Searching for Justice for Jeremiah Duggan

JEREMIAH DUGGAN.  Unlikely 'suicide'.  Normally cheerful student 'phoned home in terror before meeting his death at Wiesbaden.


A LONDON family's long search for truth and justice for the death of their son in Germany reached Barnet Coroner's Court this week, and reports of the case have brought to public notice the sinister international cult headed by Lyndon LaRouche, little known in Britain, but long notorious in the United States, where it began, before extending its activity to continental Europe.

Jeremiah Duggan was just 22, and studying at the Sorbonne in Paris in 2003 when, worried over the prospect of war on Iraq, he bought a paper called Nouvelle Solidarite, and was invited by the seller to attend a youth anti-war conference being organised in Wiesbaden, Germany, by the Schiller Institute. 
What he was not to know was that Nouvelle Solidarite is produced by Lyndon LaRouche's supporters  in France, and the cultural-sounding Institute (Friedrich Schiller was an 18th century philosopher and poet) was founded by LaRouche's German wife, Helga Zepp LaRouche.

At the conference, Jeremiah apparently disagreed with some of the things he heard, - some of the speakers seemed to blame Jews for the war - and he said so. But he agreed to attend a cadre school to continue discussion. He was not to make it.  His body was found by the side of an autobahn on the outskirts of town. German police accepted that he had run out into the road, and been struck by two vehicles, and recorded it as "a suicide by means of a traffic accident".

The Duggan family and friends have never accepted this explanation. For one thing they say Jeremiah was a cheerful, healthy young man, happy with his studies and his girlfriend, and had no reason to end his life in the horrible way described. For another, his mother Erica Duggan received a 'phone call from Jeremiah on the night that he died, saying he was in serious trouble and sounding terrified. In May 2010 the High Court ordered a fresh UK inquest after judges said evidence of possible foul play must be investigated.

At the new inquest in Barnet, as well as hearing Erica Duggan retell that 'phone call, the court heard from Paul Canning, a forensic photographic expert Paul Canning who said that after examining pictures from the scene, "the only possible conclusion is that it must have been a set-up".

Mr Canning, who has over a decade of experience working with the Metropolitan Police, said there was no evidence of contact between Mr Duggan and two vehicles - a Peugeot 406 and a Volkswagen Golf - which the German investigation found had been involved in his death.

He said: "After making a lengthy examination of the photographs I conclude that, based on my experience of attending hundreds of fatal and very serious road traffic accidents, that in examining the scene of the accident, the road, Jeremiah's body and both vehicles involved, I could find no traces of blood, hair, tissue or clothing on the vehicles or road, except round the immediate vicinity of Jeremiah's body."

He added that both vehicles and Mr Duggan appeared to have traces of a wet sandy substance which was not present at the scene and therefore placed them elsewhere before the alleged accident - perhaps a builders yard or quarry. .

He said the damage to the Peugeot, which is claimed to have hit Mr Duggan, appeared to have been caused by a "heavy metallic instrument" or possibly another car rather than a person. He described damage on the Volkswagen, which is said to have run Mr Duggan over after he jumped out and hit the Peugeot, as "inconsistent".

Coroner for north London Andrew Walker asked: "Are you saying the damage to the vehicles is unlikely to have been caused by an impact with a person?"

"Yes sir, in my opinion," Mr Canning replied.

"Is it likely that damage to the vehicle has been placed there?"

"After looking at the photographs the only possible conclusion I could find was that it was placed there and further, that it looks like pre-existing damage that was undertaken prior to this incident."

"Are you saying this was a constructed road traffic collision?"

"It certainly looks that way, sir."

Written evidence from forensic pathologists said Mr Duggan’s body had not suffered from drag marks or head injuries consistent with being run over by a car, the inquest heard.

After Mr Duggan’s death on March 27, 2003, a witness told the family of the chaotic scenes at the LaRouche conference, the court heard. Jeremiah's father Hugh Duggan said: “All their members, 40 to 50 of them, were gathered into a room and addressed by Helga LaRouche, the wife of LaRouche, at this stage she said, ‘Jeremiah Duggan is dead. We believe he was a spy sent to harm the organisation and now we want you to pack up and go home right away. Don’t talk among yourselves about this and don’t talk to others.”

That summer Hugh Duggan arranged a meeting with the German ambassador in London to discuss his concerns over the far-right group’s involvement in the lead up to his son’s death, the inquest heard. Mr Duggan told the court: “The first thing he (the German ambassador) said was, ‘We know all about LaRouche. We have been after him for years’.”

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/death-of-british-student-jeremiah-duggan-killed-after-attending-farright-cult-must-have-been-a-set-up-10261696.html

If the authorities in Germany knew all about LaRouche they, and particularly the police in the State of Hesse where the Wiesbaden institute is situated,  seem to have been quick to accept the "suicide" story which the LaRouchites proffered. British police have been slow to follow up the call for a new investigation, saying they were awaiting evidence from Germany. Most if not all the efforts to investigate what happened have been pursued by the Duggan family themselves.

I regret to say I never met young Jeremiah Duggan, nor knew the family, but as it happens I did know his grandfather Hans Freund, who died in 2007. Having left Germany as a refugee from the Nazis, Hans joined up to fight them in World War II, taking part in the campaigns in north Africa and in a daring prisoner of war escape. Later he was involved as a Communist Party member in the underground struggle against the Apartheid regime in South Africa, a cause he continued to support after coming to Britain. Best-known and loved in London as a hearty Jewish choral singer, Hans also joined the Jewish Socialists' Group, which was how I came to know him.  A good-humoured, even jovial man, modest about his own role and background, but a source of strength and encouragement. 
http://www.sacsobu.org/memoriam09.html#3
http://www.ajr.org.uk/journalpdf/1990_april.pdf

I'm sure Jerry Duggan must have taken courage, intelligence and good humour from both the Jewish and Irish sides of his family.

Like Jeremiah Duggan, and I suppose many other people, I started my acquaintance and active involvement in politics through buying a paper off someone in the street, though thankfully it was not Nouvelle Solidarite but Newsletter, the paper of the Socialist Labour League, when I was 17, and though neither still exist I'm alive to tell the tale.


From 1976-8 I was employed as a poorly-paid hack on the daily News Line.  One morning my colleague the late Jack Gale took a 'phone call, and hand over the mouthpiece, turned to ask me whether the reformist party in Sweden was called the Social Democrats? Which I confirmed.
Jack had taken a call from someone saying they spoke for the "Swedish Labour Party", asking for information about a former British soldier who had turned up in Sweden. This was a man who had testified about torture used by British forces on prisoners in South Yemen. But I also recognised the name "Swedish Labour Party" as one used by an organisation which Lyndon LaRouche had established in Sweden. We did not ring them back with any information.

Lyndon LaRouche, often using the name "Lyn Marcus", had been among a group of left-wing dissidents around the US Socialist Workers Party, America's original Trotskyist organisation, who opposed its leadership and made contact with the Socialist Labour League, led by Gerry Healy in Britain.  Unable to remain long in any group that he was not leading, LaRouche/Marcus (Tim Wohlforth recalls his "gargantuan ego") soon broke with the rest and set off on his own direction.  

Still posing as some kind of left-wing revolutionary, setting up the National Caucus of Labor Committees, while concentrating on recruiting students, LaRouche began to systematically inculcate violent hostility to other groups among his followers, going well beyond ordinary sectarianism. They turned to organised violence and thuggery.  

Armed with chains, bats, and martial-art nunchuk sticks, NCLC members assaulted Communist Party, SWP, and Progressive Labor Party members and Black Power activists, on the streets and during meetings. At least 60 assaults were reported. The operation ended when police arrested several of LaRouche's followers; there were no convictions, and LaRouche maintained they had acted in self-defense. Journalist and LaRouche expert Dennis King writes that the FBI may have tried to aggravate the strife, using measures such as anonymous mailings, to keep the groups at each other's throats.^[45][46


http://www.lyndonlarouche.org/newamericanfascism.htm

Opponents doubted whether LaRouche's organisation could operate in the way it did without some complicity from state forces. Although he did serve a prison sentence for fraud, LaRouche seems to have led a charmed life, and his organisation and publications have had no shortage of funds or prestigious contacts as they expanded their activities to Europe. Former members describe the organisation as functioning like a cult, while the LaRouchite Executive Intelligence Review, circulating among business and political circles, combines often well-informed analysis with bold conspiracy theory.

Among other things the LaRouche movement has claimed the British Royal Family heads a global drug smuggling racket, the Tavistock Institute in London is a British intelligence front for brainwashing subjects, and that Jessica Duggan's quest for truth about her son's death is part of a conspiracy orchestrated by the British Foreign Office.  

Back in 1977, when we got that 'phone call from the LaRouchites to News Line, little or nothing had been published about them in Britain. But there had been plenty in the left-wing press in the United States, including The Bulletin published by our co-thinkers in the US Workers League. They were also starting to get attention in Germany. Thinking we ought to publish something about this organisation and its expansion to Europe, I gathered what material we had and wrote an article.


To my surprise, our editor Alex Mitchell, who was away much of the time working on a project and series of articles called Security and the Fourth International, assisted by Dave North of the Workers League (nowadays Socialist Equality Party), came into the office looking worried, after a meeting with Gerry Healy, and said there was no way we could publish anything about Lyndon LaRouche and his organisation. By way of an explanation, he remarked that the last thing we wanted was some "LaRouchite nutter throwing a bomb into the printshop".

That made me feel I'd been irresponsible, instead of conscientious, and I did not argue. All the same, and though it was not the only time I was told something could not go in the paper, there was something odd about this. Much of what I had written had come straight from our US comrades. What's more, as part of the Security and the Fourth International campaign we had not only accused the Socialist Workers Party in the United States of harbouring FBI agents, which it did, but implied that it had a hand in the murder of Trotskyists, including Tom Henehan in the United States and even a Sri Lankan comrade. If all this was true - and I never questioned it - we were being brave and bold in publishing it, but apparently could not do the same with what we knew about the LaRouchite movement.

Anyway, my article never saw the light of day, and within a year -albeit for other reasons - I was exiled from the News Line office, ostensibly to cover the firefighters' strike in the West Midlands, and then sacked by Gerry Healy.  Thus ended my brief career as a professional journalist.

In the Autumn of 1985, Gerry Healy exited the Clapham centre in somewhat greater haste than I had, and public disgrace over his treatment of party members, particularly young women comrades. According to Alex Mitchell, and others who went with Healy, he was still a great revolutionary and the victim of an MI5 conspiracy. Former London mayor Ken Livingstone endorsed this line. Alex Mitchell returned to his native Australia to resume his journalistic career, and in a memoir published in 2012 he recalls hearing that Healy had denounced him too as an intelligence agent; but this does not seem to have inspired him to re-examine his own previous accusations.

In 1986, the Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme was assassinated, and a former member of the LaRouche organisation in Sweden, renamed European Workers Party, was arrested though later discharged as a suspect. The LaRouchites denounced efforts to throw suspicion their way, but their Swedish organisation seems to have undergone a crisis after this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Workers_Party

In recent years, despite its increasingly right-wing image and reputation for extremism, the LaRouche organisation seems to have continued acquiring wealthy and influential friends, including some in Russia and eastwards. Perhaps the investigation of Jeremiah Duggan's death will threaten to uncover a real and bigger conspiracy.

   
Who's your friend?

American fascist Lyndon LaRouche, his wife and colleague Helga-Zepp LaRouche and current Putin's aide Sergey Glazyev, then Russian parliament chairman of the Economic Affairs Committee, June 2001

Leave Some History Standing!

 



 PALACE OF INDUSTRY, Wembley. And Britain's first ever commemorative stamps.


ONE of the places where I worked when I first came to London was a factory at the back of the Wembley stadium and the old Exhibition Grounds. Coming out of Wembley Park tube station on the way to work you could cross Empire Way and pass a variety of buildings which, including the famous Twin-Towered stadium, were remnants of the 1924-5 British Empire Exhibition. 

In front of the stadium were the remains of a Chinese-style bridge which had stood over an ornamental pond in a garden. I knew this because I'd been able to pick up a set of sepia postcards of the Exhibition from a second hand bookshop in Harlesden. 

Other parts of the exhibition had been built to last, and were in use.  Her Majesty's Stationery Office had a warehouse in one vast hall on Olympic Way, but across the road an even bigger and more imposing building was in use by GEC, who also had laboratories and a bigger factory at North Wembley, and a smaller place near Hanger Lane. I believe their place on the Exhibition grounds was the Palace of Industry. This was half a century ago. Later, during the post-Thatcher years of industrial decline it became a warehouse for imported rugs and carpets I believe. Then that too went.


You could recognise some of these buildings by the recurrent lion motif, and some country's pavilions had their name engraved in stone, but others were very distinctive in their architecture. I remember one charming little half-domed building near Wembley Hill, I think it was the Cyprus (or Malta) pavilion, and I was pleased to recognise it again from the top of a bus passing by, about ten years ago.  Behind it a young fox was crossing a patch of waste ground. Since then that ground has been built on, though with nothing as memorable as the pavilion 

Nowadays the former Exhibition Grounds estate is owned by a company called Quintains, Wembley stadium's highly visible arch has replaced the twin towers as its landmark, and Brent council's new civic centre is among the latest additions to the area. We've commented before on whether this multi-million pound development was what people wanted their money spent on, but we're stuck with it now, and the extras.

 Which brings us to a guest posting by Philip Grant of the Wembley History Society, in Martin Francis' Wembley Matters blog:  
 

Your recent item on Quintain’s planning application for a 1,350 space temporary car park near the new Civic Centre attracted my attention. When I looked at the details online, I found in the “small print” that it also involved demolishing the remaining part of the Palace of Industry, Wembley’s last remaining building from the 1924/25 British Empire Exhibition (“BEE”). As its “Listed Building” status was removed about ten years ago, this is no longer regarded as a “heritage asset” which requires special consent before it can be demolished, but I believe its external walls should be allowed to remain in place for a little longer.

My reason for this is that 2014 will see the 90th anniversary of the exhibition, for which the Palace of Industry was built as part of the world’s “First City of Concrete”. The BEE was one of the most important events in Wembley’s history, giving us the stadium and bringing millions of visitors to the area, which promoted its rapid suburban growth over the following ten years. One of the main aims of the exhibition was ‘... to enable all who owe allegiance to the British flag to meet on common ground and learn to know each other’, and on an international level the BEE was an important stepping stone on the path from the old Empire to the modern Commonwealth of independent nations. To discover more about the BEE, and many other local history subjects, visit the Brent Archives online Learning and Resources collection at LINK

Since 2010 I have been involved, as a volunteer, in discussions with Brent Museum and Archives about an exhibition and other events in 2014 to mark the BEE’s 90^th anniversary. More recently the Arts team for the new Civic Centre (currently nearing completion at the southern end of the Palace of Industry site) have become involved, and although no final plans have yet been drawn up it is likely that these events will take place. It would be a great pity if these walls, which illustrate the scale and architecture of this great exhibition, were to be lost unnecessarily just before that anniversary, when they could be enjoyed by visitors to Wembley during the summer of 2014, probably for the final time.
Looking at the plans, it would not be necessary to demolish the remaining outside walls on the north and east sides of the Palace of Industry building to facilitate the access, lighting and all of the car parking spaces which Quintain are seeking. Only a small part of the outside walls at the north-west corner would need to be demolished, to allow access from Fulton Road. I have therefore written to Quintain and their planning agent, asking them to amend their plans so that these historic walls remain standing to their full height until they are ready to construct the proposed shopping centre which is planned for a later phase of the Wembley City redevelopment.

If you would like to add your support for the walls (not physically, as their ferro-concrete construction means that they can stand up by themselves!) please go to the Brent Planning website at: LINK  then use the "Comment on this Planning Application" link.  Alternatively, please send an email, quoting the reference number 12/3361, to David Glover, the Brent Case Officer dealing with the application, at:  david.glover@brent.gov.uk . Thank you.

You may think I am getting sentimental in my old age, but much as I've been happy to see the back of the British Empire, I would regret seeing the erasure of any trace of the British Empire Exhibition. It represented something in terms of wide world horizons, trade and the development of industry. Apparently the Palace of Industry even housed a working bread factory, showing off mass production and industrialised baking when it seemed the "greatest thing since sliced bread" was er...more sliced bread,

For young people growing up in Brent those ferro-concrete walls are a history lesson of an empire that seemed designed to last, and of the wealth their ancestors produced, whether here in London, in Britain, or the far corners of that empire. That's heritage.

Besides, the council planning documents I have seen speak optimistically of making Wembley a centre for cultural events and tourism. And I can't see tourist buses pulling up just so visitors can look at the car park.  






http://wembleymatters.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/standing-up-for-palace-walls-in-wembley.html

My Mother might have been arrested, if Westminster Tories have their way

MY mother was nobody famous. Brought up in a backstreet in Salford, she won a scholarship but had to leave school at 12 after her dad died, and was sewing buttons on overcoats to help feed the rest of the family soon after that. All the same, she acquired enough culture to put many of us 'higher educated' later generations to shame, learning poetry because she liked to recite it, rather than to pass exams, and saving money from her first proper paid job to treat herself to the D'Oyle Cart opera when it came to town.

To my education she contributed a familiarity with the library, and municipal art galleries, an acquaintance with the works of many good writers, and historical knowledge of, inter alia, the Peterloo massacre, the Russian pogroms, Keir Hardy, the General Strike, the Means Test, and the Jarrow Crusade. She even surprised me once by being able to sing "the Union Maid" -I'd got the words in a book but didn't know the tune. She did.

But the biggest surprise came one day years later in Town. Home on a visit, the great rebel intellect, I had agreed to go shopping with me Mam. Coming out of Lewis's, we crossed over to Piccadilly gardens to go for our bus. I barely paid attention to the tramp on the bench, holding his forearms across his midriff, as we passed. But Mum did.

"That man's hungry," she said. I shrugged. "I can tell by the way he is holding his stomach", she said, "that's hunger pain". I ventured, trying to be sophisticated, that the man had probably just had a bad pint, but she was not having any of it. "I know hunger pains", she said, stopping. "I can't just walk past"

Asking me to look in the shopping bag, which had a loaf and some cheeses at the top, and ignoring my protests that we'd miss our bus, or that there were loads of people about -"Bugger people", she replied - she went and asked the man on the bench if he would like some bread and cheese, then stood there in her best clothes fashioning a cheese sandwich for the man.

I was left to reflect that the other people in the gardens were eating lunch, or feeding pigeons. And that my mum, ever so conventional, was not the conformist she looked, and nor was I the big rebel I liked to think. I was also struck by the certainty with which she recognised hunger pains. I'd read about the Hungry Thirties, and even written essays, but though it was Mam who'd told me about them, seemed she had not told me everything.

My mam was nobody special. I never heard her making any speeches. She would not have been at any big charity dinners with the 'pompkes' (her derisory nickname for bourgeois society matrons). She was just a working class Salford woman who knew about things, knew about hunger, and could not walk past it.

I was reminded of this little episode twice in the past week or so. First when a friend on Facebook was inviting people to think of women who were special to them, for International Women's Day. (But my mam was nobody special). Next, when a cousin in Canada posted this about a man who feeds and cares for the homeless and destitute, many of them mentally ill, in Bangalore, India.

http://www.facebook.com/jpottins?ref=ts#!/video/video.php?v=1378237514624&comments

I was wondering how the man, who has retired from his job, manages to make a living and feed the poor, and then I remembered that I'd recently seen something on TV about a man who takes out a van with food to feed homeless people sleeping rough on the streets, or park benches, of London. Only now he may have to face prosecution for daring to continue his soup run, if the Tory-controlled Westminster council has its way.

The council spokesperson seemed to think people eating on the street are a nuisance, like the pigeons, and claimed that some of the people queuing for free food were not really sleeping out, and that if they were they shouldn't be. Feeding only encouraged them (on these cold nights? it must be good soup!). It seems even someone behaving like my mother did that day would be in breach of the law, even though it was not premeditated.

Let lawyer Liz Davies explain:

... Westminster Council - continuing its Shirley Porter tradition of punishing the poor - wants to drive out rough sleepers.

If that meant more night shelters, a more generous interpretation of its homelessness duties or more temporary accommodation were being offered, all well and good.

But Westminster prefers to criminalise both the rough sleepers and those who help them.

The council is consulting on a by-law that would make it a criminal offence for anyone to sleep on the streets or any other public place in a defined area just east of Victoria station.

The proposed boundaries are not natural or logical ones - to know whether or not he or she was in breach, a rough sleeper would have to carry a map of Westminster around.

In addition anyone "distributing free refreshment in or on any public place" would also be committing a crime.

Quite simply, soup runs are to be criminalised. Indeed, if you give a chocolate bar to a chap who seems hungry as you walk down Victoria Street, you could find yourself up in front of the magistrates.

The council says the presence of soup runs is a disincentive for rough sleepers to use their night shelters.

But there are all sorts of reasons why people don't use night shelters. Sometimes they don't know about them, sometimes they don't trust the other occupants or they don't trust the system.

It's hard to see how those obstacles are going to be overcome by arresting someone sleeping in a shop doorway or preventing them from receiving food.

Westminster has more rough sleepers than anywhere else because of Victoria station and coach station and its central location.

Its Tory council has always disliked them but until now has tried to reduce their numbers by providing at least some night shelter support.

Locking up rough sleepers will just move them on - to other parts of Westminster, to other London boroughs - until all the local authorities get in on the act.

Then we'll end up with prisons full of "incorrigible rogues" who haven't hurt anyone or stolen anything.

You can read Liz's article, 'Begging to differ' in full at:

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/102250

More on Westminster and homeless:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12594397

http://www.labourmatters.com/westminster-labour/westminster-conservatives-ban-free-food-for-the-homeless/

As Liz Davies notes, the problem of homelessness is going to get worse, as the government puts a limit on housing benefits, while doing nothing to increase affordable housing or hold down rents. Westminster as a local authority is obliged to provide for families with children, but not for anyone else. Back in the days of Dame Shirley Porter it was not only notorious for keeping council housing empty so it could be sold, but for putting homeless families in accommodation rotten with dangerous asbestos and rats. Some Tories had a stake in bed and breakfast accommodation which the council used.

Not for the first time, Westminster is attempting to export homeless people to other boroughs or out of London altogether, and does not want the poor and hungry cluttering up its streets. It's OK coming in to build, or clean them, or do other useful jobs, but once you're no longer needed or spending money you must go back to the bantustans.

...And his Mother came too

ALL this might have given the false impression that Tories do not approve of feeding the hungry, or not of free food generally (remember how Maggie first showed her mettle by taking away free school milk? A warning of what to expect, if ever there was.)

But one man has been giving the lie to that, and its our Barnet friend Cllr.Brian Coleman, who all in the course of duty has been accepting enough free dinners for everyone.

Much of this could be explained by the generosity of Barnet's communities, in gratitude for his services or him honouring them with his presence. But questions were raised a couple of years ago when it was revealed that a firm called Asset Co and its chief executive John Shannon had taken Brian Coleman to dinner on three occasions, and also presented him with a Harvey and Nichols hamper estimated to be worth £350. (I hope he does not take it for a picnic with his pals near Westminster City Hall). Asset Co. were awarded a £12 million contract with the London Fire Authority which Brian Coleman chairs.

Maybe that's the value for money in local services which the Tories have proclaimed.

But the critics are never satisfied, even when the bill for a beano is kept in-house.

"The man charged with making up to 25% cuts to the London Fire Brigade splashed thousands of pounds from the budget on a "completely excessive" meal for his colleagues. Chairman of the Fire Authority Brian Coleman used £2338 from the Brigade’s communications budget to pay for flowers and a three-course lunch for a retiring colleague.

"Authority members, the Deputy Mayor, and senior officials were served a 'Trio of Orkney Salmon' for starters, 'Corn-fed breast of Norfolk chicken served with date and apple stuffing' for mains, and an 'individual chocolate truffle with vanilla cream sauce,' for dessert".

One embittered Barnet blogger calculated that the amount spent on this dinner would have been enough to pay for Barnet's school crossing lollipop ladies, who are being sacked, to carry on their service for another year. Yeah, but as he admits, that's a different budget.

Anyway that dinner sounds nice, and I see that Brian's mother Gladys was among the guests. You can't fault a bloke who looks after Mum, can you?

http://torytroll.blogspot.com/2009/07/at-todays-mayors-question-time-boris.html

http://torytroll.blogspot.com/2009/07/brian-coleman-takes-hamper-and-breaks.html

http://barneteye.blogspot.com/2009/10/brian-coleman-free-dinner-register-fire.html

http://www.london-fire.gov.uk/gh_brian_coleman.asp
http://torytroll.blogspot.com/2011/02/brian-coleman-slammed-for-completely.html

http://colemansgottogo.blogspot.com/

Who Courted The Colonel (and the Colonel's son)?

LSE students say Gaddafi money should be restituted to Libyan people

Socialist Worker photo

IN the Spring of 1976 I packed my flask and peanut butter sandwiches, and set off to thumb my way from the Midlands where I'd been staying, to London, where I'd been invited to the offices of the Workers Revolutionary Party and its publications, for a chat with journalist Alex Mitchell. Later in the day Alex took me over to see the top man Gerry Healy. What they had to tell me was that though the WRP had been in financial difficulties, and had to close its then paper Workers Press along with its London printing operation, it had been having discussions with new friends in the Middle East, who were prepared to help it launch a new paper. Knowing my interest in the Middle East, on which I'd contributed articles before, they wanted me to come and work for this paper.

I didn't need asking twice, and not just because I needed a job. Some years previously the Party leadership had persuaded me to give up a column I'd begun writing in Free Palestine and back out of a speaking invitation I'd received (on the dubious grounds that I'd be sharing a platform with Ivor Montague, an old Stalinist). If the interest in the Middle East that had started growing when the 1973 oil crisis coincided with the miners' struggles had led to a less negative and sectarian response, I was pleased to see it. I had heard that the Party had been contacted by former adherents of Pierre Lambert's Paris-based international organisation, first in Israel and then among Palestinians. I'd not heard much. But if these promising sounding contacts had led to us finding new support for our paper, as well as it paying particular attention to the Middle East, that was fine by me.

The first week I sat down at a desk in what was to be the News Line office I read a BBC Monitoring Service digest saying Libyan radio had reported a delegation from the 'Revolutionary Workers Party' visiting from Britain. There might well be some obscure group with that precise name (Posadists from Paddington?) but Alex had just come in looking like he'd caught the sun, and I could hazard an intelligent guess. Someone saying they were from the BBC 'phoned to ask about the report. Naturally I told them I hadn't a clue.

Then a delegation from Libya arrived, nice warm friendly people, though they were whisked off upstairs to a closed meeting, from which there came a lengthy joint statement that appeared as a two page centre-spread in News Line. Not exactly a secret conspiracy.

Whatever largesse flowed from Libya's oil wealth did not reach the pockets of most WRP members, who continued toiling to raise funds for a daily paper, premises and apparatus out of proportion to the party's shrinking support and membership. To impress the friends, and obtain contracts, the party's new printshop in Runcorn, staffed by dedicated comrades, had to over-invest in what was to become surplus capacity, also purchasing quantities of newsprint destined to take up space and not be used, because someone had told Healy its price would soar.

Gerry Healy got invited to lecture on Marxism in Beirut, and later enjoyed a motor cycle escort when he was in Baghdad. My colleague Jack Gale got to cover the war in Lebanon, leaving me the run of two pages and a Reuters machine, plus perusal of various papers that came in. I eventually got to travel, to Scotland to join a youth unemployment march, and to report the firefighters' strike from Birmingham.

On the News Line, I was told to stop a corner of 'Fourth International news' I'd begun including once a week, just items such as a meeting in Dusseldorf, a demonstration in Sri Lanka, or a new journal launched by our Venezuelan comrades. "Our readers don't want to know about this sort of thing," Alex Mitchell told me firmly. I started to say that, on the contrary, workers, and especially the young, were excited to know that we were part of an international movement, as I had been when I joined as a teenager. No use. I should have realised that when he alluded to "our readers" in a certain tone he wasn't talking about those whose papers I delivered in Brixton.

Alex was sent abroad to cover conferences in Mediterranean countries of parties in which, I guessed, the Colonel had an interest. Our own comrades in Greece and Spain had to take a back seat or not be seen at all.

Having only lasted a couple of years on News Line, and never been a leading party member, or what you might call a "close associate" of Gerry Healy ("arms length" might better describe it ), I cannot confirm or deny more sensational claims about acts supposedly performed for Gaddafi. I was never asked to "spy" on the Jewish community, or I would have pointed out you could consult the Jewish Yearbook in any library, purchase a copy of the Jewish Chronicle at the newsagents, or join a conducted tour of synagogues. Nor have I ever been approached by anyone purporting to investigate such alleged activities.

I do know the WRP leadership channelled resources to a group within the Labour Party, with the paper Labour Herald, including Ken Livingstone and then Lambeth council leader Ted Knight, both of whom were battling the Thatcher government at the time. If that was Libyan money, it could have gone to worse causes (and sometimes did). I also know, from friends at the printers, that they turned out large quantities of Gaddafi's Little Green Book, though what happened to these I don't know. I never saw a copy myself, I don't recall it going on display in our bookshops, and I don't think it ever replaced Volume 38 of Lenin's Works as compulsory reading for the WRP school and Healy's lectures on Dialectics.

An amusing sight recounted by Alex Mitchell was that of Libyans on a plane returning from London, snipping off labels from garments they'd bought, so customs would not know they had been shopping at Marks and Spencer, historically a Zionist-supporting firm. I don't know if they'd be allowed to carry scissors on an airliner today, but Marks and Sparks has a branch in Tripoli these days. On the Western side hypocrisy has continued to surround the Libyan trade. At the height of supposed sanctions my last employer, its CEO a Rear-Admiral, hosted the second Libyan delegation I'd seen, signed contracts, and began sending lecturers out to Libya to run training courses, though they had to change planes a couple of times as British Airways was not going there.

Since then links have considerably increased, of course, as Libya was brought into the fold, and though irate Americans worked themselves up over the Megrahi affair and firms like BP going out to do well for themselves, American business has been just as keen as the British.

See:

http://www.tfdnews.com/news/2011/02/24/82547-libyas-opposition-leaders-slam-us-business-lobbys-deals-gaddafi.htm

Sean Matgamna in Socialist Organiser, followed by the BBC Money Programme, both did exposes on Healy's links to Gaddafi's Gold, but I don't know whether they have managed to keep up with the more recent, and 'respectable' connections. My friend Keith says: "Colonel Gaddafi's son Saif was given a 'doctorate' by the LSE, he subsequently gave a £1.5m 'grant' to them. The Oxford University Press even printed his thesis, The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance, probably encouraged by Saif's proposal to purchase 20,000 copies himself. The publication has now been put on hold, before they were able to complete the transaction. As to whether OUP now has 20,000 copies stored somewhere of a thesis now thought to be largely plagiarised, it doesn't reveal".

Oh no, not another Little Green Book saga ?! I suppose as Brent TUC assistant secretary I could enquire at the OUP in Neasden, but don't think we want to be lumbered with them even to give away as Christmas prezzies.

That venerable institution, the London School of Economics, has been embarrassed by attention drawn to its dealings with the Colonel's regime, and apparently they did not just take his money.

http://roarmagazine.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/plot-thickens-in-lse-gaddafi-connection/

Andrew Coates, writing on Facebook, notes that Anthony Giddens the former director of the LSE, and noted theorist of the Third Way, has been in a spot of bother (More Here). Baron Giddens, as he became, made a trip to Libya in 2007 to discuss 'democracy' with the Colonel, observing afterwards:

“If Gadafy is sincere about reform, as I think he is, Libya could end up as the Norway of North Africa.”

As one-party states go, Libya is not especially repressive. Gadafy seems genuinely popular. Our discussion of human rights centred mostly upon freedom of the press. Would he allow greater diversity of expression in the country? There isn’t any such thing at the moment. Well, he appeared to confirm that he would. Almost every house in Libya already seems to have a satellite dish. And the internet is poised to sweep the country. Gadafy spoke of supporting a scheme that will make computers with internet access, priced at $100 each, available to all, starting with schoolchildren.

Will real progress be possible only when Gadafy leaves the scene? I tend to think the opposite. If he is sincere in wanting change, as I think he is, he could play a role in muting conflict that might otherwise arise as modernisation takes hold. My ideal future for Libya in two or three decades’ time would be a Norway of North Africa: prosperous, egalitarian and forward-looking. Not easy to achieve, but not impossible.

Here.

Who is His Lordship?

Many people who studied sociology in the 1970s and 1980s began with a foundation course based around Gidden’s Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. An Analysis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber. This was a solid, if somewhat summary, overview of the bases of contemporary social thought – a seen through the ‘founding fathers’.

A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (1981) followed. This attacked Marxism as a dogmatic mono-causal theory. In place of economic determinism we should pay attention to a multiplicity of social antagonisms, from class to sexuality to state and social power. It outlined an overall left agenda for social advance, bringing Giddens close to radical socialism on some issues. He developed his own ‘structuration’ theory, which is basically a conceptualisation of everything agreeable to left-of-centre sociologists that has ever been said about structure and agency. By the time of the 1995 Second Edition and the Fall of Communism Giddens dropped socialism (or ‘the cybernetic model of socialism’) altogether. He began to talk of being “beyond left and right”.

Third Way.

In the rest of the decade Giddens developed the theory, and policies, of the Third Way. There was no alternative to capitalism, only different ways of managing it. Social democrats backed equality and social justice within this framework. They should modernise society (welfare reform onwards) and help everyone ’pilot’ their way in the age of globalisation.

Tony Blair appeared to endorse this approach. In practice, Blair’s leadership was used to turn the outward practice of the Labour Party into a form of Christian Democracy (favouring social solidarity and market economics). Giddens’ own influence has left little ideological imprint. I wonder if even the author read Over to You, Mr Brown – How Labour Can Win Again (2007).

Giddens was beguiled by Gaddafi. He illustrates that the ability to willingly let the wool be pulled over one’s eyes is not confined to the left. ‘Tends’ ‘Coulds’ and ideal futures apart the fact that he could not see the basic character of the regime speaks volumes about Giddens The creatures that have found progressive radicalism in Islamism are paralleled by this state intellectual who discovered the merits of the Green Book State and its Great Helmsman.

Some say that there is no stupid idea that some intellectual somewhere has not come to support (as Karel Čapek observed in the War of the Newts )."

I believe we have seen this talk of a 'third way' that is "neither right nor left" before, and it was far more deadly in Europe than with Colonel Gaddafi.


It is reported today that a top man at LSE has resigned, in advance of an inquiry by Lord Woolf into the School's links with Gaddafi.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/mar/03/lse-director-resigns-gaddafi-scandal

I do hope this inquiry will consider all LSE links with foreign dictatorships, and the more widespread practice among academic institutions, encouraged I believe by HM government, of pursuing contracts for courses for various unpleasant regimes. But I fear I am going to be disappointed and that once again it will be hypocrisy that prevails.

Meanwhile, as the latter-day WRP and miraculously surviving News Line urge the Libyan masses to rally to the side of Muammar Gaddafi against imperialism, I offer this little extract, from an item by Joe Murphy in the London Evening Standard about a shooting party, and dedicate it to the "conspiracy" buffs in some quarters who have been blaming "the Rothschilds" for the Colonel's little difficulties :

"The weekend took place in 2009 at Waddesdon Manor, the Buckinghamshire home owned by financier Jacob, 4th Baron Rothschild.
"Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was a guests of financier Nat Rothschild and Lord Mandelson, the former business secretary who was virtual deputy to Gordon Brown. The peer and Saif are said to have got on well and met again at the Rothschild holiday home in Corfu..."

While you're getting your head around that, have a thought for another family facing a dilemna.
In September 2009, Prince Andrew, the Duike of York, flew into Algeria to open a new British embassy there. While he was there, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi also paid a visit, and the two men stayed in the same compound, and had much to discuss. Now Labour's shadow justice minister Chris Bryant has had the audacity to suggest that Andrew should lose his job as a trade envoy. Speaking in the Commons, Bryant said: "Isn't it increasingly difficult to explain the behaviour of the UKTI (UK Trade and Investment) special ambassador for trade, who is not only a very close friend of Saif Gaddafi, but is also a close friend of the convicted Libyan gun smuggler Tarek Kaituni?"

Considering the hardware Britain has been selling to Gaddafi, such as sniper rifles, I would have seen no difficulty in explaining Andrew's behaviour or his value to the Department.

But with the freezing of Libyan assets, including presumably Saif (as houses?) £10 million mansion in Hampstead, think of the Windsors now having to decide if Andrew's friend should still be invited to the nephew's wedding.

Hands off Heaton Park!

MANY of the happiest memories of my childhood are located on Heaton Park, to the north of Manchester.
I remember the hot summer afternoon when a bunch of us backstreet kids were taken by our mums to discover the joys of paddling in cool water that flowed over a gentle series of steps.

The Sunday mornings, when my Dad taught me to row on Heaton Park lake.

The ascent to the Observatory on the hill, around which you could walk in a circle looking at the view. Then the descent into a quiet area of woods, long grass and green weed-covered pond beyond.

The grotto-like rocky tunnel that gave onto the olde worlde formal gardens. Or walking through the grand millstone grit pillars that stood like a mysteriously isolated remnant of Classical antiquity above the path behind the boating lake. I later learned this had once been the facade of the old Manchester town hall.

I remember the commando games with my mates, for which the Park's varied scenery played backcloth, including the time we made our way up a long culvert for concealment, and after storming the Observatory, we crawled under a barbed-wire fence into the "enemy base" to plant sticks, supposedly dynamite, at the base of their radio mast. That was before the Manchester Police radio station acquired a concrete-clad telecomms tower (obviously they were not going to give us a second chance).

I remember the first time me and my pal took refuge from a shower in Heaton Hall, with its 18th century drawing rooms, old musical instruments, and - nude ladies in stone! This was well before page 3 days. We returned with I-Spy Antiques, learning to tell a Sheraton from a Chippendale, and a spinet from a harpsichord. Barry's dad was a furniture craftsman, so he took pride in becoming knowledgable even though he was to become a chemist.

If anyone took more delight than me in Heaton Park it was Our Dog. Besides participating in our games, he had his own trick, disappearing suddenly into dense bush to nose around among dead leaves and emerge triumphantly with a golf or tennis ball that someone had lost. I don't think I ever had to buy a ball while Rover was alive.

I also remember the Winter day when, dodging school, I went into Heaton Park, crossing it from Middleton Road to Heaton Park village, tramping through clean white snow and admiring its tracery on the branches. If you grew up like me in sooty streets without a tree in sight you'll understand.

I may as well also recall the Sunday morning football game, near St.Margaret's Gate, when our side lost 11-2, and my own role was so distinguished that in the second half the other side was shouting "Give the ball to Charlie!"

On my last visit to Heaton Park, when I had been living away from Manchester for some time, I was pleased to see the council had made some innovations, such as introducing Highlnnd Cattle. Behind the thick wild red hair and fierce horns the one I passed the time of day with seemed quite amiable, and I dare say might have vouched the same for me (I didn't have horns, but did have red hair). They had some foxes too, behind a wire enclosure. The one who greeted me hopefully, playing arond a post, might have thought I'd come to help him escape, but I suppose they got their food, and were not hunted, and in those days as a city kid you might not get to see a fox otherwise.

Anyway, by now you are wondering what brought on this flood of reminiscence, and the answer is another threatened innovation, and it has to do with balls, again, and goals, though not like those scored or conceded in the fairly innocent days of my youth. Rover won't be able to find balls in the undergrowth, and kids won't have so many opportunities to get mud on their knees if the council proceeds with plans drawn up with Goals Soccer Centres which wants to place a large chunk of parkland under 12 synthetic surface soccer pitches, six tennis and netball courts, a skate park and climbing wall, a cage for "extreme football", and a licensed bar.

The quiet area where I strolled one pleasant evening after work with my Mum, and we sat and read our library books, will be turned into a floodlit complex behind a high wire fence. OK, Heaton Park is a big park, and maybe there'll still be space for kids and parents to enjoy freely. But Manchester has owned this park since 1902, we grew up enjoying and appreciating its space to play and explore, not expecting to see yet more of our public space fenced off as private, our pleasures something to pay for. "Sanctuary from the city" is what an official website promises.

Are there no more areas of waste land and dereliction in Greater Manchester which Goals could purchase and develop if it wants to provide claimed benefits to the public? Or would that be less profitable than taking park land off a hard-up council?

The move began under the Tories to introduce children young to the Wonderful World of Money, that nothing was worth having unless it cost you plenty, nobody worth respect unless they had plenty to spend (how they acquired it was another issue), and that without it you were enitled to nothing. We had the attempt to turn museums into money-making businesses, the swimming pools that had once been a cheap place for the kids to spend school holidays turned into pricey "leisure complexes". Football -well. The national game evolved into something else. It's astronomical sums make it a world of its own.

Commercialised pitches are an offshoot, and artificial surfaces an improvement on those we used to know, made of cinders. But what happens when the keenness goes into decline, and what is now profitable becomes no longer so? What are you left with?

If I am being sentimental about keeping the park and the grass, it seems I am not alone. There is a campaign to save Heaton Park from this development, and I hope the campaigners succeed, for future generations to enjoy at least the free space we did.

http://www.heatonpark.org.uk/HeatonPark/
http://www.saveheatonpark.org.uk/
http://manchester.diarystar.co.uk/heaton-park-hall/

Is it Meme(the name of the game), or Me!, Me! (like the heroine of La Boheme)?

I've been tagged by Madame Miaow in a sort of game called political meme where you all answer a few questions about yourself then pass it on to someone else. That urbane guerrilla from exotic East Eight reckons ruefully that this kimd of exercise must help Special Branch, but way I see it, when you get to my age you can fill up their files and wear down their pencil stubs, and will to persist, by loading them with useless information. So here goes:

First political experience Difficult to say, and depends what you mean by 'political' and 'experience'. I did ask why some people had big houses, gardens and lots of money, and we didn't, and why the government did not tax the rich and give it to the poor to make us all sort pf 'middle class' , a phrase my Mam liked, but she advised me to be careful or people would call me a "Communist". That seemed strange because the "communists" in my Yankee war comics were bad guys, and there was a young guy in our street home on leave from fighting communists in Malaya, his pal had been killed, but he could not answer my questions as to why the troops were there. When we visted some friends of my parents whom they'd described as Communist I found these seemed nice people, they had lots of books and magazines, and though they were working people like my Mam and Dad, they seemed to know and understand all sorts of things, but were always friendly and jolly, not like the teachers at school.

I also remember a discussion in our house once, it might have concerned the "Doctors' Plot", or the fate of Soviet Yiddish writers, or the Prague trials, and the grown' ups were saying "How can you have antisemitism in a communist country?", and so on. Someone mentioned Marx, someone then mentioned Trotsky, and a Mr.Rosenfelt said "Ah, now Trotsky was a real communist!" Later when my friend Dave whose parents were in the CP was referring to "Four great leaders, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin", I asked about Trotsky. He said Trotsky had been a "traitor", though he could not say why. Mind you, he also said Tito was a traitor, and as I was reading keenly about the Yugoslav partisans then I wasn't having that! But we stayed friends.

First vote Well, I was taking part in votes in the youth movement, and so on, and in 1959 I also helped left-wing Labour MP Frank Allaun in his campaign, his vote went up though over the rest of the country, Labour did badly, but to be fair I think he would have done well even without my support. In those days you did not get the vote till you were 21, so the first general election I voted in was 1964. By then I was in London and had just been chucked out of the Labour Party as a Trot, for selling 'Keep Left' , but I still voted Labour, for Reg Freeson, one of the people who had chucked me out.

First demo: Not sure. Could have been CND or May Day, or might have been a Connolly Association march in Manchester over two guys called Mallon and Talbot who were facing a murder charge - in those days a hanging matter.

Last vote: European and London Mayoral, though I am not that fond of either institution. If I remember rightly I voted for No2EU, Yes to Democracy, though I'd wished it had a more positively socialist name and policy, and voted Labour, for Ken Livingstone as mayor though again, I'm not his greatest fan, but just hoping to keep the Tory Boris out.

Last political activity: See my previous blog. I was in Grosvenor Square with the Iranians, partly just to find out more, but partly also to give support. Whatever one makes of the Mujihaddeen-e Khalq, I don't like to think of a refugee camp being surrounded by troops and riot police, at the mercy of a regime which, let's face it, Britain and the US put in place. Something has to be said.
And now I must get on with another political activity, editing a members'bulletin for the Jewish Socialists' Group. This was by way of a break!

And not sure how you "tag" people, being old and technologically challenged, but I'll go for Jim http://jimjay.blogspot.com/

and Stroppy or Janine, http://www.stroppyblog.blogspot.com/

Incidentally, does anyone know whence this word "meme" comes, and is it supposed tobe pronounced like "Mame" (there is nothing you can name) as in the musical, or like Mimi, whose tiny hand was frozen in La Boheme?

Two good men gone

THE labour and socialist movement has just lost two characters who will be hard to replace.

Of Howard Andrews, who has died in Somerset after a short illness, aged 101, I've written before. Born in Kilburn, North West London, he heard the call for aid to Spain as a young man, and decided to go out there himself, delivering medical supplies and tending the wounded at the front, as Italian 'planes brought death overhead.

After military service in World War II, Howard returned to hospital work, and decided to move to the West Country. He helped his fellow-workers organise in the union, and then after retirement didn't pack it in, but broadened his activity. In recent years Howard, or 'Andy' as he was known to friends, and his buggy, were a familiar sight at peace demonstrations and picket lines. Even after celebrating his century with fellow-trades unionists and socialists (he'd turned down a telegram from the Queen saying he had never got on with that family) he made it to the left stage at Glastonbury, to address the young.

Cyril Smith grew up just up the road from Andy, but in a later generation. Though he attended Communist meetings as a student, he was one of the young socialists in the Labour Party who came into the Trotskyist movement in the 1950s. Opposed to Labour's imperialism and Cold War policies, but equally repelled by Stalinist brutality, many went with Tony Cliff's tendency at the time of the Korean war, becoming what we now know as the Socialist Workers Party.

Cyril was made of more rigorous stuff, in terms of Marxist theory and analysis. His youth branch in Wembley was one of those which launched the youth paper Keep Left, and he became a member of Gerry Healy's Socialist Labour League.

When I met Cyril in 1962 he was leading the SLL's Willesden branch, using his wit and humour to impart his Marxism to a bunch of young building and engineering workers at Sunday evening classes, and occasionally bringing some clever LSE graduate student along to be tested and give us a change.

Listening and discussing with Cyril was always a pleasure, even when I was the butt of his wit. He did not confine himself to theory, or stay aloof from everyday workers' life and struggles. It was during a strike of mainly immigrant workers at a firm called Marriotts in Wembley that Cyril met Sybil, a Jamaican woman shop steward who joined the SLL, and became his partner for many years. They moved to south London, and had two daughters I believe.

It was said that when Cyril had a job working for the National Coal Board their switchboard receptionist would sometimes put callers through to the SLL headquarters in Clapham where he was doing an article for the paper. He wrote on various subjects, both under his own name and as "John Crawford". It might be a coincidence though that the SLL Newsletter and our miner comrades were kept well-informed and up-to-date on the economics of the nationalised coal mining industry, where the money was going (such as to ex-owners), and the impact of mechanisation on health and safety.

A story I heard, possibly from when he was at LSE, was of the BBC interviewing people in the street on Budget day. The interviewer was approaching Cyril with a mike when another person came hurtling out saying "Not him! Not him!" It was Cyril's brother Tony who worked for the Beeb and resembled him in all but politics, being a Fabian. Whatever he feared brother Cyril might say in a brief soundbite, BBC viewers had to be saved from the menace of hearing a Marxist at teatime!

My own lingering memory though is of the evening in 1964 when some of us made a foray to the famous Ace Cafe on the North Circular Road to sell Keep Left and see if we could interest the young bikers and ton-up lads in joining the Young Socialists. Nowadays the clientele who throng the Ace forecourt on a Sunday morning look middle aged or older, and have probably swapped their business suits for weekend leathers, but then they were young guys with a wilder image, and we thought we had to look the part.

Who should join us, saying he had come straight from work, but Cyril, bespectacled and wearing a tie, and if I'm not mistaken carrying a briefcase. Incongruous, I thought, but next time I looked he was chatting away to a bunch of bike lads who were listening intently to his every word.

It was after 1985, when the Workers Revolutionary Party without the disgraced Gerry Healy and his acolytes attracted former members like me to give it another go, that I resumed my acquaintance with Cyril Smith. Together with Cliff Slaughter, Tom Kemp, Geoff Pilling and I think Frank Girling he was one of the "five professors" as they were dubbed by a hostile faction for whom it seemed, being able to read, never mind write a book was evidence of dubious, even dangerous, activity. Oddly enough, the person to whom this breakaway faction owed allegiance while baiting the intellectuals and the "middle class" was an American who took pride in his efforts to challenge Healy on dialectics, dismissed our concern over Healy's treatment of women as "non-political"(and of course "petty bourgeois") and today heads a highly successful international printing business.

But what struck many of us as bitterly ironic was that though the comrades being attacked were academics with books to their name, none were in fact Professors - they had been far too busy doing political work and contributing to the movement intellectually, to attain the kind of career status (and establishment acceptance) to which their abilities might otherwise entitle them.

There were confused and stormy times to come, as the WRP-Workers Press tried to re-examine its ideas, as Cyril insisted we must after our experience with Healy, and to break out of the isolation to which his sectarianism had led us, with regard to the workers movement and to the left internationally. Exasperated by what he began to see as opportunism and shallowness, Cyril clashed with the leadership - and with me, separately -and decided to concentrate on his theoretical work. When I became branch secretary in SW London, not only did he absent himself from meetings, ostensibly on health grounds, but some of the other comrades skipped the meetings because they were attending Marxism classes at Cyril's place. I could not ask what he had that I hadn't, so I made do with grumbling that Cyril (a mathematician by profession) was seeking a "pure" as opposed to applied Marxism.

Perhaps after experiencing the "Marxism" of the Healy party and its results that effort at purification should have been understandable.

The WRP-Workers Press is no more, and I am not sure what was achieved by our efforts. From Cyril's later period came a stream of books, reflecting his discussions in the WRP and more widely, and attracting wide interest. Communist Society and Marxist Theory (1988), Marx at the Millennium(1996), Karl Marx and the Future of the Human (2004), Marx Myth and Legends(2004). Having taken different paths, I haven't kept track of Cyril's development, though I know others swear by some of his books. But I still value the memory of the Cyril Smith who tried to educate me many years ago, and respect the integrity which led him to take the side he did in 1985, and to be an "awkward" voice subsequently. I'm also glad we parted on friendly terms, when we last met, at Peter Fryer's funeral.

On the surface, perhaps, Andy and Cyril were two quite different comrades. Certainly for much of their lives they would have been in different necks of the left-wing political woods. And while Andy was most keen to carry on his activism to the end, Cyril considered his chief duty to
be his theoretical work. Yet each of them entered the movement when young, and committed themselves, whatever the difficulties and disappointments they encountered; and each in their own way showed a stubborn determination to persevere with what they thought right to the end.


Some of Cyril Smith's writings:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith3. htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith2.htm

http://www.cix.co.uk/~cyrilsmith/book5.pdf

http://www.cix.co.uk/~cyrilsmith/


A review by Andy Blunden of Marx's Mathematical manuscrips, on which Cyril worked
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/mathematical-manuscripts/review.htm

Communist Society and Marxist Theory, available from Index Books:
http://www.indexbooks.co.uk/socialism.html

Cyril Smith's funeral will be on Thursday, May 22, 11 am at Lambeth Crematorium, Blackshaw Rd., London SW17.

=====================

from Somerset, Dave Chapple writes (extract)_
Andy's funeral, organised by the International Brigade Memorial Trust, will be held at 2.30pm next Thursday the 22nd May, at the Taunton Deane Crematorium in Wellington Rd. I have been asked to pay tribute at the service. He requested no flowers and any donations to the Morning Star/Peoples' Press Printing Society.
If friends would like to E-mail messages they can be read out or displayed at the reception.

Dave Chapple

davechapple@btinternet.com

Thanks to Humph

LAST TRUMP FOR HUMPH

JAZZ trumpeter and broadcaster Humphrey Lyttleton died on April 25, aged 86. The tributes have been flowing, and we'll hopefully have tribute programmes to look forward to, but I want to add a personal note of thanks to a man I never met.

Back in the early 1950s, when I was growing up, the Cold War was fierce, the Left bore the grim, heavy weight of Stalinism, the Labour movement evoked images of Old Men and austerity, and the Express newspapers got away with referring to the Labour Party de rigeur as "the Socialists", purveying the impression its suburban readers were expected to see this as
perjorative, and be frightened by its "foreign" sound. Capitalism was booming, even if it owed this to the Korean war and arms production, and we were promised prosperity, even if there was not much of it around our part of the world.

Among the left-wing publications I looked at in the library, mostly old-fashioned looking and poorly-printed, I was pleasantly surprised to come across a more attractive, modern-looking magazine, I think it was called Socialist Digest. I don't think it lasted long, and I remember little of its content, except that it had an item on two minor celebrities supporting Labour. One was Jimmy Hill, the Fulham football player, head of the Professional Footballers' Association - the players' union - who went on to a long-running career on TV, familiar at first by his jawline beard, and even more so later by his outstanding chin.

The other celeb was Humph. At that time there were not that many entertainers who openly sided with the labour movement and the left, and it pleased me to see the man whose music I enjoyed appearing briefly in a Labour Party election broadcast.

My parents also noted that the Lytteltons were an aristocratic family. Humphrey was a cousin of the 10th Viscount Cobham and nephew of Tory colonial minister Oliver Lyttelton who became Lord Chandos, which added to the piquancy of his being on our side. Born at Eton, where his father was a housemaster, he also attended the school, and fagged for a young Lord Carrington.
After school, where he had already shown an interest in jazz, he was sent to the steel works at Port Talbot, with the idea that he might become an industrialist.

Instead, what he saw apparently made him a lifelong 'romantic socialist', in his own words. But then the Second World War broke out, and for the time being the jazzman and rebel was commissioned an officer in the Grenadier Guards, and saw action at Salerno.

On VE day, May 8, 1945, wheeled around the West End in a barrow by his pals, Humph played his trumpet and was fortuitously picked up by a BBC live broadcast of the celebrations. A childhood spent amid the boring pomp of country houses and the rules and fagging at public school may have helped give him his taste for jazz and distaste for pomp and formality. His aristocratic and old Etonian background may also have given him the confidence to rebel when others with careers to protect were keeping their heads down.

We may also note that to bring his jazz heroes like Sydney Bechet and Louis Armstrong over from the 'States, Humph had to oppose the dead hand of the Musicians' Union, whose policy - whether influenced by Zhdanov cultural nationalism or conservative craft unionism - was to keep out American musicians coming over here.

The second half of the 1950s saw a change in things. Suez, Hungary, and the shock which the Soviet Communist party's 20th congress delivered the Stalinist monolith, also liberated a new wave of socialist thinking and creativity. The big issue we confronted was the menace of nuclear war. The Aldermaston marches, begun independently of the official "peace" movement, and yet influencing the labour movement, brought a new generation around some old campaigners. CND was formed and local groups sprang up like mushrooms around the country. For young people coming into politics this way the culture was duffle coats, coffee (even if it was Instant), beer (albeit we had not yet a campaign for real ale) and Jazz (and this was authentic!). The traditional jazz which Humphrey Lyttelton did much to revive brought the New Orleans tradition of marching bands just right for ban-the-bomb marches. I am not sure whether Humphrey Lyttelton played on the marches, but he did take part, and do CND benefits.

While the trad jazz element sank into a rut, however, Humphrey Lyttelton moved into mainstream, expanding his range and repertoire, recording with US trumpeter Buck Clayton, and helping lead both musicians and listeners into a living, developing jazz world. His radio programme The Best of Jazz, on BBC radio 2, ran for forty years, and helped open our ears to both old and new quality sounds, while a few years ago he supplied the jazz element to a Radiohead number.

But of course what also gave us much enjoyment for many years was Humphrey Lyttleton hosting "I'm sorry I haven't a clue". This was Radio Four's "antidote to panel games", in which he not only brought out the best of his comedian panelists, with that national institution 'Mornington Crescent' over whose rules and stratagems many have pondered over the years, but delighted afficianados of the English double entendre as he kept us posted on what the fragrant Samantha was doing besides keeping the score. With his deadpan, tired and world weary style and wit, Humph was just the man to get away with it, and subvert Auntie BBC's staid image.

Though now the Establishment is paying homage to Humph, he seems to have avoided joining it
- no title or honours, so far as I'm aware. Perhaps having come from a privileged background he could not see the point of all that guff.

He did not pretend to be less than his age, quite the opposite, and maybe this was precisely why he appealed across generations. I've recently been catching up on his programme on BBC7, and appreciating them all the more, and now I wish I'd taken the chance to be in a live audience.

On Tuesday April 22 , 2008, Humph and the gang were due to appear in a recording of "I'm Sorry I haven't a Clue" at the Pavilion Theatre, Bournemouth. But Humph was ill, and so his place was taken by Bob Brydon. A pre-recorded message from Humph was played to the audience. "I'm sorry I can't be with you today as I am in hospital. I wish I'd thought of this sooner!". How typical of his style, and what a way to go!

So thank you, Humphrey Lyttelton. You served a long time, and won't be easy to replace.
And though we never met, and I only know what I heard and saw of you on radio and TV,
you gave us a good deal of pleasure.

Did we have a Mitty on the Committee?

Or was Keith's name really "Bond - Basildon Bond"?


IT must be over a dozen years ago that I met Keith Standring, taking part in a march, I think it was in south London, though I forget exactly where or what it was about. He was with the Workers' Revolutionary Party (Workers Press) contingent, at a time when it was good to see a new face.

But Keith was obviously not some youth coming fresh to radical campaigning and ideas, nor was he the kind of trade union or community activist who had spent some time working with us before deciding to join. Nor do I recall him having any story to tell of bitter struggle in the Communist Party or other corner of the left before deciding to throw in his lot with the Trotskyists.

He was introduced to me as a member of the General Municipal and Boilermakers (GMB) trade union, and it turned out he was a full-time official, who before that had served in the Grenadier Guards. The military background did not bother me. It might prove handy in some situations, but that aside, I'd known good comrades who were ex-soldiers, even guardsmen, such as Dave Longley and Fred Green, both alas no longer around. One of the best and nicest people I'd known in the movement was an ex-marine commando with a soft Edinburgh accent called Bill Dow, who didn't let threats and beatings from Rachmanite thugs and corrupt coppers deter him from fighting for west London tenants, till he was finally laid low by a dose of malaria he'd picked up in wartime Burma.

But recruiting someone who had moved up in the trade union bureaucracy was unusual. We are more used to seeing people move the opposite way, from left to right, as their careers take off in the movement. Still, that was no reason to be suspicious.

Anyway, Keith seemed affable enough, willing to help, and generous. He had held responsibility for the chemical industry in the GMB union. It seems he had approached Cliff Slaughter, a leading WRP member and Yorkshire academic who remembered him from the Young Communist League, for political discussion. As a result Cliff introduced him to the late Geoff Pilling, who was editing Workers Press, and Dot Gibson, who among other things was responsible for much of the international trade union connexions.

The International Trade Union Solidarity Campaign(ITUSC), set up following the same Budapest conference that launched the Workers International for Reconstruction of the Fourth International (WIRFI) (as difficult a concept as it was a mouthful), had three pillars; trade union independence of the state and employers; democracy inside the unions; workers internationalism. But despite this simple broad approach, ITUSC was in the doldrums. Having trades unionists think it was a great idea was not the same as them providing it with leadership, nor vice versa. WRP members argued whether it should be a campaign, or just a committee, assuming they would decide, even if they did not know what to do with it. Enthusiastic letters from sisters and brothers abroad brought with them the embarrassing thought that we could not mobilise anything like the kind of solidarity they were looking for. Some of them, with scant resources beyond their determination, were leading many thousands of workers in struggles such as few of us had experienced. Our own comrades in southern Africa were also attracting support, and with it, facing big responsibilities and sometimes physical dangers, while we in Britain had been through retreats and splits, and strayed into the confusing babble of the sects and talking-shops.

Once Keith Standring had been introduced it was easy to see him as the confident, experienced trade unionist whose drive and organising ability could get ITUSC moving again. With the ITUSC's lack of independence from the WRP it was not hard to simply replace the comrade who was ITUSC secretary, a Ford worker whose initials were also, incidentally KS. Keith Standring was even willing to take early retirement from his union job so that he could become full-time, unpaid, secretary of ITUSC. So dedicated, he later claimed that he had invested his own money in a computer and stationery so that he could work from home, in Surrey.

In those days you must understand, home PCs were not that common, nor was e-mail, let alone left-wing websites and blogs. What's more the ITUSC as yet had no resources of its own, as I found when asked to edit its Bulletin. We brought out a few issues, with a small committee anxiously vetting content, and Dot Gibson seeing to the technical side. Then I needed to produce an issue before an important conference on Bosnia in Manchester. Dot was in Bosnia where she had been leading an aid convoy, the small committee was not to be found, the photocopier in the office was not working, and when I asked about using facilities at "our" printers the cold, imperious reply was "whose paying for this?" I'd already laid out money for layout but I had not realised when agreeing to take responsibility for the ITUSC Bulletin that it would thenceforth be treated by some "comrades" as my affair, if not meshugas. Thus privatisation, the Thatcherite environment, had seeped into our comradely relations.

This was a couple of years before Keith Standring arrived on the scene, and was by the way. What has stirred the other KS, and he has brought it to my attention, is where Brother Standring is now -Councillor Standring (Conservative), Rother District Council, East Sussex. Keith Standring was a regular soldier in the Grenadier Guards before working for over thirty years in British Intelligence. He is a member of the Conservative Party, The Freedom Association and a supporter of The Bruges Group.
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/keith_standring/index.html

So Cllr.Standring, according to his own Tory CV was working for the Intelligence services during his time in the WRP and before that in the GMB union. He presumably continued working for them in the ITUSC after the WRP had disbanded itself to reform as the "Movement for Socialism". Just what he might have achieved for them is hard to say. It seems the Standring story came to attention back at the beginning of this year, and was commented upon in Tribune and by people who knew him in the union, though they recalled how he had seemed to swing from one belief to another, political or religious, with equal enthusiasm, and wondered whether he was a serious agent or Walter Mitty.

Either way, I'm sorry I missed the story when it first came out. In fact when I first saw the name Keith Standring in my informant's subject line I'd forgotten who it was until reading his message brought it back to me. Even then I've had to consult other comrades, and comb through my old diaries in the hope of finding something significant, without much success.

I remember now a story Keith told me when we were on an embassy picket with Iranian comrades, about how as a trade union negotiator dealing with a firm in East Anglia he had taken advantage of the knowledge that Israeli and Egyptian buyers were in nearby hotels to persuade management that the sooner it settled the dispute with its workers the quicker it could proceed with its business, selling military equipment to both sides in the Middle East conflict. I retold the story to a magazine journalist, but what if it was not true?

When ITUSC did find a useful role it was as a meeting place for people like the Iranian exiles, African militants, Turkish trade unionists and others here, some of whom also joined us in the support group for Liverpool dockers. But as the WRP moved towards trying to rebrand and re-invent itself as a broader movement, tensions between members were becoming disproportionately fierce. At one ITUSC meeting the chairman would not let me contribute to a discussion involving Nigerians and Iranians, telling me that people were participating as representatives of organisations. I was flummoxed. Having only intended to make some conciliatory remarks about the question of religion and secularism that had arisen, I could not truthfully say that my trades council had mandated me to take a "line" on the issue. Fortunately nowadays when I meet the African and Iranian comrades we can talk without benefit of clergy or that kind of bureaucratic chair.

What was being brought in to the ITUSC was not workers democracy or international Trotskyism but the manoeuvres and control freakery we know all too well from the union bureaucracy. Where Keith Standring was in this I cannot honestly remember, except my diary includes a comment about him and that chairman I've mentioned as lining up "like Pinky and Perky", and later at another event says "Pinky and Perky were on top table". Not the most scientific Marxist characterisation, but it would seem to indicate we were no longer exactly friends.

To be honest, any personal animosity I experienced or reciprocated at this time was incidental to a more important conflict of aims. When someone had asked at a conference whether dissolving the WRP would mean breaking up the Workers International of which we were part, I argued that no, this was a change of approach in Britain and not to be imposed worldwide. Bob Archer took a similar view. Cliff Slaughter kept his cards close to his chest, saying nothing. But after the MFS was set up, Geoff Pilling was bitterly condemned for producing a Workers International publication, and Dot Gibson denounced because she had dared to proclaim herself a Trotskyist, a member of the Workers International to Reconstruct the Fourth International, when speaking at an international conference organised by the Tuzla miners. Indeed, judging from some people's writings, the WIRFI was not only no longer to be, but treated as though it had never been. (See how it has been erased from history in the otherwise excellent book on Workers Aid for Bosnia, Taking Sides).

One issue confronting the Bosnian and Kosovar miners, as other workers in eastern Europe and Russia, and now being firmly resisted by Iraqi oil workers, is privatisation. It is a struggle in which workers East and West can learn from and strengthen each other. Some of us wanted to make defence of public ownership and services the fourth pillar of the ITUSC stand, but others felt we should not add to what had been agreed at Budapest. I cannot remember or do justice to the arguments here, nor can I say that factions were neatly aligned either side. But if the arguments about the International seem abstract, I think real issues stood behind them.

Quite independently of the union sources, Dot Gibson came up with the name "Walter Mitty" when asked about Keith Standring's role. Having worked closely with him drafting statements and letters to make sure they accorded with the policies, she did not think he had much idea, though he presented them as his own. Later he became more independent, unpredictable and then hostile, before dropping out. But Cliff Slaughter had put Keith Standring on to the Executive committee of the WIRFI. Like liquidators taking over a company to wind up its affairs, Slaughter and his aides used the Executive to discipline those who were trying to keep the International going, and though Keith Standring had ceased attending meetings, he was brought back by Cliff Slaughter just long enough to help outvote Dot. It was to be the laat time they all met.

From the Movement for Socialism, Keith Standring has moved on to feature on a site called "Make socialism history". And such, scant as it is, is the history of Keith Standring. Now, amid dull Tory company, he shines quite brightly writing on civil liberties, the European Union, Labour and ID cards. So was he an Intelligence agent, or Walter Mitty? Or did the two roles go hand in hand? I too have moved on, though not in the same direction, from the little battles of a past decade, and my memory has been otherwise occupied. But I felt it my duty to say something, and perhaps others will have more to add.


For another, earlier, angle on Keith Standring see:
http://www.labourhome.org/story/2007/2/1/1585/23084