Will the real Colonel Despard please stand up? Historiography and Politics: A case study.

When thinking about history we often hold two parallel definitions: History is both the sequence of events which we believe to have happened in the past and also the attempts of historians to interpret and reinterpret those events in order to gain new understanding of the past. When historians seek to reinterpret the past they unavoidably bring their own interests and contemporary concerns to those past events, this, as Christopher Hill pointed out, is not problematic as current interests can stimulate new directions and new avenues for historical study and new questions for historians; for example, the growth of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 70s stimulated a expansion in interest among historians in the role of women within history. Hill warned that although contemporary concerns can create new questions for historians they should take care to avoid finding contemporary answers .
To examine the way in which different historians writing at different times and with different political interests have used the same historical evidence to come to widely different conclusions it is useful as a case study to examine the way in which the history of the British colonel and war hero turned revolutionary conspirator and condemned traitor, Edward Despard has been examined and interpreted by different historians and suggest how those historians’ own political and historical approaches have affected their interpretations.
It is fair to say that, beyond the efforts of a few modern social historians who have specialised in the study of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the story of colonel Despard, his conspiracy and trial is today almost completely unknown. However at the time of his trial Edward Despard was a most notorious and reviled traitor whose sorry end was an example and warning for all who conspired against the natural order which was broadcasted from pulpit and chapbooks across the country . Despard’s death mask, fashioned in wax and lit in lurid light was a centrepiece of Mme Tussauds’ early travelling waxworks show (ironically this was destroyed in the fires lit during the insurrectionary rioting in Bristol that accompanied the introduction of the 1832 reform act).
The decline of political agitation following the failure of the Great Chartist demonstration of 1848 and the increase of prosperity in Victorian society had convinced elements of the ruling class of the safety of extending the franchise and this allowed the development of a stable and confident new trades union movement (and its accompanying bureaucracy) this in turn assisted the development of a new historical discipline of labour history, which pursued a very definite ideological agenda, a distinct English working class tradition, uninfected by violent foreign ideologies from which sprang a uniquely English socialism that was grounded in Methodism not Marxism, its forerunners were the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who had endured their transportation with pacifistic Christian stoicism rather than the armed direct action of Luddites or ‘Captain Swing’s’ rick burners, their ancient inspiration the patrician cautiousness of a Quintus Fabius Maximus rather than the servile insurrectionism of a Spartacus. These new labour historians adopted a ‘Whig’ approach to the ‘Forward March of Labour’ in which a slow, but inevitable, evolution towards the ‘promised land’ allowed no room for insurrectionary adventurers.
In order to explain the trials and repression that undoubtedly did take place and still maintain this image of a docile and pacific lower order these Fabian historians emphasised the role of the immense army of informers employed by the state, and maintained that men such as Oliver the Spy, exploited the gullibility of frightened magistrates by fabricating most, if not all, of the conspiracies. Those who were caught up in these conspiracies were either the innocent victims of the agents provocateurs, or were deluded or deranged mavericks .
The formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain under the inspiration of the Bolshevik revolution may have challenged the basis of Fabian gradualism in politics, but the Comintern’s crude and formalistic Marxism continued with the same essentially ‘inevitablist’ approach to Labour history; albeit one in which a ‘disciplined’ proletariat could be marched onto the field of History and off again as required. Thus Raymond Postgate’s and G.D.H. Cole’s book The Common People dismissed such uncomfortable and unruly expressions of working class rebellion as the Luddites or the Despard’s conspiracy as ‘desperate’ or as receiving ‘microscopic’ support, as simply juvenile extravagances before the class was able to learn its ‘proper’ place in the long march to a labour victory in 1945.
The first historian to seriously examine Despard and the conspiracy around him was the distinguished historian Sir Charles Oman. A stalwart of the establishment, and a militant conservative in both politics and in history, Oman was a history professor at All Souls’ where he also served for sixteen years as one of the university MPs . Oman received his knighthood for his work in the foreign office press office during the Great War.
It was whilst working there that Oman got the opportunity of attending the trial of the Irish rebel (and former British consul) Sir Roger Casement, it was during the trial he recounts that he was first reminded of what he considered as a comparable act of treason from a servant of the crown; that of Colonel Despard.
Later historians have cited Oman as being dismissive of Despard as being “of marginal historical importance” , however, Oman wrote his essay in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, and had witnessed the radicalisation which had been created by that war: the Bolshevik uprising, the toppling of the royal houses from half of Europe, and the threat caused to the very heart of the Empire by industrial unrest, internal sedition and the armed rebellion in Ireland. Oman used this recent History to reassess the threat that Despard’s conspiracy presented to the crown and for four reasons concluded that that threat was real.
Firstly, the Irish threat; Despard, like Casement, was connected to a wide ranging and real Revolutionary movement in Ireland. On his return to the British Isles from Honduras Despard was in contact with Wolf Tone and the United Irishmen, for which he was interned by the Pitt govt. During the uprising, Tone’s uprising in 1789 had been defeated but the UI and their British offshoot the United Englishmen remained active and as Emmett’s uprising in 1803 showed they remained a real force. There were clear parallels between the conspiracies of Tone, Emmett and of Despard with a revolutionary insurrection planned to take place in concert with a French Invasion.
Secondly, Despard sort to organise his rebellion among the rank and file of the Grenadier Guards, stationed at that time in the city of London, outlandish it may seem to have attempted to ferment mutiny within the British army in the heart of the Capital, but Oman pointed to both contemporary and more recent history to take the threat very seriously. He drew direct parallels between the mutinies that had presaged the fall of the Romanov and Hohenzollern dynasties and Despard’s plans and described Despard’s conspiracy as aiming to constitute a “soviet of soldiers and workmen” . He also pointed out that less than 3 years previously the British had faced their greatest crisis of the entire revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars; when the ‘wooden walls’ that had protected Britain’s shores from invasion had collapsed when mutinies at Nore and Spithead had left the country undefended for a month and caused panic within the establishment.
Oman acknowledged that the conspiracy that Despard had gathered around him were far too weak to be capable of to have been able to challenge the establishment, however this did not necessarily negate its threat to the establishment, Despard expected that the seizure of the Tower, with its cache of arms, and the capture or killing of the King would be the spark that would trigger a wide ranging uprising, both in London and across the Industrial North. Oman showed that Despard was convinced that the industrial regions were ripe for rebellion, and whilst believing that Despard and his co conspirators were the most desperate and impatient of the “British Jacobins” , he rejected the assertion of Whig and Labour historians that Despard was a lunatic. Oman noted that, less than 20 years before Despard’s conspiracy was hatched, London had for 8 days been at the mercy of the Mob which although roused by a sectarian firebrand, Lord Gordon, to oppose catholic emancipation, had taken on the distinct character of a class uprising which terrified both establishment and radical politician alike. This, Oman said, made Despard’s plan a realistic one in the terms of the day.
Oman completed his work on Despard by saying that: “there can be no doubt that he was a typical British Jacobin, and a most dangerous personage.”
Oman, when beginning his work about Despard, writes that he was reminded of the case whilst attending the trial of Sir Roger Casement (in 1916), however the references within the essay itself to Bolsheviks and Soviets suggest that it was in fact written much later. If that is the case there is a possible explanation for what directed Oman toward reviving the memory of the “unfortunate Colonel Despard”.
The senior officer in charge of the Home front in 1916, and thus the officer responsible for both the capture of Roger Casement and the suppression of the Easter Rising was Major General Sir John French, who later during the Irish war of independence was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In that role French was responsible for the formation and deployment of the infamous ‘Black and Tans’, and thus made himself the number one hate figure and target for the nationalist forces. One of the more famous of these, living in the shadow of French’s residence in Dublin Castle, was French’s older sister- Charlotte Despard. Charlotte French had married Maximillian Despard in 1870 and, following his death in 1890 had become active in philanthropic works in London’s East End, her work rapidly radicalised her and she became prominent in socialist and suffragette politics and on the outbreak of the first world war had joined with Sylvia Pankhurst on a resolutely anti war and socialist platform. Charlotte was a supporter of both Bolshevik communism and of the Independence movement in Ireland . The tension between the general and his rebellious sister was common knowledge (Sir John refused to speak to his sister ever again) and may well have stimulated Oman’s interest in a previous errant member of the Despard family.
Charlotte Despard was unable to long to enjoy Ireland’s freedom from British rule, Connolly’s prediction that a divided Ireland would cause “a carnival of reaction north and south” was proved true and Charlotte who had been disheartened by Irish nationalism in the fraternal bloodletting of the civil war, and placed her hopes in communism. She was forced to flee Dublin in 1933 when a catholic mob attacked her home and found shelter in the British ruled north.
The next Historian to take seriously the conspiracy of Colonel Despard was the Marxist historian Edward Thompson.
Thompson had joined the Communist Party in 1942 whilst at university, influenced by reading Christopher Hill’s Marxist analysis of the English Civil War, and by the example of his older brother, Frank, a party member and SOE operative who died whilst fighting alongside the partisans in Bulgaria. Thompson became a member of the Communist Party Historians group, which brought together Historians like Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Leslie Morton and Eric Hobsbawm . The revelations in Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ of the crimes of Stalin’s rule combined with the shock of the Russian Intervention that crushed the workers uprising in Hungary shattered Thompson’s loyalty to the party and convinced him of the necessity to restore the human element to socialism, which he believed Stalinism had jettisoned.
Thompson also sought to refashion a Marxist approach to history that reject the mechanical and “inevitablist” form of history that had become common among Marxists, instead he adopted a humanistic interpretation of Marxism that took its inspiration from the early Marx: “History does nothing, it “possesses no immense wealth”, it “wages no battles”. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.”
In his classic work, The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson sought to challenge the various ‘orthodoxies’ which had dominated the writing of labour and social history; the Fabian orthodoxy, that saw the mass of the poor as passive victims of laissez faire, awaiting their far sighted saviours (like Francis Place), the orthodoxy of the “empirical economic historians” who saw the poor as data in statistical series, or finally; “the ‘pilgrim progress’ orthodoxy, in which the period is ransacked for forerunners-pioneers of the welfare state, progenitors of a Socialist Commonwealth or (more recently) early exemplars of rational industrial relations.” Of this orthodoxy, Thompson said; “only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten.” Thompson’s history was about how real men and women reacted both individually and collectively to the birth pangs of the industrial revolution and how those reactions; accommodation, collaboration or resistance, contributed to the development of a distinct working class consciousness.
For Thompson Despard was a Janus figure, who through his association with Jacobin conspirators looked back to an eighteenth century form of radical practise, and in his links with the new secret underground in the industrial North, the “Black Lamp” , presaged a new, working class and collective resistance movement, which Thompson linked directly to the industrial direct action of the Luddites a decade later.
Thompson’s work was highly influential it: “...redefined the subject matter of social and labour history, and pushed open more than one door of historical closure.” And a generation of historians, many of whom had been Thompson’s students were inspired to deepen and expand on his work. When they did so they were affected by the political events around them and this was reflected in their work. Marianne Elliott efficiently refuted the attempts by critics who attacked Thompson’s work on Despard and questioned whether there was sufficient, or indeed any, evidence for these nationwide conspiracies. Writing in the aftermath of strikes which had destroyed power sharing at Stormont and had brought down the Tory government of Edward Heath Elliott could easily demolish Dinwiddy’s argument that there was no connection between trade union activity and radical and subversive politics.
The escalation of the civil right movements into the armed struggle in the six counties created a renewed interest in the history of the previous nationalist movements in Ireland this led Marianne Elliott and Roger Wells to reassess both Despard’s and Emmett’s roles as parts of a far wider conspiracy of which neither of whom where the true central players but whose capture fatally weakened the overall plot.
The struggles for social equality and against discrimination by women, black people and gays were amongst the most significant outcomes of the revolutionary upsurges of 1968. These struggles highlighted and inspired historians to study and explore previously ‘hidden histories’, establishing new historical disciplines.
Two American former students of Thompson, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, took inspiration from these new avenues of study and taking as their starting point Marx’s comment about capitalism being born from ‘blood and filth’ and Raymond Williams’ work on the financing of the industrial revolution through the slave trade Rediker and Linebaugh examined the lives and the communities of those at the front line of the Atlantic ‘Triangular trade’.
Rediker and Linebaugh found that all along the Atlantic coast communities of “...dispossessed commoners, transported felons, indentured servants, religious radicals, pirates, urban labourers, soldiers, sailors and African slaves” formed a multiracial and polyglot “many headed Hydra” of resistance to the attempts of the emerging imperial states to impose order on the Atlantic trade.
Linebaugh and Rediker’s Despard was at the centre of this ‘Motley crew’, extending his story outward from London and Ireland to the West Indies and Central America. It was there, at the source of the Slavocracy’s wealth, whilst fighting against French and Spanish alongside black former slaves and white former American revolutionaries, that Despard learnt both his egalitarianism and met his wife, the African- American Catherine Despard.
Linebaugh and Rediker rescued Catherine from the shadows into which she has been thrust; they showed that beyond the snobbery of the Despard family who described Catherine as ‘the deluded woman who calls herself a wife’ Catherine was a stalwart fighter and organiser in her own right, coordinating the campaign for the release of Despard and the other Habeas corpus prisoners, and later, during Despard’s trial impressing Nelson so much that he successfully petitioned for her to receive an officer widow’s pension ( which was withdrawn after Despard’s inflammatory speech at the scaffold, which Catherine was believed to have conspired with Edward in authoring.
Rediker and Linebaugh showed the links between Irish and American revolutionaries, the London mob, and slave rebellions in the Caribbean and placed the Despard’s at the very heart of them.
When the radical movements of 1968 began to run out of steam in the late 1970s through a combination of economic uncertainty, rising unemployment and ‘the crisis of militancy’: in which both the annoying failure of the revolution to materialise, and the inexplicable refusal of the workers to accept the leadership of the ex-student vanguard led many of those who had formed the central organisation of ‘the movements’ to conclude that in order to ‘make a real difference’ it was necessary to pursue their careers by going to work in social welfare agencies, Social Democratic local government or into the academy.
Separated from the struggles that did exist, and increasingly acting as the point of contact between the state dole and the needy poor, these former radicals found increasingly that they were more in sympathy with the state than with surly and ungrateful ‘proles’. However, in order to retain the illusion of radicalism both in academia and local government the left became increasingly preoccupied with identifying and challenging the language of oppression rather than the oppression itself. In their role as both petitioners for, and distributers of, state aid they encouraged the development of a ‘victim culture’ in which the poor, the needy, the oppressed were seen not as active agents in their own liberation but as helpless and voiceless victims awaiting the advocacy and largesse of professional carers.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc deepened the radicals disillusion with any progressive alternative to capitalism and accentuated their love/hate relationship with the liberal state. For them, the state was both the defender of the suffering created by capitalism’s crimes; of war, imperialism, racism, poverty, etc. and the only hope of relieving some of that suffering.
The most recent study of the life of colonel Despard is firmly rooted within this political current; for Mike Jay, author of The Unfortunate colonel Despard: hero and traitor in Britain’s first war on terror (2004) Despard’s story has immediate resonance with today’s ‘war on terror’; like the inmates at Guantanamo Bay, Jay’s Despard was an innocent victim of an all powerful state, martyred for being different and to justify state terror. Jay rejects all the previous historians who have examined Despard’s case and asserts that Despard, who suffered years in jail and a horrific death for his beliefs, did not really want the revolutionary overthrow of the state and whose cause was actually met by the passing of the Reform Act in 1832! Jay has further claimed that Despard was in fact “better characterised as patriotic and strongly conservative” . Although Jay happily ransacks the work of the social Historians he rejects all of their conclusions as in his view “E.P. Thompson et al” sought to “crudely” incorporate Despard into a direct line of working class resistance and “Chartism/ socialism/ Marxism” (which shows that even if Mike jay has actually read any Thompson, he has certainly not understood him!).
Instead Jay returns to the method of the nineteenth century patrician Fabian historians in seeing the masses as essentially passive and helpless victims, at risk from the spies and machinations of the all powerful state, but whose only relief was, and is to place ones trust in the liberal humanity of that same state. His attempt to shoehorn contemporary political parallels into the Despard story leaves Despard stranded out of time.
It might be argued that to compare Mike Jay with the other historians who have studied Despard is unfair- after all he isn’t a professional historian and his work is designed as a piece of popular non-fiction. However Jay’s book is the most readily available work on the subject, available in a paperback edition and copies are found in many libraries, and it displays perfectly the warning made by Christopher Hill: “It is right and proper that historians should ask new questions, and such questions may well be stimulated by happenings in our own society. I see no harm in this so long as our answers do not derive from the present.”
Each of the other historians, even if one can disagree markedly with their interpretations or conclusions, increased our understanding and have brought us new insights into the period. Jay, on the other hand, by dismissing the work previously done so that he can mould the facts to fit his own contemporary world view, hides the reality and brutality of the times and in doing so diminishes the courage and achievements of both Edward and Catherine Despard.

Snowdonia, the cops graveyard

Thank fuck for North Wales, keep up the good work.

A police officer who was cleared of wrongdoing after punching a woman while trying to arrest her has died after being found in north Wales.

Pc Mulhall's death comes just four months after Michael Todd, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, was found dead on Mount Snowdon.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/south_yorkshire/7515251.stm

A night at the Races

on friday mrs redstar and me celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary with a night out at Newbury Races, lovely food, good racing, inspired(!?!) betting, and beautiful company, a perfect night! An 8-1 win in the first, a 7-2 in the second and a 12-1 win in the last meant it was also a damned cheap date! after the races UB40 played in the Paddock, brill!

The 43 Group- fighting the fascists

mugabe and friends

Gordon Brown has described Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's regime as a "criminal and discredited cabal" which "should not be recognised by anybody".

But old Rob has alot of friends happy to shake his hand.

Rob and Jack

Rob and Chuck

Rob and Thatch

fat cop, little cap

What the f***! Let me get me kebab!

one asylum seeker who is definately not welcome here

congratulations to the Nepalese for Kicking out their parasitical leech of a king and declaring their country a republic.

An excellent Idea which should be copied everywhere- however, this means that another bunch of aristocratic spongers are loose on the World cadging stage.

We say Piss off you Bastard you aren't welcome here!

here is a hint for anyone with surplus Royals

making Holocaust revisionism respectable

for a while now there has been a serious weakness at the heart of mainstream liberal and leftist politics. The Idea that in opposing imperialist war it is the duty of leftists to support uncritically any and all who stand against U.S. or other Western interests. This has led the anti war movement to embrace and cheerlead for some decidedly unsavoury charactors and movements- whether the embarrassment of "We are all Hesbollah!" or the presence of the spokesmen for Hamas and Al Sadr's Mahdi Army on 'Stop The War' podiums. In recent weeks this has even led some to defend the murderous dictatorships of the Generals in Burma and Mugabe in Zimbabwe, because if the British and Americans are against them then they MUST be supported.
Given these anti-imperialists other fixation, with Israel and Palestine, and the supposed power and influence of the 'zionist' lobbys on western politics, it isn't all that surprising that eventually they would seek to exonerate the reputation of earlier opponents to American and British imperialist designs and the powerful Zionist forces that controlled them.
Last month the Guardian's forum CiF printed an article by the former editor of the New Statesman Peter Wilby which trumpeted a new book by the American author Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, which argued that the Nazis were not responsible for the Holocaust, and if it was not for the brutal warmongering of the British under Churchill and the US under Roosevelt, goaded on by the Zionist Lobby then Hitler would have peacefully relocated Europe's Jews to Madagastar. Nazi occupation and domination of all of Europe and colonisation of the East were to be prefered to fighting the fascists.
David Aaronovich's interview with Baker in yesterdays Times is fascinating showing how far such Idiot anti- imperialism can go; twisting history to fit into their conspiracy laden world view.

sex tips for trots

from last years eurotrot summer camp newspaper:
"Bring together 500 young revolutionists of all Europe, in a place closed in full summer. To take pleasure? You want of it but you do not know yet ; how that will occur, if the heterosexual reports will be soaked with sexism than in your life of every days This had to be said, between revolutionists!
For opening out reports and a maximum catch of pleasure without doubts nor risks, there are sexual tools hyper. The first element is to fight presupposed that the system policies encrusted in our heads, until our ass. For that it is important to speak about sex most freely possible: to know its desires, to discuss, understand of it that the sex as it is political… in light to dilate its spirit at the same time as its bottom.
The hood is the only means of stopping the AIDS. Lubricated well, it will be able to return in any opening according to the desires One will be able to place it with the hands or the mouth.
The female condom consists of a matter which transmits much more heat that the latex. There is almost no chance that it crash and its external ring rubs the clitoris (hmmmmmm!). It is enough to place it and await 30 min that it is fixed. And it left for 8h pleasure!
To eat an ass or a pussy, it is enough to use a dam (right-angled latex has to apply with gel ) or a hood cut in the direction length to apply the side lubricated to the vagina or the anus. One places it on the zone so much desired with a little freezing between it and the opening and it left: our languages muscular of militant can act differently. Obviously, a hood by opening and partner. And if I do not want to kiss?

The sexual release is not to set up a against-standard where everyone kisses together It is to respect its desires and the desires of the others. One inevitably does not want to kiss, one can want to build other reports that reports of seduction. One can want to hold his she-cat with his own fingers. Like said it Marx *: when, how, with which, with how much: it is me which knows if I want or not; it is me which decides if I make or not! >>
* Dialectical of sodomy and gross wet beard, 1871"

five years on- Why are we still marching?

IF MARCHING CHANGED ANYTHING THEY'D ABOLISH IT

Back in 2003 the Stop the War Coalition had two tactics to prevent war in Iraq: marching from A to B and then going home, and marching from B to A and then going home. Neither of these cunning plans worked, but they seemed so good to Tony Benn, Lindsey German and their friends it is all the StWC’s done to stop the war. This may let them claim the moral high ground: but how many divisions can that muster? Any superiority this might give them has, anyway, been squandered by their adherence to tactics which have failed to achieve their stated objectives. The British state has faced StWC down once and knows it can do so again if, for example, it chooses to partner the US in an attack on Iran.

ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS

Thankfully not all protestors followed the supine policies of the StWC. School and college students walked out of their institutions, disrupted traffic, and showed a willingness to wrestle with the police. When demonstrators travelled to disrupt the Fairford airbase, there was no ‘right’ to demonstrate, only the illegal actions of the police. Clearly they recognised the threat posed by direct action to the Government’s war plans, even if the StWC could not.

NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR

Gordon Brown is committed to the neo-conservative project. Those who celebrated Tony Blair’s resignation ought to consider that he handed over at a time of his choice to the successor of his choice who shares his politics. Britain remains in the missionary position and will remain so regardless of whether Bush, McCain, Obama or Clinton’s on top. Given this, a militant anti-war movement is as necessary as ever. Sadly the StWC is as impotent now as five years ago.

TALKING A GOOD FIGHT

To cover up its flaccid nature, the StWC has as many excuses as an incapable lover. Their 2008 pamphlet begins with the following astonishing claim by Viscount Stansgate (Tony Benn): ‘The Stop the War movement is the most powerful and influential popular political movement of my lifetime and possibly of any period of our history’. If the last five years have been a victory, we would have hated to see a defeat! Such lies can also be found amongst the witterings of the SWP leadership, with John Rees informing us that ‘Tony Blair was Britain’s worst ever prime minister’ (has he never heard of Margaret Thatcher?) and that ‘we [the StWC] had driven him out of office’. This is nothing short of collective delusion and helps explain why the 1.5 million marchers in 2003 have been followed by ever decreasing turnouts. Working class people are used to being lied to by mainstream politicians – we do not need such lies from the self-proclaimed leaders of the anti-war movement as well.Given it has been such a flop when it matters, the Stop the War Coalition needs a good dose of Viagra. We are calling on demonstrators today to let the Stop the War Coalition leadership know their feeble approach satisfies only the state and the war-mongers.

foxtons consequences

House prices directly affect the accessibility and availability of housing for everyone, but especially the working class - for us, particularly, the housing squeeze is increasing.

The social housing stock is decreasing whilst waiting lists increase. This inevitably leaves the options down to private rentals or owner occupation. However housing costs impact on rents, private rentals being considerably more expensive than those for social housing, and clearly purchase price puts most houses well out of reach for many people.

The trouble with Foxtons, and their ilk, is that they artificially inflate prices to increase their commissions. They also expand their operations into traditional working class areas which, together with their pricing policies, further restricts housing availability for the working class.

We should all support Class War's picket at Foxtons, the target is justified.

Picket Foxtons, 3pm, 3rd March

CLASS WAR PRESS RELEASE:

Picket Foxtons: Islington Branch, 3 pm March 3rd:

Monday March 3rd at 3pm sees Class War's picket of Foxtons in Islington, in a demonstration against the greatest con-men of our time - estate agents.

We've been ripped off by them, and are sick of them driving up house prices in our part of town.

So come along and tell one of the worst of the lot, Foxtons, what you think of them.

Foxtons Islington branch at 355 Upper Street will be picketed from 3pm - 7pm on Monday 3rd March.

There is however a lot that can be done before then (and afterwards!) - and not just towards Foxtons. Many estate agents routinely break the law by placing advertising signs without permission on council property, and sometimes on private property. One very simple way to fight back against the damage estate agents are doing to our communities is simply to take these signs down where ever you find them. Don't let them advertise - illegally - over-priced properties in your community.

Take these signs down, and return them to the estate agents concerned - the bigger this campaign gets, the better it gets for us, and the worse it gets for the likes of Foxtons.

Lets get busy!



NOTES:

The BBC TV Whistleblower programme found agents putting forward false offers, faking landlords' signatures and falsifying documents to inflate property prices.

Foxtons are here to drive up house prices, it's their avowed intent: their founder Jon Hunt, who sold up last year and pocketed £370 million, liked to talk of 'going to war' for his sellers. Foxtons takes a bigger commission than any other agent to flog each house which it justifies by promising to wring from a buyer the highest possible price.

QUOTES:

"Some of the people I hate most in the world are estate agents. I hate generalisations, but all estate agents are slimy, money obsessed, lying idiots, who went to public school, but still didn't get any A levels and so have to do an essentially unnecessary job for too much money. It's not a generalisation. Show me one estate agent who isn't like that and I will show you an estate agent who has lied to you to convince you that he isn't like that and has thus confirmed just exactly how much he is like that in reality." Richard Herring

"For those of you who don't live in London and have no intention of ever living in London: well, lucky you. Lucky you for not having to put up with......extortionate house prices, but mostly lucky you for not having to put up with Foxtons, the people who sell those houses for extortionate prices." Bryony Gordon

Tel: 07986 041 207
Email: londoncwf@yahoo.co.uk
http://www.classwaruk.org/
http://www.myspace.com/fkfoxtons

northern rock mantra

Privatise profits, socialise risk.

The fuckers.

Fuck the Pope

Thanks to jez for this- when we were chatting about my course and I mentioned that I was studying the french revolution and he assumed that I knew about this already. I didn't- and so I stole it:

Jacques Hébert 1790
The great anger of Père Duchesne against the bishop of Rome, who has just excommunicated all the French and who, with the Cardinals, the Bishops and all the damn priests, cooked up the plot to slaughter the National Assembly, the Jacobin Club and all good citizens. The nomination of a Patriarch to govern the clergy of France.
Who does he take us for, that bastard of an indulgence seller? Does he think that with his toilet paper — his bulls — his cannons without primers, and all the thunder and idiocies with which he put to sleep or scared our fathers, dammit, does he still believe he leads the French of today? We're no longer in the time of King Dagobert, and today we're no longer such dupes as to buy the pardons that priests trafficked in in past centuries, nor to be upset by an interdiction that the bishop of Rome will cast upon the Kingdom. The hell with them; we won’t let ourselves be fooled by those sons-of-bitches of priests. Their confessions, their purgatory, their absolutions, their indulgences are nothing but feed for the foolish. The so-called keys of St. Peter, with which the Pope’s criers once opened the doors to the great salon of the eternal father, now seem to us to be nothing but skeleton keys with which the Latin pontiff wants to pry open our houses and our coffers so as to take what we own.
How does this bastard still have the audacity to use such methods today? It’s said that he has responded to all the mitred Ravaillacs who fired him up against the French nation and he issued a brief of excommunication against us. O lord, what is going to become of us? In order to make a greater impression on people’s spirits, it’s during the fortnight of Easter that the lightning bolts are going to be thrown at us; all the croziered — and to-be-clubbed — priests must, during this holy time, make a last effort to overthrow the constitution. At the head of the devoted, escorted by knights of the dagger, the fuckers are going to lay siege in groups to the house of every deputy to the National Assembly, and those of all the members of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution and kill them during the night, and then fall upon the guards of the Tuileries and take away the King.
These are the peaceful projects of these sons-of-bitches of priests, and they dare flatter themselves that the French will back them in this abominable enterprise; they think that upon hearing their voices brother will arm himself against brother, son against father, and finally, that for the second time, we'll give them the abominable joy of a new St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
They've lied, these rascals, and we'll know how to handle them. I can reply for the Parisians, dammit, and our pals from the faubourg Saint Antoine are all disposed to fix them. I pity the bastard who will dare assume his chair to pronounce the excommunication they threaten us with. He can be sure it'll be only one small leap from there to the lamppost. And if the sons-of-bitch priests think they'll do better in the Departments; if they flatter themselves that the same brigands who they armed with daggers in Nimes, Montauban, and Vannes will back up their efforts, then, dammit, 20,000 of us are ready recall them to order.
And so, dammit, all their projects, all their plots will fail miserably, and these bastards of sons-of-bitches would do well to make of necessity a virtue and take the side of the constitution. This is the only choice left to them, and it is in vain that they place their hopes in Capet the Redhead. Despite him, despite the Germans, despite his army of Savoyards, despite his bandits from Spain, we'll accomplish our task, dammit, and we will maintain the constitution ...
So let the old rascal put away his baubles; let him remain peaceably in his Vatican. Let him feast with all the red donkeys of his fucking college, let him sip the good wines of France and Spain every day with the gluttonous de Bernis, or let him amuse himself with tender young thing, but dammit, let him not trouble his old age by messing in politics.
The bishops we'll name, dammit, will be worth as much as those of la Guimard[1], and those who will have benefices granted by the people will deserve their confidence more than all those valets of the court, those schemers, those payers of arrérages who won bishoprics and abbeys and who lived off the patrimony of the poor as once was done. But to ward off the blows that those damn low-lives want to deal us, I make the motion to cut off the living of those conspirators, and to take from them the pensions that the nation still accords them, and that we name a patriarch for France, and that the most virtuous of prelates be chosen for that eminent post, and fuck the court of Rome, its cardinals, its bishops, its abbots, its indulgences, its pardons and the Pope himself.

1. The traffic that dancer carried out in benefices while the bishop of Orleans was among her pursuers is well known. A doctor who, as a price for the exactitude and dexterity with which he rubbed that beauty down during her frequent indispositions asked her to accord him a post. Become a priest, Guimard answered him, I don’t know how to read — what difference is it...But don’t you know that between my legs I have a page of benefices. He became a priest had had a priory worth 20,000 livres.

Adultery Rocks

pigs at the trough

The police have always been happy to jump to their masters needs when breaking strikes and beating up demonstrators. Now in a bizzare twist of irony they are planning to march to demand the right to strike.

If you have found the police to be idle, useless, stupid, bigoted, dishonest, violent or just plain wrong, like us you probably see little point in giving them even more money from the public purse.

If so, now is the time to make your voice heard. We already pay for their tasers, CS gas, guns, extendable batons, surveillance squads and fast cars - now they want us to pay for fat wage increases.

Trot on copper!

We want to see everyone who has ever had a bad experience of the police in central London on Wednesday 23 January.

The police never care about the "rights" of any other workers - why should we care about theirs?

Make your voice heard when the police demonstrate in London.

Class War says give the greedy pigs what they deserve - nothing!

Protest against the Police. January 23rd Central London

further details to follow at http://www.londonclasswar.org/

police porn

Flashy dies

There have been a large number of obituaries and tributes to George Macdonald Fraser, the creator of Harry Flashman, who died recently. In the continuing spirit of RSC we have stolen a couple: A poem from Bill on Harry's Place, a pastiche of 19th century mawkishness. and an article from History Today may 2000 reproduced from the Flashman Society

The Burial of Sir Harry Flashman

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corpse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
In the trollop our hero had married.

We buried him darkly at dead of night,
When the strumpets were out gallivanting,
By the struggling moonbeam's misty light
At the hour Flashy was lustfully panting.

No useless coffin made up his bier,
Not in sheet nor in shroud was his corse girt;
But he lay like a poltroon quaking in fearHiding,
till the end, ‘neath a lady’s skirt.

Few and short were the prayers we said,
And we spoke not a word of sorrow;
But we silently thought ‘at least it’s not I who is dead’,
Though we bitterly thought of the morrow.

We thought, as we hollowed his narrow bed –
It was high time he slept alone –
Of the dangers we’d rather pile on his head,
While we lived it up safely at home.

Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that's gone,
I doubt if we'll miss him that much
And little he'll notice, if they let him sleep on
While his girls writhe ‘neath our fresh touch.

But half of our heavy task was done
When the clock struck the hour for retiring;
And we heard the distant and random gun
That the foe was sullenly firing.

Quickly and suddenly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame cold and sterile;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
But we ran far away from all peril.

Flashman author George MacDonald Fraser explains how 'history disguised as fiction' has been his inspiration and is also his aim.
`YOUR EYES ARE blinded by the sight of gold, man!' Thus Sir Daniel Darnley Darnley (or was it Darnby?), the Laughing Pirate, duelling in an Aztec treasure-house, despatching some unfortunate Spanish villain with a lightning rapier 'thrust -- and awakening my interest in history for the first time.
I was about eight years old and until I encountered Sir Daniel in a D.C. Thomson 'tuppenny blood' my acquaintance with the past had been limited to the odd Bible story, Greek and Norse myths, and my first school history book, The World Family. I'm sure it was an excellent primer, but all I remember of it is a couplet about Hannibal crossing the Alps because he wanted the Roman scalps, and a law of King Hammurabi's condemning arsonists to be thrown into the fire they had started, which seemed drastic, though not illogical. I became disenchanted with the book when, asked to read aloud from the last chapter which dealt with the Great War, I was mocked for my mispronunciation of 'the warring navies', which I rendered as though the last word was spelt with two 'v's, thus conjuring a picture of labourers swarming out of the trenches brandishing picks and shovels.
And then I chanced on Sir Daniel, and it dawned on my infant mind that history (in his case Elizabethan or Restoration, I forget which) was not only a sober record of the past, but a wonderland of action and excitement, where gallant adventurers swaggered and fought and intrigued, usually for patriotic but occasionally for mercenary reasons, against sinister enemies, most of them foreign, and life was a series of battles: escapes, ambushes, rescues, conspiracies, duels, and general romantic activity. I knew it was fiction, of course; only later did I discover that true history left fiction far behind.
This began to dawn through the exploits of another true-blue British buccaneer named Morgan, who swung a hearty cutlass and sang a merry jingle about 'the Spaniards who sail the Spanish Main, we hunt their craven souls; We cut off their heads and trim their ears, to make a game of bowls.' (It will be seen that even at the age of eight I was tending towards the Macaulay rather than the Gibbon school of history.)
But Morgan was a turning-point, for I discovered that there really had been a buccaneer of that name, whose real-life exploits were pure Hollywood; he was my bridge from dream history to true history, from the pages of The Skipper to (eventually) Esquemeling, Charles Johnson, Defoe, Dampier and Prescott; from ripping yarns to the great escape from Maracaibo and the epic march on Panama.
My progress along this path was assisted by a writer whom I regard as the best historical novelist since Walter Scott -- and I am well aware that I am giving him priority over a talented host headed by R.L. Stevenson. Rafael Sabatini it was who confirmed for me that history was not only a serious study but a magical entertainment, and showed me how historic fact may be wedded to exciting fiction. At this he was a past master, a historian turned story-teller who excelled in both fields. I should guess that he influenced more writers than any academic teacher.
I first came across Sabatini in a school library, and Captain Blood, that sweeping piratical saga inspired by the life of my old friend Morgan (the real one), held me enthralled. Months later the cinema curtains opened on the film version, with Erich Wolfgang Korngold's majestic overture thundering out, the novice Errol Flynn defying Judge Jeffreys, pinking Basil Rathbone, wooing and winning Olivia de Havilland, and scattering Dons and Frenchmen in all directions... and I was seeing history for the first time, or thought I was, which is much the same thing when you are ten years old.
From that moment I became a sort of history alcoholic, absorbing it from every available source, factual and fictional, but mostly the latter. Treasure Island, Ivanhoe, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Three Musketeers, and the works of Jeffery Farnol, Philip Lindsay, and many others were consumed, but I did not abandon my first mentors, the Wizard, Hotspur, and Rover, who took me through the Napoleonic Wars in The Fighting Temeraire, the '45 Rebellion with an Alan Breck clone named Red Fergie, the Border raids with one Black Musgrave, and the Seven Years' War with The Ten Scarlet Feathers, which dealt with a sacred war bonnet belonging to the celebrated Indian chief, Pontiac. This inspired my own first attempt at historical fiction, a lurid but (I'm proud to say) factually-based account of the massacre of British-American settlers at Fort Venango. I was writing it during a maths lesson when it was confiscated and destroyed by an unsympathetic vandal of a master; the Nazi book-burnings were taking place about this time, and I brooded on the coincidence. I still haven't forgiven that man; as Dr Campbell said of James Boswell: 'When I think of the murdered literature that lies at the door of that drunken little ass ...'
But I digress. By this time I was getting past the 'tuppenny blood' stage (so far as I ever have) and had developed a new enthusiasm, for a work by one Robert Graves, embellished with a stone bust and the title 'I, Clavdivs'. Being unfamiliar with the Roman 'u' at that time, I went about calling it 'I, Klav-divs', but if this was derided I didn't notice, for Graves had me hooked, and I still rate Claudius as one of the four best historical novels I have ever read (Scott always excepted), the three others being Captain Blood, Kenneth Roberts' Northwest Passage, and de Coster's Legend of Ulenspiegel.
I was caught reading Claudius during a Latin class (no wonder my education was erratic), and was rebuked by the teacher: 'You'll never get anywhere, Fraser, reading that sort of thing instead of Kennedy'. (Kennedy's ghastly Primer was the book of the century with Latin teachers). And then he added: 'And yet, who knows?' which was perceptive in its way, for wherever I've got (not, admittedly, very far) it has been as a result of devouring historical fiction.
All this must seem terribly juvenile and trivial -- 'tuppenny bloods', cloak and sword romances, and cinema swashbucklers as a springboard into history. Well, I have now been producing historical fiction of a fairly sensational kind for over thirty years, and I wish I had a pound for every reader's letter I have received saying, in effect: 'Thank you for awakening my interest in history, for telling me what I didn't know, and for pointing me to the sources'. That is the ultimate reward, and I know they mean it, because it happened to me too.
As I've said, it was Sir Daniel Darnley who led me to Esquemeling, and Conan Doyle to Froissart, Graves to Suetonius and Tacitus, Henry to Kinglake, Mayne Reid to Bancroft, the Wolf of Kabul to Kaye and Mallinson, and Sabatini to more than I can count. Yes, and Forever Amber to Macaulay, Pepys and Evelyn, and Gone With the Wind to Bruce Catton and Samuel Eliot Morison. Nor must I omit 1066 And All That, the best introduction to history ever written.
If this proves anything, it is that there is no truer guide to the past than good historical fiction. There is nothing phoney about it; while I tend to distrust approaches to education which suggest that it is an enjoyable game (when we know it is just hard slogging), the good costume novel is telling no more than the truth when it suggests that real history is fun and excitement and glamour and suspense; that it has all the ingredients of a great adventure story. But of course, that is what history is.
It does not matter if the historical novel is pure unashamed fiction, with plot and characters owing nothing to historic fact, so long as it is properly researched and reflects, as faithfully as the writer knows how, the period and its spirit. Better still, of course, to write what a Sabatini reviewer called 'history disguised as fiction' -- that is, to take historic truth and present it as a story, weaving in whatever fictitious incidents and characters are needed to oil the narrative's wheels, but never, never falsifying or distorting the truth on which it is based. Fairness above all, to the best of the writer's ability; it isn't always easy, but history and the reader deserve no less.
It is a rule which the best of them -- Scott, Dumas, Doyle, Graves, Forester, Sabatini, Roberts and the rest -- never broke, and far beyond the entertainment they gave and continue to give to countless millions, they did history good service, and set an impossible standard for those emulators who trudge vainly in their footsteps. I for one owe a lifetime's work to all of them. And to Sir Daniel Darnley.

how to avoid talking out of your arse

Our old Mucker Gerry has started a new Blog animated by the collapse of Respect.
Taking 'The Gorgeous One's' comments upon the desirability of the derriere of the antipodean chantreuse, and the row it triggered she has titled it the split of kylies arse.
As is our usual practise we have shamelessly stolen this piece from it:


The current collective consciousness on the left around oppression is such a miasma of postmodern, subjective, sentimental, victimised, emotive dreck. I feel a certain responsibility for having added my bit to the heap. Here by way of restitution, I offer the following insights painfully gleaned over a lifetime of politcal twaddle.
1. Membership of an oppressed group does not confer authority. It does not guarantee authenticity. It does not make you right. You should be judged by what you say and do not by what you are. I offer in evidence my Cabinet of the Oppressed: Margaret Thatcher (women’s rights), Robert Mugabe (racial equality), David Blunkett (disability), Osama bin Laden (international relations), Golda Meir (special responsibility for minorities), the entire Gandhi dynasty (democracy and anti-corruption). Feel free to nominate others to strengthen our inclusivity.
2. Being a VICTIM does not make you right. You may be worthy of sympathy, redress, sensitive consideration, but it has no bearing on the quality of your argument. Reality is dialectical: the victim becomes the oppressor, and vice versa.
3. History is not a licence to kill. An atrocity is an atrocity, however badly treated the perpetrators, wwhatever legitimate grievance they may have. I give you Nazi Germany, Dier Yassin, 9/11, Beslan…
4. My enemy’s enemy is not my friend. people and nations change sides; alliances shift. If you base your position on tactical considerations, you will end up incoherent. We endlessly repeat the argument that it was the West who armed Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. The argument applies equally to us. We may lack the fire power, but we give hostages to our future enemies if, for example, we lie about the repressive regime in Iran simply because it is threatened by the US: it will come back and bite us.
5. If you feel it, suspect it. If it feels good… wait a minute. Outrage is the crack of left polemic. There’s that flaming high - oh it feels so good! All too soon, you come down. You regret giving in to the seductive flame. You feel a bit bad, a bit ashamed, a bit depressed. Someone flames back. It feels good to join the fray again - a bigger hit. And so it goes on and on and on..Emotion brings an aura of authenicity. If you feel it, it must be real. Aint necessarily so. The evolutionary point of emotion is to move you to action. Sometimes it’s rash, dangerous to move. Except in a literal emergency, it’s better to think first. Left polemic is full of pseudo-emegencies, where the adrenalin pumping makes it feel like life and death, but nothing is lost by taking time to consider.
6. You have to laugh or else you’ll cry. The situation of the left today is a tragic absurdity, if you lose your sense of humour, you may as well shoot yourself.

Multiculturalism- The Newspeak of the Left Cop

Multiculturalism appears to be everywhere right now- from the Diversity units of the Metropolitan police to the inane ramblings of ‘Ordinary Bloke’ (and Ubertoff) Dave Cameron, Multiculturalist ideas and practices have become the official policy spanning Government and media. It has become one of the ideological planks of the Blair era. Suddenly the entire establishment appears to be casting off centuries of racism and discrimination and embracing a brave new world of tolerance in which the views and beliefs of all are valued and respected.
In the true spirit of this Brave New World, History itself is being rewritten as the crimes of the past are expunged through the copious application of apologies. In Blair’s world politics is…. Only having to say you’re Sorry… but only for those acts committed by men long dead.

The lefty and liberal press have embraced multiculturalism and denounce any who question its tenets as racist and reactionaries lower than amoeba. Who then would argue against it?
Surely these visions of a contented multiracial society in which the ideas and beliefs of all are respected are so clearly positive and good that no one but the reddest necked boneheaded tosser could object.
Actually, Multiculturalism is anything but about ending oppression and building a fairer society. It is a Cop Ideology, in its design and in its practice it seeks to divides working class communities against themselves and foists state approved ‘community leaders’ upon us who scrabble against each other for the chance to win the approval of the ‘soft pig’ middle class do-gooder professionals who decide which ‘community’ is most docily deserving of the largest share of the limited resources available.
Borrowing a hodgepodge of ideas from feminism, 1980s Political correctness, and academic anthropology the supporters of multiculturalism argue that Human beings are defined not by their individual personalities or membership of a particular social class but instead as members of distinct ‘cultures’. Instead of looking for what unites us all- our local community, our class or even our common humanity what is of prime importance is the one thing that divides us whether that is our race, gender, sexual identity or whatever.
To criticise these ’values’ from the vantage point of another ‘cultural grouping’ is to indulge in an act of ‘cultural imperialism’-a definite sin in the eyes of the multiculturalists and one for which you will be likely to get your collar felt for when the Religious Hatred Act becomes law.
Despite the support Multiculturalism gets from both lefties and Liberals it is in fact a highly conservative ideology. By its insistence that all differing cultures are of equal value multiculturalism denies most fundamental of liberal assumptions dating right back to the French and American Revolutions, the Universality of Human Rights. To condemn the hanging of gays in Iran or the mutilation of the genitals of young girls in sub-Saharan Africa is failing to account for “the legitimacy of their cultural experience and exposes our inherent racism” and again culturally imperialist.
Not only does multiculturalism denies that Class has any role but neither does it allow any room for progress or change in society as this would involve the challenging or changing of cultural values. The multiculturalists have an Idealised view of modern society-seeing it as the best that can be achieved, needing only the slightest of tweaks to remove the ‘privileges’ from which white working class people allegedly benefit, which in multiculturalist eyes form the basis of racism.
Multiculturalism claims that it is against hierarchies and yet it is intrinsically elitist, it demands that all cultures and groups be represented by ‘community leaders’ to ‘speak for’ and embody that community. Government promotion of ‘moderates’ within communities along with the fact that those who are most vocal are those who identify themselves most closely with the defining feature of their ‘culture’ leads to the most conservative elements tending to take a leading role and their reactionary interpretations of what embodies ‘their culture’ becoming the mainstream. The promotion of the more reactionary of community leaders simply exacerbates a glaring contradiction at the heart of the multiculturalist dream of a society of separate and distinct cultures and groups; what to do when the beliefs and tenets of one culture directly impinge on the rights of another? How does a society satisfy (for example) the needs and aspirations of a career woman, a gay man, an evangelical Christian and an Imam?

Into the breach boldly step the ‘highly trained’ professionals of the cultural diversity units and social services departments who can arbitrate between the competing claims and negotiate solutions and distribute funding and resources to those community leaders who can keep their respective communities quiet and suitably respectful.
Whilst the police have always been in the front line in the Rich’s Class War against us, our rulers wouldn’t survive long without the army of auxiliary cops dedicated to convincing us through persuasion and coercion that the system in which we live is the best of all possible and that our position within it is natural and unchangeable.
These auxiliary cops are the teachers, social workers, probation officers, etc., who try to con us that whilst they have the power to punish us; fine us, take away our benefits, our homes, our kids, our liberty or our future, that they are in reality on our side.
They are recruited from the university educated middle classes- the very people upon whom the Leninist vampire parties prey for their cannon fodder and they all share that same Guardianista ‘concerned’ radicalism that wishes to bring enlightenment to the poor misguided proles whether we want it or not.
Multiculturalism masquerades as being the means of putting an end to racism forever and yet it has provided new life and opportunities for the Fascists.
Griffin and his cronies have pursued a successful twin pronged strategy; firstly, feeding upon the bitterness felt within white working class areas at the effects of both the real and imagined passing over of those communities in favour of other more ‘deserving’ more ‘oppressed’ cultural communities and, secondly, presenting themselves within ‘the community of distinct cultures’ as community leaders and the ‘genuine’ voice of the white community.

Criticism of multiculturalism is not received well and is usually dismissed as attacks upon minority groups and evidence of the critic’s inherent racism. The multiculturalists reserve their bile however for those who refuse to remain within the confines of their respective cultural groupings; the breakers of the rules.
Women, such as the Iranian communist Maryam Namazie, from muslim communities who refuse the veil and argue for secular concepts of women’s equality are denounced as the tools of imperialism and
Peddlers of Islamophobia.

Trevor Philips, who has made a good living as one of the prime architects of Multiculturalism, and is head of the newly unified The Commission for Equality and Human Rights made some minor criticisms of its effects and how it aided segregation in some Northern cities and found himself condemned by London Mayor ken Livingstone as “well on the way to joining the BNP”!!
If critics in Britain get abuse it is far more serious for those who deviate from community values abroad but the multiculturalists commitment to ‘diversity’is never stretches to defend their rights; when gays were murdered in Jamaica, protests against the killings were attacked as racist and showing ‘insufficient understanding of Jamaican culture’. Similarly, protests against the state murder of young gays in Iran were condemned as pandering to American Imperialism, just as opposing the killing of gays in palestine was supporting the zionist occupier.
Although multiculturalism is most associated with the ‘soft pigs’ it has also made its presence felt in the regular police- the black police association and gay police associations have both been given official recognition and have made high profile political statements and interventions in support of laws and initiatives of which they approve. This has been part and parcelof a explicit politicisation of the police force as a whole over the last ten years. Previously in Class War we have exposed the links between senior police officers and fundamentalist christian groups.
Multiculturalism claims to be the solution to the oppression and discrimination within capitalist society, in reality it is a deeply conservative elitist ideology concerned above all with dividing our class against itself in order to best ensure the Ruling Classes continued domination. What is clear is that we will never be free until both the hard pigs and the soft pigs and the class they defend are smashed.

Benazir Bhutto

Benazir Bhutto has been killed, it's a pity her mate couldn't join her.

cop death, murder - custody death, accident?

From April 1998 until the end of November 2007, there have been 117 deaths 'following police contact' in the Met. As far as I am aware, not one police officer has been arrested or charged for being complicit in these deaths.

How different when, following a Boxing Day domestic incident, a police officer who attended died. The man involved in the aforementioned incident was immediately arrested on suspicion of murder. (The officer he was accused of assaulting was not the one who died.)

In response to this incident, Home Office minister Tony McNulty said: "Events such as this highlight the dangers that our police officers face every day when protecting the public."

It has now been established that the officer in question died from heart disease, making McNulty's comments laughable. But perhaps he was referring to cops' propensity to eat all kebabs and other takeaways and thereby protect the general public from piggy heart disease.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7161773.stm
http://www.mpa.gov.uk/issues/deaths/default.htm

lib dems pick cleggy

So Cleggy has made it to the top.


Makes you wonder why they thought old Ming the Skull was a bad choice, but hey, that's political parties for you..

halle diddley lujah, praiseland for the uk

Flanders walks tall in the North of England.

The AH Trust, a charity set up last year by a group of businessmen, wants to build a £3.5m Christian theme park in the North of England, that's right, I kid you not, Ned's 'Praiseland.'



It's intended to be a copy of the Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Florida, where hundreds of thousands of visitors make pilgrimages to see a bloodied Jesus forced to carry his cross by snarling Roman soldiers.

The trust declined to say who the backers were, but admitted it is talking to a number of businessmen who have invested in city academies, leading to speculation that it may have approached Sir Peter Vardy, who has given millions of pounds to advance the claims of creationism. Vardey has also taken tens of millions of pounds of public money to further his ridiculous ideas.

The trust also says it plans to apply for government grants and European funding to help it realise its dream of turning its own television studio into 'an international leader in promoting family-oriented Christian programmes'. Grants for religious loonies? Whatever, I shan't be subscribing to that channel.

And just like Ned's fiasco, it'll be all puff and wind, a complete fake.



So fuck off you religious whackos. If you want to emulate the life of your master, I'd be more than happy to nail you all to a cross myself.

http://tinyurl.com/37xscr

a soft toy named mohammed

It could have been worse, it could have been this cuddly little piglet, but it still wouldn't have been offensive other than to a religious crank.

Picture of the Year

A reminder to all Toffs

Bash the Rich, November 3rd, Portobello Road, Notting Hill, 2pm

Get yerself there

Gordie and Maggie, is it love?

First this (tongues at dawn), then this..............


Is Maggie triumphant after a simple shag, or was it a threesie?

cheney leader of the free world

Worryingly, whilst George Bush lay face down smashed out of his brains with a tube up his arse today, Dick Cheney became the leader of the free world. Fortunately prior to Bush being sedated, he told Dick to keep his trigger happy fingers off the big red button - 'that's my job,' said George.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6909160.stm

Bash the Rich Stickers

Naked ambition

Not having taken any previous interest in the Campaign for a Marxist Party, my eyes were suddenly drawn to the polemical letters page in last week’s paper (June 7).

The CMP were “dancing around naked in the woods under a full moon”? I almost filled out an application form before I realised that Dave Spencer’s description was a piece of sarcasm.

For god’s sake, don’t get people’s hopes up that something exciting is happening on the left. I can’t stand the disappointment.

Dave Douglass

From letters page, Weekly Worker 677 (June 14 2007)

red star legacy

Once again, I need to apologise to David Broder! I am in fact somewhat of a fool! I accidently emailed my first draft of my reply to his letter in the weekly worker, which really didn't adequately answer his points. The reply I intended to send is below:

I apologise to David Broder. He is quite right, I reread his letter (May 3 2007) and he had described my refusal to join the AWL as “ridiculous” rather than “foolish.” Given that both of us personally know people who have been caused considerable emotional distress by what their ‘comrades’ have said to them, I am disappointed that he does not acknowledge that the way in which the AWL and other groups behave in discussions can be unhealthy. In my experience, lefty-to-lefty discourse tends to be confrontational in nature. All too often the subtext is ‘I am right, you are wrong, and everyone should do what I say.’ I think this attitude is a slippery slope leading to verbal abuse of those you disagree with.

David claims that this is not the case with the AWL. I suggest he rereads the dispute between the CPGB and the AWL over the age of consent, in particular the article in Solidarity (May 16 2003) entitled ‘Crazies of the world unite,’ which concluded “there are probably one or two sane people left in the CPGB. Why do they let the nutters set the tone… of the organisation?” I am certainly not suggesting that the AWL is unique, or that all members of the AWL behave like this all the time. My point is that it is endemic to the far left. It does not need anything so crass as Sean Matgamna “geeing” anyone on: the tacit rules that govern discourse on the left are embedded in its culture. We conform to the norms of those around us and it is very hard to march out of step. Personally I have witnessed brutal verbal attacks on people or groups who simply have a different opinion. In any other context, this behaviour would justifiably be described as bullying. I regret the times when I have condoned such behaviour by staying silent. Insults should be used when you want to piss someone off. Using them to try and change someone’s mind is just weird: like a schoolboy teasing the girl he likes!

David’s own letters are the very model of politeness compared with some, but even he seems to start from the somewhat patronising perspective that he is right and that I have an obligation to justify myself where I disagree with him. For example, he uses the collective ‘we’ when saying that “we were… wrong to leave the CPGB” (May 3 2007), and infers that the rest of us were wrong again when we did not join the AWL when he did. David is of course entitled to his opinion, but here he is presenting his opinions as facts. I am sure that it was the right thing for David to join the AWL, but as far as I am aware, none of the rest of us who were involved with the red star share his opinion. I know I certainly do not.

My criticisms of the democracy in the AWL derive from their attitude towards leadership. The organisation sees itself as a leadership for the class and within the organisation there is a further division between the leaders and the led. In my opinion, this hierarchical division is inimical to democracy. Even where a decision is made within the organisation on a one-member, one-vote basis, the leadership have an unfavourable advantage over the membership in determining the outcome. Such leaders are invariably paid to do work on behalf of the organisation, affording them greater opportunities to attend meetings, gain allies and status, and in short have a plain advantage over those ordinary members who have other commitments, not least doing the paid work that allows them to financially support the leadership.

When I call the AWL Leninist, I am not using it as an insult: I use it as a description of the politics of that organisation. They are democratic centralist (which demands that the minority commits to go against itself in advance of a decision even being called, let alone being made); vanguardist (in that they have appointed themselves leaders of the class) and statist (their solution to the bourgeois state is to replace it with a state controlled by a vanguard). If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

I am not asking David to like any of this, and I am certainly not asking him to agree with me, but I do ask him to accept that I am sincere in what I have written and that my politics are not compatible with his or those of the AWL.

An exchange of views

Dave broder was a member of the old red party group, his decision to leave to join the AWL was the catalyst that finally broke the remainder of the group from traditional leninist, trotskyite Left. Broder recently wrote to the newspaper of the cpgb the Weekly Worker, ptting forward his own version of the break,which can be found here .
This is jez's reply which we reprint here as it sums up quite well how our politics have developed over the past couple of years;

I doubt that readers are interested in how two people have different memories of the same, fairly insignificant series of events, but since David Broder feels the need to “correct” me in the pages of the weekly worker (May 3, 2007) I am obliged to do the same. David, now as then is preoccupied with the faction rights of the red platform and how the decision was taken to not publish one of the seeing red columns. I have to say this was never a particular concern of mine. As far as I am concerned, the weekly worker is controlled by the PCC and they make editorial decisions in accordance with their tactical concerns, which can be criticised at members’ aggregates after the event. Not how I would do things, but that’s how Leninist publications work, surely?
I was more concerned with the decision that was taken to critically support Respect and what it revealed about the cpgb and Leninist politics, rather than how that decision was made. Most people can see that Respect is bollocks: an opportunistic attempt by a bunch of self-serving politicians to try and get themselves voted into the petty corridors of power. The vast majority of the membership saw this too, yet the decision was taken to ‘critically support’ it in order to get a foot in the door and influence the people around Respect. This meant openly arguing that Respect was worth being in and trying to persuade other people to vote for it and join it. I was not comfortable with this: it seemed dishonest, arrogant and bossy. For the first time I began to seriously question whether or not I actually agreed with Leninist politics. In retrospect it marked the beginning of my rejection of democratic centralism: there are some things I am prepared to do or not do even if the whole of the rest of the world disagrees with me, let alone the narrow majority of a small political group.
David says that we should have stayed in the cpgb and fought to win the majority to our position, which is what the cpgb argued at the time. I disagree. In retrospect I was growing disenchanted with Leninism as a political method. To stay in an avowedly Leninist organisation, stamp my feet and insist that they stopped being Leninist would be daft. It only makes sense if you subscribe to the (Leninist) position that there should be one all powerful vanguard party. I don’t. I think the revolutionary movement should be, as it is, made up of people working together in groups of varying size and permanence whose analysis and objectives change. Groups form and fall apart, grow and shrink and above all change in response to changes in material conditions.
However, it needs stating that despite what David claims, the red party did not start out hostile to Leninism when we formed, and certainly not because of any petulant dislike of the cpgb. To the contrary we all found it hard to break with what was for most of us the only political method that we knew. We tried very hard to reconcile our increasingly humanist and libertarian tendencies with Leninist politics. We could not make it work. The problem as I see it is that Leninism and its variants start with a pessimistic view of our class: that we can only achieve genuine emancipation if we follow a leadership that can match the bourgeoisie in ruthlessness and levels of organisation, and that this leadership can and will sacrifice freedom and individuality in pursuit of a future that will supposedly celebrate freedom and individuality. I could not reconcile Leninism with libertarianism and humanism, and so I rejected Leninism.
Given that they embrace vanguardism, statism and democratic centralism, it hardly needs saying that I don’t regard the AWL as a libertarian socialist organisation. I suspect that the AWL doesn’t either. The cynic in me suspects that David’s attempt to rebrand the AWL has more to do with its current orientation towards the anti-capitalist movement, where, like the good Leninists that they are, they seek to provide leadership to the poor befuddled masses. Apparently our reluctance to join the AWL was “sectarian” and “ridiculous.” The rest of us all made it clear to David that we had no intention of joining them. Other members of the red party explained their reasons less politely, but personally, as I said at the time, I would not join them because in my opinion the AWL combine the authoritarianism of Leninsm with the smug arrogance of Guardian readers.

fucking rich tory bastards!!

Never let these fuckers get away with their attempts to rebrand themselves as 'ordinary blokes'.

they are rich priviliged scum who believe that they are born to rule over us.

As Ian has said The Class War continues and we are losing!

Its time to make these curs fear us again!

Ian Bone has called for;

BASH THE RICH - TOFFS OUT!
Notting Hill 2pm Saturday november 3rd

more details here; http://ianbone.wordpress.com/

sir bonio

That mealy mouthed, crap rocker Bono is to receive an honorary knighthood for his self serving 'humanitarian' campaigning. He, and his equally loathsome mate Geldof, have achieved nothing other than increasing the sales of their back catalogues, whilst cosying up to the politicians who facilitate corporate greed and the resultant poverty.

Surely a far more deserving nominee would be Bonio, that tasty nourishing biscuit enjoyed by dogs and small children alike.

Lock 'em up (revisited)

The Queen's Speech announced the introduction of a Bill to provide a better framework for treating people with mental disorders. The government are intent on reviving the previously axed and heavily criticised Mental Health Bill. It's the return of the thorny questions of diagnosis, compulsion and some rather dubious 'treatments.'

The current Mental Health Act (1983) enables specified professionals to treat people without their consent. The Government now wants to make changes to extend and simplify this process.

The Bill seems to be motivated and promoted by a prejudice that connects mental illness with violence and the need to protect the public. In fact 95% of all killings have no connection to people with mental illnesses. They are mostly the result of drugs and alcohol, but plans have not been proposed to affect the liberty of Friday night boozers. Instead a marginalised and stigmatised section of the population is being targetted.

Currently compulsory treatment can only occur in hospital. The government wants to extend this into the community. So called 'psychiatric ASBOs' will be enforced, the conditions of which may include residency, appointments, medication and 'conduct.' These conditions would not be subject to independent review.

This proposal to restrict the movement and activities of patients in the community has been condemned by mental health workers. Rethink's campaign manager, Jane Harris, said that curfews and banning visits to pubs were completely unworkable. Tony Zigmond, of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, saw the enforcement or monitoring of the conditions being the main problem. He said, 'It's a monitoring exercise that doctors and nurses should not be doing.'

But the main problem is the lack of independent review.

The 1983 Act states that compulsory treatment must help a patient's condition, or prevent it getting worse, this is the treatability clause. The Government wishes to change this to allow treatment that is ‘appropriate’ and ‘available’ i.e. remove treatability as a criterion. The judgement of what is ‘appropriate’ is a subjective one rather than objective, and could include measures to control rather than cure. People with untreatable personality disorders could therefore be compulsorily detained whether they've committed a criminal act or not.

Health services exist to help people with their health, not to control them. Tony Calland, chairman of the British Medical Association's medical ethics committee said, 'Mental health legislation cannot be used to detain people whom the authorities simply want locked away.'

At the moment, two doctors and a social worker are required to make the decision to treat someone without their consent. This is by definition a position of considerable power and responsibility, where the control over another's life is taken. The government's intention is to empower a wider range of healthcare professionals to take these decisions. There is considerable concern that there are insufficient numbers of suitably trained and qualified people for this change to be made.

Treatment without consent can now only be given if a person has a ‘mental disorder’. Again the government wants to expand the definition of mental disorder. This, if used widely, could conceivably include immoral conduct, promiscuity, anti-social or eccentric behaviour and different political or cultural beliefs. Once detained and forcibly treated, that person must wait 6 months until they have a right to have their case reviewed by a Tribunal.

Sources of Information;

Rethink: http://www.rethink.org/how_we_can_help/campaigning_for_change/mental_health_bill/index.html
Dept. of Health: http://www.dh.gov.uk/PolicyAndGuidance/HealthAndSocialCareTopics/MentalHealth/fs/en

Farewell to Old Dunscroft

If you are anywhere in the vicinity next Sunday, get yourself to this, and give Dave Douglass the send off he deserves.

Farewell to Old Dunscroft.

Dave Douglass is leaving Dunscroft and the Doncaster coalfield after forty years.

A farewell to Donny and Old Dunscroft and the pit has been planned to take place at The Woolpack, Market Place, Doncaster on 26 November 2006 at 3:45 pm.

Neighbours, Marra's, friends and comrades from the union, the pit, politics and the community are welcome to attend the official bon voyage as Dave heads back to Bonny Tyneside for pastures new and revisited.

There will be a special showing of "Where Do I Stand ?", a TV Documentary about Dave and his politics made in 1970 and obviously before the age of 'political correctness' ! This documentary features Hatfield pit and the surrounding villages and some of the characters.

The acclaimed Rotherham folk band 'Toe-In'The Dark' with singer songwriter Ray Hearne will be appearing, as well as other guest singers who may volunteer.

Guests will be invited to join in and tell us some stories and tales and hopefully a buffet will be provided.

So don't forget!

The Woolpack, Market Place, Doncaster, from about 3:45 pm.26th November 2006. Formal programme finishes at 8 pm but folk are welcome to carry on.

All past grudges and disputes to be left at home please, and no riding horses up and down the stairs !

lock 'em up

If they can't get you with one law, there's always another.....................

Tony Calland, chairman of the British Medical Association's medical ethics committee said, 'Mental health legislation cannot be used to detain people whom the authorities simply want locked away.'

However, the government are now intent on reviving the previously axed Mental Health Bill. The legislation would allow the detention of people with untreatable personality disorders - whether they've committed a criminal act or not. The draft Bill proposed that people so detained could be held for 28 days before facing a tribunal, i.e. 28 days locked away and forcibly medicated until they could formally oppose their detention.

Jane Harris, Rethink mental health charity, concluded, '....it will mean people with mental health problems have fewer rights than someone suspected of burglaries.'

But there is a more disturbing aspect to this for everyone. Can those who make the diagnoses be trusted, and is it possible to safeguard against abuse of the system? If the state's procedure and practice in its execution of terror legislation is anything to go by.........we have a problem.

I'll be there - what will you be doing?

Thatcher, frail and feeble in mind and body - it can't be long now.