Socialism 2009

It must be that time of year again. Last weekend saw one of my rare trips down to London (malfunctioning public transport plus expensive pints does not make this one of my top UK destinations) for the Socialist Party’s annual event Socialism 2009.

Unfortunately, I can’t provide you with a comprehensive report this year as I was only down for the Sunday. If your are looking for reports and impressions, Phil’s got a round up and there’s now a full report on the main site.

Still, I got to a couple of sessions and the final rally.

Unsurprisingly, the first session I went along to was “How to defeat the BNP?” (it’s a bit of a hobby). In previous year’s attendance at the Sunday morning sessions has tended to be a little thin on the ground after people have enjoyed a few refreshment’s the previous night but there was a decent turnout.

We first heard from a lad from the Socialist Party in Northern Ireland about the series of racist attacks which had taken place against Roma people earlier this year, the total disinterest of this police and how they’d organised a campaign to defend people having their windows bricked in as they eat their dinner. Engaging stuff and the work they’ve been doing is commendable but it’s (thankfully!) a very different political situation to the one we face here.

Dave Reid from Socialist Party Wales then gave a brief overview of the Socialist Party’s approach to tackling the far right which regular readers of this blog will be familiar with. He stressed the need for a political alternative and the necessity of propaganda which demonstrated the utter, utter failure of the BNP to act in the interests of the people they see as their core constituency (the white working-class).

All good stuff and I hoped we talk about this in more detail. However, I made the first contribution from the floor to pick up on something he’d said about No Platform, a less concise version of the argument I put forward here. The next person to speak opined that No Platform was working just fine and what needed was more of it and so the discussion ended up focusing primarily on this issue for the rest of the session. Should have kept my mouth shut!

The first session was a bit of a wasted opportunity so I kept my mouth shut during the afternoon session: “Lessons of Lindsey: what the construction workers’ struggle is really about”. Having written so much on this site during the strikes this was a cracking opportunity to hear first hand what had happened from some of the strikers. Keith Gibson, a member of the strike committee, spoke along with Bill Mullins, Industrial Organiser for the Socialist Party and veteran of the strikes in the car industry during the 70’s and 80’s.

Keith spoke on the difficulties that have long plagued attempts at organising in the construction industry. When jobs only last a few months before the workforce disperses to other sites around the country it’s hard to take long-term action about specific greivances. Balloting the entire workforce, then waiting for a cooling off period before an official strike can be launched means that the site can be built before a strike can take place.

This is what made the dispute at Lindsey so significant, strikes there sparked a walkout at sites nationwide in solidarity. They were successful as well. A concerted attempt by management was defeated in two big waves of wildcat strikes and this has important implications for what will happen in the sector in the future.

Anyway, it’s a shame I wasn’t there for the whole weekend. Left-wing groups are famed for inflating attendance numbers at meetings and marches but I think there is good evidence this was the most successful Socialism weekend yet. The fact we’ve moved the final rally from a room at the University of London union, to a lecture theatre to the Friend’s Meeting House opposite Euston Station.

It’s difficult to relate the experiences of what it’s like being at rally so I won’t bore you with my attempts though I will pick up on one point made at the rally.

Over the course of the weekend we apparently managed to raise £25 grand. However, there’s a General Election coming up next year and along with plans to stand in a number of parliamentary seats four Socialist Party councillors are up for re-election.

Socialist Party members reading this will already have heard this and I don’t expect any of my regular readers from the BNP to put their hands in their pocket (though I’ve they’ve temporarily taken leave of their senses…) but what we’ve already raised isn’t enough. You can see what I’m getting at.

What do you get for your money? Nothing, we get it.

Seriously though, I know a fair few of my readers are independent minded socialists or from other radical political traditions (the three groups of people I’ve mentioned above cover, I think, about 90% of my readership).

I don’t expect you to suspend the political criticisms you have of our politics or our approach or ignore any mistakes you think we’ve made in the past or are likely to make again in the future. Whatever criticisms people have, individuals from the sensible left can appreciate that we are one of the few socialist organisations who talk about things which ordinary working-class people actually care about and have put down roots in a small number of areas round the country following years of patient, consistent political work.

If we can’t defend our council seats after years of serious grassroots community work there and poll a crap vote in the General Election the future doesn’t look bright for any of us.

1000 people listening intently, count ‘em.

English Defence League try to ruin Christmas

Not content with annoying shoppers in city centres across the country the English Defence League are now doing their best to spoil Christmas for people in Leeds:

A Christmas tree which was put up in Leeds city centre two weeks ago has been felled amid safety fears about a demonstration planned for the weekend.

The tree, which cost taxpayers £2,000, went up in City Square on 18 October.

However, the council and police agreed it could pose a risk to the public during a planned march by the English Defence League on Saturday.

Surprised commuters looked on as workmen used a chainsaw to cut down the 30ft tree early on Thursday morning.

Next week: The EDL decide to tackle Islam in Britain by going round telling small children that Father Christmas isn’t real.

Side issues – debating ‘No Platform’

Contemporary anti-fascism as a 1970’s re-enactment society: people debating the importance of No Platform.

Just like the hysteria over a certain recent appearance on Question Time, I don’t think the debate over No Platform (currently in progress on a number of left-wing blogs) matters very much anymore. The spread of the internet largely renders the idea of No Platform redundant, particularly given the popularity of the BNP website. Only a prolonged feat of technical wizardry could do anything about this.

Worth re-posting here is Paul Stott’s comment on Socialist Unity:

I think you will find that organisations and political currents that actually tried to put No Platform into practice (as opposed to waving lollipops at people or calling on the state to ban the BNP) have for some time been pointing out that the BNP have side-stepped no platform. Sadly it is no longer relevant as a strategy to defeat the BNP.

Their decade long electoral strategy, voter base and use of the internet ensure that.

Never mind the problem of supposed revolutionaries and progressives asking the state/police/CPS to act on their behalf. Hilariously in last weeks Socialist Worker Chris Bambery was arguing “we can’t rely on the liberal elite to defeat the BNP” – who the bloody hell had much of the left been appealing to the past few weeks but the BBC – the definition of the liberal elite in this country!

The final problem with No Platform is of course the brand of multi-culturalism that the state and local government introduced in the 1980s, and has seeped into the consciousness of much of the left. Having talked for a generation of ‘the black community’, the ‘Muslim community’ etc (regardless of the million and one divisions that make such concepts a nonsense) the state and the left is now reacting with horror when someone stands up and says “I represent the white community”. You’ve made your bed – lie in it.

Class politics instead anyone?

Questions that won’t be asked on Question Time

Phil, of A Very Public Sociologist fame, has posted up some cracking questions on Socialist Unity that should be asked of Nick Griffin now he’s going to appear on Question Time:

1. Why has the BNP consistently (Stoke, Burnley Pendle) voted for above-inflation increases in council taxation, despite its claims against council tax increases and property-based council tax in general?

2. Why did Broxbourne BNP vote to block free bus passes for pensioners against their pledge that “pensioners should get free bus passes”?

3. Why did Halifax BNP councillors in abstain from voting to block the closure of a primary school in Mixenden despite election literature promising to defend all primary schools in the area.

4. Why did BNP in Kirklees agree to council service cuts in Sep 2009 declaring “a lot of the silly posts can disappear. I’ve always advocated that you get rid of 25% of council staff and no-one would notice. We won’t be able to guarantee early retirement and gold-plated pensions.”?

5. You, Griffin, have expelled certain BNP members for their political actions (including ex-Conservative BNP councillor Geoff Wallace in Halifax for supporting greenbelt housing) but not those who have implemented these above actions which harm the majority whose interests you claim to further. Why is there this discrepancy?

6. Why did you oppose the firefighters’ strike of 2002-2003, asserting that firefighters should not have the right to withdraw their labour to renegotiate terms and conditions of work? You declared firefighters “must be placed on the same level as military personnel and police officers and … forego their ambiguous position of using strike action”. Do you still agree with it?

7. Why did Stoke BNP exonerate chief executive Wayne Nutbeen for closing (in 2005) Royal Doulton’s last factories. Nutbeen’s explanation was the “company isn’t owned by Stoke-on-Trent. It is owned by the shareholders. The board has to ensure it does right by them”.

8. Why has Stoke BNP agreed to budgets (2004, 2005, 2007) that cut social spending including Citizen’s Advice Bureaus, old people’s services?

9. Which aspects of the “national good” in “Oriental countries” would you emulate in Britain first – a 2000% increase in work-related suicides, mass dismissals of workers for attending anti-government meetings or homeless nomad families working in low-wage sectors? (Your manifesto (2009) claimed “Oriental countries such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore have managed their economies to combine private enterprise competition with the national good, and these are the models the BNP would emulate.”)

Unfortunately they won’t be asked because I imagine the audience and other panellists will come out with killer lines that he’s heard hundreds of times before such as ‘didn’t you write articles denying the Holocaust’, ‘what do you think of David Copeland isn’t he a bad man’, etc.

Predictably the debate about Nick Griffin on Question Time that has the whole political establishment getting their knickers in a twist has polarised over the question of whether he should be allowed or banned with gratuitious references to WWII on one side vs. misquotes from Voltaire on the other. There’s been little in the way of a debate about how a party which 10 years ago had a similar social status to people like Ian Huntley is in a position to be invited onto Question Time.

The BNP present themselves as the radical opposition to mainstream political parties and the champions of their chosen constituency, the white working-class. Therefore, an important part of undermining their support is illustrating their consistent failure to act in the interests of their chosen constituency not simply calling them Nazis. In the current circumstances of the BNP posing as a respectable, but radical, alternative to the three main parties anti-fascists appearing unwilling or unable to answer their arguments is dangerous.

I imagine this is a lesson which will be lost on the thousands of people who will gather outside the BBC studios to chant ‘Narrssttiii scum off our streets’ for a few hours.

Data protection for slow learners

For the second time in 12 months the BNP has lost its entire membership list.

The whole thing has been posted on Wikileaks:

This document contains nine spreadsheets of detailed, confidential party membership information, with dates ranging from December 2006 to 15 April 2009. The lists have been verified to be accurate in all cases examined by WikiLeaks, however it should not be assumed that every person with a BNP membership number is a current member of the BNP. For instance, journalists and opponents have sometimes joined the BNP to obtain information about it.

There are slightly over 16,000 unique membership numbers in the “April 15 Updated” spreadsheet, and based on membership number ID’s, around 35,000 memberships ever awarded.

They don’t even have Sadie ‘Shady’ Graham to blame it on this time. 

Even the thickest BNP members must be now wondering how their infallible leadership in the form of Nick Griffin has managed to lose their entire membership twice. Were there any safeguards put in place at all after last years debacle?

So, who will the BNP blame for this spectacular piece of incompetence?

A. The Labour Party.
B. ‘Zionists’.
C. Searchlight.
D. Muslims.

Answer: they will blame anyone and everyone except themselves. Personally, I have no idea who leaked this latest version and, I suspect, neither do they. I doubt that its release this week was a co-incidence though.

Last time this happened this is what they said:

It is looking increasingly likely that this is the work of Labour Party supporters,” said Simon Darby, the party spokesman. “If they have not protected their IP [internet service provider address] properly, there will be an electronic trail leading back to the culprit.

It was nothing of the sort of course. Earlier this year Sadie Graham’s boyfriend Matt Single was convicted and fined for leaking the first list. The charges against Sadie Graham were dropped. Funny that.

Hilariously, the judge in the trial then ruled that their address could not be published.

Anyway, as we saw last year this may be very embarassing for the BNP but it will do little to halt their current trajectory of moving toward the political mainstream. The months following the leak of the last membership list saw the BNP increasing their average vote in council by-elections then winning two seats in the European Parliament.

Unless it turns out that significant numbers of their members are convicted paedophiles, there is no such thing as bad publicity for the BNP. This sort of exposure will do them no harm in a week when everyone is going BNP mad anyway because (gasp!) Nick Griffin is going on Question Time.

Update: Nick Griffin claims the entire thing is a forgery:

It is a concoction of the ‘old’ list plus a number of inquiries received, but, most disturbingly, it contains thousands of names of people with whom the BNP has had no contact whatsoever.

The list includes thousands of people with renewal and membership numbers next to their names which are totally false and made up.

We have no idea from where this information has been drawn. Some of it looks like random items drawn from a telephone book.

Quick question though Nick, if the entries are random times drawn from the phone book, then why are so many mobile numbers listed?

Didn’t see this one coming… Pt II

The logical, reactionary outcome of multiculturalism and identity politics:

The government is allocating £12m to a new scheme to promote security and stability in Britain’s white working-class communities.

Mark Easton reports from Leicester, one of Britain’s most multi-cultural cities.

Social problems and their solutions seen through the lense of race and ethnicity.

The idea that there exists a ‘racial community’ with common interests, collective advantages and disadvantages is a poisonous one and has been official government policy for decades.

The idea of a ‘white community’ with its own ethnically defined interests is a logical progression for official political multiculturalism. Next stop, white community leaders.

Compulsory reading:

How to make a riot – Kenan Malik
Time ‘to dump’ multiculturalism – Joe Reilly
Race attack – Red Action on multiculturalism – G. O’Halloran
Why Class Crisis – Class Crisis

Didn’t see this one coming…

As a result of the English Defence League’s recent outing in Manchester:

The M.E.N. has learned that town hall and police chiefs, faced with picking up the bill for looking after the demos, plan to ask the home secretary for a change in the law that would ban protests where violence is expected.

From the Manchester Evening News.

What a surprise.

English Defence League outing in Manchester

Regular readers may have noticed that, once again, blogging has been light recently. I’ve had a lot on my plate, be patient.

Given what I’ve written on the EDL below plus some more stuff in a post I’m in the middle of writing this is my prelimary, professional assessment of their planned demo in central Manchester tomorrow (October 10th):

It’s a trap!

The fact they’re sending out Facebook messages and emails telling would-be protestors to turn up at Piccadilly train station so that Greater Manchester Police can direct them to their new meeting point only adds to my previous suspicions.

I’m tempted to open a sweep-stake on the numbers of people who will be nicked tomorrow. I predict somewhere between 40 and 50% of the people who turn up.

Vote for Bloggs

Not much time for a post except to note this curious addition to Searchlight’s list of BNP councillors I spotted:

For those with poor eyesight the above reads:

Name: Fred Bloggs
Ward: Gillingham
Council: Swale

The bloke is an ass.

So is this bloke really a BNP councillor then? Possibly not.

Update: And it’s disappeared from the list. Strange that.

Still visible on Google cache though.

Something about the EDL doesn’t add up

I’m sure most readers of this site will be familiar with the English Defence League (EDL), the small group of far right/right-wing football hooligans with plans to annoy shoppers in a different city centre every week for the next few months.

Flag waving football casuals yelling at large crowds of Asians over police lines may seem like the most straightforward form of politics imaginable but I think there’s more than meets the eye with the EDL, there’s a couple of curious features about this formation which suggests to me that it is deeply suspect.

Several places have reported that the links between the BNP and the EDL are self-evident or even that the EDL operates as some kind of ’street army’ for the BNP. In fact, the origins of the group and their relationship towards the BNP is more complicated but I’ll go into that in a future post.

The politics of the EDL are ambiguous, they don’t like Muslims but they’re not fond of the BNP either and, however implausibly, claim not to be racist. (For a visual illustration of their contradictory politics see this picture and then this one).

Press coverage

Mind you, say what you like about the dubious politics of the EDL, they must have had a great PR department.

They’ve had big splashes in all the main papers, good coverage from the BBC and a government minister warning of the serious threat they pose. It’ll be just like the 1930’s appprently.

The Real IRA could do with taking a leaf out of their book. Despite setting up armed checkpoints in a South Amargh village a few weeks ago they’re unable to elicit the same (or any) response from the government or significant press coverage.

This level of coverage may be a little less suspect if the EDL delivered what they promised. In fact, with the exception of a few high-profile occasions (the first protest in Luton and two outings in Birmingham) the appearance of the English Defence League on the streets is sad and pathetic. They seem to lack the capacity to bring out decent numbers regularly.

Can you imagine anyone looking at the Sky News pictures of 20 blokes huddled behind police lines being shouted at by a crowd of about a thousand people and thinking ’sod going to the football, that’s what I want to spend my weekends doing’?

This is one of the curious features of the EDL that doesn’t make sense, their uncanny ability to attract huge amounts of press coverage.

While the EDL is a new formation the same sort of crowd has been doing similar things for the last few years yet attracting precisely zero publicity.

A case in point is the annual Al Quds day march in London. This happened a few days ago in London and a small group of EDL supporters turned up and along with reporters and photographers for most of the mainstream media.

One of the groups supporting the EDL this year was March for England, another group for right-wing football fans who have a bit of a thing for flags. They protested against the Al Quds demonstration in London last year (as I did the year before that – although the one I was on was organised by Maryan Namazie and the Worker Communist Party of Iran) with similar numbers and similar results. They shouted at the demo from behind lines of police whilst waving flags, the demo shouted back and then everyone went home. Result: zero press coverage. What’s changed between last year and this year?

Tactics – learning the hard way

The other odd feature is the tactics they use.

The tactics of the EDL and their associated hangers on consist of holding a series of well-advertised (see above) city centre demos around the country with one every few weeks, a decision that looks distinctly dodgy given what’s happened on recent outings.

They’ve now had two demonstrations in Birmingham. Birmingham city centre around the Bullring and New Street station must one of the most heavily CCTV’ed areas in the country outside London and not exactly a difficult place for West Midlands Police to deploy hundreds of officers.

Didn’t take a clairvoyant to work out what would happen next. The intial news reports were of 90 arrests and a hundred participants on each side. Later reports upped this to 125 meaning that, astonishingly, near half of the total number of people who turned out on the day ended up in police cells. This also suggests that approximately 35 people so far have been identified from CCTV footage and received a knock on the door and a greeting that involved a pair of handcuffs.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that it’ll be the same routine for their next demos in Manchester and Leeds, a bit of scuffling and lots of arrests. Are they just terminally stupid?

It could be but stupid just doesn’t quite cover it when it comes to the decision to hold a demo in Glasgow city centre. Suicidal is more the word, I’ve heard Union Jacks and St George’s crosses go down really well among a large numbers of people in the city.

I don’t want to make firm conclusions here. It could just be that the EDL and its supporters are so thick that they don’t realise that a repeat of their last performance in Birmingham will end up with the lot of them facing a lengthy list of criminal charges and that the media are wetting their pants at the thought of some old-fashioned street confrontation.

Still, I reckon there’s enough circumstantial evidence to indicate that all is not what it seems with the EDL.