MCT BUSES GOES BUST! TAMESIDE BUS SERVICES AT RISK!

Manchester Community Transport

BREAKING NEWS:

Less than a year after FirstGroup’s Tamexit in September 2019, the departure ofanother company will see more upheaval for Tameside’s bus users.

On their website, MCT Travel, also known as Manchester Community Transport, announced that it is proposing to cease operations in late April. The company, rescued from closure in 2017 by joining the HCT Group, have cited “mounting losses” and “difficult trading conditions” as a factor in their withdrawal.

Manchester Community Transport’s existence predates FirstGroup and Arriva. They started out as Wythenshawe Mobile in 1980, after receiving Urban Aid funding. The company adopted its present name, Manchester Community Transport in 2005.

The Community Interest Company runs a sizeable number of TfGM tendered services in Tameside and Oldham. In all, 38 routes with a fleet of 67 vehicles. Many of which serve areas that would otherwise be bus deserts. The company expanded after the purchase of Maytree Travel’s routes, going beyond their South Manchester roots.

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Source Stuart Valentine: East of the M60

Why I Won’t Vote for Andy Burnham

by Les May

IN a few weeks time Andy Burnham will be soliciting my vote in an attempt to persuade me to re-elect him as Mayor of Greater Manchester in the poll to be held on 7 May 2020.  He will be wasting his time.

I have voted Labour all my life, but I will not give my support to any candidate who promotes policies which deliberately discriminate against people on the basis of their sex.

Burnham has been pursuing a policy which does just this since 2018 when he introduced a scheme to issue bus passes to those born between October 6, 1953 and November 5,1954 and hence too young to qualify for an English National Concessionary Travel Scheme (ENCTS) pass, BUT ONLY IF THEY WERE FEMALE.  He now proposes to extend this to women born between November 6, 1954 and April 5, 1955.

However you care to wrap it up this is deliberate, systematic discrimination on the basis of a persons sex.  Imagine the outcry if Burnham introduced a scheme offering bus passes to people in this age group, but insisting that only those who were white would be eligible.

Men and women in that age group received exactly the same notice that the age at which they would become eligible for a State Retirement Pension and hence an ENCTS pass was being raised to 66 years. Does being a man make someone less deserving than if they are a woman?

Burnham needs holding to account for this.  The majority of people doing the ‘grunt work’ in our society are men. Feminists don’t seem to have been quite so enthusiastic about getting more women into these kind of jobs.  Perhaps it is time for men to press their unions to ask Burnham for some answers.

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/transpot-free-bus-pass-women-17693595

https://tfgm.com/tickets-and-passes/womens-concessionary-travel-scheme

https://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/services/freedom-pass/tfl-60-london-oyster-photocard

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A Review.: Henry and Alice and Orca

by Les May

THE third production of the Curtain Theatre’s season of five plays has the intriguing title ‘The Secret Lives of Henry and Alice’.  Contrary to the picture of the two lithe twenty somethings on the front of the programme the characters have been married for a quarter of a century and, shall we say, are no longer in the full flush of youth, and romance, if not actually dead, is certainly sleeping quietly.  Time enough for each of them to be familiar with the other’s idiosyncrasies; time enough its seems for a tinge of irritation to have crept in.

But what to do?  Instead of engaging with each other, with all its potential for open warfare, each of them engages with us, the audience.  They tell us the words and dreams they do not, or perhaps dare not, share with each other. There’s no malice in what they tell us, but not each other.  Even in their dreams they shrink from anything that would disturb the gentle, if dull, equilibrium of their lives.

The most exciting thing that happens to punctuate the ordinariness of their lives is the death of their apparently ‘non-binary’ goldfish, Orca.  So why was it so funny?  That’s easy; an excellent script and two actors who slid so comfortably into their roles.  Damian Kavanagh gave Henry the right amount of dullness combined with a wry humour.  Ros Hendren showed a talent for switching Alice from the frumpiness of reality to the sexy seductress of her fantasy.

You can find details of this and future productions on the Curtain Theatre website: www.curtaintheatrerochdale.co.uk

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Labour’s betrayal of women,

 children and homosexuals.

What do you do if you abhor Tory politics but there’s nobody else to vote for?

Bea Jaspert

Feb 16 · 6 min read

Illustration by Ailin Rojas Bondarczuk

WHAT do you do if you are appalled by the imposition of austerity on the poorest and most vulnerable alongside tax breaks, perks and freebies for the rich, inherited wealth and big business? If you are sickened by the scapegoating of immigrants, the demonisation of foreigners, the denigration of the poor, the criminalisation of black people, the cronyism, the profit motive as god over all other considerations etc — but the only opposition party with any hope of ever beating the Tories at the polls has signed up to a misogynistic, homophobic cult?

That is the Hobson’s choice facing women, and those who support child safeguarding, women’s sex-based rights, and the sex-based rights of homosexual people.

It is also the choice facing anyone who believes in freedom of speech and freedom of expression as fundamental democratic rights.

Labour Campaign for Trans Rights last week issued a contentious series of pledges — contentious for a number of reasons:
1. They define “transphobia” as dissent with ‘gender identity ideology’.
2. They slander Womans Place UK — a grassroots group campaigning for female sex-based rights, and LGB Alliance — who campaign for homosexual/bisexual rights, as “transphobic hate groups”.
3. They call for the expulsion from the Labour Party of all dissenters.

READ MORE:   https://medium.com/@BeaJaspert/labours-betrayal-of-women-children-and-homosexuals-90c724c1c0d0?fbclid=IwAR0XL_LVfRUKt3AH_ly1RAjeCr9iWZkKB2gFAm6OCutRo5VwvO-vJc1cyNc

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No 10 refuses to say if Boris Johnson thinks black people are 'mentally inferior'.

Andrew Sabisky

On 6 February, in  a 'Guardian Journal article entitled, 'Inside the Mind of Dominic Cummings, the English Literary critic, Stefan Collini, wrote:

"In Cummings's ontology, the world appears to be made up of an extremely small number of outstandingly clever individuals and a mass of mediocrities. 

David Cameron, who served as the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between 2010 to 2016, called Cummings a "Career Psychopath", and other people have said even less flattering things of Cummings, who doesn't court popularity. 

Early in January, Cummings published a 3,000 word discursive rant that urged "Misfits and Weirdos" to come and help him to transform the government as Chief Special Adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Cummings declared that he didn't want to hire "confident public school bluffers" or "Oxbridge English graduates who chat about (French psychoanalyst Jacques) Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers..." 

Among the draft of  'misfits and wierdos' who applied for a job to become a special adviser to Boris Johnson, was 27-year-old, Andrew Sabisky, who joined the administration. The young thruster, who calls himself a 'super forecaster', soon began to attract attention because of his many Tweets. Sabisky has stated that he wants the young to undergo compulsory contraception to prevent a 'permanent underclass' and suggested that many black people are "close to mental retardation." In 2014, Sabisky wrote on Cummings's website:

"One way to get round the problems of unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass, would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception at the onset of puberty."

Among his more egregious comments, are that 'richer people are more intelligent' than the rest of us and that eugenics, is about 'selecting for good things.' He also argues for giving all children a drug called 'modafinil', a treatment for narcolepsy, to cut the need for sleep by two-thirds, even at the cost of "a dead kid once a year." Sabisky, has also said that women's sport is more akin to the Paralympics, the sporting event for  people who have physical impairments, than it is to men's sport. In one blog, he wrote:

"It is still unclear to what extent female genital mutilation represents a serious risk to young girls, raised in the UK, of certain minority group origins. Much of the hue and cry looks more like a moral panic."

On May 1st, Sabisky tweeted: "It says something about how badly defence is regarded that we keeping getting proper morons as SecDef, Mordaunt somehow being even worse than Williamson."

Downing Street have declined to say which policy area Sabisky is working in, but confirmed he was a contractor working on specific projects. At a recent press conference the Prime Minister's deputy spokesman refused 32 times to say whether the PM, Boris Johnson, shared Sabisky's views on eugenics or if Johnson thinks black people are mentally inferior. He could only say Mr Johnson's views were "well publicised and documented."

Although Boris Johnson is being urged to sack Sabisky and other special advisers are saying they would refuse to work with him, there is nothing really original, astonishing or even remarkable, in what the 'super forecaster' has been saying. The clown is a waste of taxpayers money and so is Cummings. However  shocked people are by his comments, much of what he says, has been said well before he was born and even put into practice.

In the U.S., following the famous court ruling in Buck v. Bell in 1927,  which upheld the principle of applying compulsory sterilisation to the disabled teenager Carrie Bell, the Supreme Court voted eight to one for her sterilisation. The U.S. Supreme Court Judge, Oliver Wendall Holmes Jr, said during the hearing, "three generations of imbeciles are enough." The case set a precedent and over 60,000 compulsory sterilisations followed in the U.S. until the practice was abandoned in the 1960s. Many of those sterilised were poor Americans, epileptics, and those considered 'Feebleminded'.

However, one should be careful about what you wish for. Both the writer and playwright George Bernard Shaw and the academic Professor Harold Laski, were keen eugenicists and Fabians. Shaw's writings on socialism and Soviet Communism, included proposals to execute economic exploiters (capitalists), by poison gas, and Laski, a committed supporter of the Soviet Union, told his American friend Wendall Holmes, "Sterilize all the unfit, among whom I include all fundamentalists."

Racial differences in intelligence and the underclass were discussed in the controversial 1994 book the 'Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life' by the psychologist Richard J Hernstein and political scientist Charles Murray, and the idea that the world is made up of a small number of talented individuals, who we 'mediocrity's', should all be indebted to for our conditions in life, has a long lineage.

In January 1958, Ludwig von Mises, the acknowledged leader of the Austrian school of economic thought, wrote to the novelist Ayn Rand about her pro-capitalist novel 'Atlas Shrugged'. He told her: "

You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you. If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it still is the truth that had to be said in this age of the Welfare State."

To this day, the views and comments of Ludwig von Mises to Ayn Rand are shared by many Conservatives and those on the right, including Margaret Thatcher, who subscribed to this view. The book Atlas Shrugged was said at one time to be the bible of the U.S. Congress and  the U.S. Tea Party movement, and devotees of Ayn Rand, have included the former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, U.S. Congressman, Paul Ryan, and the former UK chancellor, Sajid Javid. 

A staunch believer in unfettered capitalism and individualism, Rand reviled welfare protection measures for the poor, who she considered parasites, but in old age she finished up on social security, Medicare and Medicaid.

BRING BACK KROPOTKIN!

by Christopher Draper

MANCHESTER’s People’s History Museum aims to depict all political strands that comprise Britain’s rich labour tradition but one aspect is notably absent. There’s more to politics than voting and the anti-Parliamentary ideas and artifacts of the hugely influential anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) have been exiled to the museum’s storeroom. 

When the institution opened in London in 1975 Kropotkin’s desk and chair were prominently displayed and visitors learnt from attached brass plaques that they’d previously belonged to radical campaigner Richard Cobden but when the collection moved to Manchester these exhibits were curiously removed.  Curiously because Cobden is strongly associated with Manchester, where he founded the 'Anti Corn Law League', was MP for Stockport then for Rochdale, lived for years at nearby 19, Quay Street, has a statue erected to his memory in St Anne’s Square and a bust on view in the Town Hall.  As activists have successfully campaigned for blue plaques memorialising Kropotkin’s former homes in Bromley and Brighton, so now with the approaching centenary of his death on 8th, February 1921, what better time to restore these key exhibits to public view?

                                  WHOSE HERITAGE?

'HERITAGE' in Britain generally promotes a ruling class perspective with stately homes, art galleries and statues of the “Great and Good” predominant.  Since the 1893 foundation of the Independent Labour Party Britain’s official labour movement directed most its time, money and energy into getting Labour governments elected and few resources were spared for independent working class education and preserving, recording and presenting the artifacts and history of workers’ struggles.

To secure adequate resources the Manchester museum treads a perilous path between faithfully recording campaigns for freedom and equality whilst not upsetting establishment sources of funding. From its roots in the labour movement the museum has over the years moved into the heritage industry, successfully widening its popular appeal and funding-base but along the way it’s quietly succumbed to 'ideological cleansing', gently edging anarchism out of the picture in order to
represent Parliamentary power as the ultimate goal of past struggles. 

There’s no denying that Parliamentary politics dominate the labour movement but revolutionary ideas and movements were and remain a vital thread in the tapestry.  There’s more to labour history than campaigns for the franchise and it’s essential that displays also reflect the continuing battle for ideas within the movement.  With the Cobden connection and the fast approaching centenary (Feb 2021), it’s time Kropotkin’s artifacts along with an explanation of anarchism’s political significance were restored to the museum’s public galleries.

                Slippery Slope from Limehouse to Manchester

THE collection was begun in the 1960’s by enthusiastic members of the 'Trade Union, Labour and Co-operative History Society' who eventually secured exhibition space at Limehouse Town Hall.  The museum’s moving spirit and founding curator was Harold Fry who’d started work in a brush factory at the tender age of eleven before campaigning for years to persuade the Labour movement to value its own history, 'because it is not yet history conscious.  The movement must know where it has been to know where it is going… we want to educate the public, to balance the history of the ruling classes, which they are taught, with the people’s history'.

On 19th Monday 1975 Prime Minister Harold Wilson officially opened the 'National Museum of Labour History', accompanied by Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Hugh Scanlon and Clive Jenkins, and in an ominous gesture of vacuous popularism donated his pipe for exhibition, 'but not the famous clogs in which he is said in some speeches to have trudged as a ragged urchin to Milnsbridge Council School' (Clement Attlee’s pipe is on reverent display in the current museum). 

The museum remained in Limehouse until 1985 when it was promised a new, larger home at the
redundant Mile End Baths. In the course of conversion it was discovered that the baths was contaminated with asbestos and on so the collection was packed away and remained in storage until a funding offer was made by Greater Manchester authorities.  A new trust was formed and in 1990 the collection went on display again, initially occupying part of the old 'Manchester Mechanics Institute' in Princess Street, in 1868 the first meeting place of the Trade Union Congress. In 1994 the collection moved into its present home in a beautifully restored hydraulic pumping station on the banks of Manchester’s river Irwell.

Still officially registered as the 'National Museum of Labour History' on moving north the institution re-opened under the new, establishment-friendly title of the 'People’s History Museum'.  In an apparently continuing quest for ever greater de-politicisation and vacuity, the collection now bills itself as the 'National Museum of Democracy'.  If this trend continues perhaps Clement Attlee’s pipe will soon be confined to storage lest it be viewed as an incitement to revolution!

                                      The Anarchist Prince

IRONICALLY, throughout the three decades Kropotkin lived in England he was welcomed rather than feared by 'civilised society'.  As an internationally respected geographer and scientist as well as an acknowledged, if alienated, member of Russia’s aristocracy his ideas and activities were even sympathetically reported by the London Times.  'Mutual Aid', Kropotkin’s classic rejoinder to T. H. Huxley’s interpretation of the social consequences of Darwinism will forever serve as eloquent testimony to the cooperative impulse that underlies anarchism and indeed all progressive politics.
Sadly for Kropotkin’s last years in England he alienated former anarchist comrades by supporting the war against Germany but retained friendships with local members of the Brighton labour movement. When he departed for Russia in 1917 he took with him seventy tea chests of books and papers but presented his desk to Brighton Trades Council (who subsequently donated it to the museum). 

This episode in itself  offers any museum worth its salt an ideal opportunity to pose important questions of political loyalty to interested visitors.  Finally returning to Russia on 12th June 1917 Kropotkin’s support for the revolution but opposition to the Bolsheviks might similarly raise critical questions in the mind of anyone viewing Kropotkin exhibits, and reading interpretive boards about his life.  
       
                        - 'Labour History Museum'  –  
             - Lively Debating Chamber or Necropolis? -

Despite my reservations about the some of the innovations, the museum’s administrators have worked wonders keeping the collection together, conserving the artefacts, providing imaginative attractive displays and continuing to offer free admission.   Everyone involved deserves to be heartily congratulated.  This year (2019) the “Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair” returned to the museum increasing the impetus to restore anarchist content to the galleries.  'People’s History' isn’t a
lost world of clog dancing,  Hovis adverts and chimney sweeps, it should stimulate political questions about the past, present and future.  It is a vital debate that recognises Parliament may be a political preoccupation for many but it’s not the realisation of labour’s 'New Jerusalem'.  The return to public view of Kropotkin’s furniture won’t change the world or frighten the horses but it might stimulate debate and attract the interest of a younger generation turned off by traditional politics. 

Why not visit the museum yourself, hand in a card (or email - Katy.Ashton@phm.org.uk) requesting the return of Kropotkin’s desk before the 8th, February 2021 centenary of his death?  Refusing to vote isn’t anarchy in action if you do nothing to promote positive alternatives - Stand up for Kropotkin’s chair!

                                                                                                       Christopher Draper (Dec 2019)

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