Dave Douglass: Why I'm No Longer a 'Wobbly'! *

 Farewell British Isles Industrial Workers of the World
by Dave Douglass

Follonsby Miners Lodge Banner

FOR almost fifty years I have been a member of the IWW since it reformed in Britain in the late 70’s.  At that time it did what it said on the tin, it was a revolutionary union based on the principles on which it was founded in 1905 in Chicago, the principle of One Industry One Union, with all workers in one industry in the same union regardless of craft or skill or grade. United through their industries to One Big Union of all workers.  It sought not just a fair days wage but abolition of wage slavery, it fought for the next slice of bread and demanded the bakery.  Unions like the NUM and NUR at that time were based upon the principle after the early Industrial Unionists and Syndicalists in 1908/ 1909 and programmes like The Miners Next Step, and Industrial Union Britain had a profound influence on the trade union and labour movement.  We (The IWW through the 70’s 80’s and 90’s) continued to work within the mass unions as cells and duel members, we of course worked within communities on community issues too.  During the decades I was associated with the IWW I worked a lifetime in the mines and during that time South Yorkshire and North East IWW branches.  We organised large conferences and rallies within the heart of working-class communities and in mass mobilisations of the class and militant sections of it.  North Eastern IWW hosted a conference on Clean Coal technology and Climate change and commissioned a pamphlet in support of the coal communities and industry in defence of the miners union on the basis of clean coal technology.

The IWW internationally had had a significant impact on the pre-WW1 war and post WW1 war period, particularly within the Irish Socialist Republican Movement and coalfields Miners Federation of GB.

George Harvey first national organiser of the IWW in Britain, creator of the Follonsby (Red)Banner. Lodge Secretary Follonsby Wardley Lodge.

It is the inspiration of the miners ‘red banners’ and northern IWW members were influential in recreating the red miners Follonsby banner and forming the Follonsby Miners Lodge Association.  It carries the portrait of Harvey first British organiser of the IWW Connolly first national organiser of the IWW and founder member, Arthur Cook syndicalist president of the Miners Federation during the 26 lock out and General Strike, and V I Lenin whose slogan All Power to the Soviets sounded like the same aims of the IWW and the international Industrial Unions.

It has toured the country and been used as a central plank for lectures on our revolutionary history and culture, as well as publications on the banner and founder members of Industrial Unionism in Britain.  We had been regular guests at the James Connell commemoration in Kills County Meath, a Wobbly and author of The Red Flag, our banners and his influence inspired a radical red RMT union banner.  In major commemorations of 1912, 1926, and annually the Durham Miners Gala where we always had a marquee and bookstall and organised major rallies and discussions about revolutionary class politics.  From time to time we organised workers into the union and represented them at work and tribunals.  I had the honour last year of having the Follonsby Banner as the backdrop to a lecture on the struggles of the IWW and the Wobblies in Irish revolutionary history and the British mines, at the Socialist Republican commemoration of the Hunger Strikers.

To cut a decades long story short, over the last ten years and more I have been more and more distanced and disillusioned with the team calling itself the British IWW , to start with it has become hugely more centralised than it has ever been in its creation.  The decentralised democratic function of the branches is now controlled and centralised into a national leadership.  Sad to say the ‘union’ has become dominated by the south of England and within that a largely middle class London based membership who have carried their liberal left agenda’s straight from that milieu into the policy of the union.  You could be listening to the young liberal leftist Corbynista’s, Climate Extinction or now the IWW.  The social outlook of this milieu has grated for some time.  I was amazed for example as a person who fought for my class for ten years from 83 to 93 against pit closures and the slaughter of the coal industry and miners union and community, to hear anti coal anti mining agenda’s rolled out in the name of the union.  It was simply assumed this being the attitude among the southern middle class it was generally agreed, it wasn’t, not by any of us in the rust belts.  But the final straw for me is the wholesale adoption of Identity Politics, the sectarian politics of sex and gender with enforced PC positions again just assumed to be common sense and currency.  The agenda of class struggle and the sovereignty of the working class as a whole the bedrock upon which all other forms of oppression stem and around which we unite as a common class is the absolute bedrock of the IWW or has been up to now.

IWW picket line Gateshead 2014

Today I get sent this:-

Gemma (East Scotland area organiser) and Maddi (Clydeside Branch co-communications officer) are inviting you to the IWW's first online welcome session for women & non-binary members: Wednesday 15th July, at 7pm on Zoom (details below).

Please note: This message is being sent to all IWW members so that everyone can help spread the word. The welcome session on the 15th is specifically for women (trans-inclusive) and non-binary members. If you are a cis-gender man (you were assigned male at birth, and are still male now) then please stay tuned for news of future welcome sessions, or reply to this email if you'd like to speak to someone from your local branch or in your industry.

And today I resign, it’s a long way from Fellow Worker to cis-gender man and designating me not on my class and class orientation but whether I have a problem with the gender I was born with and actually assuming that that is some common feature of humanity.

The IWW for a long time, even when we were doing great things was always a very poor tribute band to the original, today it is no longer a class struggle organisation and is completely shot through with Middle class PC Identity liberal leftist politics.  A Sad and sorry end to a once great organisation, but they can't take away its fine past and heroic contribution. 

*  Origin of Wobbly Theory #1 - "Eye Wobble Wobble"

Also known as the "Chinese Restaurant Owner Theory", this is the most often cited and embellished theory.  There exists plenty of anecdotal evidence to support this theory as having a grain of truth to it.  Although it is equally likely to be little more than a cleverly crafted tall tale or yarn. We quote from Three Original Sources:
(1) The earliest known reference to the term:

In Vancouver, in 1911, we had a number of Chinese members, and one restaurant keeper would trust any member for means. He could not pronounce the letter "w" (due to the "l" sounds in the pronunciation of the letter), but called it "wobble" and would ask, "you Eye Wobble Wobble?" and when the [red] card was shown credit was unlimited. Thereafter the laughing term amongst us was "I Wobbly Wobbly".

--Mortimer Downing, IWW Member. Quoted in Jack Scott, "How the Wobblies Got their Name," in his Plunderbund and Proletariat (Vancouver, BC.: North Star Books, 1975), p. 153. Also quoted in Jerry Lembcke and William M. Tattam, One Union in Wood, A Political History of the International Woodworkers of America (New York, NY.: International Publishers and Madeira Park, BC.: Harbour Publishing, © 1984), pp. 188-89 n31.
(2) The following account is from the Official IWW History:

It was at this time (1912 during a "thousand mile picket line" railway strike in British Columbia) that the term "Wobbly" as nick-name for IWW came into use. Previously they had been called many things from International Wonder Workers to I Won't Works. The origin of the expression "Wobbly" is uncertain. Legend assigns it to the lingual difficulties of a Chinese restaurant keeper with whom arrangements had been made during this strike to feed members passing through his town. When he tried to ask "Are you I.W.W.?" it is said to have come out: "All loo eye wobble wobble?" The same situation, but in Vancouver is given as the 1911 origin of the term by Mortimer Downing in a letter quoted in Nation, Sept. 5, 1923..."

--From The IWW: Its First 100 Years by Fred W. Thompson and Jon Bekken, 2006, IWW: Cincinnati, page 60..
3) This account is further elaborated in the following quote:

The word "Wobbly", a nickname for IWW members, humorously illustrates the union's efforts to combat racism. A Chinese restaurant keeper in Vancouver in 1911 supported the union and would extend credit to members. Unable to pronounce the letter "w", he would ask if a man was in the "I Wobble Wobble". Local members jokingly referred to themselves as part of the "I Wobbly Wobbly," and by the time of the Wheatland strike of 1913, "Wobbly" had become a permanent moniker for workers who carried the red card. Mortimer Downing, a Wobbly who first explained the etymology, noted that the nickname "hints of a fine, practical internationalism, a human brotherhood based on a community of interests and of understanding."

--Mark Leier, Where the Fraser River Flows, The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia (Vancouver, BC.: New Star Books, 1990), page 35.

Weighing the Evidence

Conceivably, Downing's account could be the honest truth. According to Dan Cornford (in Workers and Dissent in the Redwood Empire, ©1987, Temple University Press), The IWW was the first labor union in North America to refuse to discriminate against Chinese and Chinese Americans. (Many earlier left-wing organizations, including the Greenback Labor Party and the Knights of Labor discriminated vehemently against Chinese and Japanese Americans. Former members of these organizations (such as George Speed) later joined the IWW and jettisoned their racism). Such interracial solidarity most certainly did not go unnoticed in the Chinese American community, and they would likely have responded favorably to the IWW.
However, all the evidence of the "Chinese Restaurateur Theory" apparently stems from Downing's letter. There is no known independent source that verifies Downing's story. His account may just as easily be a romanticized embellishment of the truth, or it could be pure fiction, and there is no credible proof that it isn't. Downing's narrative also suggests deeply ingrained stereotypical views of Chinese and Chinese-American speech patterns, even by 1911 standards.
Quoting Mark Leier again:

In a letter to the author, dated 31 January 1989, Craig M. Carver, managing editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English states that the Chinese restaurateur version is not given "much credence ... because the story is simply unverifiable." Those with a scientific bent must conclude that the etymology is unknown; romantics may choose to stick with Downing.

--Mark Leier, Where the Fraser River Flows, The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia (Vancouver, BC.: New Star Books, 1990), p 35.

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‘Cancel culture’ Condemned by Noam Chomsky &

Salman Rushdie et al. in Harper’s Magazine

“HARRY POTTER” writer J.K Rowling, “Handmaid’s Tale” author Margaret Atwood and “Midnight’s Children” writer Salman Rushdie are amongst 150 public figures to have signed a letter condemning the practice of public shaming, or ‘cancel culture’ as it is known popularly.

‘Cancel culture’ is a term used to describe individuals who have shared an unpopular opinion or have past behavior that’s deemed offensive, who are ‘canceled’ on social media. Rowling is one such example, due to her views on the trans community.

Atwood received considerable backlash in late 2016 after supporting an open letter calling on Canada’s University of British Columbia to provide its reasons for suspending and firing novelist and instructor Steven Galloway after sexual assault allegations emerged.  Meanwhile, Rushdie’s 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses” has also drawn criticism over the years for its depiction of Islamic beliefs.

Other signatories of the letter include authors Martin Amis and Jeffrey Eugenides, public intellectuals Malcolm Gladwell and Noam Chomsky, jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, psychologist Steven Pinker, feminist Gloria Steinem, chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov and CNN and Washington Post journalist Fareed Zakaria.

The letter, published Tuesday in Harper’s Magazine, states:  “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.  While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.”

“Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal,” the letter argues.  “We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.”
“We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us,” the letter concludes.

The letter has provoked a deluge of online responses.  Author and transgender activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, who signed the letter, recanted her position within hours.  “I did not know who else had signed that letter,” Boylan tweeted. “I thought I was endorsing a well-meaning, if vague, message against Internet shaming.   I did know Chomsky, Steinem and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company.  The consequences are mine to bear.  I am so sorry.”
 

Similarly, historian Kerri K. Greenidge, an original signatory, was removed from the list after she tweeted that she does “not endorse” the Harpers letter, and had contacted the publication about a retraction.

Surgeon and scientist David Gorski tweeted: “I read the letter. It’s the same old whiny BS about ‘cancel culture’ from privileged people with large audiences complaining about facing criticism and consequences for their speech.  I am unimpressed.”

Meanwhile, John Boyne, author of “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas,” tweeted:  “I agree with this letter completely.  Self-appointed witch-finders hounding people for perceived moral slip-ups while trashing reputations, destroying careers, shouting down women & pursuing cancel culture is the opposite of free speech & reasoned debate.”

PUBLISHED TODAY IN VARIETY MAGAZINE

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Why 'Black Lives Matter' Will Fail!

by Les May

THE proximate factor in the murder of George Floyd is that the USA has militarised police forces; the notion of ‘policing by consent’ is absent. Trump does not want any international legal oversight of the actions of the the US military with regard to possible ‘war crimes’; should we be surprised that strong legal oversight of US police officers is resisted?

As of 30 June 2020 a total of 506 civilians were shot in the US, 105 of whom were black. In 2018, there were 996 fatal police shootings, and in 2019 this figure increased to 1,004.  For comparison the rate of shootings per million of the population was: black 31, hispanic, 23, white 13, other 4.  These figures speak for themselves.   By comparison the average number of fatal police shootings per year in England and Wales in the 15 year period 2004/5 to 2018/9 was less than 3 in a population of about 60,000,000, that is about 0.05 per million.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/319246/police-fatal-shootings-england-wales/

Faced with a fatality rate from police shooting which is 200 to 600 times higher than in the UK one might have thought that saving lives, black, brown and white, by demilitarising US police forces, would be central to any widespread response to the murder of George Floyd. Seemingly it isn’t.

Instead of attempting to attain measurable objectives like improving police training and making officers accountable every time they use a firearm, the emphasis is on ‘racism’, something for which there is no objective measure and having all the explanatory power of asking ‘how long is a piece of string?’ It’s a popular badge to display because it allows the wearer to get a warm glow of satisfaction from ‘calling out’ racists. If by chance the murder of George Floyd causes anyone to remember their humanity and dare to say they think all lives matter, you can call that racist too!

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/07/13/why-saying-all-lives-matter-opposite-black-lives-matter/87025190/

And if you have any time left over from combating racism you can always spend it ‘dismantling cisgender privilege and uplifting Black trans folk’ or ‘disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure’ or you could ‘dismantle patriarchal practice’ or even ‘foster a queer‐affirming network’. You will find the quotes by scrolling down the page at:

https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/

But if all this is too much for you then why not buy the tee-shirt for a mere $25* and get back to denouncing someone on Twitter?

https://blacklivesmatter.com/

Things are not much better in the UK. Check out the website at https://www.blacklivesmatter.uk/ and you will find the disclaimer, ‘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.’

In the UK the response to the murder of George Floyd has been to facilitate the rise of groups of ‘activists’ who think that symbolic gestures like tearing down statues actually achieves something which will improve the lives of real people, and the energising of self promoting academics.

The media are for now superficially supportive, but this is all too reminiscent of the #MeToo movement. Dr David Starkey has unwittingly managed to contribute a couple of ways of keeping BLM in the news, but eventually the media will move on to another story.  Unfortunately it won’t be the one about inequality in the UK and the US. Getting a few black faces in the boardroom won’t solve that.

*$25 would pay for one sixth of an operation to correct cleft palate, or all of an operation to correct ingrowing eyelashes plus 40 doses of antibiotic to treat an eye infection of children and adults in Africa.

https://smiletrain.org.uk/sightsavers uksmile train

https://www.sightsavers.org/

AUTHOR'S FOOTNOTE:

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.

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Who is now 'The Left' and what about the workers?

beware long angry rant

by Dave Douglass
  
David Douglass worked as a coalminer in the coalfields of Durham and South Yorkshire, and was NUM Branch Delegate for Hatfield Colliery from 1979.  He appears in the documentary The Miner's Campaign Tapes to discuss the role of the popular media in the strike of 1984–85. In 1994–95 he was Branch Secretary at Hatfield Main, but after the pit was privatised the NUM no longer had any recognition there.  Dave was also until the 12th, August 2019 a Friend of Freedom Press, the anarchist publisher.   
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SINCE Thatcher and Major decimated Britain's industrial base there has been a seismic change in 'left' perceptions, and who exactly speaks for 'the left'.  Consistently the working class itself, self-consciously advancing its own interests not only embraced the politics of social change, anti-capitalism, and socialism, it determined for itself the how and what of strategy, tactics and general social outlooks.  The middle class 'left' the liberals the paper sellers in general stood in awe at the mighty columns of organised labour and respected 'the workers' as people who knew what was best for the class but knew who the class was and how it thought.  All other struggles and oppressions and individual hardships suffered by this or that specific, sexism or racism as symptoms of capitalism not necessarily overthrown by the end of capitalism were nonetheless subsumed into the overall class struggle, that being the struggle of the working class itself.

Some tectonic plates however have shifted, and we find now on issue after issue 'the left' is not by enlarge represented by horny handed sons and daughters of labour, nor yet the mass of intellectual or technical white-collar workers.  Almost at every stage 'the left' now confronts the opinions and politics of the working class , by 'the working class'  I am not talking figuratively here, I mean literally the folk who labour by hand and by brain , the working class communities, though mostly these are now post-industrial centers of unemployment and social deprivation.  These are the heartland of the working-class traditions with conscious class struggle halls of fame.  The left now isn’t us, not these people, the left is now the army of middle-class liberal leftists who deem to speak on our behalf and know what’s best for us. In order to do this they have of course to confront our own attitudes and outlooks and conclusions, so consistently over the last twenty years 'the left' has defacto become 'anti the working class' at least how we express our opinions and outlooks and conclusions.  

Any collection of normal working-class folk expressing opposition to what currently passes as left politics, is likely to be designated 'far right' or any of the numerous 'isms' which separate us out from the shining paths of liberal agendas.   Often the aspiration of the 'left' is synonymous with that of the state itself, on issues such as remain or leave the EU, or racism, transism, censorship, safe spaces etc.  So often the 'left' has become the cheerleader of the state singing off the same hymn sheet and forgetting the most fundamental principle of class warfare, to keep an independent identity from the state and its interests. The bleating of the 'left' over social distancing, scooting folk out of the parks or beaches, crying for harsher and longer curfews and abandoning any notion of civil liberties and social freedoms.

The Trade Union movement now that the big militant industrial unions like the miners and shipyard and heavy engineering proletariat have gone and construction workers and car and others have paled into insignificance, it is the white collar and professional unions which dominate.  Not that the nature of the work union members do, or even our opinions matter too much.  The unions and the TUC are now dominated by middle class liberal agenda's, re-education classes, PC speak schools, and making policy fit the liberal middle class left agenda is now the dominant 'culture' of the TUC. it is doubtful how far workers are actually allowed to express their opinions on subject like Brexit with unions like UNITE and GMB swinging in behind leave agenda's despite their rank and file's opinions (RMT and ASLEF were exceptions).  The passing of anti-radical feminist policies denying the existence of women as a biological sex, even in the Women’s Commission of the TUC is a case in PC point.  You could cite almost any major issue over the last twenty years and the so-called left will have drawn the opposite conclusion to the bulk of the actual working class and particularly the traditional working class, postindustrial communities and regions.  Brexit comes to mind, but then also the degree of hysteria and anti-industrialization in response to climate change is another, the remain position of the PLP and NEC and host of bright young mainly southern middle class liberals in the Labour Party itself, Identity politics and the trans impositions, and oddly the lock down and attitudes to withdraw of civil liberties and rights . There is now a miss match between those who see themselves as the left leaders of the working class and the working class itself.  The attitude of the current left tends be one of 'fuck em' if they won’t do as we tell them, they are all Tory, racist, xenophobic, sexist, transphobic, fascists anyway.  They appear to find the working class and engaging with our politics at large, entirely superfluous. In one way, it was this contempt for the opinions of the working class communities which led to the surprising victory of the Tories, the belief that Brexit- committed communities in the rust belts who were the heartlands of Labour support would never vote Tory and could therefore be ignored.  Actually I was one who swore they would never vote Tory too I knew they were never going to vote for Labour on a remain anti-industry program, but the degree of their anger transcended for the space of time it took to put the cross on their deep hatred of the Tories over generations of struggles.  The left is now expert at painting the working class into corners charging us with racism, and empire loyalism monarchism and patriotism and other such absurdities.

The statue toppling hysteria sweeping the nation, no I understand not many are being knocked over by groups of Simon pure iconoclasts, but the fear that they will and the fear of being regarded as reactionary, or racist has panicked City Councils into the pre-emptively felling them themselves. Let’s be clear I have no attachment to any of the victim statues thus far and I doubt that I will shed any tears for any on the secret hit list. What rattles us is that someone else has come along and imposed these judgements upon us, that without public discussion and debate a group of unelected vigilantes can decide what is 'appropriate' for us to continue to view.  

Cities are being scoured.for offending masonry and brass and any obscure imperialist lackey can now pay the price. This is an attempt to sanitize history it is an attempt to make the nasty history go away and remove memory of it, when clearly we should be doing the opposite. They were erected within a social and political context and thankfully that context has now changed , the statue though is a reminder of social attitudes and politics of the past , as long as there is adequate information boards alongside there is no reason why they need to be removed.  The statue of Nelson in Trafalgar Square is a case in point, was Nelson a distinctive character of history who served the state and the cause of his country as he would have seen it at the time?  Obviously, nobody today including the ruling class would aspire to empire building and defense and colonialism which they did at the time, almost anyone with a brain cell knows this is a historical monument in a historical context.  Actually it is quite interesting from a social history point of view, walk round the base plinth and look at the images of the seafarers in the height of the battle, look at the racial composition of the crew and the ages of the lads running through bombardments with gun powder for the guns, there is a clear presence of black seamen and boys, volunteers earning their freedom from slavery serving 'their' country.  Statues and plaques are interesting platforms for discussing history and understanding it.  Following the logic of the liberal iconoclast would surely see the pyramids fall and the colosseum?   There are already moves afoot to move the statue of the emperor Constantine from York, it appears the guardians have suddenly found out Roman Society was based on slavery, there noo !   I think most of us knew that, it really doesn’t make us want to run through the country uprooting all the many Roman monuments and remains for fear we upset.  Well who exactly?

Churchill and the miners existed in mutual hatred and class warfare, as miners children right through the post war period and before we were raised on stories not so much of Goldilocks and three bears, but Churchill and Tonypandy, and 26, and his hatred toward us.  Was he due his distinctive Mohican grass haircut and spray-paint during the class war protest of a few years ago?  Of course, he was.  Was he a distinguished member of the British ruling class and a memorable character from history, of course he was.  A statue of him in the coalfields would be blown to kingdom come, but outside parliament is fine by me, of course when we the miners pass it, our tale our history in regard to him is somewhat different than the ones told by the tour guides (incidentally see:  'The Day Britain Said No' a more clear sighted history of Churchill) and dauntless any demonstration by the working class or radical movements will find expressions of class war on the statue and plinth, no problem here.

Can I warn against allowing a simple 'hit list' of statues and monuments and plaques as this will always favour those opposed to and rarely those who defend, not least because the defenders won’t know whether or not they need to do any defending or whether someone is attacking something they think is valuable. Can I also warn against taking at face value accusations against particular historic figures, these may well come down to poor research or a particular political or cultural or class interpretation.  Scratching around for something to link Tyneside and the river and the region with the Slave Trade in order that we too might be suitably contrite and consumed with self-guilt, on the day of the first, BLM demonstration in Newcastle,  Look North focused on Blackett Street.  Repeating a poorly researched piece in I think the Journal, talking about Newcastle and the slave trade, the author firstly couldn’t even spell Fredrick Douglass's name right ! But then went on to talk about Blackett having made his fortune in an offshoot of the slave trade by importing Rum.  A totally misguided image was thus conjured up enough that now the name Blackett Street is now on some hit lists. Let’s be clear Blackett was a Liverpudlian , Liverpool being certainly a center of the slave trade though also strongly working class opponent of it. Blackett had started as a young merchant apprentice to his Cousin who did make his fortune in slaves, but he himself didn’t. The fortune and business and wealth of the river, city and region was coal not slaves. Of course, at this time boy miners from six years old worked in the mines, bonded to the coal owners and not allowed to run away or be employed elsewhere on pain of imprisonment the blacklist and starvation. This is the wrong sort of slavery of course, since these children who happened to be sometimes white, if they found time between the 18 hour shifts to get bathed and eat and sleep.  Doubtless some middle-class liberal PC wit will tell us they had 'white privilege' although I’ve never discovered just what that was.  It’s almost certainly true Blackett would have received cases or barrels of rum from his cousin, all rum consumed worldwide was based on the slave trade , as was tea, and cotton and much else, but this wasn’t how fortunes were made on the Tyne or Newcastle which were NOT part of the slave trade other than living in a country and state which overall was.  We had no specific connection and the penitents ought to stop scraping the bottom of (rum) barrels to find one.

The problem with a witch hunt is once you start looking, the world is full of witches.  All Judeo-Christian traditions including Islam have condoned slavery.  Neither Mohamad or Jesus condemned it or banned it or spoke or instructed against it, the bible euphemistically refers to master’s 'servants' rather than the slaves they actually were.  Paul went further and instructed the slaves not to disobey their masters and work hard for them.  This means all religious statues, churches, temples in that tradition Islam, Judaism, and Christianity could be charged with complicity and excusing slavery worldwide and therefore should be removed and shut down.

Modern morality imposes strict age limitations on sexual relationships, courtship and marriage, all sorts of outrage and repudiation is heaped upon those who breach the law or the consensus, but history had no restrictions especially on kings and queens.  If the trend is to take modern values and mores back into ancient history regardless of context and understanding of past society, the censorship of past artifacts could be unlimited.  How many kings and queens have been under 16 or were not even teenagers when they married,?  How many preteens and even on occasion babies, were married?  The whole of European history as it is represented could be shut down.

So, buildings, paintings and statues and books and even the history of such times could be banned and removed from view or knowledge.  The young comrades of the Chinese Red Guard during the so called 'cultural revolution' in their enthusiasm for change, destroyed swathes of ancient Chinese heritage believing it was keeping China in the past. it wasn’t of course, as the miner’s slogan says 'the past we inherit the future we build'.

 We have to acknowledge that Britain was a long time Imperialist and colonialist state, it invaded other countries, it imposed empires it suppressed other cultures and peoples, throughout that long period of the 'empire of which the sun never set' statutes and heroes of the time were built and commemorated. If the attempt is to be allowed to remove all markers to these people and any attempt to see them in historic context then essentially any appreciation of history will be impossible. All statues of Victoria and all other imperial monarchs, generals, wars , must be removed, Lord Collinwood springs to mind, certainly no Mr Nice Guy to his crews. Baden Powell the founder of the scout movement, unsurprisingly an imperialist empire loyalist, was not put up for that reason, but for founding the international scouting movement.  Shock horror they now discover he condemned homosexuality, but society condemned homosexuality, it was highly illegal and poor souls rotten in jails, were beaten and murdered for the offence, that was the injustice of the period in which he lived. Also as man trying to found an organization of little boys would hardly be a public advocate of same sex relationships would he ?, pedophilia being synonymous with homosexuality in those days.

A controversial figure in history, not particular Mr Nice Guy might well still be important corner stones of history and events and worthy of marking. I would expect that if Adolf Hitler had been born on Pilgrim Street Newcastle a plaque at least would mark this fact, that would simply be a historic marker and not some celebration or badge of honour.

The miners have particular reason to remember our slavery and oppression and see in the character of Lord Londonderry in Durham City Centre a monument worthy of removal, but how would that serve our history?  That statue allows us to tell that story, and to demonstrate that the same history can have at least two versions and two sets of facts.  I use it often given on the stump lectures.

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Slavery, Fitzwilliam College & Dr. Starkey

VARSITY 3rd, July 2020*

IN an interview with Reasoned on Tuesday, the controversial historian Dr. David Starkey argued, “Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain would there?”

Since then Cambridge's Fitzwilliam College has announced it will discuss Dr David Starkey’s Honorary Fellowship at a Governing Body meeting on Wednesday, following widespread condemnation of “racist” comments by the historian.

Dr. Starkey has argued:  “You cannot decolonise the curriculum because you, Black Lives Matter, are wholly and entirely a product of white colonisation. You are not culturally Black Africans. You would die in seconds if you were dumped back in black Africa.”  He went on to say, “Of course, slavery was not the same as the Holocaust.”

In response Fitzwilliam College said:  “We support and promote freedom of speech in our academic community, but we have zero tolerance of racism. Dr David Starkey’s recent comments on slavery are indefensible.”

Varsity understands that it is “almost certain” that his fellowship will be revoked.

Meanwhile Fitzwilliam College has issued the following statement:
'Fitzwilliam College does not tolerate racism.

We support and promote freedom of speech in our academic community, but we have zero tolerance of racism. Dr David Starkey’s recent comments on slavery are indefensible.
Fitzwilliam was founded upon values of fairness and mutual respect and we are proud of the College’s inclusive and diverse membership.
The matter of Dr Starkey’s Honorary Fellowship will be considered by the Governing Body at its meeting next Wednesday.'

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*  Varsity is the independent newspaper for the University of Cambridge, established in its current form in 1947. In order to maintain our editorial independence, our newspaper and news website receives no funding from the University of Cambridge or its constituent Colleges.
We are therefore almost entirely reliant on advertising for funding, and during this unprecedented global crisis, we have a tough few weeks and months ahead.
In spite of this situation, we are going to look at inventive ways to look at serving our readership with digital content for the time being.
Therefore we are asking our readers, if they wish, to make a donation from as little as £1, to help with our running cost at least until we hopefully return to print on 2nd October 2020.
Many thanks, all of us here at Varsity would like to wish you, your friends, families and all of your loved ones a safe and healthy few months ahead.

Samuel Pepys on the Pox.

Is this what we have to look forward to tomorrow?

 

https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10158655600301383&id=784721382&set=a.10150629665531383&source=48

 

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Contact Tracing: Shoe Leather or Apps?

by Les May

IF WE are going to eliminate the virus which causes Covid 19 the only way to do it is to break the chain of transmission from one person to another. One effective way of doing this is to interview every infected person to find out who they have been in contact with, trace all the people named, contact them and determine if they are showing signs of infection. If they are, they too must be interviewed to determine their contacts, and so on. If they are not showing signs of infection they would be advised to ‘self isolate’, a.k.a. ‘go into quarantine’, and monitored daily. If they show symptoms during this period the business of contact tracing must start all over again.

The process of investigating identified cases and tracing contacts is well shown on the website of the US Center for Disease Control website, but the basic procedure is applicable to any public health system.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/downloads/php/contact-tracing-CDC-role-and-approach.pdf

A more detailed explanation is given at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_tracing#Steps_in_contact_tracing

This is what I call the ‘shoe leather’ approach to contact tracing. It has both advantages and disadvantages. Its major advantages are that it is ‘low tech’, a pencil and notebook is all that is needed, proactive in the sense that it is a public health initiative and does not rely on the infected person to initiate it, and it is infinitely adaptable, because the contact tracer can prompt the interviewee if necessary.

Its disadvantages are, it requires trained people to carry out the interviews, hence it is expensive and difficult to implement if the number of infections is high, it is relatively slow, the infected person may not remember all their contacts or fail to mention, for example, that they stood at a bus stop with other people.

It is in order to mitigate these disadvantages that technological solutions to the problem of contact tracing have been proposed. These necessarily involve smartphones. At which point one disadvantage of this approach becomes apparent, not everyone owns, or want to own, a smartphone. Nor would every smartphone owner want to allow it to be used in this way. This is not fatal to the enterprise; it only requires that about 60-70% of a population can or will allow this.

One of the things which may make people reluctant to allow their smartphone to be used for contact tracing is a concern for their personal privacy. There are however a number of points which people who have these concerns might like to consider. ‘Shoe leather’ contact tracing also carries risks to personal privacy, remember the pencil and notebook. Owning and carrying a smartphone poses even greater privacy risks. Users may not switch off, or know how to switch off, the GPS location facility on their phone. Even if they do, smartphones regularly ‘ping’ nearby mobile phone masts.  Both these can be used to obtain location data for a mobile phone owner.   Both may be misused for surveillance of individuals, but locations are too crude for contact tracing.

So called contact tracing ‘apps’ make use of Bluetooth hardware which is available on most smartphones.  This signal is of much lower power which restricts the detection range to other smartphones in the immediate vicinity, hence the term ‘proximity tracing’.

Proximity tracing applications send to, and collect from, other smartphones in the vicinity very short ‘nonsense’ messages which act as an identifier of the phone. These are changed frequently to prevent tracking by a third party.  This exchange only happens if the phones, and hence their owners, are sufficiently close, say less than 2 metres, for a sufficient length of time.  This assessment is carried out by the ‘app’, not the phone owner, and the identifier of the nearby phone is then logged. It is in measuring the strength of the Bluetooth signal and hence estimating the distance between phones and their owners, that ‘apps’ seem to run into trouble.

At this point all the logged data is on the user’s phone.  To be useful in alerting other smartphone users that they have been close enough, for long enough, to an infected individual to be considered a contact, some means must be found for bringing all logged identifiers together and alerting potential contacts. It is at this point that the potential for surveillance comes into play again.

The extreme surveillance by the state in China is well known, but other countries have implemented systems where there is a high risk of exposure to surveillance. The TraceTogether application used in Singapore requires users to share their contacts information with the authority which keeps a database that links identifiers to contact information. When a user tests positive, their phone sends all the identifiers it has logged over the past two weeks. The authority looks up the identifiers in its database, and contacts by phone or e-mail the people who may have been exposed to infection. This places a lot of information in the hands of the government.

For the potential for misuse of centralised information see:

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/knesset-debates-extending-shin-bet-coronavirus-surveillance-626942

For the potential misuse in some other countries see;

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/challenge-proximity-apps-covid-19-contact-tracing

Apple and Google’s proposal is a more decentralised system which uses a database accessible to the public.  When a user tests positive, they can upload their private identifiers to that public database.  The database can be hosted by a health authority or on a peer-to-peer network; as long as everyone can access it, the contact tracing system functions effectively.  Peer to peer networks do not have a centralised server.  All users are equally privileged.

How the decentralised system works is here:

https://www.blog.google/documents/57/Overview_of_COVID-19_Contact_Tracing_Using_BLE.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer

If I used a smartphone I would probably find this system acceptable from the privacy point of view if the code were ‘open source’ which would allow thousands of pairs of eyes all over the world to check it for potential privacy violations.

So far as I can ascertain the system which was proposed initially would be used in the UK was in the second rank so far as privacy is concerned; better than many, but still leaving something to be desired.  Now it seems to have been dropped altogether in favour of one using the applications interface (appi) proposed by Apple and Google, but will it be ‘open source’?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/06/30/track-trace-app-uk-google-apple-when-download/

The downside of relying on technology to alert us to something that has already happened to us is that we will be lulled into a false sense of security about our present behaviour.  Rather like the man who fell off the Empire State Building and as he passed each window shouted “So far so good”.  Meeting as few people outside our own household and keeping at least two metres away from those we do meet is still the best way of reducing transmission and eliminating the virus. 

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