Pandering to religious tribalism by Chris Sloggett.

EDITOR'S NOTE:

Chris Sloggett wrote the opinion piece below on the 2nd, July on the National Secular Society website.

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VOTERS and politicians who value social cohesion and basic democratic principles should reject the trend of pandering to religious tribalism, says Chris Sloggett.

The recent events at Batley Grammar School are well-documented, but still shocking to recount. A loud group of intolerant Muslims gathered at the gates of a school demanding a teacher's dismissal because they objected to a resource he used in class. The school suspended the teacher and issued a grovelling apology. The teacher faced threats, and soon afterwards two of his colleagues were also suspended.

A local investigation has found that the resource which the teacher showed - a cartoon of Islam's prophet Muhammad - was not used with any ill intent. The teacher was nominally reinstated. But he and his colleagues can't return to work because they fear they could be attacked. Meanwhile the investigation has effectively enforced a blasphemy taboo on the school by saying the cartoon, or similar ones, shouldn't be used again.

The teacher at the centre of the row has been driven out of the area and into hiding. The mob that hounded him has got what it wanted. Other schools around the country will have taken note.

And the politicians have moved on. The Department for Education has called on parents to accept the outcome of the local investigation. The department and others have presented this as if it's some kind of reasonable compromise. But anyone who cares about teachers' freedom to do their jobs without facing intimidation and threats - on this issue or any other - should say what this is: a meek surrender to demands for censorship.

When the protests first broke out many politicians and commentators wrung their hands. Some called for calm, but the message was often that the main concern lay in the minutiae of a handful of teachers' decisions about how to present a particular lesson in one school.

The grubby Batley and Spen by-election, which limped to a close...., helped to highlight the price to be paid for this. When the issue came up during the campaign, mainstream candidates' responses smacked of fear, self-interest and short-termist thinking. They either doggedly avoided it or offered responses which were weak to the point of meaninglessness, as a piece from Batley by Dan Hodges in The Mail on Sunday highlighted this weekend. Meanwhile George Galloway spotted an opportunity to weaponise the issue to try to win over some reactionary Muslim voters, saying the school had "absolutely no right" to use the cartoon.

Did the politicians think their positions were right, or did they just not want to upset a perceived bloc vote? Either way, this collective wall of silence was alarmingly predictable. It's now a standard tactic to treat large swathes of voters primarily as members of various religious 'communities', and to appeal to them through the gatekeepers who claim to speak for them.

But this approach sends the message that religious identity groups can make increasingly unreasonable demands and nobody will dare to say no to them. In Batley, there seems to have been a widespread unspoken agreement that freedom of expression - the most important freedom which citizens in a democracy enjoy - could be treated as a commodity and signed away for electoral convenience.

Politicians should beware where the multi-communal game leads. If they rely on religious identity politics to shore up their support, they'll come under pressure to extend more privileges to particular religious groups. Others will organise along competing identitarian lines, or grow bewildered that politicians appear uninterested in them. The principle that we all enjoy equal citizenship and that politicians should seek to serve all of our interests will be further frayed.

There will also be fertile ground for bad actors of various stripes. The Batley and Spen campaign was marred by inter-communal tensions and intimidatory tactics, including homophobic intimidation aimed at Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater. More moderate and reasonable voices, such as a group of Muslim women who rejected the authority of a "loud minority" of Muslim men this week, faced an uphill battle to make themselves heard. Several far right candidates also spotted an opportunity to advance their agendas.

This ugly campaign should be a prompt to pause and reconsider. Indulging religious tribalism is risky and unsustainable. Voters and politicians who value social cohesion and basic democratic principles should unite against it.

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Rolling In The Cess Pit by Les May

IN an article on the NV blog a couple of weeks ago I referred to something I wrote at the end of June 2020. I commented that having read some of the abusive posts directed at Priyamvada Gopal, who had posted a ‘tweet’ which said “I’ll say it again. White Lives Don’t Matter. As white lives”, I thought you would meet nicer turds in a slurry pit.

A long article by Brendan O’Neill on the Spiked Online website graphically describes the vile abuse directed at author J. K. Rowling. From the context it appears that it came via her Twitter account, which of course means the brave authors could remain anonymous.

My own experience of anonymous communications is somewhat limited. I had one letter from an unknown ‘Christian’ in 1970 after I wrote to the local paper saying that I did not think that the Muslim children at the school I worked at should be made to attend what was in effect a Christian oriented morning assembly. I had another in 2010 after I had the temerity to point out in the same paper that Canada Geese were in a nearby park because their staple diet was grass which they got from the lawns and not the bread which they got to the visitors. Short of blocking my letter box there was nothing I could do to prevent them being delivered.

One of O’Neill’s concerns is the almost complete absence of people willing to publicly defend J. K. Rowling. He also took a few well aimed potshots at ‘Cancel Culture’ and ‘Identity Politics’. But it seemed to me that he was somewhat missing the point. If Rowling was distressed at what was being said about her on Twitter, the remedy was in her own hands, literally. All she had to do was switch off her smartphone or if that was too radical, delete the ‘app’.

Rowling, the footballers, Priyamvada Gopal and Sajid Javid are all in their own way ‘commodities’ where image matters. Keeping their names before the public is how they can both relish their present fame and make sure there they are putting something in the metaphorical bank for the future. Rowling may yet write another book; the footballers may think of taking a leaf out of the book of Lionel Messi and launch a premium fashion brand; judging by the Twitter post which led to the abuse Gopal evidently likes to be seen as ‘controversial’, and Sajid Javid is a politician who wants to be seen as ‘just like us’. He has learned the hard way that that there’s always someone who will make a grab the moral high ground if you dare use a word they don’t like.

It’s no use waiting for the government to solve the problems raised by social media by banning so called ‘hate speech’. If you find it unpleasant just stop it being delivered to your smartphone, because it will only hurt you if you let it and no one is forcing you to read it. This isn’t a ‘freedom of speech’ matter. None of the individuals I have used as examples would have the slightest difficulty in getting their voices heard in the UK media, something that cannot be said of the people who resort to vulgar abuse. I doubt the NV editors would turn down a piece on ‘transphilia’ by Ms Rowling.

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Dedicated Follower Of Fashion by Les May

I STARTED reading the then Manchester Guardian in 1960 when I started work and for the first time had the money to buy it. For forty or so years, during which it changed dropped the Manchester bit, I was a loyal reader, but somewhere around 2000 I finally tired of its increasingly uncritical feminism and stopped buying it.

The final straw was an article about a couple of women who claimed to have ‘taken on’ the builders. It turned out that one was an academic and the other a student and they had worked on a site for all of a fortnight in the middle of summer. In other words not exactly a lifetime working outside in the middle of winter. More like a fortnight in the sun and then back to a nice warm office or lecture theatre for the cold wet weather.

Though Suzanne Moore, with her ever so predictable man bashing columns, has never been one of my favourite journalists, but I certainly warmed to her comments; ‘the cult of righteousness that the Guardian embodies’ and ‘lately it has been hard to define what the Left consists of beyond smug affirmation’ in a piece entitled Why I had to leave The Guardian.

Moore had written an article which, as well as being in her usual man bashing style, complete with references to ‘the patriarchy’ and ‘who the real enemies are’ (a.k.a. Men), included the comment that some women ‘were uncomfortable with people being able to self-declare as a man or a woman – whatever their biological sex – for all sorts of reasons.’. It also referred to the ‘disinviting’ of Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford, who was due to give a polite two-minute speech of thanks at an event at Exeter College, on the grounds that she had addressed a meeting of the group Woman’s Place UK, which was formed in 2017 after proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act.

This was too much for the sensitive souls at The Guardian and 338 of them took exception to it in a letter to the editor.

So long as the fashion amongst those who like to call themselves ‘of the Left’ was that women, however privileged, were to be seen as the most oppressed creatures in the world, Moore was never short of a market for her wares. But then being ‘trans’ knocked women off the top spot and suddenly Moore found some of her views were unfashionable. Hence the letter.

A friend recently suggested that Labour’s poor showing in the recent election might be because working people had no time for the world of identity politics which has become the go-to issue for many would be activists on the Left. Is it just coincidence that when they were Labour leadership candidates Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey signed up to a pledge put together by the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights? Perhaps working people just have different priorities.

You can find Moore’s original article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2020/mar/02/women-must-have-the-right-to-organise-we-will-not-be-silenced

And her version of the spat at The Guardian here:

https://unherd.com/2020/11/why-i-had-to-leave-the-guardian

For a quite different take on The Guardian look here;

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/05/05/the-ugly-truth-about-the-guardian/

NV can no longer embed links in the text of articles. To use these links copy the full text of the link into your browser (Startpage, DuckDuckGo or Google) and search in the usual way.

A Comment On the Sukuta Project by Les May

THE most striking thing about the recent piece by John Walker on the Sukuta Project which intends to renovate the Gambia’s largest primary school is the relatively small amount of money, £60,000, which will be needed to accomplish a project which will benefit 2,000 children immediately and go on benefiting similar sized cohorts for many years to come.

In July 2020, I wrote an article for NV with the title ‘Why Black Lives Matter Will Fail’. Something I wrote at the end of that piece seems pertinent here.

In the article I mentioned a disclaimer which read ‘We are not affiliated with either Black Lives Matter USA or the political arm of the Black Lives Matter (Activist Coalition) UK who are purported to be affiliated with BLM USA.’

If you check out the website https://uk.gofundme.com/f/ukblm-fund which appears to be the group referred to in the disclaimer, you will find passages like ‘a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people’ and ‘we lift up the experiences of the most marginalised in our communities, including but not limited to working class queer, trans, undocumented, disabled, Muslim, sex workers, women/non-binary, HIV+ people.’

You’ll also find the group have been given £1.2 million by 35,000 donors. At the risk of being tedious I will mention that this sum would change the lives of almost 7500 black children in Africa who were born with a cleft palate and face a lifetime of ridicule and social isolation, or pay for nearly 75,000 ingrowing eye lash operations or nearly seven and a half million doses of a drug to cure trachoma and prevent this many black people going blind.

Clearly all those donors have different priorities to mine.

£1.2 million would fund 20 similar projects in Africa meaning that 40,000 black children would benefit immediately and would be followed by the same number of children benefiting long into the future.

As someone recently wrote to me, ‘organisations like BLM are more concerned about displaying sentiments rather than addressing issues.’

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It’s Time To Report The Pay Gap by Les May

WHEN I first became interested in left wing politics in the early 1960s the people I met were primarily interested reducing inequalities of income, wealth, power and influence. Times change; being ‘of the left’ today frequently means an obsession with identity politics. Inequalities between groups which can be attributed to differences of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, you name it, are all seen as grist to the mill. Inequalities of income, wealth, power and influence within these different groups are largely ignored.

Today the BBC reported; ‘Three quarters of employers want large firms to be forced to release data on the pay gap between staff of different ethnicities, a leaked report shows. The findings, seen by the BBC, came from a consultation exercise on ethnicity pay gap reporting launched by Theresa May in October 2018. The then PM promised to 'help employers identify the actions needed to create a fairer and more diverse workforce'. But two years later, the government has yet to respond’.

The news report included an interview with someone who was described as a ‘consultant’, which presumably means they were being paid quite a lot of money for doing this very important job. Now it happens that the interviewee was a woman and she was black. But the question which occurs to me is should I get more excited that in some big company someone who happens to be black and/or a woman is being paid a paltry £110,000 when her white male counterpart is being paid £120,000, or should I be more concerned that the same company has a proportion of it’s staff on zero hours contracts being paid minimum wage.

If we are going to have big companies forced to report the pay gap between staff of different ethnicities and sexes, then by the same token companies should be forced to report the differences in remuneration between executives, managers, shop floor workers and toilet cleaners.

One of the ways I shall judge Keir Starmer is whether he shows any sign of a commitment to reducing income and wealth inequalities. Signposting his willingness to support mandatory reporting of the pay gap within companies would be a good start.

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J.K. ROWLING & tyranny of historical processes

ON the 10th, June 2020, J.K. Rowling Wrote about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues:

'But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces.'

She added: 'The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people. All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.'

Evolution of Fashionable Addiction in the Cultural Realm

When I read the above address from a children's author of which I must admit to having only read the occasional oddments in newspapers, and I haven't even seen any of the associated films related to her work; I was drawn back to George Orwell's essay 'Inside the Whale' written in 1940. Orwell was then aware and worried about the poor state of English literature and he wrote of the period: 'Symptomatically, that is more significant than the mere fact that five thousand novels are published in England every year and four thousand nine hundred of them are tripe.'

Back in 1940, Orwell was clearly as pessimistic, as J.K. Rowling seems to be today, and he felt the writer was living in 'an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction'. He believed that: 'As for the writer, he [sic] is sitting on a melting iceberg: he is merely an anachronism, a hangover from a bourgeois age...'

A few years earlier in 1936 Orwell clarified the problem while reviewing 'The Novel Today' by the Marxist critic Philip Henderson, when he wrote that the official 'art for art's sake' school was finished and it was then being replaced by two gangs of extremists: 'Both the Catholic and Communist usually believe, though unfortunately they do not often say, that abstract aesthetic standards are bunkum and that a book is only a "good" book it it preaches the right sermon. To the Communist, good literature means "proletarian" literature. (Mr Henderson is careful to explain, however that this doesn't mean literature written by proletarians; which is just as well, because there isn't any.)'

Sermons and the Winter of Anarchistic Free Thinking

In that bleak world of 1940 with the bombs falling, the year in which I was born, Orwell pinned his hopes on Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer' and a novel 'With No sermons, merely subjective truth'

Orwell during the war regarded Henry Miller then as the best bet in the circumstances: 'a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceper of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.' Not very edifying but once read never forgotten; J.K. Rowling is clearly a much more fragrant specimen and one more easy to get behind in the battle against the current cancel culture fanatics. For freedom of expression is under attack now just as much as it was in the 1930s when the Marxists held the sway; today it is now the obsessive identity politicians cracking the whip, and as a consequence writing and literature is suffering under the current historical process.

Nowadays though, it's not just the general message which is under threat from the 'cancel culture' clans, but anyone can pulled-up for some throwaway remark: a recent example is J.K.Rowling for mentioning 'Never trust a man in a dress' in her book 'Troubled Blood[' a 900-page novel that is said to be Dickensian in its scope.

Nick Cohen in The Spectator [15/09/20] reviewed Ms. Rowling's sin thus: 'Troubled Blood is a 900-page novel that is Dickensian in its scope and gallery of characters. Strike and his business partner Robin Ellacott are hired by a middle-aged woman to investigate the disappearance of her mother in the 1970s. Detectives at the time thought Creed had killed her, but no one knew the truth and the woman’s body had never been found. Strike and Ellacott investigate Creed, but then they investigate a good dozen others. You have to search hard to find a justification for the belief that the book’s moral 'seems' to be "never trust a man in a dress". But then relentless searches for the tiniest evidence of guilt are the marks of heresy hunters.'

The trouble is that this kind of censorship is that it is not just the preserve of the usual suspects among the political authoritarians on the left and the right. Curiously, the socalled libertarians at the 'anarchist' Freedom Press have been vigously rooting out dissidents who have supported people like Helen Steel and J.K.Rowling. Dave Douglass, an anarcho-syndicalist, and in August 2019 a member of the Friends of Freedom Press, was told by the secretary of the group Steve Sorba that he had 'had embarrassed his fellow Director colleagues by favouring a booklet which questions some of the stranger aspects of gender politics'. Dave was then encouraged to spare his colleagues blushes as directors of Freedom Press and to step down.

The Freedom Press directors have had a troubled history since it was found that Secretary Sorba had been been running the show without reference to his fellow directors, and even placing the names directors on the Company's House register without their knowledge. Since that was discovered and exposed on the NV Blog, Secretary Sorba is believed to have cleaned-up his act.

The Seed within el Culo de un Burro

There was a time more than two decades ago when the anarchist newspaper Freedom had a good reputation for being courageous, controversal and a kind of political Daniel in the lion's den, but that seems no longer to be the case. Its current publishers seem shy and quite willing to censor folk, and to court any fashionable fad no matter how despicable.

When a few years ago two distinguished academics and historians, David Goodway and Peter Marshall, gained entry as directors of Friends of Freedom Press it was thought that things may improve. Alas, it has not really happened. Not only was Dave Douglass effectively shown the door by Secretary Soba, but the rest of the directors have not covered themselves with glory and their committee seems to continually side with censorship and the prescriptions of the cancel culture.

In 2005, David Goodway wrote 'Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - left libertarian thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward' which tried to show that anarchistic forms and projects can be discovered within the structures of everyday life if we seek them and that these 'seeds beneath the snow' should be thrown into relief and promoted by anarchists. It is a seductive theory and can easily be shown to have some credibility substance by focusing upon the ordinary and everyday activities of 'people's methods' which Orwell himself had long ago advocated as a form of common place sociology. In 1967, Harold Garfinkel had even introduced what he came to 'ethnomethodology' [people's methods], which became a form of response to the then conventional sociology of Talcott Parsons with social action theory and structural functionalism.

Colin Ward had long ago criticised British anarchists for being too obsessed with history when he thought they would do better by focussing on a more sociological approach. The work of Colin Ward is very popular in Italy, and the original author of the novel 'The Seed Beneath the Snow'* Ignazio Silone is Italian. But Goodway and Peter Marshall are themselves both English historians, and both are historians presenting artful historical naratives. Now Silone was one of those writers who Orwell in 1944 said belonged to the school of foreign writers who are 'what one might call concentration-camp literature' in that they had seen and understood totalitarianism from the inside. In his book Silone has the seed hidden from the police by the peasants, not beneath the snow, but up the culo of a donkey. It is perhaps a more approprate place since neither of the two historians on the Friends of Freedom Press directorate have covered themselves with glory.

* The Seed Beneath the Snow, the final novel in The Abruzzo Trilogy, follows the fugitive Pietro Spina as he refuses to accept the conditions of pardon for his transgressions against the fascist state and flees to the mountains. As in Fontamara and Bread and Wine, Silone achieves a rich harmony of allegory and realism in his portrayal of the cafoni of Abruzzo and their struggle for freedom. An extraordinary, unburnished vision of the conflict between good and evil, communicating to its reader, in the words of F. W. Dupee, “Silone’s deep integrity, his sufferings and aspirations, his radical sense of the world’s wrongs.” ****************************************************************

Let's Talk About The War

by Les May

SIR John Hawkins is considered the first English trader to profit from the demand for African slaves in the Spanish colonies of Santo Domingo and Venezuela in the late 16th century.  In other words he, along with Sir Francis Drake, was a slave traders as well as privateer.

From 1577 onwards Hawkins was Treasurer of the English Navy.  He rebuilt older ship and helped design newer, faster, sleeker, more manoeuvrable ‘race-built galleons’.  These were the ships that he and Drake commanded when with less than fifty ships they took on and defeated the 130 strong Spanish Armada in 1588.

The stories around this have sometimes been described as forming the ‘foundation myth’ of English identity; plucky little England standing up to more powerful bullies and giving them a ‘bloody nose’.  Nearly five hundred years later it was woven into another now British myth in Edward Shanks’ poem ‘The other little boats’ (see below)

On 13 July 1916 my uncle Tom died during the battle of the Somme, when ‘lions were led by donkeys’.  His name is on the war memorial in Littleborough near Rochdale. Somewhere in Germany there will be memorial with the name of a man who died the same day.  On the island of Tiree there is a tiny graveyard and in it are fifteen stones recording Merchant Seamen whose bodies washed up on its beaches in WW2.   Near Kiel is the Möltenort U-Boat Memorial it records the names of the 30,000 submariners who died in the same war.

In Europe we have learned to live with the knowledge that our past and those who peopled it, were imperfect.  We do not demand that the names of the U boat crew who fought for the Nazis be erased from memory.  We honour them as brave men, like we honour the imperfect men who ran up the beaches of Normandy in 1944.

It is that capacity, to not forget what happened, but also not to hold grudges about it, that gives me a sense of pride in being British.  Perhaps that is just something that my generation, who knew people on both sides who had lived through WW2 and are thankful it did not happen to them, can feel.  Particularly amongst students it seems that it is being replaced by an intolerant and puritanical insistence that only those whose views are deemed acceptable in the present should be remembered. Hawkins and Drake had better watch out.

If I take a somewhat jaundiced view of this it is nothing to how I feel about those privileged academics who, no doubt with an eye on furthering their careers, have decided that ‘the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon us even unto the third and fourth generation’.  Yes, Hawkins and Drake had better watch out.

The Other Little Boats

A pause came in the fighting and England held her breath
For the battle was not ended and the ending might be death
Then out they came, the little boats, from all the Channel shores
Free men were those who set the sails and laboured at the oars.
From Itchenor and Shoreham, from Deal and Winchelsea,
They put out into the Channel to keep their country free.
Not of Dunkirk this story, but of boatmen long ago,
When our Queen was Gloriana and King Philip was our foe,
And galleons rode the narrow seas, and Effingham and Drake
Were out of shot and powder, with all England still at stake.
They got the shot and powder, they charged the guns again,
The guns that guarded England from the galleons of Spain,
And the men that helped them do it, helped them still to hold the sea
Men from Itchenor and Shoreham, men from Deal and Winchelsea,
Looked out happily from heaven and cheered to see the work
Of their grandsons' grandsons' grandsons on the beaches of Dunkirk.

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Levelling The Gradient

by Les May

A COUPLE of weeks ago Kirsty Wark, the presenter of the BBC Two news and current affairs programme Newsnight, introduced an item which was supposed to deal with the question of discrimination in Britain using as an example the fact that there ‘weren’t many black CEOs’ (Chief Executive Officers). This intro told us little about whether there really is discrimination, and a lot about Wark’s priorities.

The assumption that you can lump all black, brown, Asian people together and label them BAME is a favourite modus operandi of armchair sociologists and media pundits.  This lazy approach to avoid thinking more deeply is akin to what has been called the ‘ecological fallacy’.  One example of this is the assumption that if one group is found to have, say a higher average income than another, then all members of the first group will have higher incomes than anyone in the second group. This is clearly nonsense.  Some individuals in the second group will be doing very nicely thank you and have incomes which are much higher than many of the people in either of the groups.   I have little doubt that Wark is significantly more wealthy than a very large number of white and non-white people alike.  She certainly has more power and influence.

By concentrating on single issues the questions raised by the huge inequalities in income, wealth, power and status we experience in the UK get ignored.  People like Wark give no sign of wanting to disturb the status quo and the hierarchies it fosters.  Without exploring the variation in income etc within BAME and white population we can never be sure that we are not mistaking differences caused by inequality as being caused by discrimination.

Is the observation, and at the moment it is just an observation, that people in the BAME population seem to be disproportionately affected by Covid 19 disease due to the factors which also disadvantage many of the white population, such as huge differences in income, wealth etc?  Asking this does not exclude the possibility that it results from discrimination, cultural norms or the prevalence of morbidities caused by so called ‘lifestyle’ factors such as diet and exercise, which in turn may themselves be a reflection of differences in wealth.

There is little appetite in the UK for recognising the effects of our very unequal society on the lives of our citizens, irrespective of their skin colour.  Even when studies to examine the impact of inequality are done, their findings are ignored. And it’s not just the Tories who are wilfully blind.  In February two of the candidates for the Labour leadership felt that a Jewish pressure group and a ‘trans’ pressure group needed their public support, but when the Marmot review which looked at differences in health outcomes appeared later in the month it had zero impact on the campaign.

The media gave prominence to only one finding; that ‘Female life expectancy declined in the most deprived 10 percent of neighbourhoods’ and ignored both the large disparity in life expectancy (LE) between people of higher and people of lower economic and social status, and that, irrespective of economic status women tend to live longer than men. (see page 18, Figure 2.4) reported in the review. (my emphasis).

http://www.instituteofhealthequity.org/resources-reports/marmot-review-10-years-on/the-marmot-review-10-years-on-full-report.pdf

These disparities also exist with regard to the disability free life expectancy (DFLE), i.e. the number of years of life someone will have free from disability.  The review referred to these differences as forming a ‘social gradient’.

What the review showed was that in England, the difference in life expectancy at birth between the least deprived 10% of the population and the most deprived 10% was more than 9 years for men and more than 7 years for women.  Life expectancy at birth for men living in the most deprived areas in England was 74 years, compared with 83 years in the least deprived areas; the corresponding figures for women were 79 and 86 years in 2016-18. (see pages 15-17, figures 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3) in the review.

With regard to disabilities in later life the review said, ‘The social gradient in disability-free life expectancy is steeper than the gradient in life expectancy.  As a result, people living in areas with more disadvantage not only expect to live a shorter life, but also to spend more of that shorter life with a limiting long-term illness.’ (my emphasis)

The effect of ongoing and future rises in the age at which people become eligible to receive a state pension (SPA) will be felt most strongly by those of lower economic status (aka ‘the least well off’).  Only people in the least deprived 20—30% of areas will reach SPA before they can expect to develop a disability. Those in the more deprived areas will spend years with a disability before they reach SPA.

The Marmot review simply referred to ‘people’; not ‘black’ people, not ‘brown’ people, not ‘minority ethnic’ people, just people.  There seems to be no data on differences in life expectancy between these groups and ‘white’ people which are free of the influence of the socio-economic characteristics of the areas in which they live, i.e. the ‘social gradient’.

It is not unreasonable to assume that the differences in life expectancy (LE) and disability free life expectancy (DFLE), which show a clear gradient with socio-economic status, will be equally applicable to these groups also.   Getting a few more ‘black’, ‘brown’, ‘ethnic’ faces around boardroom tables will have no positive impact on the life chances of the people who happen to have the same skin colour.

We have heard a lot in recent weeks about ‘flattening the curve’.  When we know that there is a socio-economic gradient which means that women and men in affluent areas have a life expectancy at birth which is 7-9 years longer than those in poor areas, then I would suggest we direct our collective effort to ‘levelling the gradient’.

Obsessing over ‘race’, to the exclusion of all other considerations is a form of identity politics which allows people, who by any reasonable measure are privileged, to pose and be seen as, victims.   This comment is equally applicable to other forms of identity politics.   I would suggest that it is the inequalities in the UK of income, wealth and power which should be the main focus of attention for those of us who see ourselves as being ‘of the Left’ and not the politics of identity.  This would benefit far more people than a narrow focus on skin colour, sex, gender or preferred sexual partner.

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Narcissism is not a Third Gender

             by Arthur Brick & friends 

                  

Editorial Note:  We publish the report below after

some consideration.  It raises some serious questions

about the standards of debate on the libertarian left.

We have long been aware of a deficiency among the
British left with regard to addressing truth to power,
but we would have expected the anarchists to hold to
a better quality of journalistic standards.  Yet, our
experience has been that the anarchist media blog put 
out under the title 'Freedom News' has a sadly depressing
tone in the way that it has become a mere megaphone for
a 'trans' tendency, and is too fashionably trendy 
for its own good.  The small 'Solidarity Federation' grouping 
has become yet another addict to this politics of the absurd,
its members Ron Marsden and Phil Dickens are mentioned below 
in dispatches: we know nothing of Mr Dickens but Mr Marsden
was in attendance when 'Arthur Brick' was roughly removed by a gang from a  meeting discussing blacklisting at the Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair on the 7 April, 2018.  

Knowing Ron Marsden we are not surprised to learn that he was cagey and even furtive about supplying help to this victim of discrimination & blacklisting.  

Sitting next to the passive Mr. Marsden someone tried hard to get 
the exclusion of 'Mr Brick' discussed, but to no avail.

This silencing of free debate is becoming a cancer that lies at the
heart of the politics of the far left in the UK.

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

Open letter to Sol Fed’s Keyboard Warrior from 'Arthur Brick'& friends:

Phil Dickens: 'The conflicted tax collector'?

THIS article is in relation to the use of abusive terms adopted by some left wing and anarchist political groups to put down anyone who does not take their opinions on the subject of transgender seriously.  The name calling and abuse of socialists, anarchists, activists etc. living outside their freaky social scenes is a way of them avoiding debate, through fear of their claims being scrutinised.
The article also deals with a pretty insignificant group called ‘Sol Fed’.  We are not sure what they are federated to, as they are almost invisible on a street level, yet they do a great job of discrediting class politics with their absurd adoption of transgender identity politics.  So here we will shed a light on the keyboard warrior.

I was recently asked by a feminist friend of mine if I knew an individual named Phil Dickens. I should point out that Phil Dickens is already a somewhat conflicted individual and I found it amusing to discover that whilst being an
‘anarchist’ he also works at the tax office!   On the one hand ‘smashing the state’ for purely theatrical effect but on the other being a servile state functionary.  I think we can safely call that contradiction and hypocrisy, but it does reveal the level of insincerity regarding the bogus claims of this keyboard warrior.

2. Response to my question.

I was sent a link to his social media outpourings and decided to challenge
him. No sooner had I done so, Phil Dickens blocked me and backed out of answering my question.  After further investigation it would appear that
SolfFed has no platform in which to redress the behaviour of its members.
For example there are no positions in the group such as regional or
national secretary in which you can voice your concerns.

Ron Marsden of Manchester Sol Fed was asked about this when people wanted to address the behaviour of Liverpool SolFed member Pablo who disrupted a blacklisted workers meeting, as it was considered somebody attending did not hold the correct opinions on gender self identification (such was the outrage he saw fit to disrupt the meeting).  This is covered in depth in the booklet 'Shit Wigs and Steroids'.

1. Phil Dickens post and my question.  This makes any external or internal grievance of Sol Fed members go unanswered or conveniently ignored.  Any ‘difficult issue’ is swept under the carpet with the hope it will not raise its ‘ugly head’.  So when we see these ‘members’ (scuse phallic pun!!) advertise ‘women’s meetings’ but are also calling women TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) in public, how are we to take that?

It could be said the SolFed is nothing more than an obscure social group with
a supposed ’workerist’ base. Its older members seem happy with its utter failure to grow into anything meaningful but lets put that comical issue to one side.

However, the issue here is that the term TERF is aimed at women, which is an
affront to working class women who have suffered at the hands of men.  What we are seeing displayed by Liverpool SolFed who perhaps number four people is crude bullying of those not towing a line that is being widely scrutinised elsewhere.  Another example of bullying in full effect is when Liverpool SolFed recently ousted one of their own members who sought discussion on the issue. Members of Sol Fed are clearly cowardly on this issue.

It really does show SolFed’s absurd contradiction on women’s rights. It shows the complete denial of women’s voices over their concerns of men identifying as women and, comically, as lesbians.  The use of TERF as a slur by tax official Dickson shows his contempt for those of us not falling into line with the male
perspective that transgender activists peddle.  It looks like Liverpool
SolFed / Mersey SolFed (all four of them) are sinking in the mire of their own introverted identity politics bullshit. The adoption of a pro trans narrative does not seem to be swelling the ranks of their “disorganisation”.  When we see SolFed publishing articles on class and women, we really are left scratching our heads to the clear contradiction and absurdity of their “politics”.

Will Phil Dickens answer this question:

What names have you got for us Northern Working Class blokes who do not swallow the idea that our fathers, brothers, sons can miraculously be ‘actual women’ through the power of thought, medicine, body modification etc.? What you are holding up as transgender, Phil Dickens, as you insult women (with critical opinions), is transvestism,  Autogynephilia* and a whole set of other
issues.  But you are good at calling people things they are not.  If you had a grasp of radical feminism you would see the people you are abusing are not ‘radical feminists’ merely people with the capacity to consider issues well outside of your narrow field of understanding on issues whilst working for the state in your little tax office.

Ron Marsden:  'Hay que malalingua!'

I see you have had 4 views on your Youtube videos.  I think we can help boost that for you.  Being angry on behalf of others, whilst not looking at the issues, leaves people open to responses like ours.  We politely suggest that the 'toxic tax worker' has a read of this:  https://uncommongroundmedia.com/as-a-transsexual-i-support-dr-eva-poen/ the trans activists.

It is easy to overlook the significance of the arguments adopted by these fringe groups, but tomboys are now pushed into identifying as male, effeminate men are getting swept along with the idea they are female, straight men who identify as women claim to be lesbians.  All kinds of absurd ideas and contradictory thinking are marketed as ‘transgender’.  There is a considerable backlash from
many people in wider society against the absurdity of claims from the trans activists.


There has been a substantial ground shift against the claim of transgender activists because what is actually happening is that many of the young people and significantly young women over the last number of years are detransitioning.  The publicity this is rightly receiving are collapsing the arguments that ‘trans activists’ put forward.  Many young people leaving the ‘trans cult’ are left physically and emotionally scarred by the process of conditioning that led them to consider themselves ‘trapped in the wrong body’.  The physical impact on some has had a catastrophic effect.

When we look at the small groups of individuals who claim to be ‘anarchists/ socialists’ etc. who promote the transgender narrative, what we are seeing is the very clear closing down of actual debate on the subject.  One facet of opinion (they want to personally profit from) is ridiculously over emphasized by them, but any challenging opinion of that one facet is shut out.  How can you claim
to support issues around gender but then do all you can to keep the debate massively reduced.

This is done by abusing people who are a part of that debate, dehumanising intelligent people with insults and shutting down supposedly public events like bookfairs, conferences etc.  What we have seen are people like Phil Dickens, Ian Bone, Freedom Press, Simon Saunders, Alice Flebotte, Dave Downes etc. promoting the idea they are concerned about an issue, ‘gender identity politics’,
but under scrutiny, and without doubt, they are showing no compassion or empathy for those who struggle with gender identity issues.

To use 'TERF' to put critics down is beyond sloppy.  It is weak and derogatory.  You have got to hand it to them that they arrogantly believe they can avoid being pulled up on their contradiction and lack of sincerity.  When people take such an abusive line by calling strangers TERFs or bigots etc. they will be in for a shock when their words are drawn into public debate.  We hope to add to this article and we will by looking at particular individuals who hope to avoid any personal responsibility and publicity for the farcical ideology they push from behind their
keyboards.


* autogynephilia

A sexuality that consists of someone being aroused by the idea of themselves being the opposite sex. Not to be confused with transsexualism, which is a medical condition defined by sex dysphoria.

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

This was written before Covid 19 happened.  As in all negative situations we are seeing positive initiatives come from the chaos:
LGB Alliance https://lgballiance.org.uk/
LGB activists standing up to the transgender nonsense
Boxer Ceiling https://www.facebook.com/BoxerCeili

Long-Bailey ignites row after pledging to fight 'transphobic' women's groups!

Drag Queen Story Times for 5-year olds

The Salford MP Rebecca Long-Bailey, has ignited a furious row within Labour's ranks after signing up to a campaign to fight women's groups who have been branded 'transphobic' and has pledged to expel offending party members, if she becomes the next Labour leader.

The Labour leadership contender has urged Labour members to join her in backing a 12-point plan initiated by a group called the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights. The plan demands the expulsion of anyone deemed to have espoused "bigoted transphobic views" and names 'Women's Place UK' and 'LGB Alliance' as 'transphobic organisations' that must be opposed. 

Women's Place, which is comprised  of Labour Party members who want to keep women-only safe spaces, denied it was transphobic and said the accusation was 'defamatory'. It called on the Labour Party to oppose the misogynistic abuse of women. "Defend us or expel us", it said, in a statement. Other Labour members have warned of a "witch-hunt" if the 12-point plan is adopted.

While some Labour members have warned that the plan, if adopted, will lead to thousands of women leaving the Labour Party, the gay Guardian columnist and Labour supporter, Owen Jones, called Long-Bailey a "hero."

Only recently, Long-Bailey provoked criticism when she announced that she opposed the law on abortion after 24-weeks on the grounds of disability. She said that she believed that disability and none disability should be treated equally. She also said that though she believed in a women's right to choose, she "would never contemplate an abortion."

What seems curious, is why Long-Bailey, a Roman Catholic, should be in favour of abortion at all or why she should be a supporter of same sex marriage or want to expel Labour Party members who insist that a person's sexuality, is determined by their biology and not something that can be self-assigned.

Having antagonised many feminists in the Labour Party by allying herself with the vitriolic transgender faction and having pledged to fight and expel so-called 'transphobic' women's groups, is this now the nail in the coffin for Long-Bailey, and has it quashed any hopes of her becoming the next leader of the Labour Party? Already 50 MPs have said they will quit the Labour Party if Long-Bailey wins the Labour Leadership.

At the last General Election, huge numbers of working-class traditional Labour voters deserted Labour to vote Conservative, in order to put Boris Johnson back in Downing Street. If Labour is serious about winning back these disenchanted Labour voters, do they really think that bizarre arguments about transgender rights, queer politics and identities, or Stalinist purges of people who question the cult of transgenderism, is the way to woo these Labour voters back? A northern Labour MP has told the 'ipaper': "My constituents don't give a flying fuck about transsexual issues."

Take this, as an example, of political correctness gone mad in a looney-left Labour controlled council. The picture at the top of this article, which shows a child on the stomach of a drag queen, was quickly taken down by Newham library after there was a backlash from members of the public who found the picture offensive and inappropriate. Newham London Borough Council, which is only composed of Labour councillors and has been Labour controlled since 1964, celebrated LGBT History Month in February with a series of 'Drag Queen Story Times' for the under 5s and their parents and carers. Newham library said:

"By providing spaces in which kids are able to see people who defy gender restrictions, Drag Queen Story Time allows children to imagine the world in which people can present as they wish. Where dress up is real."

Is life really one big gay party? Life is certainly no dress rehearsal, and you only get one crack at it. Is it any wonder that Labour is becoming unelectable and is a laughing stock, when five year old's are being taught to 'defy gender restrictions' by drag queens as some form of crazy social engineering project. Childhood doesn't last very long, so leave the kids to it. Thomas the Tank Engine and Horrid Henry, are far more appropriate stories for 5-year-olds than 'Drag Queen Story Times.'