No "Ordinary Bloke" , that Nigel

Making Plans for Nigel
A Beginner's Guide to Farage and UKIP,  by Harry Paterson
                                                                 Five Leaves Publications. £7.99

Caught by a UKIP party political broadcast on TV the other day, and unable to immediately lay my hand on the remote, I had to watch the Leader make his triumphal entry at an Essex motel and hear him say he was "Just an ordinary bloke"  before I could switch over to something -it could have been anything -less nauseating.

Ordinary bloke?!  He might play the part, as if some saloon bar con man in an Ealing  comedy was what 21st century Britain finds "ordinary",  but Nigel Farage's daddy was a stockbroker, Dulwich College was his school, and some masters there thought he showed fascist tendencies. But as Harry Paterson tells us, Farage's final school report said Dulwich "would be a poorer place without this boy's personality

Being an 'ordinary bloke', young Nigel followed father's footsteps into the City. joining  US commodities brokers Drexel Burnham Lambert on the London Metal Exchange. There followed stints with Credit Lyonnais, and others.  A friend from City days recalls the social life, in smoke-filled rooms, with a bunch of happy traders gathered around Farage.  "There'd always be a vey politically incorrect atmosphere that just relaxed everybody".

A Tory since his schooldays, Farage left the party in 1993 over the Maastricht treaty, and joined LSE professor Alan Sked in founding UKIP.    The partnership, and UKIP's interest in an educated criticism of European policies and treaties, was not to last. According to Sked, Farage was not unduly worried about the National Front and British National Party types who came into his Party, nor inhibited by political correctness when expressing himself, at least in private, about the darker-complexioned Britons whom he didn't want.

Not that UKIP has not found it useful to put the odd minority member on display.  Nor has Nigel Farage's negativity towards the European Union and its parliament prevented  him  and his chums going to Brussels, and doing well out of it. Though UKIP might have benefited from public disenchantment with "moneygrabbing" Westminster MPs, it seems UKIP's shameless  MEPs can leave them standing.

 As the Mirror's story headline put it on January 12, 2014, "UKIP leader Nigel Farage and Euro MPs pocket £800k in expenses - despite wanting UK to leave."   Farage put his wife on the payroll, collecting £30,000 a year from Brussels.  On April 15, 2014, the Telegraph reported that a complaint about Farage had been filed with the EU fraud office.  It said the UKIP leader had been collecting £16,000 a year towards his office at Bognor Regis which had been donated to the party by supporters.
Another generous source of funds has been a Greek businessman called Demetri Marchessini, whose views on women, rape, and gays would have been considered reactionary, even barbaric (he says there is no such thing as "date rape"), in the 19th Century, never mind the 21st. But as the ancient Romans use to say, money has no smell.

Some of the people whom UKIP has brought forward as candidates or even had elected are far from "ordinary", unless you're casting an edgy new political series of  Little Britain.  Harry Paterson reminds us of the woman who earnestly recommended the notorious 'Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion' as a guide to world events, and the man who blamed gay sex and marriage for the flooding in the south-west.

Godfrey Bloom, a former flatmate of Farage was elected UKIP MEP for Yorkshire and Humberside. Appointed to the European Parliament’s women’s rights committee, he told journalists: “No self-respecting small businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age.”

He complained that women did not clean behind the fridge, and amiably joked with his own party's women members at conference that they were all "sluts".  At the Oxford Union he interrupted a disabled student to mock his disability . Suspended from UKIP after remarks about aid to "Bongo Bongo land" - in fairness a phrase previously made famous by Tory Alan Clark - Bloom quit in October, 2014, complaining that UKIP had become too "politically correct".  That month he appeared as star speaker at the far-right Traditional Britain conference, though apparently without the colourful gags that had made his name.
http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/archive/from-godfrey-bloom-to-national-action-the-talking-shops-of-the-far-right

Alex Wood, the UKIP candidate for Blackhorse Vale in Somerset was suspended after a photograph was published of him appearing to give a Nazi salute, though he explained that he had been reaching for his girfriend's mobile phone while leaning over a pot plant. More recently his name was linked to an antisemitic tweet sent to journalist Owen Jones, though Wood says someone else has hacked his account. According to Yeovil wannabe Nazi Joshua Bonehill it was Wood who defecated in the aisle at Tesco's, an offence which others have attributed to Bonehill.  He says the pair of them had been drinking together, having been buddies until he discovered Wood was Jewish.  Perhaps the misfortunate young UKIP candidate has just been accident prone, and kept bad company.   

Exasperated that interviewers kept asking him about "the idiots in UKIP" (his words),  Farage  seems comfortable with his own prejudices, and contradictions, less so with anyone who points them out.  As his name suggests, he is of part Huguenot immigrant ancestry, and his second wife is German, yet he complains about hearing foreign languages spoken during a suburban train journey in London, and says he would not like a Romanian family living next door. Asked whether it would matter if they were another nationality, say German, Farage retorts "I think you know the difference".

The UKIP leader seems able to change his line on something like the NHS from one day to the next, but maybe policy is less important than gaining power,  and anyway the plebs are not supposed to ask. We may have caught a glimpse of the real Nigel Farage at the end of a TV debate when he complained the audience was too "left-wing", and accused the "left-wing" BBC -which has given him so much airspace denied other political figures -of picking an audience biased against him. 

Were he and his party ever to take power we might hear them take the same view of dissenting voters, but hopefully that remains an unlikely prospect, and meanwhile we  look forward to him making a similar complaint against the electorate in South Thanet.

Is Farage, then, a fascist?  Harry Paterson does not think so, and he gives short shift  to anyone who unthinkingly slaps on such a label. The writer does take note of UKIP's alliance with far Right parties in Europe, and more ominously, the way Britain First, better known for stunts outside mosques, has set itself up as UKIP's protector, threatening opponents and proclaiming on Facebook "UKIP at the Ballot Box, Britain First on the Streets".

Describing  Farage's politics as "Thatcherite but not Conservative", Paterson points out that many voters don't even see UKIP as right-wing, at the same time uncovering some of the right-wing thinking behind its 'simple' image. Pointing to some of the myths that have become widespread with the help of popular media, and which mainstream parties -Labour included -have gone along with, or failed to rebut, he also shows that the Left has to think beyond the next street protest, or its own internal wrangles, if it is to face its responsibility of raising awareness and really defeating the Right.      

To order online:
http://inpressbooks.co.uk/products/making-plans-for-nigel-a-beginner-s-guide-to-farage-and-ukip
  
 

Questions worth asking

'BLACKLISTED' is a new book out exposing an old practice which has blighted the lives of thousands of workers and their families in this country, and despite breaching laws about data protection, not to mention human rights, is still no doubt going on.

Having unfortunately missed a book launch in the House of Commons on March 12, I was glad that one of the authors, Dave Smith, was able to make it to the Greater London Association of Trade Union Councils' AGM a couple of days later, to talk about the book, and some of his own experiences, and sign copies. 

As well as getting writer's cramp inscribing messages in books, Dave has kept busy in other ways. He has been fighting his case against Carillion over blacklisting, which has ended with the company winning in the High Court because it appears, having been employed via an agency, Dave had no rights. Maybe he'll have to appeal to the European human rights court in Strasbourg, if the Tories don't win in May and take us out of the court (No Rights, please, we're British!?)

And on Wednesday night, Dave was lifted by police after a building workers' protest outside the Hilton hotel spilled over into Park Lane, stopping traffic. About forty workers were demonstrating  outside the Construction News Awards in the Hilton, over the sackings of workers who raised health and safety concerns on the Crossrail project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLuP7iYDAfg  

I remember a similar incident a couple of years ago when striking electricians resisting pay cuts blockaded white-tied contractors arriving for a dinner at a Park Lane hotel.  On that occasion the workers and their sound system blocked Park Lane traffic for some time, yet police seemed unsure what to do, and I don't recall any arrests being made. That episode is mentioned in the 'Blacklisted' book. This time it would seem the Met had their instructions, and had decided whom to nick.

Dave Smith is secretary of the Blacklist Support Group. And the book he has co-authored with Phil Chamberlain does not just tell the story of blacklisting by employers and employer-funded organisations, from the Economic League founded in 1919 to its successor Consulting Associations. It looks at the links with police infiltration and spying on trade unionists, environmental campaigners and others.

It is worth remembering that blacklisting and victimisation of workers who raised safety issues does not just hit these workers and their families. It also affects those left in work who fear for their jobs and decide to keep their mouths shut even if they see something which looks wrong. And of course, those workers and members of the public who suffer harm or injury as a result of bad practices or neglect.

Yet while the government has been cutting right back on HSE inspections, and the police are talking about services they may no longer be able to provide, we hear nothing about the cost of police surveillance and infiltration -including use of agent provocateurs -against members of the public and legitimate organisations such as trade unions. Who authorised such operations, and how many are still going on? 

The Blacklist Support Group are demanding a full public enquiry into blacklisting.

It so happened that last week I received an e-mail from the Labour Party, inviting me to "ask Ed" any questions I liked. So I asked whether Labour would launch an inquiry into blacklisting. I am used to chairpersons not seeing my hand at question time, and I was not expecting blacklisting to be an issue our politicians want to discuss, but I was pleasantly surprised to receive this reply - not signed by "Ed" (or anyone else), but I'm not a fan of personality cults, and it is e-mailed from "frontbench" and on record nevertheless.
  

Dear Mr Pottins,

Thank you for your email regarding blacklisting in the construction industry.

Trade unions are an important voice for people at work and in wider society, and have a central role to play in boosting training, pay and conditions for their members and helping Britain win the race to the top. At a time of rapid global economic change and a cost-of-living crisis at home, it is vital that the UK continues to have strong and modern trade unions as a genuine voice fighting against discrimination and abuse.

That is why the next Labour Government will launch a full inquiry into the disgraceful practice of blacklisting in the construction industry. This inquiry must be transparent and public to ensure the truth is set out. We should also learn the lessons of the actions on procurement taken by the Welsh Assembly Government with regards to blacklisting.

The choice at this election is between a failing plan and a better plan for working families. Only Labour understands that Britain only succeeds when working families succeed. That’s why Labour’s plan offers a better future: for living standards, for the next generation, and for the NHS. You can read more about Labour’s better plan in our Changing Britain Together booklet.

With kind regards,

On behalf of the Labour Party

 It's worth asking the questions like this, because you might get an answer, and if nothing else the politicians can't pretend no one is interested and they have not received any questions about the subject.

I won't be holding my breath waiting for Labour to hold a full public enquiry, but nor will we be holding our fire if Labour having got in fails to honour any such pledges it has made. And whatever public cynicism says about politicians and pre-election promises, you have a much better starting point for protest if the promises have been made.  

On Dave Smith v. Carillion case:


http://www.constructionenquirer.com/2012/01/18/carillion-confirms-worker-was-blacklisted/

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/no-hope-justice-blacklist-victim-5359392

A well-earned tribute, and a timely book

MICK ABBOTT, in white Justice for Pickets tee shirt, with Ricky Tomlinson at Westminster


WIGAN building worker Mick Abbott, a dedicated fighter against the blacklist, and for justice for the jailed Shrewsbury pickets, has been honoured with a memorial plaque at the Casa, the club started by locked out and victimised Liverpool dockers.

A plaque commemorating the late Michael Abbott has been unveiled at The Casa on Liverpool’s Hope Street.

The anti-blacklisting campaigner, who died, aged 74, last year after a battle with cancer, discovered files that showed he was blacklisted due to his trade union activities and his raising of concerns towards health and safety on construction sites. The plaque marks the first anniversary of his death.

Abbott discovered that the first file against him dated back to 1964 when he was working on the construction of the Fiddlers’ Ferry.

Upon this discovery, he fought for the rights of other men that had also been blacklisted from working on building sites.

Researcher and Secretary of the Shrewsbury 24 campaign, Eileen Turnball, told JMU Journalism: “We meet in The Casa every month at The Casa to discuss blacklisting in Liverpool. Michael Abbott left us in 2014, but the blacklisting in Liverpool has always been prevalent, but it mushroomed after the 1972 building workers strike.”

 http://jmu-journalism.org.uk/anti-blacklisting-campaigner-remembered/

This is a well-earned tribute.

This year will be forty years since the march from Wigan to London, of which Mick was one of the leaders, to demand the release of the Shrewsbury Two, trade unionists jailed on "conspiracy" charges after the 1972 building workers' strike.

The previous year I'd met some of the Wigan lads on a march against the 'Lump' system, called by UCATT, in Preston.  They had brought placards about the Shrewsbury pickets on to the march, and a few of us came down from Lancaster to join them. Mick Abbott and his pals were surprised to hear that I was working on the Heysham power station site, as they told me they'd been unable to get jobs there, having previously worked on Fiddlers' Ferry. (My lack of power station background might have been an advantage, as was the irregular way I was smuggled on site by an Irish acquaintance, bypassing the main contractor Taylor Woodrow's procedure).

Determined not to let the jailed pickets issue be dropped or forgotten, Mick was with Ricky Tomlinson when, after his release, he protested at the 1975 TUC over the continued detention of Des Warren. Ricky had been refused permission to speak from the platform, while right-wing bureaucrats were allowed to slag off the pickets. 

One of 12 siblings born in Kirkdale, Liverpool, Mick Abbott worked most of his life -when he could -in the building trade. He was a scaffolder, and a TGWU shop steward on several sites. Married with four kids, he was known as a warm, friendly man with a typically Scouse sense of humour, as well as a dedicated trade unionist.    

There were 400 people at his funeral. 

But even before their tributes, or the plaque at the Casa, Mick had been honoured, by being among more than 3,000 building workers on the blacklist. Documents he was able to obtain after the so-called Consulting Association was exposed refer to his involvement in the Fiddlers' Ferry strike and to his serious concerns over site safety.  

Des Warren, at his trial over picketing, famously said that there had been a real conspiracy - between the Tory government of the day, the building industry bosses, and the police. Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, one of the "gang and four" who went on to found the SDP,  refused to release the two pickets, so that as Ricky Tomlinson says, "We spent more time in jail under Labour than we had under the Conservatives".  A later Labour Home secretary, Jack Straw, told MPs that government documents concerning the Shrewsbury trial must be kept secret for reasons of "national security".

But then this Straw, recently in the news over his readiness to take remunerative retirement work, declined the chance to peek at his own file with the security services, when he was Home Secretary.  

Talking about the CA blacklist, Mick Abbott said last year; “My file goes back to 1964, and the last entry says that I rekindled the campaign for justice for the Shrewsbury picketers in 2006. They have been watching me all these years and passing this information around, blighting my life over four decades.”


The struggle for justice for the Shrewsbury pickets, demanding that secret files be opened so that the sentences can be squashed, the construction safety campaign - revealed to have also been subject to police spying, - and the battle against the blacklist, have been shown to be interlocking.


A new book about the blacklisting is being launched this week.

'Blacklisted: the secret war between big business and union activists' published by New Internationalist Magazine

http://newint.org/books/politics/blacklisted-secret-war/

Speakers:
Dave Smith , author
Phil Chamberlain , author
John McDonnell MP
Gail Cartmail Assistant General Secretary, Unite

Committee Room 15
Houses of Parliament
Westminster

Followed by drinks and book signing at the Red Lion, Whitehall.

Anyone coming to the event in the Commons is advised to come half an hour early to get through security procedure. 

see also:  http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/27/on-the-blacklist-building-firms-secret-information-on-workers

A Hero No Longer Forgotten

EDWARD RUSHTON (1756-1814)

IT is just a few years since I heard about Edward Rushton, Liverpool's blind poet, anti-slavery campaigner and radical revolutionary.

Born in John Street, Liverpool, in 1756, Edward Rushton was educated at Liverpool Free School to the age of 11, and then he was apprenticed to a shipping firm, sailing to the West Indies. It was thus that he saw the slave trade first-hand and also befriended a young African slave of his own age.
 
Rushton's adventures at sea were ended when a disease caught overseas caused him to go blind at the age of 19. But that was just the start of a new life, in which he did not forget what he had seen, nor fail to advance those who faced the same obstacles as himself. Rushton wrote poetry, campaigned against the press gangs and against black slavery, and supported the American War of Independence and the French Revolution.

He founded the worlds first school for the blind which, in the middle of the nineteenth century, moved to a building later occupied by the Merseyside Trade Union, Community and Unemployed Resource Centre.

I think it was while in Liverpool during the 1995-8 docks struggle that Bill Hunter told me he was writing something about Edward Rushton, a figure I'd never heard of before. Bill, whom I'd known since my youth, had been at times an engineering worker, shop steward and professional revolutionary, and was known and respected by the dockers. He was also a great strengthener to those younger Trotskyists who sent Gerry Healy packing.  In retirement, though not always in good health, Bill not only kept up his activities but broadened them, maintaining links with Latin American revolutionaries, and producng books on, among other things, his own life, the dockers' struggles and Edward Rushton.  Bill Hunter says: “I wrote this book on Edward Rushton in an attempt to rescue from obscurity, this uncompromising fighter for the common people, and to pay tribute to his indomitable spirit.”

http://www.billhunterweb.org.uk/books/forgottenhero.htm
Living History Library
Book ISBN: 0-9542077-0-X
Talking Book ISBN: 0-9542077-1-8
click on this icon to hear Rushton's 'Ode to a Robin'

Rushton's letter to Washington about the president's 'owning' of slaves
Chapter 12 - The Liverpool Seamen’s Revolt of 1775
Nerve review of the book

Bill Hunter is not the only one to have been inspired to write about Rushton, as it happens, historian Mike Royden appears to have beaten him to it, and you can read his account of Rushton's life and achievment here:
http://www.roydenhistory.co.uk/mrlhp/local/rushton/rushton.htm

Actor John Graham Davis seems to have been typecast as a copper for much of his TV appearnces, though recently promoted to be a judge for Peter Barlow's trial on Coronation Street. Whether he'll get to judge the real culprit we'll have to wait and see, but meantime John, whom I met in Leeds through Workers Aid for Bosnia, takes on a different kind of role this month. It's appropriate as he was the speaking voice in the Talking Book version of Forgotten Hero. Here's a message from John on Facebook:

This month marks the bi-centenary of Liverpool's great unsung radical, Edward Rushton. I've spent two years researching and writing about this extraordinary man, and I can't believe that he has remained a virtual secret for two hundred years. Come and help us in this archeological dig, and celebrate our forgotten hero... Blinded at seventeen as a result of helping kidnapped Africans below decks on a slave ship, Rushton educated himself by having a boy read to him during a long period of poverty. Eventually accepted into the liberal abolition circles dominated by university men such as Rathbone and Roscoe, the 'ordinary sailor' Rushton became one of the most intransigent opponents of slavery, suffered hostility within the slave trading city, lost two businesses through Admiralty boycotts and widespread public hostility and escaped an assassination attempt - only to persevere in his various campaigns, and to finally see the slave trade abolished in 1805.

To celebrate Rushton's life - and hopefully to help pull him out of his shameful anonymity - Turf Love and DaDaFest are collaborating on a number of events in Liverpool throughout November and the coming months. Here's what's lined up.... Exhibitions at the Victoria Museum and the National Slavery Museum, readings in libraries sponsored by UNISON, a commemorative inter-faith service in the Anglican Cathedral (Nov 22nd) and a staged reading of the new play by James Quinn and myself, Unsung. Please book free tickets below.

 All these things are in celebration of a remarkable man: radical reformer, determined slavery abolitionist, fighter against impressment (the press gang), defender of freedom of speech, campaigner, through his verse, against violence against women, supporter of the rights of the Irish against English colonial oppression, supporter of trade unions, of Polish independence from Czarism, of American independence from colonial rule, and of French freedom from autocracy. Rushton's poetry is also justly celebrated, and a new edition, featuring his passionate anti-slavery verse, is about to be published. Join us to celebrate this remarkable and shamefully neglected figure. Event details - http://www.dadafest.co.uk/the-festival/unsung/

I will be speaking about Edward Rushton and giving readings from his work on Wednesday Nov 12 at Toxteth Library (1.30-3) and Central Library (6.30-8pm). These readings are sponsored by UNISON, and are free. It would be really good to see you at some of these events.

John Graham Davies

Remembering for our future

REMEMBERED.  Blair Peach, above, and on union banner

It is thirty years since Margaret Thatcher's government unleahed the police on Britain's miners, and two films now going around, 'Pride' and 'Still the Enemy Within' recall that year of struggle. 

"The Enemy Within" was of course the expression Thatcher used about the miners, and  we now know she intended to use it about the miners and the Labour movement in a public speech if the IRA Brighton bomb had not caused a slight change of plans.  Seems ironic that Thatcher had been briefed this way about Neil Kinnock and his advisers, while Kinnock was listening to those who said the working class and its struggles were over.

http://the-enemy-within.org.uk/the-film-3/

Thatcher is dead, but the struggle against the forces she represented goes on. The exposure of how police, press and prime minister lied about Hillsborough has spurred the demand for truth about the Battle of Orgreave.   'Still the Enemey Within'  challenges us to look again at our past so that in the words of one miner, “we can still seek to do something about the future”. 

In 'Who Killed Blair Peach?', David Renton takes up the thread of politics, police brutality and lies from the past, not thirty but thirty five years ago, to be precise, St.George's Day, April 23, 1979, just over a week before the general election which brought Thatcher's Tory government in.
James Callaghan, former Home Secretary, and before that Parliamentary Adviser to the Police Federation, was still prime minister.  Merlyn Rees was Home Secretary.  In Southall, west London, an area whose large population of Asian origin had become used to fighting off racist attacks,  the far-right National Front had booked the town hall for a meeting.

People had tried petitioning the authorities to stop the National Front coming to Southall. On the Sunday, April 22,  5,000 people marched on Ealing town hall with a petition signed by 10,000 urging the local authority to deny the NF the use of council premises.  When the protesters encountered a bunch of young white racists shouting abuse, police arrested a young Asian lad who'd sworn back at the racists.

On Monday, April 23,  many shops and businesses on Southall High street closed for the afternoon,  and several factories in the area were also shut by workers walking out to join the protest against the fascists.  People thought they could block the streets to stop the NF reaching the town hall.  Anti-fascists, supporters of the Anti-Nazi League from other parts of London were coming to reinforce them.

But the police, several thousand of them, with armoured vehicles and including members of the Special Patrol Group, took control of the centre of Southall. 

Blair Peach, a New Zealander teaching in a special needs school in London's East End, elected president of the East London Teachers Association in 1978, a member of the Socialist Workers Party and active anti-racist, had gone to Southall that evening with a group of friends.   As the police forced a way through the crowd for a bus carrying the National Fronters, he found himself among demonstrators pushed into a side street, Beachcroft Avenue, police coming after them. This offered no chance to retreat much further or disperse, as it only led into  Orchard Avenue and then back onto the Broadway.

Several people saw Blair hit on the back of his head by  a policeman, in Orchard Avenue.  He slumped to the ground.  A family who found him outside their house, dazed and injured, took him inside, to lie on their sofa, and phoned for an ambulance.  In hospital Blair was taken into intensive care, but  despite surgery he died at 12.30 a,m on April 24, as a result of a fractured skull.

How Blair Peach was killed, and who by, is not a secret.  On the day before his funeral his body lay in state at the Dominion cinema in Southall, and thousands queued to pay their respects.  In the years since people have commemorated his life and campaigned for justice for Blair Peach.  Yet in these same years the deployment of fully-equipped riot police has become common, the police have acquired more gear and greater powers, and they have claimed more victims.

As Susan Matthews, the mother of injured student demonstrator Alfie Meadows, writes in an introduction to this pamphlet, "... when I spoke live to the BBC World at One on 10 December 2010 after a night spent waiting to discover whether emergency brain surgery had saved the life of my 20-year old son, I found myself speaking about the death of Blair Peach".
Yet an inquest on Blair Peach in May 1980 reached a verdict of "death by misadventure".

Dave Rention came into anti-racist politics in his youth, the days of Rock Against Racism, and was impressed by the Battle of Lewisham. But Dave is also a barrister, and I'd say a good one, judging by the way I saw him demolish the representatives of a major construction company, in a test blacklisting case.

Besides carefully assembling the facts about what happened in Southall with the help of witnesses, he skilfully takes apart that 1980 inquest.  First, there was the reluctance of the coroner. John Burton, to have a jury hear the case, something only obtained in the Court of Appeal. Then there was his blatant bias, shown by constantly interrupyimg those acting for Blair Peach's family or the Anti-Nazi League, and his later memo to the Home Office  claiming the National Front and the police were blameless, and Asian witnesses were unreliable.

Above all,  neither Burton  nor the police, whose representatives cross-examined witnesses, disclosed the police's own  Cass report,which would have backed what those witnesses were saying, and made nonsense of Burton's assertion that blaming police was an "extreme" theory, on a par with suggesting one of the demonstrators might have killed Peach to make him a martyr.

It was not until April, 2010,  that Commander Cass' report was published. The officer makes clear he had little sympathy for Blair Peach's suppoters, saying his funeral had been  "akin to a political demonstration with left-wing political elements most prominent". But his report goes on to describe how police  in vehicles had gone into Beachcroft Avenue in pursuit of demonstrators, how SPG officers had dismounted to attack people, and how a Professor Bowen who carrried out the initial post-mortem thought Peach might have been struck with a police radio.  Though inclined to be skeptical about civilian witnesses - more than a dozen of whom had seen police striking Blair Peach, Cass accepts that Mrs.Balwant Atwal had given an accurate account of what she saw.   He concluded "it is now obvious that the officers concerned were Special Patrol Group".

Perusing the reports by Commander Cass and his team,  Dave Renton shows how an Inspector Murray of the SPG had left his vehicle at exactly the spot where Mrs.Atwal saw an officer strike Blair Peach. This officer initially lied about  it, and he further troubled Cass  by  having had a row with TV crew further along the road.   "Officer E was not as cool as he should have been , and the strain was showing. ...he has not given a credible account of his movements, and it s disturbing."

 On June 1 , 1980, having resigned from the Metropolitan Police, Inspector Murray gave an interview to the Sunday Times, in which he referred to the Southall demonstrators as the "loony left". and said the protest had promised to be a "tasty one". Boasting how he  and  his mates had been able to act on their own initiative, he reckoned he could always spot the ringleaders and "nasties" in a crowd.

Nobody who knew Blair Peach would recognise anything nasty or violent about the quiet New Zealander who worked patiently with vulnerable children.

Whereas we can recognise  a recurrent pattern of nastiness such as led to Blair Peach's death and the dishonesty of the inquest. In 2009 Ian Tomlinson was struck down by an officer of the Territorial Support Group, the successor to the SPG, during the G20 protests. Though this time the inquest recorded a verdict of unlawful killing, the officer was acquitted. In the case of student Alfie Meadows, a story was put around that he was hit a lump of concrete thrown by a fellow protestor, though there was no evidence for this.

From kettling to declaring protests illegal, police seem to keep discovering new powers for themselves on top of those they are given by parliament. 

As for new toys, they have tasers, and in July the Met received its first water cannon.

Dave Rention, and Defend the Right to Protest, believe that demanding a new, proper inquest  into the death of Blair Peach is important, not only for upholding Blairs memory, and forestalling any attempts to befog the truth and revise history, but to raise awareness and consciousness about the threat to our rights today.

Who Killed Blair Peach by David Renton, is available for £2.60 (inc. post and packing) from Defend the Right to Protest.
http://www.defendtherighttoprotest.org/who-killed-blair-peach-buy-now/

Further reading
http://www.defendtherighttoprotest.org/

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/03/thatcher-labour-miners-enemy-within-brighton-bomb

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/apr/27/blair-peach-killed-police-met-report

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/david-renton/the-killing-of-blair-peach

Monopolising Marx and Engels, or censoring the Internet?

"REMOVING our work from the archive, Fred? In this case, Property really is Theft!

 
Marxists Internet Archive is an international project which, thanks to the efforts of a growing team of unpaid but dedicated volunteers, has made a wide range of socialist and progressive literature available on the internet, free of charge, translated into many languages,  and reaching around the world.


For students, and for militants wanting to educate themselves about the movement's history and ideas, it is, if you'll forgive a non-materialist expression, a godsend! The M.I.A. is not just non-profit but non-sectarian. Authors listed in their expanding collection range from Adorno and Althusser through to Zizek and Emil Zola. Having this material in electronic form makes it easier to peruse if you want to trace a subject or passage, but more important is having it available at all.

You could spend near a lifetime looking for some of the writings in bookshops or libraries, you would have to know what you were looking for, and still might not find it. Even in Britain the number of left-wing bookshops has declined, and now many public libraries are being closed, and those remaining are unlikely to see some obscure Marxist philosopher as meriting expenditure. That's  assuming the work in question is to be had.

For many years the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow supplied cheap paperback editions of classics like Lenin's What Is To Be Done  or  State and Revolution. When that source dried up its place was taken to some extent by Beijing. There used to be a bookshop in London's Chinatown where you could get them. It may have been harder to get this "export only" literature in China itself. In discussion with a Chinese academic at the time of Tiananmen Square she complimented fiends who had quoted Marx and Lenin, saying wryly that "In China we don't get  the chance to read that kind of thing. We don't even get to read Mao properly. Just that bloody little red book!"


A few years ago the M.I.A. comrades found their Chinese language site was being blocked, much as some governments used to jam radio stations they did not like.


Even in the heyday of Stalinist publishing it was selective of course, and some books were killed off with their writers. When I wanted to read Osip Piatnitsky's Memoirs of a Bolshevik a few years ago I had to go to the British Library. Not everyone has the time or access, or I'd have had to wait in a queue. Piatnitsky's book was published in English in 1935, but he was arrested two years later and executed in 1938, so the book remained out of print for decades, even after Piatnitsky was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.


Cecilia Bobrovskaya's Twenty Years in Underground Russia: Memoirs of a Rank-and-File Bolshevik (1934) was similarly unavailable, from the same publishers, but I was delighted to be able to download a copy from the Marxist Internet Archive..Both Piatnitsky and Bobrovska's books are enlightening as to history and good reads.

But of course for most people visiting the Marxist Internet Archive site the main interest will be accessing the works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The recent chaos in world capitalism has reportedly had even Wall Street brokers deciding they should read up what Marx said, and there is certainly some serious discussion among less pecunious groups like students. The availability of theoretical material which all can access is also relevant for those discussing the revival of independent working class education along the lines of the pre-war Plebs League, who had to manage with none of the electronic marvels we enjoy today.

But a spanner has been thrown into th works. When I first read this I thought it might be a hoax.

"Lawrence & Wishart, who hold the copyright for the Marx Engels Collected Works, have directed Marxists Internet Archive to delete all texts originating from MECW. Accordingly, from 30th April 2014, no material from MECW is available from marxists.org"

It's not a hoax. It's real. Lawrence and Wishart, the publishing house which used to be associated with the British Communist Party, is using copyright to prevent a left-wing initiative circulating writings by Marx and Engels internationally.

A friend in Ireland who saw my comment on Facebook has drawn my attention to a petition about this, which is gaining thousands of signatures. Lawrence and Wishart have also received letters deploring their action, from readers in many countries.

In response to such criticism, L&W say they are not the first publisher to take such actions. This is true. In the Middle Ages when the new media technology upsetting power and privilege was the invention of printing, the Church took quite draconian measures to curb unauthorised lay people getting hold of, nay even reading and studying, copies of the Bible.

Lest this comparison seems too extreme - after all L&W has not burned anyone at the stake, and does not even support a Russian Stalinist Inquisition nowadays - we should acknowledge a more recent case. The Socialist Workers' Party in the United States (no connection with its namesake in the UK) may have abandoned Trotskyism, but its publisher Pathfinder has been reluctant to give up its copyright on many of Leon Trotsky's writings. Business is business. Pathfinder's lawyers sent a warning letter to MIA about some of the work it was making available.

This brought protests at the time.
http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/admin/legal/disputes/pathfinder/support.htm
And I am surprised that Lawrence and Wishart should want to follow the precedent.

It is not as though Marx and Engels are struggling young writers whose right to earn a crust is being protected by their publishers, against some unscrupulous pirate publisher out to exploit them. The long-dead authors are not the beneficiaries of Lawrence and Wishart's proprietary hold on their work. And the Marxist Internet Archive is not a profit-making commerical competitor.

L&W say allowing the free use of  works over which they have copyright would be commercial "suicide",  They claim they are only a shoe-string operation these days, but maintaining their monopoly on Marx and Engels helps them publish more contemporary authors. I am not sure this argument stands up even from a business point of view. I doubt whether any library or institution with the money and intention to buy Marx and Engels' Collected Works at around £40 a volume these days is going to change its mind because you can get some of it on the internet.

Even more unlikely is that any worker or student from here to Tokyo or Timbuktu, deprived of an article they were hoping to find on the Marxist Internet Archive, will be able to rush out and buy the Collected Works, published by Lawrence and Wishart. I also doubt whether the London publisher has got around to producing editions in Arabic, Serbo-Croat or Tagalog, the sort of thing M.I.A. can be proud of doing. (My late friend and comrade Bongani Mkhungo alas died after a lifetime of toil and struggle in 2009, without fulfilling his ambition to translate the Communist Manifesto into Zulu, a language not yet on M.I.A.'s list).

I don't know whether the current writers cited by Lawrence and Wishart will be happy with their publisher using their names to justify it depriving others of work by Marx and Engels. But I think I can imagine what Marx and Engels might say. These great founders of scientific socialism had to make a living, but they lived for the movement, not off it, and longed for the chance to spread their ideas around the world and correspond with other thinkers and revolutionists. They would have leapt at the opportunities presented by the internet.

And in a case like this, when ownership of copyright is asserted to remove access to his work,  I can see Marx agreeing for once with Proudhon, that "Property is Theft"!.

What MIA says:

http://www.marxists.org/admin/legal/lw-response.html

L&W defends its position:

http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/collected_works_statement.html

And the Petition:

http://www.change.org/petitions/lawrence-wishart-no-copyright-for-marx-engels-collected-works

Imagine the Books She Might Yet Have Written

TWO items, one amusing, one sad. Let's start with the lighter side. It might be just paper talk, but Euan Blair, the son of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, reportedly fancies standing for Parliament himself, and is setting his sights on Bootle, on Merseyside, regarded as one of Labour's safest seats for the next general election.

Joe Benton, the sitting MP who has represented the constituency for 24 years, is 81, and though he has said he intends standing again in 2015, there is a move in the local party to deselect him and find a younger replacement. That sounds reasonable. But Euan Blair?

The Liverpool Echo reports there are rumours, though it also quotes an unnamed Labour source as saying: “There’s no way Labour is going to lose Bootle, but the idea of parachuting someone like Euan Blair in would be a disaster, a joke."

The joke comes as Blair senior has been boasting how proud he is of going to war on Iraq, and making a new claim to replace his old Weapons of Mass Destruction story, this time saying he saved Iraqis from a war like that in Syria.  Around Falluja, where people still suffering the effects of Blair and Bush's war have been fleeing bombardment by the Iraqi government they left, they may not be forthcoming with gratitude to Mr.Blair for saving them from anything.

I must admit I haven't followed young Euan's career until now.  It was not his fault who his Dad was, nor that he was sent to a posh school instead of the local comp. When it was reported that he'd been found lying drunk in Leicester Square, that was not as bad as his father's lying in office, though if he had not been at the posh boys' school he might have had the kind of mates who found him a cab home instead of running off leaving him there.

Anyway, years go by, and at 29, Euan has worked for merchant bankers Morgan Stanley, he is married, and he and the missus have moved into a six bedroom Georgian town house in Marylebone with a price tag of £3.6million. But as with his student days and bachelorhood, Mum Cherie the barrister and QC still helps out with housing. "The new Mrs Blair is not the Mrs Blair listed on the property deeds. Land Registry documents have revealed the six-bedroom Georgian town house in Marylebone is joint owned by Euan and his mother Cherie Blair".

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2554526/Newlywed-Euan-Blairs-new-3-6million-six-bedroom-marital-home-joint-owned-Mrs-Blair-MOTHER.html

If young Mr.Blair has opinions of his own about the Iraq war or anything else he seems to have kept them to himself so far, but there may have been a clue otherwise at the wedding.

The bride's step mother, weather woman Sian Lloyd, was not invited, and she guesses it was because she was against the war. 

Cherie Blair grew up in Waterloo just up the road from Bootle, and this is being touted as Euan's connection with the constituency, though local left-wingers wonder what he knows about conditions in the constituency or what experience he has campaigning on issues like jobs or housing. To be fair, Euan Blair did a bit of political work when he was in the States. For the Republicans.

Anyway, Labour's selection procedure is under way, and we'll know whom they have chosen by May 30.

And now to the sad news. Author Sue Townsend, best known as the creator of troubled teenager and sensitive though aspiring yuppie Adrian Mole, has died aged 68, on April 10, in her home town Leicester. She had been ill for some time, and had been dictating her work to her son after suffering blindness as a result of diabetes.

Sue Townsend came from a working class background and had known poverty first hand, and though she found her metier poking fun at the Thatcher years and after in her humorous writing, she was serious in her political views. In a 2009 Guardian interview with Alex Clark, she described herself as a "passionate socialist" who had no time for New Labour. "I support the memory and the history of the party and I consider that these lot are interlopers", she told Clark.

Her views on the Welfare State, and the way it was coming under attack without having yet fulfilled its purpose, were beautifully expressed in a set of essays, drawn both from experience and keen observation, and published as Mr.Bevan's Dream. (Chatto and Windus, Counterblasts, 1989) Her ideas were considered worthy of an intellectual analysis by Jurgen Willems, which can be read on line.  His study makes thoughtful reading, though for pleasure I'd re-read Sue Townsend's little book.

Sue Townsend was also a no-nonsense republican (not the kind Euan and his Dad worked with) and  in The Queen and I  she imagines Her Majesty transferred from Buck House to a council house in Leicester. Helen, a friend in the Labour Representation Committee who unlike me had the pleasure of meeting the author recalls:

 "I saw ST during an English day I had to go on during A Levels and she related the story of her own poverty i.e. having no money left due to non-arrival of giro and how she was reduced to asking the benefits officer if he could lend her a fiver - this is also what happpens to the fictional Queen in the Queen and I. It should be essential reading for the Osbornes of this world.

Also when I was an English  teaching assistant in Germany in the nineties I did the Adrian Mole books with my sixth formers and as well as laughing (just to prove Germans do have a sense of humour!), they seemed to get the image of Thatcherite Britain Sue Townsend created and could discuss how it could be changed. R.I.P. Sue.

In one of the Adrian Mole books - it may have been Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction - her eponymous hero writes to Tony Blair asking about a refund for having cancelled a holiday in Cyprus believing what the PM said about being in range of Iraqi missiles. That was Sue Townsend's way of bringing things down to earth, and it was a way of speaking a true word in jest.
    
Here is what she said in person, and not through her fictional character:

    'In the build-up to the Iraq war I lost the ability to read due to diabetic retinopathy. Instead I became a close listener. I heard Blair distort and manipulate the English language so that, like Humpty Dumpty in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, for him a word "means just what I choose it to mean".

    The phrase "weapons of mass destruction" was ubiquitous. You knew he was talking it up. He had been given a grain of sand by the intelligence services and didn't stop talking it up until it was a boulder, hurtling, Tom and Jerry-like, down a mountain, flattening everything in its path.

    I wept tears of shame, rage, and pity as British and American planes dropped their "strategic" bombs over Baghdad. I wondered if Blair was sitting on a sofa with his family watching shock and awe. Did they share a monster bag of Revels, and could he look his children in the eye when the transmission was over? I have never recovered from the shock of that night.

    I have been told my fixation with Blair and his involvement with the invasion of Iraq is unhealthy – "that was all back in the day", get over it, "move forward". But I can't. I am a professional cynic, or sceptic if you prefer, but deep inside I romanticised the qualities of this country and its government. We had a reputation in the world for the moderation of our political system, the fairness of our judiciary, and, whether entitled to or not, we marched up the hill and built a fortress on the moral high ground. That lies in ruins now.'

    Sue Townsend, writing in September 2010

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/apr/04/sue-townsend-on-new-labour

 (thanks to another LRC comrade, Mike Phipps, for bringing my attention to that).

I don't suppose it is a joke to the people of Bootle, least of all the local Labour Party members, if they should really find themselves saddled with Euan Blair as their candidate or MP.

Sadder still, we no longer have the genius who invented Adrian Mole, socialist and humourist Sue Townsend, who would have been able to write about it. 

__._,_.___

A Shameful Day's Work for All Souls College - and for Brent's Labour council

 PUBLIC ENTERPRISE wrecked by drive for private profit

WHAT sort of vandals tear down library shelving and dump the books out on the pavement in the rain? Security men hired by a property firm did this in Kensal Rise, west London, on Friday morning, demolishing the pop-up library which local residents had set up, and dumping the books, while putting up metal fencing around the closed library building which the owners want to "develop" for other use.
  
By the afternoon supporters of the Friends of Kensal Rise Library campaign had done what they could to save their book collection under tarpaulins, and were gathering for a protest rally against the library closure and the raid on their volunteer effort.

Recriminations were echoing back and forth between the property developers, the owners - who happen to be the prestigious All Souls College, Oxford (registered as a charity for the furtherance of knowledge) and Brent's Labour council (elected to serve the community and raise education, as part of the public's wellbeing). It was the council's decision to close six local libraries in Brent, Kensal Rise being one of them, which brought on local resistance, efforts to keep the library, and the setting up of the "pop up" library as a stop-gap measure maintaining a service and showing they were in earnest.  Campaigners have been pressing for a community library space in the proposed new development of the site by developer Andrew Gillick.
  .
Brent council claimed its library closures were not just cuts but part of  a 'library transformation' project, pointing to the opening of a new library as part of the expensive civic centre built in Wembley. Meanwhile people in Kensal Rise were advised to use the library in Willesden Green, a bus ride away, though this was hardly a satisfactory alternative for young chidren, or the elderly. It then turned out that Willesden Green library was also being closed for redevelopment.

The Kensal Rise campaigners attracted wide attention, holding literary events at the library with well-known writers, such as J.K.Eowlings and Alan Bennett, for both adults and children, before the building was closed. Some Labour councillors, as well members of the local party, opposed the council and sided with the library campaign.

Among those who contributed to the pop up library, posthumously, was my late friend Kyran Connolly. A former president of the National Union of Journalists(NUJ) and writer for encyclopedias, Kyran lived in Kensal Rise, and supported the library campaign, so relatives and friends thought it appropriate that some of his impressive book collection be donated to the library. I can imagine Kyran's explosive rage if he caught the property men dumping his books on the pavement!

It was a predecessor of his, Sir Hugh Gilzeal Reid, the first president of the NUJ, who had an important part over a century ago in starting Kensal Rise library. Sir Hugh, the son of a Scottish shoe-maker, was a self-educated man, who had to start work on a farm at the age of 8, before starting his rise to eminence. It was in 1900, that he invited a successful American writer, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, to come and stay at his house in Dollis Hill.

Hearing that Twain was staying locally, and knowing perhaps that he too, having started work young, had educated himself  in public libraries, Kensal Rise Library Committee thought he would be just the fellow to come and open their Public Reading Room, which was built on land given to Willesden Council by All Souls College Oxford under a restricted covenant that said it could only be used as a site for a free public reading room and library. Beside the brass plaque commemorating his visit, the library proudly held a photograph of Twain with local dignitaries.


Twain had expressed the hope that reading room would grow into a full library, and in 1904, Andrew Carnegie donated £3,000 so it could do just that. In more recent times the pleasant Victorian redbrick building was tastefully modernised inside, and it had become a favourite place for local children, for story groups, a relaxing place to read, or a quiet place to study and use computers.


In 1988 an earlier attempt to close Kensal Rise library was resisted by local people who occupied it overnight to prevent closure. They also won support from All Souls College and promises of free legal representation. The council backed off, realising the strength of opposition.

In May 2012 the council adopted a tougher line, staging a raid to empty the library of its contents, and also taking the Mark Twain plaque away. Meanwhile however the library campaigners won suppot from the Mark Twain institute in the United States, and had hoped that All Souls College too would honour its tradition by supporting the building's continued use for the community. 
   
This time it is different. Property developer Andrew Gillick appears to have the go ahead even though a previous planning application was dogged by reports of fraudulent e-mails submitted in support. Some of these appeared to come from other libraries, and people who could not be traced, others from an address the developer allegedly owned. Some people who were traced said their names and addresses had been used without permission and they actually opposed the development.An investigation has not yet been completed.

But in reply to questions from Brent Labour Party member Michael Calderbank, who is also a member of the left-wing Labour Representation Committee, Brent Council leader Mohammad Butt says police are not pursuing further investigation. 

Fake e-mails support developers

The latest news is that, while local councillors were expressing real or crocodile tears or sympathy for the angry Kensal Rise residents,  All Souls College, Oxford, which handed the management of the now defunct library Gillick, is blaming Brent council for the destruction of the beloved makeshift library.

In a letter seen by the Times, a planning enforcement officer threatened action after stating the build of the pop up library was in breach of planning control.
“I am of the opinion that this is unacceptable and it is my intention that enforcement action should be taken to remedy this breach of planning control,” the letter read.
A spokesperson for the college said: “The council asked us to do this a long time ago but we didn’t in the interest of the community.
“We waited till the last possible moment until we were legally obligated to vacate the property.”

 Owners blame council

All in all, a sad undignified spectacle for both the hallowed Oxford college and the once supposedly left-wing Brent Labour council, even if the latter seems to leave it to paid officers to lay down the line.  Versus a brave, ongoing struggle by "ordinary" members of the community determined to defend services and cultural amenities against the property profiteers. This is the reality, not David Cameron's increasingly forgotten myth of the "Big Society".

http://www.savekensalriselibrary.org/2011/01/21/local-author-maggie-gee-writes-about-kensal-rise-library/

http://wembleymatters.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/video-kensal-rise-rises-up-to-defend.html?spref=fb

http://wembleymatters.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/video-kensal-rise-rises-up-to-defend.html?spref=fb

VICTORIAN VALUES?  Mark Twain at opening ceremony for Kensal Rise library, 1900.

Black and Red

IT must be almost thirty years since I went to a lecture by the late Peter Fryer, and got into his book 'Staying Power; the History of Black People in Britain'. That was how I learned about the Black abolitionist, Olaudah Equiano, and the Black Chartist William Cuffay.


We'd done the Chartists at school, and of course we must also have learned something about the abolitonists and William Wilberforce. But I could not remember any mention  that there were black people involved in these contributions to our history.


I might mention that not long before I went to that Peter Fryer lecture I overheard a conversation between two members of the Transport and General Workers Union, one of whom worked at Transport House, about a union recruitment leaflet that had been produced but was considered unsuitable and sent back by an officer for one of the regions.


The leaflet had used a photograph of some smiling women workers, who happened to be union office staff, to say something like "This is the union for us!" Only it seemed that before a particular region of the TGWU would use it their batch had to be reprinted with the photograph altered, so that two of the women had their complexions lightened and a third, evidently too dark,  was airbrushed out altogether.
 
I heard the sisters concerned saw what had been done, and were not too happy about it. 


Well, we have come a long way since then, or so we like to think. Prejudice of that sort is far less common nowadays, certinly less admitted.. The TGWU had a black general secretary, Jamaican-born Bill Morris, even if he did end up as Baron Morris of Handsworth.  Local authorities as well as the TUC hold a "Black History Month", though its effectiveness may vary.

If there seemed moves afoot to reverse things, they were vigilently opposed. Dalston has got its new CLR James Library, and Equiano and Mary Seacole remain in the national curriculum. Quite rightly so. This is not about "political correctness" nor simply giving black youngsters positive "role models", but teaching history with nowt left out. Perhaps Ken Loach's "Spirit of '45" may be forgiven for having none other than white faces (though I know friends disagree) , but if that is the way we picture all our labour movement history we are as bad as those union officials who wanted black faces whitened out of their leaflets.

So lets welcome two fascinating books published this year which contribute to putting things right.
First is 'William Cuffay, The Life and Times of a Chartist Leader' by Martin Hoyles, which starts by telling us about slavery on the island of St.Kitts in the West Indies, which is where William Cuffay's grandfather was taken as a slave from Africa. As a historian tells us "Given the size of St.Kitts and Nevis, the wealth generated by their planters during the latter half of thee eighteenth century was extremely impressive. But it was made only at the cost of untold human suffering."

 One way slaves could escape to freedom, despite its rough conditions, was the Navy, and thus it was that William Cuffay was born in Chatham, where his father had landed and obtained work in the dockyard. William started as an apprentice tailor, a trade in which perhaps his deformed legs and stunted growth, the result of childhood rickets, were less of an obstacle. He moved to London, where in 1827 he married Mary Ann Marvell, a straw hat maker, at the now fashionable St.James', Picadilly, and they lived in the now less fashionable Lambeth, south London.

Attempting to defend their wages and conditions by organising at work, for mutual help and strike action, the journeymen tailors were among those who formed the backbone of the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union. When this did not suffice, the tailors, and Cuffay among them, turned to the fight for political rights. This coalesce around the Six Points of the People's Charter.

Holding meetings around the country, gathering signatures for their mass petition, organising women as well as men (though as yet they only demanded votes for men), the Chartists' slogan was "Peaceably if we can, forcibly if we may". In November 1839 after the Chartists in South Wales attempted to free arrested comrades and clashed with armed troops in Newport, it was William Cuffay who moved the resolution at a meeting of the Metropolitan Tailors Charter Association in London, blaming the government's "injustice and cruelty" for provoking insurrection, and declaring "We therefore do most deeply feel for and sympathise with our brethren in Wales, and with Mr.Frost in particular, and further, we pledge ourselves to use every exertion to save them."

John Frost, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones were sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered, but after a national outcry this was commuted to transportation for life. William Cuffay continued his activity, popular as a speaker for his wit and humour, He sang at Chartist concerts and even acted in plays. He worked with Feargus O'Connor on his Land Plan, by which working people could acquire cottages and smallholdings. He helped plan the renewed petition and mass demonstrations of 1848. But then as some Chartists prepared to go underground, and the government's spies set about trying to catch them, Cuffay was entrapped in a supposed plot, arrested, and clapped in jail to await trial. A portrait of him in Newgate shows him grinning in good-humoured defiance, as though to say "You think you can stop us this way?!" His wife Mary collected for the defence fund, and was banned from the court for protesting.  

Transported to Van Diemens Land (Tasmania), Cuffay was fortunate enough to be freed to work at his trade there, and Mary managed to raise support to go out and join him. The population of Tasmania, half of whom themselves freed convicts, were ready for Cuffay's ideas, and he was able to play his part in establishing trade unions, ending the use of convict labour for docks and public works, and repealing the oppressive Master and Servants Act. Still addressing big public meetings in his 'Seventies, Cuffay died in the workhouse in 1870, aged 82. Obituaries credited his contribution to the cause of  workers' freedom, and thanks to people like Cuffay, Chartism has been called Britain's most successful export. Tasmanians gained universal male suffrage by 1900 and enfranchised women in 1903 - well ahead of Britain.

 Martin Hoyles' tribute to Cuffay, true to its sub-title, not only recounts his life for inspiration, but fully describes his times, the hardships and the happier side, and of course the Chartist movement, with a fantastic wealth of illustrations. If you want to defend your rights you ought to know to whom you owe them. Read this book, and give it to your children.

Chris Braithwaite, whose life is the subject of the latest Socialist History Society publication, came to Britain from Barbados, having first served in the Merchant Navy during the First World War. He married an English woman, Edna,and settled in the East End of London,  Obtaining work with the Shipping Federation, he joined the National Union of Seamen.

Havelock Wilson, the notoriously right-wing leader of that union, who had organised patriotic demonstrations against other trade unionists during the war, was not interested in the conditions of coloured and colonial seafarers, nor would he give Braithwaite the chance to improve things. He preferred a deal with the shipowners not unlike that which led to Apartheid in South Africa, by maintaining a divided workforce.

Strange as it may seem, Chris Braithwaite was to get a better hearing from Nancy Cunard, whose anti-racist sympathies and interest in African roots (she married an American jazz musician) set her on the opposite side to her wealthy shipowning family. Documents show MI5 took an interest in her friendship with the Indian V.K.Menon, and we know they were also watching Braithwaite.

With some experience of militant trade unionism and black struggle in the United States, the Bajan joined the Communist Party. To conceal his political acvtivity from his employers he always used the name "Chris Jones", which is how most people knew him. The Comintern attached great importance to seafarers and their struggles, holding an international conference of them, and during the so-called Third Period of "class against class" the Red International of Labour Unions proposed to set up a rival seafarers' union in Britain, an idea which must have had some appeal not only for colonial seafarers like Braithwaite but for those who saw the NUS expelled from the TUC after 1926. However Harry Politt resisted the idea as particularly impractical during a trade recession.

What did emerge in 1929 however was the Seamen's Minority Movement, linked with the National Minority Movement spanning other unions, mobilised for militant left-wing policies. A committee of "militant coloured seamen" was formed by the SMM, and an international seamen's club opened in Poplar. A "Chris Jones" chaired the committee's second meeting,and a Trinidadian called Jim Hedley became secretary. Nor did this Chris Jones confine his work to organising seamen. In 1932 he helped organise a demonstration against the imprisonment of the National Unemployed Workers Movement leader Wal Hannington.

 The rise of Hitler to power brought a new change in the politics of the Soviet leadership. As it encouraged popular front policies and sought improved relations with Britain and France, the struggles of colonial peoples against these powers were relegated. Not only that, but Mussolini's Italy, the original fascism, seems to have been seen as a lesser evil, and at a time when the brutal invasion of Ethiopia brought calls for League of Nations sanctions, Moscow decided it should not impede trading, including oil, with Italy.

Chris Braithwaite and George Padmore broke with the Communist Party and its fronts, and joined the Trotskyist C.L.R. James to set up an International African Friends of Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was called at this time). Braithwaite also chaired the first conference of the Colonial Seamen's Association, which brought together black, Chinese, Arab and Indian seafarers,

The political party with which Braithwaite and Padmore came closer in the late 1930s was the Independent Labour Party(ILP), though having got their fingers burnt with the CP they hesitated to trust another predominantly white left party. It might be interesting to know what they thought of the ILP leader Maxton's neutralism when the issue of Ethiopia and sanctions came up. Braithwaite's colonial seamen decided to launch their own, workers' sanctions, interfering with strategic cargos which might go to help Mussolini's war.

As 'Chris Jones', the black seafarer did speak alongside Bob Edwards of the ILP when the latter, back from aiding the POUM in Spain, addressed thousands at a Glasgow rally. He also spoke at dock gate meetings in London, as the anarchist Matt Kavanagh recalled. He worked with the ILP writer Ethel Mannin who has him little disguised speaking alongside anarchist Emma Goldman in her satirical 1946 novel Comrade, O Comrade.

In opening up the story of 'Chris Jones' or Chris Braithwaite, author Christian Hogsbjerg has also opened up a largely otherwise forgotten chapter, still with interesting questions, in the history of the British Left. The Socialist History Society is to be congratulated on bringing it out.

William Cuffay, The Life and Times of a Chartist Leader   
 by Martin Hoyle, Hansib  £9.99

Chris Braithwaite, Mariner, Renegade and Castaway,
 by Christian Hogsbjerg, Socialist History Society, in association with Redwords  £4



   

Five Leaves Opens Shop

January 15, 2014, will be the twentieth anniversary of the attack by a gang of fascists on the Mushroom Bookshop in Nottingham. They knocked down shelves, scattered books and assaulted staff members. Among the shop's staff who stood up to the thugs was Scots-born Ross Bradshaw.  More than two dozen Nazis from several towns took part in the attack, and many were soon arrested. Among them was a police inspector's son.

About 1,000 people marched through Nottingham in solidarity with the Mushroom Books workers. Mushroom survived the attack by fascists, and stayed in business, a centre both for readers and left-wing activists, though cynics complained that more visitors accepted buckshee tea and coffee than spent money on books. Like many bookshops around the country, Mushroom did not survive changing times and a decline in the trade, which together with a director's illness and disputes over ownership led to it entering liquidation in 2000.

By then Ross Bradshaw had already taken a job with the council, and taken up publishing, which he'd first tried at Mushroom with a book on allotments which still sells. Five Leaves still boasts that it's the world's biggest publisher of books about allotments, but that's along with crime fiction, poetry, books by regional authors, social and Jewish interest.


Another venture while still publishing as Mushroom Books was "You Are, Aren't You?", a book of poems by Michael Rosen published jointly with the Jewish Socialists' Group(JSG). More recent books under the Five Leaves imprint included Battle for the East End, by JSG member David Rosenberg, which was launched with others on related themes as part of the event commemorating the Battle of Cable Street.

There were also well-attended launch events in London for Mike Gerber's labour of love Jazz Jews (2010),  and last year for From Revolution to Repression, an anthology of Soviet Yiddish writing in translation.

But notwithstanding its expansion and bold forays into the capital, Five Leaves remains Nottingham based and focused on the region. Besides publishing, the company jointly organises Lowdham Book Festival in Nottinghamshire and sponsors an annual fiction prize for MA students at Nottingham Trent University. But tomorrow publisher Ross Bradshaw, who started his career and political perspectives like Sir Alex Ferguson, as an engineering apprentice, though with slightly different results, return to his love of selling books direct to the customer.

  Five Leaves is opening a new bookshop in Nottingham.  
   It is at 14a Long Row, in the city centre.

Ross says “When I came to Nottingham in the late 70s there were several independent bookshops and in subsequent years various chains were represented, but for many years there has only been Waterstones in the city centre. It's a great shop but there's plenty room for an independent as well.”

The new bookshop will specialise in history, politics and landscape; fiction and poetry; lesbian and gay books; and international writing, with an emphasis on independent publishers. Initial events will include a memorial evening for the Nobel Literature Prize winner Seamus Heaney and a speaker from the peace movement in Israel.

By sheer coincidence, tomorrow happens to be the 75th anniversary of the Nazi pogrom and state-organised orgy of destruction and violence which became known as Kristallnacht. Of that I will have more to say shortly. Meanwhile, what better way to mark it than by the creative act of opening a bookshop! And just in time for folk to buy their Chanukah and Christmas presents!

http://fiveleavespublications.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/five-leaves-is-opening-bookshop-in.html


http://fiveleavespublications.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/twelve-questions-about-bookshop.html

http://www.fiveleaves.co.uk/