Another Anarchist Bookfair Drama in Manchester

by Brian Bamford

JUST beyond  the wrestling crowds of the Manchester Xmas Markets and the site of the current play 'The Producers' featuring 'Springtime for Hitler' at the Royal Exchange, in down town Salford on Saturday the 1st, December another knock-about farce took place seemingly provoked by a bunch of political drama-Queens at the Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair.

Based on the info on the Twitter, the website MUMSNET at around teatime on the night of the Manchester Bookfair, set up a thread which opened with the following:

Reports that Helen Steel and another woman were surrounded and physically dragged out of (another) anarchist bookfair for wrongthink

Since the night of the Manchester 'anarchist' bookfair not much else has been in evidence explaining why Helen Steel and the other woman were excluded from this event.  Northern Voices approached the bookfair organisers, and others questioned the Partisan Collective, the managers of the bookfair venue for an explanation, but answers came there none.  What we know of what happened comes mostly from comments on Twitter and MUMSNET.

This year's incident in Manchester follows the series of conflicts at bookfairs that started at the London Anarchist Bookfair in October 2017, when a dispute ensued between certain transexuals and some feminists over the distribution of leaflets criticising proposals in the new legislation on the Gender Recognition Act.  During that case Helen Steel somehow became involved arguing for free speech and the right to debate the issues.

Since that time Helen Steel and others who think like her have been labeled 'TERF's', and it is understood that the Manchester venue 'The Partisan' does not allow space for TERF's.

After the disaster of the 2017 London Bookfair and the later conflicts at other 'anarchist' bookfair's like Manchester, Milan Rai the editor of Peace News wrote an editorial in the December-January 2018 issue entitled 'How to destroy our own movements':
'Activists need to find better ways to struggle with each other and to fight with each other, argues Milan Rai

"People ask me how we would defend the bookfair from a fascist attack, but I’m not worried about them out there. I worry about what we might do to each other in here." – one of the organisers of the London Anarchist Bookfair, on 28 October.
'A few hours later, a group of trans rights activists stopped some feminists handing out leaflets that they found oppressive to trans women. A nontrans woman, Helen Steel, objected to this censorship. 'About 30 trans rights activists then surrounded Helen Steel and shouted at her for having stood up for the leafleters.
'The confrontation went on for a long time. Some people (including members of the bookfair collective) surrounded Helen Steel to protect her from possible assault. An unknown person then tripped the fire alarm, leading to an evacuation of the building.'

The consequences of this conflict between trans-rights activists and feminists still prevails as was evident in Manchester earlier this month.  But it is a symptom of a wider problem of the inability of the broader left to communicate owing to a righteous arrogance which has developed within its ranks.  It is inevitably that today an ideology which roots itself in an orthodoxies such as political correctness and identity politics was bound to suffer from the inconsistencies of its own contradictions.

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