiting 'a woman' - in this case Heather Brown, the artist's model at Bury Art School - he said 'exploiting women': a category. The middle-classes use these kind of devices with blind abandon and in so doing 'brush away' others who they see as essentially inferior and beneath them.

Anthropology of British Hypocrisy

ROCHDALE EXPOSES BIGOTRY against White Working Class:

Folk on the streets of Rochdale are talking about yesterday's confrontation between Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy over immigration and bigotry. Seldom has the clash between the white working class and the lower middle class political elite been displayed so vividly. Seldom has political hypocrisy been put so bluntly.

This morning's International Herald Tribune described it thus: 'The encounter began mildly enough when Mr Brown, who has been told by his advisors to get out and do a better job of meeting ordinary people, went walkabout among voters in the depressed community of Rochdale, outside Manchester.' But el Bruto Brown is not safe to out on the streets! Hence, guided by his handlers, he was led to meet 66-year-old Gillian Duffy, who challenged him on immigration, the main worry of the white workers of the North. Brown buttered her up before the cameras, then jumped into a waiting car to be sped away only to moan: 'That was a disaster', saying that his aides 'should never have put me with that woman ...' Whereupon, he claimed that Mrs Duffy was 'just a sort of a bigoted woman ...'

My dictionary says a 'bigot' is 'a person of strong conviction or prejudice, especially in matters of religion, race or politics, who is intolerant of those who differ from him.' Judging from Mr Brown's reaction, once in the car, that would seem to sum up his attitude and moreover, it would appear to reflect the spirit of the British political class as a whole, because politics in this country is dominated by the middle classes. They all, including much of the British left, look down on the likes of the Mrs Duffy's of this world, if the truth be known. Does the prejudice of these British middle class politicians know no bounds that they need to belittle Lancashire people and their opinions thus? God help us from the pseudo-tolerance of these educated middle class politicians.