Would the election of Long-Bailey lead to witch-hunts in the Labour Party?

Rebecca Long-Bailey
By Derek Pattison

Rebecca Long-Bailey is Unite's choice for Labour's next leader. In their Spring 2020 issue of 'unite Works' the magazine for Unite members, Long-Bailey, a 40-year-old Roman Catholic Salfordian, is described by Unite general secretary, Len McCluskey, as having both "Brains and brilliance." 

The article, or should I say, panegyric, tells us that Long-Bailey, the daughter of a dockworker, grew up in working-class Salford and before going to university (to study politics and sociology) and becoming a solicitor, had worked in various odd jobs including a pawn shop, call centre, furniture factory, and as a postwoman. You might say that 'Becky' has pulled herself up by her own bootstraps, or that is what we're led to believe. Unite members are told of her gastronomic delights, a Chinese takeaway, sweet and sour chicken balls, fried rice, chips and curry sauce. According to Long-Bailey, what distinguishes her from the other Labour leadership candidates, is "her deeply-held socialist beliefs." She says:

"My politics are very specific. I've always been true what I've believed in. I was one of the first MPs in 2015 to give a speech where I said I was proud socialist. At that time, that was unheard of."

Rebecca Long-Bailey became the Member of Parliament for Salford and Eccles at the 2015 General Election. She has served as Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in Jeremy Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet since 2017. Many of her more controversial comments and views were not dealt with in the Unite interview with her, so here are some key facts to focus on when holding your nose and voting for Long-Bailey.

Long-Bailey would like to see Luciana Berger return to the Labour fold even though she stood unsuccessfully for a rival party, the Liberal Democrats, at the last general election. She would also like to see Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair's former spin doctor, return to the party even though Campbell publicly admitted to voting Liberal Democrat at the last election. 

During the campaign for Labour leader, Long-Bailey announced that she had signed up to the Board of Deputies of British Jews ten pledges, or 'Ten Commandments', aimed ostensibly at tackling anti-Semitism within the Labour Party. Thousands 0f people called on her to oppose the 10 pledges which they fear is aimed at censoring criticism of Israel. During an interview with Robert Peston in February, Long-Bailey was asked by Peston: 

"Do you regard it as anti-Semitic, to describe Israel, its policies or the circumstances around its foundation as racist because of their discriminatory impact? Is that an anti-Semitic statement?

Long-Bailey replied, "Yes," and then Peston pointed out that the Labour Leader, Jeremy Corbyn, had said that statement is not anti-Semitic.

A Roman Catholic, Long-Bailey has said that she opposes the law on abortion after 24 weeks on the grounds of disability arguing that disability and none disability should be treated equally. She's also said that though she believes in a woman's right to choose, she "would never contemplate abortion." What seems curious, is why a Roman Catholic, should be in favour of abortion at all and why Long-Bailey should support same-sex marriage which many Christian's consider reprehensible and contrary to scripture.

Among her other pledges, which Long-Bailey took on board and signed up for, was the bizarre '12-point plan' initiated by a group called 'Labour Campaign for Trans Rights'. The plan, (which is likely to lead to women Labour Party members leaving the party in droves if it ever becomes Labour policy) demands the expulsion of anyone deemed to be espousing "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, wants to keep 'women-only' spaces' and denies being transphobic and says the accusation is defamatory.

As a member of Unite the Union, I emailed Rebecca Long-Bailey on 9 March 2020, to give her the opportunity to explain what she really understood by 'bigoted transphobic views' and sought her view on some aspects of the transgender issue (see below). I was curious why a Roman Catholic would want to expel Labour Party members who insist that a person's sexuality is biological and not something that can be self-assigned or embrace such ideological idiocy. To date, I have not had a response to my email.

Long Bailey has called on Unite members to vote for her in the Labour leadership election and says that "Labour will need a leader (who) will be able to tackle Boris Johnson at the dispatch box", and told Unite members: "I don't think he'll be able to handle a northern, working-class woman with a forensic eye for detail."

Len McCluskey believes that Long-Bailey "has the brains and brilliance to beat Boris Johnson", but if Long-Bailey cannot face or avoids answering a couple of questions from a fellow Unite member, I don't think Mr Johnson has much to fear from facing Ms Long-Bailey at the dispatch box. No wonder up to 50 MPs have threatened to resign if Rebecca Long-Bailey is elected Labour leader, which now seems highly unlikely.


Dear Rebecca Long Bailey,
I am a member of Unite the Union and have a vote in the forthcoming Labour election contest. My union has given support to you but I am not sure that I share their confidence in you as a possible and credible leader of the Labour Party.
You recently signed up to a campaign (a 12 point plan), that calls for the "expulsion from the Labour Party of those who express bigoted transphobic views", and you called on Labour Party members to support this campaign that deems the organisation 'Woman's Place UK' to be a trans-exclusionist hate group.
As I am rather concerned with the way in which ideological madness and the denial of objective reality seems to have gained a foothold in the Labour Party, I would be grateful if you would answer the following:
If a Labour Party member was to declare that a man cannot be a woman because he has a penis, and cannot be a woman because he cannot menstruate, give birth, or go through the menopause, would you as Leader of the Labour Party, call these views 'bigoted and transphobic' and would you support the expulsion of this person from the Labour Party?

Can I also ask if you also support the view that if a man self identifies as woman and commits sexual offences against women, he should be treated as a woman offender and if convicted, sent to a woman's prison?
Yours sincerely,
Derek Pattison

We Are Following The Science! Oh Really?

by Les May

DURING the Apollo 8 mission to the moon one of the crew, Jim Lovell, pressed the wrong button on the flight computer.  That cleared the memory which held the data about the exact position and orientation of the command module.  As a result the flight computer ‘thought’  it was still on the launch pad so instead of the nose pointing forward along the flight path, it pointed more or less at right angles.  Using the astro-sextant to make sightings on various stars the crew were able to give the computer enough data to allow it to figure out the orientation of the module.

Getting back to Earth safely wasn’t magic or good luck, it followed from the fact that the physics of space flight is an exact science obeying the laws of motion formulated by Sir Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century.   Knowing the mass, velocity and the forces acting on an object we can predict exactly where it will be at any time in the future.

Like ecology, economics, politics and sociology, epidemiology is not an exact science. It uses the tools of science to analyse its data, presents its findings in numerical form and runs computer simulations, but unlike physics, it is not an exact science. Its predictions are ‘educated guesses’ based upon the collective experiences of it’s practitioners.  Those experiences come from investigating past outbreaks of some pestilence.  The educated guesses are in the form of ‘this is what happened last time with a similar disease’.

The UK government could truthfully say it was being ‘led by the science’ so long as we were in the ‘containment phase’ of dealing with the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the name of the virus which causes the disease COVID-19.  Containment worked with the original outbreak of the first human transmissable SARS virus which was eventually brought under control in July 2003, following a policy of isolating people suspected of carrying it and screening all passengers travelling by air from affected countries for signs of the infection.  It has also worked with outbreaks of Ebola, so it is a tried and tested method.  That phase is passed. From now on the decisions are political ones.

As I understand the situation the government is assuming that about 60% to 70% of the UK population will become infected with SARS-CoV-2 and suffer from COVID-19, and that those that recover will resist further infection so the virus will die out, an assumption based upon the concept of ‘herd immunity’.

Now lets put some figures to this. The present population of the UK is about 60 millions. If we take the conservative estimate of a 60% infection rate that means that some 36 million people will be infected.  According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) the crude mortality rate (the number of reported deaths divided by the number of reported cases) is between 3-4%, (the Chinese experience suggests 3.9%), but the infection mortality rate (the number of reported deaths divided by the number of infections) will be lower.  Assuming that it is in the regions of 1% that suggests 360,000 deaths can be expected in the the UK in the space of a few months.

What I find remarkable is that the UK government seems so complacent about the spread of the virus. Compare this with the situation in China where there have so far been 82,000 cases reported and 3,200 deaths in a population of 1.4 billion people. (Figures correct at 13 March 2020)

Just because the UK government has decided that the spread of the virus can no longer be contained does not mean that we as individuals have to fall in with this view.  Older people in particular can to a large extent avoid placing themselves in a position where they might become infected, by avoiding meeting groups of people in confined spaces. This isn’t ‘panic’ it is rational behaviour.

https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200313-sitrep-53-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=adb3f72_2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity

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Democracy for Realists

by Brian Bamford

NICHOLAS ALLOTT. is a senior lecturer in English language at the University of Oslo and co-author of Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (2017): his research interests include pragmatics, semantics of natural language and interpretation, and philosophy of linguistics.  He argues that it is not enough for intellectuals to do as Noam Chomsky recommends to 'speak the truth and to expose lies.' 

Mr. Allott warns that intellectuals have not just the obligation to tell the truth to power but 'to do so in ways that - in their best judgement are most likely to be understood and to be effective'.

Chomsky himself has admitted:  'I don't have faith that the truth will prevail if it becomes known, but we have no alternative to proceeding on that assumption', and Mr. Allott has said Chomsky has often endorsed Gramsci's 'optimism of the will' as a necessary corollary to pessimism of the intellect.

Allott quotes from a study by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels who have argued that 'voting is not well explained as a selection of a party with policies that match the voter's preferences', and that 'Evidence includes the startling fact that votes are strongly affected by natural events.'

The political scientists, Achen and Bartels have found that 'voters punish politicians for outcomes that are clearly not under their control, including natural events such as shark attacks, droughts and floods.'

Also, Allott writes 'voters are not good at keeping track of changes, even those that impact upon their own welfare'.  

Achen and Bartels argue that 'most voters pay little attention to politics, and at elections their choices depend largely on recent developments in the economy and on political group loyalties that are typically held from childhood.' (Achen & Bartels Democracy for Realists). 

Nicholas Allott writes:  'What is more, political change does not come about only, or even mainly, through choices at elections, and supporters of RI (responsible intellectuals) can argue that the responsibilty to tell the truth is such as by improving the political culture.'

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How the war in Europe began?

Johnathan White

by Brian Bamford

WHAT caused the Second World War? 

Many answers can given according to A.J.P. Taylor:  'German complaints against the peace settlement of 1919 and the failiure to redress them; failure to agree general controlled disarmament; failure to agree collective principles of security; fear of communism and, on the Soviet side, of capitalism and its impact on international policy; German strength, which destroyed the balance of power in Europe; American aloofness from European affairs; Hitler's unscrupulous ambition - a blancket explanation favoured by some historians; at the end, perhaps only mutual bluff.'

A view from the Morning Star

In the Morning Star the journalist Jonathan White on Monday, September 30, 2019 wrote:

'The second world war started, apparently, because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the dual invasion of Poland. It was the dismemberment of free and independent Poland by the “totalitarians” that started the war.' 

Here he is reacting to the decision on September 18, 2019 by the European Parliament to vote by 535 votes to 66 to support a resolution 'On the Importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe.'

The historian A.J.P.Taylor wrote 'English History - 1914-1945' that 'On 23 August he [Ribbentrop] and Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact.'  And 'Soviet Russia promised to stay neutral if Germany were involved in war' He adds:  Thus 'Hitler assumed almost certainly that, without the Soviet alliance, the Western Powers would run away.'  And Taylor thinks:  'Stalin probably made the same assumption.' adding 'Both seem to have expected that Poland would be diminished or dismembered without general war,'

The totalitarians, Hitler and Stalin, both got it wrong with regard to Britain, but Taylor says 'The French almost came up to these expectations.'  'French statesmen stood aside' writes Taylor, 'and let things happen during the days which settle their destiny.'

In Britain reactions were different and the 'Nazi-Soviet Pact was regarded as an affront, a challenge to British greatness'.  Thus, Conservatives turned against Hitler and Labour were equally bitter against Stalin.  Taylor records:  'Even members of the Left Book Club were determined to show that they, at any rate, were sincere in their anti-fascism.  The stir was confined to parliament.  There were no great public meetings in the week before the outbreak of war, no mass marches demanding "Stand by Poland".  It is impossible to tell whether members of parliament represented the British people.  At any rate, the M.P.s were resolute and the government tailed regretfully after the house of commons.'

 Anglo-Polish Treaty Signed & War Begins

Despite what Johnathan White now says about the Nazi-Soviet Pact; Taylor observes that: 'On 25 August the Anglo-Polish treaty of mutual assistance was at last signed.  The British government had announced on the 22 August that the Nazi-Soviet Pact would not change their policy towards Poland' 

In consequence the British ultimation was delivered to the German government at 9 a,m. on the 3 September 1939, and the Germans made no reply, and the ultimatum expired at 11a.m.

Despite all the post-facto chatter of a 'world campaign against fascism', now echoed by Comrade White in the Morning Star, only 'France, Great Britain, and Dominions were, the only powers who declared war on Germany.'  As Taylor writes:  'All other countries which took part waited until Hitler chose to attack them, the two World Powers, Soviet Russia and the United States, as supine as the rest...  Perhaps the British and French could boast that they alone joined the crusade for freedom of their own free will.'

Aa A.J.P. Taylor writes:  'Probably the British people were surprised at the noble part which events had thrust on them.'

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RUSSIA: WHEN THE NEEDLES GOT STUCK?

  International Brigade deplores EU Remembrance Resolution

 YOU'VE certainly got to hand it to those few people on the British left who still stick with the idea that Russia offers some form of hope for human civilisation.  It is an idea that somehow a remnant of a golden age ideal rooted in historical Marxist-Leninism, will emerge through the person of  Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin; (a former student of law at Leningrad University and later a KGB foreign intelligence officer going on to be Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB's successor agency). 

In this country the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT) is seemingly one of those bodies dedicated to upholding the myth of this new Russian Saint Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.   As evidence of this on the 5th,  October 2019, at the LONDON AGM of the Chair Jim Jump moved a motion expressing dismay at the decision of the European Parliament to approve a remembrance resolution. 

The actual text of the EU resolution,  of which the IBMT so violently disapproves, reads as follows:

'This strand supports activities inviting reflection on European cultural diversity and on common values. It aims to finance projects reflecting on causes of totalitarian regimes in Europe's modern history (especially, but not exclusively, Nazism that led to the Holocaust, Fascism, Stalinism and totalitarian communist regimes) and to commemorate the victims of their crimes.

'This strand also concerns other defining moments and reference points in recent European history. Preference will be given to projects encouraging tolerance, mutual understanding, intercultural dialogue and reconciliation.'

Now the International Brigade resolution, which was agreed unanimously,  begins sa follows:  

'The European Parliament’s recent decision to equate communism with Nazism and to ignore British appeasement of fascism as one of the key factors leading to the Second World War has been roundly condemned by the IBMT.'   

This is the opening wording with which the International Brigade AGM motion begins condemns European Parliament’s remembrance resolution as an ‘insult’ to anti-fascists!   What this IBMT motion blatantly ignores is the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact,^[a] officially known as the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,^[b] was a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by Foreign Ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, respectively.^[8]

In the end it was the Germans that broke with this pact not the Soviets.  The British International Brigade.  However, it would good if we could conclude the crimes of the Soviet Union with a dodgy pact taken out with a neighbouring regime in the difficult circumstances of the1930s.  Any disinterested observer of 20th century history must know this cannot be the case.  As I write this I am reviewing a book 'THE RESPONSIBILITY OF INTELLECTUALS: Reflections by Noam Chomsky & others after 50 years' which which deals with what honest journalists and academics ought to be doing to tell truth to the powerful.  In this book Craig Murray* writes about 'The abdication of responsibility':  'It is worth noting the clear-eyed recognition in Chamsky's work that the Soviet Union was also a rival empire.  Even while deporing Russophobia and continual threat posture of encirclement - which Chomsky also note in his essay - I always find it is worth reminding people that Russia itself still is an empire.  Much of its current land - and I mean Russia itself, not the former Soviet Republics - was acquired in the nineteenth century by imperial conquest precisely contempororary with British acquisitions in India or indeed the westward expansion of the USA.  These territories are majority Muslim.  Russian imperialism is quite real.'  

This is indeed an inconvenient truth which the IBMT and those who sell the Morning Star may wish to forget.  It's harder to forget the mountains of  corpses in the  Ukrainian Famine of 1933-4 or Stalin's Show Trials and purges in the later 1930s, but George Orwell described in December 1945 in a penetrating essay entitled 'Through a Glass, Rosily', an attack on a Tribune's Vienna correspondent for revealing 100,000 rape cases owing to the inappropriate misbehavior of the Russian occupying troops with the local citizenship.  At that time Orwell argued that some readers of  Tribune seemed to imply that (even if true) the '100,000 rape cases in Vienna are not a good advertisement for the Soviet regime:  therefore, even if they happened, don't mention them.  Anglo-Russian relations are more likely to prosper if inconvenient facts are kept dark.'

What the wrong-headed motion, which originates from the International Brigade Memorial Trust, and is now being promoted by the Morning Star salesmen, is doing is to throw historical facts down the Orwellian 'Memory Hole'.  What these people are saying is 'don't reveal inconvenient facts' like the Ukrainian Famine in 1933-4 or mass rapes by Russian troops of citizens in occupied wartime Vienna or the purges, simply it because it will play into the hands of the enemy.

 But the trouble with this kind of cover-up is that when it gets out that it is false then people tend not to believe you even when you are telling the truth.  The Morning Star itself has few readers and it little credibility in intellectual circles.  By contrast the International Brigade has retained some degree of integrity over the years, but now by associating itself with the motion it risks bring its own organisation into disrepute:  any body who is willing to weigh the management of the Russia's Soviet gulags more favourably than the gas-chambers of Nazi Germany has surely an unenviable task?

Orwell introduced the term 'Inverted Nationalism', to explain how some people came to embrace either Germany or Russia in contrast to their own countries in the 1930s.  With some people on the left somehow the needle got stuck, and despite Russian regime now being committed to the Orthodox Church and passionate Slav nationalism these same people still cling emotionally to this Oriental despotism.  It's as if there is some deep physological need for these attachments.

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*  Craig Murray is author of Murder in Samarkand (Mainstream Publishing, 2006).  Became well known when he resigned as British ambassador to Uzbekistan in protest against British collusion with the Uzbek dictatorship during the 'war on terror'.  He received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence in 2006.

Dealing with the BBC Gestapo!

Free TV licenses, funded by the government, for all over 75's will come to an end in June 2020. From the 1st June, anyone aged 75 or over receiving Pension Credit, will be eligible to apply for a free TV license paid for by the BBC.

In 2015, the government announced that the BBC would take over the costs of providing free TV licenses for the over 75's by 2020 as part of the fee settlement. In 2017, the Conservative prime minister, Theresa May, made an election pledge to preserve pensioner benefits "for the lifetime of this Parliament", due to run util 2022. But the BBC said that the costs of providing free TV licenses for the over 75's, £745 million, amounted to a fifth of the BBC's total budget by 2021/22. The BBC said: "Funding free TV licenses for all over-75's would have resulted in unprecedented closures."According to the BBC, around 900,000 households are claiming Pension Credit but some 1.5 may be eligible but don't claim the benefit. 

Although the Conservative government have reneged on a manifesto commitment to guarantee free TV licenses for the over 75's until 2022, by passing the buck to the BBC to provide them,  the current Conservative prime minister, Boris Johnson, has talked of scrapping the BBC license fee.

From 1st April 2020, the cost of a TV license will increase from £154.50 to £157.50. It is a criminal offence to watch live TV or use BBC iplayer unless you have a valid TV license. You can be prosecuted and issued a fine of up to £1,000 plus court costs. Nineteen people were jailed in 2017, for defaulting on their TV license. The majority of those jailed, were women. A total of 129,446 people were prosecuted for not having a TV license in 2018. TV license enforcement officers also carry out checks at properties, (see above video). One measure that is increasingly being adopted by householders is to serve notice on TV Licensing "Withdrawing Implied Right of Access" to a property and deeming any subsequent approach as harassment.

Trouble at the Greek border crossing

by Brian Bamford

IN March1997, I stood on the Greek border at the Albanian Kakavijë frontier crossing near the Greek town of Ioannina, and watched as wagons driven by the Greek police emptied Gypsies out of the back onto Albania territory.  That was during the political crisis set off by the Pyramid sales* scandal, and all pretense of State power had collapsed in Albania.  

Later a Greek customs officers tried to explain to me why he was turning back middle-class Albanians, and he told me in English: 'this is just like the problem in the USA with its border with Mexico -- we can't keep letting people through'.  

One young lass who'd been turned back that day had traveled from her home further north to the Kakavijë frontier, and the guard said she had tried to cross three-times and each time with a different father.  When I spoke to the Albanian consul in Ioannina, he told me that there was nothing he could do for these people, and that I could have more influence by connecting the Greek Embassy in London.  This I did and I reported incident in Freedom at the time.  

That was in 1997, but as I write today with the enforced Turkish pressure on emigrants from Syria now being pushed up against the Greek frontier, according to the Politico website:

'Greek authorities [have] said they had intercepted around 4,000 people attempting to cross at points along the 50-mile border on Friday night. Some estimates suggested more than 1,000 made it to Greece on Friday, although the government denied these estimates. After 66 people were arrested Friday night, another 70 were arrested on Saturday. Officials said Saturday night more than 10,000 people were at the border.'

This weekend about 1,000 people are reported to be stranded between Turkey and Greece.

And the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reiterated Saturday that the country no longer intended to work to prevent migrants from entering Europe. 'We will not close these doors ... Why? The European Union needs to keep its promises. We don’t have to take care of this many refugees, to feed them,' he said.
 
The Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has suggested that Austria could soon consider closing its border if the situation worsens.

Kurz tweeted Saturday that Austria is ready to provide additional police support to other countries but added, 'If the protection of the EU's external border is unsuccessful, Austria will protect its borders.'

A statement by European Council President Charles Michel read: 'The EU is actively engaged to uphold the EU-Turkey Statement and to support Greece and Bulgaria to protect the EU’s external borders.'

On the eve of the Serbian Parliamentary elections, which were to be held in the Republic of Serbia on 23 December 2000^[1], I was in Achau in the Baverian Alps, and there I boarded a train for Saltzburg which ultimately connected with a train bound for Belgrade via Budapest.  Owing to visa problems I was held up at Subotica in northern Serbia, and sent back to the Serb Embassy in Hungary to get authentication for my Freedom Press credentials which was soon sorted.  But not before I was briefly detained by Hungarian police as I was on my way to the railway station, who demanded my passport and accused me of being a Iranian.  At that time Hungary was anxious to affiliate to the EU, and there was a fear of an invasion of immigrants from Serbia and Kosvo.

What was interesting was that while I was being held by the frontier guards at Subottica, a Kosovan migrant was brought out, and we exchanged greetings before he was taken off somewhere.  I managed to give him some sandwiches which he ate greedily before he was hauled off by armed guards.  Kosovans are Muslims. yet this didn't prevent him eating and apparently enjoying the ham butties.

One can't spend time in the Balkans** without becoming concious of the importance of frontiers to those people who don't live on islands as we do.

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*  A pyramid scheme creates the illusion of financial success by paying off early investors with funds provided by later investors.  The scheme eventually collapses when no more investors can be found.  When the schemes began to collapse in Albania [in 1997] and the money vanished, Europe’s second-poorest country (ahead of Bosnia-Herzegovina) erupted into violent riots that left one person dead, scores injured and city halls, courts and police stations in flames.
High-risk, get-rich-quick pyramid schemes have popped up in Poland, Romania, the former Yugoslav federation and the former Soviet Union, where transition economies, lax regulation and vulnerable populations have created fertile ground for abuse.

But only in Albania did the schemes reach such mammoth proportions and operate with the tacit blessing--some say complicity--of the government.
Suddenly Albania, a country that seemed to be emerging successfully from decades of brutal Communist rule and numbing isolation, was plunged into a crisis that has undermined both its wobbly economy and chances for the government’s survival, exposed a false sense of prosperity and led to profound questioning of the nominally democratic system that Albania adopted after the belated fall of Stalinism in 1991.


**  The First Balkan War began when the League member states attacked the Ottoman Empire on 8 October 1912 and ended eight months later with the signing of the Treaty of London on 30 May 1913. The Second Balkan War began on 16 June 1913. Both Serbia and Greece, utilizing the argument that the war had been prolonged, repudiated important particulars of the pre-war treaty and retained occupation of all the conquered districts in their possession, which were to be divided according to specific predefined boundaries.

DWP Boss wants British pensioners to pay National Insurance!

 

DWP BOSS THERESE COFFEY

THE Conservative Government's  Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, The Rt Hon Dr Therese Coffey, might look like a dyke with a cigar, but she voted against the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2013.

The DWP boss has said that food banks are the 'perfect way' to help the poor. During the MP's expenses scandal it was disclosed that she was claiming £1,000 a month for mortgage interest on her London home along with £160 a month for a cleaner and £150,000 for staff salaries and office costs.

When she recently made an unannounced visit to a Liverpool Jobcentre, Coffey was asked if she would be ending the 5-week wait for Universal Credit that is causing many people severe hardship. She said: "No, I don't think we are going to change that." Coffey also believes that pensioners should be forced to pay National Insurance.

Ms Coffey (47), was born in Billinge, Lancashire in 1971 and grew up in Liverpool. She graduated from UCL with a PhD in chemistry. A keen football fan, she supports Liverpool F.C. and likes pints of Guinness. She's also in favour of lifting the ban on smoking in public places. 

Her voting record reveals a tranche of reactionary views, likely to be offensive to homosexuals, women, pensioners, migrant workers, and non-smokers. 

Derek Pattison on class & delusion

I THINK both Wallace and David Selbourne would do well to read Orwell's 'Politics and the English language'.  Much of what Wallace has written here along with the quotes from Selbourne, would be barely comprehensible to most people. It is pretentious academic verbiage that doesn't illuminate at all.

The cloth cap Tory or the Tory in clogs, is a well known archetype within the English working class and I meet them frequently. We've always known there were plenty of Tory voters who lived in council houses and why do you think the Irish socialist, Robert Tressell called his famous book the 'Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist'? You can't read Tressell's book without being fully aware that his socialist character, Owen, (Tressell himself), is largely contemptuous of many of his fellow workers for their political ignorance and apathy, their conservative outlook and the fact that they acquiesce, in their own exploitation. "They were the enemy" Tressell wrote, they not only "submitted like so many cattle to the existing state of things, but defended it, and opposed and ridiculed any suggestion to alter it."

It is often said of the book that you can identify many of the characters with people you know and that is perfectly true.  The same arguments that you find Tressell's working men having between themselves, you can still hear played out to this very day.

However, it would be a great mistake to tar all the working class with the same brush as middle-class academics, who write about them,are inclined to do. Anyone who has been involved in English left politics, will know, that most of the participants are middle-class university types, the sort who make up the bulk of the Labour Party membership today.

Yet, the people who most influenced me politically, were not academics like Dave Selbourne, who I knew as a student, but ordinary working-class people, like the anarchist copytaker, Jim Pinkerton, from Ashton-under-Lyne and the opera buff, Jack Macpherson, who lived in a council house with his wife Margaret, in Dukinfield. Both these men were representative of what I would call, the class conscious working-class, politically savvy, as well as highly cultured.

I think Brexit is a big mistake, for a variety of reasons, and though it seems to have politicised many working class people, who previously may have been indifferent or apathetic to politics and felt powerless, I suspect it will be economically damaging to many of the Brexiteers in the long run. Yet, one can't deny, that with Brexit, the worm has turned; the working-class voter has found a voice and far from feeling impotent and powerless as they used to do, they now know they have some influence and can make a difference. Now the genie is out of the bottle it might be difficult to put it back.

ROYAL MAIL GROUP NATIONAL BALLOT

ROYAL MAIL GROUP NATIONAL BALLOT – VOTE YES 

Dear Colleagues, 

From today ballot papers will land at the home addresses of all Royal Mail and Parcelforce members.

When your post arrives at home today we would urge you to use your vote and to vote YES. There has never been a more critical time to support your union.

We have put together some ballot day videos for you to enjoy;

Marathon Facebook Live session

CWU Dispute video

Dave Ward General Secretary final message

Terry Pullinger Deputy General Secretary (Postal) final message

Finally, tomorrow (5th March) is National Get The Vote Out Day. We urge every single office in the UK to 1. Hold a gate meeting and 2. WhatsApp us a silent video to 07583725644 – here is an example of the type of video we want 

The time is now – vote YES

#IAmTheUnion

Brenda Christie: Stuart Christie's eulogy to his wife

Good morning everyone and thank you all for coming on this sad occasion to say goodbye to Bren, my wife, life partner, friend and comrade through fifty-one years of life’s vicissitudes, caprices and blessings — the beloved mother of Branwen — and Nanna to granddaughters Merri and Mo.

Brenda was an intensely private person who— although engaging, sociable and witty — disliked being the focus of attention, but I’ve no doubt she would have been pleased to see everyone here, sharing this day with us.

A baby-boomer, born in Shoreditch in London in April 1949, Bren’s formative years were spent in Gosport in Hampshire where her lovely dad, Bert, was a Chief Petty Officer, a ‘Sparks’ in the Royal Navy.

She hoped to take up a career in journalism, but despite her sharp intelligence, enquiring intellect, love of literature and creative writing skills, the breakup of her parents’ marriage and her tense relationship with her mother Eliza forced her to leave home at 15 and move to London where she became a copy typist, working in a variety of temporary jobs, including at the Treasury.

In 1967, her adventurous spirit took her to Milan where she worked for a time as companion to a glamorous American model, a job that introduced her to the dolce vita of Milan and Portofino, but it was a lifestyle that failed to satisfy her sense of moral integrity.

With news of the events of May 1968 in Paris and the radical political, musical and cultural turbulence that was taking place in Britain, largely provoked by the U.S. war in Vietnam, the feisty-spirited 19-year-old Brenda was drawn back to London to be part of the radical social and cultural revolution then taking place, which is where we got together on Bastille Day, 14 July 1968, shortly after my 22nd birthday.

We were together from then until the morning of her passing, just a month after she turned 70.

Those fifty-odd years of our lives together saw many adventures, good and not so good — laughter and tears — as happens in all relationships.

But it’s the treasured, shared and cheery memories that are the abiding ones.

On our first date in 1968 I took her to Jimmy’s Greek Restaurant, a carpeted sewer in Soho’s Frith Street which to me was excitingly cosmopolitan in character, but was also cheap with plentiful Mediterranean-style food. Brenda, however, was distinctly unimpressed, particularly when she spotted the column of cockroaches marching along the wainscoting by our heads.

We made our excuses and left for the more salubrious Amalfi in Old Compton Street. From there we went on to the theatre; Unity Theatre in Somers Town to see Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs for which I had wangled complimentary tickets.

I certainly knew how to treat a girl in those days.

After the performance we went back to my flat in Crouch End in North London where I further tried to impress Brenda with my skill in tossing a Spanish omelette, but my hand to eye coordination was skewed that night and it ended up splattered on the floor.

Brenda, who was precariously balanced on a three-legged chair at the time, laughed so much she leaned back, lost her balance and ended up on her back on the floor with the remains of the omelette, legs akimbo, unladylike, flashing her knickers.

Despite those early misadventures, and fortunately for me, Brenda shared my surreal sense of humour, and so began a tumultuous, lifelong, genuinely loving relationship.

Brenda was introduced originally to the Marxist-led International Socialists through her best friend Valerie Packham, and the pair were deeply involved in the staff and student occupation of the Hornsey College of Art in Crouch End, which took place from May to July 1968.

Later, during the final years of the fascist dictatorship in Spain, she became increasingly committed to the anti-Francoist cause, working closely with the clandestine anarchist First of May Group, which brought her under the radar of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch and the Security Service, MI5. That, of course, ran alongside her role as a co-founder of the anarchist publishing house Cienfuegos Press and her involvement with the Anarchist Black Cross and Black Flag magazine.

In the summer of 1971 I was framed and arrested on conspiracy and possession charges which led to me spending eighteen months on remand in Brixton Prison, which is when Brenda came into her own.

While holding down a job as a temporary copy typist, not only did she visit me most days throughout those eighteen months, she brought me cooked meals all the way from Shoreditch to Brixton on public transport.

She also played a crucial and pivotal role in helping to organise and coordinate my ultimately successful defence — that the only incriminating evidence against me had been planted by former Flying Squad detectives, with their superiors’ knowledge! — that and working late into the night typing up the barristers’ notes during the eight-month Old Bailey trial, one of the longest in British legal history.

Her character and integrity won her the grudging respect of the senior police officers involved in the case. One of them, Commander Ernest Bond, brazenly admitted to her — in the presence of a Chief Superintendent — that they knew I’d been ‘fitted up’, but they could live with my possible acquittal. As far as they were concerned they’d succeeded in keeping me out of circulation for eighteen months.

It’s at times such as those these that we come to really know people in ways of which others remain completely ignorant. Brenda, to me, exemplified the Sufi and humanist ideal of ‘faithful in loving friendship, kindness, compassion and solidarity’.

A few months after my acquittal, in May 1974, following the kidnapping in Paris by anti-fascists of a Francoist banker, a Special Branch officer visited our flat in Wimbledon and advised us to move out of London. Whether or not this was friendly advice or an implicit threat we decided not to put to the test. As Falstaff says in Shakespeare’s King Henry the Fourth, ‘The better part of valour is discretion’, and so we began our life Odyssey.

I may not always have been her Odysseus, but she was certainly always my Penelope.

Our first house was an nineteenth century mill house in Honley, Last of the Summer Wine country in West Yorkshire, in fact its exterior featured in a few episodes of that long-running series.

As well as typesetting our books and journals, Brenda and a friend opened a competitively priced teashop called Touchwood, which became a popular eatery for local mill workers and long-distance lorry drivers on the Trans-Pennine A6024 between Huddersfield and Manchester. Their home-made pies and pasties were to die for. On Touchwood’s last day, when we were preparing to leave Yorkshire for Sanday in Orkney, she and her partner Deanna gave all their regular customers free lunches. Many were in tears when they learned the teashop was closing down.

Our next home was the penultimate of the Northern Isles, Sanday in Orkney, where we lived for seven years with Bren’s beloved dad, Bert. It was idyllic for a time, especially made glorious by the birth of our daughter, Branwen, albeit in fairly dramatic circumstances.

Our wonderful lady doctor had been struck down by cancer and she had been replaced by a series of locums straight out of the animated cartoon Scooby Doo. When the one arrived who was to deliver Branwen he had clearly been drinking, as had the taxi driver of the Commer van that doubled as the island ambulance. To aggravate the situation, the only bottle of oxygen on the island had been used up that morning trying to revive a suicide who had jumped off the end of the pier, having filled his pockets with stones.

I lay on the bed beside Brenda dripping chloroform onto a tea towel covering a flour sieve, both of us breathing the fumes intended to ease the pain of the birth contractions, which somehow the doctor’s ineptness had caused to go out of synch.

In the end we had to call for the local inter-island aeroplane to airlift her to hospital on the Orkney mainland. Even that was problematic as a heavy haar, a sea mist, had enveloped the islands so completely that the pilot had to fly in dangerously low, just above sea level. Even the lifeboat couldn’t make it.

That and a few other run-ins with incompetent locums, some of whom had already been struck off the Medical Register two or three times, proved to be the writing on the wall, especially given our now elderly Bert’s deteriorating medical condition.

From Sanday we moved south again, to Cambridge where Brenda found a job as an editorial assistant with Cambridge University Press, working with the leading historian Albert Hourani and the noted Arabist Trevor Mostyn on a number of prestigious CUP titles such as the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Middle East and North Africa. Both men insisted Brenda was credited by name for her work on the encyclopedia, threatening to remove their names as authors and editors if the class-driven Press Syndics refused to comply, which they had done initially. To credit a lowly editorial assistant by name in such a distinguished publication was unheard of, and I doubt if it has happened since.

It was in Cambridge too that Brenda discovered what proved to be her true métier as a teacher, initially teaching Business Studies to 16- to 19-year-olds at Cambridge College of Further Education where her best friend Valerie was Senior Lecturer in charge of Secretarial Studies. Although to be honest she did think it was a thankless task trying to teach teenagers things they didn’t particularly care about — and to be somewhere they didn’t want to be.

However, after six years in Cambridge, Bert, Brenda’s delightful dad, who’d lived with us since our Yorkshire days, passed away. It was time again to move on, this time to Hastings where we settled for twenty years, largely to ensure that Branwen, our daughter, could put down roots and enjoy some stability with regard to her education and friends.

Among her talents Branwen had a predilection for drama. But it turned out that the principal of the local after-school drama studio she attended was not only a drama queen, but a complete chancer to boot, one whose knowledge and understanding of Shakespeare and his time and plays was embarrassingly superficial. Think Donald Trump meets Danny La Rue and you’ll get some idea of the kind of person I’m talking about.

The bottom line was that Brenda ended up teaching Branwen herself, and was so successful that she swept the board at the local Music and Drama Festival, as well as other festivals in East Sussex, Kent and South London, putting to shame the competing local drama schools. Other mothers approached her to teach their children, which led to Brenda setting up her own Rude Mechanicals Drama Studio. This lasted for almost 10 years and won the hearts and minds of her pupils, whom she enthused with her love of Shakespeare — to say nothing of winning countless drama festivals across the South East.

Our final move was to Clacton. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it coincided with a decline in Brenda’s health. A heavy smoker for more than 50 years, she had increasing breathing and mobility difficulties, but these were eased by the entry into her life of her two darling granddaughters, Merri — born in 2014 — and Mo, in 2017.

Their dynamic and irresistibly exuberant personalities boosted her spirits and recharged her morale enormously.

The end came much sooner than any of us expected.

Hardly a month had passed between her biopsy and diagnosis of small-cell cancer, the first chemo session, and her death.

It was sudden and unexpected — it came in the hour of the wolf, the hour between night and dawn.

What Branwen and I draw some small comfort from is the fact that it wasn’t a long and painful process. She didn’t suffer, she died at home, loved and cared for, not in a cheerless hospital ward or strange hospice room, and I was beside her, able to comfort her at the end. It was her time to go.

This morning we say goodbye to Brenda’s body, but not to her spirit or to the love we had for her and she for us. She has joined what some African societies call the ‘sasha’, the recently departed, whose time on earth overlaps with people still alive. They do not die, they live on in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, and bring them to life in stories and anecdote. Only when the last person to know an ancestor dies does that ancestor leave the ‘sasha’ for the ‘zamani’; the generalised ancestors who are never forgotten, but are revered in memory.

Brenda was a feisty and spirited woman who found it difficult to pull her punches in her dealings with others. She didn’t suffer fools gladly — or even badly, including me on occasions. But despite our sporadic harsh but soon forgotten and forgiven outbursts of frustration, words can never express my own and Branwen’s profound gratitude to Brenda for bringing purpose, happiness and a sense of fulfilment to our lives — not least for her constant part in the general effort to alleviate the burden of the darker times we’ve shared.

Goodbye, dear.

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Brenda Christie died at home in June after a short battle with cancer. At the KSL we have always tried to commemorate the less famous comrades who made up the anarchist movement. Intensely private, she appeared only as ‘Marigold’ (the typesetter) in the Cienfuegos Press titles she helped publish. Later, the academic authors ensured she was thanked by name when she worked as an editorial assistant at Cambridge University Press.

Brenda worked with the First of May Group against Franco’s dictatorship. She also thought of the name for and played a central role in the Stoke Newington Eight Defence Group. Stuart Christie in his eulogy says Brenda ‘played a crucial and pivotal role in helping to organise and coordinate my ultimately successful defence… working late into the night typing up the barristers’ notes during the eight-month Old Bailey trial, one of the longest in British legal history. Her character and integrity won her the grudging respect of the senior police officers involved in the case.’ John Barker, one of those convicted, later thanked her for her work with the defence group saying that she had saved him several years of prison time.

Anarchists can have complex lives: Brenda loved Shakespeare and ran a drama school. In the eulogy, Stuart tells how she turned her back on the ‘dolce vita’ of sixties Milan because it ‘failed to satisfy her sense of moral integrity.’ Instead, she lived a life full and committed. Our thoughts go out to Stuart, Branwen, Merri and Mo and all who knew and worked with her.

[You can read Stuart’s Eulogy at https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/9kd6dm]

Image: Stuart and Brenda Christie, Paris, 1974: photo by Antonio Téllez (who also cooked the delicious rabbit á la Basque). With thanks to Stuart Christie. https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/djhc94

 KSL

Brenda Christie, who has died of cancer aged 70, was my wife, friend and comrade for more than 50 years. An intensely private person, though engaging, sociable and witty, she was a typist, editor, teacher and political activist; we met in London in 1968 on Bastille Day.

Brenda was born in Shoreditch, east London, daughter of Eliza (nee Evans) and Bert Earl, and grew up in Gosport, Hampshire, where her father was a chief petty officer in the navy. With a love of literature and a sharp intelligence, she had hoped to make a career in journalism, but the breakup of her parents’ marriage led her to leave home at 15 and move to London, where she became a copy typist.

In 1967 her adventurous spirit took her to Milan, where she worked as a companion to an American model, but the political and cultural turbulence of the time drew her back to London. Brenda was introduced to the International Socialists (which became the Socialist Workers party) through her best friend, Valerie Packham, and they were involved in the occupation of Hornsey College of Art in 1968.

She was also committed to the anti-Francoist cause, working with the anarchist First of May Group, which brought her to the attention of the Metropolitan police’s special branch and the intelligence services, as did her role as a co-founder, with me, of the anarchist publishing house Cienfuegos Press, and her association with the Anarchist Black Cross and Black Flag magazine.

When I was arrested and falsely charged with being involved in the Angry Brigade conspiracy in 1971, Brenda visited me almost daily in Brixton prison for 18 months, bringing home-cooked meals on public transport, and helped my legal team in my successful defence and acquittal.

In 1974, following the kidnapping in Paris of a Francoist banker by anti-fascists, a special branch officer visited our flat in Wimbledon and advised us to move out of London. We went first to Honley, in Yorkshire, where Brenda and a friend opened a teashop, Touchwood, which became popular with local millworkers and lorry drivers.

Our next home was Sanday in Orkney, where our daughter, Branwen, was born and where we continued our work on Cienfuegos Press. We then moved to Cambridge, and Brenda worked for Cambridge University Press on a number of titles with Albert Hourani and Trevor Mostyn including the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Middle East and North Africa.

In Cambridge she discovered her true metier in education, initially teaching business studies at Cambridge college of further education. After a move to Hastings, East Sussex, where we settled for 20 years, Brenda’s teaching extended to giving drama lessons to Branwen – who later became an actor – and setting up the Rude Mechanicals Drama Studio.

Our final move to Clacton, Essex, coincided with a decline in her health, the pain of which was eased by the arrival of our granddaughters, Merri and Mo, who survive her, along with me and Branwen.

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Cyril Smith and Faisal Rana

by Les May

NOT two names you would ever expect to see together, but as I was reminded when I read the somewhat garbled story by Jennifer Williams in the Saturday edition of the Rochdale Observer, there are some remarkable similarities.

Let’s forget the speculation and recap what we actually know. Smith indecently assaulted young men at the Cambridge House hostel in the 1960s.  Had he not been guilty of this he would have sued Rochdale Alternative Paper (RAP) for the article in the May 1979 edition.  Rana voted twice in the May 2018 local government election. When found out he admitted it. Two guilty men; two sets of blind eyes being turned.

What are the similarities?   For a start neither of these men ever stood in the dock and answered for their crimes, though the reasons for this appear very different. Another similarity is the way that people who could, and should, have taken non-judicial actions against these two guilty men have excused their reasons for not doing so.

David Steel who was told of these accusations against Smith by the RAP editors, David Bartlett and John Walker, has excused his inaction by saying;

‘These allegations all related to a period some years before he was even an MP and before he was even a member of the party, therefore it did not seem to me that I had any position in the matter at all. He accepted that the story was correct. Obviously I disapproved, but as far as I was concerned it was past history.’

How remarkably similar this is to the response I received when I raised the matter of Rana voting twice with the RMBC monitoring officer.  I was told that Rana’s criminal behaviour had taken place before he became a Councillor, hence no action could be taken.  Just as party leader Steel was able to avoid taking any action against Smith, these seems to have been enough to have allowed party leader Alan Brett to avoid taking action against Rana.

In fact the excuse from the monitoring officer was nonsense.  Rana’s crime was committed on polling day 3 May 2018 and his term of office runs from that day until the day before the next poll is held.  I feel justified in using the term ‘excuse’ here because when I later asked for clarification about Rana’s failure to declare his interests within the stipulated time period the officer who dealt with this during an extensive correspondence squirmed and did everything possible to avoid having to admit that Rana had failed to comply with the rules.

So why did neither of these men appear in the dock?  We know that in the case of Smith the police pursued a rigorous investigation, that the file was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and that no action was taken against Smith.  No evidence has yet been produced that this was a ‘cover up’ and the most likely explanation is that even though a number of young men has made similar accusations against Smith as the law stood at the time this could not be taken as corroboration that he committed the crimes he was accused of.  This seems absurd to us now and the law has since been changed.

In the case of Rana things are much less clear. We don’t know whether the decision to allow him off the hook with only a caution was taken by Greater Manchester Police (GMP) without referring the matter to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) or whether it was a decision made by the CPS.   If the decision was made by GMP alone then it seems to me to be a significant error of judgement on someone’s part.

Voter fraud strikes at the heart of our democracy and whether it be GMP, the CPA, a council officer or a party leader no one should do anything which appears to excuse or condone it.  Smith is dead, Steel is yesterday’s man and Rana is still a councillor. Which do you think we should be most concerned about?

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2019/03/what-rap-said-about-smith-in-1979.html

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"Unsung Hero - The Jack Jones Story"

I attach a Flyer for the Blackley & Broughton Contituency Labour Party showing of the Film:

"Unsung Hero - The Jack Jones Story"

On Sat 21st March, 6.30pm at the Moston Miners Cinema.

Please do your best to attend.  You can pay at the door but please let me know in advance if you are coming. 

Yours in Comradeship,

VAL EDWARDS

0161 795 3483 or 07840955149

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